Three score years and ten, we have on this planet, according to popular lore. Actually a recent study has shown one in five British people will reach their centenary. But eventually, we have to come to terms with the fact that there will be a time when we are here no more.

Time, however, will go on. Children will be born, lives will be lived, new stories written and new realities carved, without us.

Some of us are philosophical about this. Others are preoccupied with leaving some trace of their existence on time’s surface, which seems sometimes soft as gold and at others diamond-hard.

It cannot be easy to make a mark when ones name is Smirke.

However one Smirke did make his mark: he converted an old museum into a huge neo-classical creation bordering on Bloomsbury.

Robert Smirke was born in London in 1780, one of twelve sons of a portrait painter. He studied architecture and quickly excelled, winning a silver medal at the Royal Academy in 1797. An eminently well-connected Tory, he rose quickly to favour and created prolifically. His work included the second Covent Garden Theatre Royal.

Today we turn our eyes in the direction of an illustrious building indeed: for Smirke designed much of the hallowed halls of the British Museum.

He was the architect for a set of buildings around a courtyard, light, airy and accessible to its visitors and very different from its cramped predecessor, Montagu House, which had held this most democratic of collections – free, independent of church and state – since its inception in the mid 18th century.

But very soon this spacious vision hit a hard place. There was nowhere to put the books, you see.

The British Museum Library had to go somewhere. And there was only one space left. The courtyard was designated as the site of a rather beautiful circular reading room, to be placed at its centre. in 1857, the space was a space no more, but a great round building complete with accompanying bookstacks.

Smirke’s name has not suffered unduly, but visitors to the museum never saw that space. For 143 years it was lost to the public. They shuffled around the buildings in cramped discomfort.

In 1997 the books moved house to a much nicer condo in St Pancras. The space was up for grabs.What do do?

When in doubt, hold a competition. Of 130 illustrious entries, all hoping to write their name alongside Smirke’s on time’s glassy surface, there could be only one. The winners, Foster and Partners, cleared out the space and constructed a great glass computer-designed dome, constructed of more than 3,000 panes of glass.

Now, in this rainy inclement climate, it is the perfect place to take the air and catch some rays on a gloomy January day.

It is packed to the gunnels with wonderful things, and now, even when one has battled with tourists with elbows of steel at the Rosetta Stone, one can retreat to this rather wonderful space to lick one’s wounds and make oneself feel better by buying a little treat at the museum shop.

Now Smirke and Foster are names writ in the diamond-hard surface, and their creation houses thousands of artefacts with a similar claim on a strange kind of immortality.

The most blatant example is the Egyptian section.

Egyptology has held a fascination for so many: but it seems those in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries occasionally saw discovery and pilfering of the treasures as a way of being remembered. It started with The Battle of the Nile, and King George III’s decision to present that Babelesque symbol, the Rosetta Stone, to the museum.

Great treasures were taken from their home and carried across the world at a time when no-one seemed to be reasoning why. Thus, the British Museum has a breathtaking collection of Egyptian souvenirs, many gathered to garner reputation.

The shady circumstances of their procurement do not render them less awesome, towering in those Victorian halls with a reserved dignity which does not belong here. It is rather like going to a zoo: one has a yearning to see them in their natural habitat. They have a wild incongruous beauty which is as un-English as the cry of a jackal in the desert.

Yet still the men who commissioned the statues and pictures are remembered; and still those who removed them and brought them across the sea have their names carved on time’s surface.

Today I heard an extraordinary story about a man who went to great lengths to ensure he would be remembered, even though he died childless.

And in the last few days it seems he has proved successful beyond his wildest dreams, even though he has been dead these hundred years.

Thus, you may have heard his name: Louis Mantin.

Mantin was the owner of a very nice town house in Moulins in central France. His occupation is recorded, enviably, as Aesthete and Gentleman of Leisure, although he did work as a civil servant until he inherited a huge fortune aged 42.

Lucky chap.

He chose the former site of a palace of the Dukes of Bourbon and built his own stately pile on top.

And then he began work procuring and furnishing it with impeccable taste. He commissioned sculptures, and  accumulated collections of Egyptian relics and neolithic flints, and mediaeval locks and keys. He decorated the place with opulence and taste in the style of the day.

He had 12 years in which to enjoy the very act of creation: and then he died.

But as his death neared, locals will tell you he summoned his lawyers and made a decree that his house be kept locked for 100 years. In reality, he laid down provision for it to be made a museum, a century from his death.

“In the will, he says that he wants the people of Moulins in 100 years time to be able to see what was the life of a cultured gentleman of his day,” said assistant curator Maud Leyoudec to a BBC reporter.

“A bachelor with no children, he was obsessed with death and the passage of time. It was his way of becoming eternal.”

Ah: posterity, that most whimsical of taskmasters. Robert Smirke ensured his through grit and a smidgen of politicking. The Pharaohs lavished a life’s work and riches to achieve the kind of infamy that might conceivably have made them turn in their sarcophagi; the relic hunters were better acquainted with their infamous signature on time, I suspect.

But of all these players, dissembling or otherwise, surely clever Louis Mantin knew human nature best, For the most sensational of immortality: make ’em wait.