Conrad wrote the Preface to The Nigger of the ‘Narcissus’, his well-known literary manifesto, sometime between January and August 1897. A number of sources have been suggested, both French and English, the latter including Walter Pater's Marius the Epicurean (1885, rev. edn 1892), his essay The School of Giorgione’ (1877), and especially his essay on ‘Style’ (1889), and also Henry James's The Art of Fiction’ (1884). It is, of course, Conrad's debt to nineteenth- century French literature which will be examined here, and that means primarily his debt to Flaubert (the hero of Pater's essay on ‘Style’), Maupassant, and Anatole France.

The first studies of Maupassant's influence on Conrad appraised the impact of ‘Le Roman’ (the introductory essay to Pierre et Jean (1887)) on Conrad's preface. Edgar Wright showed that ‘the main themes of [the Preface], the stress on temperament, the denial of any formula for the novel, the demand for sincerity and originality, the importance placed on the handling of words and style, the personal vision, the presentation of actual events so handled that the reader can arrive at the contained meaning, all these repeat Maupassant’. Conrad's intimate knowledge of ‘Le Roman’ may also account, as Wright has noted, for the wording in a letter to Miss Watson on 27 January 1897.