Bishop of Geneva, in whose intercessions, and in the assistance of the God
of Saints, he trusts, and is confident of victory.

He tells us in several of his works, and especially in his "Unknown
Traveller," that it was St. Francis de Sales who first advised him to use
his pen in this manner, and that for twenty-five years the Saint had been
cogitating and developing this design in his brain.

In the same little pamphlet Camus points out the methods he followed as a
novel writer.

"It consists," he says, "in saying only good things, dealing only with good
subjects, the single aim of which is to deter from vice, and to lead on to
virtue."

He was an extraordinarily prolific and rapid writer, scarcely ever
correcting or polishing up anything that he had put on paper. This was a
defect, but it was the natural outcome of his temperament, which was a
curious combination of lightness and solidity, gaiety and severity.

Few people really understood him. He was often taken for a mere man of the
world, when in truth he was one of the stoutest champions of the Church,
and in his inner life, grave and ascetic, macerating his flesh like a
monk of the desert. He wrote in all about 200 volumes, 50 of these being
romances.

In the latter, which drew down upon him such storms of bitter invective,
owing to his freedom of language in treating of the vices against which
he was warning his readers, we do not pretend to admire his work, but
must remind readers that his style was that of the age in which he lived,