The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  His cry rose and was lost in the heavens. There was not a breath of wind, only the river slipping silently by beneath the willows. Turning sharply to his companion, Sandoz spoke full into his face:

  ‘I know now exactly what I’m going to do in all this. Oh, nothing colossal, something quite modest, just enough for one lifetime even when you have some pretty exaggerated ambitions! I’m going to take a family and study each member of it, one by one, where they come from, what becomes of them, how they react to one another. Humanity in miniature, therefore, the way humanity evolves, the way it behaves. … I shall place my characters in some definite period that will provide the milieu and the prevailing circumstances and make the thing a sort of slice of history, if you see what I’m getting at. … I shall make it a series of novels, say fifteen or twenty, each complete in itself and with its own particular setting, but all connected, a cycle of books that will at least provide a roof in my old age, if they don’t prove too much for me in the meantime!’

  He stretched out on his back on the ground and spread his arms wide, as if he wanted the earth to embrace him, and then began to laugh as he launched into a comic tirade.

  ‘Good earth!’ he cried. ‘Take me to thy bosom, thou who art the mother of us all, the only, the unique source of life! Thou, the immortal, the eternal, through whom the very soul of the world doth circulate, the sap which floweth even through thy stones, and maketh the trees themselves the brothers of us all! … Let me lose myself in thee, good earth, as I feel thee now beneath my limbs, embracing me, filling me with thy warmth! In my work thou alone shalt be the great moving force, the means as well as the end, the mighty ark in which all things shall draw life from the breath of all beings!’

  Started as a joke, on a note of mock lyricism, his invocation ended as a cry of burning conviction quivering with the poet’s true emotion. There were tears in Sandoz’s eyes, and, to hide his feelings, he added in a deliberately hard voice and with a vague gesture that embraced the whole horizon:

  ‘Of all the damned silly notions! One man one soul, when there’s this universal soul for all of us!’

  Claude, almost completely hidden in the grass, lay still where he was. Then, after another silence, he broke out with:

  ‘Good old Pierre! Go ahead and slay the lot of ’em. … But be ready for a few hard knocks yourself.’

  ‘I’m not worrying about that,’ replied Sandoz, scrambling to his feet and stretching himself. ‘My hide’s too thick. They’d only break their wrists. … Time we were making a move now, don’t you think? I don’t want to miss my train.’

  Christine had taken a great liking to Sandoz; she admired his healthy, straightforward attitude to life, so one day she found the courage to ask him to do her a favour and be godfather to Jacques. She never entered a church herself these days, but she saw no reason for penalizing the child. What really decided her was the desire to provide him with a firm support in life in the shape of a godfather whose steady reliability she had not been slow to discern in the midst of his powerful outbursts. Claude was clearly surprised at her idea, but agreed with a casual shrug, and so the child was baptized. They managed to find him a godmother, a neighbour’s daughter, and they all feasted on lobster brought specially from Paris.

  That day, when goodbyes were being said, Christine took Sandoz on one side and beseeched him to come and see them again:

  ‘Come again soon,’ she said. ‘He gets so bored out here.’

  She was right. Claude was slipping back into his fits of black despair, dropping his painting, going out alone, hanging round the Faucheurs’ inn near where the ferry-boat landed its passengers, as if he expected to see Paris itself step ashore at any moment. Paris haunted him. He went there regularly, once a month, and always came back depressed and unable to work. Autumn came, and then winter, a wet, muddy winter, and he let himself sink into a kind of surly torpor, accompanied by occasional recriminations against Sandoz who, since he married in October, had been unable to make such frequent trips to Bennecourt. Sandoz’s visits were the only thing that seemed able to arouse him; they would keep him in a state of great excitement for a whole week and provoke an endless flow of feverish talk about the latest news from Paris. For a long time Claude had been able to hide his longing for Paris, but now he talked about it from morning till night, and, as they sat by the fireside after Jacques was asleep, made Christine’s brain reel with a spate of talk about things she had never heard of and people she had never seen. The more he talked the more his excitement grew, and Christine was called upon to express her opinion and side with this person or that as they cropped up in his never-ending commentary.

  Didn’t she think Gagnière was a fool to throw himself away on music when he might have been developing his talent as a painter of landscapes? He was going to a young lady for music lessons now, it appeared. At his age! What did she think of that? Didn’t she think he was mad? Then there was Jory, trying to make it up with Irma Bécot ever since she got herself a nice little place of her own in the Rue de Moscou. She knew those two, of course; a fine pair, and well matched, didn’t she think so? But the smartest of the smart was Fagerolles. He’d tell him what he thought about him next time he met him. He’d let down the whole gang by entering for the Prix de Rome, even if he had been turned down! A bounder who used to have nothing to say in favour of the Beaux-Arts and wanted to wipe tradition off the face of the earth! There was no getting away from it, all this itching for success and being hailed by a lot of numskulls even if it meant riding rough-shod over one’s friends, made people do the dirtiest tricks. Say what she liked, she couldn’t defend him, could she? She couldn’t be bourgeois enough to do that! And when she had agreed with him on that point, he would revert to another story he thought extremely funny and that always provoked him to fits of noisy, nervous laughter, the story of Mahoudeau and Chaîne. Between them they had killed little Jabouille, the husband of the terrible Mathilde who kept the herb-shop. Oh, yes, they killed him, the little consumptive cuckold, one night when he had one of his fits; his wife called in the pair of them, and between them they massaged the life out of the poor little beggar!

  When Christine showed no sign of being amused, Claude would get up and grumble:

  ‘Nothing ever makes you laugh! … Come on, we’d be better off going to bed.’

  He adored her as much as ever and claimed her body with the desperate urge of a man who means love to be a joy unto itself, blotting out the memory of all else. But now love in itself was not enough, he wanted to go beyond even that, for another old, unconquerable urge had come over him once more.

  When spring came he began to show a lively interest in the Salon, though he had previously pretended to disdain it and had sworn he would never submit a picture again. Whenever he met Sandoz he asked him what the others were sending in. On opening-day he went to see it and came back in the evening very excited and very critical. There was a bust of Mahoudeau’s, not bad but not outstanding; a little landscape by Gagnière, a make-weight really, but nicely lighted. That was all, except a thing by Fagerolles, an actress in front of a mirror making up her face. He did not mention it at first, but later referred to it with a certain amount of indignant laughter. Just like Fagerolles, always with an eye to the main chance! Now he had missed his Prix de Rome he had no qualms about exhibiting his work and breaking away from the Beaux-Arts; but the way he was doing it had to be seen to be believed. He was simply producing a sort of slick compromise, painting that appeared daring on the surface but without a single original quality about it! What’s more, he was certainly going to make a success of it, for there’s nothing the bourgeois likes better than being stroked when he thinks he’s being manhandled. It was time a real painter showed up in that dreary wilderness of a Salon, among that crop of smart young men and brainless idiots! If ever a citadel was worth storming, this was, by God it was!

  Christine, realizing how furious he was, finally ventured to break in quietly with:

  ‘If you
like, we can go back to Paris.’

  ‘Who’s talking about going back to Paris?’ he cried. ‘It’s impossible to talk to you without your getting the wrong end of the stick!’

  Six weeks later he heard something that kept him occupied for a whole week. … His friend Dubuche was going to marry Mlle. Régine Margaillan, the daughter of the owner of ‘La Richaudière’. It was a complicated story, full of surprising details which kept him tremendously amused. In the first place, Dubuche had gone and won himself a medal with a project he had exhibited for a pavilion in the middle of a park. And the funny part about that was that his teacher, old Duquersonnière, had apparently remodelled the whole thing himself and then coolly arranged for the Selection Committee, of which he was chairman, to award it the medal! And, to crown all, it was the award that settled the wedding. A pretty state of affairs, eh, when medals were used for placing poor but deserving pupils in conveniently wealthy families! Like all parvenus, old Margaillan wanted nothing more than a son-in-law who could be of use to him in his business, a son-in-law complete with the right sort of diplomas and the latest cut in morning coats.

  For some time he had had his eye on the young man from the École des Beaux-Arts who always got such very good marks and was so diligent and so highly commended by his teachers. The medal brought his enthusiasm to a head; he gave him his daughter on the spot and took him into the firm as a partner who could not fail to turn millions into tens of millions, since he knew all there was to know about good building. Besides, he was just what poor, sickly, little Régine needed, a good healthy husband.

  ‘A chap would have to be pretty keen on the cash, don’t you think, to marry a skinned rabbit like Régine?’ was Claude’s inevitable comment.

  When Christine, who felt sorry for her, tried to say something in her favour, he would retort:

  ‘But I’m not running her down! If married life doesn’t prove too much for her, all well and good. It’s certainly no fault of hers if her father’s a mason who was silly and ambitious enough to marry a bourgeois. With generations of drunkards on one side and the worn-out, disease-ridden blood of a degenerate race on the other, no wonder the girl’s what she is! There’s decrepitude for you, in spite of the money-bags! What’s the good of piling up wealth? I ask you, what is the good of it if all it leads to is a generation of foetuses in pickle-bottles?’

  He showed signs of becoming so violent that Christine had to take him in her arms and hold him there as she kissed him and laughed him back to his old kind-hearted self. Then, in a quieter mood, he understood and even approved of the marriages his two old friends had made. It meant three of them had found wives for themselves, really! What a funny thing life was, after all!

  Once more summer went by, the fourth they had spent at Bennecourt, and the happiest they were ever to have, for living was a quiet, easy affair in the depths of the country. Since they went there they had never been short of money; Claude’s thousand francs a year and the money they got for the few pictures he sold were enough for their needs. They even managed to put a certain amount aside as well as buy some linen. Country life was ideal, too, for young Jacques. He was two and a half now, sturdy and rosy-cheeked, and spent all his days out of doors, tearing his clothes to tatters and getting so dirty that his mother very often did not know where to start getting him clean. So long as he slept well and enjoyed his food she did not worry over much about him, but kept all her tenderness and anxiety in reserve for her grown-up child, her artist husband whose humours and depressions kept her nerves constantly on edge.

  The position was growing worse every day. They led a quiet life and should have been free from cares, and yet they felt themselves slipping into a restless, depressing state of mind which expressed itself in a sense of perpetual exasperation.

  The joy they had known in the early days of their country life was over. Their boat had rotted, fallen to pieces and sunk to the bottom of the Seine, and they never even thought of making use of the one the Faucheurs had placed at their disposal. They had grown tired of the river and lost all taste for rowing, and although they still repeated their old cries of enthusiasm over certain favourite beauty-spots on the islands, they never had any inclination to go and visit them again. Even their rambles along the river-bank had lost their charm; it was too hot down there in summer, and in winter it was where you caught colds. As for the plateau overlooking the village with its vast stretches of apple orchards, it might have been some far distant county, so completely off the beaten track that it would have been foolish even to try to get there on foot. Even the house was getting on their nerves, with its living-room like a barracks where they had to eat in a perpetual smell of stale cooking, and a bedroom that seemed to be the rallying-ground of all the winds of heaven. To make things even worse, the apricot crop had failed and the finest of the giant rosebushes, being so old, had fallen easy victims to blight and died. It was familiarity breeding dreary contempt, making even eternal nature appear to grow old through over-contemplation of the same landscape. The worst thing about it was that Claude the painter was tired of it all, totally unable to find a single subject to fire his imagination. He plodded wearily about the countryside as if it were devoid of all interest and drained of all life, and there was not a single tree he did not know or a play of light he had not seen. No, it was all over, cold, lifeless; he would never do anything worth while now in such a god-forsaken backwater!

  October came with its watery skies, and on one of the first wet evenings Claude flew into a rage because his dinner was late. He pushed the stupid Mélie out of the house and slapped Jacques because he happened to get into his way. Christine, in tears, put her arms around him and said:

  ‘It’s time we left this place. Please let us go back to Paris.’

  ‘So you’re at that again, are you?’ cried Claude furiously, tearing himself from her embrace. ‘We shall never go back to Paris! Never! Do you hear?’

  ‘For my sake,’ Christine went on gently. ‘Do it for my sake, please. Do it to please me.’

  ‘Why, don’t you like being here?’

  ‘No, I shall die if we stay here. Besides, I want you to work, and I know your place is in Paris, not here. It would be a crime to bury yourself in this place any longer.’

  ‘That’s enough! We’re staying here.’

  He was trembling with emotion, for Paris was calling him, just on the horizon yonder, Paris lighting up on a winter evening. He could feel the mighty effort his friends were making there; he was back with them, sharing their triumph, being their leader again, since there was not one among them strong enough or proud enough to claim their leadership. Yet, for all his hallucinations, for all the need he felt to hasten back to join them, by some ungovernable contradiction which sprung he knew not how from the very depths of his being, he persisted in his refusal to go. Was it the fear that is known to attack even the brave, or the unconscious revolt of happiness against the force of destiny?

  ‘Listen!’ cried Christine. ‘I’m going to pack and you’re going to come with me!’

  Five days later they were on their way to Paris, after packing up all their things to be forwarded by rail.

  Claude was already outside in the road with little Jacques when Christine suddenly had an idea that she had forgotten something. She went back into the house alone, and when she saw it completely empty began to cry; she felt it somehow tearing at her, as if she were leaving behind some part of herself. How willingly she would have stayed on there, how keenly she felt she could have lived there for ever, though it was she who had insisted upon them leaving it and going back to that passionate city in which she had always sensed a rival! Still looking around for what she thought she had forgotten, she picked a rose she found growing outside the kitchen window, the one last rose, nipped by the frost. Then she closed the gate on the deserted garden.

  Chapter 7

  No sooner was Claude back on the Paris pavements, among the feverish bustle and the din, than he was all eager to
be out and about, to go and look up his friends. As soon as he was up in the morning he was out of doors, leaving Christine alone to settle into the studio they had rented in the Rue de Douai, near the Boulevard de Clichy. Thus, two days after their return, he dropped in on Mahoudeau at eight o’clock on a dull, cold, grey November morning. He found the shop the sculptor occupied in the Rue du Cherche-Midi already open, and Mahoudeau, only just out of bed, pale-faced, bleary-eyed and shivering with cold, was just taking down the shutters.

  ‘Why, it’s you, is it?’ he said. ‘Bit early for Paris, aren’t you? … Have you left the country then? Back in town?’

  ‘Since the day before yesterday.’

  ‘Good! We’ll be seeing more of you now. … Come in. Bit chilly outside this morning.’

  Inside the shop Claude felt colder than before. He kept his overcoat collar turned up and plunged his hands deep into his pockets as he met the sudden chill of the damp streaming down the bare walls and the mud, the heaps of clay and the endless pools of water that covered the floor. The wind of poverty had blown through the place since his last visit, sweeping the casts after the Antique from the studio shelves, playing havoc with the work-tables and tubs which were now held together by rope. It was simply a messy, disreputable hole, like a mason’s yard gone to rack and ruin, and in the whitening that had been rubbed over the glass panel in the door some derisive finger had drawn a sun with rays all round and a face in the middle with a grinning semicircle for a mouth.

  ‘Wait a bit,’ went on Mahoudeau, ‘we’ll soon have the fire going. These damned studios soon get clammy with all the water and wet rags and what not.’

  On turning round, Claude saw that Chaîne was there, kneeling in front of the stove pulling the straw out of the seat of an old stool to use as a fire-lighter. He greeted him, but Chaîne did not even look up; all he did was to give a sort of low growl.