In which Something will be said of Cropoli—of Cropoli and of a Great
Unknown Painter.
Whilst the Comte de la Fere with Raoul visits the new buildings he has
had erected, and the new horses he has bought, with the reader’s
permission we will lead him back to the city of Blois, and make him a
witness of the unaccustomed activity which pervades that city.
It was in the hotels that the surprise of the news brought by Raoul was
most sensibly felt.
In fact, the king and the court at Blois, that is to say, a hundred
horsemen, ten carriages, two hundred horses, as many lackeys as
masters—where was this crowd to be housed? Where were to be lodged all
the gentry of the neighborhood, who would gather in two or three hours
after the news had enlarged the circle of its report, like the
increasing circumference produced by a stone thrown into a placid lake?
Blois, as peaceful in the morning, as we have seen, as the calmest lake
in the world, at the announcement of the royal arrival, was suddenly
filled with the tumult and buzzing of a swarm of bees.
All the servants of the castle, under the inspection of the officers,
were sent into the city in quest of provisions, and ten horsemen were
dispatched to the preserves of Chambord to seek for game, to the
fisheries of Beuvion for fish, and to the gardens of Chaverny for
fruits and flowers.
Precious tapestries, and lusters with great gilt chains, were drawn
from the cupboards; an army of the poor were engaged in sweeping the
courts and washing the stone fronts, whilst their wives went in droves
to the meadows beyond the Loire, to gather green boughs and
field-flowers. The whole city, not to be behind in this luxury of
cleanliness, assumed its best toilette with the help of brushes,
brooms, and water.
The kennels of the upper town, swollen by these continued lotions,
became rivers at the bottom of the city, and the pavement, generally
very muddy, it must be allowed, took a clean face, and absolutely shone
in the friendly rays of the sun.
Next the music was to be provided; drawers were emptied; the
shop-keepers did a glorious trade in wax, ribbons, and sword-knots;
housekeepers laid in stores of bread, meat, and spices. Already numbers
of the citizens whose houses were furnished as if for a siege, having
nothing more to do, donned their festive clothes and directed their
course towards the city gate, in order to be the first to signal or see
the cortege. They knew very well that the king would not arrive before
night, perhaps not before the next morning. Yet what is expectation but
a kind of folly, and what is that folly but an excess of hope?
In the lower city, at scarcely a hundred paces from the Castle of the
States, between the mall and the castle, in a sufficiently handsome
street, then called Rue Vieille, and which must, in fact, have been
very old, stood a venerable edifice, with pointed gables, of squat but
large dimensions, ornamented with three windows looking into the street
on the first floor, with two in the second and with a little oeil de
boeuf in the third.
On the sides of this triangle had recently been constructed a
parallelogram of considerable size, which encroached upon the street
remorselessly, according to the familiar uses of the building of that
period. The street was narrowed by a quarter by it, but then the house
was enlarged by a half; and was not that a sufficient compensation?
Tradition said that this house with the pointed gables was inhabited,
in the time of Henry III., by a councilor of state whom Queen Catherine
came, some say to visit, and others to strangle. However that may be,
the good lady must have stepped with a circumspect foot over the
threshold of this building.
After the councilor had died—whether by strangulation or naturally is
of no consequence—the house had been sold, then abandoned, and lastly
isolated from the other houses of the street. Towards the middle of the
reign of Louis XIII. only, an Italian, named Cropoli, escaped from the
kitchens of the Marquis d’Ancre, came and took possession of this
house. There he established a little hostelry, in which was fabricated
a macaroni so delicious that people came from miles round to fetch it
or eat it.
So famous had the house become for it, that when Mary de Medici was a
prisoner, as we know, in the castle of Blois, she once sent for some.
It was precisely on the day she had escaped by the famous window. The
dish of macaroni was left upon the table, only just tasted by the royal
mouth.
This double favor, of a strangulation and a macaroni, conferred upon
the triangular house, gave poor Cropoli a fancy to grace his hostelry
with a pompous title. But his quality of an Italian was no
recommendation in these times, and his small, well-concealed fortune
forbade attracting too much attention.
When he found himself about to die, which happened in 1643, just after
the death of Louis XIII., he called to him his son, a young cook of
great promise, and with tears in his eyes, he recommended him to
preserve carefully the secret of the macaroni, to Frenchify his name,
and at length, when the political horizon should be cleared from the
clouds which obscured it—this was practiced then as in our day, to
order of the nearest smith a handsome sign, upon which a famous
painter, whom he named, should design two queens’ portraits, with these
words as a legend: “To The Medici.”
The worthy Cropoli, after these recommendations, had only sufficient
time to point out to his young successor a chimney, under the slab of
which he had hidden a thousand ten-franc pieces, and then expired.
Cropoli the younger, like a man of good heart, supported the loss with
resignation, and the gain without insolence. He began by accustoming
the public to sound the final i of his name so little, that by the aid
of general complaisance, he was soon called nothing but M. Cropole,
which is quite a French name. He then married, having had in his eye a
little French girl, from whose parents he extorted a reasonable dowry
by showing them what there was beneath the slab of the chimney.
These two points accomplished, he went in search of the painter who was
to paint the sign; and he was soon found. He was an old Italian, a
rival of the Raphaels and the Caracci, but an unfortunate rival. He
said he was of the Venetian school, doubtless from his fondness for
color. His works, of which he had never sold one, attracted the eye at
a distance of a hundred paces; but they so formidably displeased the
citizens, that he had finished by painting no more.
He boasted of having painted a bath-room for Madame la Marechale
d’Ancre, and mourned over this chamber having been burnt at the time of
the marechal’s disaster.
Cropoli, in his character of a compatriot, was indulgent towards
Pittrino, which was the name of the artist. Perhaps he had seen the
famous pictures of the bath-room. Be this as it may, he held in such
esteem, we may say in such friendship, the famous Pittrino, that he
took him in his own house.
Pittrino, grateful, and fed with macaroni, set about propagating the
reputation of this national dish, and from the time of its founder, he
had rendered, with his indefatigable tongue, signal services to the
house of Cropoli.
As he grew old he attached himself to the son as he had done to the
father, and by degrees became a kind of overlooker of a house in which
his remarkable integrity, his acknowledged sobriety, and a thousand
other virtues useless to enumerate, gave him an eternal place by the
fireside, with a right of inspection over the domestics. Besides this,
it was he who tasted the macaroni, to maintain the pure flavor of the
ancient tradition; and it must be allowed that he never permitted a
grain of pepper too much, or an atom of parmesan too little. His joy
was at its height on that day when called upon to share the secret of
Cropoli the younger, and to paint the famous sign.
He was seen at once rummaging with ardor in an old box, in which he
found some brushes, a little gnawed by the rats, but still passable;
some colors in bladders almost dried up; some linseed-oil in a bottle,
and a palette which had formerly belonged to Bronzino, that dieu de la
pittoure, as the ultramontane artist, in his ever young enthusiasm,
always called him.
Pittrino was puffed up with all the joy of a rehabilitation.
He did as Raphael had done—he changed his style, and painted, in the
fashion of the Albanian, two goddesses rather than two queens. These
illustrious ladies appeared so lovely on the sign,—they presented to
the astonished eyes such an assemblage of lilies and roses, the
enchanting result of the change of style in Pittrino—they assumed the
poses of sirens so Anacreontically—that the principal echevin, when
admitted to view this capital piece in the salle of Cropole, at once
declared that these ladies were too handsome, of too animated a beauty,
to figure as a sign in the eyes of passers-by.
To Pittrino he added, “His royal highness, Monsieur, who often comes
into our city, will not be much pleased to see his illustrious mother
so slightly clothed, and he will send you to the oubliettes of the
state; for, remember, the heart of that glorious prince is not always
tender. You must efface either the two sirens or the legend, without
which I forbid the exhibition of the sign. I say this for your sake,
Master Cropole, as well as for yours, Signor Pittrino.”
What answer could be made to this? It was necessary to thank the
echevin for his kindness, which Cropole did. But Pittrino remained
downcast and said he felt assured of what was about to happen.
The visitor was scarcely gone when Cropole, crossing his arms, said:
“Well, master, what is to be done?”
“We must efface the legend,” said Pittrino, in a melancholy tone. “I
have some excellent ivory-black; it will be done in a moment, and we
will replace the Medici by the nymphs or the sirens, whichever you
prefer.”
“No,” said Cropole, “the will of my father must be carried out. My
father considered——”
“He considered the figures of the most importance,” said Pittrino.
“He thought most of the legend,” said Cropole.
“The proof of the importance in which he held the figures,” said
Pittrino, “is that he desired they should be likenesses, and they are
so.”
“Yes; but if they had not been so, who would have recognized them
without the legend? At the present day even, when the memory of the
Blaisois begins to be faint with regard to these two celebrated
persons, who would recognize Catherine and Mary without the words ‘To
the Medici’?”
“But the figures?” said Pittrino, in despair; for he felt that young
Cropole was right. “I should not like to lose the fruit of my labor.”
“And I should not wish you to be thrown into prison and myself into the
oubliettes.”
“Let us efface ‘Medici,’” said Pittrino, supplicatingly.
“No,” replied Cropole, firmly. “I have got an idea, a sublime idea—your
picture shall appear, and my legend likewise. Does not ‘Medici’ mean
doctor, or physician, in Italian?”
“Yes, in the plural.”
“Well, then, you shall order another sign-frame of the smith; you shall
paint six physicians, and write underneath ‘Aux Medici’ which makes a
very pretty play upon words.”
“Six physicians! impossible! And the composition?” cried Pittrino.
“That is your business—but so it shall be—I insist upon it—it must be
so—my macaroni is burning.”
This reasoning was peremptory—Pittrino obeyed. He composed the sign of
six physicians, with the legend; the echevin applauded and authorized
it.
The sign produced an extravagant success in the city, which proves that
poetry has always been in the wrong, before citizens, as Pittrino said.
Cropole, to make amends to his painter-in-ordinary, hung up the nymphs
of the preceding sign in his bedroom, which made Madame Cropole blush
every time she looked at it, when she was undressing at night.
This is the way in which the pointed-gable house got a sign; and this
is how the hostelry of the Medici, making a fortune, was found to be
enlarged by a quarter, as we have described. And this is how there was
at Blois a hostelry of that name, and had for painter-in-ordinary
Master Pittrino.