The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  ‘Oh, my goodness!’

  She was dazed and, for a moment, petrified with fear at finding herself in a strange place, with this young man in shirt sleeves devouring her with his eyes. Then, with one desperate gesture, she pulled up the sheet and hugged it to her bosom with both arms. So profound was the shock to her modesty that the blood rushed to her cheeks and her blush flowed, in a rosy tide, to the very tips of her breasts.

  ‘Hey, what’s up?’ snapped Claude, his crayon poised, ‘what’s wrong?’

  She neither spoke nor stirred, but lay there clutching the sheet to her throat, and making herself so small in the bed that she was hardly noticeable under the bedclothes.

  ‘Don’t worry, I’m not going to eat you. … Come on. Do me a favour and lie back the way you were.’

  She flushed again and finally stammered:

  ‘No! Oh, no! I couldn’t, monsieur.’

  He thought her obstinacy ridiculous and soon let fly in one of his characteristic outbursts of temper.

  ‘What difference can it make to you? Why should you worry because I know what you look like undressed? You’re not the first I’ve seen!’

  At that she burst into tears and he, beside himself with anger, desperate because he thought he might never finish his drawing and this silly girl’s prudery was going to deprive him of a good study for his picture, gave full vent to his rage.

  ‘So you won’t do it, eh? … Of all the damned silly things! What do you take me for? Have I as much as tried to lay a finger on you, tell me that? If I’d even thought of having a bit of fun, I’ve had plenty of opportunity since last night. … If you think I’m interested in that sort of nonsense, my girl, you’re very much mistaken. You can show me all you’ve got, it won’t upset me. … Besides, it doesn’t show much gratitude, does it, refusing a little favour like that? … After all, I did take you in off the streets, and I did let you sleep in my bed.’

  She was sobbing now, and had hidden her face in the pillow.

  ‘I give you my word it’s absolutely necessary, or I wouldn’t be worrying you like this.’

  All these tears surprised him, and he began to feel ashamed of his harshness. Not knowing what to do for the best, he said nothing for a few moments and then, when she had had time to calm herself, he said in a much gentler voice:

  ‘If you really do mind, we’ll say no more about it. … But if you only knew what it means to me … I have a picture there, you see, half finished, and likely to stay that way, and you were so exactly the type I’ve been looking for. … With me, the thing is, when it comes to damned painting I could kill my own mother and father! … Can you understand that? Forgive me. … You know, if you were really kind, you’d give me just a few minutes more. … No, you needn’t be embarrassed, I don’t mean the bust. I don’t need that, I only want the head now. Just the head, that’s all. If I could just finish that. … Will you do it? … Please … Put your arm back as it was, and I’ll be grateful to you as long as … oh, as long as I live!’

  By the time he had finished he was almost praying to the girl, making vague, pitiful gestures with his crayon, so powerful was the urge he felt to draw. Otherwise, he had not stirred, he was still perched on the edge of his low chair, still at a respectable distance from her. At length she took a chance, now that she felt calmer, and uncovered her face. What else could she do? She was at his mercy, and he looked so downcast! One last moment of hesitation, one last touch of shyness and then, slowly, without saying a word, she slipped her arm back under her head, taking great care to keep the other out of sight, holding the sheets tightly up to her neck.

  ‘Ah! Now that’s what I call kind!’ said Claude. ‘I won’t take long now. You’ll be free in a matter of minutes.’

  Bent over his drawing, glancing at her from time to time with the keen eye of the artist, he saw her no longer as a woman but simply as a model. Her faint blush lingered for a time in her confusion at exposing her bare arm, though it was no more than she would have innocently shown at a ball. But the young man seemed so reasonable that she soon regained her calm, the hotness left her cheeks, her mouth relaxed into a smile of confidence, while from under her half-closed lids she in her turn studied him. She had been terrified of him with his thick beard, his big head, his violent gestures, ever since she had set eyes on him; but she saw now he was not really ugly. There was a deep tenderness, she discovered, in his dark brown eyes, and above his bristly moustache the nose was surprisingly delicate, almost feminine. There was something inexplicably touching about his passionate intentness, sending a faint quiver through him as he worked, making a live thing of the crayon he held between his slim fingers. He could not be wicked, she thought. He bullied because he was shy. She would have found it difficult to explain what she felt, but her mind was at rest and she began to relax, as in the company of a friend.

  The studio, however, still rather frightened her. Glancing discreetly about her, she was appalled by the disorder and apparent neglect. Last winter’s ashes were still heaped up in front of the stove. Apart from the bed, the little washstand and the divan, the only other pieces of furniture in the place were a dilapidated oak wardrobe and a huge deal table littered with brushes, tubes of paint, unwashed crockery, and a spirit stove on which stood a saucepan still spattered with vermicelli. Chairs stood about, with holes in their seats, surrounded by rickety easels. Near the divan, on the floor, in a corner which was probably swept out less than once a month, was the candle he had used last night, and the only thing in the room that looked neat and cheerful was the cuckoo-clock, a large one of its kind with a resounding tick, ornamented with bright red flowers. But what unnerved her more than anything else were the unframed sketches hanging on the walls, covering them from ceiling to floor, where others lay heaped up in a disorderly landslide of canvas. She had never seen painting like it, so rugged, so harsh, so violent in its colouring; it shocked her like a burst of foul language bawled out from the steps of a gin-shop. She looked away, but her eyes were drawn towards one picture turned face to the wall. It was the big canvas the artist was working on and which he turned to the wall every night in order to judge it with a fresh, unbiased eye when he resumed his work in the morning. What could be on that one, she wondered, that he didn’t even dare exhibit it?

  By now the whole studio was flooded with sunshine, for there was no shade at the window, and it flowed like molten gold over the carefree poverty of its ramshackle furniture.

  Claude found the silence oppressive. He wanted to say something, anything, partly in order to be polite, but largely to help her to forget she was posing. He racked his brains for a long time, but all he could find to say was:

  ‘What’s your name?’

  Opening her eyes, for she had started to doze, she replied:

  ‘Christine.’

  Then he remembered he had never told her his own name. There they had been under the same roof since last night without even knowing each other’s names.

  ‘Mine’s Claude.’

  And, as he happened to look at her just at that moment, he saw her break into an enchanting laugh, the playful reaction of a girl not yet quite grown up. It struck her as very funny, this belated introduction and, following up her train of thought, she said:

  ‘How odd! Claude and Christine. We both start with the same letter!’

  There was another silence. His eyes half-closed, oblivious for a moment, he went on drawing, but then he thought he noticed her getting restless. He was so afraid she would lose the pose that to occupy her he ventured:

  ‘A bit warm, isn’t it?’

  This time she restrained her laughter although now that she felt more at one with her surroundings her natural gaiety had revived and was not always easy to control. It was so hot that the bed was like a bath and her skin was damp and pale, with the milky paleness of camellias.

  ‘Yes, it is rather warm,’ she answered seriously, though her eyes were sparkling with merriment.

  And Claude carried on in h
is simple, good-natured way:

  ‘It’s all this sun. … Still, it does you good, plenty of sun on your body. … We could have done with a bit of this last night in the doorway, couldn’t we?’

  That made them both laugh. Claude, delighted to have discovered a topic of conversation, began to ask her about her adventure, but not in any inquisitive spirit. He did not really care whether she told him the truth or not; all he wanted to do was to prolong the sitting.

  Simply, in a few words, Christine told him what had happened. On the previous morning she had left Clermont to come to Paris to take up a post as reader to a Madame Vanzade, a wealthy old lady, the widow of a general, who lived in Passy. According to the time-table, her train was due into Paris at ten past nine, and all arrangements had been made for her to be met by one of Madame Vanzade’s maids. They had even agreed that the maid should be able to recognize her by the grey feather in her black hat. But just on this side of Nevers the train had been held up. A goods train had been derailed and the main line was blocked by debris. That was the start of a long series of delays and setbacks. First they had waited an unconscionable time in the train, then they had been told to get out, leave their luggage behind and trudge three kilometres to the nearest station where a relief train had been formed. Two hours had been lost that way, and two more were lost through the general dislocation the accident had caused all along the line. So the outcome of it all was that they had only got into Paris at one o’clock in the morning, four hours late.

  ‘Bad luck!’ said Claude, breaking into her narrative, still not quite convinced, but staggered by the ease with which all complications were being smoothed out. ‘And, of course, at that hour, the person who should have met you had gone.’

  He was right. Christine had not been met by Madame Vanzade’s maid, who must have given her up and gone home. She told him how scared she had been in the huge, poorly-lit concourse at the Gare de Lyon, practically deserted at that hour of the morning, and how for a long time she had not dared to take a cab but had wandered to and fro, clutching her tiny travelling bag, hoping somebody would turn up. When at last she had screwed up her courage it was too late, for there was only one cab on the rank, and the driver, who was very dirty and reeked of wine, had sidled up and leered as he asked her where she wanted to go.

  ‘I know the sort,’ said Claude, as interested now as if he were living a fairy-tale. ‘And you let him pick you up?’

  ‘He made me,’ said Christine, her eyes fixed on the ceiling, still holding the pose. ‘He called me dearie. I was scared to death. When I said I wanted to go to Passy he was furious and started off at such a rate that I had to hang on to the doors. After a time, I began to think he was harmless after all. He went at a reasonable pace along the streets that were still lit up, and I could see there were people about. Then I recognized the Seine. I’ve never been to Paris before, but I knew what it looked like on the map, so I thought he would simply follow the embankment. But when I saw we were going over a bridge I was scared again. It was just beginning to rain when the cab turned into a patch of shadow, pulled up with a jerk and the driver scrambled down from his seat. He wanted to get in with me. He said it was too wet outside. …’

  Claude started to laugh. He believed her now. She could never have invented that cabby! She had stopped, embarrassed by his laugh.

  ‘So that was his game, was it?’ he said. ‘And what did you do?’

  ‘I jumped straight out of the other door on to the roadway. He started swearing at me then, pretended we were there and said that if I didn’t pay him he’d tear the hat off my head. … It was pouring with rain and there wasn’t a soul about. I didn’t know what to do, so I gave him a five-franc piece and he drove off as fast as he could go, taking my travelling bag with him. Fortunately there was nothing in it but two handkerchiefs, a piece of brioche and the key to the trunk I’d had to leave in the train.’

  ‘But why didn’t you take the number of the cab?’ cried the indignant painter.

  He remembered now that a cab had whisked past him at a break-neck speed as he was crossing the Pont Louis-Philippe in the blinding rain, and he marvelled to think how often truth is really stranger than fiction. Compared to the natural course of life’s limitless combinations, his version of the affair was so simple and logical that it was completely stupid.

  ‘You can just imagine how I felt when you found me in the doorway!’ said Christine. ‘I knew very well I wasn’t in Passy; that meant that on my first night in this terrible city I was going to have to sleep in the streets. Then there was the thunder and lightning! Oh, those dreadful flashes, all blue and red. I shudder to think what I saw when they lit up the streets!’

  Her eyes had closed again, and her face turned pale as she recalled the baleful vision she had seen the previous night; the embankment, a trench cut through a blazing furnace; the leaden waters of the river, a moat, congested with great black barges like so many dead whales, and stretching out over it all the gibbet-like arms of a host of motionless cranes. Could anyone call that a welcome? she reflected.

  There was another gap in the conversation. Claude had resumed his drawing. At last his model had to move, for she felt her arm going to sleep.

  ‘Could you keep the elbow just a little bit further back?’ he said mechanically and, partly to show he was still interested, partly to excuse his abruptness, added:

  ‘Your parents are going to be worried, aren’t they, if they’ve heard about the train crash?’

  ‘I haven’t got any parents.’

  ‘Neither father nor mother? Do you mean you’re all alone in the world?’

  ‘Yes. Quite alone.’

  She was eighteen, she said, born at Strasbourg while her father, Captain Hallegrain, was waiting to be posted to another garrison. He was a Gascon, her father, from Montauban, and he had died, when she was nearly twelve years old, at Clermont where he had had to retire when he had become paralysed in both legs. For nearly five years more, her mother, who was a Parisian, had stayed on in Clermont, eking out her meagre pension by painting fans in order to bring up her girl like a lady. Fifteen months ago she, too, had died, leaving a penniless orphan whose only friend in the world was the Mother Superior of the Sisters of the Visitation, who had kept her on at the convent school. That was where she had come from now, as the Mother Superior had found her a place as reader to her old friend Madame Vanzade, who was practically blind.

  Claude made no comment on these latest details. The thought of the convent, this nicely brought up girl whose story sounded more and more like a novel, had revived his embarrassment and made him clumsy again in his speech and gesture. He stopped drawing and sat there staring fixedly at his work, eventually asking:

  ‘Is it a nice town, Clermont?’

  ‘Not very. Rather gloomy. … But I hardly know, really. I didn’t go out very much.’

  Propped up on her elbow now, she went on in a low voice, deepened by the tears and emotion of bereavement, as if speaking to herself:

  ‘Mamma wasn’t very strong. She worked herself to death really. … She spoilt me. Nothing was too good for me. I had private tutors for everything, but I didn’t make much headway. I was ill for a long time, but I wasn’t very attentive either; I was far too unruly, much too fond of play. … I wasn’t a bit fond of music-lessons; my arms simply ached when I had to play the piano. … I think I was best at painting. …’

  Claude was alert at once, and broke in with:

  ‘What? Do you paint?’

  ‘Oh, no, not really. … Mamma was very clever. She taught me something about water-colours and I used to help her occasionally with the fans, painting in the backgrounds. She was a beautiful painter.’

  As she said this, she instinctively cast a glance round the studio, at the terrifying pictures blazing on its walls; and a strange look came into her bright eyes, a startled, disquieted look occasioned by their stark brutality. From where she lay she could see, upside-down, the sketch Claude had made of hersel
f. She was so taken aback by the violence of the colouring that slashed through the shadows that she did not dare to ask for a closer look. Besides, she was growing restless and uncomfortably hot in bed, and she was tortured by the idea of getting away once and for all from things which since last night had been like one long dream.

  Claude, too, began to be aware of her restlessness and, feeling suddenly conscience-stricken, he put down his unfinished drawing and said hastily:

  ‘Thanks for being so helpful, mademoiselle. I’m afraid I kept you rather a long time. … I’m sorry. … Do get up now, please. You have affairs of your own to attend to.’

  And, not understanding why, when he was being so solicitous, she made no attempt to move, but drew her bare arm beneath the sheets and even blushed, he repeated his suggestion that she might now get up. Then, suddenly remembering, he made one wild gesture, swept the screen back round the bed and made his way to the other end of the studio where, in a bout of exaggerated modesty, he began to tidy up his pots and pans, making a deliberate clatter about it, so that she could get up and dress without thinking he was listening.

  He made such a din that at first he did not hear her call out diffidently:

  ‘Monsieur, monsieur …’

  He stopped and listened.

  ‘Monsieur, would you be so kind? … I can’t find my stockings.’

  Why, of course! What was he thinking of? How could he expect her to dress behind the screen when her stockings and the rest of her clothes were still spread out in the sun where he had put them? The stockings were quite dry; he rubbed them slightly to make sure. As he passed them to her over the thin partition, he had one last glimpse of her soft, round arm, as fresh and delicate as a child’s. He tossed the rest of the garments on to the foot of the bed and pushed her boots round the edge of the screen, leaving only her hat still hanging on the easel. She thanked him, but that was all, and he heard nothing more for a time but the faintest possible rustle of garments and the discreet splash of water being poured into the basin. But he had not forgotten her needs.