The French painter Frédéric Auguste Cazals portrayed Paul Verlaine – a friend since 1886 – many times over, and the resulting collection, which can be read as a diary of their friendship, closes with drawings of the poet on his deathbed. Verlaine’s face fascinated his contemporaries with its singular features: oriental, archaic, and somehow animal. In Cazals’s hands, these qualities underscore the poet’s uniqueness and his sense of otherness. Though Cazals occasionally caricatured his older friend, the final portrait strikes a different note – one of a deep tragedy, combined with the definitive silence that the deathbed genre carries with it. The quality was not lost on poet Sigismund Bouška, whose encounter with Cazals’s sketch inspired his poem Mrtvý Verlaine (The Dead Verlaine).