From 188 Contes à régler (1998 edition)
Fascinated by the myth of Doctor Frankenstein, he had devoted his entire life to tinkering in a lab where he could create a living creature.
After years of unconvincing attempts, he finally succeeded and even believed he had exceeded his expectations: he believed he knew that his first experiment had almost every chance of being a success, obviously revolutionary. But he also knew that, for technical reasons, this groundbreaking first would be the last. There was no question of launching assembly-line monsters or little artificial geniuses onto the market.
That's when he had the idea.
Not the idea of giving life to a foreign creature that would probably be very disappointing, but that of giving life to the only person who mattered to him on this earth: himself. Being revived after death.
For twenty years already he had been working with an assistant without imagination, but a computer virtuoso, capable of mastering all the complexity of the most subtle circuits of experience.
To avoid dying in a pulp or being eaten away by some disease, the researcher decided to end it quickly, preferring an instant, clean death. The researcher decided to take dangerous turns at full speed and drive in the middle of the road.
He did not see the truck coming in the opposite direction until it was too late; it hit him head-on and killed him instantly.
The young woman he had met the week prior was obviously not Death - his death was more modest. But, in any case, he would have died within the year. The woman with whom he had been with for too long would have shot him dead in a fit of jealous rage. And, even if he were able to escape these two violent ends, he would have been fired by the editor-in-chief of his newspaper who had bullied him for the past five years, and, seeing no way to survive, he would have ended his life that December.
Death, indeed, for him as for all humans, had its faithful employees and occasional replacement delegates.