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And the inventory of its contents at Elsbeth's death, some six years after Holbein's death, proves that this home was to the full as well furnished and comfortable as was usual with people of similar condition. In the summer of 1528 the painter bade farewell for ever to Sir Thomas More's gracious Chelsea home.
"I know it," said Paul. "But you have the right, as you know, to refuse any statement if you fear that the same would bring down any punishment upon yourself or your family. Will and can you make use of this right now, as you did before?" "No." He spoke in a firm, clear voice, for he had the certainty that Elsbeth's honor would be irremediably lost if he were silent now.
Her mother has told me how, on Christmas eve, as usual, she and Elsbeth's father filled the stockings of the little ones, and hung them, where they had always hung, by the fireplace. They had little heart for the task, but they had been prodigal that year in their expenditures, and had heaped upon the two tiny boys all the treasures they thought would appeal to them.
A joyful thrill passed through the congregation. The troop of children hastened to throw themselves into the arms of their parents, and a kindly glance greeted him from Elsbeth's eyes. Paul now began to help with the farming. He faithfully kept the vow which he had made on the morning of his confirmation.
Then it seemed to him as if he saw Elsbeth's face vanishing in mist over his head, then it was night again round him.... At the first streak of dawn a sad procession went across the autumnal heath, on the way to Helenenthal. Two miserable wagons crept slowly, one behind the other. In them was found room for all that remained of the Haidehof.
Next morning, when the locomobile was pulled out, a strange rattling, scrunching sound was heard on the threshold of the shed. "Something has got under the wheels," said the foreman. Paul looked. There, in a heap of little fragments, broken in half, and pressed quite flat, lay Elsbeth's flute.
Paul went with his card which bore Elsbeth's hand-writing behind a haystack, and there studied each letter of it in solitude for wellnigh an hour. Then he went up to his garret and stood before the looking glass. He found that his whiskers had grown in fulness and only at the cheeks still showed thin places.
But all the simple commonplaces of first love, estrangement, separation, and a renewed betrothal after Elsbeth's early widowhood with one child, could easily have run a natural course between 1515 and their marriage, somewhere about 1520. The realities of that chime are buried, whether well or ill, four hundred years deep in the seas that roll over that submerged world of his youth and passion.
And this is in no way dispersed by studying Elsbeth's traits. But the painting itself is a tour-de-force. By sheer Quality Holbein has invested these portraits, a middle-aged, coarse-figured, unamiable-looking woman, a very commonplace infant, and a bright-faced boy, with the prestige inseparable from an achievement of a high order. Basel Museum
And in the same year, very likely from one of the frequent epidemics so fatal to Basel, died Künegoldt, Elsbeth's youngest child. The Merian family of Frankfurt-am-Main claims an hereditary right to the artistic gifts of its famous copper-engraver, Mathew Merian, as descendants of Holbein through this daughter Künegoldt, who, when she died, was the wife of Andreas Syff, a miller, of Basel.
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