Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/243

 obstacles are to surmount, the more interest I shall take in them."

At these words, he took up his brush again, and Scacciati, seated near his easel, thus commenced:

"In Ripetta street rises a house, whose balcony is remarked as soon as you enter the city by the Popolo gate. There resides the strangest and most whimsical personage in Rome; an old bachelor, hunted down by ail the miseries of life, vain as a peacock, miserly as a Jew, giving himself the airs of a young man, as dandified as a duke, and what is worse, in love; physically a vine stalk in Spanish doublet, with a faded wig, a plumed hat, gauntlet gloves, and a rapier"

"Halt there!" exclaimed Salvator; and turning over the canvas on which he was working, he took a piece of chalk and sketched in two or three lines the profile of the personage that he had seen before Antonio's picture.

"By all the saints," exclaimed Antonio, without being able, in spite of his sorrow, to refrain from laughing, "that is truly the man, Signor Pasquale Capuzzi!"

"Well, then," continued Salvator, "since I already know your rival, go on."

"Signor Pasquale Capuzzi," said Antonio, "is as rich as he is miserly and pretentious. There is nothing good in him except his passion for the arts, above all, music and painting; but he spoils this taste by so deplorable a mania, that even on this side his heart and his purse are inaccessible. Add to this, that he believes himself the best composer in the world, and singer, the like of whom the pope's chapel does not possess. He also calls our old Frescobaldi a novice; and when Rome is in ecstacies at Ceccarelli's concerts, Pasquale says that he sings like a postillion's boot; but as the celebrated Ceccarelli, first singer to the pope, bears the name of Odoardo Ceccarelli de Merania, our Capuzzi, to show his contempt, calls himself, pompously, Signor Pasquale Capuzzi de Senigaglia; that is the name of the village where, it is said, his mother brought him into the world before his time, being seized with a sudden fright, at the sight of a monstrous fish.