The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  Chapter 5

  On the fifteenth of May, Claude, who had come home from Sandoz’s at three o’clock in the morning, was still asleep at nine when Madame Joseph brought him up a big bunch of white lilac. He knew what it meant. It was Christine celebrating in advance the success of his picture. For this was his great day, the opening of the ‘Salon des Refusés’, the first of its kind, where his picture, which had been turned down by the Selection Committee of the official Salon, was being hung.*

  He was touched by her delicate thought of sending fresh, sweet lilacs to greet him on awaking, like the promise of a happy day. Barefoot in his shirt, he took them and put them in his water-jug. Then, bleary-eyed still, he hustled into his clothes, grumbling because he had slept so late. The night before he had promised Dubuche and Sandoz he would pick them up at eight o’clock at the latter’s flat, so that they could all go together to the Palais de l’Industrie where they were to meet the rest of the gang. And he was an hour late already!

  He might have known he would be unable to lay his hand on anything, since the studio had not been tidied up since the big picture was taken away. It took him five minutes to find his shoes, crawling around on his knees among a lot of old frames, with gold dust floating in the air all round him. As he had not known where to find the money for a frame, he had got the local joiner to knock together four pieces of wood and he had gilded them himself, assisted by Christine, who had proved a very inexpert gilder. Fully dressed at last, and his hat sparkling with constellations of gold dust, he was just about to go when a superstitious thought called him back to the flowers left standing alone in the middle of the table. He had to kiss those lilacs or meet with a setback; so he kissed them and filled his nostrils with their heavy springtime scent.

  Down in the porch he handed his key to the concierge as usual and said:

  ‘I shall be out all day, Madame Joseph.’

  In less than twenty minutes he was on Sandoz’s doorstep in the Rue d’Enfer. Sandoz, whom he hardly expected to find, was also late. His mother had not been well; nothing serious, just a bad night. It had worried him and kept him awake, but now his mind was at rest. Dubuche had written to say they were not to wait for him, he would meet them at the exhibition, so the two of them started out together. As it was nearly eleven they decided to lunch at a quiet little dairy in the Rue Saint-Honoré. They lingered over their meal, as if their eagerness had suddenly given way to inaction and left them to revel in sentimental recollections of their childhood.

  One o’clock struck as they were crossing the Champs-Elysées. It was a beautiful day, with a clear blue sky made brighter somehow by a breeze which, for the season, was still cool. Under the corn-coloured sun the long rows of chestnuts spread the delicate green of their newly-opened, freshly-varnished leaves; the fountains spouting their watery sheaves, the well-kept lawns, the endless avenues and vast open spaces all gave the city landscape an air of luxury. A few carriages—it was still early for them—were making their way up the Avenue, but crowds were pouring, like ants, in a never-ending stream towards the Palais de l’Industrie and being swallowed up by its enormous arcade.

  Claude shuddered when he found himself in its gigantic entrance hall, for it was as cold as any cellar and on its damp flagstones footsteps resounded as on the floor of a church. Looking up, right and left, at the monumental staircases, he said scathingly:

  ‘What do we do, trudge through all the rubbish in their Salon?’

  ‘I should think we don’t!’ replied Sandoz. ‘Let’s cut through the garden to the west staircase. That leads straight to the “Refusés”.’

  They passed scornfully by the little tables of the catalogue sellers, between the great red velvet curtains and through a porch full of shadow to the glass-roofed garden.

  It was the moment of the day when the garden was practically empty, apart from the crowd flocking to lunch at the buffet under the clock. Everybody else was on the first floor, looking at the pictures, and the only figures to be seen near the yellow sanded pathways that cut smartly round the green of the turf were the white marble statues—permanent, motionless visitors bathed in the diffused light that filtered through the glass and settled on them like dust. At the southern end the centre aisle was blocked by sun blinds, making it golden when the sun was out, with a splash of bright red and blue at either end from the stained-glass in some of the windows. One or two visitors who were already feeling the strain were sitting about on the brand new chairs and benches bright with paint, while flocks of the sparrows which roosted in the forest of girders overhead kept swooping and wheeling in noisy pursuit, or boldly scratching about in the sand.

  Claude and Sandoz made a point of hurrying ahead without looking at anything: they had been so irritated by the first thing they saw, a stately but graceless Minerva in bronze, by a Member of the Institut. But, as they were racing past an interminable row of busts, they recognized Bongrand, alone, walking slowly round a massive recumbent figure of colossal proportions.

  ‘Why, hello!’ he exclaimed when they went to shake his hand. ‘I was just looking at friend Mahoudeau’s effort. They did at least have the intelligence to accept it and put it in a good place. …’

  He stopped suddenly, then asked:

  ‘Have you been upstairs?’

  ‘No,’ said Claude, ‘we’ve just come in.’

  Then, very slowly, he talked to them about the ‘Salon des Refusés’. He was a Member of the Institut himself, though he had little in common with his fellow members, but he found the whole thing very amusing; the everlasting dissatisfaction of the painters, the campaign launched by the smaller papers such as Le Tambour, the protests, the endless complaints which had eventually begun to worry the Emperor himself; the artistic coup d’état for which he had been solely responsible, silent dreamer though he was; the shock and commotion he had caused, well and truly setting the cat among the pigeons.

  ‘You have no idea,’ he went on, ‘of the indignation among the members of the Selection Committee! … And they don’t say too much in front of me, you know; they don’t quite trust me. The full blast of their fury, of course, is meant for those awful Realists. It was against them, you remember, that the doors of the temple were systematically barred, and it’s for their benefit that the Emperor wanted to give the public a chance to revise its opinion. And the Realists have won! Oh, the things I heard said! If half of them were true, I should think the outlook’s going to be pretty black for you youngsters!’

  And with a big, kindly laugh he flung wide his arms as if to embrace all the youth he felt was springing up about him.

  ‘Your pupils are growing up,’ said Claude.

  Bongrand silenced him with a gesture, as though suddenly embarrassed. He had nothing in the exhibition, and all these things he was walking round and looking at, all this effort of human creation, the pictures, the statues, filled him somehow with regret. It was not jealousy, for he was a good man and his soul was above such emotions; rather they gave him pause and stirred that unspoken fear of gradual decline that he was never able to escape.

  ‘What about the “Refusés”?’ asked Sandoz. ‘Are they a success?’

  ‘Superb. You’ll see.’ Then, turning to Claude, and clasping both his hands, he said:

  ‘You, my lad, have got something. … They tell me I’m smart, but believe me, I’d give ten years of my life to have painted that buxom wench of yours upstairs.’

  Such praise, from such a source, moved the young artist to the verge of tears. So he had done something worth while at last! Unable to utter a word of thanks, he suddenly switched the conversation to another subject, to cover up his emotion.

  ‘Good old Mahoudeau!’ he cried, ‘he’s done a good job here! Talk about temperament, eh!’ he added, as he and Sandoz walked round Mahoudeau’s figure.

  ‘Temperament enough,’ said Bongrand with a smile, ‘but too much leg and too much bust. Still, look at the joints of those limbs, how delicate; beautifully done! … Ah well,
goodbye. This is where I leave you. I’m worn out. I’m going to sit down.’

  Claude, meanwhile, was looking up, listening, suddenly aware that the air was filled with a terrific noise, a persistent rumbling, like the pounding of a storm against rocks, or the ceaseless roar of some untiring onslaught from out of the infinite.

  ‘Listen,’ he said. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘That,’ said Bongrand, as he moved away, ‘is the crowd upstairs at the show.’

  And the two young men hurried across the garden and up to the ‘Salon des Refusés’.

  It was all very well set out; the setting quite as luxurious as that provided for the accepted pictures: tall, antique tapestry hangings in the doorways, exhibition panels covered with green serge, red velvet cushions on the benches, white cotton screens stretched under the skylights, and, at the first glance down the long succession of rooms, it looked very much like the official Salon, with the same gold frames, the same patches of colour for the pictures. But what was not immediately obvious, was the predominant liveliness of the atmosphere, the feeling of youth and brightness. The crowd, already dense, was growing every minute, for visitors were flocking away from the official Salon, goaded by curiosity, eager to judge the judges, convinced from the outset that they were going to enjoy themselves and see some extremely amusing things. It was hot; there was a fine dust rising from the floor; by four o’clock the place would be stifling.

  ‘Damn it!’ said Sandoz, elbowing his way in. ‘It’s going to be no easy job getting through this crush and finding your picture.’

  In the warmth of his friendship for Claude, Sandoz wanted to lose no time; this day he was living only for Claude, Claude’s work and Claude’s success.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ cried Claude, ‘we’ll get to it in time. It won’t fly away!’

  And he deliberately pretended to be in no hurry, in spite of his overwhelming desire to run. Head high, he began to look about him. Soon, through the mighty voice of the crowd that had dazed him somewhat at first, he detected laughter, restrained still, and drowned by the trampling of feet and the hubbub of conversation. Visitors were making humorous comments in front of some of the pictures. That disturbed him, for beneath his rugged revolutionary’s exterior he was as credulous and sensitive as a woman, always expecting martyrdom, always suffering tortures, always amazed to find himself rebuffed or ridiculed.

  ‘They seem to be having fun in here,’ he said, half to himself.

  ‘I should think they are, and no wonder,’ Sandoz pointed out. ‘Look at the nags there. Can you beat those?’

  At that moment, just as they were preparing to linger a moment in the first room, Fagerolles walked straight into them. He had not seen them, and started slightly, as if the meeting annoyed him, but he was soon his amiable self again.

  ‘Hello!’ he said. ‘I was just thinking about you two. … I’ve been here for the last hour.’

  ‘What have they done with Claude’s picture?’ Sandoz asked.

  Fagerolles, who had just spent twenty minutes in front of the picture, studying it and studying the reactions of the public, answered smoothly:

  ‘I’ve no idea. … Let’s all look for it together, shall we?’

  With that, he joined them. He was as big a humbug as ever, and had now exchanged his former raffish garb for clothes of more formal cut, and, though devastating irony was still never far from his lips, he now assumed the serious, pursed-up expression that indicates the young man bent upon success.

  ‘I’m sorry now I didn’t put something in this year, too,’ he said, with great conviction. ‘Then I could have been on the line with the rest of you. … There are some startling things here, believe me. Look at those horses now.’

  He pointed at the huge canvas ahead of them, and at the crowds milling in front of it and laughing. It was the work, they said, of a retired vet, and showed a lot of horses in a meadow. They were life-size horses, painted in the most fantastic blues and mauves and pinks, with their bones sticking through their hides in a most astonishing manner.

  ‘What do you mean?’ said Claude suspiciously. ‘What do you take us for?’

  Fagerolles feigned enthusiasm.

  ‘No, seriously,’ he said, ‘it has its points. The chap knows his horses! He paints like nothing on earth, of course, but what does that matter? He is at least original. He does offer something new.’

  There was not a trace of a smile on his girlish face, but only in his bright eyes just the faintest spark of mockery. Then he threw out another remark, the unkindness of which he alone was able to appreciate:

  ‘If you’re going to attach any importance to a lot of ignoramuses laughing, you’re going to have your eyes opened in a minute or two.’

  The three friends moved on and were soon ploughing their way laboriously through the sea of shoulders. When they reached the second room they cast their eyes round, but the picture they were looking for was not there. What they did see, however, was Irma Bécot on Gagnière’s arm, crushed close against the wall. He was inspecting a very small canvas, and she, with a smile on her comic little face, was looking about her, thoroughly enjoying being jostled by the crowd.

  ‘Hello,’ said Sandoz, surprised. ‘She’s with Gagnière now, is she?’

  ‘Just a passing fancy,’ explained Fagerolles calmly. ‘It’s very funny really. … You know somebody’s furnished a flat for her, of course? Oh, yes, the very last word. It’s that young duffer of a marquis there was such a fuss about in the papers, remember? Oh, she’s a girl with a future, is Irma; I’ve always said she was. You can put her in a four-poster in a mansion, but there are times when you can’t keep her out of a camp-bed in a studio. That’s what she was after on Sunday night. She dropped in at the Café Baudequin about one o’clock in the morning; we’d just gone, and there was only Gagnière left, asleep over his beer. … So she picked up Gagnière!’

  Irma had noticed them at once and was already making affectionate gestures to them, so they could not escape. When Gagnière turned round, looking even more generally colourless than usual, with his light hair and beardless cheeks, he showed no surprise at finding them standing behind him.

  ‘It’s amazing,’ he faltered.

  ‘What is?’ asked Fagerolles.

  ‘This picture. … A little masterpiece. … Honest, simple, painted with real conviction.’

  And he pointed to the tiny canvas in which he had just been so absorbed. It was such an infantile effort that it might have been painted by a child of four: a little house with a little path in front and a little tree on one side, all very badly askew, all outlined firmly with black, with the inevitable corkscrew of smoke twirling out of the chimney.

  Claude looked impatient, but Fagerolles, completely selfpossessed, murmured:

  ‘Subtle, very subtle,’ and added: ‘But what about your picture, Gagnière? Where’s that?’

  ‘Mine? There,’ replied Gagnière.

  And indeed there it was, not far from the little masterpiece. It was a landscape, all pearly grey. A bit of the Seine, very carefully painted, pretty, though rather heavy in tone, perfectly balanced and completely free from all revolutionary crudity.

  ‘So they were fools enough to turn this down, were they?’ said Claude, now full of interest. ‘But why?’ he went on, for there was no obvious reason for the Selection Committee’s action. ‘Why, I ask you, why?’ And indeed there seemed to be no reason why the Committee should have refused it.

  ‘Because it’s Realist!’ declared Fagerolles in a voice so decisive that it was impossible to tell whether his remark was directed against the Selection Committee or the picture.

  Irma, meanwhile, left to her own devices, was simply staring at Claude, smiling unconsciously, as she always did, at his rather bungling shyness. To think he had never had the gumption to look her up! He looked different today, she thought, funny somehow, certainly not at his handsomest, dishevelled as he was and blotchy about the face, as if he had had a high fever. Grieved by his
lack of interest, she tugged his sleeve as she said:

  ‘Isn’t that a friend of yours over there, looking for you?’

  It was Dubuche. She recognized him as she had met him once at the Café Baudequin. He was pushing laboriously through the crowd and looking vaguely about him, over the sea of heads. Suddenly, just as Claude was waving wildly to attract his attention, he turned round and bowed very low to a group of three people; the father, very short and stout and red in the face with blood pressure; the mother, very thin with a complexion like wax, wasted by anaemia; the daughter, so puny for her eighteen years that she looked as frail and spindly as a very young child.

  ‘Now he’s nicely entangled,’ said Claude quietly. ‘The fellow certainly has some ugly friends! I wonder where he dug up those beauties?’

  Gagnière, unperturbed, said he knew the man by name. It was old Margaillan, a big building contractor, a millionaire five or six times over already and making another fortune out of the rebuilding of Paris, contracting for whole boulevards at a time. Dubuche had most likely made his acquaintance through some of the architects whose plans he overhauled.

  Sandoz felt sorry for the girl, she was so thin.

  ‘Poor thing!’ he said. ‘Like a skinned rabbit. Of all the sad sights!’

  ‘Enough of that!’ said Claude harshly. ‘They’re every one of ’em stamped with all the crimes of their class; they reek of stupidity and scrofula … and serve ’em right, too. … There! He’s dropping us and going off with them. We might have known he would, he’s an architect! Ah, well, good riddance! If he wants us now, he can look for us.’