The Mysterious Sketch.

by Emile Erckmann, et al.

I

Opposite the Saint Sebaldus Chapel in Nuremberg rises up a little inn, tall and narrow, with a jagged gable, dusty windows and a plaster cast of Our Lady on top of its roof. It was here that I spent the unhappiest days of my life. I had gone to Nuremberg to study the old German masters, but, due to a lack of liquidity, I had to paint portraits...and what portraits they were! Fat purveyors of t.i.ttle-tattle with a cat on their knees, aldermen in wigs, burgomasters wearing a three-cornered hat and the whole thing set off by luminous ochre and cinnabar by the bucketful.

From portraits I descended to sketches and from sketches to outlines.

Nothing can be worse, believe me, than to constantly have on your back a head steward, tight-lipped, shrill, impudent-looking, who comes to you every day with: "So then! How soon will you be paying, sir?

Have you any idea how much your bill is now? No. It doesn't bother you, does it?... Sir eats, drinks and sleeps as he pleases... Does not our heavenly Father feed even the birds of the air? Sir's bill comes to four hundred schillings and ten kreuzer... It's hardly worth mentioning, I know."

Those who have not heard this scale being sung can have no concept of it - love of art, imagination, a sacred pa.s.sion for the beautiful all dry up under the withering breath of such a browbeater... You grow gauche and timid, all your energy dissipated along with any feeling of personal dignity.

One night, penniless as usual, and threatened with debtor's prison by that worthy steward Rap, I decided I would thwart his hopes of payment by slitting my throat. With this pleasant thought in mind, sitting on my truckle bed opposite the window, I gave myself up to a thousand philosophical reflexions of varying degrees of cheerfulness. I did not dare to open my razor for fear that the irresistible force of my reasoning might well instil in me sufficient courage to do away with myself once and for all. Having argued with myself in this way, I blew out my candle, deferring the conclusion to this line of thought to the morrow.

This abominable Rap had driven me completely round the bend. All I could do now artistically was draw silhouettes and my only desire was to have the money to rid myself of this awful man's odious presence.

But that night my mind performed a singular about-turn. I woke up going on for one o'clock, relit my light and, wrapping around me my grey smock, dashed down on paper a quick sketch reminiscent of an old Dutch master...something strange, bizarre and bearing no resemblance to my usual style.

Picture a dark courtyard hemmed in by high dilapidated walls...These walls are furnished with hooks seven or eight feet from the ground.

Even at a cursory glance we may guess that this is a shambles of some sort.

On the left there is a latticework made up of narrow strips. Through it you can see a side of beef suspended from an enormous ceiling by enormous 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 s.p.a.ce. In this s.p.a.ce 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 att.i.tudes, 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 surrept.i.tious 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 gla.s.s 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.

II