own like a harpy into the street: and his
acquaintances, catching sight of him in the distance, sought to turn
aside and avoid a meeting with him, saying that it poisoned all the rest
of the day.

Fortunately for the world and art, such a life could not last long:
his passions were too overpowering for his feeble strength. Attacks of
madness began to recur more frequently, and ended at last in the most
frightful illness. A violent fever, combined with galloping consumption,
seized upon him with such violence, that in three days there remained
only a shadow of his former self. To this was added indications of
hopeless insanity. Sometimes several men were unable to hold him. The
long-forgotten, living eyes of the portrait began to torment him, and
then his madness became dreadful. All the people who surrounded his bed
seemed to him horrible portraits. The portrait doubled and quadrupled
itself; all the walls seemed hung with portraits, which fastened their
living eyes upon him; portraits glared at him from the ceiling, from the
floor; the room widened and lengthened endlessly, in order to make room
for more of the motionless eyes. The doctor who had undertaken to attend
him, having learned something of his strange history, strove with all
his might to fathom the secret connection between the visions of
his fancy and the occurrences of his life, but without the slightest
success. The sick man understood nothing, felt nothing, save his own
tortures, and gave utterance only to frightful yells and unintelligible
gibberish. At last his life ended in a final attack of unutterable
suffering. Nothing could be found of all his great wealth; but when they
beheld the mutilated fragments of grand works of art, the value of which
exceeded a million, they understood the terrible use which had been made
of it.

PART II

A THRONG of carriages and other vehicles stood at the entrance of a
house in which an auction was going on of the effects of one of those
wealthy art-lovers who have innocently passed for Maecenases, and in
a simple-minded fashion expended, to that end, the millions amassed by
their thrifty fathers, and frequently even by their own early labours.
The long saloon was filled with the most motley throng of visitors,
collected like birds of prey swooping down upon an unburied corpse.
There was a whole squadron of Russian shop-keepers from the Gostinnui
Dvor, and from the old-clothes mart, in blue coats of foreign make