Especially considering the way he was gotten up! This is what must have happened: the Road hog, who had let us catch up with him, naturally, and was keeping to the left, almost in front of the locomotive; the Road hog, coming up at the very instant when the shadow disappeared, and merging for a second with it, crossed the track in front of our machine with incredible awkwardness but with providential luck, both for him and for us. On his apocalyptic machine, he went veering into the first rail. . .You would have thought, my goodness, from the amount of zigzagging he was doing, that he hadn’t ridden a bicycle for more than three hours in his life. He crossed the first rail at right angles, at the risk of his life, and he looked quite desperate, as if he knew he would never cross the second. Hypnotized by the functioning of his handle bars, his eyes on his front wheel, he did not appear to realize that he was carrying out his imbecilic little maneuvers in front of a great express train that was booming down on him at more than three hundred kilometers an hour. He seemed suddenly struck with some extremely prudent and ingenious idea, swerved sharply to the right, and took off down the gravel straight in front of him, fleeing before the locomotive. At precisely that instant the front of the machine caught up with his rear wheel.

During that second when he was about to be crushed to pulp, everything about his comical silhouette, down to the details of the spokes in his bicycle wheels, remained photographically imprinted on my retinas. Then I closed my eyes, not wishing to count his ten thousand fragments.

He wore pince-nez, was practically clean-shaven, and had just a small, sparse, curly beard.

He was dressed in a frock coat and wore a top hat gray with dust. His right trouser leg was rolled up as if for the express purpose of being more likely to get entangled in his chain, and his left leg was caught up in a lobster-claw clip. His feet, on their rubber pedals, were in elastic-sided boots. His machine was a straight-framed, balloon-tired model of a type now worth its weight in gold – and it must have been heavy! – what with iron mudguards fore and aft. Many of its spokes – direct spokes – had been industriously replaced by whalebone umbrella stays whose forks, which had not been removed, whirled around in the shape of a figure eight.