When an artist like myself suffers from a hypertrophy of the intelligence, when he feels himself intoxicated by criticism, paralysed by theories, this symbol of the cursed and wandering nymph who expiates in distress the crime of wishing to know, becomes, too, too real, too true. It agitates too powerfully cords which are too deep. I always felt myself attracted by this subject, without doubt on account of that, and I have never been able to make a success of the scenes of canvasses on which I have begun to treat the subject. Camille Favier is far away and the “Psyché pardonnée” is still unfinished. I would like to introduce into the picture, too, many tints. But then the slightest pretext has always been and will always be enough to distract me. The clear impression which I retained of Camille was of all these pretexts the most delightful, and the one which least disturbed my craft as a painter, thanks to the strange compromise of conscience which I devised, about which I will tell you. “As I cannot help thinking of her all day long,” I said to myself at last, “suppose I try to paint her portrait from memory? Goethe pretended that to deliver himself from a sorrow, it was sufficient for him to compose a poem. Why should not a painted poem have the same virtue as a written one?” Was not this paradoxical and foolish enterprise, the portrait without a model of a woman seen but twice, the work of a poet? It was paradoxical but not foolish. I had to fix upon canvas this pale silhouette which haunted my dreams, my first impression of which was so clear that by shutting my eyes I could see her before me just as she appeared—upon the stage, fine and fairylike in her youth and genius beneath her make-up, with the blue costume of her part; then in her dressing-room, by turns tender and satirical, with the picturesque disorder around her which betrayed the thousand small miseries of her calling; then along the wall of the Invalides under the stars of that December night, leaning on my arm, pale and magnified as if she were transfigured by the sadness of her confidences; and last of all at home, tragic and trembling at the deceit practised upon her? All these Camilles were blended in my mind into an image hardly less clear than her presence itself. I dismissed Malvina. I relegated “_Psyché_” to a corner of the studio, and I made a large red crayon drawing of my phantom. The likeness in this portrait outlined in the fever of a passionate pity was striking. Camille smiled at me from the bluish paper. It was only a sketch, but so lifelike that I was astonished at it myself.