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Our companionship lasted several months, until I was obliged to journey North. But the same cordial relations continued to subsist between us for more than a quarter of a century, when Death robbed me of my friend. Georges Noufflard was the son of a rich cloth manufacturer at Roubaix, and at an early age had come into possession of a considerable fortune.
Georges Noufflard was the first Frenchman of my own age with whom I had been intimate and whose character I partly understood and entered into, partly absorbed into my own. If many of the various opinions evident in my first lectures were strikingly emancipated from Danish national prejudices which no one hitherto had attempted to disturb, I owed this in a great measure to him.
There, where it touches the nether rocks, rests the end of the enormous rainbow which, when the sun shines, is always suspended across it. Noufflard told me that Niagara itself impressed one less.
It was as though all Nature were disembodied, and flinging herself down. Like a Latin, Noufflard personified it all; he saw the dance of nymphs in the waves, and their veils in the clouds of spray. My way of regarding Nature was diametrically opposite, and pantheistic.
All that I was acquainted with in Rome, all that I saw every day with Georges Noufflard, I could show her and her party, from the most accessible things, which were nevertheless fresh to the newcomers, such as the Pantheon, Acqua Paola, San Pietro in Montorio, the grave of Cecilia Metella, and the grottoes of Egeria, to the great collections of Art in the Vatican, or the Capitol, or in the wonderful Galleria Borghese.
He was beloved by the beautiful wife of his captain, and Noufflard, who frequented their house, one day surprised the two lovers in tears. Cerrotti was crying with his lady-love because he had been faithless to her. He had confessed to her his intimacy with four other young ladies; so she was crying, and the end of it was that he cried to keep her company.
It was impossible to rouse any interest in him for Thorwaldsen, whom he considered absolutely academic. "You cannot call him a master in any sense," he exclaimed one day, when we had been looking at Thorwaldsen bas-reliefs side by side with antiques. I learnt from my intimacy with Noufflard how little impression Thorwaldsen's spirit makes on the Romance peoples.
It was not only that Noufflard was very well and widely informed about the artistic treasures of Italy and the places where they were to be found, but his opinions enriched my mind, inasmuch as they spurred me on to contradiction or surprised me and won my adherence. Fresh as Julius Lange's artistic sense had been, there was nevertheless something doctrinaire and academic about it.
He attracted me from the first by his refined, reserved, and yet cordial manner. Although only thirty-five years of age, Georges Noufflard had travelled and seen surprisingly much. He was now in Italy for the second time, knew France and Germany, had travelled through Mexico and the United States, had visited Syria, Egypt, Tunis, and Algiers to the last oasis.
All this, that I was accustomed to see alone with Noufflard, acquired new splendour when a blonde girl walked by my side, asking sensible questions, and showing me the gratitude of youth for good instruction. With her nineteen years I suppose she thought me marvellously clever. But the works of Art that lay a little outside the beaten track, I likewise showed to my compatriots.
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