Excerpt from The Downfall (La Debacle) A Story of the Horrors of War It then became necessary to see the places, to study the geography of my book, for at that period I did not know where my scenes were to be laid, whether on the banks of the Rhine, or elsewhere. So, with my rough draft in my pocket, and my head teeming with the shadows of my marionettes, and of the things that they were to do and to explain, I set off for Rheims and went carefully over the whole ground, driving from Rheims to Sedan, and following foot by foot the road by which the Seventh Corps - ahead y then decided upon as the milieu in which my novel was to develop - m arched to their disaster. During that drive I picked up an immense quantity of material, halting in farmhouses and peasants' cottages, and taking copious notes. Then came Sedan, and after a careful study of the place and the people, I saw that my novel must deal largely, for the full comprehension of my story, not only with the locality, but with the people of the town. This gave me the bourgeois of Sedan, who play an im portant part in my tale. Little by little, the geography gave me also the physiology of my book. Each new place that it became necessary to describe supplied its type, its characters. So, on my return to Paris, I was in an immense work shop or yard surrounded with huge mountains of hewn stones. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.