PREFACE.
It has happened of late that several of my books have been more or less criticised for improbabilities attached either to a character, or some event selected from the rest of the book as too extravagant for belief or for the harmonies of true art. Now, singular enough, in every instance, the events or characters selected for these criticisms have been facts in themselves, or portraits drawn from persons well known to myself and others. If such criticism should fall on the character of Madame De Marke, I may perhaps be permitted to state that this woman has lived within the last fifteen years, and was well known in a certain neighborhood in the city of New York for her wealth, her eccentricity, and her avaricious habits. Her person, her manner of life, and her extreme parsimony, are in no respect overdrawn. The room in which she lived and died is described exactly as she inhabited it in 1849. Of course, the events of the story which runs through this volume are not absolute facts, but the character of the woman, improbable as it may seem, is thevraisemblanceof a real individual.