Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/189

 "No;" said he to himself one day, "this is not the ideal being that I saw; this cursed creature took for a time her celestial form to seduce me and draw me into her snares! This is not a woman, it is a demon!"

And the miserable man, a prey to fits of delirium, made use of such cruel treatment towards Angiola and her child, that the neighbors became indignant and denounced him to the magistrate. Berthold, warned that they were coming to arrest him, disappeared from his garret with his wife and child. They were unable, at first, to find out what had become of him. Sometime afterwards he came to N, in Upper Silesia. But he was alone then, and he undertook to recommence the picture of the Virgin; but he could not succeed in finishing it. A languishing disease was carrying him to the grave step by step. It was necessary for him, in order to exist, and pay for some remedies, to sell the last of his property, and even his unfinished picture, which were sold at auction by a picture dealer. Death was not yet ready for Berthold. When he had recovered some strength, he went away begging his bread, from door to door, and paying his trifling expenses by painting signs.

Here the manuscript given me by professor Aloysius Walter ended. I concluded that the unfortunate Berthold, become mad with misery, had assinated [sic] his wife and child, to get rid of their support. However, as nothing after all, authorized such a belief, I felt a lively curiosity to interrogate him adroitly in one of his moments of good humor, to which he sometimes gave himself up when his labor went to his liking.

I went back to the church; he was, as formerly, perched on his scaffolding, looking gloomy and absent; he was sketching on the wall tints of rose marbling. I went up and placed myself beside him, to officiously hand him his colors; and as he looked at me with surprise:—"Am I not," said I to him in a low voice, "your last night's companion, whom you accepted in the place of that lazy fellow Christian?" 16*