The Conventional image of Arnold Bennett as a novelist-at-work has three or four sources: general notions about realistic novelists, inferences from Bennett's completed novels, glimpses of Bennett at his task, and fragmentary remarks by Bennett himself. The image of Zola, notebook in hand, going down into the mines to gather material for Germinal is the image of Bennett interviewing an elderly couple to gather material on the Siege of Paris for The Old Wives' Tale. The ninety volumes of Zola's notebooks in the Bibliothèque Nationale are matched by dozens of notebooks that Bennett kept. J. B. Atkins asserts that Bennett “would divide his scheme [for a novel] into parts which he numbered and divide each part into sections. He knew in advance what he would put into each part and each section.” And George Doran recollects, in Chronicles of Barabbas, that on one of many silent walks in the forest at Fontainebleau he interrupted Bennett's thoughts to say, “I suppose in these silences you are actually phrasing your thousand words for tomorrow,” and got “yes” for an answer. Some of Bennett's voluntary remarks about his writing support the image. In his Preface to The Old Wives' Tale he comments upon the tedious but necessary research that he undertook for the novel. In an article in the Evening Standard he writes about “moving … an entire bookseller's shop with all its books and dust from a South Coast port to … [Clerkenwell]” to use in Riceyman Steps. And in his Journal, 1929, he says about Imperial Palace, then being written: “I have the whole of the material for the novel; and it is indexed, in a notebook. I would sooner lose fifty pages of the manuscript than that notebook.”