The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  Dubuche was already explaining his exhibit to his friends. It consisted of a single drawing, a sorry little project for an art-gallery, sent in at the last moment, merely to satisfy his ambition and contrary both to accepted custom and to the wishes of his teacher, who had, however, as in honour bound, arranged to have it accepted.

  ‘What’s it intended to house, this gallery of yours,’ asked Fagerolles with a very straight face, ‘painting of the Open-Air School?’

  Gagnière nodded his head in admiration, thinking all the time of something else, while Claude and Sandoz, out of loyalty to Dubuche, showed a genuine interest in the work.

  ‘It’s not at all bad,’ said Claude. ‘The decoration looks a bit mongrel to me, but that’s a mere detail.’

  Jory broke in then; he was getting impatient.

  ‘Let’s get a move on,’ he said. ‘I’m catching my death in this place.’

  So the gang moved on. The one drawback was that, to make a short cut, they had to go through the official Salon; this they resigned themselves to doing, although they had sworn that, as a protest, they would not even set foot in it. Cutting through the crowd they went firmly from end to end of the rooms casting only the occasional indignant look to right or left. There was nothing here to recall the lively riot of their Salon, with its fresh colours and its exaggerated rendering of bright sunlight. It was one long succession of gold frames filled with shadow, black, ungraceful shapes, jaundiced-looking nudes in gloomy half-lights, all the paraphernalia of Classical Antiquity, historical subjects, genre paintings, landscapes, each one thoroughly soaked in the train-oil of convention. Every picture oozed unfailing mediocrity; every one showed the same dingy, muddy quality typical of anaemic, degenerate art doing its best to put on a good face. They hurried ahead, ran almost, to escape from this place where bitumen still reigned supreme, condemning everything wholesale with the injustice of all good partisans and swearing there was nothing worth while in the place, nothing, absolutely nothing.

  They managed to escape at last and were just going downstairs to the garden when they ran into Mahoudeau and Chaîne. The former flung himself into Claude’s arms exclaiming:

  ‘What a picture, old fellow! Full of character! Full of character!’

  Claude immediately replied with a word of praise for the ‘Grape-Picker’.

  ‘You’ve given them something of an eye-opener, too!’ he said.

  Then, seeing Chaîne hovering in the background without a word from any of them about his ‘Woman taken in Adultery’, Claude felt sorry for him. There was something inexpressibly sad about Chaîne’s abominable painting and the way his whole peasant’s life had been spoilt by the misguided admiration of a foolish bourgeois amateur, so Claude always tried to cheer him with a word of approval.

  ‘Good bit of work, too, that little thing of yours,’ he said, giving Chaîne a friendly slap on the back. ‘You can still teach ’em a thing or two when it comes to drawing.’

  ‘Yes, I believe I can,’ replied Chaîne, blushing purple with vanity under his scrubby black beard.

  Now he and Mahoudeau tagged on to the rest, and Mahoudeau asked them if they had seen Chambouvard’s ‘Sower’. It was amazing, the only decent bit of sculpture in the show, he said, as he led them into the garden which was now also being overrun by the crowds.

  ‘Look!’ he said, stopping in the middle of the centre alleyway. ‘There it is, and Chambouvard himself standing in front of it!’

  And there, indeed, firmly planted in front of the statue, admiring his own work, was a big fat man with a bull neck and the heavy handsome face of an Indian idol. He was said to be the son of a veterinary surgeon from Amiens or thereabouts. At forty-five he had already produced a score of masterpieces, simple, lifelike statues, modern in texture, modelled by a workman of genius, without any refinements, all part of his routine production, for he brought forth statues as a field produces grass, good one day, bad the next, with no idea of the value of the thing created. His lack of critical faculty was such that he drew no distinction between the most glorious works of his hands and the abominable gimcrack figures he sometimes turned out. Never worried or dubious about his work, but always firmly convinced of its worth, he had the pride of some divine creator.

  ‘Stupendous!’ Claude remarked as he examined. ‘The Sower’. ‘Look at the size—and the gesture!’

  Fagerolles did not even look at the statue; he was much more amused by the great man and the train of open-mouthed young disciples he always dragged around.

  ‘Just look at them!’ he said. ‘You’d think they were at Holy Communion! And look at him! The great brute transfigured by the contemplation of his own navel!’

  Isolated, completely unaffected by the general curiosity, Chambouvard stood gaping at his Sower with the shattered look of a man who cannot quite believe he ever fathered such a work. He might have been viewing it for the first time and finding it more than he could take in. Then a look of ecstasy spread over his broad features, his head began to nod and he broke into a soft, irrepressible laugh as he murmured over and over again to himself:

  ‘Funny … funny … funny.’

  Behind him his entire train was almost swooning in rapture, but that was the only word he could find to express his boundless admiration of himself.

  There was a moment of tension when Bongrand, who was walking round with his hands behind his back, looking at nothing in particular, came up against Chambouvard. A whisper ran through the crowd as it watched the two famous artists, one short and sanguine, the other tall and diffident, shake hands and exchange a few friendly words:

  ‘Still producing marvels, I see.’

  ‘As usual! What about you, have you nothing in this year?’

  ‘Not a thing. I’m having a rest, looking for a new idea.’

  ‘Don’t be funny! You don’t need to look for new ideas!’

  With that they parted. Chambouvard and his courtiers made a measured progress through the crowd, like a sovereign very satisfied with life. Bongrand, on seeing Claude and his friends, came up to them, his hands now fluttering with agitation, and said, indicating the sculptor with a movement of his chin:

  ‘There’s a fellow I envy! Always convinced he produces masterpieces!’

  He complimented Mahoudeau on his ‘Grape-Picker’ and treated them all with a fatherly good humour that well became an old Romantic who had made his peace with the world and received the blessings of officialdom. Turning to Claude, he said:

  ‘Now, what did I tell you? You’ve seen for yourself, now you’ve been upstairs. … You’ve founded a new school.’

  ‘Well, they certainly didn’t mince matters upstairs,’ said Claude, then added: ‘But the master of all of us is you.’

  Bongrand made his usual vague, pained sort of gesture:

  ‘What do you mean?’ he said as he hastened away. ‘I’m not even my own master yet!’

  The gang strolled round for a little longer and had gone back to look once again at the ‘Grape-Picker’ when Jory noticed that Gagnière no longer had Irma Bécot on his arm. Gagnière was flabbergasted; he could not think how he had lost her. But when Fagerolles told him she had gone off in the crowd with a couple of young men he stopped worrying and followed the others around feeling considerably lightened and relieved by the loss of his embarrassing conquest.

  By this time it was almost impossible to move at all. All the benches were full and the crowds blocked the pathways, so that the slow progress of the visitors was punctuated with stops and starts marked by the most popular of the bronzes and marbles. Round the refreshment bar the general clamour that filled the vast, church-like nave swelled into a tremendous babel of voices, accompanied by the rattle of crockery and the tinkle of spoons. The sparrows had sought refuge in the forest of girders, chirping and chattering at the sinking sun through the warm glass panels in the roof. The atmosphere was static, damp and close as in a greenhouse, and with the same insipid smell of leaf-mould freshly turned, while over
the seething tide of humanity in the garden the din from the upstairs rooms, the tramping of feet on the cast-iron floors, roared on and on like the beating of a gale against cliffs.

  Claude was keenly aware of the tempest raging in the background and reaching a point where it blotted out all other sounds and howled and shrieked with all its might. It was the gaiety of the crowd, the cat-calls and the laughter released like a hurricane by the sight of his picture. He could bear it no longer:

  ‘What are we hanging round here for?’ he asked. ‘Surely not for refreshments? The place reeks of the Institut! Let’s go and have a drink outside, shall we?’

  Footsore and weary, but with contempt marking every feature, they left the exhibition. Outside they breathed again, noisily, to indicate their joy at renewing contact with nature and the spring. It was only four o’clock or thereabouts, and the sun was shining straight down the Champs-Élysées, setting everything alight, the serried ranks of carriages, the young leaves on the trees, the jets of the fountains as they leaped into the air and broke into spray of purest gold. Sauntering down the Avenue they stopped at last at a small café, the Pavillon de la Concorde, on the left just before the Place itself. It was so cramped inside that they sat down at the tables near the side-avenue, although it was already almost cold under the thick, dark canopy of the leaves. Beyond the belt of dark green shadow under the two double rows of chestnut trees, the sunlit roadway of the Avenue lay before them, and they could see Paris going by in a cloud of glory, the carriages with wheels like radiant stars, the great yellow omnibuses more heavily gilded than triumphal cars, riders whose glossy mounts seemed to shoot out sparks, while the very passers-by were transfigured and resplendent in the blaze of the sun.

  For close on three hours Claude sat there, his beer untouched, talking, arguing, in an ever-rising fever, worn out physically, but his brain seething with ideas after all the painting he had just seen. What usually happened after their visit to the Salon was greatly intensified this year as a result of the Emperor’s liberal gesture; the tide of theories rose even higher, their voices grew thicker as they grew more and more intoxicated with far-fetched theories and gave vent to their burning passion for art and beauty.

  ‘What does it matter,’ he cried, ‘if the public laughs? All we have to do is to educate the public! … After all, it really amounts to a victory. Take out a couple of hundred duds and our Salon knocks theirs into a cocked hat. We’ve got guts! We’ve got courage! We are the future! … Oh yes, the day will come when we’ll kill their Salon stone dead. We’ll ride into it as conquerors, with masterpieces for weapons. If Paris is silly enough to laugh, let it laugh! We’ll have it at our feet yet!’

  He broke off only to make a prophetic gesture embracing the great triumphal Avenue, alive with all the gaiety and luxury of the city and sweeping down to the Place de la Concorde, the view of which, through the trees, was composed of one of its splashing fountains, a stretch of balustrade, and two of its statues, Rouen with her enormous breasts, and Lille advancing her gigantic naked foot.

  ‘They think it’s amusing, the open air,’ he went on. ‘Good! If it’s open air they want, let ’em have open air, the Open-Air School, eh! Yesterday nobody had heard of it except you and me and one or two artists. Today the name’s well launched, the new school’s founded, and they founded it. … After all, why not? Open-Air School’s a good name, so I’ve no objection.’

  Jory meanwhile was slapping his thighs with satisfaction.

  ‘What did I tell you?’ he said. ‘After those articles of mine they’d got to bite, they’d got to swallow it, the numskulls! We’ve got ’em at our mercy now, and they’re going to know it!’

  Mahoudeau joined in the victory chorus, too, repeatedly bringing in his ‘Grape-Picker’ and explaining its bold originality to the silent Chaîne, the only one who was listening. Gagnière, ruthless like all timid people let loose on pure theory, was talking glibly of sending the entire Institut to the scaffold, while Sandoz, an ardent sympathizer with all sound workmanship, and Dubuche, succumbing to the contagion of his friends’ revolutionary ideas, were both seething with indignation, thumping the table and drowning Paris in every draught of beer they took. Fagerolles, very calm and collected, just smiled. He had followed the others round out of sheer amusement, for his own peculiar pleasure in inciting his friends to do things he knew would have disastrous results. While egging them on to rebel, he was making the firm resolve to work from now on for the Prix de Rome. The day’s events had made up his mind for him; he would be a fool, he thought, to compromise his talent any longer.

  The sun was dipping now to the horizon, shedding its paler gold upon the downward flow of carriages returning from the Bois. The Salon, too, must have been closing, for among the steady stream of passers-by there were numbers of gentlemen who looked like critics, with catalogues tucked under their arms.

  ‘If you want to know who invented landscape, look at Courajod,’ said Gagnière in a sudden burst of enthusiasm. ‘Have you seen his “Pool at Gagny” in the Luxembourg?’

  ‘A perfect gem!’ said Claude. ‘It’s thirty years old, and still nobody has done anything to beat it. Why do they leave it in the Luxembourg? It ought to be in the Louvre!’

  ‘Because Courajod isn’t dead,’ said Fagerolles.

  ‘What! Courajod not dead? But nobody ever sees him, nobody ever talks about him!’

  They were all astounded to learn from Fagerolles that the seventy-year-old landscape painter was still living quietly somewhere in Montmartre with his dogs and his poultry. That was one of the sad things about elderly artists; they could outlive their reputations, they could be lost sight of during their own lifetime. An awed silence fell on the little group as Bongrand, with flushed face and diffident gestures, greeted them as he went by on the arm of a friend. Close on his heels, surrounded by his disciples, came Chambouvard, laughing loudly, forging ahead, an absolute master, confident of eternity.

  ‘Hello, you leaving us?’ said Mahoudeau to Chaîne, who was moving away from the table.

  Chaîne mumbled some vague reply into his whiskers, shook hands all round and made off.

  ‘You know where he’s going,’ said Jory to Mahoudeau. ‘He’s off for another bit of fun with your midwife friend, the herbalist, the lady who smells of seasoning! … I know he is; I saw that burning look come into his eyes. Look at him, practically running. Comes over him suddenly evidently, like a touch of toothache!’

  Some of them laughed; Mahoudeau shrugged his shoulders; Claude was not listening, he was busy talking architecture to Dubuche. The art-gallery Dubuche had shown was not at all bad, but there was nothing new about it; it was simply a patient piecing together of Beaux-Arts formulas. Surely all the arts were intended to march forward together, and the process of change which was taking place in literature, painting, and even music, was going to lead to a renewal of architecture too. If ever there was a century in which architecture should have a style of its own, it was the century shortly to begin, the new century, new ground ready for reconstruction of every kind, a freshly sown field, the breeding ground of a new people. Down with the Greek temples; there was no use or place for them in modern society! Down with the Gothic cathedrals; belief in legends was dead! Down, too, with the delicate colonades and the intricate tracery of the Renaissance, that Classical revival crossed with medieval art, which produced architectural jewels but could never house modern democracy! What was wanted, and he emphasized his words with vigorous gestures, was an architectural formula to fit that democracy, the power to express it in stone, building which it could feel to be its own, something big and strong and simple, the sort of thing that was already asserting itself in railway-stations and market-halls, the solid elegance of metal girders, developed and refined still further, raised to the status of genuine beauty, proclaiming the greatness of human achievement.

  ‘Yes, quite,’ Dubuche kept saying, swept off his feet by Claude’s enthusiasm. ‘Yes, quite. That’s exactly what I wan
t to do. You wait. Give me a chance to get where I want to, and as soon as I’m free, the moment I’m free, you’ll see what I can do.’

  It was growing darker, and Claude’s increasing animation made him more eloquent than his friends had ever known him. It excited them all to listen to him, and all showed their rowdy appreciation of the outrageous remarks he fired off at them. He had returned to the subject of his own picture now and enjoyed himself thoroughly, talking about it, mimicking the bourgeois visitors looking at it, imitating every note of their imbecile laughter. On the Avenue, now ashen grey, there was nothing to see but the shadow of an occasional carriage. The side-avenue was quite dark, and it was bitterly cold under the trees. From somewhere in the clump of trees behind the café a solitary voice came floating on the air, probably from a rehearsal at the Concert de l’Horloge, the maudlin voice of a woman running through a sentimental song.

  ‘Oh, the fun those fools have given me!’ laughed Claude in a final outburst of merriment. ‘I wouldn’t have missed today for ten thousand francs!’

  He had talked himself out. The others, too, had dried up, and in the consequent lull in the conversation, they all shuddered in the icy breeze that had sprung up. With an exchange of weary handshakes the party broke up in a kind of stupor. Dubuche was dining in town. Fagerolles had an appointment. Jory, Mahoudeau and Gagnière tried in vain to drag Claude off to a cheap meal at Foucart’s, but Sandoz, worried at seeing him so abnormally cheerful, had already taken his arm and was leading him away.

  ‘Come along with me,’ he said. ‘I promised Mother I’d go home. You can have a bite of food with us. It’ll be nice to end the day together.’

  They started off along the embankment by the Tuileries, arm in arm, like two brothers, but at the Pont des Saints-Pères Claude would go no further.

  ‘You’re not going to leave me!’ Sandoz exclaimed. ‘I thought you were coming to dinner!’

  ‘No, Pierre, thank you. … I’ve too much of a headache. … I’m going home to bed.’