The Portrait of Torment

A pale light from the late winter filtered through the half-drawn blinds of Isao’s workshop. Dust particles danced in the oblique beams, suspended in time. For several days now, he had been living in a sort of intellectual frenzy, tirelessly navigating the digital archives of the greatest Parisian museums.

He had almost forgotten to eat. His sister, worried, sometimes dropped off bentos and onigiri from the convenience store by his side. She watched with dismay as the dark circles deepened under his eyes and the growing obsession that was pulling him away from the real world. But Isao was elsewhere, lost between two centuries, desperately trying to understand the man who had imprisoned Lucille.

“Adrien Rousseau,” he murmured, scrolling through images on his screen.

His gaze stopped on a yellowed photograph of a painting with an odd framing. The artwork had been captured at an angle suggesting a clandestine shot. The caption simply read: “Unfinished portrait, attributed to A. Rousseau, 1844. Private collection, not on display.”

Isao squinted. The portrait depicted Lucille, but in a way that chilled him to the bone. Her face, recognizable despite the tortured style, was distorted by a painful expression. Her eyes seemed to beg the viewer for help. Behind her, a shadow with masculine contours loomed, possessive and intrusive.

“Damn, he was already trapping her, even in his paintings…”

He continued his research with renewed determination. Articles about Adrien Rousseau were plentiful, but fragmented. Coming from a modest family in Montmartre, he had stood out early on with an extraordinary talent. By the age of twenty, he was already making a name for himself in the Parisian salons, exhibiting alongside major figures like Turner, Delacroix, and Courbet. Critics praised his flawless technique and striking mastery of light and shadow, sometimes comparing him to the masters he worked alongside.

Then came his encounter with Lucille.

“The prodigy apprentice seems to have found his muse,” wrote L’Artiste magazine in 1843. “The young aristocrat illuminates each of his new canvases with an ethereal grace that transcends simple beauty. Rousseau not only captures her features but seems to have grasped the very essence of her soul.”

The first portraits of Lucille were stunning. Perfect technique in service of an almost palpable admiration. Isao recognized in these early works the same expression he had felt when first discovering Lucille in the mirror: a fascination mixed with respect, the desire to capture the elusive.

But soon, the tone of the articles changed.

“Rousseau's obsession with his muse takes on troubling proportions,” noted a critic in 1844. “His latest works, though technically flawless, exude an indefinable discomfort. Mademoiselle Morel no longer appears as a free woman, but as a creature trapped within the canvas itself, her gaze begging for a release that the artist seems to deny her.”

Isao found a series of images showing the evolution of the portraits. The progression was terrifying. First sublimated, then idealized, Lucille gradually became an object of possession. Her skin, once radiant, began to take on cadaverous hues. Her eyes, initially lively and mischievous, filled with mute terror.

“He was already killing her in his paintings before even imprisoning her in the mirror,” murmured Isao, rubbing his exhausted eyes.

An email notification caught his attention. The Musée d’Orsay had responded to his request for access to special archives. A temporary link allowed him to view documents rarely made available to the public. Isao clicked on it eagerly.

A file appeared on the screen, revealing a series of black-and-white calotypes, relics from an exhibition held in October 1845 — just before Lucille’s disappearance. Its title left no room for doubt: “The Captured Soul — The Last Known Work of Adrien Rousseau.”

The images that appeared made him instinctively recoil in his chair. The painting, briefly exhibited before being removed due to the uproar it caused, depicted Lucille dead, her eyes wide open. Her pale body was embraced by a skeleton with human proportions. The pose suggested both a loving embrace and eternal imprisonment. Around them, a circle of broken mirrors reflected this macabre union infinitely.

“My God,” whispered Isao.

A document accompanied the photographs. A handwritten letter, found in Rousseau’s abandoned studio after his mysterious disappearance, just weeks after Lucille’s. Isao zoomed in on the text, deciphering the feverish handwriting with difficulty.

“I have followed her for months. She suspected nothing. While she posed for others, I descended into the bowels of Paris. The catacombs keep secrets older than the bones they house. I learned, from men whose names I will not reveal, that one can capture more than just a person’s image. One can seize their very essence, imprison it in an appropriate vessel. Death is but a transition. Beauty, however, can be eternal if one knows how to preserve it.

I found the perfect mirror from an antique dealer on Rue Saint-Honoré. He told me it had belonged to a Spanish alchemist who claimed to have discovered the secret of immortality. I laughed then. I no longer laugh now.

Tomorrow, she will come to pose one last time. She does not yet know that it will be for eternity…”

The letter ended abruptly. A chill ran down Isao’s spine. These words, written nearly two centuries ago, resonated with terrifying clarity. He closed his eyes for a moment, overwhelmed by the vision of Lucille trapped in this macabre ritual, her soul ripped from her body by the devouring love of a man unable to accept that she did not belong to him.

When he reopened his eyes, his gaze fell on a small notebook he had placed near his computer. It contained his personal notes on the evolution of his photographs of Lucille. He had written about how he had perfected his technique to capture her more clearly, how each chemical adjustment allowed him to reveal her further.

A deep unease suddenly enveloped him. Was he not also obsessed with Lucille’s image ? Hadn’t he spent weeks trying to capture her perfectly, to reveal her, to possess her through his lens ?

He stood up abruptly, nearly knocking over his chair. In the corner of the room, the Victorian mirror seemed to absorb the fading light of the day. Isao approached it slowly, as if magnetized. His own reflection suddenly seemed foreign, almost hostile. Behind him, he could almost see Lucille’s silhouette, prisoner of the glass.

“Am I like him ?” he whispered, a cold sweat beading on his forehead.

Silence was his only answer. On its surface, he thought he saw a reflection that wasn’t his — an indistinct male shadow, with a gaze burning with disturbing intensity.

Adrien’s gaze… A hungry, almost carnivorous adoration. A gaze he recognized for having sometimes caught it in his own mirror after hours spent developing images of Lucille.

Isao recoiled, horrified by this revelation. His hand struck a pile of photographic plates that scattered on the floor. He rushed to pick them up, but stopped dead when he saw the evolution of his own shots. The first showed a blurry, barely visible silhouette. The last revealed Lucille in every detail, captured with almost cruel precision. Her pleading gaze was frozen there, exactly like in Adrien’s final portraits.

“No, it’s not the same,” he whispered to reassure himself.

But doubt had crept in. He remembered Kagura-sama’s words: “You contemplate her beauty… But do you feel the weight of her soul ?”

He had never thought about what she truly felt. Her loneliness, her fear, her despair of being a prisoner for so long. He had only seen her beauty, her grace from another time. Had he ever truly looked at her as a person, and not as an image to capture ?

The phone rang, startling him. It was his sister, worried about his prolonged silence. He answered in a distant voice, assuring her he was fine. After hanging up, he stood still in the middle of his workshop, surrounded by images of Lucille and haunted by the ghost of Adrien Rousseau.

That night, Isao couldn’t sleep. His eyes wide open in the darkness, he stared at the ceiling, troubled by a question that kept swirling in his mind: Was he following in Adrien’s footsteps, under the guise of wanting to save Lucille ?

And what if, deep down, he only loved the idea he had of her ? A perfect muse, captured in the eternity of the mirror, who could never disappoint him, never leave him, never become anything other than that sublime image he contemplated every day ?

One thing was certain: to save Lucille, he would have to confront not only Adrien Rousseau but also that dark part of himself, that all-consuming fascination with the image rather than the soul. A battle that was only just beginning.