ound sorrow did the king's
sculptor witness the departure for Italy of a young man whose profound
ignorance of the things of life he had, as a matter of principle,
refrained from enlightening. Sarrasine was Bouchardon's guest for six
years. Fanatically devoted to his art, as Canova was at a later day, he
rose at dawn and went to the studio, there to remain until night, and
lived with his muse alone. If he went to the Comedie-Francaise, he was
dragged thither by his master. He was so bored at Madame Geoffrin's, and
in the fashionable society to which Bouchardon tried to introduce him,
that he preferred to remain alone, and held aloof from the pleasures
of that licentious age. He had no other mistresses than sculpture and
Clotilde, one of the celebrities of the Opera. Even that intrigue was of
brief duration. Sarrasine was decidedly ugly, always badly dressed, and
naturally so independent, so irregular in his private life, that the
illustrious nymph, dreading some catastrophe, soon remitted the sculptor
to love of the arts. Sophie Arnould made some witty remark on the
subject. She was surprised, I think, that her colleague was able to
triumph over statues.

"Sarrasine started for Italy in 1758. On the journey his ardent
imagination took fire beneath a sky of copper and at the sight of the
marvelous monuments with which the fatherland of the arts is strewn.
He admired the statues, the frescoes, the pictures; and, fired with a
spirit of emulation, he went on to Rome, burning to inscribe his name
between the names of Michelangelo and Bouchardon. At first, therefore,
he divided his time between his studio work and examination of the works
of art which abound in Rome. He had already passed a fortnight in the
ecstatic state into which all youthful imaginations fall at the sight of
the queen of ruins, when he happened one evening to enter the Argentina
theatre, in front of which there was an enormous crowd. He inquired the
reasons for the presence of so great a throng, and every one answered by
two names:

"'Zambinella! Jomelli!'

"He entered and took a seat in the pit, crowded between two
unconscionably stout _abbati_; but luckily he was quite near the stage.
The curtain rose. For the first time in his life he heard the music
whose charms Monsieur Jean-Jacques Rousseau had extolled so eloquently
at one of Baron d'Holbach's evening parties. The young sculptor's senses
were lubricated, so to speak, by Jomelli's harmonious stra