Eclipse Three

The Visited Man by Molly Gloss

In April after the death of his wife-her death coming only weeks after the death of his son-Marie-Lucien stopped going out of his apartment. It had been his habit to go out every morning to buy a newspaper, five bronze centimes for Le Petit Journal; but as he stopped caring to read about assassinations and political scandals, or anything else occurring in the world, so he stopped going out to buy the paper. Then he stopped going to the butcher, the tea shop, the fish market, the bakery. Every Wednesday and Saturday his landlord M. Queval brought a few groceries and sundries to him from lists he scribbled on scraps of old newsprint. He and M. Queval exchanged perhaps a dozen words while standing on the landing, words about frostbit spinach or the freshness of the fish, but otherwise Marie-Lucien saw no one, spoke to no one. Friends who came to the house went away after a few words passed through the cracked-open door, or perhaps without sight of him at all; and after the first weeks they stopped bothering to inquire of his well-being.

He had taken his pension from the service more than a year earlier, a pension barely sufficient to pay the rent and the groceries, and he had been working mornings for a trinket vendor in order to eke out a decent living for himself and his family. Now he stopped going out to work, which meant the matter of money would eventually become acute; but he ate very little, spent nothing on clothes, and the weather in April was warm enough to put off the question of coal. He slept in his clothes. In the morning he warmed up yesterday's bad coffee and drank it while looking out at the traffic in the street. Then he undressed slowly and performed the necessary morning ablutions, before dressing again in the same shabby clothes. Most of the hours of his days were spent turning over a deck of cards in slow games of Patience.

Late in May, after Marie-Lucien had spent the better part of two months alone with no expectation or wish for this to change, someone knocked at his door. He would not have bothered to answer, but the knocking became continuous and insistent and finally he felt forced to rise from his chair. The apartment directly below his, and just above M. Queval's street-side metal foundry, was occupied by an artist, a painter of poor reputation who people in the neighborhood said was either a clever joker or slightly mad, a precocious senile. It was this painter who now stood on the landing, wearing a tranquil expression as though he had not for the past many minutes been pounding vigorously on the door in a demand to be let in. He held in one arm a skeletal and filthy brown tabby, and announced matter-of-factly that the cat had followed him back from his morning walk through Montsouris Park, and that he could not take it into his own apartment because "as you know, there are the other cats." The two men had seldom met, seldom exchanged more than a remark about the weather as they passed each other going in or out of their apartments; and in the past two months they had not met or spoken at all. Now, as if they had already discussed the matter and reached some sort of agreement, he delivered the little tabby into Marie-Lucien's hands. "She is starving, you realize, and her stomach must first be calmed with tiny portions of oatmeal before she will be able to keep down cream and fish and begin to put on weight."

Marie-Lucien, who was startled out of words, managed only, "I cannot… " and the painter, who had already begun to descend the stairs, replied cheerfully without turning, "Oh my dear, none of us can."

Marie-Lucien put the cat on the floor of the landing and shut the door, but her continuous piteous crying was difficult to listen to. He finally opened the door again, but only to put out scraps of a lunch he had not eaten, which she ate and then immediately vomited. He was forced to boil up some oatmeal and feed it to her slowly until her starving stomach became calm. And of course by the time she began to put on weight from being fed little tidbits of fish and sips of cream, she had made herself at home in his apartment.

The arrival of the cat did little to change Marie-Lucien's habits. He continued to sleep in his clothes and to spend his days playing solitary card games. But now that his attention had been drawn to it, he frequently heard the voice of the painter rising up from the apartment below him, particularly at night, muttering to himself or perhaps speaking to his paintings; sometimes declaiming lines of poetry; sometimes singing badly or playing a few fragile notes on a violin, the refrains of humorous and nostalgic songs Marie-Lucien remembered from his own childhood and from the nursery days of his son. When the painter thumped heavily against the walls or the floor and woke him in the night, he complained aloud to the cat: "Do you hear him? The damn painter? He is stumbling drunk again." Presumably these sounds had been coming up through the floor during the entire year the painter had lived in the apartment below, and Marie-Lucien had simply been oblivious of them until now-preoccupied with watching over the illness and death of his son, and then his wife.

In June, after a string of unreasonably cold and rainy days, there was again a banging on the door and the painter held out a squat black dog whose wiry coat was muddy and matted. "Abused and abandoned," he said, with a brief, commiserating smile.

"I cannot," Marie-Lucien said, and shut the door.

The painter began beating on the jamb, calling and repeating "M. Pichon, M. Pichon."

Finally Marie-Lucien opened the door again. "I am not M. Pichon," he said unhappily. "Please go and find this man Pichon, give him the dog and leave me alone."

The painter shook his head, still smiling. "Ha ha, I am famous, among other things, for getting wrong the names even of my friends." He bowed slightly. "M. Guyard, I apologize." This was not Marie-Lucien's name any more than Pichon, but it seemed pointless to say so. "He likes tomatoes," the painter said, "and chicken," and for a confused moment Marie-Lucien thought he was speaking of Pichon, or Guyard; but then the painter placed the dog in his arms and turned for the stairs.

Hurriedly Marie-Lucien started after him, holding out the animal, which smelled of mud and oak leaves and the sewer. "This is impossible!" he protested. "M. Rousseau, take him back." He intended to sound strict and authoritative but he had been speechless for so long that his voice came out hoarse and thin; and even to his own ears, his urgent insistence that he could not keep the dog seemed as querulous as an old woman's whining. He was forced to trail the painter down the stairs, calling out ridiculously that he could not afford chicken even for himself, and as he followed the painter right into his apartment, repeating again his refusal to keep the dog, he was startled to find himself suddenly in a jungle-huge umbels, fans, rockets, cascades of intense greens, spangled with the enormous cups and corollas of unimaginably bright magenta and yellow flowers.

"Oh!" he said, and staggered back.

They were paintings, of course, many of them quite large paintings, standing along all the walls of the rooms, and Marie-Lucien blushed and straightened up when he realized it. In fact, they were not even very good paintings, having no more than a child's sense of perspective, and drawn entirely without shadow or relief. The tiger, which had seemed so ready to spring at Marie-Lucien from among the leaves, he now saw was flat and simple and unconvincing as a picture postcard. He frowned, and said the first thing that came into his mouth, which was, "The flowers are too large, I have never seen flowers in life this large."

"Haven't you?" the painter said, and gazed about at his own work, entirely unpersuaded.

Many of these jungle scenes were of death and dismemberment-jaguars and tigers and lions variously attacking Negroes, a white horse, a hunch-shouldered Indian buffalo. Yet there was something oddly innocent in all the expressions, as if the creatures were only playing at a game, and in a moment would scramble to their feet, laughing, their wounds nothing more than circus greasepaint. Now that Marie-Lucien had regained his composure, the feeling this summoned in him was odd as well: odd, that paintings of such violence and bloodshed conjured for him an ingenuous child's world, a world in which the lion lies down with the lamb.

After several moments the little black dog in his arms squirmed to be released, and woke him from the brief dream state he must have slipped into.

"M. Rousseau, I cannot keep this dog," he said hoarsely, unequivocally, and let the dog down onto the floor. The little thing immediately ran out the door and up the stairs, where his claws could be heard scrabbling across the floor of Marie-Lucien's apartment. This was followed shortly by the cat's yowl and then the dog's tortured yelp.

The painter laughed: "A dog is the emblem of fidelity," he said, as if pronouncing from a pulpit. Then he began rustling through cupboards, apparently in search of glasses or a bottle, for he said brightly, "We should first have a glass of wine," though he did not say what he meant by "first."

"I must… " Marie-Lucien tried to say, but Rousseau waved a hand and said, "All the more reason not to." He poured a few drops of vin blanc, the last from a dusty green bottle, into two paint-smeared cups and held out one of the cups to Marie-Lucien. "Santé!" he said, and downed the bit of wine in a single swallow. Marie-Lucien, because he could not readily think of a reason not to, drank his also. The wine was vinegary and tasted of the dust of the bottle; or perhaps there had been dust in the cups.

The painter then clapped him on the shoulder and began steering him from painting to painting in the two rooms of the apartment, declaiming before each one as if he were a docent in a museum. Not all of his work was of the jungle. There were a few commissioned portraits of children whose parents, Rousseau cheerfully admitted, had refused payment on grounds the painting did not resemble their child. Two were small portraits of the artist, painted not from mirrors but from "the image of my handsome self I carry in my own mind, ha ha!" One was a very strange painting of a man resembling Rousseau standing over an infant apparently abandoned beside a country road, though neither the child nor the man appeared the least frightened or disturbed by their circumstances. There were, as well, scenes from the Parisian countryside and the suburbs, and of Laval, where the artist had spent his childhood. In them, cows grazed in stiff profile, completely without perspective; roads ran between hedges and fences without any sense at all of a third dimension. It was evident to Marie-Lucien that Rousseau was a second-rate amateur; but at the same time he felt himself helplessly drawn into the world of the paintings, a world beyond everyday life, beyond time, a strange and dreamlike world in which childhood's careless days had deepened without abandoning their purity.

"The colors… " he said at one point, without any notion of how to finish the thought.

"Yes, yes. But it's my blacks that Gauguin admires: the perfection of my blacks."

Marie-Lucien did not for a moment consider the painter's boast to be true-Gauguin, after all, being a somewhat notorious artist-but he was more alert than most people to the color of hearse cloth, having recently watched the undertaker's mutes carry off first his only son and then his wife. Now that his attention had been brought to it, he became aware of the depth, the rich inkiness of the blacks in all the paintings; and he realized what it was he should have said about the colors: that their bold frankness must come from offsetting them with so much black.

When they finished their tour of the "Imaginary Museum," as Rousseau laughingly called it, Marie-Lucien went back up to his apartment where the black dog and striped cat had come to an uneasy détente; and he resumed his sequestered life, though the conditions were somewhat moderated from the need to bring a dog down to the street twice a day to relieve himself. He and the painter did not speak to each other again for more than a fortnight, or only on the handful of occasions when they passed on the front stoop as Marie-Lucien carried the dog out to the gutter. But one evening late in June Rousseau came to his door well after dark, banging on the jamb and calling out, "M. Bernier, M. Bernier." Then, as if they were old comrades, he took Marie-Lucien's arm and said, "Jardin des Plantes! Best seen at night, you know, leaning through the fence," and pulled him toward the stairs.

"I am not Bernier," Marie-Lucien said, but without expecting to accomplish anything by it.

"No, no, of course not, I have known Bernier for years and he is a vast pig of a man, lacking completely in charm, you are much superior in every way to Bernier." The painter spoke consolingly, as if Marie-Lucien had confided a terrible dissatisfaction with himself.

They walked along the streets in silence, Rousseau's arm looped through Marie-Lucien's. He was not an old man, the painter, not even as old as Marie-Lucien who was not yet seventy, but he strolled along at an old man's pace, limping slightly and facing straight ahead when he walked, turning his entire body on the frequent occasions when he paused to peer into shop windows with a concentrated frown. Marie-Lucien waited while the painter carried out these examinations, waited without interest but also without impatience. It had been three months since he had traveled farther than the sidewalk directly in front of M. Queval's foundry; he was astonished to find himself out and about so late at night, interested to find he was not afraid of the streets largely emptied of all but the unsavory and the wretched.

At the gates of the Botanical Gardens the painter clasped the iron bars with both hands and thrust his head as far into the closed park as his shoulders would permit. "Such a strange and mysterious world," he said very quietly. Marie-Lucien, standing behind him, peered into the darkness without seeing anything he considered strange or mysterious. But he became gradually aware that, away from street lamps as they were here, the trees and bushes were wrapped in fantastic black shadows. He pushed his own head between the iron bars and leaned into the fence; and after several moments he began to make out amongst the shrubbery the vivid yellow blossoms of a rose, magnified hugely against the blackness.

In the nights that followed, Marie-Lucien and the painter, after sharing a bowl of soup at one apartment or the other, shut the aggrieved cat and dog in the upstairs apartment and strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens and Montsouris Park and leaned into the fences of various private gardens. They explored not only the parks and woodlands and brushy clearings but traversed the bridges and aqueducts and watched the late-night goings-on at the quais and along the banks of the rivers and canals. They spoke little, which suited Marie-Lucien: he found Rousseau to be a strange sort, just as people had said, possibly a confidence trickster or a candid idiot. Once, while they were studying the statue of a lion in the darkness of the Luxembourg Gardens, the painter said matter-of-factly that the "other cats" he had spoken of, the ones that occupied his apartment, were in fact lions and jaguars and tigers that wandered in from the jungles to visit him at night and sit for their portraits. It was impossible to know if he was speaking figuratively, or if he was genuinely hallucinatory, or if he merely enjoyed playing the part of an eccentric artist. But Marie-Lucien, walking with him at night, looking into the dark corners of the city-coming suddenly upon the black statue of a lion in the midst of clipped hedges and graveled paths-often felt as he had when he had first walked into the painter's apartment and gazed on his strange canvases: a vivid awareness of how beautiful and dangerous the world was, both tender and cruel. And this was the closest he had come, since the deaths of his wife and his son, to discovering any sort of meaning in the world.

One night while they were standing on a viaduct watching the body of some sad unfortunate being fished out of the water, the painter said thoughtfully, "I have run into ghosts everywhere. One of them tormented me for more than a year when I was a customs inspector."

Marie-Lucien did not believe in ghosts. Belief in ghosts would have required him to believe in something beyond death, a world of the spirit. He had been, as a young man, at the battle of Sedan where thousands had died; and he had watched his wife and his son on their death beds; and he had never had the least inkling that any scrap or glimpse of the people he loved remained anywhere in the universe. He had come to the unshakable conclusion that death was unremitting and permanent; death, he believed, was death. He said to the painter, to turn him aside from his ghosts, "You were a douanier?"

Rousseau smiled modestly. "Nothing so grand. A mere inspector." But he was not put off the track. He said, "Whenever I was on duty this ghost would stand ten paces away, annoying me, poking fun." He turned to Marie-Lucien with a somewhat amused grimace. "Letting out smelly farts just to nauseate me."

Marie-Lucien smiled slightly.

"I shot at him, but a phantom apparently cannot die again. Whenever I tried to grab him, he vanished into the ground and reappeared somewhere else."

Marie-Lucien asked him uninterestedly-mere politeness-"Was he someone you knew? An old acquaintance?"

"Not at all. He was not haunting me, but the post, which was at the Gate of Arcueil. When I left that post, I never saw him again. I suppose something must have happened there, perhaps something in the way he was killed, that caused his soul to attach itself to the gate, or to the person guarding the gate."

At the muddy edge of the canal several men were now standing in the glare of gas lamps, surrounding the naked body of a young woman, a woman only recently dead, her body still lovely, unblemished, not sufflated, her long brown hair from this distance seeming to hang in a neat braid across one shoulder and breast. The painter's expression, looking down at the scene, slowly softened into satisfaction. "I don't like to read the big tabloids that talk a lot of politics, what I read is the Magasin Pittoresque." He laughed. "The more drowned bodies in the river the greater my reading pleasure."

Marie-Lucien was taken aback. "That's a terrible thing to say."

"Is it?" Rousseau said, in a tone of complete sincerity, and might have been about to turn to Marie-Lucien to collect his answer, but suddenly swept his hand and his glance skyward. "There goes that poor woman's soul," he said, with surprised delight.

Marie-Lucien looked quickly where Rousseau had pointed but saw only the full moon hanging low and white on the night sky, as perfectly round as if it had been drawn with a compass. "What?" he said in frustration. He did not at all believe the painter had seen a drowned soul flying up to heaven but couldn't help his question, or its meaning: Not, What did you say? but What did you see?

"Ah, such peace!" the painter said quietly, which he may have meant as an answer.

In the early part of August, Rousseau came to Marie-Lucien's door unexpectedly-it was morning, and Marie-Lucien was still drinking his terrible coffee, still wearing the rumpled clothes he had slept in. The painter took hold of his arm and said, "Le Ménagerie! Best seen at night when the animals are at their most alert, but unfortunately open only in the daylight. Ten centimes and you're in." Marie-Lucien attempted to refuse. It was one thing, their nightly strolls, the two not-quite-old men leaning into fences, peering at trees and flowering shrubs in dark public parks and private gardens; but the daylight hours he intended still to keep for his own use, which was not grieving, as his friends had supposed, but a prolonged, expectant waiting for his own death.

Rousseau, of course, would not be put off. He had a long-established morning practice of strolling through one or another of his favorite amusement parks, and he had made up his mind to share that pleasure with Marie-Lucien. Shortly, they were out on the lively daytime streets, and Rousseau, brisk with morning energy, led the way to the Zoological Gardens, where he spent a good long while studying a mangy lion rocking restlessly in a space too small to accommodate pacing; and kinkajou monkeys and gibbon apes quietly pining in their cages. None of this was of much interest to Marie-Lucien, or only insofar as to strengthen his old opinion that he lived in a brutal, godless universe. He stood back from the animal pens, shifting his weight lionlike in anxious boredom.

When finally they left the zoo, Rousseau insisted they must visit the Palmarium, and the Orangerie, as well; and inside those hothouses, Marie-Lucien felt as if he had slipped once again into a dream. Confronted with a spectacle of perpetual novelty-huge Paulownia trees, tropical palms, mango and pineapple trees, thick-stalked grasses taller than any man-he seemed to recognize everything, to rediscover it all in his memories. It struck him suddenly that the foliage under the translucent glass vault was the most exalted green he had ever seen outside Rousseau's jungle canvases, and when he said this to the painter-a bit of mild praise coming rather late in their acquaintance-Rousseau replied offhandedly, "I don't seek and invent, my dear, I only find and discover."

"Well then, it seems to me, you find and discover strangeness above all," Marie-Lucien said, which the painter took as true praise and which provoked in him a pleased laugh.

In the weeks that followed, because Marie-Lucien had little interest in visiting the Zoo or the Monkey Palace again, they confined their morning walks to the Orangerie, the Palmarium and the Botanical Gardens, which Rousseau said was not an inconvenience. The animals in the menagerie were, after all, not suitable studies for his art-always either reclining or sitting in a torpor-and his genuine models (his expression guileless as a child's) were the wild ones who visited him at night.

One morning as the two men walked back through the streets from le Jardin des Plantes to the apartments, the painter wrapped an arm about Marie-Lucien's shoulders and said, "Come into the studio, M. Bernal, see what strangeness I've been about in recent days. The woman has been posing for me, the woman we met on the quai."

Marie-Lucien had no recollection of meeting a woman on the quai, but this did not surprise him, as the painter had a practice of striking up conversation with virtually anybody they passed, even prostitutes and obvious villains; and Marie-Lucien the practice of not joining in. "I am not Bernal," he said mildly, but only from habit.

The painting Rousseau wished him to see was of a nude reclining on a Bordeaux-red chaise inexplicably set down in the midst of a jungle lush with impossibly huge Egyptian lotus blossoms. The work was far from completed-the foliage flourishing before the woman-but Marie-Lucien could already see that she was no one he recognized; or, given the painter's awkward draftsmanship, perhaps he would not have recognized her even if she had been someone he knew well. It was a very strange painting, of course, very much in line with the greater part of his work, and the sort of thing that caused Marie-Lucien to lose his foothold in the world: In the trees were exotic birds and monkeys, in the sky a perfectly round bone-white moon, in the foliage a glimpse of an elephant, as well as lurking lions and serpents; and oddest of all, a Negro snake charmer holding a musette to his lips. Even half-finished as it was, the painting gave an impression of stiff, stark peace, of Dantesque silence.

Marie-Lucien's wife had died slowly of consumption; for years before her death she had been unable to engage him in sexual congress, and it had been years since he had bothered to abuse himself. At the intersection of circumstance and advancing age, he had become celibate without taking a decision, and was somewhat interested in the fact that paintings and photographs of naked women no longer aroused him. In any case, this particular painting of a nude was not, to his eye, erotic. Her ankles were chastely crossed, her pubis neatly hidden behind the flesh of her thighs. One thick arm outstretched on the back of the chaise seemed in gesture toward the snake charmer or the lions, but whether this was to beckon or fend off, was difficult to know. She was dark-haired, dark-eyed, two twisted strands of her hair falling across one of her perfectly globular breasts. It seemed to Marie-Lucien that this was a woman not ashamed to be naked-not living in the world he knew, but in some universe absent the Biblical tale of sin.

"She is a Pole," the painter said, standing back in admiration of his own work. "A pious Polish girl, though I've drawn her as she is now, not pious at all but an innocent, an angel, restored to Genesis."

This was not quite what Marie-Lucien had been thinking, but near enough that he murmured, "Eve in Paradise."

The painter corrected him, in a tone of surprise, "Yadwigha, after death. Do you not recall how we watched her soul float up to the clouds?"

Marie-Lucien grappled through memory until he remembered the young woman lying dead on the bank of the canal, naked under the stares of half a dozen men. "It was only you who saw… " he began to say, but the painter was already going on, gesturing toward a Louis-Philippe sofa that was evidently the model for the chaise in his painting. "She has been posing for me here, every night. Her spirit has attached itself to me, which I suppose is due to my catching sight of her as she departed her body. Poor girl drowned herself out of grief."

Marie-Lucien said, smiling very faintly, "So not as pious as all that, if she killed herself. God condemns the suicide."

The painter brushed this away with a gesture. "God condemns no one, it's the priests who are always in a mood to condemn." He gazed at his painting in silence. "The girl had suffered greatly, her husband and child dead in an overturned taxi. How can we condemn her for finding this world unbearable? I should have found it unbearable myself, years ago, and ten times over, if I weren't a bit of a spiritist." He turned to Marie-Lucien with a smile. "Art is the confession of its maker. You shall have to look at my art, to know why sadness has not grabbed hold of me in its teeth."

It was Rousseau's nonchalance that offended Marie-Lucien, and caused him to remember suddenly a remark the painter had made, a remark about the pleasure he took from reading about drowned bodies hauled from the river. At the time, he had been distracted from it; but now, recalling the tone and the words, Marie-Lucien said bitterly, "What do you know of unbearable? of grief? of great suffering? When you have lost your wife and your son, as I have, then speak to me of unbearable."

The painter gave him a startled look. "Oh my dear M. Derain, I am sorry to hear of it. Sorry to hear of it. Your poor heart." He draped his arm across Marie-Lucien Derain's shoulders and drew him close.

But this was the beginning of the end of their friendship. Marie-Lucien took work soon afterward with a neighborhood pork butcher, and seldom found time to join Rousseau on his morning visits to the pleasure gardens. They carried on their evening explorations for a short while, but ended them after an argument: When Marie-Lucien objected to hearing another tale of ghosts, the painter said to him that people who had never dreamed when fully awake were loathe to admit the realness of dream; and Marie-Lucien took this badly. Afterward he merely nodded when he passed Rousseau going in or out of the apartments, and if the painter spoke to him, he replied in as few words as possible.

In January during a spell of cold, bright weather, Marie-Lucien began working very late helping the butcher render fat, and one night climbing the stairs after midnight carrying scraps of meat for the cat and the dog, he passed the painter's open door and saw a naked woman posing on the Louis-Phillipe sofa, her arm outstretched and beckoning, her pallid body clothed in moonlight. The woman, who may have heard his steps on the landing, turned to him a face not beautiful at all but transparent and luminous, lit from within; and then she resumed her pose, fixing her gaze perhaps on the moon that he could not see but which he imagined must be visible through the apartment window. Her expression in profile was difficult to interpret, her mouth seeming at the verge of amusement but her thick brows intent and straight. One long brown braid fell across her shoulder and one breast. The painter, too, turned and stood very poised and erect, one thumb pushed through the hold of his palette, his brush held down in the other hand. The look he gave Marie-Lucien was a questioning frown of expectancy and joy; but they did not speak, and Marie-Lucien continued up the stairs, his heart thudding. When he sat down inside his own apartment the animals came immediately into his lap, and he rested his trembling hands in their fur.

In March, Marie-Lucien heard from his landlord that the painter had hung a new canvas at the Société des Peintres Indépendants: a painting of a naked woman dreaming on a Louis-Phillipe couch. Word later went around the neighborhood that this new painting had brought Rousseau a flurry of minor attention, and the admiration even of other artists. When the pork butcher took his wife to the salon to view it, Marie-Lucien stayed behind and kept the shop open.

Often, during that winter, he heard the painter's voice in conversation with himself or with his paintings, and from time to time the voice of this or that visitor. Twice, Rousseau gave parties to which Marie-Lucien was invited, but which he did not attend, parties at which the host played his violin very badly, and Marie-Lucien heard rising up through the floor the sounds of people applauding and laughing at the same time.

After the second party, the painter knocked on Marie-Lucien's door to plead poverty and beg twenty-five francs. "I imagine if you had saved all the money spent on parties, you would not need to beg from your friends and acquaintances," Marie-Lucien said to him, after he had given over the twenty-five francs. He had not wished to be the man's friend or to be invited to his entertainments, so could not quite account for the sound of bitterness in these words. The painter was not at all taken aback. He kissed Marie-Lucien on both cheeks and said fondly, "My dear, you are like a brother to me," which Marie-Lucien felt to be a grandiose figure of speech.

In the months afterward, he seldom saw the painter. Once, through his window, he watched Rousseau limping up the street to the apartments, appearing so sickly and pale that Marie-Lucien was struck with a moment of remorse; but then, to M. Queval who was standing on the front stoop, the painter complained in an aggrieved voice that he "suffered greatly" from a phlegmon in his leg. These were the same words he had used, speaking of the drowned woman, the very words that had begun their estrangement-that she had "suffered greatly"-and when he heard them, Marie-Lucien turned away from the window.

In September he opened his newspaper and was startled to read that the painter had died. Le Petit Journal was famous for the brevity of its reporting, and spent only a few lines to say that the minor artist H. Rousseau had died of a blood clot after surgery to remove a gangrenous leg; and that he had belonged to the Société des Peintres Indépendants, where an artist paid twenty-five francs a year for the privilege of hanging his canvases.

It had been many months since Marie-Lucien had visited the Palmarium or the Orangerie. On the day of the painter's burial he walked through the hothouses slowly; and then went into the menagerie, which he and Rousseau had visited only once together. A jaguar trudged in circles, dazed and ill, in a narrow box where he bumped into all the corners; the lion reclined in a stupor. As Marie-Lucien was going out again, he turned to see if it was his friend he had glimpsed going in one of the other gates, though of course it was only an old man with a thick mustache, a sickly complexion, a slight limp.

He stopped at a newsstand to buy a copy of Le Soleil for the obituaries, and read as he was walking back to the apartments that Rousseau was "a painter without any of the notions required by art;" and that his friends had spoken of him as a man of generosity, credulity and good humor. His living relations were a daughter Julia, and granddaughter Jeanne; he had been preceded in death by two wives and six of his seven children. In the painter's last days, Le Soleil reported, he had become delirious: had spoken of seeing angels, and of hearing their celestial music.

When Marie-Lucien, climbing the stairs, passed the open door of the painter's apartment he saw a woman standing inside, a woman he remembered having seen twice before. She was gazing at a new, unfinished painting, standing before it as unclad as the figure in the painting, which was herself, Yadwigha. In the painting her dead body lay beside a stream, watched over by the wide eyes of lions and monkeys. In the painter's apartment, her ghost turned to Marie-Lucien with an expression innocent as a child's; a look of expectancy and of joy. In a moment a woman came out from the second room of the apartment, a women Marie-Lucien had never met nor heard the painter speak of, a woman in black crepe, the painter's daughter Julia. And in the unfinished painting, death's bright angel ascended through the impossibly blue sky.