Artists Wives | Page 9

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,