I love my friend Lampron, though fully aware of his superiority.  His energy sets me up, his advice strengthens me, he peoples for me the vast solitude of Paris.

Suppose I go to see him?  A lonely watch to-night would be gloomier than usual.  The death of the year brings gloomy thoughts, the thirty-first of December, St. Sylvester’s day—­St. Sylvester!  Why, that is his birthday!  Ungrateful friend, to give no thought to it!  Quick! my coat, my stick, my hat, and let me run to see these two early birds before they seek their roost.

When I entered the studio, Lampron was so deep in his work that he did not hear me.  The large room, lighted only in one corner, looked weird enough.  Around me, and among the medley of pictures and casts and the piles of canvases stacked against the wall, the eye encountered only a series of cinder-gray tints and undetermined outlines casting long amorphous shadows half-way across the ceiling.  A draped lay figure leaning against a door seemed to listen to the whistling of the wind outside; a large glass bay opened upon the night.  Nothing was alive in this part of the room, nothing alight except a few rare glints upon the gold of the frames, and the blades of two crossed swords.  Only in a corner, at the far end, at a distance exaggerated by the shadows, sat Lampron engraving, solitary, motionless, beneath the light of a lamp.  His back was toward me.  The lamp’s rays threw a strong light on his delicate hand, on the workmanlike pose of his head, which it surrounded with a nimbus, and on a painting—­a woman’s head—­which he was copying.  He looked superb like that, and I thought how doubly tempted Rembrandt would have been by the deep significance as well as by the chiaroscuro of this interior.

I stamped my foot.  Lampron started, and turned half around, narrowing his eyes as he peered into the darkness.

“Ah, it’s you,” he said.  He rose and came quickly toward me, as if to prevent me from approaching the table.

“You don’t wish me to look?”

He hesitated a moment.

“After all, why not?” he answered.

The copper plate was hardly marked with a few touches of the needle.  He turned the reflector so as to throw all its rays upon the painting.

“O Lampron, what a charming head!”

It was indeed a lovely head; an Italian girl, three quarter face, painted after the manner of Leonardo, with firm but delicate touches, and lights and shades of infinite subtlety, and possessing, like all that master’s portraits of women, a straightforward look that responds to the gazer’s, but which he seeks to interrogate in vain.  The hair, brown with golden lights, was dressed in smooth plaits above the temples.  The neck, 1351 somewhat long, emerged from a dark robe broadly indicated.

“I do not know this, Sylvestre?”

“No, it’s an old thing.”

“A portrait, of course?”

“My first.”