VIII.
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."