The Ink-Stain | Page 6

glass doors see only this aspect of devastation. It
gives a wrong impression. Here and there, at haphazard, you may find a
few women among these men. George Sand used to come here. I don't
know the names of these successors of hers, nor their business; I have
merely observed that they dress in sober colors, and that each carries a
number of shawls and a thick veil. You feel that love is far from their
thoughts. They have left it outside, perhaps--with the porter.
Several of these learned folk lift their heads as I pass, and follow me
with the dulled eye of the student, an eye still occupied with the written
thought and inattentive to what it looks on. Then, suddenly, remorse
seizes them for their distraction, they are annoyed with me, a gloomy
impatience kindles in their look, and each plunges anew into his open
volume. But I have had time to guess their secret ejaculations: "I am
studying the Origin of Trade Guilds!" "I, the Reign of Louis the
Twelfth!" "I, the Latin Dialects!" "I, the Civil Status of Women under
Tiberius!" "I am elaborating a new translation of Horace!" "I am
fulminating a seventh article, for the Gazette of Atheism and Anarchy,
on the Russian Serfs!" And each one seems to add, "But what is thy
business here, stripling? What canst thou write at thy age? Why
troublest thou the peace of these hallowed precincts?" My business, sirs?
Alas! it is the thesis for my doctor's degree. My uncle and venerated
guardian, M. Brutus Mouillard, solicitor, of Bourges, is urging me to
finish it, demands my return to the country, grows impatient over the
slow toil of composition. "Have done with theories," he writes, "and get
to business! If you must strive for this degree, well and good; but what
possessed you to choose such a subject?"
I must own that the subject of my thesis in Roman law has been
artistically chosen with a view to prolonging my stay in Paris: "On the
'Latini Juniani.'" Yes, gentle reader, a new subject, almost incapable of
elucidation, having no connection--not the remotest--with the exercise
of any profession whatsoever, entirely devoid of practical utility. The
trouble it gives me is beyond conception.

It is true that I intersperse my researches with some more attractive
studies, and one or two visits to the picture-galleries, and more than an
occasional evening at the theatre. My uncle knows nothing of this. To
keep him soothed I am careful to get my reader's ticket renewed every
month, and every month to send him the ticket just out of date, signed
by M. Leopold Delisle. He has a box full of them; and in the simplicity
of his heart Monsieur Mouillard has a lurking respect for this nephew,
this modern young anchorite, who spends his days at the National
Library, his nights with Gaius, wholly absorbed in the Junian Latins,
and indifferent to whatsoever does not concern the Junian Latins in this
Paris which my uncle still calls the Modern Babylon.
I came down this morning in the most industrious mood, when the
misfortune befell. Close by the sanctum where the librarians sit are two
desks where you write down the list of the books you want. I was doing
so at the right-hand desk, on which abuts the first row of tables. Hence
all the mischief. Had I written at the left-hand desk, nothing would
have happened. But no; I had just set down as legibly as possible the
title, author, and size of a certain work on Roman Antiquities, when, in
replacing the penholder, which is attached there by a small brass chain,
some inattentiveness, some want of care, my ill-luck, in short, led me to
set it down in unstable equilibrium on the edge of the desk. It tumbled-
I heard the little chain rattle-it tumbled farther-then stopped short. The
mischief was done. The sudden jerk, as it pulled up, had detached an
enormous drop of ink from the point of the pen, and that drop--Ah! I
can see him yet, as he rose from the shadow of the desk, that small,
white- haired man, so thin and so very angry!
"Clumsy idiot! To blot an Early Text!"
I leaned over and looked. Upon the page of folio, close to an
illuminated capital, the black drop had flattened itself. Around the
original sphere had been shed splashes of all conceivable shapes-rays,
rockets, dotted lines, arrowheads, all the freakish impromptu of chaos.
Next, the slope lending its aid, the channels had drained into one, and
by this time a black rivulet was crawling downward to the margin. One
or two readers near had risen, and now eyed me like examining

magistrates. I waited for an outbreak, motionless, dazed, muttering
words that did