by Émile Zola
Claude, too, was with them, running alongside Dubuche, who brought up the rear, very annoyed because he had not been able to spend another quarter of an hour to finish tinting his drawing.
‘What are you doing afterwards?’
‘Oh, I have a whole host of things to do today.’
Discouraged, realizing that his friend was not to be detained, Claude answered reluctantly.
‘I’ll leave you to it then. … You’ll be at Sandoz’s tonight, I expect.’
‘Well, yes. If I’m not asked to stay to dinner elsewhere.’
They were both getting out of breath. The mob was keeping up a goodish pace and, for the fun of prolonging its racket, was going the longest way round. At the bottom of the Rue du Four it had swept across the Place Gozlin and dashed into the Rue de l’Échaudé. In front, the handcart, pushed and pulled with increasing vigour, bumped madly over the uneven pavings giving its load of drawings a dreadful shaking; behind it, the students racing hell-for-leather forced everyone else to stand well out of the way to avoid being run down, while tradesmen stood open-mouthed in their shop doorways, thinking revolution had broken out. The entire neighbourhood was roused. In the Rue Jacob the din and confusion reached such a pitch that some people closed their shutters. As they turned at last into the Rue Bonaparte, one fair-haired youngster scooped up a little servant-girl who stood gaping on the pavement and carried her along, a straw on the waters.
‘I’ll say goodbye then,’ said Claude. ‘See you tonight.’
‘See you tonight.’
Completely breathless, Claude broke away at the end of the Rue des Beaux-Arts. The others surged into the open forecourt of the School. He watched them until he had got his breath again, and then made his way back to the Rue de Seine. His bad luck was getting worse; it was clearly not intended that he should lead any of his friends astray that morning. He walked slowly up the street and on as far as the Place du Panthéon, without any particular plans in his mind. Then, as he happened to be so near, he thought he might just as well call on Sandoz at his office. It would be ten minutes well spent. To his amazement he was told that M. Sandoz had asked for a day off, to attend a funeral. He knew what that meant. Sandoz always made the same excuse when he wanted to do a good day’s work at home. He had already turned in that direction when a sudden fellow-feeling for an artist absorbed in his work stopped him in his tracks. It would be a crime to go and disturb an honest workman, to break in on him with a tale of discouragement just when he was probably making splendid progress himself.
Resigned to spending the day in his own company, Claude trailed gloomily along the riverside until noon, his brain throbbing with the persistent thought of his impotence, but otherwise so numb that he perceived his favourite views of the Seine only as through a veil of mist. As he found himself back again in the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête, he stopped to lunch at Gomard’s, the wine-shop with the sign ‘Au Chien de Montargis’ that always intrigued him. Some masons, their smocks caked with plaster, were already at table; he joined them and, like them, took the eight-sous ‘ordinary’: the bowl of broth into which he broke up his bread, and the slice of boiled beef and beans served on a plate still wet with washing-up water. Still too good, he thought, for a dud who can’t even do his own job! Whenever he had spoilt a piece of work he always set himself below the meanest labourer who at least had brawn enough to do his job. He lingered there for over an hour in the stultifying atmosphere of the general conversation before he resumed his leisurely, aimless walk along the streets.
In the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville an idea struck him which made him quicken his pace. Why had he never thought of Fagerolles? Fagerolles was a nice chap even though he was at the Beaux-Arts; he was jolly, and no fool. You could talk to him, even when he was trying to defend bad painting. If he’d been home for lunch, he was probably still there, in the Rue Vieille-du-Temple.
It was cooler, Claude noticed, when he turned into that narrow street, for the day was now very hot. But in that busy little thorough-fare steam was still rising from the pavings; it was still damp and even slippery under foot, in spite of the cloudless sky. Every moment drays and waggonnettes threatened to run him down when the crowd forced him to step off the pavement. Still, as a street, it amused him. He liked the happy-go-lucky arrangement of the houses, their flat fronts plastered to the eaves with sign-boards, pierced with narrow slits of windows, each one of them a hive of busy craftsmen. At one of the narrowest points in the street his attention was arrested by a tiny paper-shop, with a barber’s on one side and a tripe-shop on the other and its window full of ridiculous prints remarkable either for their mushy sentimentality or their barrack-room lewdness. Feasting their eyes on the amazing display were a dreamy-looking youth and a couple of giggling, precocious little girls. He could have slapped their faces. Fagerolles lived just opposite in an old, dark house that stood out further than its neighbours and was, in consequence, more thickly splashed with mud from the gutter. As Claude turned to cut across the street, an omnibus came bearing down upon him; he had just time to leap on to the pavement, at that point merely a kerb, as the wheels brushed past and splashed him up to the knees.
Fagerolles senior dealt in ornamental zinc-work and had his workshops on the ground floor, using as his showrooms, because they were better lighted, the two big first-floor rooms overlooking the street. He lived at the back of the shop in a set of gloomy, stuffy little rooms like a cellar. There his son Henri had grown up, a true child of the Paris streets, on that narrow strip of pavement worn by the wheels of the traffic, drenched by the water from the gutter, across the street from the paper-shop, the tripe-shop and the barber’s. His father had started by making him design ornaments for the shop. Then, when the lad had begun to have higher ambitions, had gone in for painting and started to talk about going to the Beaux-Arts, there had been quarrels and even blows, periods of estrangement and eventual reconciliations. And even now that Henri had begun to make his way, his father still treated him harshly and, although he was resigned to letting the boy do what he liked, was still convinced he was going to the bad.
Claude brushed the filth off his clothes and plunged into the entry, through a long archway opening into a yard about which there hung the same greenish light and stale, musty smell one might expect to find at the bottom of a water-tank. The stairs ran up the outside of the building, protected by an awning and a balustrade crumbling with rust, and as Claude was passing the showrooms on the first floor he saw M. Fagerolles through the glass panel of a door, bending over some of his wares. Not wishing to appear rude, he went in, though he knew nothing more nauseating than the hideous, deceptive prettiness of M. Fagerolles’s zinc masquerading as bronze.
‘Good afternoon, Monsieur Fagerolles. Is Henri still with you?’
The zinc-ornament dealer, a big, sallow-complexioned man, straightened up in the midst of his urns, flower-vases and statuettes, clutching in his hand the latest thing in thermometers, a woman juggler squatting on her heels and balancing the fine glass tube on the end of her nose.
‘Henri hasn’t been home for lunch,’ he said curtly, leaving the young man somewhat disconcerted by his welcome.
‘Oh, I see. He hasn’t been home. … Sorry, monsieur. Good afternoon.’
‘Good afternoon.’
Outside, Claude cursed to himself. No luck again! Fagerolles had escaped him too. He was annoyed with himself now for coming, and especially for taking an interest in the picturesque street, for that meant that he still harboured within him the canker of Romanticism. Perhaps that was his trouble; perhaps that was the false idea he could feel obstructing his brain! By the time he had reached the river again he was beginning to wonder whether to go back to his studio and see whether his picture was really as bad as he thought. But the very idea made him shudder. His studio struck him as a place of horror where he could never bear to live again now that it housed the mutilated corpse of something he had loved. No! No! Climbing those three flights of stairs, ope
ning his door and shutting himself up with that was more than he could bear to contemplate. He crossed the Seine and walked from one end of the Rue Saint-Jacques to the other. There was nothing else for it; he was so miserable he could stand it no longer! He was going to the Rue d’Enfer to distract Sandoz from his work!
The little fourth-floor apartment consisted of a dining-room, a bedroom and a small kitchen which Sandoz himself occupied, and, across the landing, another room where his mother, hopelessly paralysed, spent her days in doleful, self-imposed solitude. The street was deserted and the windows of the flat looked out over the vast gardens of the Sourds-Muets, across the rounded tree-tops to the square belfry of Saint-Jacques-du-Haut-Pas.
Sandoz was in his room, sitting at his table, poring over a page of manuscript when Claude arrived.
‘Am I disturbing you?’
‘Not at all. I’ve been at it since this morning. I’ve done enough. … Believe it or not, but I’ve been struggling for the last hour trying to knock one sentence into shape; it haunted me all through lunch.’
A gesture from Claude, together with his look of blank despair, and Sandoz summed up the situation at once.
‘So you’re in a bad way, too, are you?’ he said. ‘Come on. Let’s go out; a good long walk will brighten the pair of us up. What do you think?’
As he was passing the kitchen he was detained for a moment by an old woman, his daily who came for two hours in the morning and two in the afternoon, but on Thursdays stayed on for the evening because of the dinner.
‘It’s all settled, then, is it, monsieur?’ she asked. ‘Skate, and then roast leg of lamb and potatoes?’
‘Yes, if you would.’
‘For how many tonight, monsieur?’
‘That’s one thing I never know. … Set for five, anyhow. … For seven o’clock. We’ll try to be back in time!’
Then, leaving Claude on the landing for a moment, Sandoz slipped in to see his mother. When he came out again, with the same solicitous discretion, the pair of them went downstairs without a word. On the doorstep, after a glance to right and left to take their bearings, they went up the street to the Place de l’Observatoire and then turned down the Boulevard du Montparnasse. It was their usual walk; they chose it instinctively, for there was nothing they loved better than a leisurely stroll down the long, broad stretches of the outer boulevards. Neither had spoken yet, for both were still preoccupied, but they gradually recovered their good spirits in each other’s company. It was not until they were passing the Gare de l’Quest that Sandoz suddenly had an idea.
‘I know,’ he said, ‘let’s go and look up Mahoudeau and see how that thing of his is getting on. I know he’s giving his saints and angels a miss today.’
‘Good idea!’ Claude answered. ‘We’ll call on Mahoudeau.’
They turned at once into the Rue du Cherche-Midi, where, only a short walk from the boulevard, Mahoudeau the sculptor had rented a shop from a fruiterer who had gone bankrupt, rubbed a thick coat of whitening on the windows and called it a studio. There is something pleasantly provincial about this particular bit of the broad, quiet Rue du Cherche-Midi, and even just the faintest dash of the odour of sanctity. There are great open gateways leading to long strings of courtyards, a cow-byre that sends out wafts of bed-straw and manure, and a convent wall that seems to go on for ever. It was there, between the convent and a herbalist’s, that Mahoudeau had opened his studio which was still marked by the signboard with ‘Fruit and Vegetables’ painted on it in great yellow letters. Claude and Sandoz were nearly blinded more than once by little girls skipping in the road, for they had been forced off the pavement, which was blocked by chairs where people sat sunning themselves on their doorsteps. They lingered a moment outside the herbalist’s. Between the two windows with their show of enemas, bandages, and a host of other intimate and delicate objects, under the bunches of dried herbs hanging over the doorway shedding their spicy odours on the passers-by, a thin, dark woman stood staring at them, while behind her, in the half light of the shop, they could make out the figure of a pallid little man apparently coughing out his lungs. They nudged each other and there was a roguish look in their eyes as they turned the handle of the studio door.
It was a roomy shop, but it appeared to be completely filled by an enormous heap of clay, a colossal Bacchante reclining on a rock. The planks which supported it sagged beneath the weight of the still more or less shapeless mass with its gigantic breasts and legs like twin towers. There was water all over the floor, buckets of muddy liquid about the place and a nasty, plastery mess in one corner, and the shelves which had once been used to display fruit and vegetables were now cluttered with casts after the antique, already assuming a thin, grey veil of accumulated dust. The place was as damp as a wash-house and reeked of wet clay, and the wan light from the whitened windows made it look even dirtier and more dismal than the average sculptor’s studio.
Mahoudeau, whom they discovered sitting smoking his pipe in contemplation of his giantess, welcomed them with a cheerful ‘Hello! Come in!’
He was a thin little man with a bony face already, at twenty-seven, deeply furrowed with wrinkles. His narrow forehead was crowned by a bush of crisp, black hair, and the ferocious ugliness of his sallow face was tempered by the disarmingly childish smile in his pale, vacant eyes. He was the son of a Plassans stone-cutter and, having been brilliantly successful in the art competitions organized by the local Museum, had been sent to Paris with an annual grant of eight hundred francs for four years. But in Paris he had found himself out of his element, had failed at the Beaux-Arts and frittered away his allowance doing nothing, with the result that at the end of his four years, when he had found himself obliged to earn his living, he had hired himself out to a dealer in religious statuary for whom he slaved ten hours a day making Saint Josephs, Saint Rochs, Mary Magdalenes, and all the Saints in the calendar. During the last six months, since he renewed contact with his friends from Provence, his juniors from the days when they all attended ‘Auntie’ Giraud’s nursery school and now a lot of red-hot revolutionaries, his ambition had begun to revive. The more he saw of his rabid artist friends who fuddled his brain with their outrageous theories, the more his ambitions favoured the colossal.
‘I say!’ Claude gasped. ‘What a piece!’
Mahoudeau, delighted, took out his pipe and blew a cloud of smoke.
‘Yes, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘I’m going to show ’em some real flesh, not those bladders of lard they’re all so fond of!’
‘What’s she doing, bathing?’ Sandoz asked.
‘Bathing! Of course she isn’t. She’s a Bacchante … will be when she gets her vine leaves.’
This was too much for Claude.
‘A Bacchante!’ was his indignant exclamation. ‘What do you take us for? A Bacchante! Is there such a thing? A grape-picker, if you like, and a modern grape-picker, what’s more! I know it’s a nude, but what does that matter? She can be a peasant girl undressed, can’t she? People have got to feel that she’s alive!’
Mahoudeau merely trembled and said nothing for a moment; he was rather afraid of Claude’s censure and usually ended by accepting his ideal of strength and truth in art; so now, to make up for his shortcomings he blurted out obsequiously:
‘Yes. Of course. That’s what I meant, really, a grape-picker. And she’ll be alive, you’ll see. She’ll reek of woman when I’ve finished with her!’
Just then Sandoz, who was making his way round the great mass of clay, gave a cry of surprise:
‘Well! If sly old Chaîne isn’t here, too!’
And there, completely obscured by Mahoudeau’s gigantic work, sat the stolid Chaîne, silently copying on to a diminutive canvas the rusty old studio stove. It was easy to discern his peasant origins in his slow, deliberate gestures and his thick bull-neck, tanned brown as leather by the sun of Provence. His only other prominent feature was his forehead, a forehead bulging with obstinacy, for his nose was so short that it was lost between
his rosy cheeks, and his powerful jaws were hidden by his vigorous beard. He came from Saint-Firmin, a village near Plassans where he had been a shepherd until he was old enough to draw for conscription.* His undoing had been the enthusiasm of a local art-collector for the walking-stick handles he used to carve out of roots with his clasp knife. Once ‘discovered’, he became the shepherd-boy genius, the artist with a future, according to his patron, who happened to be on the Museum Committee and who pushed him, flattered him and turned his head with hopes for the future. That had not prevented him from failing all along the line, in his class-work, in the Beaux-Arts entrance competition, in the local scholarship test; but he had come to Paris nevertheless. He had got his father, an impoverished peasant, to advance him his share of his patrimony, a mere thousand francs, on which to live for a year, until his undoubted success was achieved. The thousand francs lasted eighteen months. Then, when he had only twenty francs left, he had joined forces with his friend, Mahoudeau. They shared the same bed in the gloomy back premises of the shop; they shared the same loaf of bread, and they bought their bread once a fortnight only, so that it would be thoroughly stale and they would be unable to eat more than a small portion at a time.
‘Very accurate, that stove of yours, Chaîne,’ said Sandoz.
Chaîne did not answer, but smiled through his beard, a smile of triumph that lit up his face like a ray of sunshine. To cap everything his patron’s advice had made him take up painting, in spite of his genuine talent as a wood-carver. And a clumsy job he made of it, succeeding only in reducing the purest and most vibrant colours to the same oppressive drab. But, for all his lack of skill, his great gift was accuracy. His infantile mind, still of the earth earthy, delighted in minute detail which he reproduced with the meticulous simplicity of a primitive. His stove, its perspective completely askew, was precise and lifeless and the colour of mud.
Claude went over and looked at it and in a moment of pity, he who was usually so hard on bad painting, found a word to say in its favour:
