The Journey must have Been enjoyable: a seventeen-year-old boy heading through Vienna, Zurich, and Lyons for Marseilles, free at last from adult supervision, and with his pockets reasonably full. On his way he stopped at Pfäffikon, Switzerland, to visit an old friend of his father, Tadeusz Oksza- Orzechowski, the former plenipotentiary of the Polish National Government in Istanbul. Conrad recalled later how everyone there laughed at his enthusiasm for the sea. “ ‘You want to become a sailor, but have you got a knife in your pocket?’ I had not. I knew nothing about it.”

Much has been written about Konrad Korzeniowski’s stay in Marseilles— tales of fascinating episodes of youthful follies, great romance, and a duel. But this attractive tableau is not supported by documentary evidence; it is the result of a peculiar collaboration of excessive good will on the part of biographers— and Conrad’s flights of retrospective imagination. To the French period of his life Conrad devoted two chapters of The Mirror of the Sea, a couple of fragments in A Personal Record, and The Arrow of Gold. The discrepancies between the descriptions of the same persons and facts in The Mirror of the Sea and The Arrow of Gold ought to warn us against treating those books as valid evidence, particularly if we bear in mind that Conrad asserted the authenticity of both. And then the contrast that exists between the plot of the novel about the charming Doña Rita and the unfinished novel The Sisters, where the same two sisters appear as in The Arrow, as well as their uncle the Basque priest, the Ortegas, and the painter—at first glance they seem the same and yet they are quite different. What are we to believe? It is best to trust only the documents. Conrad altered facts, confused dates, and changed effects into causes, even in his private correspondence. Although scholars have shown beyond doubt that his literary works are mostly based on material drawn from real life or from reading, with his imagination playing a lesser part, we should not conclude that whatever we find in those works is a faithful rendering of fact.