Jogging With Roussel 19 (Part 1)

One morning, January 20, 2013, as Canterel sat alone in his private quarters in Locus Solus at Mont-morency, he perused a large illustrated volume over tea called ‘Dumb Fortune’ which was actually a catalogue of the collection of paintings owned by one Phillip Louis of Justin, Texas printed in the year 1923 privately by a firm in London called Faeringa Editions Ltd. Mr. Louis it seems had recently acquired large sums of money in the oil and cattle businesses of the local area.

One image in particular was fascinating Canterel, a painting entitled “Le mystère et la menace de «je m'en fiche.” which according to the short description was a portrait of Étienne Cabet at his desk as procureur-général in Corsica in 1830 and belonging to the government of King Louis Philippe I. Of particular interest to Canterel was the large strange painting behind M. Cabet’s desk after which this painting had been named as well, which according to the book had been painted by Nathanael Tinck, a French immigrant to Texas in 1848, and who had subsequently died there of Malaria. This painting inside a painting ‘Le mystère’ had been painted it said in 1821 in Le Havre, in Normandy.

        The painting owned by Mr. Phillip Louis of Justin, Texas was painted by one Evelyn Tinck of Dallas, Texas, in 1899. Nathaniel Tinck’s painting depicted a black knight who, with helmet removed, was gazing at the stars in rapt amazement while at the same time about to stamp down with the sole of his boot on the back of the neck of another man looking up in terror at the former’s grace, and neither of them noticing that the sole of knight’s boot like a red-hot branding iron was about to inscribe the symbol of the Christian Ichthys on the back of the fallen man’s neck. The black knight bore a striking resemblance to the most common representations of Jesus Christ, while at the same time resembling none other than Étienne Cabet while the fallen man looked remarkably like Franz Xaver Winter-halter, or Louis Philippe I, the King of France, though with one striking difference.
       
           This gentleman appeared to have a strange and bulbous nodule which, like a continuation of the bridge of the nose culminated in what could only be a cranial blow-hole situated like a third eye in the forehead of this fallen warrior. What seemed even more strange, was that the banner of the fallen man had itself fallen across his back to reveal its image to the frame; upon a solid green field, a large white diamond was about to land tip to tip onto a smaller inverted diamond, thus almost about to create a rough, vertical, non-curvilinear analog of the Ichthys symbol as well. Under this symbol one could plainly glimpse the words CAUSE ARCSIN LIED.