We have lost all hope, all self-respect.  We are ships that have come to grief, that are foundering, that will presently go down.  Yet we are not altogether to be pitied:  we know life.  To the respectable man, the prosperous, life shows herself only in the world, decently attired:  we know her at home in her nudity.  For him she has manners, a good behaviour, a society smile; with us she is frankly herself—­brutal, if you please, corrupt with disease and vice, sordid, profane, lascivious, but genuine.  She is kind to him, but hypocritical, affecting scruples, modesties, pieties, a heart and conscience, attitudinising, blushing false blushes, weeping crocodile tears; she is cruel to us, but sincere.  She is at her ease with us—­unashamed.  She shows us her thousand moods.  She doesn’t trouble to keep her secrets from us.  She throws off the cloak that hid her foulness, the boot that constrained her cloven hoof.  She gives free play to her appetites.  We know her.

‘Here is the fruit of the tree of life,’ he went on, extending his open hand.  ’The respectable man but smells its rind; I eat deep, taste the core.  The smell is sweet, perhaps; the taste is deathly bitter.  But even so?  He that eats of the fruit of the tree of life shares the vision of the gods.  He gazes upon the naked face of truth.  I don’t pretend that the face of truth is beautiful.  It is hideous beyond imagination.  All hate, all savagery, all evil, glare from it, and all uncleanness is upon it.  But it is the face of truth; the sight of it gives an ultimate, a supreme satisfaction.

’Say what you will, at the end of life the important thing is to have lived.  Well, when all is over, and the prosperous man and I lie equal in the article of death, our fortunes, conditions, outlooks at last for once the same, our results the same, I shall have lived, I shall have seen, I shall have understood, a thousandfold more than he.  I shall have known life in her intimacy; he will have had but a polite acquaintance with her.’

The hour for Bibi to put this philosophy to the test was nearer than he suspected.  He used to describe himself as ’thoroughly cured and seasoned,’ and to predict that he would ‘last a good while yet.’  But, one day in December, a subject of remark in the Boul’ Miche was Bibi’s absence; and before nightfall the news went abroad that he had been found on the turf, under a tree, in the Avenue de l’Observatoire, dead from a coup de sang, and that he was now lying exposed to the gaze of the curious in the little brick house behind Notre Dame.

A meeting of students was called, at which it was resolved to give Bibi a decent funeral; and in order that his friends who had crossed the river might have an opportunity of assisting at it, a lettre de faire part was published in the newspapers.  The Committee who had these matters in charge made an attempt to get a Pope from the Russian Church to officiate; but the holy men were scandalised by the request, and refused it with contumely.  So a civil funeral was the best that could be achieved.