pulleys. Broad pools of blood run down over paving stones and meet up in a drain full of undefined debris.
The light comes down from on high, from between chimneys, against which weathervanes are silhouetted by a piece of sky only as big as your hand and the roofs of neighbouring houses drop their shadows dramatically from one floor to another.
At the end of this recess is a space. In this space is a woodshed, on this woodshed ladders, a few bales of straw, rope, a hen-coop and an old rabbit hutch that has seen better days.
How did these heterogeneous details come to present themselves to my imagination?… I do not know. I had no memories of things like this and yet each stroke of my charcoal pencil was a fantastic feat of observation by dint of being true to nature. Nothing was missing!
But on the right of the picture one corner of the sketch remained blank. I knew not what to put there… Something was stirring and moving about… Suddenly I saw a foot, a foot in the air, a foot off the ground. Despite its improbable position, I followed my inspiration without understanding where all this was leading. This foot bordered on a leg…over the tensely stretched-out leg there soon floated part of a dress…To cut a long story short an old woman appeared, rumpled, dishevelled, haggard, successively leaning backward over the edge of a well and fighting against a fist that was strangling her…
I was drawing a murder scene. The charcoal pencil fell from my hand.
This woman, posed in the most brazen of attitudes, the small of her back pushed up against the coping of the well, her face twisted in terror, her two hands tightly attached to the arm of the murderer, frightened me… I did not dare to look at her. But the man himself, the owner of this arm, I could not see… It was impossible for me to finish what I was doing.
“I’m tired,” I told myself, my brow bathed in sweat. “I only have this one figure still to do. I’ll finish it tomorrow… It shouldn’t be hard.”
And I went back to bed, scared half to death by my vision. Five minutes later I was fast asleep.
The following day I was up at the crack of dawn. I had just got dressed and was preparing myself to take up where I had left off when two short knocks resounded at the door:
“Come in!”
The door opened. A man already in the twilight of his life, tall, thin, dressed in black, appeared on the threshold. The face of this man, his eyes set close together, his great hook nose over which loomed a broad, bony brow had something stern about it. He greeted me solemnly.
“Mr Christian Venius, the painter?” he said.
“I am he, sir.”
He bowed once more, giving his own name:
“Baron Frederick Van Spreckdal.”
The appearance in my poor hovel of the rich art collector Van Spreckdal, a judge in the criminal court, made a strong impression on me. I could not stop myself from casting a surreptitious glance at my old worm-eaten furniture, my damp tapestries and my dusty floor. I felt humiliated by such a squalid state of affairs… But Van Spreckdal did not seem to pay any attention to these things and promptly sat down at my little table:
“Mister Venius,” he went on, “I’ve come to…”
But, just then, his eyes came to rest on the incomplete sketch.… He failed to finish his sentence. I had seated myself on the edge of the truckle bed and the sudden attention given by this person to one of my works made my heart beat faster with a feeling of apprehension that was difficult to define.
After a minute Van Spreckdal raised his head:
“Are you the author of this sketch?” he asked, now giving me his undivided attention.
“Yes, sir.”
“What are you asking for it?”
“I don’t sell my sketches… It’s the rough draft for a picture.”
“I see,” he said, lifting up the paper with the tips of his long yellow fingers. He took a magnifying glass from his waistcoat pocket and started to study the drawing in silence.
The sun’s rays were, at this time of day, falling obliquely into my garret. Van Spreckdal did not breathe a word; his big nose curved into a claw, his thick eyebrows contracted, and his protruding chin created a thousand wrinkles in his long sunken cheeks. The silence was so impenetrable that I could hear quite distinctly the plaintive buzzing of a fly caught in a spider’s web.
“And how big is this picture going to be, Mister Venius?” he said without even looking at me.
“Three feet by four feet.”
“What will you charge for the picture?”
“Fifty ducats.”
Van Spreckdal placed the drawing on the table and took out of his pocket a drooping green silk purse, elongated into the shape of a pear. He slid the rings in order to open it.
“Fifty ducats then,” he said. “There you have them.”
I went dizzy.
The baron got up, said goodbye to me and I heard his great ivory-handled cane knock against each step till he finally came to the bottom of the stairs. Then, waking up from my temporary stupor, I suddenly remembered that I had not thanked him, and I ran down those four flights of stairs as quick as a flash. But, when I got to the door, it was in vain that I looked both right and left—the street was deserted.
“Well! Fancy that!” I said to myself. “Here’s a how-d’you-do!”
And I went back up the stairs quite out of breath.
CHAPTER II
The surprising way in which Van Spreckdal had just appeared to me threw me into a deep trance: “Yesterday,” I said to myself as I contemplated the pile of ducats sparkling in the sunshine, “yesterday I formed the culpable intention of cutting my throat for the lack of a few miserable schillings and today good fortune smiles on me unbidden… A good job then I didn’t open my razor and, if ever the temptation to do away with myself overtakes me again, I’ll take care to put the thing off to the following day.”
After these judicious reflexions, I sat down to finish the sketch. Four strokes of the charcoal pencil and that would be that. But here an unfathomable disappointment awaited me. I found it impossible to make these four strokes. I had lost the thread of my inspiration and the mysterious personage would not emerge from the limbo of my brain. It was in vain that I evoked it, mapped it out, went back to it—it was no more in keeping with the whole than a figure by Raphael would be in a David Teniers smoke-filled snug… I was sweating cobs.
To cap it all Rap, in accordance with his habitual good manners, opened the door without knocking, his eyes becoming glued to my pile of ducats. Then he cried out in a voice like a yelp:
“Aha! I’ve caught you. Will you persist in telling me now, Mr
Painter, that you’re short of money?…”
And his claw-like fingers advanced with that nervous trembling that the sight of gold always arouses in misers.
For
