o the
biting in of the shadows in the portrait of Lutma, the greenish and then
whitish ebullition produced by the long-continued biting so frightened
me, that I hastened to empty the acid into a pail, not, however, without
having spattered a few drops on a proof of the _Vow of Louis XIII._,
which had been scratched in the printing, and which we were about to
repair. At last I removed the ground, and, trembling all over, went to
have a proof taken, but not to the printer regularly employed by
Calamatta.

What a disappointment! I believed my etching to have been sufficiently,
nay, even over-bitten, and in reality I had stopped half-way. The color
of the copper had deceived me. I had seen my portrait on the fine red
ground of the metal, and now I saw it on the crude white of the paper. I
hardly knew it again. It lacked the profundity, the mystery, the harmony
in the shadows, which were precisely what I had striven for. The plate
was only roughly cut up by lines crossing in all directions, through the
network of which shone the ground which Rembrandt had subdued, so as to
give all the more brilliancy to the window with its leaded panes, to the
lights in the foreground, and to the cheek of the pensive head of Lutma.
As luck would have it, all the light part in the upper half of the print
came out pretty well; the expression of the face was satisfactory, and
the grimaces of the two small heads of monsters which surmount the back
of the chair were perfectly imitated. I had to strengthen the shadows by
means of the roulette, and to go over the most prominent folds of the
coat with the graver; for I had not the knowledge necessary to enable me
to undertake a second biting. Bosse says a few words on this subject,
which, as they are wanting in clearness, are apt to lead a beginner into
error. He speaks of smoked ground, while, as you have so admirably
shown, white ground must be used for retouching. I therefore finished my
plate by patching and cross-hatching and stippling, and finally obtained
a passable copy, which, at a little distance, looked something like the
original, although, to a practised eye, it was really nothing but a very
rude imitation. It is needless to say that we carefully obliterated all
evidence of our proceedings, and that, my teachers having returned, I
went to work again, with hypocritical compunction, upon what I called
the _military_ lines of Gerard Edelinck. But we were betrayed by some
incautious words