His slight feeling of remorse had entirely evaporated, and he was unable to conceive how he could for a moment have believed himself responsible for Chevalier's death.

Yet the affair troubled him.
Suddenly he thought: "Supposing he were still alive!" A while ago, for the space of a second, by the light of a match blown out as soon as it was struck, he had seen the hole in the actor's skull.
But what if he had seen incorrectly?
What if he had taken a mere graze of the skin for a serious lesion of the brain and skull?
Does a man retain his powers of judgment in the first moments of surprise and horror?
A wound may be hideous without being mortal, or even particularly serious.

It had certainly seemed to him that the man was dead.

But was he a medical man, able to judge with certainty?
He lost all patience with the wick, which was still charring, and muttered: "This lamp is enough to poison one." Then recalling a trick of speech habitual to Dr.Socrates, as to the origin of which he was ignorant, he repeated mentally: "This lamp stinks like thirty-six cart-loads of devils." Instances occurred to him of several abortive attempts at suicide.

He remembered having read in a newspaper that a married man, after killing his wife, had, like Chevalier, fired his revolver into his mouth, but had only succeeded in shattering his jaw; he remembered that at his club a well known sportsman, after a card scandal, tried to blow out his brains but merely shot off an ear.