Yet it is hard to separate fact and fiction here; to decide between the true and the false; to pluck from the haze with which time has enveloped them, and to distinguish the puppets of actual flesh and blood who lived and moved and had their being, and the phantoms of imagination called into life and given each its local habitation and its name by the poet's pen working its immemorial spell upon the reader's credulity.
To me D'Artagnan is rather more vital than Richelieu.

Hugo's imps and Balzac's bullies dance down the stage and shut from the view the tax-collectors and the court favorites.

The mousquetaires crowd the field marshals off the scene.

There is something real in Quasimodo, in Caesar de Birotteau, in Robert Macaire, something mythical in Mazarin, in the Regent and in Jean Lass.

Even here, in faraway Kentucky, I can shut my eyes and see the Lady of Dreams as plainly as if she were coming out of the Bristol or the Ritz to step into her automobile, while the Grande Mademoiselle is merely a cloud of clothes and words that for me mean nothing at all.
I once passed a week, day by day, roaming through the Musee Carnavalet.
Madame de Sevigne had an apartment and held her salon there for nearly twenty years.