by Émile Zola
Claude turned back to Mahoudeau.
‘What are you doing these days?’ he asked.
‘Oh, nothing particularly startling! It’s been a rotten year really; worse than last, and that wasn’t up to much! … There’s a bit of a slump in saints and angels, you know. Oh yes, religion doesn’t sell like it did, so that means I’ve had to tighten my belt. Look, this is what I’m reduced to in the meantime,’ he said, and began to unwrap a bust he had been working on. He revealed a long face made still longer by side-whiskers, a monstrosity of pretentiousness and boundless stupidity.
‘It’s a barrister from round the corner,’ he explained. ‘Did you ever see such a revolting mug in all your life? You should hear the fuss he makes about having his mouth just as he wants it! … Still, what can you do? A man has to eat.’
He had an idea for the Salon, he said, an upright figure, a ‘Woman Bathing’, trying the water with her toes, with just that faint shudder of cold that looks so lovely on a woman’s skin. The model he showed Claude was already showing signs of cracking; Claude looked at it in silence, surprised and angry to notice the artist’s concessions, a certain obvious prettiness showing through the persistent exaggeration of the limbs, a natural desire to please without deviating too far from his natural prejudice in favour of the colossal. Mahoudeau’s complaint was that it was no simple matter producing an upright figure. It meant using metal supports, and they were pretty dear, and turntable, as he had not got one already, besides a lot of other equipment. So he thought, after all, he might decide to have her reclining on the water’s edge.
‘What do you think?’ he asked Claude. ‘Do you like her?’
‘Yes, in a way,’ Claude replied. ‘A little bit sugary, in spite of her hefty thighs. Still, one can’t really tell until it’s finished. … But she must stand up, old chap; she’s got to stand up, or the whole thing’s lost!’
The fire was roaring in the stove now, so Chaîne got up and began to move around. He went into the dark back room where he shared the bed with Mahoudeau, and came out again in a moment with his hat on. He still did not open his lips, and in deliberate, oppressive silence he slowly took a piece of crayon in his clumsy, peasant’s fingers and scrawled on the wall: ‘Off to buy baccy, put more coal on stove’, and walked out.
Claude watched him in astonishment; then, when he had gone, turned to Mahoudeau.
‘What’s all this?’ he asked.
‘We’re not on speaking terms,’ was the sculptor’s quiet explanation. ‘We always write.’
‘Since when?’
‘The last three months.’
‘And you share the same bed?’
‘Yes.’
Claude roared with laughter. Of all things! What a couple of stubborn mules they must be to carry on like that! And what, he asked, was the cause of their little tiff? The indignant Mahoudeau replied by saying exactly what he thought about Chaîne. The hound! Hadn’t he come home unexpectedly one evening and caught Chaîne with Mathilde, the herbalist next door, both in their underclothes, tucking into a pot of jam? It wasn’t their being half-dressed that upset him, he didn’t care a damn about that. No, what upset him was the jam! He couldn’t ever forgive them for treating themselves behind his back. Disgusting, he thought, when he had to eat his bread dry! God’s truth, if you share your woman, you can surely share your jam!
So for the last three months or so, without any explanation, they had been steadily sulking at each other. Their life had organized itself in consequence and their strictly necessary relations had been reduced to the short messages they scrawled about the walls. They still shared the same woman just as they still shared the same bed, having reached a tacit agreement about the times they were to be with her, each arranging to go out when the other’s turn came round. After all, it wasn’t absolutely necessary to talk; they understood each other well enough without.
As he finished making up the fire Mahoudeau poured out all his resentment to Claude.
‘You may not believe it,’ he said, ‘but when you’re half starved it isn’t unpleasant not to have to talk. Silence helps you to vegetate somehow. It acts as a sort of a damper on the hunger pains. … But Chaîne! … You’ve no idea how grasping he can be; it’s the peasant in him, of course. When he found he’d spent his last sou and was still no nearer making the fortune he’d expected to make out of painting, he went into business, in a small way, to be able to pay for his education. What do you think of that for keenness? And what do you think his scheme was? He used to have olive oil sent from Saint-Firmin, from home, you know, and then he went round collecting orders for it among the well-to-do Provençal families who have houses in Paris! Unfortunately, his scheme didn’t last long. He’s so uncouth, people would have no more dealings with him. So, as there’s one jar left that nobody wants, we’re living on it ourselves. We dip our bread in it … when we have any bread, that is.’
He pointed to the jar in a corner of the shop. The oil had run and made big, black stains on the wall and the floor.
Claude stopped laughing now at the thought of such poverty and discouragement, wondering how anyone could be hard on people who gave way under it. As he walked round the studio his anger against the models with their tame concessions died away, and he even began to feel he could tolerate the frightful bust. In the midst of his meditations he came upon a copy Chaîne had made at the Louvre, a Mantegna, all its native stiffness reproduced with amazing exactitude.
‘The rascal!’ he muttered to himself. ‘He’s nearly brought it off! … Certainly never done anything better. … Perhaps that’s what’s wrong with him; he was born four hundred years too late!’
Then, as the place began to warm up, he took off his overcoat and remarked as he did so:
‘He’s a long time fetching his “baccy”.’
‘Oh, I know his “baccy”,’ said Mahoudeau, busy on the sideburns of the bust. ‘His “baccy’s” just there, on the other side of this wall. When he sees I’m busy he slips off to see Mathilde, hoping to pinch a bit of my share of her too. The man’s a fool!’
‘Has it been going on long, this affair with Mathilde?’
‘Oh, yes. It’s got to be a habit now. If it wasn’t her it would be somebody else. … But it’s she who comes back for more. … She’s too much for me to handle alone, believe it or not!’
There was no ill-will in what Mahoudeau said about Mathilde. She must be ill, he thought, to behave as she did. Since little Jabouille’s death she had taken up religion again, but that did not prevent her from scandalizing the neighbourhood. There were still a few of the local church-going ladies who patronized the shop because they could not face the initial embarrassment of asking for their delicate and intimate purchases elsewhere; but the business was going rapidly downhill, and bankruptcy appeared unavoidable. One night, when the gas company had cut off supplies because she had not paid her bills, she had come round to borrow some olive oil, but she had obviously been unable to get it to burn in her lamps. She never paid any bills these days, and to save the expense of a workman she used to get Chaîne to repair the sprays and syringes her pious customers brought in carefully done up in newspaper. In the wine-merchant’s across the street they did say that she sold syringes second-hand to convents. In a word, the place was heading for disaster; the mysterious little shop with its cassocks hovering in the shadows, its murmurings, discreet as any confessional, its vestry atmosphere of stale incense and all it stood for in the way of intimate care and attention which could never be mentioned above a whisper, was all going to rack and ruin. The decay of poverty had already such a firm hold that the dried herbs hanging from the ceiling were a mass of cobwebs, and the leeches in their bottles were dead and mouldering on the top of their water.
‘Here he comes,’ said Mahoudeau. ‘That means she’ll be here, too, in a minute. See if it doesn’t.’
Chaîne came in as he spoke and ostentatiously brought out a packet of tobacco, filled his pipe and settled down to smoke in
front of the stove, without speaking a word, as if there was no one else present. Almost immediately Mathilde appeared, to pass the time of day, as any neighbour might do. Claude thought she looked thinner than ever; her face was blotchy, though there was the same fire in her eyes, and her mouth looked wider as she had lost two more teeth. The smell of spices that always clung to her unkempt hair seemed staler, the sweet freshness of camomile and aniseed had gone. She still filled the place with the peppermint that seemed to be her natural breath, but that, too, was tainted by the stricken body that produced it.
‘Working already!’ she cried, then added: ‘Good morning, my sweet,’ and kissed Mahoudeau before she even acknowledged Claude. Then she did go and shake his hand in her usual brazen fashion, with her belly thrust well forward, which made her appear to be offering herself to every man she met.
‘Guess what I’ve found!’ she said. ‘A box of marshmallows! We’ll have it as a treat for breakfast, shall we? … Come on, now, let’s share it out.’
‘Thanks all the same,’ said the sculptor, ‘but it’s a bit too cloying for me. I’d rather have a pipe.’
Then, seeing Claude putting on his overcoat, he added:
‘You’re not going?’
‘Yes, I’m going,’ said Claude. ‘I want to get back into the old ways again and fill my lungs with Paris air.’
He lingered for a moment or two, watching Chaîne and Mathilde stuffing themselves with marshmallows, first one dipping into the box, then the other. And, in spite of being forewarned, he was again amazed to see Mahoudeau pick up the crayon and scribble on the wall: ‘Give me baccy out of coat pocket.’
Without a word, Chaîne pulled out the packet and handed it to the sculptor, who filled his pipe from it.
‘See you soon, I suppose,’ he said to Claude, who replied:
‘Hope so. … Next Thursday, at Sandoz’s, if not before.’
He was unable to repress an exclamation of surprise when, on leaving the shop, he bumped straight into a man busily engaged in peering between the dusty old bandages in the herbalist’s window, trying to see what was going on inside the shop.
‘Why, it’s Jory!’ he cried. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘I? … Oh, nothing. … I happened to be passing … just having a look in,’ said the startled Jory, twitching his big, pink nose. Then, having decided to laugh the matter off, he dropped his voice, as if he thought somebody might overhear him, and said:
‘She’s next door with the others, I expect, isn’t she? In that case, let’s go. I’ll call another day.’
As he walked along with Claude he told him of the goings-on at the herb-shop. The whole gang visited Mathilde these days, he said; they had told each other about her, so now they called on her in turn, or sometimes even in a group, if they thought it might be more amusing that way; and he held up Claude in the middle of the jostling crowd on the pavement to tell him, in a confidential undertone, of the marvellous orgies. The revival of an ancient Roman custom, what? Couldn’t he just imagine it all, behind the barrier of enemas and bandages, under the shower of scents from the herbs on the ceiling! What could be smarter? A brothel for priests, old fellow, complete with all the dubious perfumes of corruption, in a setting of cloistered calm!
Claude laughed.
‘But you used to say that woman was a fright!’ he said.
‘She’s good enough for that particular job,’ Jory answered, with a nonchalant gesture. ‘That why I thought I’d pop in and see her this morning. I happened to be passing the shop after seeing somebody off at the Gare de l’Ouest. … It was handy, you understand. I wouldn’t go out of my way for it.’
He was clearly embarrassed to provide an explanation at first; then, in what was, for him, an unexpected flash of truth, he suddenly launched into a frank revelation of his depravity.
‘Oh, what the hell does it matter? I think she’s an amazing creature, so you might as well know it. … She’s no beauty, I’ll admit, but there’s something bewitching about her, the sort of woman you pretend you wouldn’t even touch with a barge-pole and yet you do the craziest things for her.’
It was only at this point that he expressed surprise at seeing Claude in Paris, and, as soon as he had heard Claude’s plans and learnt that he was in Paris to stay, he ran on again:
‘Now I’ll tell you what you’re going to do,’ he said. ‘You’re coming with me to lunch with Irma!’
The idea frightened Claude; he refused the invitation with brusque firmness, and pretended he could not accept as he was not dressed for the occasion.
‘What the devil does that matter?’ was Jory’s retort. ‘That’s all to the good, much more amusing. Irma’ll be delighted. … I think she has a bit of a soft spot for you, she’s always talking about you. … Come along, now, and don’t be silly about it. I tell you she’s expecting me this morning, and she’s sure to do both of us proud, so come on.’
He had taken Claude’s arm and refused to let it go as they walked along together up to the Madeleine. Generally Jory kept his love affairs to himself, just as drunkards avoid talking about drink, but that morning he was overflowing, joking about them and describing them in detail. The singer from the café-concert with whom he had eloped from Plassans and who used to tear his face to ribbons with her nails, had been abandoned a long time ago. Now, year in year out, his life was just one endless cavalcade of women, the maddest and most unexpected collection; the cook at a house where he used to dine with friends; the legitimate spouse of a member of the police force, which meant he had to remember when the husband was out on the beat; a girl who worked for a dentist, earning sixty francs a month letting herself be put to sleep and brought round again before every patient, just to inspire confidence. There were others too, lots of others, odd girls picked up in low dives, respectable women in search of excitement, the girls who brought his laundry, the char-women who made his bed, any woman who showed she was willing; the whole street and everything it offers in the way of pick-ups, chance meetings, women to buy and women to steal. He did not choose his women but took them as they came, young or old, pretty or ugly, sacrificing quality to quantity to satisfy his insatiable appetite for female flesh. Whenever he happened to be alone at night, the idea of a cold, unshared bed filled him with horror and urged him to go out on the prowl scouring the pavements until the sinister small hours and only going back to his room when he had captured his woman. As he was so short-sighted, he occasionally went astray, so that one morning, for example, he found the white head of a hag of sixty sharing his pillow, whom, in his haste, he had taken for a blonde.
In general, he was satisfied with life. His skinflint of a father had cut him off again and cursed him for sticking to the primrose path, but that made no difference to him now that he was making seven or eight thousand francs a year in journalism, where he had made quite a niche for himself as an art critic. The rowdy days of Le Tambour were over; articles at a louis a time were a thing of the past. He was settling down, collaborating with two widely read periodicals, and although he was still, at bottom, as cynical as ever in the pursuit of his own ends, in his desire for success at all costs, he had assumed a certain bourgeois pomposity and distributed praise and blame with solemn finality. He had inherited his close-fistedness from his father, and every month now he put money aside, but always in mean little investments the secret of which he kept firmly to himself. His vices had never cost him less than they did now, for the only treat he offered his women was a cup of chocolate, and that only when he was feeling especially generous and particularly well satisfied.
As they were approaching the Rue de Moscou, Claude said:
‘So you’re keeping the Bécot girl now, are you?’
‘I!’ exclaimed Jory, profoundly shocked. ‘You forget, my dear chap, that she now pays twenty thousand a year in rent and is talking about building herself a mansion that’s going to cost five hundred thousand! No, all I do is lunch with her, or dine with her once in a while, and that’s m
ore than enough for me.’
‘Apart from sleeping with her, of course?’
Jory laughed and avoided a direct answer.
‘Fathead! Who wouldn’t? … Here we are now. In you go!’
But Claude made yet another attempt to get away. He could not, he said; his wife was expecting him home for lunch. It meant that Jory had to ring the bell and push him into the vestibule, insisting that he would accept no excuses and that they would send a footman to the Rue de Douai with a message. Suddenly a door opened and there was Irma Bécot herself. When she saw Claude she exclaimed:
‘Well, well! The wanderer’s return!’
She put him at his ease immediately, welcoming him as an old friend, and he was relieved to see that she did not even notice his old overcoat. He found her so altered he would hardly have recognized her. In four years she had become a different woman. With all the cunning of a hardened actress she had narrowed her brow with a fringe of frizzled hair, made her face look long and thin, by sheer will-power presumably, and changed herself from the lightest of blondes into a violent red-head, so that the former guttersnipe appeared to have grown into a courtesan by Titian. As she used to say in her more confiding moments, this was ‘the mug she put on for the mugs’. The house itself, which was smallish, was luxuriously appointed, but not free from lapses of taste. There were some good pictures on the walls; a Courbet and a notable sketch by Delacroix prompted Claude to remark to himself that little Irma was no fool, in spite of the frightful cat in coloured biscuit so prominently displayed on a side-table in the drawing-room.
When Jory mentioned sending the footman to let Claude’s wife know where he was, Irma, taken completely by surprise, exclaimed:
‘You married? Not really!’
‘Yes, really,’ replied Claude simply.
She turned to Jory for confirmation; he smiled; she understood, and added:
‘You’re living with somebody, that’s what you really mean, isn’t it? … To think that they used to say you had no use for women! … Do you know I’m very cross with you? I am really! You used to be so scared of me, do you remember? You still are, or you wouldn’t be backing away as you’re doing now. Am I as ugly as all that?’
