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