Really, that sums up all my past:  two certificates!  A third diploma in prospect and an uncle to leave me his money—­that is my future.  Can anything more commonplace be imagined?

I may add that I never felt any temptation at all to put these things on record until to-day, the tenth of December, 1884.  Nothing had ever happened to me; my history was a blank.  I might have died thus.  But who can foresee life’s sudden transformations?  Who can foretell that the skein, hitherto so tranquilly unwound, will not suddenly become tangled?  This afternoon a serious adventure befell me.  It agitated me at the time, and it agitates me still more upon reflection.  A voice within me whispers that this cause will have a series of effects, that I am on the threshold of an epoch, or, as the novelists say, a crisis in my existence.  It has struck me that I owe it to myself to write my Memoirs, and that is the reason why I have just purchased this brown memorandum-book in the Odeon Arcade.  I intend to make a detailed and particular entry of the event, and, as time goes on, of its consequences, if any should happen to flow from it.

“Flow from it” is just the phrase; for it has to do with a blot of ink.

My blot of ink is hardly dry.  It is a large one, too; of abnormal shape, and altogether monstrous, whether one considers it from the physical side or studies it in its moral bearings.  It is very much more than an accident; it has something of the nature of an outrage.  It was at the National Library that I perpetrated it, and upon—­But I must not anticipate.

I often work in the National Library; not in the main hall, but in that reserved for literary men who have a claim, and are provided with a ticket, to use it.  I never enter it without a gentle thrill, in which respect is mingled with satisfied vanity.  For not every one who chooses may walk in.  I must pass before the office of the porter, who retains my umbrella, before I make my way to the solemn beadle who sits just inside the doorway—­a double precaution, attesting to the majesty of the place.  The beadle knows me.  He no longer demands my ticket.  To be sure, I am not yet one of those old acquaintances on whom he smiles; but I am no longer reckoned among those novices whose passport he exacts.  An inclination of his head makes me free of the temple, and says, as plainly as words, “You are one of us, albeit a trifle young.  Walk in, sir.”

And in I walk, and admire on each occasion the vast proportions of the interior, the severe decoration of the walls, traced with broad foliated pattern and wainscoted with books of reference as high as hand can reach; the dread tribunal of librarians and keepers in session down yonder, on a kind of judgment-seat, at the end of the avenue whose carpet deadens all footsteps; and behind again, that holy of holies where work the doubly privileged—­the men, I imagine, who are members of two or three academies.  To