“Poesy is deliverance”; yes, perhaps, for a Goethe, or for a Leonard, for one of those sovereign creatures who throw all their inner being into, and incarnate it in, a written or painted work. There is another race of artists to whom their work is only an exaltation of a certain inner state. They do not rid themselves of suffering by expressing it, they develop it, they inflame it, perhaps because they do not know how to express it and to entirely rid themselves of it. This was so in my own case. Before these photographs my project for a portrait became praise. I only retained the first one. It was the eighteen-year-old Camille I wished to evoke and paint. It was a phantom, the phantom of her whom I might have known in her purity, as a virgin, might have loved and perhaps married. It was a portrait of a phantom, of a dead woman. From this task was diffused upon me during the week’s seclusion and uninterrupted labour that vague and satisfying delight which floats around a woman’s form which has gone for ever. In analysing under the microscope the tiny details of this face upon this bad and almost faded photograph, I enjoyed for hours a voluptuous and unutterably attractive soul’s pleasure. There was not a trait in this ingenuous face in which I did not discover a proof, quite obvious and physiological to me, of an exquisite delicacy of nature in the person, of whom that had been a momentary likeness. The tiny ear with its pretty lobe told of her breeding. Her pale silky hair displayed tints in its ringlets which seemed faded and washed out. The construction of the lower part of the face could be seen to be fine and robust beneath her slender cheeks. There was a shade of sensuality in her lower lip which was slightly flattened and split by the wrinkle which betokens great goodness. There was intelligence and gaiety in her straight nose, which was cut a trifle short in comparison with her chin. But what of her eyes? Her great, clear, profound eyes, innocent and tender, curious and dreamy! As I looked at them, to my overwrought imagination they seemed to be animate. Her little head turned upon a neck, which fine attachment displayed the slenderness of the rest of the body.