“What have you done?” he asked at last in a low voice.  “You have broken it?”

And raising my hand I replied solemnly: 

“Foolish youth, I have done that which I would have done to my heart if it wanted to jest and mock me!  Unfortunate youth, can you not see that your art has long been mocking you, that from that slate of yours the devil himself was making hideous faces at you?”

“Yes.  The devil!”

“Being far from your wonderful art, I did not understand you at first, nor your longing, your horror of aimlessness.  But when I entered your cell to-day and noticed you at your ruinous occupation, I said to myself:  It is better that he should not create at all than to create in this manner.  Listen to me.”

I then revealed for the first time to this youth the sacred formula of the iron grate, which, dividing the infinite into squares, thereby subjects it to itself.  K. listened to my words with emotion, looking with the horror of an ignorant man at the figures which must have seemed to him to be cabalistic, but which were nothing else than the ordinary figures used in mathematics.

“I am your slave, old man,” he said at last, kissing my hand with his cold lips.

“No, you will be my favourite pupil, my son.  I bless you.”

And it seemed to me that the artist was saved.  True, he regarded me with great joy, which could easily be explained by the extreme respect with which I inspired him, and he painted the portrait of the Warden’s wife with such zeal and enthusiasm that the esteemed lady was sincerely moved.  And, strange to say, the artist succeeded in making so strangely beautiful the features of this woman, who was stout and no longer young, that the Warden, long accustomed to the face of his wife, was greatly delighted by its new expression.  Thus everything went on smoothly, when suddenly this catastrophe occurred, the entire horror of which I alone knew.

Not desiring to call forth any unnecessary disputes, I concealed from the Warden the fact that on the eve of his death the artist had thrown a letter into my cell, which I noticed only in the morning.  I did not preserve the note, nor do I remember all that the unfortunate youth told me in his farewell message; I think it was a letter of thanks for my effort to save him.  He wrote that he regretted sincerely that his failing strength did not permit him to avail himself of my instructions.  But one phrase impressed itself deeply in my memory, and you will understand the reason for it when I repeat it in all its terrifying simplicity.

“I am going away from your prison,” thus read the phrase.