Picture a dark courtyard hemmed in by high dilapidated walls…These walls are furnished with hooks seven or eight feet from the ground. Even at a cursory glance we may guess that this is a shambles of some sort.
On the left there is a latticework made up of narrow strips. Through it you can see a side of beef suspended from an enormous ceiling by enormous pulleys. Broad pools of blood run down over paving stones and meet up in a drain full of undefined debris.
The light comes down from on high, from between chimneys, against which weathervanes are silhouetted by a piece of sky only as big as your hand and the roofs of neighbouring houses drop their shadows dramatically from one floor to another.
At the end of this recess is a space. In this space is a woodshed, on this woodshed ladders, a few bales of straw, rope, a hen-coop and an old rabbit hutch that has seen better days.
How did these heterogeneous details come to present themselves to my imagination?… I do not know. I had no memories of things like this and yet each stroke of my charcoal pencil was a fantastic feat of observation by dint of being true to nature. Nothing was missing!
But on the right of the picture one corner of the sketch remained blank. I knew not what to put there… Something was stirring and moving about… Suddenly I saw a foot, a foot in the air, a foot off the ground. Despite its improbable position, I followed my inspiration without understanding where all this was leading. This foot bordered on a leg…over the tensely stretched-out leg there soon floated part of a dress…To cut a long story short an old woman appeared, rumpled, dishevelled, haggard, successively leaning backward over the edge of a well and fighting against a fist that was strangling her…
I was drawing a murder scene. The charcoal pencil fell from my hand.
This woman, posed in the most brazen of attitudes, the small of her back pushed up against the coping of the well, her face twisted in terror, her two hands tightly attached to the arm of the murderer, frightened me… I did not dare to look at her. But the man himself, the owner of this arm, I could not see… It was impossible for me to finish what I was doing.
"I'm tired," I told myself, my brow bathed in sweat. "I only have this one figure still to do. I'll finish it tomorrow… It shouldn't be hard."
And I went back to bed, scared half to death by my vision. Five minutes later I was fast asleep.