IV

From this time forth I had a strange experience. I saw beauty

everywhere. If I sat at the window of a café on the Corso on a Sunday

morning, as the ladies were going to Mass, it seemed to me that all the

beauty on earth was going past. A mother and her three daughters went

by, a mere grocer's wife from the Corso, but the mother carried herself

like a duchess, had a foot so small that it could have lain in the

hollow of my hand, and the youngest of the three daughters was so

absolutely lovely that people turned to look after her; she might

perhaps have been fifteen years of age, but there was a nobility about

her austere profile, and she had a way of twisting her perfect lips

into a smile, that showed her to be susceptible to the sweetest

mysteries of poetry and music. My long illness had so quickened the

susceptibility of my senses to impressions of beauty that I lived in a

sort of intoxication.

In the Scandinavian Club I was received with endless expressions of

sympathy, courteous remarks, and more or less sincerely meant

flatteries, as if in compensation for the suffering I had been through.

All spoke as though they had themselves been deeply distressed, and

especially as though Copenhagen had been sitting weeping during my

illness. I certainly did not believe this for a moment, but all the

same it weighed down a little, the balance of my happiness, and the

first meetings with the Northern artists in these glorious surroundings

were in many respects very enjoyable. The Scandinavian Club was in the

building from which you enter the Mausoleum of Augustus, a colossal

building in the form of a cross, several storeys in height. A festival

had been got up on the flat roof for a benevolent object one of the

first evenings in April. You mounted the many flights of stairs and

suddenly found yourself, apparently, in an immense hall, but with no

roof save the stars, and brilliantly illuminated, but with lights that

paled in the rays of the Italian moon. We took part in the peculiarly

Italian enjoyment of watching balloons go up; they rose by fire, which

exhausted the air inside them and made them light. Round about the moon

we could see red and blue lights, like big stars; one balloon ignited

up in the sky, burst into bright flames, and looked very impressive.

Troops of young women, too, were sitting there, and dazzled anew a

young man who for a second time had given the slip to the old gentleman

with the scythe. There was one young servant girl from the country, in

particular, a child of thirteen or fourteen, to whom I called the

attention of the painters, and they went into ecstasies over her. The

type was the same as that which Raphael has reproduced in his Sistine

Madonna. Her clear, dark blue eyes had a look of maidenly shyness, and

of the most exquisite bashfulness, and yet a look of pride. She wore a

string of glass beads round her lovely neck. We ordered two bottles of

wine to drink her health, and, while we were drinking it, the rotunda

was lighted up from a dozen directions with changing Bengal fire. The

ladies looked even handsomer, the glass lamps dark green in the gleam,

the fire-borne balloons rose, the orchestra played, the women smiled at

the homage of their friends and lovers--all on the venerable Mausoleum

of Augustus.

V

I made the acquaintance that evening of a young and exceedingly

engaging Frenchman, who was to become my intimate friend and my

travelling companion. He attracted me from the first by his refined,

reserved, and yet cordial manner.

Although only thirty-five years of age, Georges Noufflard had travelled

and seen surprisingly much. He was now in Italy for the second time,

knew France and Germany, had travelled through Mexico and the United

States, had visited Syria, Egypt, Tunis, and Algiers to the last oasis.

When the conversation touched upon Art and Music, he expressed himself

in a manner that revealed keen perception, unusual knowledge, and a

very individual taste.

The following morning, when we met on the Corso, he placed himself at

my disposal, if he could be of use to me; there was nothing he had

arranged to do. He asked where I was thinking of going; as he knew Rome

and its neighbourhood as well as I knew my mother's drawing-room, I

placed myself in his hands. We took a carriage and drove together,

first to the baths of Caracalla, then to the Catacombs, where we very

nearly lost our way, and thought with a thrill of what in olden times

must have been the feelings of the poor wretches who fled there,

standing in the dark and hearing footsteps in the distance, knowing

that it was their pursuers coming, and that they were inevitably going

to be murdered, where there was not even room to raise a weapon in

their own defence. Next we drove to _San Paolo fuori le mure_, of the

burning of which Thorwaldsen's Museum possesses a painting by Leopold

Robert, but which at that time had been entirely re-built in the

antique style. It was the most beautiful basilica I had ever seen. We

enjoyed the sight of the courtyard of the monastery nearly 1,700 years

old, with its fine pillars, all different, and so well preserved that

we compared, in thought, the impressions produced by the two mighty

churches, San Paolo and San Pietro. Then we dined together and plunged

into interminable discussions until darkness fell. From that day forth

we were inseparable. Our companionship lasted several months, until I

was obliged to journey North. But the same cordial relations continued

to subsist between us for more than a quarter of a century, when Death

robbed me of my friend.

Georges Noufflard was the son of a rich cloth manufacturer at Roubaix,

and at an early age had come into possession of a considerable fortune.

This, however, was somewhat diminished through the dishonesty of those

who, after the death of his father, conducted the works in his name. He

had wanted to become a painter, but the weakness of his eyes had

obliged him to give up Art; now he was an Art lover, and was anxious to

write a book on the memorials and works of art in Rome, too great an

undertaking, and for that reason never completed; but at the same time,

he pursued with passion the study of music, played Beethoven, Gluck and

Berlioz, for me daily, and later on published books on Berlioz and

Richard Wagner.

As a youth he had been an enthusiast such as, in the Germanic

countries, they fancy is impossible elsewhere, to such an extent indeed

as would be regarded even there as extraordinary. At seventeen years of

age he fell in love with a young girl who lived in the same building as

himself. He was only on terms of sign language with her, had not even

secured so much as a conversation with her. None the less, his

infatuation was so great that he declared to his father that he wished

to marry her. The father would not give his consent, and her family

would not receive him unless he was presented by his father. The latter

sent him to America with the words: "Forget your love and learn what a

fine thing industrialism is." He travelled all over the United States,

found all machinery loathsome, since he had not the most elementary

knowledge of the principles of mechanics, and no inclination for them,

and thought all the time of the little girl from whom they wished to

separate him. It did not help matters that the travelling companion

that had been given him lived and breathed in an atmosphere of the

lowest debauchery, and did his best to initiate the young man into the

same habits. On his return home he declared to his father that he

persisted in his choice. "Good," said his father, "Asia Minor is a

delightful country, and so is Northern Africa; it will also do you good

to become acquainted with Italy." So he set off on his travels again,

and this time was charmed with everything he saw. Then his father died,

and he became pretty much his own master and free to do as he liked.

Then he learned that the father of the girl had been guilty of a bank

fraud. His family would not receive hers, if, indeed, herself. So he

gave up his intention; he did not wish to expose her to humiliation and

did not wish himself to have a man of ill-fame for his father-in-law;

he set off again on his travels, and remained a long time away. "The

proof that I acted wisely by so doing," he said in conclusion, "is that

I have completely forgotten the girl; my infatuation was all fancy."

When he commenced by telling me that for three years he had loved, and

despite all opposition, wished to marry a girl to whom he had never

spoken, I exclaimed: "Why, you are no Frenchman!" When he concluded by

telling me that after remaining constant for three years he had

abandoned her for a fault that not she, but her father, had committed,

I exclaimed: "How French you are, after all!"

While mutual political, social, and philosophical interests drew me to

Giuseppe Saredo, all the artistic side of my nature bound me to Georges

Noufflard. Saredo was an Italian from a half-French part,--he was born

at Savona, near Chambéry,--and his culture was as much French as

Italian; Noufflard was a Frenchman possessed by such a love for Italy

that he spoke the purest Florentine, felt himself altogether a

Southerner, and had made up his mind to take up his permanent abode in

Italy. He married, too, a few years afterwards, a lovely Florentine

woman, and settled down in Florence.

What entirely won my heart about him was the femininely delicate

consideration and unselfish devotion of his nature, the charm there was

about his manner and conversation, which revealed itself in everything

he did, from the way in which he placed his hat upon his head, to the

way in which he admired a work of art. But I could not have associated

with him day after day, had I not been able to learn something from

him. When we met again ten years later, it turned out that we had

nothing especially new to tell each other. I had met him just at the

right moment.

It was not only that Noufflard was very well and widely informed about

the artistic treasures of Italy and the places where they were to be

found, but his opinions enriched my mind, inasmuch as they spurred me

on to contradiction or surprised me and won my adherence. Fresh as

Julius Lange's artistic sense had been, there was nevertheless

something doctrinaire and academic about it. An artist like Bernini was

horrible, and nothing else to him; he had no sympathy for the sweet,

half-sensual ecstasy of some of Bernini's best figures. He was an enemy

of eighteenth-century art in France, saw it through the moral

spectacles which in the Germanic countries had come into use with the

year 1800. It was easy for Noufflard to remain unbiased by Northern

doctrines, for he did not know them; he had the free eye of the beauty

lover for every revelation of beauty, no matter under what form, and

had the intellectual kinship of the Italianised Frenchman for many an

artist unappreciated in the North. On the other hand, he naturally

considered that we Northmen very much over-estimated our own. It was

impossible to rouse any interest in him for Thorwaldsen, whom he

considered absolutely academic. "You cannot call him a master in any

sense," he exclaimed one day, when we had been looking at Thorwaldsen

bas-reliefs side by side with antiques. I learnt from my intimacy with

Noufflard how little impression Thorwaldsen's spirit makes on the

Romance peoples. That indifference to him would soon become so

widespread in Germany, I did not yet foresee.

Noufflard had a very alert appreciation of the early Renaissance,

especially in sculpture; he was passionately in love with the natural

beauties of Italy, from North to South, and he had a kind of

national-psychological gift of singling out peculiarly French, Italian

or German traits. He did not know the German language, but he was at

home in German music, and had studied a great deal of German literature

in translation; just then he was reading Hegel's "Aesthetics," the

abstractions in which veritably alarmed him, and to which he very much

preferred modern French Art Philosophy. In English Science, he had

studied Darwin, and he was the first to give me a real insight into the

Darwinian theory and a general summary of it, for in my younger days I

had only heard it attacked, as erroneous, in lectures by Rasmus Nielsen

on teleology.

Georges Noufflard was the first Frenchman of my own age with whom I had

been intimate and whose character I partly understood and entered into,

partly absorbed into my own. If many of the various opinions evident in

my first lectures were strikingly emancipated from Danish national

prejudices which no one hitherto had attempted to disturb, I owed this

in a great measure to him. Our happy, harmonious intimacy in the Sabine

Hills and in Naples was responsible, before a year was past, for whole

deluges of abuse in Danish newspapers.