Chapter 4 Chapter 1 The Birth of a Poet (2)

But the more she repressed her desire to be a mother, the more it took possession of her; she saw it as something unacceptable, secret, even illicit; The idea of ​​a child within her had an alluring, sensual quality.Come on, let me have a little girl.She begged her husband inwardly, which sounded provocative. Late one night, the couple came home from a party in good spirits.Jaromil's father lay down beside his wife, turned off the light (since the wedding he had always possessed her in the dark, letting touch rather than sight guide his desire), pulled the covers over, and made love to her.Perhaps it was a rarity in their intercourse, or the influence of the booze, and that night she gave herself to him in an ecstasy she hadn't experienced in a long time.

Her whole being was filled with the idea that they were making a baby; and when she felt her husband was close to orgasm, she could no longer control herself and yelled at him drunkenly, telling him not to cower and stay with her. Together, let her conceive a child, a little girl.She clung to him convulsively so tightly that he had to struggle to break free, convinced that her wish would not come true. Later, when they lay exhausted together, Maman clung to him and whispered again in his ear that she longed to have another child with him; she didn't want to upset him, no, she just wanted to explain her Why was the action just now so violent and impulsive (maybe it was so dirty, she was willing to admit it).She murmured that this time they would definitely have a girl, and that this little girl would be his apple of the eye, just as Jaromil was her apple of the eye.

The engineer reminded her (for the first time since marriage) that he never wanted children; he was forced to compromise then and it was her turn to compromise; if she really wanted him to see in another child an image of himself, then he could tell her he would see himself more clearly in the child that would never be born. They lay silent for a while, and then Maman began to cry, and she choked up all night; her husband did not touch her, but murmured words of comfort.The words didn't even penetrate her mournful shell.She seemed to finally understand everything: the man she was with day and night had never loved her.

She fell into the deepest sorrow of her life.Fortunately, while her husband didn't offer her any comfort, someone else did: History.Three weeks after that night, the husband received an order for military mobilization.He packed up and went to the front line.The air was full of war, and people bought gas masks and built underground shelters.Maman embraced the country's misfortune as if it were her savior; she immersed herself in her country's pain and spent a great deal of her time teaching her son about what was going on in the country. The great powers met in Munich and an agreement was reached.German troops occupied the border fortress, and Jaromil's father returned home.Since then, the whole family sat in my grandfather's room downstairs every night, discussing the various processes of history.History, it seemed to them, had hitherto been asleep (or at least pretended to be asleep), and now it suddenly stretched itself, its gigantic figure eclipsing everything else.Ah, how Maman welcomes this great shadow!Groups of Czechs fled the border, and Bohemia was like a peeled orange, exposed undefended in central Europe; six months later, German tanks suddenly appeared on the streets of Prague, and Ma Mann devoted herself to a soldier who was cheated into fighting for her country; she completely forgot that it was the man who never loved her.

But even in times of howling historical storms, the everyday mundane emerges from the shadows sooner or later, and conjugal life stands out in its extreme triviality and astonishing obstinacy.One night, when Jaromil's father put his hand on Mamen's breast, she realized that the man who was touching her was the same one who had insulted her.She pushed his hand away, gently reminding him of the heartless words he had said to her before. She doesn't want revenge.She just wanted to imply that the great events of the country could not erase the memory of the past in the humble heart; she wanted to give her husband a chance to correct his unkind words and heal her wounds.She believed that the country's calamity had made him more emotional, and she would gladly accept any gesture of tenderness; as a sign of the beginning of their new love life.However, when her husband's offer was rejected, he just rolled over and soon fell asleep.

After the student demonstrations in Prague and the Germans closing down Czech universities, Maman waited in vain for her husband to reach under the covers and touch her breasts.My grandfather was shocked to find out that the charming woman in the perfume shop had been secretly robbing him for years, and died of a stroke.The Czech students were transported to concentration camps in stuffy tank trucks. Maman went to see a doctor. The doctor worried that she was in a bad state of mind and advised her to take a long-term rest.He told her about an apartment next to the spa, near several lakes and a river.Every summer, many people who love nature gather there to fish, swim and boat.It was early spring, and Maman was fascinated by the idea of ​​a quiet walk along the lake.But she was uneasy at the thought of the cheerful dance music that always seemed to float in the air of a wild summer restaurant, a haunting reminder of summer days gone by, and her own sorrow troubled her, so she Decided not to go on vacation alone.

Of course, she quickly realized who to take!Of late, half from marital troubles and half from the desire to have a second child, she had almost forgotten him.How stupid she was to forget her baby, to destroy herself!He bowed down to him remorsefully: "Jaromil, you are my first child; and also my second!" She hugged him tightly and babbled nonsense: "You are my first child!" My second, my third, my fourth, my fifth, my sixth, my tenth child..." She kissed his face all over. They were greeted at the station by a tall gray-haired woman with haughty manners; a burly coachman took two suitcases and carried them out on the pavement, where a black buggy was waiting; In the driver's seat, Jaromil, his mother, and the tall woman sat facing each other on the leather-covered seat; the sound of horses' hooves accompanied them as they galloped through the streets of the small town and through the square, on one side of which was the Renaissance Arcades in the style of the city, and on the other side the gardens of the old mansion, surrounded by green balustrades, covered with ivy.Then they drove towards the river; Jaromil saw a row of yellow cabins, a diving board, white tables and chairs.Farther on he caught a glimpse of a line of poplars along the river, and the carriage was driving them to the isolated villas scattered along the river.

In front of a villa, the horses stopped, and the coachman jumped out to pick up the luggage.Jaromil and his mother followed him through the garden, into the hall, up a flight of stairs, and into a room in which, as was customary for married couples, two beds were arranged side by side.There are two large French windows, one of which opens onto a balcony facing the garden and the river.Maman held onto the balcony railing and took a few deep breaths, "Ah: what a beautiful tranquility!" she said, taking another deep breath, looking at the pier, where a red rowboat was gently tossing move.

At dinner that night, Maman made friends with an old couple who lived in the apartment; every night after that, there were murmurs of conversation in the small dining room; everyone liked Jaromil, and Maman liked Listen to his stories, opinions, boasting discreetly; yes, discreetly: Jaromil would never remember being humiliated by that woman in the dentist's waiting room, he was always looking for a shield to defend against Her mocking gaze.He still craved praise, of course, but he had learned to get it with innocence, humility, and brevity. Jaromil entered a world of ecstasy: the villa is located in the middle of a peaceful garden, the deep river and the moored boats make one imagine a long voyage; The tall mistress of the countess in the story takes away; people can go to remote baths in a buggy, just like going back and forth between centuries and dreams.In the Renaissance square, brave cavaliers fought duels in the shadow of its narrow arcades.

This beautiful world of fairy tales also includes a man with a dog.When they saw him for the first time, he was standing on the bank of the river, gazing at the rolling water; he was wearing a fur coat, and beside him squatted a black German shepherd dog. As if from another world.They met him again in the same spot; he was still wearing the fur coat, and he threw twigs and the dogs brought them back.When they met him for the third time (still the same view: the river and the poplars), the man bowed slightly to Maman, and after they passed by, the curious Jaromil noticed that he turned his head several times .The next day, when they came back from a walk, they saw the black German shepherd dog squatting in front of the gate of the villa.They entered the hall and heard the conversation, and they had no doubt that the man who spoke was the dog's owner.Curious, they remained in the hall, loitering and talking idly, until the mistress came out.

Maman pointed to the dog and asked, "What does its owner do? We always seem to run into him when we go for a walk." "He is an art teacher in our middle school here." Maman said that she would like to talk to an art teacher, because Jaromil likes painting, and she is eager to hear an expert's opinion.The hostess introduced the man to Mamen, and Jaromil was sent upstairs to his room to get a sketchbook. Then the four sat down in the small living room—the mistress, Jaromil, the dog's owner, and Maman.The man was flipping through the painting book, and Mamen kept explaining beside him; she explained that Jaromil always liked moving scenes rather than static scenery; she said that she really felt that his paintings had something Ordinary life and movement, although she was puzzled why all the figures had dog-headed bodies; if Jaromil painted real portraits, his work might have some value, and she was not sure whether the child's attempt was justified. The dog's owner examined the paintings with pleasure; he then commented that it was precisely the combination of the animal's head and the human body that fascinated him.The strange union of these two worlds is obviously no accident, and the multitude of drawings on the subject clearly shows that this idea fascinates the child deeply, taking root in the depths of his mysterious young mind.It would be a mistake to judge a child's talents solely by his ability to reproduce the external world; anyone can learn to do so.As an artist (which implies that teaching is merely a necessary misfortune of earning a living), what fascinates him is the creative inner world of the little one, which is expressed on paper. Maman was very happy to hear the praise of Jaromil. The hostess stroked the child's hair and announced that he had a great future. Jaromil stared at the floor, engraving every word in his memory.The painter said that he will transfer to a school in Prague next year, and he hopes that Maman will continue to show Jaromil's subsequent works to him. Inner world!What important words, Jaromil heard them with great satisfaction, he never forgot that at the age of five he was already called an unusual child, different from other children.The attitudes of his fellow students, their outrageous jeering at his purse and shirt, were constantly reminding him of his superiority (albeit painfully).Hitherto, however, his distinctiveness has been something empty and vague, an incomprehensible hope, or an incomprehensible veto; now at last it has a definite name: the creative inner world. .At the same time, the name is also given a specific and clear content: the image of a dog-headed world.Of course, Jaromil was well aware that his discovery of the much-admired kobolds was purely accidental, simply because he could not draw faces; this gave him the impression that the uniqueness of his inner world was not born Not any positive effort, but whatever was scrambling through his mind.This is a gift given to him. From then on, he began to pay attention to all his thoughts and ideas and appreciate them.It occurred to him, for example, that if he were to die, the world in which he had been living would cease to exist.At first; the thought was just passing through his mind, but now that he was aware of his inner creativity, he didn't let it slip away like so many thoughts in the past.He holds it, looks at it, examines it from every side.He walked along the river, closing his eyes from time to time, and asking himself if the river still existed when his eyes were closed.Of course, the river continued to flow in front of him every time he opened his eyes, but it was worth noting that this fact did not prove that the river was still there when Jaromil was not looking at it.He found this very interesting, spent most of the day on this experiment, and then told Maman all about it. The closer the holiday drew to an end, the happier the conversation seemed to them.As night fell, they went out and sat on the crumbling wooden bench, holding hands, and stared at the waves as the full moon swayed back and forth across the river. "It's beautiful!" Maman sighed.Her son looked at the moonlit eddies and fantasized about sailing on the river.Then Maman thought of the dreary days that would soon begin again, and said, "My dear, I feel very sad. But you can't possibly understand me." She looked into her son's eyes, which looked so full of love, Filled with longing understanding.It frightened her: to confide a woman's heart to a child!But those understanding eyes still attracted her like a secret evil.They lay next to each other in two beds, and Mamen recalled how happy they were when they slept together until Jaromil was six years old; Man feeling happy in bed.The thought amused her.But looking again into his tender eyes, she said to herself, the boy would not only distract her (thus giving her the comfort of forgetting), but listen intently to her (thus giving her the comfort of forgetting). comfort that she understands). "Let me tell you a big secret; I have very little love in my life," she told him.On another occasion she even told him: "I'm happy being a mother, but a mother is also a woman." Yes, there was a sinful allure to these hesitant intimacy, and she knew it.Once, he answered her unexpectedly: "Mommy, I'm not as young as you think, I understand you." She was taken aback.Of course, the child had no specific thoughts in mind, but he just wanted to express to his mother his desire to share all her sorrows.There are, however, several possible meanings to his words.They suddenly opened eyes to the abyss of danger, of forbidden intimacy, of perverse understanding. How is Jaromil's unique inner world going? It didn't go so well: Schoolwork, which had been easy child's play for him in elementary school, became much more difficult in middle school, when the glory of his inner world began to fade into the bleak routine and homework.The teacher spoke in a mocking tone of pessimistic books that only described the pain and misery of the world. Jaromil's view that life is like a weed now seemed to him an insulting cliché.He is no longer sure whether any of his past thoughts and feelings are really his own, whether his thoughts are merely a public part of the stockpile of human thought, always readily available and merely borrowed, like the books in a library. books.So who is he?What does his inner self look like?He tried to get a closer look at the inner life, but all he saw was his own watching eyes. So, he began to miss the man who first talked about his inner world two years ago.His art grades have always been mediocre (when using watercolors, the paint always spills over the pencil sketches).Maman therefore decided that there was every reason to comply with her son's entreaties, to find the artist, to arrange homeschooling, to help Jaromil catch up in class, and to improve his art grades. In this way, Jaromil one day found himself in the painter's studio.The studio is on the top floor of an apartment building. There are two rooms; the first room is full of bookshelves; the second room has no windows, only a skylight set on the sloping roof, which is framed by several large pieces of milky white glass.In this studio were several easels holding unfinished pictures, a long table littered with papers and vials of colored ink; The dog Jaromil was familiar with was squatting on the couch in the corner, silently watching the visitor. The painter asked Jaromil to sit down at the long table, and then flipped through his sketchbook. "The pictures are all the same," he concluded, "and that doesn't make you any good." Jaromil wanted to remind the artist that these paintings were the kobolds he liked very much in the past, and he painted them specially for him, but he was so disappointed and self-pitying that he couldn't say a word.The painter placed a stack of blank paper in front of Jaromil, opened a bottle of ink, and put the brush in his hand. "Draw whatever comes to mind, don't think too much? Try to do whatever you want..." But Jaromil was so timid that he couldn't think of anything, and when the painter encouraged him again, he uncomfortably drew the tall and thin The tried and tested dog head on the body.The painter is dissatisfied and confused.Jaromil said he wanted to learn how to use watercolors properly; because in school he could never get the paint to stay clean inside a pencil sketch. "Your mother told me that," replied the painter, "but now forget the watercolors, and forget the dog too." Then he put a thick book in front of the child, and opened a page with a naughty, Childish lines, twisting across the colored background.This line made Jaromil think of centipedes, starfish, reptiles, stars and the moon.The painter asks the child to use his imagination to draw similar things. "But what should I draw?" Jaromil asked, and the painter told him, "Draw a line. Draw the kind of line that makes you happy. Remember, a painter's job is never to imitate, but to create on paper." A world of lines of his own." So Jaromil drew those lines that he didn't like at all, filling one sheet after another, and finally, according to his mother's instructions, he handed the painter a banknote and went home up. The visit turned out to be nothing like what he had expected.It did not lead to rediscovering his lost inner world.On the contrary, Jaromil can truly be called his only work - football players and soldiers with dog heads were taken away.Nevertheless, when his mother asked him what he thought of the class, he gave her an impassioned debrief; not because he was hypocritical: his visit, while not returning him the inner world, at least provided him with A unique external world, never open to anyone, rewards him by granting him a few glimpses: he sees, for example, unusual pictures which, though bewildering him, conveyed a distinct character (how distinct he recognized at once) from the landscapes and still lifes that hung at home; and he heard a few words of value, which he immediately accepted: , he understands that the word "bourgeois" is an insult; bourgeois is the kind of people who demand that paintings look like real life; but we can laugh at such people (Jaromil likes this phrase), because they are dead, But don't know it. Therefore, Jaromil was eager to continue to see the painter, hoping to regain the success that those dog-headed and figure paintings once had; Without the charm of children's fantasies, those drawings of African masks remain clumsy reproductions that do not excite the child's own imagination as the artist would have liked.Jaromil, who had visited his governess several times without a word of praise, could not stand it, and decided to make a bold move: he took with him his secret sketchbook, which contained his drawings of nude women. These paintings were mainly imitated by Jarobber from the photos he saw in a magazine in his grandfather's study.So the drawings on the first pages of the sketchbook were full of mature, dignified women, dignified, typical allegorical figures of the nineteenth century.However, the next part has something more interesting: on one page there is a drawing of a headless woman, and the paper is cut off where the woman's neck is drawn, making it look as if the head had been chopped off, leaving a Imaginary ax marks.The cut in the paper was made by Jaromil's pencil sharpener; Jaromil found a girl in the class particularly attractive.Often he gazed at her clothed body, longing to see it naked.It so happened that he had a picture of the girl, so he got his wish by cutting out the head from the picture and pasting it in a cutout in the sketchbook.The nudes on the following pages are all headless and have a cutout.Some of the characters are in bizarre states: squatting as if urinating, Joan of Arc on top of a burning log, or some other scene of torture.For example, one headless woman was nailed to a pillar, another had her legs chopped off, and a third lost an arm.There are also scenes we'd better not mention. It is true that Jaromil did not know how the painter would react to these pictures; they were certainly far inferior to the pictures in the painter's studio and those in his thick books.Even so, Jaromil felt that the paintings in his secret sketchbook had something in common with the painter's work: they were unconventional; they were different from the paintings at home; condemnation and misunderstanding from any member of Jaromil's family or from their regular guests. The artist gently flipped through the sketchbook.Without saying a word, he handed the child a large picture album, and then sat down, busy arranging the papers on the table.Jaromil began to look through the album carefully.He saw a naked man with his buttocks so far out that he had to be propped up on a cane; a flower from an egg; a face covered with ants; The painter walked up to Jaromil. "Attention," he said, "what a draftsman Dali is!" Then he placed a nude plaster cast in front of Jaromil. "We have always neglected drawing skills. This is a mistake. Before we can make fundamental changes to the world, we have to learn to see it for what it is." So Jaromil's sketchbook began to be filled with women's bodies .Outlines and proportions were modified where the painter had carefully examined them. If a woman cannot fully enjoy life from her body, she sees her body as an enemy.Mamen had always been dissatisfied with the strange graffiti that Jaromil had brought home from outside, and when he began to show her naked women, her uneasiness turned into intense disgust.A few days later, from the window, she saw Magda, the maid, picking cherries, and Jaromil was holding the ladder for her, his eyes darting back and forth under the girl's skirt.Maman felt that he had been surrounded by a mass of women's breasts and buttocks lately, and she decided to fight back.That afternoon Jaromil was due to go to his art class again; she dressed quickly and arrived at the painter's studio ahead of her son. "I'm by no means a Puritan," she said, sinking into an armchair, "but Jaromil is entering a dangerous age, you know." She had thought carefully about what to say to the painter, but now she was clumsy.She had, of course, rehearsed what she was going to say, in the familiar surroundings of her home, against the background of greenery in the garden which always silently applauded her thoughts.But there is no trace of green nature here.It was surrounded by strange paintings on easels and a dog crouching like a suspicious sphinx staring at her from a couch. The painter dismissed Mamen's criticism in a few words, and went on to say that he was not at all interested in Jaromil's grades at school, because school art education could only kill any talent a child might have.No, what fascinated him about her son's drawings was his peculiar, almost morbidly sensitive imagination. "Notice the strange form. Those paintings you showed me a few years ago - they were all dog-headed figures. Recently, he has been painting nude women - but they are all headless. You don't think he refuses to recognize human beings. Face, does it make sense to refuse to humanize people?" Maman said she finds it hard to believe that her son has become so pessimistic that he wants to dehumanize people. "Naturally, he didn't always draw these pictures after pessimistic thinking." The painter retorted, "Art does not arise from reason. Jaromil's impulse to paint a dog-headed figure or a headless woman is out of Instinct. I'm sure he didn't know how he came to these things. His subconscious whispered to him these shapes—strange, but by no means meaningless shapes. Don't you think that in Jaromil's imagination and this war Is there a mysterious link between them? War shakes us, makes us shudder every day, every night, every hour. Is it not the war that takes the face and the head of a man? Aren't we living in In a world full of headless men yearning for the torso of headless women? Isn't the so-called realistic view of the world the greatest illusion? I ask you, aren't your son's paintings more authentic and realistic ?" She had come to reproach the painter, and now she was flustered like a timid girl who fears punishment, not knowing how to answer. The painter got up from his chair and walked to the corner of the studio where several unframed oil paintings were leaning against the wall.He pulled out one, turned it around so that the painted side was facing out, stepped back a few steps, and squatted down. "Come here," he said to Mama.She walked obediently, and he put his hands on her waist, pulling her closer, so they squatted side by side, and Maman watched a strange set of reddish-brown shapes that could be seen as a sea of ​​burnt A dark fire in a bare, bare scene, but it could also be streaks of blood.A few strokes of a figure with a palette knife have been brushed across the scene, a curious figure that seems to be made of white string (the effect is due to the blank frame).It seemed to be floating instead of walking, and flickering in the distance instead of actually being there. Once again Maman didn't know what to say, and the painter continued his speech; he spoke of the vagaries of war, which far surpassed the imagination of modern painters; of horrifying images; , a human finger on the tree, and an eye peering out from the trunk.Then he said that in such a time of ruin he was no longer interested in anything but war and love.A love that flickers behind the bloody reality of war, just like the human figure Maman sees on that page. (In the middle of this conversation, Maman felt for the first time that she understood the painter's words, because she also saw that the painting was a war scene, and she also recognized that the white figure was a human figure.) The painter talked about their The river bank when we first met.He said that she was like that dark white love emerging from the foggy obscurity. Then he turned the squatting Maman to face him, and kissed her.He kissed Maman before she even realized what was happening.This is actually consistent with everything that has happened between them; things often come too suddenly, as if they are always out of her expectation; she is kissed before she has time to think about it, and the reaction that follows Can't change what happened, only confirm the fact that something is wrong; Mama isn't even sure it's wrong, so she puts the problem off until later and concentrates on the moment at hand . She felt his tongue sticking out of her mouth, and immediately realized that her own tongue was so limp and lifeless that the painter would have felt it like a wet washcloth.She was ashamed, and thought angrily, after all these loveless years, no wonder her tongue had become a facecloth!She quickly returned the painter's tongue with the tip of her tongue, and he picked her up, carried her to the couch (the dog who had been staring at them jumped up and lay down by the door), put her down gently, and caressed her. to her breast.She felt a sense of contentment and pride; the painter's face looked young and emotional.She feared that she no longer knew how to react, so she commanded herself to try to appear young and emotional, and before she knew it (again, it was happening so quickly that she had no time to think), he had become deep. A third man deep inside her and into her life. Suddenly, she realized that she really didn't know whether she needed him or not.She thought that she was still behaving like a stupid, inexperienced little girl, and that if she had thought about what she was doing, she would never have gotten to where she was.This thought calmed her down, for it meant that her infidelity in marriage was not due to lust but to ignorance.This thought, in turn, fueled her resentment toward the man who kept her in a state of immature innocence, and this resentment hung over her mind like a veil, causing her to stop thinking altogether and feel herself speeding up. heartbeat. Their breathing calmed her, her mind cleared, and she buried her head in the painter's arms to hide from her own thoughts, let him stroke her hair, breathed in the calming scent of the oil painting, and waited to see who would speak first. But it wasn't him, and it wasn't her, that rang first—it was the doorbell.The painter stood up, quickly put on his trousers, and said: "Jaromil." She was terrified. "It's okay, don't worry." He stroked her hair and walked out of the studio. He greeted the child and seated him at the table in the outer room. "There is a guest of mine in the studio, we will stay here and show me the paintings you brought." Jaromil handed the sketchbook to the artist.The painter looked at one of his homework carefully, put paints in front of him, handed him paper and brush, asked him to start painting with a topic. He returned to the studio and found that Maman had already dressed and planned to leave. "Why did you let him stay? Why didn't you send him away?" "You're so anxious to leave me, aren't you?" "It's crazy," she said.The painter put his arms around her again.This time, she neither resisted nor reciprocated his touch.She leaned against his arms like a body without a soul.The painter whispers to the dull body, "Yes, madness. Love is either madness or nothing." He sits her on the couch, kisses her, touches her breasts. Then he went out again to see how Jaromil was doing.This time, the questions he assigned were not intended to improve the child's manual dexterity.Instead, he asked him to draw a scene from a dream that had recently impressed him.The painter glanced at Jaromil's homework and began to talk about fantasy.The most beautiful thing about dreams is that fantasy encounters can happen, encounters between people and things that never happen in everyday life.In the dream, a boat can sail into the room through the open window, and a woman who has been dead for twenty years can get up from her bed, step into the boat, and the boat suddenly becomes a coffin, which can float A river bank strewn with flowers.He quotes Lautermont’s famous quote about beauty—it is beautiful to meet an umbrella and a sewing machine on the operating table.Then the painter said: "Such an encounter is beautiful, but it is even more beautiful to meet a woman and a child in a painter's room." Jaromil noticed that his teacher seemed more lively than usual.He felt a peculiar tenderness in the painter's voice when he spoke of dreams and poetry.Jaromil liked this tenderness, he was glad he had provoked such a passionate conversation, he understood the painter's last words about meeting a woman and a child.When the painter first told him that they were going to stay in the outer room, Jaromil immediately guessed that there might be a woman in the studio; if Jaromil was not even allowed to look at her, she was not just any woman, but a special one. people.但是，他距离成人世界还太远，不可能试图解答这个秘密；他更感兴趣的是画家说话的方式，是把他雅罗米尔的名字同那位神秘的女士连在一起的最后那句话。雅罗米尔觉得，不知怎么，正是他的在场使那位女士在画家眼中显得更加重要。他很高兴，画家喜欢他，也许还把他看作对他生活有影响的人，在他俩之间有一种深刻的、秘密的亲和力，这种亲和力年轻而无经验的雅罗米尔不可能完全理解，而他那聪明、成熟的家庭老师却一清二楚。这些想法使雅罗米尔快乐，当画家又给他布置作业时，他急切地用画笔蘸上颜料，俯在素描簿上画起来。