L’avertissement (Spirit Scene) (1905) by Serafino Macchiati is a haunting image that blends the everyday with the uncanny. Inspired by Jules Claretie’s novel Moi et l’Autre, it depicts André Fortis, a man split between two selves, confronted during a dinner by the luminous vision of a woman’s head floating in the air. More than a ghostly apparition, the scene embodies Fortis’s fractured psyche, where the boundaries between reality and imagination collapse. Macchiati, who often moved between painting and illustration, uses this vision not to shock with the supernatural but to explore the weight of inner conflict, turning an ordinary setting into a psychological stage where fear, memory, and obsession become vividly real.