I therefore found in the character of Doltaire--which was the
character of Voltaire spelled with a big D--purely a creature of the
imagination, one who, as the son of a peasant woman and Louis XV, should
be an effective offset to Major Stobo. There was no hint of Doltaire
in the Memoirs. There could not be, nor of the plot on which the story
was based, because it was all imagination. Likewise, there was no
mention of Alixe Duvarney in the Memoirs, nor of Bigot or Madame Cournal
and all the others. They too, when not characters of the imagination,
were lifted out of the history of the time; but the first germ of the
story came from 'The Memoirs of Robert Stobo', and when 'The Seats of
the Mighty' was first published in 'The Atlantic Monthly' the subtitle
contained these words: "Being the Memoirs of Captain Robert Stobo,
sometime an officer in the Virginia Regiment, and afterwards of
Amherst's Regiment."
When the book was published, however, I changed the name of Robert Stobo
to Robert Moray, because I felt I had no right to saddle Robert Stobo's
name with all the incidents and experiences and strange enterprises
which the novel contained.
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