The Provincial Portrait Gallery*
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE
I
PASSED
quickly through the dimly lighted vestibule. My steps made
no sound on the black and white flagstones. Around me a whole race
of people twisted their plaster arms. I caught a glimpse in passing,
through two large openings, of cracked vessels, plates, a blue and
yellow satyr on a pedestal. It was the Bernard Palissy room, conse–
crated to ceramics and the minor arts. But I don't get much fun from
ceramics. A lady and gentleman in mourning were respectfully con–
templating these baked objects.
Over the entrance of the main salon-or the Bordurin-Renaudas
Salon-was hung, doubtless recently, a large canvas which I did not
know. It was signed Richard Severand and was called
The Death of
the Bachelor.
It was a gift of the state.
Nude to the waist, the torso a little green as befits the dead, the
bachelor lay on an unmade bed. The disordered sheets and blankets
attested to a long period of suffering. I smiled, thinking of M.
Fasquelle.
He
was not alone: his daughter was looking after him.
Already, on the canvas, the maid, a clever servant with features
marked by vice, had opened the drawer of a bureau and was counting
some money. Through an open door could be seen waiting in the
shadows a man with a cap, a cigaret hanging from his lower lip.
Near the wall a cat lapped some milk indifferently.
This man had lived only for himself.
As
a punishment, severe
and deserved, no one had come to his deathbed to close his eyes.
This picture gave me a
final
warning: there was still time, I could
retrace my steps. But,
if
I went further, I knew very well that on
the walls of the great room which I was about to enter more than
one hundred and fifty portraits were hung; if one excepted some
young people wrested too soon from their families, and the Mother
Superior of an orphanage, not one of those represented had died
unmarried, not one had died without children or intestate, not one
without the last sacraments. Their accounts in order, on that day
*
This is a chapter from the novel
La Nausee.
