The Masterpiece
Page 29
Outside this ceaseless struggle with himself, material difficulties were accumulating. Was it not enough, he asked himself, not to be able to bring out what you knew you’d got in you? No, you had to cope with things into the bargain! The fact was that, although he refused to admit it, painting from nature, in the open-air, was impossible if the canvas exceeded reasonable dimensions. There were the added difficulties, too, of setting up one’s easel in a busy street and of getting people to pose for a sufficient length of time. That meant, obviously, that subjects were limited to country landscapes and a restricted type of urban landscape in which the figures are little more than silhouettes painted in almost as an after-thought. The weather, too, provided endless complications; the wind would blow over the easel, or rain would stop the work altogether. When that happened he would go home in a raging temper, shaking his fist at the heavens, accusing nature of defending itself against being captured and conquered. He complained bitterly of not being rich, for his dream would have been to have mobile studios, one on wheels for use in Paris, one on a boat on the Seine, and live like a gypsy artist. But nothing ever came to his assistance; everything conspired against his work.
Christine suffered as much as he did. She had been very brave, sharing his hopes and, like a good housewife, keeping the studio bright and cheerful; but now, when she saw Claude so weary and helpless, she would slump into a chair, discouraged. Every time he had a picture rejected, she felt it more keenly than ever; it wounded her pride, for, like every woman, she was not indifferent to success. As Claude grew bitter, she grew bitter too; his feelings were hers, so now were his tastes; and she defended his painting, which had become, in a way, a part of her, the one important thing in her life, the one thing she relied upon for her happiness. She sensed that painting was claiming her lover from her a little more every day, and she accepted it for the time being, offering no resistance but letting herself be carried along, determined to be as one with him as long as his effort lasted. But she felt sick at heart at the thought that the moment of abdication might be near; she was afraid of what the future might hold for her and premonitions often chilled her to the very soul. She felt she was growing older and a great pity welled up within her and a desire to weep for no reason at all, a desire which she often satisfied for hours on end when she was alone in the gloom of the studio.
About this time, too, her heart seemed to grow warmer and more expansive as she realized that she could be not only a lover but also a mother to Claude. He was little more than a grown-up child, she felt, and her maternal feelings sprang from the vague but infinite pity which so softened her heart towards him, his perpetual, illogical sense of weakness and the endless calls it made on her sympathy and understanding. He was beginning to make her unhappy now, and his caresses were of the casual, mechanical kind a man bestows on women who have ceased to mean anything to him. How could she love him still when he slipped from her arms and showed every sign of boredom when she enveloped him, as always, in her ardent embrace? How could she love him at all if she could not love him with that same, absorbing affection, the same eternal adoration and sacrifice? Deep down inside her she felt the gnawing of that insatiable desire, for she was still the same passionate, sensual woman with the blood-red lips and determination in her firm, square chin. And so, after the secret sorrows of her nights, she drew a certain bitter-sweet consolation from mothering her man throughout the day and found one last, fleeting pleasure in being kind and trying to make him happy now that their life was no longer what it once had been.
The only one who suffered by this change of affection was little Jacques. Christine neglected him more than ever; he meant nothing to her, since her maternal instinct had been aroused only through physical love. Her real child was the man she adored and desired; Jacques was nothing more than a proof of the great passion that had brought them together. As she had watched him grow up and become less and less dependent on her care, she had made a sacrifice of him, not because she was fundamentally callous, but simply because that was the way she felt about him. At meal-times he was always given second best; the warmest place, near the stove, was not for his little chair. In any moment of imminent danger, her first cry, her first protecting gesture was never for him, the weaker of her men. Whenever she could, she relegated him to the background, or repressed him with ‘Jacques, be quiet! Father’s tired!’ or ‘Jacques, be still! Can’t you see father’s working?’
What was more, Paris did not suit the child. He had been used to roaming at will about the vast countryside; now, boxed up as he was and restricted in his activities, he was stifled. He lost his healthy colouring, did not thrive, but grew up like a puny, serious, wide-eyed little man. He was just five, but by some strange phenomenon his head had grown out of all proportion to his body, which often provoked his father to remark: ‘What a head! The youngster’ll be a great man one day!’ His intelligence, however, seemed to diminish in proportion to the growth of his skull. He was a gentle, timid child, and would spend hours apparently oblivious to his surroundings, without a word for anyone, his thoughts away in the blue; but when he awoke from his daydreams it would be to shout and leap about as madly as any young, playful animal giving way to his instincts. Then ‘Be stills’ and ‘Be quiets’ fell thick and fast, for his mother could not understand these sudden bursts of animal spirits and, seeing that Claude, busy at his easel, was about to lose his temper, she was upset and immediately lost hers and rushed the child back into his chair in the corner. There, with a frightened shudder like someone suddenly roused from a dream, he would quickly calm down and doze off to sleep again, his eyes wide open, so uninterested in life that toys, corks, pictures, old paint-tubes, whatever he was playing with, slipped out of his hands to the floor. Several times Christine had tried to teach him his letters; he had always refused to learn and burst into tears, so they had decided to wait another year or two to send him to school, where the teachers were bound to make him learn something.
One thing which scared Christine more than anything else was the threat of poverty. Living in Paris, with a growing child, was dearer than living in the country, and resources were strained to the utmost, at the end of the month particularly, in spite of all kinds of economies. The only income they were certain of was Claude’s thousand francs a year; out of that four hundred went on rent, and what could they do on the fifty francs a month that remained? For a time they managed to avoid financial embarrassment by the sale of the occasional picture. Claude had somehow run to earth the amateur collector who used to patronize Gagnière, a hated bourgeois, of course, but one of those with a genuine artist’s soul beneath an outward shell of eccentricity. M. Hue, that was his name, was a retired government official and, unfortunately, not sufficiently well-off to be able to buy whenever he wished; all he could do was to deplore the short-sightedness of the public in letting yet another genius starve to death. Convinced of Claude’s genius from the very first, he made his choice of the harshest of his canvases and hung them side by side with his Delacroix, swearing they had a similar future before them. Old Malgras, unfortunately for Claude and Christine, had retired, his fortune made—a modest fortune, it is true, a matter of ten thousand francs a year—and, being a careful man, he had decided to enjoy it in a cottage he had bought at Bois-Colombes. It was amusing to hear him talk about the great Naudet and express his contempt for the gambler’s millions which, he was convinced, would do him no good in the end. As the result of a chance meeting, Claude managed to sell him one last picture, for his own collection, one of the nudes he had painted at Boutin’s studio, that superb study of the abdomen which had always made Malgras’s heart beat faster every time he saw it. Poverty, then, was on their doorstep; possible markets were closing instead of opening, and a disturbing legend was beginning to grow up around this painting which was continually being rejected by the Salon, though art such as this, so incomplete, so revolutionary, so provoking by its denial of all accepted conventions, would have been enough in itself to s
care prospective buyers. One evening, in a quandary as to how to pay a paint bill, Claude declared he would rather live on his capital than stoop to producing commercial pictures. Christine opposed such an extreme solution to their difficulties with all her might; it was mad, she said; she would cut down expenses even lower, she would prefer anything to letting their capital go; that would send them starving to the gutter in no time!
The year his third picture was rejected, the summer was so perfect that Claude somehow found his powers miraculously restored. There was not a cloud in the sky above the immense activity of Paris, and the days flowed by in limpid serenity. Claude had started his wanderings about the city again, bent on what he called ‘spotting something worth while’, something tremendous, something decisive, he did not know exactly what. September came and he had still discovered nothing; he had put all his energies, for a week or so at a time, into various projects and then decided that it was not what he was looking for. He lived in a perpetual state of tension, always on the alert, always on the point of attaining the realization of his dreams, which always escaped him. At heart, beneath his intransigent, realist’s exterior, he was as superstitious as any nervous female; he believed in all kinds of secret and complicated influences; he persuaded himself that success or failure would depend entirely on his choice of a lucky or unlucky subject.
One afternoon, on one of the last fine days of the summer, he took Christine out with him, leaving Jacques, as they usually did when they went out together, in the care of the kindly old concierge. He felt a sudden desire to have her by his side, to revisit with her the places they had once been so fond of, but behind his desire was a vague hope that her presence would bring him luck. So they went down as far as the Pont Louis-Philippe and spent a good quarter of an hour on the Quai des Ormes leaning over the parapet, looking in silence across the Seine to the old Hôtel du Martoy where they first fell in love. Then, still without a word, they started out over the ground they had covered together so often in the old days. They followed the embankment, under the plane-trees, seeing the past rise up at every step as the landscape opened out before them: the bridges, their arches cutting across the satin sheen of the river; the Cité covered with shadow, dominated by the yellowing towers of Notre-Dame; the great sweeping curve of the right bank, bathed in sunshine, leading to the dim silhouette of the Pavillon de Flore; the broad avenues, the buildings on either bank, and between them, the Seine, with all the lively activity of its laundry-boats, its baths, its barges. As in the past, the setting sun seemed to follow them along the riverside, rolling over the roofs of the distant houses, partially eclipsed for a moment by the dome of the Institut. It was a dazzling sunset, finer than they had ever seen, a slow descent through tiny clouds which gradually turned into a trellis of purple with molten gold pouring through every mesh. But out of the past they were calling to mind nothing reached them but an unconquerable melancholy, a feeling that it would always be just beyond their reach, that it would be impossible to live it again. The time-worn stones were cold and the ever-flowing stream beneath the bridges seemed to have carried away something of their selves, the charm of awakening desire, the thrill of hope and expectation. Now they were all in all to each other, they had forgone the simple happiness of feeling the warm pressure of their arms as they strolled quietly along, wrapped, as it were, in the all-enveloping life of the great city.
At the Pont des Saints-Pères, Claude, who could bear it no longer, came to a standstill. He let go Christine’s arm and turned back towards the point of the Cité. She felt that the break was more than a physical one, and the thought filled her heart with sorrow; so, seeing him prepared to linger, rapt in thought, she made some attempt to reclaim him.
‘It’s time to go home, Claude,’ she said. ‘Jacques will be expecting us back, you know.’
But Claude walked along to the centre of the bridge. Christine had to follow him. There he stopped again, his gaze fixed upon the island riding for ever at anchor in the Seine, cradling the heart of Paris through which its blood has pulsed for centuries as its suburbs have gone on spreading themselves over the surrounding plain. His face lit up, as with an inward flame and his eyes were aglow as, with a broad, sweeping gesture, he said:
‘Look! Look at that!’
In the foreground immediately below them lay the Port Saint-Nicolas with the low huts that housed the various shipping offices, the broad sloping wharf, its paving-stones heaped up with sacks and barrels and sand; alongside, a string of loaded barges being swarmed over by a host of dock porters, and, stretched out over it all, the great iron jib of an enormous crane. Against the far bank, an open-air bath, gay with the shouts of the last of the season’s bathers, flaunted the strips of grey tenting that served as its roof as bravely as if they were banners. Between the two, the Seine, clear of all traffic, flowed along, greeny-grey, whipped up into little dancing wavelets tipped with white and pink and blue. The middle distance was marked by the Pont des Arts, with the thin line of its roadway, raised aloft on its network of girders, fine as black lace, alive with endless foot-passengers streaming perpetually to and fro like so many ants. Beneath it, the Seine flowed away into the distance to the ancient, rusty stone arches of the Pont-Neuf, away to the left as far as the Ile Saint-Louis in one straight vista, bright and dazzling as a stretch of mirror; to the right, the other arm making a sudden bend, the weir in front of the Monnaie seemed to cut off the view with its bar of foam. Over the Pont-Neuf the great yellow omnibuses and the gaily coloured waggonettes moved with the clockwork regularity of children’s toys. Thus the whole background was framed between the perspectives of both banks of the river: on the right bank the houses along the embankment, half-hidden by a clump of tall trees, and beyond them, on the horizon, a corner of the Hôtel de Ville and the square tower of Saint-Gervais stood out against the skyline above the surrounding conglomeration of smaller buildings; on the left bank, one wing of the Institut, then the flat façade of the Monnaie, and beyond that, more trees, stretching into the distance. What occupied the centre of this vast picture, rising from the river-level and towering high into the sky, was the Cité, the prow of the ancient ship, for ever gilded by the setting sun. Below, the poplars on the terrace raised a powerful mass of greenery, completely hiding the statue on the bridge. Above, the sun threw the two shores of the Ile into violent contrast, plunging in shadow the grey stone houses on the Quai de l’Horloge, lighting up so brightly the red-gold houses and the islets of oddly assorted buildings on the Quai des Orfèvres, that all their details, shop-signs, and even window-curtains, were clearly visible to the naked eye. Higher up still, between the ragged lines of chimneys and beyond the tilted chess-board of diminutive roof-tops, the pointed towers of the Palais de Justice and the lofty gables of the Préfecture spread vast expanses of slate, broken by an enormous blue advertisement painted on a wall, its huge letters, visible all over Paris, breaking out like a rash of modernity on the city’s fevered brow. Higher again, much higher, higher than the twin towers of Notre-Dame, now the colour of old gold, two spires rose; behind the towers, the cathedral spire, and on the left, the spire of the Sainte-Chapelle, so fine, so graceful that they seemed to sway with the breeze, the lofty rigging of the age-old ship against the full light of the open sky.
‘Are you coming, Claude?’ asked Christine gently.
Spellbound by the heart of Paris, Claude did not hear her speak. The beauty of the evening intensified the clearness of the view, with sharp lights, clean shadows, a lively precision of detail, and a delightful, transparent quality of the atmosphere, while the life of the river and the activity of the wharves were joined by the stream of humanity flowing down from every side, along the streets and over the bridges into the city’s great melting-pot where it steamed and seethed and bubbled in the sun. There was a faint breeze blowing, and a flight of little rosy clouds, high overhead, was drifting across the fading blue of the sky, and from all around there rose the slow pulsation of the city’s mighty soul.
‘Come home, Claude,’ she murmured. ‘You’re doing yourself no good. … Come, take me home.’
As she touched him, he shuddered like a man aroused from a dream. Then, turning back for one last look, he said:
‘Oh God! but it’s beautiful!’ and let her lead him away. For the rest of the evening, throughout their meal, sitting round the stove afterwards and even up till bedtime, he seemed thoroughly dazed and so preoccupied that he did not make more than a half-dozen remarks, so that Christine, unable to get him to answer, stopped trying to make conversation. She lay looking at him, anxiously, wondering whether he might not be sickening for some serious illness, whether he could possibly have caught a chill as he stood on the bridge that afternoon. Claude meanwhile lay staring blankly into space, his face flushed with mental effort, as if some process of germination were at work within him and something was coming to life, with the accompanying exaltation and nausea familiar to women in pregnancy. At first everything seemed painfully difficult, confused, restrained by endless bonds, then suddenly all was loosened and he ceased his restless tossing and sank into the deep slumber which follows on great fatigue.
Next morning, breakfast over, he left the house at once. It meant a trying day for Christine, who, although she had felt reassured to some extent to hear him whistling Provençal tunes as he was getting up, was worried for another reason which she had kept carefully hidden from him, for fear of depressing him. Today, for the first time, they were faced with want; there was still another week to go before they could draw their meagre interest on Claude’s capital, and, as she had spent her last sou that morning, there was nothing left for an evening meal, not even enough to buy a loaf of bread. What was she to do? How was she going to be able to keep on lying to him when he came home hungry? The only solution she could find was to pawn the black silk dress Madame Vanzade had given her all those years ago. But it was not a solution she accepted easily; she trembled with fear and shame at the thought of a pawnshop, the refuge of the down-and-out; she had never set foot in such a place. She was so apprehensive of the future now that out of the ten francs they lent her she only spent enough to make some sorrel soup and some potato stew. A chance meeting just as she was leaving the pledge office had unnerved her completely.