The first sketch was the key to the room, and it began in a corner of the hall with a low voice:

The only daughter of Lord Oursel had dreamed of love since childhood, and was certain that when she grew up she would meet a prince on a white horse who would become her perfect match: he would be handsome, kind, and gentle — and very rich besides, for a prince must be perfect in everything. And such a man did indeed appear in your life when your father, after many months of humiliating visits and negotiations, finally managed to arrange a marriage, and you were given in marriage to the young Emelyan Karán.

The wedding went exactly as you had imagined: a great many guests arrived, and your dress was so heavy and voluminous that you could barely stand in it, but it was beautiful, and so everything else did not matter — for beside you stood a handsome young husband, as though he had stepped straight out of your childhood dreams.

Everything changed on the very first wedding night, when Emelyan simply did not come to you. A few days later you were explained how your life would henceforth be arranged: the physician relayed all the details of your monthly cycle, and from them the days most favorable for conceiving an heir were calculated. This had gone on for more than a year and a half — Emelyan came to your bedchamber one or two nights a month, quickly performed what he considered his duty, and at once returned to his own chambers.

What hurt most was that you knew your husband was capable of tenderness, for he had a mistress, Lady Ondine Vaudrey, whom he often brought to the estate. Society whispered that you were a bad wife for still not having given him an heir, but you could not help noticing that in all this time his mistress had not once conceived by him either. Ondine was no villain in it: she had been arranged into her own corner of the same house. By that spring a petition for separation was already waiting in your father's lawyer's hands.

Everything changed in the spring, when the family was invited to a reception. Emelyan, as usual, spent the whole evening with his friends, and you were left alone, as the other ladies scarcely spoke to you. Society considered you a frivolous, flighty woman who spent your entire allowance on dresses and jewels, and no one knew that these purchases had long since become your only consolation.

At the reception you dozed off on a couch in a far corner of the hall, and it was then that Mathurin Tansen drew you — a second-year student at the royal institute for drawing who paid for his studies by attending such receptions and sketching the guests for commemorative albums.

They met again a month later in Desiderio Hasketti's bookshop. Mathurin recognized you, came up, explained who he was, and gave you the drawing, saying that he considered it wrong to keep a portrait of a woman he had drawn without her permission. You were delighted with the drawing but did not want to take it for nothing and decided to thank him in your own way: you bought him the book of engravings sold in that shop — the one he needed for his classes but which cost so much that he could not afford it, and which was why he so often came there to make sketches from it.

From that day you met many more times, each time as though by chance, and little by little you realized that Mathurin was the very man from your childhood dreams: he had neither money nor a palace nor a title, but he was kind and caring, and beside him, for the first time in a long while, you felt at peace.

That evening you had supper in a little tavern near the institute, after which you decided not to go home in the dark. Mathurin at once offered to walk you to the inn on the next street. The innkeeper, a stout elderly man, at first looked with suspicion at the noble lady in her expensive cloak and the poor student beside her, but Mathurin calmly explained that the lady needed a separate room for one night. He took the key from the innkeeper, escorted you to the second floor, opened the door himself, and glanced inside to make sure there was a candle and water in the room, then remained standing on the threshold, clearly not knowing what else to say.

he said.

Then he went down the stairs with one hand on the rail.