est works of art. In
the auction room, none cared to oppose him, for all were certain to be
outbid. He was held to be mad, and certainly his conduct and appearance
justified the presumption. His countenance, of a jaundiced hue, grew
haggard and wrinkled; misanthropy and hatred of the world were plainly
legible upon it. He resembled that horrid demon whom Pushkin has so ably
conceived and portrayed. Save all occasional sarcasm, venomous and
bitter, no word ever passed his lips, and at last he became universally
avoided. His acquaintances, and even his oldest friends, shunned his
presence, and would go a mile round to escape meeting him in the street.
The mere sight of him, they said, was enough to cloud their whole day.

Fortunately for society and for art, such an unnatural and agitated
existence as this could not long endure. Tchartkoff's mental excitement
was too violent for his physical strength. A burning fever and furious
delirium ravaged his frame, and in a few days he was but the ghost of
his former self. The delirium augmented, and became a permanent and
incurable mania, in some of whose paroxysms it was necessary to bind him
to his couch. He fancied he saw continually before him the singular old
portrait from the Stchukin Dvor! This was the more strange, because
since the day he had turned it out of his studio, it had never once met
his sight. But now he raved of its terrible living eyes, which haunted
him unceasingly, and when this fancy came over him, his madness was
something terrific. All the persons who approached his bed he imagined
to be horrible portraits; copies, repeated again and again, of the old
man with the fiendish eyes. The image multiplied itself perpetually; the
ceiling, the walls, the floor, were all covered with portraits, staring
sternly and fixedly at him with living eyes. The room extended and
stretched out to a vast and interminable gallery, to afford room for
millions of repetitions of the ghastly picture. In vain did numerous
physicians seek to discover, with a view to the alleviation of the poor
wretch's sufferings, some secret connexion between the incidents of his
past life and the strange phantom that thus eternally haunted him. No
explanation or clue could be obtained from the patient, who continued to
apostrophise the portrait in disconnected phrase, and to utter howls of
agony and lamentation. At last his existence terminated in one last
horrible paroxysm. His corpse was frightfu