Fifty years ago a young European sat up 15 minutes beyond his bedtime writing in a book. That was the Beginning of a habit. The first pages of the book were like any one of a million other diaries, taken up with a description of the young man's doings, ambitions, theories. Gradually, the man's doings came to have a more than personal importance. Sir Basil Zaharoff began to be spoken of as the "richest man in Europe"; people said that his power was beyond that of kings and premiers. When it became known that Basil Zaharoff had written down all his obscure and enormous conquests, his dark and perhaps reprehensible maneuvers, there followed a great curiosity to see the book in which they were notated. Men tried to buy it, to beg it, to steal it. Last week a publisher offered Zaharoff's Scotch servant $10,000 for the diary of his master to whom the servant immediately reported this attempted bribery.
Said Sir Basil Zaharoff: "This decides me. For a long time I have been questioning myself whether to leave the diary in existence or not. But I'd better not leave it, I see." In Paris, a fire was built and on the fire were placed the first pages of the diary. Like the fires that smoulder in the autumn along country roads, this fire burned slowly and with an acrid smoke as if there had been some bitter taste in the old crisp leaves that it was compelled to chew. For two days the secrets that had been written down so neatly upon paper, were translated into a soft and fragmentary tongue before they perished into smoke. Sir Basil Zaharoff, content to disregard a questionable fame that might have injured a more immediate potency, watched the conflagration with mild attention. He said: "I burned it because I have no reason for satisfying morbid public curiosity." After this arrogant comment and after the last page of the diary had be come a black and feathery tissue, Sir Basil Zaharoff left Paris for Monte Carlo.