The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  About the middle of the winter, however, Claude found the heart to paint again. Tidying up in the studio one day, he discovered, behind a lot of old frames, a piece of an old canvas, the nude reclining figure from his ‘Open Air’ which he had cut away from the rest and kept when his picture came back from the ‘Salon des Refusés’. As he unrolled it he let out a cry of genuine admiration:

  ‘God, but it’s beautiful!’ He fixed it on the wall at once, with a nail in each corner, and then feasted his eyes upon it for hours. His hands began to tremble and his cheeks grew hotter and hotter as he looked at his work and wondered how he could possibly have shown such mastery. He must have had genius then, he reflected. Could his brain and his eyes and his hands have changed in the meantime? His excitement and the need to express his feelings grew to such a pitch that in the end he called to his wife:

  ‘Come and look at this! … There, how’s that for painting? … Look at those muscles, aren’t they delicate? … And that thigh there in the full sunlight … and this shoulder, and even the curve of the breast there. … Why, damn me if she isn’t alive! I can feel she’s alive, as if I were touching her. I can feel that skin of hers, it’s soft and warm; I can even smell it!’

  Christine, as she stood by his side, responded in monosyllables. She had begun by being surprised and rather flattered by this sudden resurrection, after all those years, of herself as she had been at eighteen, but the more she felt Claude giving way to his enthusiasm, the more aware she became of her own increasing unhappiness coupled with vague but as yet unspoken irritation.

  ‘Well!’ cried Claude. ‘Isn’t that beauty to bow down to and worship?’

  ‘Oh yes, yes. … She’s darkened a bit, though, hasn’t she?’

  ‘Darkened! What are you talking about?’ came Claude’s violent retort. ‘She would never darken,’ he went on. ‘She had eternal youth!’ He might have been madly in love with her, the way he talked about her as if she were a real person, a person he felt sudden urges to see again from time to time and who made him forget everything else in his haste to keep their rendezvous.

  Then, one morning, he got up with a violent thirst for work.

  ‘God in heaven!’ he cried. ‘I’ve done it once, I can do it again! … And this time I’m a dud if I don’t make a go of it!’

  Christine had to sit for him there and then, for he was already on his ladder ready to start work again on his big canvas. For a whole month he kept her standing naked eight hours every day, until her feet were quite numb and she herself was exhausted. But he showed her no mercy and stubbornly refused to give way to his own fatigue. He was determined to produce a masterpiece, to make his upright figure as good as the reclining figure, so radiant with life, on his studio wall. He never stopped looking at it, consulting it, comparing it with his model, goaded into despair by the fear that he would never produce its like again. Glancing first at it, then at Christine, then at his canvas, he would fly into a rage and swear violently when he was not satisfied with his work, until at last he turned on Christine.

  ‘No doubt about it, my dear, you’re nothing like what you were in those days,’ he said. ‘There’s no comparison. … Funny, you know, how well developed you were for one so young. I shall never forget how surprised I was to see you with a breast like a grown woman when the rest of you was as frail as a child. … You were supple and fresh in those days, too, like an opening bud, a breath of spring. … You can flatter yourself, anyhow, you once had a body worth looking at!’

  He spoke with no intention of hurting her feelings, but simply as an observer, with eyes half-closed, considering her body as a specimen that was deteriorating.

  ‘The colouring’s still splendid,’ he went on, ‘but not the line. Not now. … The legs, oh, the legs are still all right; they’re usually the last thing to go in women. … But the belly and the breasts are certainly going to pieces. There, just take a look at yourself in the glass. Near the armpits now, you can see the way the flesh is starting to sag? Not very lovely, is it? Look at her body now, there’s no sagging there, is there?’ he added, with a tender glance in the direction of the recumbent figure. ‘It’s no fault of yours, of course, but that’s obviously the root of the trouble. … Pity!’

  His every word pained her as she stood listening to him, swaying with fatigue. She had already suffered agonies, posing for him hours on end; now he was turning posing into unbearable torture. What was this latest invention of his, throwing her youth in her face and fanning her jealousy by filling her mind with poisonous regrets for her lost beauty? It was turning her into her own rival, making it impossible for her to look at the picture of herself as she used to be without feeling envy biting into her heart. What a part that picture had played in her life! It had been the source of all her unhappiness from the moment she had unconsciously bared her breast as she slept. Through it, in a gesture of soft-hearted charity, she had bared her whole virgin body for him, and then, after the mocking crowd had ridiculed her nudity, she had given herself to him, and so her whole life had been his to dispose of; through it, she had stooped to becoming his model, and through it she had even forfeited his love. Now it had come to light again, full of life, fuller of life than herself, and ready to kill her outright. Now it was clear to her that there was one work, and one work only; the reclining woman in the old picture was reincarnated in the upright figure in the new one.

  With every sitting now Christine felt herself growing older; looking down at herself with tearful eyes, she imagined she could actually see her wrinkles forming and the purity of her figure melting away. She had never examined herself so closely before, and she felt ashamed and disgusted by the sight of her body, which filled her with that infinite despair that comes to all women of her ardent disposition when love slips from their grasp as their beauty fades. Was that why he had ceased to love her, she wondered; was it that made him spend nights with other women or take refuge in his unnatural passion for his painting? Whatever it was, it made her lose all interest in life and fall into the most slipshod ways. She lost all sense of grace and neatness and was quite happy to go about all the time in dirty camisole and skirt, so discouraged was she by the idea that resistance was useless since she was showing such signs of age.

  One day, infuriated by an unsuccessful sitting, Claude made a remark so terrible that she never got over it. In one of his fits of uncontrollable rage he nearly put his fist through his canvas, and then vented his wrath on her, crying as he shook his fist in her face:

  ‘It’s plain to see I shall never do anything with that! … When women want to be models, they should never have children!’

  She was so taken aback by his outrageous remark that she burst into tears and ran away to dress, but her hands trembled so that she could hardly tell one garment from the other.

  Immediately overcome by remorse, Claude came down from his ladder forthwith to console her.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I ought not to have said that. I am a miserable wretch. … But please hold the pose just a little longer … just to show there’s no ill-feeling.’

  He picked her up in his arms, naked as she was, and stopped her in the act of slipping on her chemise. Once more she forgave him and took up the pose again, but inwardly so quivering with emotion that she felt great waves of pain passing through her limbs and, although she managed to remain motionless as a statue, tears streamed down her cheeks and over her naked breast. Ah, yes, she reflected, it might have been better if that child had never been born! It was he, maybe, who was to blame for everything. She stopped crying, her mind already making excuses for the father as she became aware of her smouldering wrath against the poor little creature who had never aroused her maternal instinct and whom she hated now since she thought it might be he who had destroyed her appeal as a lover.

  This time Claude determinedly finished his picture and swore he would send it to the Salon at all costs. He stayed on his ladder from morning till night, tidying up his canvas, until it was
too dark for him to carry on. Then, having worn himself out completely, he said he was not going to touch the thing again. That day, when Sandoz went up to see him about four o’clock, he was not at home; Christine said he had just gone up the hill for a breath of air.

  The break between Claude and his old friends had slowly widened. His painting they found so disturbing, and were so conscious of the disintegration of their youthful admiration that little by little they had begun to fall away, and now not one of them ever dropped in to see him. Gagnière had even left Paris to go and live in one of his own houses at Melun, where he lived very meagrely on the rent of the other, after amazing all his friends by marrying his music mistress, an old maid who played Wagner to him in the evenings. Mahoudeau said his work kept him away, for now he was beginning to earn a reasonable living touching-up for a manufacturer of art bronzes. Jory’s case was rather different; nobody ever saw him now that Mathilde kept him so closely guarded, gorging him with titbits, making him stupid with lovemaking and giving him so much of everything he was fond of that he had stopped scouring the pavements in search of adventure and picking up his pleasures in the gutter because he was too close-fisted to pay for them. Instead he had become as domesticated as a pet dog, given Mathilde control of his purse, and only with her permission did he ever have enough money in his pocket to buy himself a cheap cigar. It was even rumoured that Mathilde, who had at one time been a regular churchgoer, had tightened her hold on him by thrusting religion upon him and talking to him about death, of which he was terribly scared. Fagerolles was the only one who managed to put on some semblance of cordiality whenever he met his old friend, promising to go and see him, though he never actually did so; he had far too many calls upon his time now he was such a great success, boosted, fêted, celebrated, and on the highroad to glory and fortune. The only one of his old friends Claude felt rather sorry to lose was Dubuche, for whom he still felt a certain attachment for old times’ sake, in spite of the clashes to which their differences of character had led in recent years. Dubuche, apparently, was not particularly happy either; he was rolling in wealth, of course, but nevertheless wretched; he was in continual disagreement with his father-in-law, who complained that he had been disappointed by his capacity as an architect, and he lived in a perpetual sick-room atmosphere with his invalid wife and his two children, both born prematurely and brought up in cotton-wool.

  Sandoz was the only one of the group who still appeared to know the way to the Rue Tourlaque. He used to go there for the sake of little Jacques, his godson, and of poor, wretched Christine, whose passion among so much squalor moved him very deeply, for he saw in her a woman in love he would have liked to portray in his books. He used to go there especially because his sympathy for Claude as a brother-artist had increased since he realized that Claude had somehow lost his foothold and, so far as his art was concerned, was slipping deeper and deeper into madness, heroic madness. At first he had been amazed, for he had had greater faith in his friend than in himself; ever since their schooldays he had considered himself inferior to Claude, whom he looked up to as one of the masters who would revolutionize the art of a whole epoch. Then his heart had been wrung by the spectacle of failing genius, and surprise had given way to bitter compassion for the unspeakable torments of impotence. Was it ever possible, in art, to say where madness lay? he wondered. Failures always moved him to tears and the more a book or a painting inclined towards aberration, the more grotesque and lamentable the artist’s effort, the more he tended to radiate charity, the greater was his urge to put the stricken soul respectfully to sleep among all the wild extravagance of its dreams.

  The day Sandoz called and found Claude was out, he did not go away at once when he saw that Christine’s eyes were red with weeping.

  ‘If you think he’ll be back soon,’ he said, ‘I’ll wait for him.’

  ‘Oh, he certainly won’t be away for long,’ she answered.

  ‘Then I’ll stay till he comes in, if I shan’t be in your way.’

  Never had he felt so sorry for her as he did now; she seemed so despondent and forlorn, so weary of gesture and so slow of speech, so completely uninterested in everything but her own burning passion. For at least a week she had never so much as dusted the furniture or tidied the room, but simply let everything run to dirt and disorder, for she had hardly the strength to drag herself about. It was a heart-rending spectacle: poverty degenerating into squalor, the harsh light from the big window showing up all the filth and untidiness in the great, black shed of a place, that made him shudder with gloom even on that bright February afternoon.

  Christine lumbered back to the chair she had been occupying at the side of a bed which Sandoz had not noticed until now.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ he asked. ‘Jacques isn’t ill, is he?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, drawing the bedclothes over the child who kept throwing them off again. ‘He’s been in bed three days now, so we’ve brought him in here, to be near us. … He’s never been very strong, you know. He seems to get worse rather than better, too, so we hardly know what to do about him,’ she added in a monotonous voice, staring vaguely into space as she answered.

  Sandoz was really frightened when he went up and looked at the child, he was so pale and his head seemed larger than ever, and far too heavy for his neck. Had it not been for the heavy breath passing between his bloodless lips, the child might have been taken for dead, he lay so motionless.

  ‘Hello, Jacques,’ said Sandoz. ‘Don’t you know who it is? It’s me, your godfather, Sandoz. Aren’t you going to say hello?’

  The head made a painful but futile effort to raise itself and the eyelids half opened, showing the whites of the eyes, then closed again.

  ‘Haven’t you had a doctor?’ he asked Christine.

  ‘Oh, doctors! What help can they be?’ she replied, with a shrug of the shoulders. ‘We’ve seen one. He said there was nothing we can do. … Let’s hope it’s just another false alarm. It’s his age, I think. He’s twelve now and growing fast.’

  Horrified, Sandoz did not press the point; he had no desire to upset Christine further, since she obviously did not realize the seriousness of the situation. He crossed the room in silence and stopped in front of the picture.

  ‘Aha! This is going well,’ he said. ‘He’s on the right track this time.’

  ‘It’s finished.’

  ‘Finished!’

  When she added that the canvas was being sent to the Salon the following week, he did not know what to say, but sat down on the divan to contemplate it at leisure and avoid hasty condemnation. The background, the embankment, the Seine, with the prow of the Cité rising triumphantly out of it, were merely sketched in, but sketched in by a masterly hand, as if the painter had been afraid of spoiling his dream Paris by an excess of detail. To the left there was one excellent group, porters unloading sacks of plaster, which was beautifully and powerfully finished. But the boat with the female figures in it simply broke the canvas with a violent burst of flesh tints which were completely out of place. The big nude figure in particular, which had clearly been painted at fever-heat and had the glow and the strange larger-than-life quality of an hallucination, struck a disturbing and discordant note amid all the realism of the rest of the picture.

  Sandoz said nothing as his heart filled with despair in the presence of such a splendid failure, until, feeling Christine’s eyes fixed expectantly upon him, he managed to murmur:

  ‘Amazing! Really amazing, that central figure.’

  He was saved from further comment by the return of Claude, who shouted for joy at the sight of his old friend and wrung his hand with delight before he went across to Christine and kissed little Jacques, who had once more thrown off the bedclothes.

  ‘How is he now?’ he asked.

  ‘Still the same.’

  ‘He’ll be all right after a rest. Growing too fast, that’s what it is. I told you there was nothing to worry about,’ he said and then went and sat next to Sand
oz on the divan.

  There they both lay back and scrutinized the picture, while Christine, sitting by the bed, looked at nothing and apparently thought about nothing in her desolation. Gradually, as night came on, the bright light from the window faded and weakened in the slow, smooth deepening of the twilight.

  ‘So you’ve made up your mind to submit it, Christine tells me?’ said Sandoz.

  ‘Yes, I’m sending it in.’

  ‘You’re right. You’ve been at it quite long enough. There are some fine bits in it; that perspective along the embankment on the left, and that man there lifting a sack. But …’

  He hesitated a second, then decided to offer his criticism.

  ‘But I still don’t see why you’ve insisted on leaving in those nude figures in the centre. … There’s no obvious reason for them, is there? And you promised me they shouldn’t be just nudes, don’t you remember? Are you really determined to leave them as they are?’

  ‘I am,’ replied Claude curtly and with that note of obstinacy that goes with an idée fixe and indicates that explanations are not worth giving. Reclining with his hands clasped at the back of his head, he started to talk about something else, though gazing all the while at his picture, over which the twilight was beginning to cast a fine veil of shadow.

  ‘Do you know where I’ve been?’ he asked. ‘I’ve been calling on Courajod. … You know Courajod, the landscape painter, his “Pool at Gagny” is in the Luxembourg. Don’t you remember, I thought he was dead, and then we discovered he lived quite near here, just on the other side of the hill, in the Rue de l’Abreuvoir? Well, Courajod had got me puzzled. I’d discovered where he lives once when I was walking round that way to get some fresh air, and I’d never been able to pass it since without wanting to go in. Who wouldn’t, knowing that a great master lived there, the fellow who made landscape painting what it is, living there ignored, played out, buried away like a mole?. … And as for the street and the place itself, well, you can’t imagine. The street might as well be in a country village; it has grassy banks on either side and poultry all over the roadway, and the cottage is more like a doll’s house than anything else, with its tiny windows, tiny doors, and tiny garden—hardly a garden, really, just a steep strip of land with four pear-trees, cluttered up with a hen-run made of mouldering lath and plaster and rusty iron railings tied together with string.’