by Émile Zola
Chapter 9
Since Claude was unable to paint his big picture in the little studio in the Rue de Douai, he decided to rent some sort of shed where he would have plenty of space. He found exactly what he wanted on one of his rambles round Montmartre, halfway up the Rue Tourlaque, the street that runs down the hill from the cemetery, and from which you can look out over Clichy and as far as the marshes at Gennevilliers. It was an old dyer’s drying-shed, a flimsy lath and plaster construction, fifteen metres by ten, and a meeting-place for all the winds of heaven. The rent was three hundred francs. He took it. Summer was on the way; as soon as he had finished his picture, and that wouldn’t take him long, he’d give notice and clear out.
His mind was made up, now that he was determined to work and make a good job of it, to spare no expense. As his ship was bound to come home, why spoil it for a ha’porth of tar? As he now had the right to do so, he broke into the capital that brought him in his thousand francs a year, and soon grew used to indiscriminate spending. He did not tell Christine what he had done for some time, as she had already prevented him from doing it on two occasions. When he finally did tell her, however, after a week or so of worries and reproaches, she too grew accustomed to their altered circumstances, and enjoyed the pleasant feeling that there was always money to be had for the asking. At least, it meant a year or two of ease and comfort.
Claude soon reached the point at which he lived only for his picture. He had furnished his big studio with the odd chair, his old divan from the Quai de Bourbon, and a deal table bought for five francs at a junk-shop; he never craved for luxury as a background to his art. His only extravagance was a travelling ladder with an adjustable platform. His canvas came next; he wanted it eight metres by five and insisted on preparing it himself. He had the frame specially made, and bought seamless canvas which he and a couple of friends had the greatest difficulty in stretching and clamping. Then all he did by way of priming was to lay on with the knife a coat of white lead; he refused to size it, as he wished it to remain absorbent since that, he said, made for light yet solid painting. It was useless, of course, to think of using an easel for a canvas of that unmanageable size, so he rigged up a system of ropes and beams which held it to the wall, just sufficiently tilted to catch the necessary light, and with the ladder running the whole length of the vast white sheet. The whole effect was that of a scaffolding, a cathedral scaffolding, set up around the masterpiece about to be built.
When everything was ready to start he was assailed once more by endless scruples. He let himself be tormented by the thought that, on the site, he had not really chosen the most satisfactory lighting. Wouldn’t an early morning light have been best after all? Or perhaps he ought really to have picked a dull, grey day. The result was that he spent another three months viewing the site from the Pont des Saints-Pères.
At all hours of the day, in all kinds of weather, he contemplated the Cité as it rises between the two vistas of river. After a late fall of snow, he saw it draped in ermine, encircled by muddy grey water and backed by a pale slate sky. He saw it in the first spring sunlight, shaking off the winter, its youth renewed in the fresh green buds of the trees on the terrace. He saw it on a day of soft mists, vague, remote, airy as a palace of dreams. Then came the heavy rains to submerge it and hide it behind the mighty curtain dropped from the heavens to earth; then storms and the tawny lightning to give it the air of a sinister cut-throat’s alley, half ruined beneath a crumbling mass of great copper-coloured clouds. After that, it would be swept and scoured by gales of wind that sharpened all its angles and stood it up stark naked against a sky of paling blue. At other times, when the sun filtered like fine gold dust through the mists of the Seine, it was bathed in diffused light, without a single shadow, equally lighted from all sides, with all the delicate charm of a jewel carved in solid gold. He wanted to see it as the sun was rising, breaking through the morning mists, with the Quai de l’Horloge burning red on one side and the Quai des Orfèvres, heavy with shadow, on the other, and its own towers and spires awakening to life again, revealed in the rosy morning light as by a mantle slipping slowly to the ground. He wanted to see it at noon, in the full force of the midday sun, consumed in the harshness of its glare, pale and silent as a city of the dead, the only live thing in it being the heat that quivered on the distant roof-tops. He wanted to see it as the sun was going down and night creeping up from the river again, topping all its buildings with a fringe of glowing light, like sparks on dying embers, piercing their sombre frontages with bursts of flame from the raging fires it lighted on every windowpane. But of all the many aspects of the Cité, familiar now at all hours of the day and in every kind of weather, he still preferred the one he admired on that first September afternoon about four, the Cité standing serene in the flawless atmosphere, the heart of Paris beating in the gentle breeze, swelling against the vastness of the sky broken only by a trail of tiny clouds.
Claude spent all his days now in the shadow of the Pont des Saints-Pères; it had become his refuge, his roof, his home, and he had grown used to the ceaseless rumble of the traffic, like the distant roll of thunder. Installed near the first pier of the bridge, under its great iron girders, he made sketches in both paint and pencil, but he was never completely satisfied that he had captured what he needed and would sketch the same bit of detail over and over again at various times. The employees of the various navigation companies, whose offices were nearby, had come to know him, and the wife of one of the foremen who shared a sort of tarred hut with her husband, two children, and a cat, kept his canvases fresh for him to save him the trouble of carting them through the streets every day. He was delighted with his refuge, hearing Paris roaring in the air above, feeling all its life and ardour flowing overhead. First it was the Port Saint-Nicolas that thrilled him with its ceaseless activity like some distant seaport a mere stone’s throw from the Institut, with the steam-crane ‘Sophie’ busy moving great blocks of stone, and carts coming for loads of sand, horses and drivers heaving and panting up the long paved slope leading from the water’s edge above the granite wharf, alongside which barges and lighters were moored two deep. For weeks on end he worked on one of his studies: porters unloading plaster, carrying white sacks on their shoulders, leaving a trail of white behind them, covered in white dust themselves, while another boat nearby had been unloading coal and left a great inky blot upon the wharf. Next, he took a side view of the open-air bath on the left bank. Then, on another plane, a laundry with all its glass panels wide open and the washerwomen kneeling in rows at water level, beating away at their linen. For the centre he made a study of a boat with a bargee sculling it, and, in the distance, a steam-tug hauling a train of planks and barrels at the end of its chain. The background he had already worked upon, nevertheless he picked out one or two details for further study: the two vistas of the Seine, and a sky effect showing nothing but towers and spires golden in the sunlight. Working in the shelter of the bridge, as remote as in some hollow in the rocks, he was rarely disturbed by inquisitive passers-by, while the riverside anglers treated him with withering indifference; so his only companion was generally the foreman’s cat, which spent its time washing itself, calm and unruffled beneath the tumult of the world above.
At last Claude’s preparatory sketches were all complete. In two or three days he worked out a rough sketch of the whole picture and the masterpiece was started. Immediately there began in the studio in the Rue Tourlaque the first battle between Claude and his canvas; it raged throughout the whole summer. He insisted on trying to square up his composition himself, but without success, for he merely piled one mistake upon another, as he was undisciplined to the mathematical accuracy required. In his indignation, he decided to ignore accuracy and to make the necessary adjustments later; such was his feverish urge to create something that he flung all his energies into covering the entire canvas. He practically lived on his ladder, wielding his enormous brushes and expending muscular strength enough to move mountai
ns. At the end of a day he staggered like a drunkard and dropped dead asleep almost before he had finished his meal, so that his wife had to put him to bed like a child. The result of his heroic labours was a masterly sketch, one of those sketches in which genius comes flashing through the otherwise indeterminate mass of colour. Bongrand came to see it and, his eyes brimming with tears, flung both arms round Claude and smothered him with kisses. Sandoz, in his enthusiasm, gave a dinner in its honour, while the others, Jory, Mahoudeau, and Gagnière, went around announcing another masterpiece. As for Fagerolles, he stood for a moment in silent admiration, then burst into congratulations; it was ‘too beautiful’, he said.
And, indeed, it soon began to look as if Fagerolles’s malicious pronouncement had brought Claude bad luck, for from that moment his work on the sketch began to deteriorate. It was the usual story; he worked himself out in one magnificent burst of genius; after that, nothing would come and he was unable to finish what he had started. His impotence returned. He worked on the canvas for two whole years; for those two years it was the sole aim and end of his existence, sometimes sending him soaring to heights of delirious joy, sometimes plunging him into such depths of doubt and despair that poor wretches breathing their last on beds of pain were happy by comparison. Twice he was unable to finish in time for the Salon; for always, at the last moment, when he was hoping to complete his work in a matter of hours, he discovered some blemish or other and felt the whole composition crumble and fall to pieces in his fingers. With the third Salon approaching, he went through another terrible crisis and did not go near the studio in the Rue Tourlaque for a whole fortnight. When at last he did go back, it was like going into a house left uninhabited since the tenant’s death. He turned his great canvas face to the wall, pushed his ladder into one corner and would have smashed up the place and set fire to it if he had strength enough left in his trembling hands. It was the end of everything; in his wrath he wanted to make a clean sweep of the place and talked of tackling little things since he was clearly incapable of handling big ones.
Even then, his first attempt at a smaller picture took him straight back to the Ile de la Cité. Why, after all, shouldn’t he do a simple view of the place, on a medium-sized canvas? A wave of modesty, however, strangely tinged with jealousy, kept him from setting up his easel under the Pont des Saints-Pères; he felt the spot was somehow sacred now and that he ought not to deflower the virginity of the greater work, dead though it was. He installed himself, therefore, at the end of the wharf, upstream from the Port Saint-Nicolas. This time, at least, he was working direct from nature, and it pleased him not to have to cheat, as one had inevitably to do when working on an outsize canvas.
Although he finished it off with much more care and in much greater detail than was his custom, the smaller picture met with the same fate as the others when it came before the Selection Committee which was ‘scandalized’ by painting that looked, according to the expression then current in the studios, as if it had been done ‘by a drunk with a broom’. This was a setback even more serious than its predecessors, as there had been a certain amount of talk about concessions made to the Beaux-Arts to ensure the picture’s success.
When it came back, Claude, very embittered and weeping with rage, tore the canvas into little strips and burned them in the stove. It was not enough to stab the thing to death, it had to be destroyed completely.
For another whole year Claude did nothing in particular. He painted by force of habit, but never finished anything, saying, with a pained sort of laugh, that he had lost himself and was trying to find himself again. Even during his long fits of despondency there was no destroying his hopes, for he was never completely unconscious of his genius. He suffered all the torments of the man condemned to roll a rock uphill for ever or be crushed when it rolled back on him; but the future was still before him, and in it the assurance that one day he would be able to pick up his rock with both hands and hurl it away to the stars. In time the light of passion came back to his eyes, and it soon became known that he was beginning to shut himself up again in the Rue Tourlaque. In the past he had always let himself be carried far beyond the present work by his dreams of a greater work in the future. Now he found himself once more at grips with the old subject, the Ile de la Cité; it had become his idée fixe, blocking his vision like a brick wall. After a time, in a fresh outburst of enthusiasm, he began to talk about it openly, exclaiming with childish glee that he had found himself again and this time victory was assured.
One morning, after keeping his door bolted for a long time to all his friends, Claude at last allowed Sandoz into the studio. What Sandoz found there was a fine, spirited sketch, done without a model, and admirably coloured. The subject was the same: the Port Saint-Nicolas on the left, the swimming-bath on the right, the Seine and the Cité in the background; but he was amazed to see, in place of the boat sculled by the bargee, another and much bigger boat, filling the whole centre of the composition, and occupied by three women. One of them, wearing a bathing costume, was rowing, another was sitting on the edge with her legs in the water and her bathing dress slipped half-way off one shoulder. The third was standing at the prow, completely naked, her nudity so radiant that it dazzled like a sun.
‘I say, what an ideal!’ said Sandoz quietly. ‘What are they supposed to be doing?’
‘Bathing, of course,’ said Claude calmly. ‘They’ve come from the swimming-bath, you see, and that provides a nude motif. Quite a discovery, don’t you think? It doesn’t shock you, does it?’
As his oldest friend, Sandoz knew Claude’s weakness and, afraid of stirring up the slightest doubt, replied:
‘Shock me? Why, of course it doesn’t. … Only I’m wondering whether the general public is going to misunderstand it again. It could hardly be like that, could it? I mean a woman naked like that in the middle of Paris?’
‘Do you really think so?’ asked Claude in artless surprise. ‘Oh, well, it can’t matter all that much, can it, so long as she’s well painted? I’ve got to have her in, to feel the thing’s worth while.’
In the days that followed Sandoz again brought up the subject of Claude’s strange composition and made a gentle plea, since it was in his nature to do so, on behalf of what he thought was outraged logic. How, he asked, could a modern painter, who took pride in painting nothing but reality, jeopardize the originality of his work by introducing such obvious products of the imagination? It was easy enough to find other subjects in which studies of the nude would be natural and essential!
Claude refused to give way, and offered unsatisfactory and violent reasons for his choice, since he did not wish to admit the real reason for it. It was an idea he had had, but an idea so vague that he would have been unable to express it clearly, the outcome of some tormenting secret symbolism, the old streak of romanticism in him that made him think of his nude figure as the incarnation of Paris, the city of passion seen as the resplendent beauty of a naked woman. Into it he poured all his own great passion, his love of beautiful bellies and thighs and fecund breasts, the kind of bodies he was burning to create in boundless profusion that they might bring forth all the numberless offspring of his prolific art.
In face of his old friend’s pressing arguments, he pretended at last to give way.
‘Very well,’ he said. ‘I’ll see. I’ll put some clothes on her later, if that’s what shocks you. … But I’m still going to keep her in, understand. I like her that way.’
After that, out of sheer obstinacy, he never mentioned her again. He simply hunched his shoulders and gave an embarrassed smile at the faintest allusion to everyone’s amazement at seeing Venus rising in triumph from the waters of the Seine, amid the buses on the embankment and the dockers on the Port Saint-Nicolas.
With the return of spring Claude was ready to start work on his big picture again when a decision, made in a moment of prudence, brought about a serious change in his domestic life. Christine had occasionally expressed anxiety about the rate at which
they were spending their money and taking great chunks out of their capital, but on the whole they paid little attention to money matters since the source was apparently inexhaustible. Then, after four years, they were horrified to learn, the day they asked for a statement of accounts, that out of their twenty thousand francs three thousand was all they had left. They reacted immediately by practising the most rigid economy, eating less bread and even planning to reduce expenditure on all the necessities of life. Thus it was that, in their first impulsive need for sacrifice, they decided to leave the Rue de Douai. Why pay two rents? There was plenty of room in the old drying-shed in the Rue Tourlaque, still stained all over with splashes of dye, to house three people. Moving in was a simple matter; installation proved more difficult, for the great shed, fifteen metres by ten, meant that they, like regular Bohemians, had only one room for all purposes. In the face of a certain amount of ill-will on the part of the landlord, Claude divided it up. He made a matchwood partition near one end, and behind that rigged up a kitchen and a bedroom. They were delighted with the result, in spite of the draughts that whistled through the cracks in the roof and the rain that came pouring through during bad storms and had to be caught in bowls. It still looked depressingly empty; their few bits of furniture were lost against the big bare walls. They were pleased, however, to be so roomily housed and explained to their friends that at least little Jacques would now have space to run about in. Poor little Jacques was nine now, but still a puny child. The only part of him that seemed to grow was his head. If he went to school for a week, at the end of it he was worn out both mentally and physically with the effort of trying to learn. So now, more often than not, he stayed at home, crawling about the floor or mooning in corners.
