Marguerite à l'église

The scene is from the first part of Goethe's Faust. Marguerite, the young woman Faust has ruined, kneels at Mass while an evil spirit leans in at her shoulder and whispers her guilt, the choir and a priest carrying on behind. Delacroix had drawn this same moment years earlier, in a set of lithographs he made for a French edition of Faust in 1828. Those prints reached Goethe himself, who is said to have told a visitor that the artist had gone beyond what he had pictured in his own mind. This painting, made after 1850, returns to the subject in oil more than twenty years on. Marguerite hides her face against a pew as the spirit's hand settles on her back.