"HOW MUCH WAS THIS ONE?"

In several of my universes, a Siglo-de-Oro-style dark group painting plays a lead role: "How Much Was This One?" At both installments of the Maison de l'Étrange (both the Darkness and Ayakashi Editions), as well as Hanged Men's Seed (El semen de los ahorcados), it hangs at the Gillenormands', for instance (though concealed behind a curtain or in a garret or a forgotten turret, as taboo for Marius). Though in Hanged Men's Seed it's donated by Luc Gillenormand to Hogwarts, as payment for surveillance on Marius, and hangs in the Slytherin common room --that of the Pontmercy boy's enemies/rivals!--, fascinating both 'Parnasse and 'Ponine, but making Enj feel uneasy. The painting itself is a gory tavern scene depicting visually, in a Siglo de Oro style, this scene from a subplot or vignette (like the flowers' dreams in The Snow Queen) in a Victorian fairytale by the Mayhew brothers:

Then the scene was changed once more, and men sat drinking in a tavern. As they laughed and joked, the door was flung suddenly back, and the huntsman entered, with the bloodhounds whining and jumping up about him. Advancing to the table where the drinkers sat, the huntsman dashed down among the wine-cups the bleeding head of the runaway, and demanded of one of the revellers the price that he had set upon it.