by Émile Zola
He stopped and stepped back to look at his work, and was lost for a moment in contemplation. Then he went on:
‘Now we need something else. … Just exactly what I don’t really know! If I did, and if I could … I should be very smart … and I should be the one person to be reckoned with! But I do feel that the grand, Romantic pageantry of Delacroix is just about played out, and Courbet’s “black” painting is already beginning to feel stuffy and reek of a musty studio where the sun never enters. … Do you see what I mean? Perhaps that’s what we need now, sunlight, open air, something bright and fresh, people and things as seen in real daylight. I don’t know, but it seems to me that that’s our sort of painting, the sort of painting our generation should produce and look at.’
Words failed him again; he began to stammer in his unsuccessful attempt to express the first vague stirrings of the future he could feel within himself. While he finished feverishly brushing in the black velvet jacket, there was a long silence.
Sandoz had listened to him without dropping the pose and now, still with his back turned, as if addressing the wall, he answered in a dreamy voice:
‘We don’t know, that’s the trouble. We don’t know … but we ought to know. … Every time a teacher has wanted to impose a truth on me, I’ve been filled with revolt and defiance. Either he’s deceiving himself, I’ve thought, or he’s deceiving me. Their ideas simply exasperate me. … Truth must surely be broader and deeper than that. … Wouldn’t it be wonderful to devote one’s whole life to one work and put everything into it, men, animals, everything under the sun! But not in the order prescribed by philosophy text-books, not according to the idiotic hierarchy so dear to our personal pride, but in the mighty universal flow of a life in which we should be a mere accident, completed, or explained by a passing dog or a stone on the roadway … the mighty All, in a word, in working order, exactly as it is, not all ups and not all downs, not too dirty and not too clean, but just as it is. … Science, of course, is what poets and novelists are going to have to turn to; science is their only possible source these days. But there you are again! What are they to get out of it? How are they to keep up with it? As soon as I think of that, my mind goes blank. If I knew, if only I knew, I’d turn out a series of books that would give the world something to think about!’
He, too, fell silent. The previous winter he had published his first book, a series of pleasant sketches of life in Plassans, in which a harsh note here and there was the only indication of the author’s revolt, of his passion for truth and power. Since then he had been groping his doubtful way through the mass of still confused notions that besieged his brain. He had started by toying with the idea of a gigantic undertaking and had projected an ‘Origins of the Universe’ in three phases: the creation, established according to scientific research; the story of how the human race came to play its part in the sequence of living beings; the future, in which beings succeed beings, completing the creation of the world through the ceaseless activity of living matter. He had cooled off, however, when he began to realize the hazardous nature of the hypotheses of this third phase, and was now trying to find a more limited, a more human setting for his ambitious plan.
‘The ideal would be,’ said Claude, after a while, ‘to see everything and paint everything. To have acres of walls to cover, to decorate the railway stations, the market-halls, the town-halls, whatever they put up when architects have at last learnt some common sense! All we’ll need then will be a good head and some strong muscles, for it isn’t subjects we’ll be short of. … Think of it, Pierre! Life as it’s lived in the streets, the life of rich and poor, in market-places, at the races, along the boulevards, and down back streets in the slums; work of every kind in full swing; human emotions revived and brought into the light of day; the peasants, the farmyards and the countryside. … Think of it! Then they’ll see, then I’ll show ’em what I can do! It makes my hands tingle only to think of it! Modern life in all its aspects, that’s the subject! Frescoes as big as the Panthéon! A series of paintings that’ll shatter the Louvre!’
Claude and Sandoz were never together for long before they reached this pitch of excitement; they goaded each other into it in their obsession with glory and success. Behind it all there were such flights of youthful enthusiasm, such a passion for hard work that they often smiled themselves at their ambitious dreams, though they found them a cheering source of flexibility and vigour.
Backing away from his easel, Claude leaned up against the wall, relaxed. Sandoz, tired of posing, got up from the divan and went across to him. Without a word they both stood looking at the picture. The man in the black velvet jacket was now completely brushed in; his hand, which was farther advanced than the rest, showed up well against the grass, while the dark patch of his back stood out with such force that the two little shapes in the background, the two women tumbling each other in the sunshine, looked as if they had withdrawn far away into the shimmering light of the forest clearing; the big reclining female figure, however, was still only faintly sketched in, still little more than a shape desired in a dream, Eve rising from the earth smiling but sightless, her eyes still unopened.
‘Tell me,’ said Sandoz, ‘what are you going to call it?’
‘“Open Air”,’ was the curt reply.
Such a title sounded over-technical to Sandoz who, being a writer, often found himself being tempted to introduce literature into painting.
‘“Open Air”! But it doesn’t mean anything!’
‘It doesn’t need to mean anything. A man and a couple of women resting in the woods, in the sunshine. What more do you want? Seems to me there’s enough there to make a masterpiece.’
Then, throwing back his head, he added between his teeth:
‘Damn it! It’s still too dark! Delacroix, that. Can’t get away from him. And the hand there, look at it. That’s Courbet, pure Courbet! … That’s what’s wrong with all of us, we’re still wallowing in Romanticism. We dabbled in it too long when we were kids, and now we’re in it up to the neck. What we need is a thorough scrubbing!’
Sandoz made a gesture of despair. He, too, complained that he had been born ‘at the confluence of Hugo and Balzac’. Still, Claude was satisfied, happy and excited at the result of a good sitting. If Sandoz could let him have two or three more Sundays like this, his man in black velvet would be finished, really finished. Today he’d done enough, he said, and that made them both laugh, for generally he nearly killed his models, and only released them when they fainted clean away from fatigue. Today it was he who felt ready to drop; his legs were tired and he had not had a decent meal all day. The cuckoo-clock was singing five as he fell on the remains of his breakfast roll and devoured it. Dog-tired, breaking off bits with his trembling fingers and gulping them down unchewed, he went back and stood in front of his picture, so completely obsessed that he was not even aware he was eating.
‘Five o’clock,’ said Sandoz, stretching his limbs. ‘Time we had some dinner … and here’s Dubuche on the dot.’
There was a rap on the door and in came Dubuche. He was a thick-set young fellow, dark, respectable-looking, with puffy features, cropped hair and, for his age, a heavy moustache. He shook hands with Sandoz and Claude, then stopped, nonplussed, in front of the picture. Such unbridled painting brought him up with a jolt; it disturbed his sense of balance, it jarred with his respect for established formulas; usually it was only his old friendship for Claude that made him keep his criticism to himself. But this time, it was plain to see, his whole being rebelled.
‘Well, what’s up? Don’t you like it?’ asked Sandoz, who had seen his reaction.
‘Oh yes, yes. … Nice bit of painting. But …’
‘Come on, out with it! What’s worrying you?’
‘It’s … it’s the man. … Fully dressed and the women naked. It’s so … so … unusual!’
At once the other two burst out laughing. Weren’t there scores of pictures in the Louvre composed exactly like this? Be
sides, if it was unusual now, it jolly soon wouldn’t be. Who cared a twopenny damn for the public anyhow?
Unperturbed by the vehemence of his friends’ retorts, Dubuche answered quietly:
‘The public won’t understand that. … They’ll think it’s just smutty. … And it is smutty.’
‘Philistine!’ cried the furious Claude. ‘A rare old die-hard you’re getting to be since you went to the Beaux-Arts. You used to be a reasonable human being!’
This, the stock rejoinder to any of Dubuche’s remarks since he went to study at the École des Beaux-Arts, together with the disturbingly violent turn the discussion had taken, caused him to beat a retreat, but not without some parting shots at painters in general. One thing was quite certain, the painters at the Beaux-Arts were a fine collection of numskulls, but for architects, well, the situation was rather different. Where else could he go to study architecture, he’d like to know? He had to go to the Beaux-Arts, it was the only place he could go to. But that didn’t mean he wasn’t going to have ideas of his own, later. As he said this he put on the most revolutionary air he could muster.
‘Good,’ said Sandoz. ‘Now you’ve made your excuses, let’s go and have some dinner.’
But Claude had automatically picked up his brush and set to work again. The woman’s face looked all wrong somehow in relation to the man, so now, in a moment of impatience, he was drawing a sharp line round it, to fix it in what he now thought was its proper place.
‘Are you coming?’ Sandoz repeated.
‘In a minute, I’m busy. What’s the hurry, anyhow? … Just let me finish this, and I’m with you.’
Shaking his head, Sandoz added, gently, for fear of exasperating him even more:
‘It’s a mistake to stick at it like that, Claude. … You’re tired, you’re hungry, and all you’re going to do is spoil it again like you did last time.’
An irritated gesture from Claude, and he said no more. It was the usual story: Claude never knew when to stop working, he let himself be carried away by the desire for immediate certitude, the urgency of proving to himself that this really was his masterpiece. Now, after a momentary feeling of satisfaction with the sitting, he was being assailed by doubt and despair. Ought he to have given so much prominence to the velvet jacket? Was he going to be able to find the note he wanted to give the nude figure of the woman? And he would rather have died on the spot than not have the answer at once. He whisked the drawing of Christine’s head from the portfolio in which he had hidden it, and began comparing his picture with the document he had copied direct from nature.
‘Hello!’ exclaimed Dubuche, ‘where did you draw that? Who is it?’
Claude, startled by the question, made no reply; then, without any compunction, although he usually told them everything, he lied, overcome by a strange sense of reserve, a delicate feeling that he wanted to keep his adventure to himself.
‘Do you hear? Who is it?’ the architect insisted.
‘Oh, nobody. A model.’
‘A model! Really? Very young, isn’t she? Not bad either. … You must let me have her address. … Not for myself, for a sculptor I know who’s looking around for a Psyche. Is it here, with the rest?’
And Dubuche turned to a patch of the studio wall where addresses of models were chalked up at all angles. Women in particular left their ‘cards’ there, in sprawling, childish hands: ‘Zoé Piédefer, 7 Rue Campagne-Première’, a big brunette, now inclined to sag round the middle, cut clean across little ‘Flore Beauchamp, 32, Rue de Laval’, and ‘Judith Vaquez, 69 Rue du Rocher’, a Jewess; two nice, fresh girls, though both a little on the skinny side.
‘I say, have you her address?’ Dubuche repeated.
Claude was furious.
‘For God’s sake be quiet!’ he bellowed. ‘How should I know her address? … And stop making a damned nuisance of yourself when somebody’s working!’
Sandoz had not spoken. Claude’s outburst had startled him at first, but now he smiled. He was subtler than Dubuche, to whom he gave a knowing wink as they both turned on Claude. Beg your pardon. Sorry, I’m sure. If Monsieur wanted to keep her for his own private use, they would not dream of asking Monsieur if they might borrow her. What a rascal, treating himself to beauties like this! Who would have thought it now? And where had he picked her up? In a low dive in Montmartre, or in the gutter in the Place Maubert?
Claude, whose irritation increased with his embarrassment, could contain himself no longer.
‘Don’t be such fools!’ he said. ‘Don’t be such fools! … And stop it, anyhow, I can’t bear it just now!’
His voice sounded suddenly so different that the other two stopped at once, while he, after scraping off the head of his nude figure, drew it afresh and painted it in again after the drawing of Christine, though his hand was feverish, uncertain and often clumsy. From the head he went on to the breasts, which as yet were barely sketched in. This keyed him up even more, for, chaste as he was, he had a passion for the physical beauty of women, an insane love for nudity desired but never possessed, but was powerless to satisfy himself or to create enough of the beauty he dreamed of enfolding in an ecstatic embrace. The women he hustled out of his studio he adored in his pictures. He caressed them, did them violence even, and shed tears of despair over his failures to make them either sufficiently beautiful or sufficiently alive.
‘Give me ten minutes, will you?’ he asked. ‘I just want to go over these shoulders ready for tomorrow, and then we can be off.’
Knowing that it was useless to try to prevent him from slaving away, Dubuche and Sandoz resigned themselves. The former lit his pipe and flung himself on the divan. He was the only smoker of the three. The other two had never really taken to tobacco; they still felt sick at the smell of a good strong cigar. Lying flat on his back, gazing aimlessly through the puffs of smoke, he began rambling on in his monotonous way, about himself. What a place Paris was, the way you had to work yourself to the bone to get anywhere at all! He talked about his fifteen months’ apprenticeship with the famous Dequersonnière, ex-Grand Prix, now architect to the Government, Officer of the Legion of Honour, Member of the Institut, whose masterpiece, the Church of St. Mathieu, was a cross between a jelly-mould and an Empire clock; a decent sort, at bottom, whom Dubuche made fun of from time to time, though he still shared his respect for the old-established formulas. Without the other students, however, he would never have learned very much at the studio in the Rue du Four, where the patron only made fleeting appearances three times a week. They were a tough lot and they had led him a pretty hard life when he was a newcomer, but they had at least taught him how to make a mount and how to draw and wash a plan. The times he’d lunched off a roll and a cup of chocolate in order to pay his twenty-five francs fee, the paper he’d spoilt, tinkering away at his drawing, the hours he’d spent at home poring over his books before he’d sat for the Beaux-Arts entrance exam! Even then he’d nearly failed, in spite of his tremendous effort. It was imagination he lacked. In the drawing test, a caryatid and a summer dining-room, he had come out bottom. At the oral, it is true, he had fared better, with his logarithms, geometry, and history, as he was particularly keen on the scientific side. Now he was at the Beaux-Arts as a second-class pupil, he was having to wear himself to a shadow to pull off a first-class diploma. A hell of a life! Sort of thing that might go on for ever!
On he went, sprawling all over the cushions, puffing away at his pipe:
‘The lectures you have to attend, perspective, descriptive geometry, stereotomy, building, history of art! And the reams of notes you’re expected to make! … Then there’s the monthly architecture test, sometimes a draft, sometimes a working drawing. No time for playing around if you want to get through your exams decently, especially when you’ve to do as I have and earn your keep out of school hours. … Honestly, it’s killing …’
A cushion had slipped off the divan. He picked it up with his feet.
‘Still, I’ve been lucky, I suppose. I k
now plenty of fellows on the look-out for jobs who can’t get a thing. Day before yesterday I came across an architect who works for a big contractor. Never met an architect who knew so little about his job. He’d be useless as a mason’s labourer and can’t make head or tail of a drawing if he sees one! He pays me twenty-five sous an hour, and I sort out his houses for him. … Couldn’t have been more convenient. Mother’d just written to say she was stony again. Poor mother! The money I owe to that woman!’
As Dubuche was obviously talking for his own benefit, chewing over his usual ideas, his everlasting preoccupation with making money, Sandoz was not taking the trouble to listen. He had opened the little window, finding the heat in the studio almost overpowering, and was sitting down looking out over the roof. After a time he did break in on the architect.
