Third Floor Right, 3
THE THIRD ROOM in this ghost flat is empty. The walls, the floor, the ceiling, the skirting boards, and the doors are painted in black gloss. There is no furniture.
On the back wall hang twenty-one engraved steel plates of identical dimensions and uniformly rimmed with matt black metal beads. The steel plates are arranged in three rows of seven, one above the other; the leftmost on the top row depicts ants carrying a large crumb of gingerbread; the rightmost on the bottom row portrays a young woman squatting on a shingle beach, studying a stone bearing a fossil imprint; the nineteen intermediate etchings depict respectively:
a girl stringing cork stoppers to make a curtain;
a carpet-layer kneeling on a floor, taking measurements with a folding yardstick;
a starving composer in a garret feverishly scribbling an opera the title of which, The White Wave, is legible;
a prostitute with an ash-blonde kiss curl facing a gentleman wearing an Inverness cape;
three Peruvian Indians sitting on their heels, their bodies almost entirely hidden by their grey rough-cloth ponchos and with old felt hats pulled over their eyes, chewing coca;
a man in a nightcap, straight out of Labiche’s Italian Straw Hat, taking a mustard foot-bath whilst leafing through the annual accounts for 1969 of the Upper Dogon Railway Company;
three women in a courtroom, at the witness box; one wears a low-corsaged opal dress, and elbow-length ivory gloves, a sable-trimmed brick-quilted dolman, a comb of brilliants and a panache of osprey in her hair; the second: a cap and coat of seal coney, wrapped up to the nose, scanning the scene through tortoiseshell quizzing glasses; the third in amazon costume, hard hat, jackboots cockspurred, waistcoat, musketeer gauntlets with braided drums, long train held up, and hunting crop;
a portrait of Etienne Cabet, who founded a newspaper entitled Le Populaire, wrote the Voyage en Icarie, and attempted unsuccessfully to set up a communist colony in Iowa before his death in 1856;
two men in tuxedos sitting at a flimsy table playing cards; close scrutiny would show that the cards depict the same scenes as those depicted on the etchings;
a kind of long-tailed devil hauling a big round tray covered in mortar to the top of a ladder;
an Albanian brigand at the feet of a vamp draped in a white kimono with black polka dots;
a worker perched on the top of a scaffold, cleaning a great crystal chandelier;
an astrologer in a pointed hat and a long black robe spangled with silver-foil stars, pretending to look up through an obviously hollow tube;
a corps de ballet curtseying before a lord in the uniform of a colonel in the Hussars – silver-braided with dolman and boars’-hair sabretache;
pupils giving a gold watch to Claude Bernard, the physiologist, on his forty-seventh birthday;
a besmocked porter with his leather straps and regulation numberplate carrying two cabin trunks;
an old lady dressed in the fashions of the 1880s – lace coif, mittens on her hands – proffering fine grey apples on a large oval wicker tray;
a watercolourist with his easel on a little bridge over a narrow channel lined with oystermen’s huts;
a handicapped beggar offering a cheap horoscope to the sole customer on a café terrace: it is a printed sheet bearing under the title The Lilac a branch of lilac as a background to two rings encircling respectively a ram and a crescent moon pointing to the right.