The Erckmann-Chatrian Megapack: 20 Classic Novels and Short Stories Read Online Free Page A

man… I could see him… He was posing for me.
    At ten o’clock the jailer came into my cell. His owl-like impassiveness gave way to admiration.
    “Can such things be?” he cried, standing in the doorway.
    “Go and fetch my judges,” I said to him, pursuing my work with mounting excitement as I did so.
    “They’re waiting for you in the courtroom,” Schlüssel added.
    “I want to tell them something,” I cried, putting the finishing touches to the mysterious protagonist.
    He was alive. He was frightening to look upon. His face, seen from the side, foreshortened on the wall, stood out against the white background with a prodigious presence.
    The jailer left me.
    A few minutes later the two judges appeared. They stood there open-mouthed.
    As for me, my arm outstretched and trembling in every limb, I said to them:
    “Behold the murderer!”
    Van Spreckdal, after some moments of silence, asked:
    “His name?”
    “I don’t know… but he is at this moment in time in the covered market… he’s cutting meat on the third stall on the left as you enter the market hall through the Street of the Bodyguards.”
    “What do you think?” he said, leaning towards his fellow judge.
    “Let that man be sent for,” answered the latter in solemn tones.
    Various guards, stationed in the corridor, obeyed this order. The judges remained standing still looking at the drawing. I sank down on the straw, my head between my knees, like someone dead.
    Soon steps resounded from afar from under the vaults. Those who have not waited for the hour of their deliverance and counted the minutes, long then like centuries… those who have not felt the agonizing feelings of waiting, terror, hope, doubt…those people will not be able to imagine the inner turmoil I was experiencing just then. I could have distinguished the footsteps of the murderer, walking flanked by his guards, from a thousand other similar ones. They were getting nearer…Even the judges themselves seemed nervous. I had raised my head and my heart was in the grip of an iron hand—I was staring at the now closed door. It opened… The man came in… His cheeks were puffy, his broad contracted jaws made the muscles in his face stand out prominently right up to his ears and his little eyes, restless and wild like those of a wolf, glittered under bushy eyebrows of a reddish brown.
    Van Spreckdal showed him my drawing without so much as a word being said.
    This broad-shouldered sanguine man, having looked at it, went pale… then, letting out a roar which made us all freeze in terror, he stuck out his huge arms and jumped backwards to knock down the guards. There was a frightful struggle outside in the corridor. All that could be heard were the butcher’s frantic panting, muffled curses, staccato speech and the feet of the guards, hoisted up off the floor, falling back on the flagstones.
    This lasted for over a minute.
    Finally the murderer was brought back in, his head lowered, his eye bloodshot, his hands tied up behind his back. He stared once again at the picture of the murder…seemed to ponder it and then, in a low voice, speaking as if to himself, came out with:
    “Who was around to have seen me at midnight?”
    I had been saved from the hangman’s noose!
    * * * *
    Many years have gone by since this terrible adventure. I no longer do silhouettes or portraits of burgomasters, thank God! By dint of perseverance and hard work, I have staked my claim to a place in the sun and I earn my living honourably by painting works of art, the only end, in my opinion, that any true artist should strive to attain. But the memory of the nocturnal sketch has always stayed in my mind. Sometimes, in the middle of working on something, my thoughts return to it. When that happens I put down my palette and dream for hours on end!
    How was it possible for a crime carried out by a man I did not know in a place I had never seen before…to reproduce itself under my charcoal and chalk so