Jettatura by Theophile Gautier

The hour for meals had long since passed, and the coal fires that during the day turned the kitchen of the Hotel de Rome into a crater of Vesuvius, were slowly dying out in glowing embers under the sheet- iron extinguishers. The stew-pans had ben hung on their respective nails and glittered like a row of bucklers on the rail of a trireme. A yellow brass lamp, like those found in the ruins of Pompeii, was suspended by a triple chain to the main beam in the ceiling, and with its three wicks dipping into the oil, lighted up the centre of the great kitchen, the corners of which remained in shadow.

The luminous beams falling from above illumined, with most picturesque play of light and shade, a group of characteristic figures collected around the thick wooden table, cut and slashed in every direction with knife marks, and that stood in the centre of the great hall whose walls the smoke of the cooking had turned to the dark brown so dear to the painters of Caravaggio's school. Unquestionable neither Spagnoletto nor Salvator Rosa, with their bold love of truth, would have disdained the models collected there by chance, or, to be more accurate, by nightly custom.