The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  Dubuche, who had not even noticed his friends, had just offered his arm to the mother and was moving away, explaining the pictures with a wealth of obsequious and exaggerated gestures.

  ‘Come on,’ said Fagerolles. ‘It’s time we moved, too.’

  Then, turning to Gagnière, he added:

  ‘Do you happen to know where they’ve stuck Claude’s picture?’

  ‘I don’t,’ replied Gagnière. ‘I was looking for it. … I’ll go along with you.’

  So he joined the party, but forgot to include Irma Bécot. It had been her idea that it would be nice to go round the Salon on his arm, but he was so unused to having a woman with him that he was continually losing her and was always surprised to find her at his side, since he could not think how, or why, they came to be together. She ran after him now and clutched his arm again, though she really wanted to be with Claude, who was just moving into the next room with Fagerolles and Sandoz.

  All five of them wandered around taking in what they could, forced apart one moment, crushed together the next, but carried along by the general surge of the crowd. An abominable effort of Chaîne’s, ‘Christ and the Woman taken in Adultery’, brought them to a momentary halt with its stiff, wooden figures, all skin and bones, painted in the drabbest of colours. Next to it was something they admired; a beautiful study of a woman from the back, her haunches well in evidence, and her head turned towards the painter. On every side the walls were covered with a mixture of the excellent and the execrable, in every possible style; last-ditchers of the ‘historical’ school cheek by jowl with youthful fanatics of Realism, colourless mediocrity with blatant originality, a ‘Jezebel Dead’ that looked as if she had mouldered away in the cellars of the Beaux-Arts hung next to a ‘Woman in White’, a curious vision, but seen by the eye of a great artist; opposite an immense ‘Shepherd contemplating the Sea (Fable)’, a tiny picture of Spaniards playing pelota, a marvel of intensity in lighting. The execrable was very fully represented; nothing was left out, neither military subjects complete with toy soldiers, wishy-washy Classical subjects nor medieval subjects heavily scored with bitumen. Superficially, it was an incoherent jumble, but there was truth and sincerity enough about the landscapes and sufficient points of technical interest in most of the portraits to give it a healthy atmosphere of youthful passion and vigour. There may have been fewer frankly bad pictures in the official Salon, but the general level of interest and attainment was certainly lower. Here there was a scent of battle in the air, a spirited battle fought with zest at crack of dawn, when the bugles sound and you face the foe convinced you will defeat him before nightfall.

  The warlike atmosphere put new life into Claude and roused him to such anger that he listened to the swelling laughter of the crowd with a look on his face as defiant as if he were listening to the whistle of bullets. The laughter, which had sounded very discreet at first, grew louder as he advanced through the various rooms. When he reached the third the women had stopped stifling their merriment with their handkerchiefs, and the men, completely unrestrained, were holding their sides and roaring with laughter. It was the contagious hilarity of a crowd bent on amusement, gradually working itself up to the point where it would laugh loudly at nothing and be just as convulsed by beautiful things as by ugly ones. Chaîne’s Christ provoked less laughter than the nude woman whose prominent buttocks, which seemed to stand out from the canvas, were apparently thought to be screamingly funny. The ‘Woman in White’ provided some amusement, too, for she was rarely without her group of grinning admirers digging each other in the ribs and going off into fits of helpless mirth. Every picture had its peculiar attraction; people would call to each other to come and look at this or that, and pithy remarks were heard on every lip, until at last, by the time Claude had reached Room No. IV, one old lady’s chortles so exasperated him that he nearly slapped her face.

  ‘Of all the idiots!’ he cried, turning to the others. ‘Enough to make you want to take a masterpiece and knock them on the head with it!’

  Sandoz, too, was becoming hot under the collar now, but Fagerolles merely added to the general merriment by singing the praises of the most detestable paintings, while Gagnière simply floated through the throng and in his wake trailed Irma, delighted to feel her skirts wrapping round the legs of the men.

  Suddenly they recognized Jory away in the distance, blond and handsome as ever, his fine, pink nose resplendent in his beaming face, thrusting his way through the crowd, waving his arms and hurrahing as if he had just had some personal triumph. As soon as he saw Claude he exclaimed:

  ‘So there you are at last! I’ve been looking for you for the last hour. … Talk about a success, my friend! I’ve never seen anything like it!’

  ‘Success? What success?’

  ‘Your picture, of course! … Come on, I must show you. No, go and see for yourself. It’s stunning!’

  Overjoyed, Claude turned pale and he felt a lump in his throat, although he pretended to be unmoved by his friend’s announcement. Recalling what Bongrand had said, he was now convinced of his genius.

  ‘Good afternoon all!’ Jory ran on, shaking hands all round. Then he, Fagerolles, and Gagnière settled round the good-natured Irma, who dispensed her smiles evenly among the three of them; it was, as she said, ‘quite a family gathering’.

  Sandoz was impatient.

  ‘Where is the thing?’ he asked. ‘Take us to it, can’t you?’

  So Jory took the lead and the others followed. They practically had to fight their way into the last room, and Claude, who was well behind the rest, heard the laughter growing louder and louder, mounting like a tide. Then, when at last he did manage to get inside the room, he saw one enormous confused mass of humanity seething and milling in front of his own picture. It was there that everybody was laughing loudest and longest: in front of his picture.

  ‘There!’ cried the triumphant Jory. ‘How’s that for success?’

  Gagnière, cowed and feeling almost as ashamed as if he had taken a smack in the face, murmured:

  ‘It’s the wrong sort. … I’d rather have seen something else.’

  ‘Something else! Don’t be a fool!’ cried Jory in a burst of impassioned conviction. ‘That’s success, I tell you! Who cares a damn if they laugh? We’re launched, no doubt about it. The papers’ll be full of us tomorrow!’

  ‘Idiots!’ was all Sandoz could say; he was choking with grief.

  Fagerolles said nothing, but assumed the dignified, detached look of a family friend at a funeral. The only one who could still smile was Irma; she thought it was funny. Then, with a soothing gesture she leaned on the shoulder of the wretched Claude and whispered gently:

  ‘Don’t take on because of them, love. It’s only meant in fun, you know, so cheer up.’

  Claude never stirred. He felt frozen. His heart had stopped beating for a moment in his bitter disappointment. As if drawn and held by some invisible force, he stood glaring in astonishment at his picture. He hardly recognized it hanging there in that room. It was certainly not the work he had seen in his studio. It looked yellower in the light that filtered through the white cotton screen; it looked somehow smaller, too, and cruder, and yet at the same time more laboured. And now, either by comparison with the pictures hanging near it, or simply on seeing it for the first time in this new setting, he took in all its faults at a glance, after looking on it with blind eyes for months on end. In a few strokes he was already painting it all afresh, altering all the planes, rearranging a limb here, changing his tone value there. Without a shadow of doubt, the man in the black velvet jacket was all wrong, he was over-painted and badly posed; the best thing about him was his hand. In the far distance the two little female figures rolling together on the grass were not sufficiently developed, not solid enough, only amusing to the trained eye of the artist. The trees and the sunlit glade he liked, and the naked woman lying on the grass he found so resplendent with life that she looked like something above and beyond his capacities, as if
she had been painted by someone else and he himself had still to see her as she really was.

  He turned to Sandoz and said:

  ‘No wonder they’re laughing. The picture’s unfinished. … Still, the woman’s good. Bongrand wasn’t fooling.’

  Sandoz tried to get him outside, but he refused to be led and moved even closer to the picture. Now he had passed judgment on his own work, he wanted to watch and listen to the crowd. It was one long-drawn-out explosion of laughter, rising in intensity to hysteria. As soon as they reached the doorway, he saw visitors’ faces expand with anticipated mirth, their eyes narrow, their mouths broaden into a grin, and from every side came tempestuous puffings and blowings from fat men, rusty, grating whimperings from thin ones, and, dominating all the rest, high-pitched, fluty giggles from the women. A group of young men on the opposite side of the room were writhing as if their ribs were being tickled. One woman had collapsed on to a bench, her knees pressed tightly together, gasping, struggling to regain her breath behind her handkerchief. The rumour that there was a funny picture to be seen must have spread rapidly, for people came stampeding from every other room in the exhibition and gangs of sightseers, afraid of missing something, came pushing their way in, shouting ‘Where?’—‘Over there!’—‘Oh, I say! Did you ever?’ And shafts of wit fell thicker here than anywhere else. It was the subject that was the main target for witticisms. Nobody understood it; everyone thought it ‘mad’ and ‘killingly funny’. ‘There, do you see, the lady’s too hot, but the gentleman’s wearing his jacket, afraid of catching a cold.’—‘No, that’s not it! She’s green, can’t you see! Must have been in the water some time when he pulled her out. That’s why he’s holding his nose.’—‘Pity he painted the man back to front, makes him look so rude, somehow!’—‘I know what it is, it’s a Young Ladies’ Academy having a picnic. Don’t you see those two playing leap-frog?’—‘I say, what’s this, washing day? People blue, trees blue, he’s blued up the whole thing, if you ask me!’ The ones who did not laugh lost their tempers, taking the overall blueness, Claude’s original way of rendering the effect of daylight, as an insult to their intelligence. It was an outrage and should be stopped, according to elderly gentlemen who brandished their walking sticks in indignation. One very serious individual, as he stalked away in anger, was heard announcing to his wife that he had no use for bad jokes, while another visitor, a finicky little man who searched through the catalogue for an explanation to enlighten his daughter, read out the title: ‘Open Air’, and released a fresh outburst of hooting and shouting. The word was picked up, repeated, passed on for comment. ‘Open Air’! Well, well, it was certainly open, and there was plenty in the air, too much in the air, it was all in the air! It was beginning to look like a riot. More and more people kept forcing their way up to the picture, and as the heat grew more intense faces grew more and more purple, the stupid, gaping faces of ignorant people pretending to appreciate painting and voicing all the nonsense, all the preposterous remarks, all the gibes and taunts that the sight of an original work never fails to elicit from the mouths of bourgeois imbeciles.

  The last blow had still to fall. The commotion was at its height when Claude saw Dubuche coming back with the Margaillans still in tow. As soon as he came up to the picture the cowardly Dubuche, overcome with shame and embarrassment, tried to hurry past, pretending he had seen neither the picture nor his friends. But the building contractor had already planted himself in front of the picture, his stubby legs well apart and his eyes starting from their sockets as he bawled in his great, raucous voice:

  ‘I say! Does he call himself a painter, the fellow who did this?’

  The millionaire parvenu’s good-humoured coarseness, summing up as it did the average opinion of the crowd, raised a tremendous guffaw. Then Margaillan, flattered by his reception and tickled by the unfamiliarity of the painting before him, began to laugh, too, an unrestrained, full-throated laugh that boomed over all the rest—the grand finale on the great organ, with all the stops full out.

  ‘Please take Régine outside,’ pale Madame Margaillan whispered to Dubuche, who immediately began to clear a passage for the daughter, whose eyes were modestly cast down, and he put so much muscular vigour into the task that he might have been rescuing the poor little creature from certain death. Then, when he had taken his leave of the Margaillans in the doorway, with many handshakes and a rare display of social graces, he came back to join his friends and said bluntly to Sandoz, Fagerolles, and Gagnière:

  ‘How could I help it? It wasn’t my doing. … I’d told him what to expect, that people wouldn’t understand it. And besides, say what you like, it’s smutty and you can’t deny it.’

  Sandoz turned pale and clenched his fists with rage.

  ‘They jeered at Delacroix,’ he cried, ‘and they jeered at Courbet! Philistines, that’s what they are! An enemy race of cruel, mindless executioners!’

  Gagnière, remembering his Sunday battles for real music at the Pasdeloup concerts, shared Sandoz’s indignation.

  ‘It’s the same lot who hiss at Wagner,’ he cried. ‘I know their faces. … Look. That fat one over there. …’

  Jory had to hold him back, though he himself would have liked to stir the excitement of the crowd even more. He kept on saying it was a capital show, with a hundred thousand francs’ publicity value! Meanwhile Irma, who had been running loose among the crowd, had picked up two young stockbrokers she knew, a pair of the most unbridled scoffers, and was trying to make them see reason, slapping their fingers to make them say the picture was good.

  So far Fagerolles had not opened his lips. He was still examining the picture, with occasional glances at the public. With his Parisian’s flair, his slickness, and his supple conscience, he realized at once where the discrepancy lay, and he had the vague feeling that some slight attenuation, a rearrangement of the subject and a general toning-down of the treatment were all that was needed to make the picture an unqualified popular success. The influence Claude had had on him persisted; it had soaked deep into him, left its mark upon him; but he still thought Claude was an unutterable fool for submitting a picture like this. Wasn’t it sheer stupidity to believe in the intelligence of the public? What was the point of the woman being naked and the man fully clothed? What was the sense of the two small female figures wrestling in the background? Here was a piece of painting without its equal in the Salon, the work of a master, but for all that he could not help feeling a profound contempt for a painter who, though so admirably gifted, set all Paris laughing as if he was the craziest of crazy daubers.

  His feeling of contempt was so strong that he could hide it no longer, and in an outburst of irrepressible candour he said to Claude:

  ‘Between you and me, old fellow, you asked for it. If anyone’s a fool here, it’s you!’

  Claude did not answer, but turned his eyes from the crowd and looked at him. He was pale and his lips twitched occasionally, but otherwise the laughter had not affected him; nobody knew who he was; it was his work, not he, that had been outraged. For a short while, then, he looked back at the picture and then, very slowly, at all the other paintings in the room, and, amidst the ruins of his illusions and the pain of the wound inflicted on his pride, there came to him, out of all that painting, so gay and brave and reckless in its challenge to out-of-date routine, a breath of youth and sanity. It both consoled him and gave him strength, it freed him from all sense of remorse or self-reproach and urged him rather to make an even firmer stand against the public. Some of the efforts were clumsy, inevitably, and some of them childish, but the general tone was admirable and so was the light, a fine, silvery, diffused light, with all the verve and sparkle of the open air! It was like a window flung open on all the drab concoctions and the stewing juices of tradition, letting the sun pour in till the walls were as gay as a morning in spring, and the clear light of his own picture, the blue effect that had caused so much amusement, shone out brighter than all the rest. This was surely the long-awaite
d dawn, the new day breaking on the world of art! As he looked around he saw one critic stop, but not to laugh; he saw famous painters, obviously surprised, but interested; and he watched old Malgras, unwashed as usual, and lips pursed as becomes a connoisseur, after going from canvas to canvas, stop dead in front of his and stand rapt in contemplation. It was then he turned to Fagerolles and surprised him by his delayed retort:

  ‘Fools are born, my dear chap, not made, so my fate seems to be sealed. How lucky you must feel to be so clever!’

  Fagerolles slapped him on the back to show there was no ill-feeling, and Claude let Sandoz take him by the arm to lead him away. They had all decided that on leaving the ‘Salon des Refusés’ they would go through the Architecture room, as Dubuche had had a plan for an art-gallery accepted, and he had been hovering around with such a humble, beseeching look on his face that they felt they could hardly refuse him the satisfaction of showing it to them.

  ‘Ah! What an ice-box!’ said Jory with a laugh as they entered the room. ‘At least you can breathe in here!’

  They all took off their hats and mopped their brows in relief, for it was like coming into cool shadow after a long trek in the broiling sun. The room was empty. The soft, even, rather dismal light that filtered through the white holland blind stretched across the sky-lights, was reflected like a stagnant pool in the mirror of the highly polished floor. Against the faded red of the walls the plans, large and small, with their pale blue borders, stood out in rectangles of palest watercolour. And alone, absolutely alone in the heart of this desert was one man, a man with a beard standing lost in contemplation in front of a project for a charity institution. Three ladies who looked in took fright and trotted hastily into the next room.