The Vengeance of the Oval Portrait

by Gabriel de Lautrec

Three-dimensional beings, solids, which have length, breadth and thickness, are limited by two-dimensional surfaces. In the same way, four-dimensional beings must be limited by solids. And thus, in consequence…the world in which these beings move, even those closest to us, must infinitely surpass the coarseness of ours. It’s the place of a worse fall, the terrible world inhabited by…

Among the inn’s regulars there were painters who spent their time like the majority of young painters, wearing strange clothes and emitting superannuated paradoxes. One of them, named Brancowich, who had been smoking his pipe at the second table on he left for ten years, while waiting until he could get a place at the Institut’s manger, had chosen the innkeeper as a victim. Had he not undertaken to demonstrate one evening last week, with supporting evidence and indubitable philosophical citations, that color did not exist? To tell the truth, the existence of certain painters is an energetic and continuous protest against the reality of colors—but Monsieur Ciboire’s innocent soul had never raised the slightest doubt about the existence of colors.

Considering the causes that led to the death of my friend Désormeaux, and the circumstances of that death, I cannot help experiencing, modest as I am, a very legitimate pride. Never was a wisely-conceived project put into action with more security, or procured a more profound joy to the perpetrator. To tell the truth, I had wanted to kill Désormeaux for a long time. His existence had become incompatible with mine. I was used to the ingratitude of men, but that of my friend Désormeaux was something so monstrous that it exceeded the extraordinary. For several years I admired that special case, and came to cultivate it curiously, incessantly giving the wretch new opportunities to prove that radiant ingratitude to me. I furnished him with benefits, as a sumptuous king heaps gold upon the artist of genius whose works magnify him, but it was only gradually that I tasted the full savor of his inverted gratitude.

“Other scarabs, in their march through the great forest, encounter other stray humans, and worship them under various names. They have, in the eternal course, encountered different gods. But all the gods are true in whom someone believes. They are furtive apparitions of misunderstood and feared beings. Thus, in the sphere superior to ours, lives a population of gods who are only gods to us, who are enveloped by another sphere, haunted by others, who serve them as gods in their turn.