Singular freak of chance! If this man had not had a quarrel with Carrel, and if Carrel had not deprived him of his two fingers, he would have fought with me, and he might have killed me or been killed by me. And for what reason, I ask you? BOOK III CHAPTER I The Arsenal--Nodier's house--The master's profile--The congress of bibliophiles--The three candles--Debureau--Mademoiselle Mars and Merlin--Nodier's family--His friends--In which houses I am at my best--The salon of the Arsenal--Nodier as a teller of tales--The ball and the warming-pan I promised I would return to Nodier, and I will keep my word. After the service Nodier rendered me by opening the doors of the Théâtre-Français to me, I went to thank him. Nodier did better for me on my second visit than he did on the first--he opened the doors of the Arsenal to me. And, lest my readers should be frightened at the word, and think that I mean a collection of arms, a museum of artillery, let me hasten to add that the doors of the Arsenal were the doors of Charles Nodier's house. Everybody knows the large, gloomy-looking building called the Arsenal, in a line with the quai des Célestins, at the back of the rue de Morland, looking over the river. This was where Nodier lived. In these unpretentious Memoirs it would take us too far afield to relate how, once upon a time, when Paris was preparing for war, this heavy building was raised upon a piece of ground called the Champ-au-Plâtre; how, when the heavy-looking building was raised, François I. had the cannon cast there which did much unlucky work at Pavia; how, requiring a plot of ground, he borrowed a farm from his good town of Paris, promising to return it; how, having borrowed this first farm, he borrowed a second from it, and a third; how, in short, on the principle of the axiom "What is good to take is good to keep," he kept the three borrowed farms--we will relate these matters when, at the end of our impressions of Europe, Asia and Africa, we set about putting down our impressions of rambles in Paris. These farms, together with the great building of which we have spoken, were used to store cannon and powder. One day, in the reign of Henri II., a spark, coming from nobody knew where,--who knows whence terrible fires spring!--set fire to the powder-magazine and exploded it. Paris shook as Naples and Catana shake when Vesuvius or Etna are in a state of eruption; the fish perished in the river; at the unexpected concussion the neighbouring houses swayed and then collapsed one upon another. Melun, a dozen leagues off, shuddered at the noise of the explosion; thirty persons blown into the air by this volcano fell down in fragments, a hundred and fifty were wounded and, unacquainted with the cause of the accident, attributed it to the Protestants, against whom they were not slow to pick a grievance. It will be readily understood that the buildings erected by François I.