head lowered, his eye bloodshot, his hands tied up behind his back. He stared once again at the picture of the murder…seemed to ponder it and then, in a low voice, speaking as if to himself, came out with:

"Who was around to have seen me at midnight?"

I had been saved from the hangman's noose!!! …. …………………………………………………………………

Many years have gone by since this terrible adventure. I no longer do silhouettes or portraits of burgomasters, thank God! By dint of perseverance and hard work, I have staked my claim to a place in the sun and I earn my living honourably by painting works of art, the only end, in my opinion, that any true artist should strive to attain. But the memory of the nocturnal sketch has always stayed in my mind. Sometimes, in the middle of working on something, my thoughts return to it. When that happens I put down my palette and dream for hours on end!

How was it possible for a crime carried out by a man I did not know in a place I had never seen before…. to reproduce itself under my charcoal and chalk so accurately, right down to the finest detail?

Was it by chance? No! And besides what is chance, after all, if not the effect of a cause that we cannot fathom?

Who knows? Nature is much bolder in the construction of its realities than man's imagination in its fantasies.

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