Thursday, 11.30

I have spent two hours working in the reading room.  I have come down into the cour des Hypothèques to smoke a pipe.  A square paved with pink bricks.  The people of Bouville are proud of it because it dates from the eighteenth century.  At the entrance to the rue Chamade and the rue Suspédard, some old chains bar the way to vehicles.  These ladies in black, taking their dogs for a walk, glide beneath the arcade, hugging the walls.  They rarely come right out into the daylight but they cast furtive, satisfied, girlish glances at the statue of Gustave Impétraz.  They can't know the name of that bronze giant, but they can see from his frock coat and top hat that he was somebody in high society.  He holds his hat in his left hand and rests his right hand on a pile of folio volumes: it is rather as if their grandfather were there on that pedestal, cast in bronze.  They don't need to look at him for long to understand that he thought as they do, exactly as they do, on all subjects.  At the service of their narrow, firm little ideas he has placed his authority and the immense erudition drawn from the folio volumes crushed under his heavy hand.  The ladies in black feel relieved, they can attend peacefully to their household tasks, take their dogs out: they no longer have the responsibility of defending the sacred ideas, the worthy concepts which they derive from their fathers; a man of bronze has made himself their guardian.

      The encyclopedia devotes a few lines to this personage; I read them last year.  I had placed the volume on the windowsill; through the pane I could see Impétraz's green skull.  I discovered that he was in his prime about 1890.  He was a school inspector.  He painted charming trifles and wrote three books: Popularity among the Ancient Greeks (1887), Rollin's Pedagogy (1891), and a poetic testament in 1899.  He died in 1902, deeply mourned by his dependants and people of good taste.

      I lean against the front of the library.  I draw on my pipe, which is threatening to go out.  I see an old lady timidly emerge from the arcade and look at Impétraz with a shrewd, stubborn expression.  She suddenly plucks up her courage, crosses the courtyard as fast as her legs can carry her, and stops for a moment in front of the statue with her jaws working.  Then she runs away again, black against the pink pavement, and disappears through a crack in the wall.

      This square may have been a cheerful place about 1800, with its pink bricks and its houses.  Now there is something dry and evil about it, a delicate touch of horror.  This is due to that fellow up there on his pedestal.  When they cast that scholar in bronze, they turned him into a sorcerer.

      I look Impétraz full in the face.  He has no eyes, scarcely any nose, a beard eaten away by that strange leprosy which sometimes descends, like an epidemic, on all the statues in a particular district.  He bows; his waistcoat has a big bright-green stain over his heart.  He looks sickly and evil.  He isn't alive, true, but he isn't inanimate either.  A vague power emanates from him, like a wind pushing me away.  Impétraz would like to drive me out of the cour des Hypothèques.  I shan't go before I have finished this pipe.

      A tall, thin shadow suddenly springs up behind me.  I give a start.

      "Excuse me, Monsieur, I didn't mean to disturb you.  I saw your lips moving.  You were probably repeating phrases from your book."  He laughs.  "You were hunting Alexandrines."

      I look at the Autodidact in amazement.  But he seems surprised at my surprise.

      "Shouldn't we take great care, Monsieur, to avoid Alexandrines in prose?"

      I have gone down slightly in his estimation.  I ask him what he is doing here at this time of day.  He explains that his boss has given him the day off and he has come straight to the library; that he is not going to have any lunch, that he is going to read until closing time.  I have stopped listening to him, but he must have strayed from his original subject, for I suddenly hear:

      "... to have, like you, the good fortune of writing a book."

      I have to say something.

      "Good fortune ..." I say with a dubious look.

      He mistakes the meaning of my reply and rapidly corrects himself:

      "Monsieur, I should have said: 'merit'."

      We go up the staircase.  I don't feel like working.  Somebody has left Eugénie Grandet on the table, the book is open at page 27.  I pick it up automatically and start reading page 27, then page 28: I haven't the courage to begin at the beginning.  The Autodidact has gone swiftly over to the shelves along the wall; he brings back two books which he places on the table, looking like a dog which has found a bone.

      "What are you reading?"

      He seems reluctant to tell me: he hesitates a little, rolls his big wild eyes, then stiffly holds the books out to me.  They are Peat and Peateries by Larbalétrier, and Hitopadesa or Useful Education by Lastex.  Well?  I can't see what's bothering him: these books strike me as perfectly respectable.  As a matter of form I glance through Hitopadesa and see nothing in it that isn't very high-minded.

3 p.m.

I have given up Eugénie Grandet.  I have started work, but without any enthusiasm.  The Autodidact, seeing that I am writing, watches me with a respectful concupiscence.  Now and then I raise my head a little and see the huge stiff collar with his chicken-like neck coming out of it.  His clothes are threadbare, but his shirt is dazzling white.  From the same shelf he has just taken down another book, whose title I can make out upside down: The Spire of Caudebec, Norman chronicle, by Mademoiselle Julie Lavergne.  The Autodidact's reading-matter always disconcerts me.

      All of a sudden the names of the last authors whose works he has consulted come back to my mind: Lambert, Langlois, Larbalétrier, Lastex, Lavergne.  It is a revelation; I have understood the Autodidact's method: he is teaching himself in alphabetical order.

      I contemplate him with a sort of admiration.  What willpower he must have to carry out, slowly, stubbornly, a plan on such a vast scale!  One day, seven years ago (he told me once that he has been studying for seven years) he came ceremoniously into this reading room.  He looked round at the countless books lining the walls, and he must have said, rather like Rastignac: "It is between the two of us, Human Knowledge."  Then he went and took the first book from the first shelf on the far right; he opened it at the first page, with a feeling of respect and fear combined with unshakeable determination.  Today he has reached 'L'.  'K' after 'J', 'L' after 'K'.  He has passed abruptly from the study of coleopterae to that of the quantum theory, from a work on Tamerlane to a Catholic pamphlet against Darwinism: not for a moment has he been put off his stride.  He has read everything; he has stored away in his head half of what is known about parthenogenesis, half the arguments against vivisection.  Behind him, before him, there is a universe.  And the day approaches when, closing the last book on the last shelf on the far left, he will say to himself: "And now what?"

      It is time for his afternoon snack; with an innocent air he eats a piece of bread and a bar of Gala Peter.  His eyelids are lowered and I can study at leisure his beautiful curved lashes - a woman's eyelashes.  He gives off a smell of old tobacco, mingled, when he breathes out, with the sweet scent of chocolate.