The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  ‘Ah, good morning,’ said Naudet to Bongrand. ‘So you’ve come, like everyone else, to admire my Fagerolles.’

  His attitude to Bongrand had changed; he was no longer respectful, humble, ingratiating as he had been in the past. He talked of Fagerolles, too, as if he owned him, as if he were simply a hired labourer who needed perpetual chivvying. It was he who had installed Fagerolles in the Avenue de Villiers, forced him to have an expensive establishment flashily furnished, and run him into debt buying carpets and objets d’art, in order to have him at his mercy ever afterwards. Now he was beginning to accuse him of being heedless and of compromising himself. This picture now – a serious artist would never have sent it to the Salon. Oh, of course, it caused its bit of a stir, and there was some talk of giving it the médaille d’honneur; but nothing could be worse for keeping up prices. When you wanted the American market you had to learn to stay quietly at home, like a god in his holy of holies.

  ‘Believe me, my dear Bongrand,’ Naudet continued, ‘I would rather have given twenty thousand francs out of my own pocket than have those idiotic newspapers make such a to-do about this year’s Fagerolles.’

  Bongrand, listening bravely, in spite of his suffering, smiled.

  ‘Perhaps they have been rather too indiscreet,’ he said. ‘Why only yesterday I read somewhere that Fagerolles eats two boiled eggs every morning!’

  He was poking fun at the sudden outburst of publicity which, for the past week, as a result of an article published before his picture had been exhibited, had been giving Paris its fill of the youthful celebrity. Every available reporter had been pressed into the campaign, and they had practically stripped him naked, telling everything there was to tell about his childhood, his father the art zinc manufacturer, his schooling, where he lived, how he lived, the colour of his socks, and his trick of pinching the tip of his nose. He was the rage of the moment, the very painter the public wanted, since he had been lucky enough just to miss the Prix de Rome and to break with the Beaux-Arts while retaining its methods. His good fortune would be a short-lived affair, brought by the wind, the passing whim of a nerve-racked city; and his success, hinged on half-measures and false courage, the accident which staggers the public in the morning but by evening is recounted with indifference.

  Naudet had noticed the ‘Village Funeral’.

  ‘So this is your picture, is it?’ he said. ‘You’ve been wanting to match the “Wedding”, I see. … If you’d asked me, I’d have advised you against it. … Ah, the “Wedding”, that was a picture!’

  Still listening, still smiling, though with a painful twist about his trembling lips, Bongrand forgot all his own masterpieces and his own assured claim to immortality, thinking only of the immediate, effortless success coming to this young whipper-snapper, who was not even worthy of cleaning his palette, and pushing him, Bongrand, into oblivion, he who had had to struggle for ten years to gain recognition! If they only knew, these younger generations, when they make up their minds to bury you, what tears of blood they make you shed in death!

  As he was slow in answering, he was afraid he might have given some hint of his suffering. He was surely not going to give way to jealousy; he had not yet sunk so low? The way to die was standing on one’s own feet, he reminded himself angrily, so he pulled himself together and instead of the violent answer he had ready on the tip of his tongue, he said quietly:

  ‘You’re quite right, Naudet. It’s a pity I had nothing better to do the day I thought of painting that picture.’

  ‘Ah, there he is! Excuse me!’ cried Naudet, and turned tail.

  ‘He’ was Fagerolles, who had just appeared in the doorway. He did not come into the room, but stopped discreetly on the threshold, smiling, bearing his good fortune with characteristic ease. He was looking for someone and eventually motioned to a young man to whom he wished to speak. The news he had to impart was evidently good, for the young man positively overflowed with gratitude. Two other young men rushed up to Fagerolles to congratulate him; a woman detained him for a moment, to point out, with a martyred expression, a still life hanging in a particularly dark corner. Then he disappeared after casting one solitary glance at the crowd in ecstasies in front of his picture.

  Claude, who had been taking everything in, felt sorrow welling up in his heart. The throng was increasing every minute and there he was gazing into a lot of staring faces, all damp with perspiration in the now unbearable heat. Between him and the door stood a rising mass of heads and shoulders, and in the doorway itself all the people who could not see the picture eagerly pointed to where it hung with their umbrellas still streaming with rain from the storm outside. Bongrand never stirred; he was too proud to go but stood firm, taking his defeat as an old soldier should, looking thankless Paris squarely in the face, determined that his end should be worthy of his courage and his all-embracing human kindness. Claude, as he received no answer when he spoke to him, realized at once that from behind the calm, cheerful face the soul had fled, stricken with grief, tortured with unspeakable pain; so, filled with awe and respect, he said no more but slipped away without Bongrand even noticing he had gone.

  Claude had yielded, too, to the impulse of another idea that had come to him as he watched the crowd go by. He had been unable to understand why he had not found his own picture, but surely the answer was a simple one. There must be one room in the place where people were laughing and joking and jostling each other to scoff at some particular picture. If there was, that picture was sure to be his. He could still hear the laughter at the ‘Salon des Refusés’, after all those years. So now he began to listen at every doorway for jeers as an indication of his picture’s whereabouts.

  Back again in the great East room, the death-chamber of art on a grand scale, where they dump all the outsize canvases of clammy, gloomy, historical, and religious subjects, a sudden shock brought him to a standstill. He had been through this room twice already, but wasn’t that his picture up there? It was; but it was hung so very high up that he could barely recognize it, it looked so tiny, clinging like a swallow to the corner of a frame, the huge ornamental frame of a tremendous canvas ten metres long representing the Flood, a seething mass of yellow people struggling in a dark red sea. On the left hung yet another depressing full-length portrait of yet another pale-grey general, and on the right a nymph of colossal proportions in a moonlit landscape, like the bloodless corpse of a murder victim lying putrefying on the grass, while all around, above, below and on every side, were pink effects, mauve effects, a variety of sorry visions, even a comic scene of monks getting drunk in their monastery, and an ‘Opening of the Chamber of Deputies’ with a long screed on a gilded scroll and a line reproduction of the Deputies’ heads, each one carefully labelled. And there, high up among all its sickly-looking neighbours, the little canvas, so much bolder in treatment than all the rest, stood out in violent contrast, like a monster grinning in pain.

  So that was the ‘Dead Child’, poor little thing! Hanging where it did it was just a confused mass, like the carcass of some shapeless creature cast up by the tide, while the abnormally large head might have been any white, swollen object, a skull or even a bloated belly, and the wizened hands on the shroud looked like the curled-up claws of a bird that has died of cold. The bed, too, was a sorry mass of white upon white, pale limbs on pale sheets, one cancelling out the other, the bitter end! In time, however, it was possible to distinguish the light, glassy eyes and to recognize a child’s head, a pitiful case of some dread disease of the brain.

  Claude moved first in one direction, then the other, to get a better view, for the light was so bad that the canvas was one mass of reflections. Poor little Jacques! They’d placed him very badly, probably out of contempt, but more likely out of shame and the desire to be rid of his baleful ugliness. But Claude saw him differently; he remembered him away in the country, all fresh and rosy, rolling on the grass, then in the Rue de Douai, pale-faced and rather dull-witted, and then in the Rue Tourlaque, unable t
o lift his head, dying one night all alone, while his mother slept on at his side. Claude thought of her, too, the mother of his child, who had stayed at home with her sorrow, to weep most likely, for now she would often weep the whole day through. Perhaps she had been wise, after all, not to come; it might have been more than she could bear to see their poor little Jacques, already cold in his bed, cast aside like a pariah and so harshly treated by the light that his face looked contorted in a horrible grimacing laugh.

  Claude suffered even more deeply to see his work ignored. Surprised and disappointed, he looked about him for the crowd, the throng he had expected, and wondered why there was no one there to scoff. The jeers, the insults, the indignation he had had to hear in the past, though painful at the time, had given him a zest for life. Where were they now? This time there was nobody even to spit and pass on. It was death. Obviously bored, visitors tended to file hastily through the great room, where the only picture that tempted them to linger was the ‘Opening of the Chamber of Deputies’, which was never without its small group reading the inscription and picking out the various Deputies. Hearing someone laughing behind him Claude turned to look, only to discover that the cause of the merriment was the picture of the monks on the spree, the humorous picture of the year which some gentlemen were describing to their fair companions as ‘brilliantly witty’. But everybody passed beneath little Jacques without even looking up, for not a single person realized he was there!

  Claude’s only hope seemed to be two gentlemen, one fat, one thin, both wearing decorations, sitting well back on the upholstered seat in the middle of the room, looking up at the pictures and talking very earnestly. He went and stood near them to listen.

  ‘Well, I followed them,’ the fat one was saying, ‘down the Rue Saint-Honoré, along the Rue Saint-Roch and the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin, then up the Rue Lafayette. …’

  ‘You spoke to them, I suppose,’ said the thin one, deeply interested.

  ‘No, I didn’t. I was so afraid of losing my temper.’

  Claude moved away again, but on three occasions he listened with bated breath when the odd visitor stopped and looked up towards the ceiling; for he had a morbid desire to hear some remark about his picture, however brief. Without criticism, what was the use of exhibiting? How was one to know what people thought? He would have preferred anything to this terrible torture of silence. He was beginning to find it utterly unbearable when he saw a young couple approaching, a pleasant-looking husband with a small blond moustache and a ravishing wife as frail and delicate as a Dresden china shepherdess. It was she who saw the picture and, finding she could make no sense of it, asked her husband for the title. When the husband had gone through the catalogue and discovered it was entitled ‘Dead Child’, she was horrified, and seizing him by the arm dragged him away, exclaiming:

  ‘How dreadful! The police ought to forbid that sort of thing!’

  So Claude was left staring transfixed, oblivious of the milling herd around him which ignored the one sacred object he alone could see. It was there, with everybody elbowing their way round him, that he was discovered by Sandoz.

  Sandoz, too, was alone; his wife had stayed at home with his mother, who was unwell. He had just stopped to look at the little picture, which he had only discovered by accident, and his heart had been wrung as he thought how disgustingly pointless life can seem to be. In a flash he lived through all their youth again, the school at Plassans, the long escapades on the banks of the Viorne, their carefree rambles in the blazing sun, and all the burning enthusiasm of their earliest ambitions. He recalled, too, how they had all worked together in later life, their certainty of victory, their insatiable hunger for success and the feeling that they could swallow Paris in one mouthful. How often, in those days, had he seen Claude as the great man, the man whose unbridled genius would leave the talents of all the rest of them far, far behind! He remembered the studio on the Quai de Bourbon, the mighty canvases they dreamed of, the projects that were going to ‘shatter the Louvre’, their untiring struggles, working ten hours a day, giving themselves body and soul to their art. And all to what purpose? After twenty years of passionate striving, this; this mean, sinister little object, universally ignored, isolated like a leper, a melancholy, heart-breaking sight! All the hopes, all the sufferings of a whole lifetime spent on the arduous task of bringing into the world what? This, this, this! Oh God!

  Finding Claude standing quite close to him, Sandoz spoke, and there was a quiver of brotherly emotion in his voice.

  ‘So you came after all,’ he said. ‘What made you refuse to call for me?’

  Claude offered no excuse. He seemed very tired and incapable of any strong reaction, as if he were ready to drop gently off to sleep.

  ‘Come now,’ Sandoz continued. ‘Don’t stay here. It’s after twelve, so come and lunch with me. I’m expected at Ledoyen’s, but we’ll forget about that. Come along down to the buffet and see if that’ll rejuvenate us a bit!’

  Linking his arm warmly through Claude’s, Sandoz led him away, doing his utmost to draw him out of his gloomy silence.

  ‘Look here, old friend,’ he said, ‘what the hell is the good of being down in the mouth? Maybe they have hung your picture too high, but that doesn’t prevent it from being a damned fine bit of painting! … Oh, I know, you’d expected something different, but you’re not dead yet, and where there’s life there’s hope. Besides, you’ve every reason to be proud, come to that. The Salon’s your victory this year. Fagerolles isn’t the only one to plagiarize you, far from it! They’re all doing it. They all got a good laugh out of “Open Air”, but it nevertheless caused a revolution! Look around you. Look, there’s another “Open Air”, and there’s another and another, the whole Salon’s “Open Air”!’ he cried, pointing first to one picture, then another, as they walked through the exhibition.

  He was right; broad daylight, after gradually filtering into contemporary painting, had at last come into its own. The old Salon with its grim, dark-coloured pictures had given place to a Salon full of bright spring sunshine. The dawn of this new day had first begun to break all those years ago at the ‘Salon des Refusés’; now it was spreading rapidly, putting new life into painting, filling it with light subtly diffused and decomposed into nuances without number. On every side the famous blue tone was manifest, even in portraits and in the historical scenes which are really glorified genre pictures. The old-style academic subjects had disappeared with the dreary academic colouring, as if the rejected doctrine had taken with it all its ghostly personifications, imaginary beings and events, the cadaverous nudes of pagan and Catholic mythology, the legends not founded on faith, the anecdotes not founded on fact—in short, all the Beaux-Arts bric-à-brac worn threadbare by generations of painters, brainless and unscrupulous alike, was gradually disappearing, and even among the die-hards, both young and old, the influence was obvious: the light of day had dawned. Even from a distance it was plain to see. On every side there were pictures that were like holes in the wall, open windows on the world outside. It would not be long before the walls themselves crumbled and made way for nature itself; the breach was already wide, routine had gone down before the lively onslaught made by youth and daring.

  ‘You’ll come into your own yet, old fellow,’ Sandoz went on. ‘You’re bound to. The art of the future is going to be your art. These chaps are where they are now because you’ve made them.’

  Claude opened his mouth at last and muttered dourly:

  ‘What the hell’s the use of having “made” them, if I haven’t “made” myself? … You know as well as I do it was too much for me, and that’s just what I can’t stomach.’

  A despairing gesture was enough to indicate his train of thought—his inability to be the genius of his own artistic creed, his frustration at being the forerunner who sows the idea but cannot reap the glory, his despair at seeing himself robbed and despoiled by a gang of slapdash painters, a swarm of facile daubers without any conception of concerte
d action, who were simply cheapening the new art before he or anybody else had had the strength to produce the masterpiece that would be a landmark in contemporary painting.

  Sandoz did not agree. The future was still before them, he said. Then, to distract him, he stopped him as they were crossing the central hall.

  ‘Look at that woman in blue standing in front of that portrait,’ he said. ‘That’s a fine slap in the face for painting! … Do you remember how we used to watch the Salon public in the old days, the clothes they wore, the way they behaved? There wasn’t a picture in the place that would bear the comparison. The pictures today stand up to it better. In one landscape I just noticed over there, there was much more life in the yellow tone-values than there was in the women who were going up to look at it.’

  Claude winced; his suffering was beyond words.