what he calls "that freak" of a Degree in Arts. He builds some hopes
upon me, and, in return, it is natural that I should build a few upon
him.

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