It is true, he still went regularly to the studio and shut himself in under the pretense of laboring at some great, mysterious work; yet he never touched a brush all day long, but cowered over the stove, in which he managed to keep up a wretched little fire made out of fragments of old fences that he had picked up here and there. There he sat wrapped in his shawl, an unlighted cigar in his mouth, spying around among his antiquities, to see which piece he should next tear from his soul and deliver to the shop-keepers.
For a very considerable payment that he had to make had exhausted his last penny of ready money. In his emotion over the martyrdom of the faithful dog, Rosenbusch had determined to give Jansen a pleasant surprise by ordering a grave-stone for the little mound in the garden, bearing the following profound inscription:
Hic jacet Homo, _Nihil humani a se alienum putans_.
It was merely a plain block of granite ornamented by a dog's head cut in profile, and the letters were not even gilded. Yet the stone-cutter's bill proved to be twice as large as the first estimate of the cost; so that he had been obliged to sell the sword and scabbard of a Walloon cuirassier, a rusty snaffle-bit of the time of the Swedish war, and his last halberds; and besides this, to paint an oil-portrait of the stone-cutter's wife, in order to complete this act of respect without incurring any debts.
He never said a word about his troubles to any of his friends, not even to Elfinger, and at the dedication of the monument, over which he presided, he conducted himself with so much ease and dignity that they all thought he had really found some unknown patron who advanced him money on his great new picture. The fact that he appeared in a dress-coat, in spite of the bitter winter cold, was attributed to the formality with which he insisted upon treating the whole affair.
He himself tried hard at first to keep up his spirits. He composed an account of the ceremony in his most feeling verses, and accompanied them with a sketch of the grave-stone and other illustrations relating to the dedication, and sent the document to Florence, where Jansen and Julie were then sojourning.
The postage for this parcel cost him his last kreutzer. That day it was nine o'clock in the evening before he ate his dinner (on credit); and even then he went to bed hungry.