It was not so high, the wall, as massive, not so old as moss-covered.  After Rudolph Cot, the painter, had achieved celebrity with his historical canvas, The Death of the Antique World, now in the Louvre, he bought the estate of Chalfontaine, which lies at the junction of two highroads:  one leading to Ecouen, the other to Villiers-le-Bel.  Almost touching the end of the park on the Ecouen side there is a little lake, hardly larger than a pool, and because of its melancholy aspect—­sorrowful willows hem it about, drooping into stagnant waters—­Monsieur Cot had christened the spot:  The Dark Tarn of Auber.  He was a fanatical lover of Poe, reading him in the Baudelaire translation, and openly avowing his preference for the French version of the great American’s tales.  That he could speak only five words of English did not deter his associates from considering him a profound critic of literature.

After his death his property and invested wealth passed into the hands of his youthful widow, a charming lady, a native of Burgundy, and—­if gossip did not lie—­a former model of the artist; indeed, some went so far as to assert that her face could be seen in her late husband’s masterpiece—­the figure of a young Greek slave attired as a joyous bacchante.  But her friends always denied this.  Her dignified bearing, sincere sorrow for her dead husband, and her motherly solicitude for her daughter left no doubt as to the value of all petty talk.  It was her custom of summer evenings to walk to the pool, and with her daughter Berenice she would sit on the broad wall and watch the moon rise, or acknowledge the respectful salutations of the country folk with their bran-speckled faces.  In those days Villiers-le-Bel was a dull town a half-hour from Paris on the Northern Railway, and about two miles from the station.

The widow was not long without offers.  Her usual answer was to point out the tiny Berenice, playing in the garden with her nurse.  Then a landscape painter, one of the Barbizon group, appeared, and, as a former associate of Rudolph Cot, and a man of means and position, his suit was successful.  To the astonishment of Villiers-le-Bel, Madame Valerie Cot became Madame Theophile Mineur; on the day of the wedding little Berenice—­named after a particularly uncanny heroine of Poe’s by his relentless French admirer—­scratched the long features of her stepfather.  The entire town accepted this as a distressing omen and it was not deceived; Berenice Cot grew up in the likeness of a determined young lady whose mother weakly endured her tyranny, whose new father secretly feared her.