The sound went through him like a physical pain. He sank back in his chair, and closed his eyes. His heart was beating as after a mighty physical exertion. He knew vaguely that a calamity had befallen him; he could vaguely imagine the splinters of shattered glass at his feet. But his physical prostration was so great as to obliterate, to neutralise, emotion. He felt very cold. He felt that he was being hurried along with terrible speed through darkness and cold air. There was the continuous roar of rapid motion in his ears, a faint, dizzy bewilderment in his head. He felt that he was trying to catch hold of things, to stop his progress, but his hands closed upon emptiness; that he was trying to call out for help, but he could make no sound. On—on—on, he was being whirled through some immeasurable abyss of space.
'Ah, yes, he's dead, quite dead,' the doctor said. 'He has been dead some hours. He must have passed away peacefully, sitting here in his chair.'
'Poor gentleman,' said the porter's wife. 'And a broken looking-glass beside him. Oh, it's a sure sign, a broken looking-glass.'
THE REWARD OF VIRTUE
He was one of the institutions of the Latin Quarter, one of the least admirable. He haunted the Boulevard St. Michel, hung round the cafés, begged of the passing stranger, picked up cigarette-ends, and would, at a pinch, run errands, or do odd jobs.
With his sallow, wrinkled skin, his jungle of grey beard, his thick grey hair, matted and shiny, covering his ears and falling about his shoulders, he was scarcely an attractive-looking person. Besides, he had lost an eye; and its empty socket irresistibly drew your gaze—an abhorrent vacuum. His clothes would be the odds and ends of students' offcasts, in the last stages of disintegration. He had a chronic stoop; always aimed his surviving eye obliquely at you, from a bent head; and walked with a sort of hang-dog shuffle that seemed a general self-denunciation.
Where he slept, whether under a roof or on the pavement, and when, were among his secrets. No matter how late or how early you were abroad, you would be sure to encounter Bibi, wide-awake, somewhere in the Boul' Miche, between the Luxembourg and the Rue des Ecoles. That was his beat. Perhaps one of the benches was his home.
He lived in a state of approximate intoxication. I never drew near to him without getting a whiff of alcohol, yet I never saw him radically drunk. His absorbent capacity must have been tremendous. It is certain he spent all the sous he could collect for liquids (he never wasted money upon food; he knew where to go for crusts of bread and broken meat; the back doors of restaurants have their pensioners), and if invited to drink as the guest of another, he would drain tumbler after tumbler continuously, until his entertainer stopped him, and would appear no further over-seas at the end than at the outset. There was something pathetic in his comparative sobriety, like an unfulfilled aspiration.