"She is a Pole," the painter said, standing back in admiration of his own work. "A pious Polish girl, though I've drawn her as she is now, not pious at all but an innocent, an angel, restored to Genesis."

This was not quite what Marie-Lucien had been thinking, but near enough that he murmured, "Eve in Paradise."

The painter corrected him, in a tone of surprise, "Yadwigha, after death. Do you not recall how we watched her soul float up to the clouds?"

Marie-Lucien grappled through memory until he remembered the young woman lying dead on the bank of the canal, naked under the stares of half a dozen men. "It was only you who saw… " he began to say, but the painter was already going on, gesturing toward a Louis-Philippe sofa that was evidently the model for the chaise in his painting. "She has been posing for me here, every night. Her spirit has attached itself to me, which I suppose is due to my catching sight of her as she departed her body. Poor girl drowned herself out of grief."

Marie-Lucien said, smiling very faintly, "So not as pious as all that, if she killed herself. God condemns the suicide."

The painter brushed this away with a gesture. "God condemns no one, it's the priests who are always in a mood to condemn." He gazed at his painting in silence. "The girl had suffered greatly, her husband and child dead in an overturned taxi. How can we condemn her for finding this world unbearable? I should have found it unbearable myself, years ago, and ten times over, if I weren't a bit of a spiritist." He turned to Marie-Lucien with a smile. "Art is the confession of its maker. You shall have to look at my art, to know why sadness has not grabbed hold of me in its teeth."

It was Rousseau's nonchalance that offended Marie-Lucien, and caused him to remember suddenly a remark the painter had made, a remark about the pleasure he took from reading about drowned bodies hauled from the river. At the time, he had been distracted from it; but now, recalling the tone and the words, Marie-Lucien said bitterly, "What do you know of unbearable? of grief? of great suffering? When you have lost your wife and your son, as I have, then speak to me of unbearable."

The painter gave him a startled look. "Oh my dear M. Derain, I am sorry to hear of it. Sorry to hear of it. Your poor heart." He draped his arm across Marie-Lucien Derain's shoulders and drew him close.

But this was the beginning of the end of their friendship. Marie-Lucien took work soon afterward with a neighborhood pork butcher, and seldom found time to join Rousseau on his morning visits to the pleasure gardens. They carried on their evening explorations for a short while, but ended them after an argument: When Marie-Lucien objected to hearing another tale of ghosts, the painter said to him that people who had never dreamed when fully awake were loathe to admit the realness of dream; and Marie-Lucien took this badly. Afterward he merely nodded when he passed Rousseau going in or out of the apartments, and if the painter spoke to him, he replied in as few words as possible.

In January during a spell of cold, bright weather, Marie-Lucien began working very late helping the butcher render fat, and one night climbing the stairs after midnight carrying scraps of meat for the cat and the dog, he passed the painter's open door and saw a naked woman posing on the Louis-Phillipe sofa, her arm outstretched and beckoning, her pallid body clothed in moonlight. The woman, who may have heard his steps on the landing, turned to him a face not beautiful at all but transparent and luminous, lit from within; and then she resumed her pose, fixing her gaze perhaps on the moon that he could not see but which he imagined must be visible through the apartment window. Her expression in profile was difficult to interpret, her mouth seeming at the verge of amusement but her thick brows intent and straight. One long brown braid fell across her shoulder and one breast. The painter, too, turned and stood very poised and erect, one thumb pushed through the hold of his palette, his brush held down in the other hand. The look he gave Marie-Lucien was a questioning frown of expectancy and joy; but they did not speak, and Marie-Lucien continued up the stairs, his heart thudding. When he sat down inside his own apartment the animals came immediately into his lap, and he rested his trembling hands in their fur.

In March, Marie-Lucien heard from his landlord that the painter had hung a new canvas at the Société des Peintres Indépendants: a painting of a naked woman dreaming on a Louis-Phillipe couch. Word later went around the neighborhood that this new painting had brought Rousseau a flurry of minor attention, and the admiration even of other artists. When the pork butcher took his wife to the salon to view it, Marie-Lucien stayed behind and kept the shop open.

Often, during that winter, he heard the painter's voice in conversation with himself or with his paintings, and from time to time the voice of this or that visitor. Twice, Rousseau gave parties to which Marie-Lucien was invited, but which he did not attend, parties at which the host played his violin very badly, and Marie-Lucien heard rising up through the floor the sounds of people applauding and laughing at the same time.

After the second party, the painter knocked on Marie-Lucien's door to plead poverty and beg twenty-five francs. "I imagine if you had saved all the money spent on parties, you would not need to beg from your friends and acquaintances," Marie-Lucien said to him, after he had given over the twenty-five francs. He had not wished to be the man's friend or to be invited to his entertainments, so could not quite account for the sound of bitterness in these words. The painter was not at all taken aback. He kissed Marie-Lucien on both cheeks and said fondly, "My dear, you are like a brother to me," which Marie-Lucien felt to be a grandiose figure of speech.

In the months afterward, he seldom saw the painter. Once, through his window, he watched Rousseau limping up the street to the apartments, appearing so sickly and pale that Marie-Lucien was struck with a moment of remorse; but then, to M. Queval who was standing on the front stoop, the painter complained in an aggrieved voice that he "suffered greatly" from a phlegmon in his leg. These were the same words he had used, speaking of the drowned woman, the very words that had begun their estrangement-that she had "suffered greatly"-and when he heard them, Marie-Lucien turned away from the window.

In September he opened his newspaper and was startled to read that the painter had died. Le Petit Journal was famous for the brevity of its reporting, and spent only a few lines to say that the minor artist H. Rousseau had died of a blood clot after surgery to remove a gangrenous leg; and that he had belonged to the Société des Peintres Indépendants, where an artist paid twenty-five francs a year for the privilege of hanging his canvases.

It had been many months since Marie-Lucien had visited the Palmarium or the Orangerie. On the day of the painter's burial he walked through the hothouses slowly; and then went into the menagerie, which he and Rousseau had visited only once together. A jaguar trudged in circles, dazed and ill, in a narrow box where he bumped into all the corners; the lion reclined in a stupor. As Marie-Lucien was going out again, he turned to see if it was his friend he had glimpsed going in one of the other gates, though of course it was only an old man with a thick mustache, a sickly complexion, a slight limp.

He stopped at a newsstand to buy a copy of Le Soleil for the obituaries, and read as he was walking back to the apartments that Rousseau was "a painter without any of the notions required by art;" and that his friends had spoken of him as a man of generosity, credulity and good humor. His living relations were a daughter Julia, and granddaughter Jeanne; he had been preceded in death by two wives and six of his seven children. In the painter's last days, Le Soleil reported, he had become delirious: had spoken of seeing angels, and of hearing their celestial music.