ion is devouring you, you old table; I am writing on a swarm of
insects! No support could be more appropriate to my entomological notes.

What will become of you when your master is gone? Will you be knocked
down for a franc, when the family come to apportion my poor spoils? Will
you be turned into a stand for the pitcher beside the kitchen sink?
Will you be the plank on which the cabbages are shredded? Or will my
children, on the contrary, agree and say:

'Let us preserve the relic. It was where he toiled so hard to teach
himself and make himself capable of teaching others; it was where he so
long consumed his strength to find food for us when we were little. Let
us keep the sacred plank.'

I dare not believe in such a future for you. You will pass into strange
hands, O my old friend; you will become a bedside table, laden with bowl
after bowl of linseed tea, until, decrepit, rickety and broken down, you
are chopped up to feed the flames for a brief moment under the simmering
saucepan. You will vanish in smoke to join my labors in that other
smoke, oblivion, the ultimate resting place of our vain agitations.

But let us return, little table, to our young days; those of your
shining varnish and of my fond illusions. It is Sunday, the day of rest,
that is to say, of continuous work, uninterrupted by my duties in the
school. I greatly prefer Thursday, which is not a general holiday
and more propitious to studious calm. Such as it is, for all its
distractions, the Lord's day gives me a certain leisure. Let us make the
most of it. There are fifty-two Sundays in the year, making a total that
is almost equivalent to the long vacation.

It so happens that I have a glorious question to wrestle with today;
that of Kepler's three laws, which, when explored by the calculus, are
to show me the fundamental mechanism of the heavenly bodies. One of them
says: 'The area swept out in a given time by the radius vector of the
path of a planet is proportional to the time taken.'

From this I have to deduce that the force which confines the planet
to its orbit is directed towards the sun. Gently entreated by the
differential and integral calculus, already the formula is beginning to
voice itself. My concentration redoubles, my mind is set upon seizing
the radiant dawn of truth.

Suddenly, in the distance, br-r-r-rum! Br-r-r-rum! Br-r-r-rum! The noise
comes nearer, grows louder. Woe upon me! And plague take the Pagoda!

Let me explai