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 ca