Jay was sitting at the small coffee-stained table like a hunter on the watch for adventure. Lillian said: "The painters and the writers heightened these places and those people so well that they seem more alive than today's houses, today's people. I can remember the words spoken by Leon Paul Fargue more than the words I hear today. I can hear the very sound of his restless cane on the pavement better than I can hear my own footsteps. Was their life as rich, as intense? Was it the artist who touched it up?"

Time and art had done for Suzanne Valadon, the mother of Utrillo, what Jay would never do for Sabina. Flavor by accretion, poetry by decantation. The artists of that time had placed their subject in a light which would forever entrance us, their love re-infected us. By the opposite process which he did not understand, but which he shared with many other artists of his time, he was conveying his inability to love. It was his hatred he was painting.

Jay once said: "I arrived by the same boat that takes the prisoners to Devil's Island. And I was thinking how strange it would be if I sailed back with them as a murderer. It was in Marseilles. I had picked up two girls in a café, and we were returning by taxi after a night of night clubs. One of the girls kept after me not to let myself get cheated. When we arrived at the hotel the taxi driver asked me for a ridiculously high sum. I argued with him. I was very angry, and yet during that moment I was conscious that I was looking at his face with terrific intensity, as if I were going to kill him, but it was not that; my hatred was like a magnifying glass, taking in all the details, his porous meaty face, his moles with hair growing out of them, his soggy hair falling over his forehead, his cloudy eyes the color of Pernod. Finally we came to an agreement. That night I dreamed that I strangled him. The next day I painted him as I saw him in my dream. It was as if I had done it in reality. People will hate this painting."

"No, they will probably love it," said Lillian. "Djuna says that the criminal relieves others of their wish to commit murder. He acts out the crimes of the world. In your painting you depict the desire of thousands. In your erotic drawings you do the same. They will love your freedom."

At dawn they stood on the Place du Tertre, among houses which seemed about to crumble, to slide away, having been for so long the façades of Utrillo's houses.

Three policemen were strolling, watching. A street telephone rang hysterically in the vaporous dawn. The policemen began to run towards it.

"Someone committed your murder," said Lillian.

Two waiters and a woman began to run after the policemen.