On the wall of the reception room and of the corridor hung some large,
indistinct oil paintings. A person of intelligence would perhaps have
considered them detestable, but the landlady, who imagined that a very
obscure painting must be very good, refreshed herself betimes with the
thought that mayhap these pictures, sold to an Englishman, would, one
day make her independent.
There were several canvases in which the artist had depicted
horrifying biblical scenes: massacres, devastation, revolting plagues;
but all this in such a manner, that, despite the painter's lavish
distribution of blood, wounds and severed heads, these canvases
instead of horrifying, produced an impression of merriment. One of
them represented the daughter of Herodias contemplating the head of
St. John the Baptist. Every figure expressed amiable joviality: the
monarch, with the indumentary of a card-pack king and in the posture
of a card-player, was smiling; his daughter, a florid-face dame, was
smiling; the familiars, encased in their huge helmets, were smiling,
and the very head of St. John the Baptist was smiling from its place
upon a repousse platter. Doubtless the artist of these paintings, if
he lacked the gift of design and colour, was endowed with that of
joviality.
To the right and left of the house door ran the corridor, from whose
walls hung another exhibit of black canvases, most of them unframed,
in which could be made out absolutely nothing; only in one of them,
after very patient scrutiny, one might guess at a red cock pecking at
the leaves of a green cabbage.
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