La Colline des Rêves (3)

"False tracks again, hopeless efforts, spoilt folios thick about me till by some chance or another, I know not how, the right notion was given me, and I wrote the seventh and last chapter in a couple of nights. Once more the thought of the old land had come to my help ; the book was finished. It had occupied from first to last of the labour of eighteen months.
I then began to send the manuscript round to the publishers. The result would have melted the heart of the sourest cynic. To those hard men of business, as they are sometimes called, time was nothing, kindness everything. They wrote me, one after another, long letters in small writing on large quarto paper. They all implored me, as I loved them, not to publish this book because, as they explained, it was so poor and weak and dull that its publication would ruin what little reputation I had gained before.
(...)
'The Hill of Dreams' was published in 1907, ten years after it had been finished. "