Felix Lanzberg's Expiation by Ossip Schubin

A small room with large windows opening on the park, innumerable flowers in vases of different forms standing about the room, a perfume as intoxicating and painfully sweet as poison which gives one death in a last rapture; on the walls, hung with silver-worked rococo damask, a few rare pictures, only five or six; two Greuze heads with red-kissed lips and tear-reddened eyes, eyes which look up to heaven because earth has deceived them; then a Corot, a spring landscape, where dishevelled nymphs dance a wild round with dry leaves which winter has left; a Watteau, in which women, in the bouffant paniers of the time of the regents, with bared bosoms and hair drawn high up on their heads, touch glasses of champagne with gallant cavaliers, a picture in which everything smiles, and which yet makes one deeply mournful; a picture in which men and women, especially women, seem to have no heart, no soul, no enjoyment on earth, no belief in heaven; but in deepest _ennui_ float about like butterflies, tormented by the curse of the consciousness that their life lasts only from sunrise to sunset; a Rembrandt, a negress, brutally healthy, bestially stupid, with dull glance, broad, hungry lips, huge, homely, and wholly satisfied with herself and creation; about the room soft, inviting furniture; no dazzling light, pale reddish reflections; draperies in Roman style, artistic knick-knacks and soft rugs -- this is what Erwin finds as, pushing aside the drawn portieres, he enters Linda's boudoir without announcement.

Amid these surroundings she sits at an upright piano, and softly and dreamily sings an Italian love-song.