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“Poor unfortunate man!” exclaimed I, “how did the hand of the devil take such a deadly hold of thy life?”

“Oh!” cried the professor, “the hand as well as the arm grew in his own body: he was his own demon, his own Lucifer, flashing the infernal torch upon his own life. That is plain enough to those who know his biography.”

I entreated the professor at once to tell me all that he knew about the life of the unfortunate painter.

“That would be much too prolix, and cost too much breath,” replied the professor. “Do not let us spoil the cheerful day by such gloomy stuff. We will take breakfast and then go to the mill, where an excellent dinner awaits us.”

I did not desist from my requests to the professor, and after much talk on both sides, it came out that, immediately after Berthold’s arrival, a youth who was studying at the college, devotedly attached himself to him, and that Berthold, by degrees, communicated the particulars of his life to this youth, who had carefully written them down, and had given the manuscript to the professor.

“He was,” said the professor, “much such an enthusiast as–pardon me–you are! But this work of writing down the strange events in the painter’s life served him as a capital exercise for style.”

With much trouble I obtained from the professor a promise that he would lend me the manuscript after the close of our pleasure-party. Whether it proceeded from my own violent curiosity, or whether it was the professor’s fault, I never felt more uneasy than during this day. The icy coldness of the professor when speaking of Berthold had been repulsive to me, but his conversation with his colleagues who participated in the repast, convinced me, that in spite of all his learning, and all his knowledge of the world, he had no sense for the sublime, and was as gross a materialist as possible. The system of consuming and being consumed, as Berthold called it, he had actually adopted. All mental endeavours, all the powers of creation and invention, he deduced from certain states of the stomach and the entrails, uttering on this subject all sorts of monstrous conceits. Thus, for instance, he very seriously maintained that every thought proceeded from the marriage of two fibres in the human brain. I perceived how the professor, with all this absurd stuff, must torment poor Berthold, who, in the irony of despair, attacked the notion of any favourable influence from a higher region, and how he must plunge pointed daggers into wounds still fresh and bleeding. The evening at last came, and the professor put a few sheets of manuscript into my hand, with the words: “There, my dear enthusiast, is the student’s handy work. It is not badly written but very odd, and the author, against all rule, thrusts in discourses of the painter, word for word, without any notice to the reader. I will make you a present of the work, of which I have a right to dispose by virtue of my office, for I know perfectly well that you are no writer. The author of the “Fantasie-Stuecke in Callot’s Manier,”[1] (fancy pieces in the style of Callot) would have cut it according to his own mad fashion, and would have printed it at once. I have nothing of the sort to expect from you.”

Professor Aloysius Walter did not know that he really stood before the “travelling enthusiast,” although he might have found it out, and thus, gentle reader, I am enabled to give you the Jesuit-student’s short history of the painter, Berthold. It thoroughly explains the manner in which he conducted himself in my presence, and thou, reader, wilt be able to see how the strange spirit of destiny often plunges us into destructive error.

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