The play was just over, and while the crowd, with its many varied
impressions, hurried away and poured out under the glare of the
principal portico of the theatre, a few friends, of whom I was one,
awaited the poet at the artists' entrance in order to congratulate him.
His production had not, indeed, been very successful. Too powerful to
suit the timid and trivial imagination of the public of our day, it
was quite beyond the range of the stage, limited as that is by
conventionalities and tolerated traditions. Pedantic criticism declared:
"It is not fit for the stage!" and the scoffers of the boulevards
revenged themselves for the emotion these magnificent verses had given
them by repeating: "It won't pay!" As for us, we were proud of the
friend who had dared to roll forth in a ringing peal, his splendid
golden rhymes, flashing the best product of his genius beneath the
artificial and murderous light of the lustres, and presenting his
personages in life-like size, heedless of the optical illusion of the
modern stage, of the dimness of opera-glass and defective vision.
Amid a motley crowd of scene shifters, firemen, and _figurants_ muffled
up in comforters, the poet approached us, his tall figure bent double,
his coat collar chillily turned up over his thin beard and long grizzled
hair. He seemed depressed. The scant applause of the hired claque and
literary friends confined to a corner of the house foretold a limited
number of representations, choice and rare spectators, and posters
rapidly replaced without giving his name a chance of being known. When
one has worked twenty of talent and life, this obstinate refusal of
the public to comprehend is wearying and disheartening, and one ends by
thinking: "Perhaps after all they are right." Fear paralyses and words
fail. Our acclamations and enthusiastic greetings somewhat cheered him.
"Really do you think so? Is it well done? 'Tis true I have given all I
knew." And his feverish hands anxiously clutched ours, his eyes full
of tears sought a sincere and reassuring glance. It was the imploring
anguish of the sick person, asking the doctor: "It is not true, I'm
not going to die?" No! poet, you will not die. The operettas and fairy
pieces that have had hundreds of representations and thousands of
spectators will be long since forgotten, scattered to the winds with
their last playbills, while your work will ever remain fresh and living.
As we stood on the now deserted pavement, exhorting and cheering him, a
loud contralto voice vulgarised by an Italian accent burst upon us.
"Hullo, artist! enough _pouégie_. Let's go and eat the _estoufato!_"
[Illustration: p058-069]
At the same moment a stout woman wrapped up in a hooded cape and a red
tartan shawl linked her arm in that of our friend, in a manner so
brutal and despotic that his countenance and attitude became at once
embarrassed.
"My wife," he said, then turning towards her with a hesitating smile:
"Suppose we take them home and show them how you make an _estoufato?_"
Flattered in the conceit of her culinary accomplishments, the Italian
graciously consented to receive us, and five or six of us started off
for the heights of Montmartre where they dwelt, to share their stewed
beef.
I confess I took a certain interest in the artist's home life. Since his
marriage our friend had led a very secluded existence, almost always in
the country; but what I knew of his life whetted my curiosity. Fifteen
years before, when in all the freshness of a romantic imagination,
he had met in the suburbs of Rome a magnificent creature with whom he
immediately fell desperately in love. Maria Assunta, her father, and a
brood of brothers and sisters inhabited one of those little houses of
the Transtevera with walls uprising from the waters of the Tiber, and an
old fishing boat rocking level with the door. One day he caught sight of
the handsome Italian girl, with bare feet in the sand, red skirt tightly
pleated around her, and unbleached linen sleeves tucked up to the
shoulders, catching eels out of a large gleaming wet net. The silvery
scales glistening through the meshes full of water, the golden river
and scarlet petticoat, the beautiful black eyes deep and pensive, which
seemed darkened in their musing by the surrounding sunlight struck the
artist, perhaps even rather trivially, like some coloured print on the
titlepage of a song in a music-seller's window.
[Illustration: p060-071]
It so chanced that the girl was heart-whole, having till now bestowed
her affections on a big tom-cat, yellow and sly, also a great fisher of
eels, who bristled up all over when anyone approached his mistress.
[Illustration: p061-072]
Beasts and men, our lover managed to tame all these folk, was married at
Santa-Maria of the Transtevera and brought back to France the beautiful
Assunta and her _cato_.
Ah! poor fellow, he ought also to have brought away at the same time
some of the sunlight of that country, a scrap of the blue sky, the
eccentric costume and the bulrushes of the Tiber, and the large swing
nets of the _Ponte Rotto_; in fact the frame with the picture. Then he
would have been spared the cruel disenchantment he experienced when,
having settled in a modest flat on the fourth storey, on the heights of
Montmartre, he saw his handsome Transteverina decked out in a crinoline,
a flounced dress, and a Parisian bonnet, which, constantly out of
balance on the top of her heavy braids, assumed the most independent
attitudes. Under the clear cold light of Parisian skies, the unfortunate
man soon perceived that his wife was a fool, an irretrievable fool. Not
a single idea even lurked in the velvety depths of those beautiful black
eyes, lost in infinite contemplation. They glittered like an animal's
in the calm of digestion, or in a chance gleam of light, nothing more.
Withal the lady was common, vulgar, accustomed to govern by a slap all
the little world of her native hut, and the least opposition threw her
into uncontrollable rages.
Who would have guessed that the fine mouth, straitened by silence into
the purest shape of an antique face, would suddenly open to let flow
torrents of vulgar abuse? Without respect for herself or for him, out
loud, in the street, at the theatre, she would pick a quarrel with him,
and indulge in scenes of fearful jealousy. To crown all, devoid of
any artistic feeling, she was completely ignorant of her husband's
profession and language, of manners, in fact of everything. The little
French she could be taught, only made her forget Italian, and the result
was that she composed a kind of half and half jargon which had the most
comical effect. In short this love story, begun like one of Lamartine's
poems, was ending like a novel of Champfleury's. After having for a long
time struggled to civilise this wild woman, the poet saw he must abandon
the task. Too honourable to leave her, probably still too much in love,
he made up his mind to shut himself up, see no one, and work hard. The
few intimate friends he admitted to his house, saw that they embarrassed
him and ceased to come.
[Illustration: p064-075]
Hence it was that for the last fifteen years he had been living boxed up
in his household like in a leper's cell.
As I pondered over this wretched existence, I watched the strange couple
walking before me. He, slender, tall and round-shouldered.
[Illustration: p065-076]
She, squarely built, heavy, shaking her shawl by an impatient shrug
of her shoulders, with a free gait like a man's. She was tolerably
cheerful, her speech was loud, and from time to time she turned round to
see if we followed, familiarly shouting and calling by name those of us
she happened to know, accentuating her words by much gesticulation as
she would have hailed a fishing boat on the Tiber. When we reached their
house, the _concierge_, furious at seeing so noisy a crew at such an
unearthly hour, tried to prevent our entry. The Italian and he had a
fearful row on the staircase. We were all dotted about on the winding
stairs dimly lighted by the dying gas, ill at ease, uncomfortable,
hardly knowing if we ought not to come down again.
"Come, quick, let us go up," said the poet in a low tone, and we
followed him silently, while, leaning over the banisters that shook
under her weight and anger, the Italian let fly a volley of abuse in
which Roman imprecations alternated with the vocabulary of the
back slums. What a return home for the poet who had just roused the
admiration of artistic Paris, and still retained in his fevered eyes
the dazzling intoxication of his first performance! What a humiliating
recall to every-day life!
It was only by the fireside in his little sitting room that the icy
chill caused by this silly adventure was dispelled, and we should soon
have completely forgotten it, had it not been for the piercing voice and
bursts of laughter of the signora whom we heard in the kitchen telling
her maid how soundly she had rated that _choulato!_ When the table was
laid and supper ready, she came and seated herself amongst us, having
taken off her shawl, bonnet and veil, and I was able to examine her at
my leisure. She was no longer handsome. The square face, the broad heavy
jaw, the coarse hair turning grey, and above all the vulgar expression
of the mouth, contrasted singularly with the eternal and meaningless
reverie of the dreamy gaze. Resting her elbows on the table, familiar
and shapeless, she joined in the conversation without for an instant
losing sight of her plate. Just over her head, proud amid all the
melancholy rubbish of the drawing-room, a large portrait signed by an
illustrious name, stood out of the surrounding shade,--it was Maria
Assunta at twenty. The purple costume, the milky white of the pleated
wimple, the bright gold of the over-abundant imitation jewelry, set off
magnificently the brilliancy of a sunny complexion, the velvety shades
of the thick hair growing low on the forehead, which seemed to be united
by an almost imperceptible down to the superb and straight line of
the eyebrows. How could such an exuberance of life and beauty have
deteriorated and become such a mass of vulgarity? And curiously while
the Transteverina talked, I interrogated her lovely eyes, so deep and
soft on the canvas.
[Illustration: p068-079]
The excitement of the meal had put her in a good humour. To cheer up
the poet, to whom his mingled failure and glory were doubly painful,
she thumped him on the back, laughed with her mouth full, saying in her
hideous jargon, that it was not worth while for such a trifle to fling
oneself head downwards from the _campanile del Duomo_.
[Illustration: p069-080]
"Isn't it true, _il cato?_" she added turning to the old tom-cat
crippled by rheumatism, snoring in front of the fire. Then suddenly, in
the middle of an interesting discussion, she screamed out to her husband
in a voice senseless and brutal as the crack of a rifle:
"Hey! artist! _la lampo qui filo!_"
The poor fellow immediately interrupted his conversation to wind up the
lamp, humble, submissive, anxious to avoid the scene he dreaded, and
which in spite of all, he did not escape.
On returning from the theatre we had stopped at the _Maison d'Or_ to get
a bottle of choice wine to wash down the _estoufato_. All along the road
Maria Assunta had piously carried it under her shawl, and on her arrival
she had placed it on the table where she could cast tender looks upon
it, for Roman women are fond of good wine. Already twice or three times
mistrustful of her husband's absence of mind, and the length of his
arms, she had said:
"Mind the _boteglia_--you're going to break it."
At last, as she went off to the kitchen to take up with her own hands
the famous _estoufato_, she again called out to him:
"Whatever you do, don't break the _boteglia_."
Unluckily, the moment his wife had disappeared, the poet seized the
opportunity to talk about art, theatres, success, so freely and with so
much gusto and vivacity, that--crash! By a gesture more eloquent than
the others, the wonderful bottle was thrown down and fell to the ground
in a thousand pieces. Never have I beheld such terror. He stopped short,
and became deadly pale. At the same moment, Assunta's contralto was
heard in the next room, and the Italian appeared on the threshold with
flashing eyes, lips swollen with rage, red with the heat of the kitchen
range.
"The _boteglia!_" she roared in a terrible voice.
Then timidly bending down to me, he whispered:
"Say it's you."
And the poor devil was so frightened, that I felt his long legs tremble
under the table.
[Illustration: p075-086]