Page:The Vicomte de Bragelonne 2.djvu/42

 fancy to grace his hostelry with a pompous title. But his quality of an Italian was no recommendation in these times, and his small, well-concealed fortune forbid attracting too much attention.

When he found himself about to die, which happened in 1643, just after the death of Louis XIII., he called to him his son, a young cook of great promise, and with tears in his eyes he recommended him to preserve carefully the secret of the maccaroni, to Frenchify his name, and at length, when the political horizon should be cleared from the clouds which obscured it—this was practiced then as in our day—to order of the nearest smith a handsome sign, upon which a famous painter, whom he named, should design two queens' portraits, with these words as a legend: "To the Medici."

The worthy Cropoli, after these recommendations, had only sufficient time to point out to his young successor a chimney, under the slab of which he had hidden a thousand ten-franc louis, and then expired.

Cropoli, the younger, like a man of good heart, supported the loss with resignation, and the gain without insolence. He began by accustoming the public to sound the final i of his name so little, that, by the aid of general complaisance, he was soon called nothing but M. Cropole, which is quite a French name. He then married, having had in his eyes a little French girl, from whose parents he extorted a reasonable dowry by snowing them what there was beneath the slab of the chimney.

These two points accomplished, he went in search of the painter who was to paint the sign, and he was soon found. He was an old Italian, a rival of the Raphaels and the Caracchi, but an unfortunate rival. He said he was of the Venetian school, doubtless from his fondness for color. His works, of which he had never sold one, attracted the eye at a distance of a hundred paces; but they so formidably displeased the citizens that he had finished by painting no more.

He boasted of having painted a bath-room for Mme. la Marechale d'Ancre, and moaned over this chamber having been burned at the time of the marechal's disaster.

Cropoli, in his character of a compatriot, was indulgent toward Pittrino, which was the name of the artist. Perhaps he had seen the famous pictures of the bath-room. Be this as it may, he held in such esteem, we may say in such friendship, the famous Pittrino, that he took him into his own house