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By Root 832 0

more delicate feelings. Some strange phenomenon had doubtless taken place in the organism of Camille’s murderer. It is difficult for analysis to penetrate such depths. Perhaps Laurent had become an artist as he had become lazy, after the great disruption that had unbalanced his mind and his body. Previously, he had been stifled by the heavy weight of his blood and blinded by the thick vapour of health surrounding him. Now, thinner, quivering, he had the restless vitality, the quick, sharp sensations of persons of a nervous temperament. In the life of terror that he was leading, his thoughts became exaggerated and rose to the ecstasy of genius; the sickness of the spirit, as it were, the neurosis2 that was afflicting his being, was also developing a strangely lucid artistic sensibility in him. Since he’d killed a man, it was as though his flesh had become lighter, his brain, distraught, seemed immense to him, and in this sudden expansion of his ideas he saw exquisite creations and poetic reveries. This is why his hand had suddenly acquired its distinction and his works their beauty, in a moment becoming personal and alive.

His friend gave up trying to explain the birth of this artist and left with his astonishment undiminished. Before he went, he looked at the pictures once again and told Laurent:

‘I have only one criticism to make, which is that all your sketches look alike. Those five heads resemble one another. Even the women have a sort of violent look that makes them seem like men in disguise... Now, if you want to make a picture out of those studies, you’ll have to change some of the faces: your figures can’t all look like members of the same family. People would laugh.’

He went out and, on the landing, added with a laugh:

‘It’s true, my friend, I’m glad to have seen you. Now I can believe in miracles ... Good Lord! You’ve really got it!’

He went down and Laurent returned to his studio, deeply disturbed. When his friend had remarked that all the heads looked alike, he had quickly turned away to hide the pallor of his face. The fact was that this inescapable resemblance had already struck him. He came back slowly and stood in front of the paintings; and as he looked at them, turning from one to the other, a cold sweat ran down his back.

‘He’s right,’ he murmured. ‘They are all alike ... They look like Camille.’

He stepped back and sat down on the divan, unable to take his eyes off the heads in the sketches. The first was an old man with a long white beard, but underneath the beard, the artist could make out Camille’s slender chin. The second showed a young blonde girl, and this girl was looking at him with his victim’s blue eyes. Each of the three other faces had some features of the drowned man. It was like Camille made up as an old man, as a young girl, taking whatever disguise the painter chose to give him, but always keeping the general character of his physiognomy. There was another frightful similarity in the heads, too: they seemed to be suffering, terrified, as though they were all crushed by the same feeling of horror. Each one had a slight fold to the left of the mouth that pulled back the lips and made them grimace. This fold, which Laurent remembered having seen on the drowned man’s convulsed features, marked them with the sign of a foul family bond.

Laurent realized that he had spent too long looking at Camille in the Morgue. The corpse’s image had been deeply impressed on his mind. And now his hand, without his realizing it, was constantly drawing the lines of this frightful mask, the memory of which followed him around everywhere.

Gradually, as he lay back on the divan, the painter thought he could see the faces come to life. So there were five Camilles in front of him, five Camilles that his own fingers had endowed with such power and which, through some terrifying mystery, represented every age and every sex. He got up, cut through the canvases and threw them outside. He felt that he would die of fright in his studio if he were to people it himself with portraits of his victim.

He had just