ow 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 braid