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."