e 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 resol