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.