Without another word he sat and we began to play. He played Boston with neither skill nor luck, and gave no indication that he had any interest in winning. He played by rote, more machine than man, paying scant attention to the cards. He had to be constantly prodded and prompted, suggesting that his mind was as distant as his person was near. After the game, as my companions were leaving, he asked them to return his money—he must have lost a dollar or more in a short time—and by way of reply my two friends laughed, judging his request an attempt at humor. Their reaction left him in a state of even greater despondency.

When we were alone, I resolved to satisfy my curiosity about the youth, and asked if he had just seen a phantom, for he had the countenance of a man so confronted. He assured me that he had seen no such thing. It took but little prompting for him to begin—tentatively at first, and then, assisted by a bottle of rum, with gathering confidence—an account of his life, both recent and ancient, of which the following is a summary.

The newcomer’s name was Jean-François Feuille. That very afternoon, he told me, he’d waded fully clothed into the muddy waters of the Mississippi with every intention of never returning to shore alive. Once fully submerged, he changed his mind and, after a great struggle, managed to haul himself out of the river despite the pull of the current and the added burden of his sodden woolen suit, which he had worn to prevent this precise eventuality. Thus, he told me morosely, he had proven himself a coward twice over—retreating out of cowardice from committing a coward’s act. The young man intrigued me, and I asked him his provenance.

Feuille was the youngest son of a wealthy, ambitious Bordeaux farmer. I told him I was from Toulon and he seemed somewhat uplifted by this compatriotic bond. Although his father had envisaged a career in the priesthood for him, as a child Feuille had instead developed a love for the paintings adorning the walls of his parish church. His father’s disapproval only fanned the flames of his ardour, and at the age of sixteen, against the wishes of the paterfamilias, he’d set off for Paris, determined to become an artist. Thanks to a letter of introduction penned by an aristocratic family acquaintance, he’d studied under the tutelage of the master Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson. Feuille, by his own admission, was a devoted and conscientious student but not an especially gifted one, and at the end of his studies he’d spent several fruitless years scrounging an existence in Paris, garnering few commissions of his own.