(no subject)

Careful Jeff. YOu are going too far down my path. ;- ). Rudesind was a boy artist who meets an artist ("Fechin, Fechin, himself"). Rudesind's boy portrait includes paint brushes which is an old "mystery" prop which allows the solver to figure out the painting was a self-portrait. I.e. Rudesind is Fechin. If Fechin had painted the picture of Dorcas then yes, it would be worth a lot of money, as Ouen's words suggest. So Fechin/Rudesind is Dorcas' husband. Both Rudesind and Dorcas' husband speak in the same folksy dialect. Bent, twisted monkey stuff all around. I'll stop there but you can probably guess where it is headed.

Not at all. Casdoe's dad calls Severian "Becan" even though he knows it is not the right name at least some of the time, so we know he gets names wrong some times, right? In fact, he can't name the girl in the anecdote at all. But he otherwise speaks as thoguh he and "Fechin" are school chums, while Severian judges him to be Rudesind's age. Meanwhile, Fechin was a publicly known artist at the time Rudesind was a schoolboy, so he has to be significantly older than Casdoe's dad and Rudesind. Sev can see that the boy in the portrait is the younger appearance of the old man on the ladder. If the brushes really signify a self-portrait, it's not Fechin on the ladders pretending to be Rudesind, it's a plot by Fechin to make people think he looks like Rudesind.

Doesn't this mean that Fechin--who was known to be handy with the ladies--is Rudesind's biological father? Or is that theory just cuckoo? Adam

I hadn't thought of that- a self portrait once removed! That would explain why their descriptions look alike. But it makes Fechin and Casdoe's dad about 100 years old, when the dad looks the same age as ~80-year-old Rudesind.