There remains an episodical figure which has hitherto baffled all conjectures, because it seems by its traits, its carriage, its odd splendour, and its inappropriateness, to personify the magic, the romantic feeling, or, if you prefer, the misrepresentation of the picture; I mean that little witch-like personage, child-like and crone-like at the same time, with her hair streaming and adorned with pearls, gliding among the guards for no apparent reason, and who, a not less inexplicable detail, has a white cock, that at need might be taken for a purse, hanging from her girdle.

Whatever right she has to join the troop, this little figure seems to have nothing human about her.  She is colourless and almost shapeless.  Her figure is that of a doll and her gait is automatic.  She has the air of a beggar, something like diamonds covers her whole body, and an accoutrement resembling rays.  You would say that she came from some jewry, or old clothes market, or Bohemia, and that, awaking from a dream, she had attired herself in the most singular of all worlds.  She has the light, the uncertainty, and the wavering of a pale fire.  The more we examine her, the less we can grasp the subtle lineaments that serve as envelope for her uncorporeal existence.  We end by seeing in her nothing but a kind of extraordinarily strange phosphorescence which is not the ordinary light of things, nor yet the ordinary brilliance of a well-regulated palette, and this adds more sorcery to the peculiarities of her countenance.  Notice that in the place she occupies, one of the dark corners of the canvas, rather low in the middle distance, between a man in deep red and the captain dressed in black, this eccentric light has much greater force than the most sudden contrast with a neighbouring tint, and without extreme care this explosion of accidental light would have sufficed to disorganize the whole picture.

What is the meaning of this little imaginary or real being, who, however, is only a supernumerary while yet holding, so to speak, the chief role?  I shall not attempt to tell you.  Abler people than I have allowed themselves to inquire what it was and what it was doing there, without coming to any satisfactory conclusion.

But if to all these somewhat vain questions Rembrandt replied:  “This child is a caprice no less strange than and quite as plausible as many others in my engraving or painting.  I have placed it as a narrow ray amid great masses of shadow because its exiguity rendered it more vibrating and it suited me to awaken with a ray one of the dark corners of my picture.  It also wears the usual costume of my female figures, great or small, young or old, and in it you will find the type frequently occurring in my works.  I love what glitters, and that is why I have clothed her in brilliant materials.  As for those phosphorescent gleams that astonish you here, whilst elsewhere they pass unnoticed, it is only the light in its colourless splendour and supernatural quality that I habitually give to my figures when I illuminate them at all strongly.”—­Do you not think that such a reply ought to satisfy the most difficult, and that finally, the rights of the stage-setter being reserved, he need only render account of one point:  the manner in which he has treated the picture?