The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  ‘You’ll find the soap in a saucer on the washstand,’ he called. ‘If you look in that drawer you’ll find a clean towel. … Have you enough water? Wait a minute, I’ll get you the jug.’

  Then, suddenly annoyed with himself when he realized he was being tactless again, he hastened to add:

  ‘There I go, making myself a nuisance again. … Don’t mind me, just make yourself at home!’

  With that he went back to his chores. But his mind was by no means at rest. Ought he to give her breakfast? he wondered. He could hardly send her away without, and yet, if he did, it would only drag things out and that would mean wasting the whole morning. Still undecided, he lit the spirit-stove, washed out the saucepan and started to make some chocolate. Chocolate, he thought, was more distinguished. Besides, he was secretly rather ashamed of his vermicelli, a pasta dish he prepared after the Provençal fashion, with bread and plenty of olive oil. But he had not even finished grating the chocolate into the saucepan when he exclaimed:

  ‘What! Already!’

  For there was Christine pushing aside the screen and standing all neat and tidy in her black, laced and buttoned and accoutred in the twinkling of an eye; her face fresh and rosy, her hair smooth and twisted into a heavy knot on the nape of her neck. Such a miracle of speed and housewifely efficiency filled Claude with amazement.

  ‘Well!’ he gasped. ‘If you do everything else at that rate!’

  She was taller and even lovelier than he had imagined, but what struck him more than anything else was her air of calm determination. She was not afraid of him now, that was very plain. She might have felt defenceless as long as she lay in that rumpled little bed, but once out of it, and fully clothed, she might have been wearing armour. She smiled, and as he looked her straight in the eyes he said what he had been hesitating to say for the last few minutes:

  ‘You will have breakfast before you go, won’t you?’

  But she declined.

  ‘Thank you, no … I must hurry to the station now. My trunk must surely be there by this time. … And then I shall make my way to Passy.’

  He reminded her several times that she must be hungry and that it was hardly wise to start the day without breakfast, but all was in vain.

  ‘Let me go down and find you a cab then.’

  ‘No, please don’t trouble.’

  ‘But you can’t possibly walk all the way. At least let me go with you as far as the cab-rank, as you don’t know your way about Paris.’

  ‘No, really, it’s quite unnecessary. … It would be kind to let me go by myself.’

  Her mind was made up. She could not bear the idea of being seen with a man, even by people who did not know her. She was going to say nothing about last night but would tell lies right and left and keep the memory of it all to herself. With an angry gesture Claude decided she could go to the devil and good riddance! It suited him not to have to go out and hunt for a cab. But he was hurt none the less; he thought her ungrateful.

  ‘As you wish,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to force you.’

  At this, Christine’s faint smile broadened, ever so slightly puckering the delicate corners of her mouth. She made no reply, but picked up her hat, glanced round for a mirror, but, as she did not see one, decided to tie the strings as well as she could without. As she stood with her elbows raised, twisting and pulling the ribbon calmly into a bow, her face was illuminated by the golden sunlight. Claude was surprised not to recognize the childlike softness of the features he had just been drawing, for now the upper part of the face, the candid brow, the gentle eyes, were less in evidence than the lower part, the strong jaw, the blood-red lips, and the fine white teeth. And still that enigmatic, girlish smile, which perhaps was mocking him.

  ‘Anyhow,’ he said irritably, ‘you can’t say I’ve done anything to offend you, can you?’

  She had to laugh, a light, nervous laugh, as she replied:

  ‘Oh, no, monsieur. I certainly can’t say that.’

  He could not take his eyes off her, though he was afraid he might have made himself look foolish, so powerless was he to combat his shyness and his ignorance. Just how much did she know, this tall young lady? No doubt what all girls at boarding-school know: everything and nothing. There is nothing so unfathomable as the first remote awakening of the heart and the senses. Perhaps in this artist’s studio this modest though sensual young girl, in mingled fear and curiosity, had begun to open her eyes to the existence of the male. Now that she had stopped trembling was she surprised, even annoyed with herself, at having trembled for nothing? Nothing! Not even the faintest sign of gallantry, not so much as a kiss on the finger-tips! She had not been unaware of the young man’s surly indifference, and the woman in her must have been vexed in consequence. She was probably going away a changed being, her nerves on edge, perhaps, but making light of her vexation, yet filled with unconscious regret for the terrible unknown things that might have, but had not, happened.

  ‘Did you say,’ she went on when she had recovered her gravity, ‘that the cab-rank was over the bridge, on the opposite bank?’

  ‘Yes. Just under all those trees.’

  She was ready now; having tied her ribbons and put on her gloves, there was nothing else for her to do, yet she made no attempt to go, but stood looking vaguely about her. When her glance fell on the big canvas turned face to the wall, she wanted to ask if she might look at it, but her courage failed her. There was nothing more to stay for, yet she seemed to be looking for something, as if she felt she was leaving something behind, though what it was she would have been unable to say. At last she made a move towards the door.

  Claude opened it and as he did so, a small roll of bread propped up against it fell into the room.

  ‘There, you see, you might have had some breakfast. The concierge brings up a roll for me every morning.’

  She shook her head in refusal, but on the landing she stopped for an instant, turned round and, with a cheerful smile, held out her hand and said:

  ‘Thank you, thank you very much.’

  He clasped her small, gloved hand in his large, colour-stained fingers and they stood for several seconds, close to each other, shaking hands like two good friends. She smiled, and he almost asked her: ‘When shall I see you again?’ But shyness prevented him. And so, when he said nothing, she released her hand.

  ‘Goodbye, monsieur.’

  ‘Goodbye, mademoiselle.’

  Without looking back, Christine was already making her way down the narrow, creaking stairs as Claude flung back into the studio, slammed the door and cried:

  ‘Blast these women!’

  He was raging. Furious with himself and furious with everybody else, he vented his anger by kicking the furniture about and shouting. He was right never to bring any women back home. He knew he was. All the bitches were good for was to make a monkey of a man! The one who’d just gone, now, how could he be sure she hadn’t been fooling him right and left, in spite of her innocent face? He’d certainly been silly enough to let himself be taken in by that incredible yarn she’d spun. But had he really? No, they’d never get him to swallow either the general’s widow or the train crash, still less that impossible cabby! Things never happened like that. How could they? Besides, you’d only got to look at that mouth of hers … and that queer look as she went out. If only he could have known just why she was lying! But no. Just pointless, inexplicable lies, art for art’s sake! He’d bet she was having a good laugh somewhere at his expense!

  He folded the screen with a clatter and thrust it into a corner. She’d have left everything upside-down, he knew she would! But when he saw she had left everything neat and tidy, bowl, towel, soap, all where they ought to be, he flew into a rage because she had not made the bed. Exaggerating his efforts, he began to make it himself. The mattress, which he seized in both arms, was still warm; fragrance rose from the pillow as he thumped it with both his fists, and from the sheets there came the same clean, warm, pervading odour of youth. He wa
shed in cold water to soothe his throbbing temples, but the old oppression returned when he found, in the damp face-towel, the same enveloping virginal scent that was now filling the entire studio with its sweetness. Muttering curses, he drank his chocolate out of the saucepan and gobbled great hunks of bread in his feverish haste to get back to his painting.

  ‘This place is unbearable!’ he cried. ‘This heat’s making me ill!’

  The sun had moved on; the studio was really cooler.

  Claude opened a small skylight and, with every sign of great relief, took a deep breath of the sultry breeze that floated in. He picked up his sketch of Christine’s head and sat for a long time looking at it, lost in contemplation.

  Chapter 2

  Twelve o’clock had struck and Claude was still working at his painting, when there was a loud and familiar knock on the door. Instinctively and despite himself he picked up the sketch of Christine’s head, which he had been using in retouching the large female figure in his painting, and slipped it into a portfolio. Then he was ready to open the door.

  ‘Pierre!’ he exclaimed. ‘Here already?’

  Pierre Sandoz, his childhood friend, was twenty-two, very dark, with a round head, a square nose and gentle eyes in an energetic face framed in a short, scrubby beard.

  ‘I lunched early on purpose,’ he answered. ‘I wanted to give you a good long sitting. … I say! It’s coming along nicely!’

  He stood and looked at the picture, then added, without a moment’s hesitation:

  ‘Oh look, you’re altering the type of the woman!’

  There was a long silence, during which they both stood contemplating the painting. It was a big canvas, five metres by three, all planned out, though parts of it were still hardly developed beyond the rough stage. As a sketch it was remarkable for its vigour, its spontaneity, and the lively warmth of its colour. It showed the sun pouring into a forest clearing, with a solid background of greenery and a dark path running off to the left and with a bright spot of light in the far distance. Lying on the grass in the foreground, among the lush vegetation of high summer, was the naked figure of a woman. One arm was folded beneath her head, thus bringing her breasts into prominence; her eyes were closed and she was smiling into space as she basked in the golden sunlight. In the background, two other nude women, one dark and one fair, were laughing and tumbling each other on the grass, making two lovely patches of flesh-colour against the green, while in the foreground, to make the necessary contrast, the artist had seen fit to place a man’s figure. He wore a plain black velvet jacket, and was seated on the grass so that nothing could be seen but his back and his left hand upon which he was leaning.

  ‘Coming on quite well, that woman,’ said Sandoz at last. ‘But heavens! It’s all going to take a lot of work, you know.’

  With a gesture full of confidence, his blazing eyes fixed on his work, Claude answered:

  ‘Pah! I’ve got from now till the Salon. You can get through a lot in six months, you know. Maybe I really shall finish it this time, just to show myself I’m not completely hopeless!’

  He started to whistle noisily, thrilled, though he did not say so, by the sketch he had made of Christine’s head; he was carried aloft, for the moment, on one of those great waves of hope from which he was usually plunged deep into the agonies familiar to all artists with a devouring passion for nature.

  ‘Come on then! No slacking!’ he cried. ‘As you’re here, we might as well get started.’

  Sandoz, out of friendship, and to save him the expense of a model, had offered to pose for the gentleman in the foreground. In four or five Sundays, his only free day, the figure would be practically finished. He was just slipping on the black velvet jacket when a thought suddenly struck him.

  ‘I say, you can’t have had much of a lunch, if you’ve been working all morning. … Off you go and get yourself a chop or something. I’ll wait till you’re back.’

  Claude was indignant at the idea of losing any time.

  ‘Of course I’ve had some lunch,’ he replied. ‘Take a look at the saucepan. Besides, I’ve still got a crust of bread here. I can eat that as I paint. So come on now, get settled and let me start.’

  As, full of enthusiasm, he picked up his palette and seized his brushes, he added:

  ‘Dubuche will be picking us up here later, will he?’

  ‘Yes. He said he’d be here about five.’

  ‘That’s fine. We can go and have some dinner as soon as he comes. … Are you all right now? The hand a little further to the left, head a bit more on one side. That’s it.’

  After arranging the cushions on the divan, Sandoz settled himself on it in the desired pose. His back was turned to Claude, but they still went on talking, because that morning he had had a letter from Plassans, the little town in Provence where they had met as children in the infants’ class at school. Then, after a time, the conversation petered out, for Claude, when he painted, was not of this world, and Pierre, in his efforts to retain the pose, grew more and more torpid as the sitting dragged on.

  Claude was nine years old when he had the good fortune to be able to leave Paris and go back to his birthplace in Provence. His mother, a decent, hardworking laundress, whom his good-for-nothing father had practically driven on to the streets, had recently married an honest workman who had fallen madly in love with her pretty fair skin. Try as they might, however, they could barely make ends meet, so they had been heartily relieved when an old gentleman from Plassans had come and asked if he might take Claude to live with him and send him to the local school.* The generous, though somewhat eccentric, old art collector had been struck by some of the youngster’s childish drawings. And so, for seven years, until he had practically finished his schooling, Claude had lived in the south, first as a boarder at the school, then as a day-boy, residing with his elderly patron. One morning, the old man was found dead on his bed, struck down by apoplexy. In his will he left an income of a thousand francs a year to Claude, with the power to draw on the capital when he was twenty-five. Claude, who was already consumed by the desire to paint, left school immediately, without even sitting his baccalauréat, and rushed off to Paris, whither his friend Pierre Sandoz had already preceded him.

  From their earliest years at school in Plassans, Claude Lantier, Pierre Sandoz, and Louis Dubuche had been known as ‘the three inseparables’.* Born within a few months of each other, but vastly different in both temperament and social background, they had soon become bosom friends, drawn together by subconscious affinities, the vague feeling of ambitions in common, the awakening of a higher intelligence among the vulgar herd of dunces and dunderheads they had to contend with in class.

  Pierre’s father, a Spaniard, had taken refuge in France after some political dispute and had opened a paper mill near Plassans, equipped with machines of his own invention. He had died, an embittered man, the victim of local prejudice and ill-will, leaving behind a series of such obscure and complicated lawsuits that his entire fortune was soon swallowed up in disastrous litigation. His widow, a Burgundian by birth, yielding to her resentment against the people of Provence, and suffering from creeping paralysis, for which she also held them responsible, had sought refuge in Paris, where Pierre now supported her, doing an ill-paid job and dreaming of literary triumphs. Dubuche, the eldest son of a Plassans baker, had joined his two friends in Paris later. Encouraged by his keen, ambitious mother, he was taking a course in architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, living as best he could on the stingy allowance his determined parents invested in him, like Jews banking on a certain three per cent interest.

  It was Sandoz who broke the silence, muttering under his breath:

  ‘Confound this pose! It’s breaking my wrist. I say,’ he called to the painter, ‘am I allowed to move now?’

  Claude let him stretch himself, but did not answer. He was busy brushing in the black velvet jacket. He drew back a step, looked at his work through half-closed eyes, then suddenly laughed out loud, as a me
mory flashed through his mind.

  ‘I say, do you remember the time Pouillaud lit a lot of candles in old Lalubie’s cupboard? I shall never forget the look on Lalubie’s face when he went to get his books to start his lesson and found the thing illuminated! Five hundred lines for the whole class!’

  Sandoz laughed so much he had to lie flat on the divan for a moment before he could take up the pose again.

  ‘Oh, he was a one, Pouillaud!’ he said when he was settled again. ‘Funnily enough, he says in this morning’s letter that Lalubie’s getting married. To a nice girl, too, the old slave-driver! One of Gallisard the draper’s girls, the little fair one, remember? The one we used to serenade!’

  The flood-gates opened, and Claude and Sandoz poured out recollections in an endless stream, the one painting away at feverpitch, the other facing the wall, talking with his back, his shoulders shaking with excitement.

  First it was the school itself they talked about; the mouldering ex-convent stretching away up to the town ramparts; its two playgrounds with their huge plane-trees; the muddy pond covered with green slime in which they had learned to swim; the downstairs classrooms where the damp ran down the walls; the refectory that always reeked of cooking and washing-up water; the juniors’ dormitory, known as ‘the chamber of horrors’, and the sick-bay with its gentle, soothing nuns in their black habits and white coifs! What a to-do there’d been when Sister Angèle, the one with the virginal face who played such havoc with the hearts of the seniors, ran away with Hermeline, the fat boy in the top form who was so much in love that he used deliberately to cut his fingers so as to be able to go up and have her dress them for him!

  After the school, the staff came under review, a terrible, a grotesque, a lamentable cavalcade of ill-natured and long-suffering figures; the headmaster who ruined himself giving parties in order to marry off his daughters, two fine, well turned-out girls, the subjects of endless rude drawings and inscriptions scribbled on every wall in the school; the senior master, ‘Snitcher’, whose famous nose, like a culverin, made his presence obvious from afar when he stood in ambush behind classroom doors; the whole gang of junior masters, each one labelled with a scurrilous nickname: ‘Rhadamanthus’, never known to smile; ‘Machine-Oil’, who made chair backs filthy by perpetually rubbing his head on them. Then there was ‘Adèle-how-could-you?’, the physics master, the notorious cuckold, known to ten generations of pupils by the name of his wife, caught, it was said, flagrante delicto in the arms of a cavalryman. There were others, lots of others, from ‘Spontini’, the ferocious usher with the Corsican dagger he liked to exhibit, stained with the blood of three of his cousins, and little Chantecaille, who was so easy-going that he let them smoke when they were out walking, down to ‘Paraboulomenos’ and ‘Paralleluca’, a kitchen-boy and a scullery-maid, both monstrosities, who were accused of sharing an idyll among the saucepans and the garbage.