by Émile Zola
Next they talked about the ‘rags’ and those ridiculous practical jokes the memory of which could still reduce them to helpless mirth. Oh, the morning when they lit the stove with the boots of the boy who used to supply the whole class with snuff, ‘Bones-the-Day-Boy’, otherwise known as ‘Death-warmed-Up’, he was so thin! And that winter evening when they stole the matches from the chapel to smoke dried chestnut leaves in their home-made pipes. It was Sandoz who did it, and he now admitted how scared he had been as he scrambled down from the choir in the dark. Then there was the day Claude tried roasting cockchafers in the bottom of his desk, to see if they were good to eat like people said, and filled the place with such dense, acrid smoke that the usher had dashed in with a water-jug, thinking the desk was on fire. The onion fields they had robbed when out on school walks, and the windows they had broken and thought themselves very smart if the damaged pane looked anything like a map in the atlas; Greek lessons printed in large letters on the blackboard and rattled off by all the dunces without the master discovering how they did it; the playground benches sawn off and carried like corpses round the pond, in a long procession, complete with dirges. This last affair had been a great joke. Dubuche, as the priest, had slipped into the pond when he tried to fill his cap with ‘holy’ water. But the best joke of all, and the funniest, was the time when Pouillaud tied all the dormitory chamber-pots to one long string and then in the morning—it was the last day of term—raced along the corridor and down three flights of stairs dragging this long trail of domestic china clanking and smashing itself to atoms in his wake!
Claude laughed so much that he had to stop painting.
‘Oh yes, he was a little monster, Pouillaud! Did you say he’d written to you? What’s he up to now?’
‘Nothing at all!’ replied Sandoz, getting back on to his cushions. ‘That’s the trouble. I never read such a damned silly letter. He’s finishing his Law and then he’s going to follow in his father’s footsteps and be a solicitor. … He sounds like one already in his letter. You ought to see it! Typical stodgy bourgeois settling down in his rut!’
There was another silence, then he added:
‘You know, Claude, we’ve been lucky in a way.’
That released another spate of happy memories, and both their hearts beat faster as they recalled the carefree days spent out of school, in the fresh air and the sunshine of Provence. While they were still in the junior school the three inseparables had developed a passion for long walks. Not even a half-holiday went by without their covering a good few miles and, as they grew older and more venture-some, their rambles covered all the surrounding district and even on occasion took them away from home for days at a time. They would spend the night wherever they happened to be, under a hollow rock, on the hot, flagged threshing-floor of a barn, with the new-made straw for bedding, or in some deserted hut where they would make themselves a couch of lavender and thyme. In their unthinking, boyish worship of trees and hills and streams, and in the boundless joy of being alone and free, they found an escape from the matter-of-fact world, and instinctively let themselves be drawn to the bosom of Nature.
As he was a boarder, Dubuche could only join these excursions during holidays. Besides, he could never cover the ground as they could; his were the leaden limbs and unwilling flesh of the diligent goody-goody. Claude and Sandoz never tired; every Sunday they would be up and one would be throwing pebbles at the other’s bedroom shutters by four o’clock in the morning. In summer especially their dream was the Viorne, the mountain torrent that waters the low-lying meadows of Plassans. They could swim when they were scarcely twelve, and they loved to splash about in the deeper parts of the stream; they would spend whole days, stark naked, lying on the burning sand, then diving back into the water, endlessly grubbing for water-plants or watching for eels. They practically lived in the river, and the combination of clear water and sunshine seemed to prolong their childhood, so that even when they were already young men they still sounded like a trio of laughing urchins as they ambled back into Plassans on a sultry July evening after a day on the river. Game-shooting had been their next enthusiasm, game-shooting as practised where there is no game, as in Provence, and where it means tramping six leagues to bag half a dozen sparrows. They would often come back from a whole day’s ‘shooting’ with nothing in their bags but some incautious bat, brought down when they were discharging their guns on the way back home. The memory of those country walks always brought tears to their eyes. They went along the long white roads once more, roads covered with dust like a thick fall of snow and ringing with the tramp of their heavy boots; they cut across the fields again and roamed for miles where the soil was rusty-red with iron deposits, and there was not a cloud in the sky, not a shadow, and nothing but a few stunted olive trees and the sparse foliage of almonds. They recalled their homecomings, the delicious sense of weariness, their boasting about having walked even farther than last time, the thrill it gave them to feel they were carried over the ground by sheer momentum, their bodies spurred into action and their minds lulled into numbness by some dreadful troopers’ song.
Even in those days, Claude used to carry about with him, besides his pellets and his powder-flask, an album in which he would sketch bits of scenery, while Sandoz, too, always had a book of poetry in his pocket. They lived in a kind of fine, romantic frenzy of high-flown verses, barrack-room ribaldry, and odes poured out into the shimmering heat of the summer air. And when they found a brook and half a dozen willows to cast a patch of grey on the blinding earth, they would lose all sense of time, staying there till the stars were out, acting the plays they knew by heart, booming the heroes’ parts, piping the parts of the queens and the ingénues. Those were the days when they left the sparrows in peace. That was how they had lived from the time they were fourteen, burning with enthusiasm for art and literature, isolated in their remote province amid the dreary philistinism of a small town. Victor Hugo’s mighty settings where dream figures immeasurably larger than life stalked through an everlasting battle of antitheses, had carried them away by their epic sweep and sent them gesticulating to watch the sun go down behind ruins or to watch life go by in the false but superb lighting of a Romantic fifth act. Then Musset had come and overwhelmed them with his passion and his tears; they had felt their own hearts beat with his and a new, more human world had opened before them, conquering them through pity and the eternal cry of anguish they were to associate henceforth with every mortal thing. On the whole they were not over-discriminating, but swallowed the good with the detestable, with the healthy gluttony of youth; such was their appetite for reading, so eager were they to admire, that they were often as thrilled by trash as by an acknowledged masterpiece.
It was, as Sandoz was now saying, that love for long country walks, that insatiable appetite for literature that had saved them from becoming as stolid as their fellows. They never set foot in a café, they professed a strong dislike for streets, where, they pretended, they pined away like eagles in a cage, while their contemporaries were already wearing out their elbows on café tables, playing cards for drinks. Provincial life, luring children early into its toils—the club habit, the local paper read to the last letter of the last advertisement, the everlasting game of dominoes, the same walk at the same time along the same avenue, the ultimate degradation of the brain ground down by its inescapable millstone—filled them with indignation, spurred them to protest, sent them clambering up the neighbouring hills in search of solitude, declaiming verses in the pouring rain, deliberately refusing shelter in their hatred of cities. They planned to camp on the banks of the Viorne, running wild and bathing all day, with five or six books, not more, to satisfy their needs. Women were banned, for they elevated their shyness and their inexperience into the austerity of boys who are above such things. For two years Claude was eaten up with love for a girl apprenticed to a local hat-maker; he followed her home, at a safe distance, every evening, but he was never bold enough to speak to her. Sandoz, too, h
ad dreams he cherished, of damsels met on his travels, of handsome creatures springing to life in mysterious woods, being his for a day, then flitting away like shadows in the twilight. The one ‘adventure’ they did have they still regarded as a great joke. It consisted of serenading two young misses on the instruments they played in the school orchestra. Night after night they stood under the window, one blowing a clarinet, the other a cornet, rousing the entire neighbourhood with their cacophonous efforts until that night of nights when the girls’ parents emptied every water-jug in the house over them.
They had been happy days, and the memory of them always brought them to the verge of tears amid their laughter. Just now the studio walls happened to be covered with a series of sketches Claude had made on a recent visit to the haunts of their boyhood. It made them feel that they had all around them the well-known landscapes, the bright blue sky above the rust-red earth. One sketch showed a stretch of plain with wave after wave of little grey olive trees rolling back to the irregular line of rosy hills on the skyline. Another showed the dried-up bed of the Viorne crossed by an ancient bridge white with dust, joining two sun-baked hillsides red as terra-cotta, on which all green things had withered in the drought. Farther along there was the Gorge des Infernets, a yawning chasm in the heart of a vast wilderness of shattered rocks, a stony, awe-inspiring desert stretching away to infinity. There was a host of other well-known places, too; the deep shady ‘Valley of Repentance’, fresh as a bunch of flowers among the burnt-up meadows; the ‘Wood of the Three Gods’, where the pine trees, green and glossy as varnish, shed tears of resin in the blazing sun; the Jas de Bouffan, white as an oriental mosque in the centre of its enormous fields that looked like lakes of blood. There were glimpses of dazzling white roads, of gullies where the heat seemed to raise blisters on the very pebbles, strips of thirsty sand greedily drinking up the last drops of the river, molehills, goat tracks, hills against the sky.
‘Hello,’ exclaimed Sandoz as he looked at one of the sketches. ‘Where’s this?’
Indignant, Claude waved his palette.
‘What?’ he cried. ‘You don’t remember? … We nearly broke our necks there! You must remember the day, with Dubuche, when we climbed up from Jaumegarde, and the rock was like glass. We had to claw our way up with our finger-nails, then half-way up we got stuck. When we did get to the top, we thought we’d cook some chops, and you and I nearly came to blows about it.’
Now Sandoz remembered. ‘Oh yes! Yes! We were each to cook his own chop over a fire of rosemary twigs, and my twigs burnt too quickly, so you made fun of me, because the chop was being burnt to a cinder.’
They laughed loud and long over that incident. Then Claude, who had started painting again, remarked very solemnly:
‘That’s all over, my friend! No time for messing about now in this place.’
It was quite true. Since the dream of the three inseparables had come true and they had been able to meet in Paris and set about its conquest, they had found life incredibly hard. They had made a bold attempt to revive their long cross-country walks and on Sundays they would sometimes set out from the toll-gate at Fontainebleau, make their way through the spinneys at Verrières, push on as far as Bièvres, then through the woods at Bellevue and Meudon, and come back into Paris via Grenelle. But they said Paris spoilt them for rambling; so absorbed were they by their notion of conquest that they hardly ever strayed now beyond the city’s pavements.
From Monday to Saturday Sandoz fretted and fumed in a gloomy corner of the office of the Registrar of Births for the Fifth Arron-dissement, a thraldom he accepted solely for his mother’s sake, although his hundred-and-fifty a month did not exactly keep her in luxury. Dubuche, anxious to reimburse the funds his parents had invested in him and his education, did odd jobs for architects as well as his work for the École des Beaux-Arts. Claude, thanks to his private income of a thousand francs, was a free man, though after sharing his funds with his friends he was often in sore straits at the end of the month. Fortunately, he was beginning to sell small canvases to old Malgras, an astute dealer, who gave him ten or twelve francs a time for them. He would have starved, however, rather than commercialize himself by doing bourgeois portraits, trumpery religious subjects, painting awnings for restaurants or signboards for midwives. When he had first returned to Paris he had had a huge studio in the Impasse des Bourdonnais; then, to save money, he had moved to the Quai de Bourbon. There he led a rough-and-ready existence disdaining everything but painting. Sheer disgust had made him break with his family and he had also severed connection with his aunt, who kept a pork-shop in the Halles and, he thought, was making too good a thing of it. But in his heart of hearts he suffered at the thought of his mother being exploited and dragged into the gutter by men.
Abruptly he called to Sandoz:
‘Have a care! You’re slumping!’
But Sandoz swore he had cramp and jumped off the divan to stretch his legs. He was granted ten minutes’ rest, during which they talked of other things. Claude was in a good mood now. When his work was going well he gradually warmed up and grew talkative, though he painted with clenched teeth, fuming to himself as soon as he felt nature was escaping him again. So Sandoz had hardly taken up the pose again before Claude was busily painting and providing an uninterrupted flow of talk.
‘Now we’re getting somewhere! And you’re going to cut quite a figure, the way things are shaping. … Ah, the old fools! Just let them refuse this one! I’m much harder on my own work than they are on theirs, believe me. When I say a thing’s good, it means a hell of a lot more than the opinion of all the selection committees in the world. … You know the one I did of the Halles, two kids on top of the piled-up vegetables … well, I’ve scrapped it.* No kidding. It just refused to come, so I gave it up … Got more involved than I bargained for … bitten off more than I could chew again. … I’ll go back to it one day, see if I don’t, when I feel I can do it. … I’ll show ’em yet. … Give ’em something to lay ’em out flat!’
And he flung out his arm in a gesture to sweep aside a crowd. Then, squeezing a tube of blue on to his palette, he grinned to himself as he wondered what old Belloque would have thought of his painting. Old Belloque, his first drawing master, the one-armed ex-army captain who used to impart the subtleties of shading to his pupils at the Plassans Museum! Had not Berthou, famous for his ‘Nero at the Circus’, in whose studio he had worked for six months, told him scores of times that he would never do anything worth while? He regretted them now, those six months feeling his way like an idiot and doing those stupid exercises under the iron rule of a despot with whom he could never possibly have seen eye to eye. It had set him for ever against working at the Louvre. He would rather have cut off his hand, he said, than have gone back and spoilt his eye turning out another of those copies which prevent you from ever seeing anything as it really is. What was Art, after all, if not simply giving out what you have inside you? Didn’t it all boil down to sticking a female in front of you and painting her as you feel she is? Wasn’t a bunch of carrots, yes, a bunch of carrots, studied directly and painted simply, personally, as you see it yourself, as good as any of the run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure École des Beaux-Arts stuff, painted with tobacco-juice? The day was not far off when one solitary, original carrot might be pregnant with revolution! That was why he was now content to go and paint at Boutin’s, a free studio run by an ex-model in the Rue de la Huchette. Once he had paid his twenty francs to the treasurer, he could go there, sit in his corner and draw all the nudes he wanted, men, women, enough for an orgy. And draw he did, for all he was worth, spurning meat and drink, working like a madman in an endless struggle with nature, while his superior fellow-students accused him of laziness and ignorance and boasted of their own achievements because they were satisfied with copying noses and mouths under the watchful eye of a master.
‘Look,’ he said, ‘when one of those teacher’s pets can knock together a torso like this fellow, he can come and tell me, an
d then I’ll talk to him.’
He pointed with his brush to a nude study hung on the wall near the door. It was a superb piece of work, drawn with a master touch. Alongside it were other equally admirable pieces; the feet of a little girl, of exquisite delicacy; the belly of a woman, with a texture like satin, pulsating with life. In his rare moments of contentment, he was proud of his handful of studies, the only ones that really satisfied him, the ones that revealed a painter remarkably gifted, but impeded by sudden, inexplicable fits of impotence.
Boldly brushing in the velvet jacket, and at the same time working up the fury of his intransigence, he went on talking, almost shouting, to Sandoz:
‘A lot of cheapjack dabblers, that’s all they are! Every one of ’em either a fool or a knave, ready to pander to the bad taste of the general public. Not one of ’em worth his salt. Not a man among ’em bold enough to smack the philistines clean between the eyes! Not one! … Look at old Ingres,* now. You know, he makes me feel sick, the way he smears his paint on! Well, I still take my hat off to the old devil. Know why? Because he had guts enough to do what he wanted and thrust that thundering good drawing of his down the throats of the idiots who now claim to understand him! … After him, there are only two, two, do you hear? of any consequence at all: Delacroix and Courbet.* The rest are a gang of sharpers … Delacroix, the old Romantic lion, there’s a figure for you! There’s a decorator who put some warmth in his colouring. And look at his energy! He’d have covered every wall in Paris if he’d had to; his palette simply boiled over. Boiled over, that’s what it did. Oh, I know he painted a lot of fantastical stuff, but I don’t mind that, I even get a bit of a kick out of it. Besides, it was just what was wanted to set fire to the École and all its works. … Then there’s Courbet, a sound workman if ever there was one, the only real painter of the century, one with the true classical technique. And not one of the numskulls spotted it. They howled themselves hoarse about “profanity” and “realism”, when the only realism there was was in the subjects. The vision was the same as the old masters’, the treatment simply carried on the tradition of our accepted museum pieces. … But both Courbet and Delacroix arrived just at the right moment. They both took a real step forward. But now! Now! …’
