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Updated: July 11, 2025
As soon as she discovered that she had been deserted, her only thought was to find her good friend, her counselor, her "brother," to go to Madrid, to see Renovales and tell him everything, everything! impelled by the necessity of confessing to him even secrets whose memory made her blush.
But before he went out he stopped to say another word in praise of the portrait of the countess. The two friends remained alone for a long while in silence. Renovales, buried in the shadow of that niche of Persian stuffs with which his divan was canopied, gazed at the picture. "Is she going to come to-day?" asked Cotoner, pointing to the canvas. Renovales shrugged his shoulders.
He knew everybody; he only needed to speak to an artist twice and he would call him by his first name and swear that he loved and admired him from the bottom of his heart. When Renovales came into the studio, he shook off his drowsiness and stretched out his short legs so that he could touch the floor and get out of the chair. "Did they tell you, Mariano? A magnificent dish!
Renovales helped him to find his hat, coat and cane, which with his usual carelessness he had left in different corners of the studio. The master pushed him out of a door that led into the garden. Then, when he was alone, he ran to an old Venetian mirror, and looked at himself for a moment in its deep, bluish surface, smoothing his curly gray hair with his fingers.
When Renovales found himself alone in the studio he would feel as happy as a school-boy on a holiday. He worked with a lighter touch, he roared out old songs, delighting to listen to the echoes that his voice awakened in the high-studded rooms.
I am Renovales, the painter, the famous master. I am known all over the world." And he spoke of his fame with brutal indelicacy, growing more and more irritated at her coldness, displaying his renown like a mantle of light that should blind women and make them fall at his feet. And a man like him had to submit to being put off for that simpleton of a doctor? The countess smiled with pity.
In her remains, crumbling in the lonely cemetery, there was a part of the master and he, in turn, felt something strange and mysterious which chained him to her memory, which made him always long for that body the complement of his own which had already vanished in the void. Renovales shut himself up in the house, with a taciturn air and a gloomy expression which terrified his valet.
At every reception at the two Spanish embassies, "the famous painter Renovales and his charming wife" were present and these invitations had spread to the embassies of other countries. Almost every night there was some function.
The invisible monster was beside him, dying, kicking violently, sticking him with its angular body. The howl tore the darkness like a death rattle. Renovales, aroused by his fear, awoke completely. That cry came from Josephina. His wife was tossing about in the bed, shrieking while she gasped for breath.
Renovales insisted on having them everywhere; he had sent to Valencia and Murcia for them in reckless quantities; they hung on the door-frames, and along the cornices; they lay in huge clusters on the tables and in the corners.
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