Noufflard's best friend in Rome was a young lieutenant of the
Bersaglieri named Ottavio Cerrotti, with whom we were much together.
Although a Roman, he had entered the Italian army very young, and had
consequently been, as it were, banished. Now, through the breach at
Porta Pia, he had come back. He was twenty-four years of age, and the
naïvest Don Juan one could possibly meet. He was beloved by the
beautiful wife of his captain, and Noufflard, who frequented their
house, one day surprised the two lovers in tears. Cerrotti was crying
with his lady-love because he had been faithless to her. He had
confessed to her his intimacy with four other young ladies; so she was
crying, and the end of it was that he cried to keep her company.
At meals, he gave us a full account of his principal romance. He had
one day met her by chance in the gardens of the Palazzo Corsini, and
since that day, they had had secret meetings. But the captain had now
been transferred to Terni, and tragedy had begun. Letters were
constantly within an ace of being intercepted, they committed
imprudences without count. He read aloud to us, without the least
embarrassment, the letters of the lady. The curious thing about them
was the moderation she exercised in the expression of her love, while
at the same time her plans for meetings were of the most foolhardy,
breakneck description.
Another fresh acquaintance that I made in those days was with three
French painters, Hammon, Sain and Benner, who had studios adjoining one
another. Hammon and Sain both died long since, but Benner, whom I met
again in Paris in 1904, died, honoured and respected, in 1905. I was
later on at Capri in company with Sain and Benner, but Hammon I saw
only during this visit to Rome. His pretty, somewhat sentimental
painting, _Ma soeur n'y est pas_, hung, reproduced in engraving, in
every shop-window, even in Copenhagen. He was painting just then at his
clever picture, _Triste Rivage_.
Hammon was born in Brittany, of humble, orthodox parents, who sent him
to a monastery. The Prior, when he surprised him drawing men and women
out of his head, told him that painting was a sin. The young man
himself then strongly repented his inclination, but, as he felt he
could not live without following it, he left the monastery, though with
many strong twinges of conscience.
Now that he was older, he was ruining himself by drink, but had
manifested true talent and still retained a humorous wit. One day that
I was with him, a young man came to the studio and asked for his
opinion of a painting; the man talked the whole time of nothing but his
mother, of how much he loved her and all that he did for her. Hammon's
patience gave out at last. He broke out: "And do you think, sir, that
_I_ have murdered my mother? I love her very much, I assure you, _not
enough to marry her_, I grant, but pretty well, all the same." After
that he always spoke of him as "the young man who loves his mother."