ssed a _ciociara_ in his studio, delighting in
drawing the forms of her body. He laughed, like the big giant that he
was, he spoke to her with the same freedom as if she were one of the
poor women that came out to stop him at night as he returned alone to
the Academy of Spain, but when the work was over and she was
dressed--out with her! He had the chastity of strong men. He worshiped
the flesh, but only to copy its lines. The animal contact, the chance
meeting, without love, without attraction, with the inner reserve of two
people who do not know each other and who look on each other with
suspicion, filled him with shame. What he wanted to do was to study, and
women only served as a hindrance in great undertakings. He consumed the
surplus of his energy in athletic exercise. After one of his feats of
strength, which filled his comrades with enthusiasm, he would come in
fresh, serene, indifferent, as though he were coming out of a bath. He
fenced with the French painters of the Villa Medici; learned to box with
Englishmen and Americans; organized, with some German artists,
excursions to a grove near Rome, which were talked about for days in the
cafes of the Corso. He drank countless healths with his companions to
the Kaiser whom he did not know and for whom he did not care a rap. He
would thunder in his noisy voice the traditional _Gaudeamus Igitur_ and
finally would catch two models of the party around the waist and with
his arms stretched out like a cross carry them through the woods till he
dropped them on the grass as if they were feathers. Afterwards he would
smile with satisfaction at the admiration of those good Germans, many of
them sickly and near-sighted, who compared him with Siegfried and the
other muscular heroes of their warlike mythology.

In the Carnival season, when the Spaniards organized a cavalcade of the
Quixote, he undertook to represent the knight Pentapolin--"him of the
rolled-up sleeves,"--and in the Corso there were applause and cries of
admiration for the huge biceps that the knight-errant, erect on his
horse, revealed. When the spring nights came, the artists marched in a
procession across the city to the Jewish quarter to buy the first
artichokes--the popular dish in Rome, in the preparation of which an old
Hebrew woman was famous. Renovales went at the head of the
_carciofalatta_, bearing the banner, starting the songs which were
alternated with the cries of all sorts of animals; and his comr