by Émile Zola
It was a long time since Christine had been in close contact with Claude’s daily work, but now, once again, she lived with him through every hour of every sitting. She helped him to scrape and pumice his old canvas and gave him hints about attaching it more firmly to the wall. One disaster they discovered was that the damp coming through the roof had made the ladder unsafe, so Claude had to strengthen it with a strip of oak while Christine stood by and handed him the nails, one at a time. That done, everything was ready for a second attempt on the big canvas. She watched him square up his new sketch, standing behind him until her legs gave way beneath her and she dropped to the ground and stayed there, still watching him work.
She would have given anything to win him back from the painting that had won him away from her. That was why she made herself his slave and took delight in doing menial tasks. Ever since she came to play a part in his work again, and the three of them were together, he, she, and the picture, she had been full of hopes. He had managed to escape her, leaving her to cry her eyes out alone in the Rue de Douai, and he had spent his time and his substance in the Rue Tourlaque as if some mistress had held him in thrall, but now maybe she was going to win him back again, now they were with him all the time, she and her passion. Oh that painting! How she loathed it in her jealousy! Yet her attitude towards it had changed. She was no longer the young lady with a fondness for water-colours repelled by its freedom and its superb brutality. No, she had gradually come to understand it, drawn to it first of all by her attachment to the painter and then by the feast of light and by the originality and charm of the touches of white. Now she accepted everything, pale mauve earth and bright blue trees, and she was even beginning to have a certain awe-inspired feeling of respect for works which at one time she thought were abominable. She acknowledged them as powerful and treated them as rivals who must be taken seriously. As her admiration grew, so did her rancour, and she was furious to feel herself belittled in the presence of this other love flaunting itself under her very roof.
Her campaign, though ceaseless, opened quietly. She began by imposing herself, losing no opportunity of letting some part of her body, perhaps only a shoulder or even just a hand, intervene between the painter and his picture. She never left his side but stood as close to him as she could, enveloping him in her breath, reminding him he was hers. Then she revived an old idea; she would paint too; she would go and search him out in the very fever of his art. So for a month or so she wore a smock and worked like a pupil at the side of his master, submissively copying his picture. She stopped, however, when she realized that her attempt had miscarried and that sharing Claude’s work simply made him forget she was a woman and treat her on the same friendly footing as a man. There was still one way to get him back; she determined to try it.
Very often, when he was working on his smaller pictures and wanted to fix occasional details of the figures, Claude had asked Christine to model a head, a gesture, or some particular attitude he required. He would throw a cloak over her shoulders, stop her in the middle of a gesture and tell her to hold it. Such small favours as these she was only too happy to render, but she was still loath to undress for him, feeling it was somehow undignified for her to be his model now she was his wife. One day he wanted to work on a thigh-joint; she refused to pose at first and then reluctantly agreed to tuck up her skirts, but only after double-locking the door; she was so afraid that, if anyone discovered that she had sunk to being his model, they might try to identify her nude body in her husband’s pictures. She had not forgotten the way Claude’s friends, and even Claude himself, jeered and cracked coarse jokes at the expense of a painter whose only model was his own wife and whose nicely turned-out nudes for bourgeois consumption reproduced her now well-known peculiarities: small of the back too long, abdomen rather too high, seen from every possible angle, which meant that all Paris cocked a ribald eye when she appeared encased to the tip of her chin in one of her usual discreetly dark dresses which she always wore particularly high in the neck.
But since she had seen Claude sketch in, with a certain amount of detail, the large central figure of his picture, Christine, as she pondered on it, felt her scruples fall away one by one as she surrendered to an overwhelming obsession; until, when he spoke of engaging a model, she offered to pose herself.
‘You!’ cried Claude. ‘Why you’re offended when all I want is the tip of your nose!’
‘What do you mean?’ she replied with an awkward smile. ‘After all, I did sit for your figure in “Open Air”, and that was before there was anything between us. … Besides, a model’s going to cost seven francs a sitting, and we’re not exactly well off, so we might as well save what we can.’
The mention of saving made up Claude’s mind for him.
‘All right,’ he said, ‘I’m willing. It’s really very kind of you to take it on, you know; it’s no simple pastime sitting for me. … Still, if you want to do it. … And anyway, silly, you’re afraid of another woman coming here, aren’t you? So why not admit it, you’re jealous!’
She was jealous too, agonizingly jealous, but not of other women. Every model in Paris could come and take off her clothes! She had one rival, and one rival only: painting. That was what was stealing her lover. She was ready to strip herself to the last stitch and give herself to him naked for days or weeks on end; she was ready to live naked if that meant she would win him back and be able to claim him for her own when he sank once again into her arms! What more had she to offer but herself? It was fair enough, surely, for her to risk her own body in this one last struggle, knowing that to lose would be to admit that she was a woman with no more power to charm.
Claude was delighted, and started by making a straightforward study of her in the required pose. They waited till Jacques had gone off to school and then locked themselves in. The sitting lasted several hours. At first Christine found it very painful to stand still for such long periods, but she grew used to it. She was afraid to complain, lest it should make him angry, and when he bullied her she swallowed back her tears. Claude soon began to take her for granted and to treat her merely as a model, making more demands upon her than if he had been paying her and without ever thinking that, since she was his wife, he could ask too much of her. He used her for everything and expected her to be ready to undress for him at any moment, for an arm or a leg or for any odd detail he happened to need. She was reduced to being nothing more nor less than a kind of living dummy which he set in position and copied, as he would have copied a jug or a cooking-pot in a still life.
This time Claude proceeded without any undue haste. For months before he sketched in his central figure he had worn out Christine by scores of attempts to ‘steep himself’, as he called it, in the true quality of her skin. Then, when at last he did decide to set to work on the sketch, it was on an autumn morning, when there was already a distinct nip in the wind. It was anything but warm in the studio, in spite of the roaring fire in the stove. As Jacques was home from school, suffering from one of his periodic bouts of stupor and fatigue, they decided to shut him in the far end of the studio and tell him to be a good boy. His mother, meanwhile, shivering with cold, undressed and took up the pose near the stove.
For the first hour Claude never spoke a word but, from the top of his ladder, kept glancing down at her with eyes that slashed across her like knives from shoulder to knee. She, overcome meanwhile by a feeling of slow, creeping sadness, kept trying hard not to break down, wondering whether she was suffering more from the cold or from the increasing bitterness of some deep, unaccountable despair. She felt so tired and her legs were so numb that she broke the pose and staggered a few steps forward.
‘Already!’ cried Claude. ‘Why, you haven’t been posing much more than a quarter of an hour! Don’t you want to earn your seven francs?’ he added in a gruff sort of joke.
He was so enthralled by his work that she had hardly regained the use of her limbs and slipped on a dressing-gown before he shouted:
‘Come on, now! No slacking! Today’s one of the big days. I’ve either got to show some genius or burst!’
When she had undressed again and resumed the pose in the sickly light, he started to paint again, bringing out an occasional remark, out of the sheer need to make some sort of noise as soon as he felt his work was going well.
‘It’s extraordinary what a funny skin you’ve got! It positively absorbs light. … You may not believe it, but this morning you’re quite grey. The other day you were pink, a sort of pink that didn’t look real somehow. … It’s a bit of a nuisance, really. You never know where you are with it.’
He stopped, half closed his eyes, then ran on:
‘Still, you can’t beat the nude … the way it comes up against the background. … It throbs and takes on an incredible life of its own, as if you could see the blood coursing through the muscles. … There’s nothing finer, nothing better in the whole world than a well-drawn muscle on a firmly painted limb. They’re something to worship, like God himself. … They’re my religion, the only one I’ve got. I could stay on my knees before them to the end of my days.’
And, as he had to come down to get another tube of paint, he went up to her and, with rising passion, went over every detail of her beauty, touching with his fingers the parts he desired to emphasize. ‘There, you see, under the left breast, there’s a beautiful bit where those little blue veins bring out the delicacy of the skin. … And there, on that curve of the hip, that dimple where the shadow looks golden, a feast for the eye. … And there now, under the full round shape of the belly, the pure lines of the groin and the tiniest point of carmine showing through pale gold. … That’s the part that’s always thrilled me more than all the rest, the belly. The very sight of one makes me want to do impossible things. It’s so lovely to paint, like a sun!’
Back on his ladder again, he cried, in the fever of creation:
‘If I can’t turn out a masterpiece with you, then by God I really must be a dud, and no mistake!’
Christine did not answer. Her distress deepened as her situation grew more obvious, and the longer she stood there in that atmosphere of brutal materialism the more painful did she find her nudity. At every point where Claude’s finger had touched her it had left an icy impression through which, she now felt, the aching cold was invading her entire body. She knew everything now, so what more was there to hope for? Her body which once he had covered with his lover’s kisses, he now viewed and worshipped merely as an artist. Now it was the delicate colouring of her breast that fired his imagination, some line of her belly that brought him to his knees in worship. His desire was blind no longer; he did not crush her whole body against his own, as he used to do, without even looking at her, in an embrace they hoped might fuse them into one.
No! This was the end.
She had ceased to exist, since all he could find to adore in her now was his art, and nature, and life. And she stood there, rigid as marble, staring into the void, holding back the tears she felt welling up in her heart, reduced to the point where she felt too wretched even to cry.
In the next room an impatient voice was suddenly raised accompanied by the beating of small fists on the door.
‘Mummy! Mummy! I can’t sleep, I’m bored! … Open the door, mummy, please!’
It was Jacques. Claude was annoyed and grumbled about never having a minute’s peace.
‘In a minute or two!’ Christine called back. ‘Go to sleep! Father has work to do.’
Now she seemed to find yet another cause for anxiety and after casting worried glances towards the door she finally left the pose for a moment and ran and hung her skirt on the key to cover up the keyhole. Then, without a word, she took up her position near the stove, head erect, body thrown back and breasts well forward.
The sitting seemed likely to go on for ever. Hours and hours went by, and still she stood there, offering herself like a diver ready to meet the water, while Claude on his ladder, miles away, burned with passion for the woman he was painting. He even stopped talking to her, and she became merely an object, perfectly coloured. He had been looking at her ever since morning, but she knew it was not her image she would find in his eyes, she was a stranger to him now, an outcast.
At length, out of sheer fatigue, he stopped; seeing her trembling, he said:
‘You’re not cold, surely?’
‘Yes, I am rather.’
‘How funny! I’m boiling. … Now I can’t have you catching cold. That’s enough for today.’
When he got down she expected him to kiss her; that was the usual token of husbandly gallantry with which he recompensed her for the strain of a lengthy sitting. Today he was so full of his work that he forgot and immediately started to wash out his brushes, kneeling on the floor and dipping them into a jar of soft soap. Still hopeful, Christine stood where she was, still naked. After a time, surprised to notice her standing there like a shadow, he cast one look of amazement in her direction and then continued vigorously wiping his brushes. And so, with trembling fingers, she hastily put on her clothes in all the painful confusion of a woman disdained. She donned her chemise, struggled with her petticoats, fastened her bodice all awry as if she wanted to escape the shame of her impotent nudity, fit now only to grow old out of sight beneath a covering of garments. Now she was conquered she despised herself for sinking, like the basest of prostitutes, to such depths of carnal vulgarity.
The following morning, however, she had to undress once more in the icy blasts and unforgiving light of the studio. Was it not her job, after all? How could she possibly refuse now that it had become a routine? She would never have done anything to hurt Claude, so every day she took up her position afresh in what, for her burning, humiliated body, was a losing battle. Claude never even mentioned it now; his carnal passion had transferred itself to his work and the painted lovers he created for himself. They were the only women now who could send his blood pulsing through his body, the women whose every limb was the product of his own efforts. Back there in the country, when his passion was at its height, he thought happiness was achieved when he possessed a real woman and held her in his arms. He knew now that that had been nothing more than the old, old illusion, since they were still strangers to each other; so he preferred the illusion he found in his art, the everlasting pursuit of unattainable beauty, the mad desire which could never be satisfied. He wanted all women, but he wanted them created according to his dreams: bosoms of satin, amber-coloured hips, and downy virgin loins. He wanted to love them only for the beauty of their colouring; he wanted to feel them perpetually beyond his grasp! Christine was reality, the aim which the hand could reach, and Claude had wearied of her in a season. He was, as Sandoz often jokingly called him, ‘the knight of the uncreated’.
For months posing was torture to her. Life no longer seemed to consist of the two of them living happily together; it was as if a third party had been introduced, a mistress, the woman he was painting with her body for the model. Between them stood the enormous canvas, like a great unsurmountable wall, and he lived on one side of it with the other woman. She could feel it driving her mad, this jealousy of her own ‘double’, but, realizing at the same time the futility of her suffering, she did not dare to tell him about it, knowing he would only laugh at her. Yet she was not mistaken; she could feel that he preferred the copy to herself; it was the copy that he adored, that was his sole preoccupation, the object of his affection through every hour of the day. He was killing her with posing while he added to the other’s charms; the other alone was the source of his joy or his sorrow, according as she lived or languished under his brush. What was that if not love? And was it not torture to have to make the sacrifice of her own body to help bring the other to life, to make it possible for her nightmare rival to haunt them and be forever between them, more powerful than reality, in the studio, at table, in bed, everywhere? What was she, after all, this other woman? Nothing, really; dust, colour on canvas, an image—and yet she could destroy all their h
appiness, making him gloomy, indifferent, brutal even, and leaving her tortured by his neglect and despairing of ever being able to drive out the predatory concubine, so terrible in her painted immobility!
Christine knew she was beaten, and from that moment she felt herself oppressed beneath all the weighty sovereignty of art. She had accepted painting unconditionally; now she exalted it—even more, enshrined it in an awful tabernacle before which she lay prostrate as before the mighty gods of wrath to whom homage is paid because of the very hatred and horror they inspire. Her fear was sacred, for now she was certain that it was pointless to resist further, because if she did she would simply be crushed like a straw; the canvases were just like so many boulders, even the smallest ones seemed to triumph over her, and the inferior ones to boast of easy victory. Prone and trembling, she ceased to differentiate between them; to her, all were equally formidable, and she answered all her husband’s questions automatically:
‘Oh, very good! … Oh, superb! … Oh, extraordinary, really most extraordinary!’
Yet she bore him no grudge; she still adored him, and wept to see him eating his heart out, since after a few weeks of successful work everything had been spoiled again. He could make no more headway with the main female figure, so he nearly worked his model to death, struggling with all his might for days at a time, then dropping everything for a month. A dozen times the central figure was started, abandoned, completely repainted. One year, two years went by and still the picture was not finished. One day it would be practically completed, the next scraped clean and a fresh start made.
Such is the effort of creation that goes into the work of art! Such was the agonizing effort he had to make, the blood and tears it cost him to create living flesh, to produce the breath of life! Everlastingly struggling with the Real, and being repeatedly conquered, like Jacob fighting with the Angel! He threw himself body and soul into the impossible task of putting all nature on one canvas and exhausted himself in the end by the relentless tension of his aching muscles, without ever bringing forth the expected work of genius. The half-measures and trickery that satisfied other painters filled him with remorse and indignation; they were both weak and cowardly, he said. Consequently, he was always starting afresh, spoiling the good in order to do better, because his painting ‘didn’t speak to him’, finding fault with his women because, as his friends used to say, they didn’t step out of the canvas and sleep with him! What was it he lacked, he wondered, to make them really alive? Next to nothing, probably. Some slight adjustment one way or the other. One day, overhearing the expression ‘near genius’ applied to himself, he was both flattered and horrified. Yes, that must be the explanation, he thought, over-shooting or falling short of the mark through some maladjustment of the nerve centres, or through some hereditary flaw which, because of a gram or two of substance too much or too little, instead of making him a great man was going to make him a madman. This was the notion that he could never escape when despair drove him out of the studio, the notion of preordained impotence; he could feel it beating in his head with the persistence of a funeral knell.
