One morning, three days before the execution, the innkeeper comes to visit him and finds him lying face downwards on the narrow pallet. Despite his own grief, he is sorry for the young man; nor is he convinced in his shrewd bourgeois mind of the latter's guilt.
"You must draw in the second figure," he repeats again and again. "It is your last, your only chance! Think of the faces you saw at the 'Loup Noir.' Do none of them recall anything to you? You quarrelled with Jehane in the garden about your brother. Then you went to your room. Oh, what did you think in your room?"
"I thought of your niece," responds Arnaud wildly. "How very beautiful she was, and what a model she would make. Then I prepared a blank canvas for the morning, and went to bed. When I woke up the picture was there."
"And you remember nothing more—nothing at all?" insists Jean Potin. "You fell asleep at once? You heard no sound?"
Against the barred window of the cell the rain patters softly. A distant clock booms out eleven strokes.
Something in the artist's brain seems to snap. He raises his head. He slides from the bed. As in a trance he crosses the cell, seizes a piece of charcoal, and feverishly works at the picture on the easel!
Not daring to speak, Jean Potin watches him. The figure behind the hands grows and grows beneath Arnaud's fingers.
A woman's figure!
Then the face: a coarse, malignant face, distorted by evil passions.
"Ah!"