The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  ‘How’s that? Not bad, eh?’ muttered Jory, already more than interested. ‘Who the devil’s she after? … She’s looking straight at me.’

  Fagerolles instantly retorted:

  ‘Look here, there’s no question about it. She’s mine! … You don’t think I’ve been here an hour just waiting for you, do you?’

  The others laughed, and Fagerolles lowered his voice to tell them about Irma Bécot. Quaint little thing, and screamingly funny! He knew her whole history. She was the daughter of a grocer in the Rue Montorgueil. Well educated; at school till she was sixteen; reading, writing, arithmetic, scripture, and what not; she used to do her homework in the shop between a couple of bags of lentils, and finished her education at street level, living in the rush and bustle of the pavements, learning about life from the everlasting gossip of the local cooks who laid the dark secrets of the neighbourhood bare as they waited for their quarter of Gruyère. Her mother was dead and her father had, very sensibly, taken to sleeping with his maids, as it saved him the trouble of seeking satisfaction elsewhere. But it also developed his taste for women; much wanted more, so in next to no time he was launched upon such an orgy of dissipation that the grocery business was frittered away too, all the dried vegetables, jar upon jar, drawerfuls of sweetmeats, everything. Irma was still a schoolgirl when one of her father’s assistants rolled her over on a basket of figs one evening as he was closing the shop. Six months later the business was ruined; her father died of a stroke and Irma sought refuge with an aunt who ill-treated her. Three times she ran away with a boy who lived opposite, and three times she came back. The fourth time she ran away for good and roved around all the low haunts of Montmartre and the Batignolles.

  ‘Another trollop!’ said Claude, with a look of contempt.

  All at once, after a whispered leave-taking, her escort got up and went out. Irma watched him go and then, like a child let out of school, dashed across and sat herself on Fagerolles’s lap.

  ‘See what he’s like? Can’t shake him off! … Kiss me quick, he’s coming back!’

  She kissed him full on the lips and then took a drink from his glass. She included all the others in her embrace and laughed engagingly at all of them, for she adored artists and was only sorry they were not rich enough to afford women just for themselves.

  Jory seemed to be the one who attracted her most. He was very taken and his eyes burned like coals of fire as he looked at her. As he was smoking, she took his cigarette from his mouth and put it into her own, chattering all the time like a mischievous magpie.

  ‘So you’re all painters, eh? How funny! What are those three looking so glum about? Laugh, can’t you? Or do you want me to come and tickle you? That’ll learn you!’

  True enough, Claude, Mahoudeau, and Sandoz were so taken aback that they just sat looking on without even a smile. She was still on the alert, and as soon as she heard her escort coming back she said hastily to Fagerolles:

  ‘How about tomorrow night? Pick me up at the Brasserie Bréda.’

  Then, pushing the wet cigarette back into Jory’s mouth, she made off to her own table, taking ridiculously big strides, making wild gestures, and pulling an unexpectedly funny face. By the time her escort arrived, looking very serious and rather pale, she was exactly as he had left her, her eyes still fixed on the same picture. The whole of this scene had been enacted so rapidly, at such a rollicking speed, that the two policemen, good sorts the pair of them, were ready to choke with laughter as they shuffled their cards.

  Irma had obviously made the conquest of the whole gang. Sandoz said her name, Irma Bécot, would sound well in a novel; Claude wondered whether he could get her to pose for him, and Mahoudeau saw her as a statuette, a Street-Urchin, a subject bound to sell. After a while she departed, throwing kisses behind her escort’s back to every one, a whole shower of kisses that roused Jory’s excitement to fever pitch. But Fagerolles was unwilling to lend her to any of them. It amused him, unconsciously, to think he had found in her another child of the streets like himself; he was tickled by the thought of the pavement depravity he sensed in her.

  At five o’clock, the gang called for more beer. Local habitués had filled up the neighbouring tables and, half in scorn, half in uneasy deference, were now beginning to look askance at the artists’ corner. They were well known and even beginning to acquire some notoriety. But now they just talked banalities; the heat, the difficulty of getting a seat on the bus to the Odéon, the discovery of an eating-place run by a wine-merchant where they served decent meat. One of them wanted to start an argument about a lot of dud pictures recently accepted by the Musée du Luxembourg,* but everybody agreed that the pictures were not worth the gilt they were framed in, so the subject was dropped and they sat for a time just smoking, exchanging the odd word or sharing a laugh in unspoken complicity.

  ‘Look here,’ said Claude at last, ‘are we waiting for Gagnière or not?’

  The rest of them complained, too, that Gagnière was a nuisance, but they were sure he would turn up as soon as there was any soup going.

  ‘Yes, come on,’ said Sandoz. ‘Let’s go. There’s leg of lamb tonight, so let’s try to be on time.’

  Each of them paid for his own drinks and then they left. Their departure caused something of a stir in the café. Some of the young men, who were probably painters, whispered to each other and pointed at Claude, as if he were the chief of some terrible tribe of savages. Jory’s famous article was taking effect; the public was co-operating and creating the ‘open-air’ school on its own account. The gang still looked on the whole thing as a joke and said that the Café Baudequin had no idea of the honour they were doing it by making it the probable cradle of a revolution.

  Their number had increased to five, for Fagerolles had joined them, when they left the café and started back across Paris with the calm and certainty of conquerors.

  They went down the Rue de Clichy, along the Rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin into the Rue de Richelieu, crossed the Seine by the Pont des Arts, jeering at the Institut as they passed, and reached the Luxembourg by the Rue de Seine, where a poster in three glaring colours, advertising a fairground circus, made them shout with admiration. Evening was coming on and the flow of traffic slowing down, as if the tired city was lingering in the shadows, like a woman ready to give herself to the first man with vigour enough to claim her.

  When they reached the Rue d’Enfer, Sandoz showed the others into his room and then went in to see his mother in hers; he spent a few moments there, came out smiling tenderly as he always did, and joined his friends without a word. They were soon making a terrible din, everybody laughing, arguing, and shouting at once. Sandoz tried to set a good example by helping the daily woman, who was complaining bitterly because it was half-past seven and her lovely joint was drying up in the oven. The five were already at table eating their excellent onion soup when a new guest arrived.

  ‘Gagnière!’ they yelled as one man.

  Vague little Gagnière, with his chubby, startled face fringed with a blond and wispy beard, stood for a moment in the doorway blinking his green eyes. Gagnière came from Melun, where his wealthy parents had just left him a couple of houses. He had learnt to paint all by himself in the Forest of Fontainebleau, and painted conscientious, well-meaning landscapes. But his real passion was for music. It was a kind of mania with him, an unquenchable fire in his brain that put him on a par with the rest of the hotheads in the gang.

  ‘Am I one too many?’ he asked, in a quiet voice.

  ‘Of course you’re not! Come in!’ replied Sandoz.

  The woman was already setting another place.

  ‘Don’t you think we might set a place for Dubuche at the same time?’ Claude asked. ‘He said he was almost certain to come.’

  But the suggestion was shouted down. Dubuche was beyond the pale; he had gone into Society. Jory told how he had seen him out driving with an old lady and her daughter and carrying their sunshades.

  ‘What have you been
up to that makes you so late?’ Fagerolles asked Gagnière.

  Gagnière, who was just going to take his first spoonful of soup, put it back in his plate.

  ‘I’ve been in the Rue de Lancry, listening to chamber music,’ he said. ‘Schumann. Things … oh! you can’t imagine what they were like! Things that get you here, somehow, at the back of your head, like a woman breathing down your neck. … Not like a kiss. … No, more insubstantial than that … a breath, a soft, faint breath. Oh! it’s like … like feeling your soul going out of your body!’

  His eyes glistened with tears and his face turned pale in his ecstasy.

  ‘Have your soup,’ put in Mahoudeau, ‘and tell us all about it afterwards.’

  When the skate was served, the vinegar bottle was brought on to the table for those who wanted to give an extra fillip to the black-butter sauce. They attacked the simple meal with great gusto, devouring large quantities of bread, but being careful to put plenty of water with their wine. They had just greeted the leg of lamb with a hearty cheer, and the master of the house had just begun to carve, when the door opened again. This time the late comer was received with furious protests:

  ‘Full up! No more room! … Outside! … Turncoats not wanted!’

  It was Dubuche. He was out of breath with running and, astounded by his hostile reception, pushed his great pale face round the door and tried to stammer out some kind of excuses.

  ‘It isn’t my fault, really. It’s the buses. … I had to let five go past, all full up, in the Champs-Élysées.’

  ‘Don’t believe him! He’s fibbing! Send him away! Don’t give him any lamb! Send him away! Send him away!’

  When he did manage to get inside the room, they saw he was very formally dressed, all in black: black trousers, black frock-coat, spick and span and meticulous as a bourgeois going to dine in town.

  ‘Hello! He’s missed his party!’ cried Fagerolles. ‘His society friends didn’t ask him to stay, so he’s come here to eat our lamb as he’s nowhere else to go!’

  Dubuche blushed and stammered.

  ‘Oh! What a thing to say! … That’s just not fair! Shut up, the lot of you!’

  Sandoz and Claude, who were sitting next to each other, looked at him and smiled; Sandoz motioned to him as if to say:

  ‘Get yourself a plate and a glass and come and sit here between us two. They’ll leave you alone then.’

  But all the time they were eating the lamb they never stopped teasing him. He took it all in good part, like a good fellow, and when the woman had brought him a plate of soup and a portion of skate, he began to play up to their jokes, pretending to be ravenous, mopping up his plate with his bread, telling how one mother had turned him down as a prospective son-in-law because he was an architect. The meal ended in pandemonium, with everyone talking at once. The last course, a choice piece of Brie, was particularly well received, not a trace of it was left. The bread nearly ran out and the wine actually did, so everybody washed the meal down with a good long draught of water, with much smacking of lips and clicking of tongues, accompanied by hearty laughter. And so, with faces flushed and paunches full, and with that blissful feeling experienced by people who have dined on the richest viands, they moved into the bedroom.

  It was just another of Sandoz’s pleasant gatherings. Even at his poorest he had always had a bite to share with his friends. He liked doing it; he liked to be one of a band, all good friends, all living for the same ideals. Although he was the same age as his friends, he beamed with a pleasant, fatherly sort of kindness to see them about him, under his own roof, all intoxicated with the same ambitions. He had no drawing-room, so he threw his bedroom open to the gang and, as space there was limited, two or three of them had to sit on the bed. Through the windows, flung wide open on hot summer evenings, they could see two dark shapes against the clear sky, towering over the neighbouring housetops, the belfry of Saint Jacques-du-Haut-Pas and the tree in the garden of the Sourds-Muets. When they were in funds there was beer to drink and everyone brought his own tobacco, so the room was soon so thick with smoke that they could hardly see each other as they sat talking far into the night, in the vast and melancholy silence of that out-of-the-way corner of the city.

  On this particular evening, the daily woman was tapping on the door by nine o’clock to say, ‘I’ve finished, Monsieur Sandoz. May I go now?’

  ‘Yes, off you go,’ was the answer. ‘You have left some water on, haven’t you? … I’ll make the tea.’

  Sandoz got up and went out when she had gone, and stayed out for about a quarter of an hour. He had been saying good night to his mother; he tucked her up in her bed every night before she settled to sleep.

  The talk was getting noisier. Fagerolles was just telling them something that had happened to him.

  ‘Yes, my friend,’ he was saying, ‘at the Beaux-Arts they actually correct the model! … The other day Mazel came up to me and said: “Those two legs aren’t properly balanced.” So I said: “I know they aren’t, neither are hers.” It was little Flore Beauchamp, and you know what she’s like. He was furious, and what do you think he said! He said: “Well, if they aren’t they ought to be!”’

  They were all convulsed, especially Claude, for whose benefit Fagerolles had told the story, as a form of flattery. He had been influenced by Claude for some time and, although he still painted with the slickness of a conjuror, all he talked about now was solid painting, chunks of nature flung raw on to the canvas, pulsating with life—which did not prevent him from making fun of the ‘open-air’ school, when he was in other company, and accusing them of putting on their paint with a ladle.

  Dubuche, who had not laughed because he was so shocked, screwed up the courage to retort:

  ‘Why do you stay on at the Beaux-Arts if you think it’s so stupid? If you don’t like it, leave! … Oh, I know you’ve all got a down on me because I stand up for the Beaux-Arts, but you see I happen to believe that if you want to do a job you can’t do better than learn to do it properly.’

  The others roared in derision, and Claude had to assert himself very firmly to make himself heard.

  ‘He’s right,’ he said. ‘You ought to learn your job. But it isn’t perhaps the best thing to learn it from a lot of hide-bound teachers who want to impose their point of view on you at all costs. … Mazel’s a fool! Saying Flore Beauchamp’s legs aren’t properly balanced! You’ve seen ’em for yourselves, haven’t you? They’re amazing! They tell everything there is to know about her, fast living included!’

  He lay back on the bed and, as he gazed into space, talked on, his voice warm with enthusiasm.

  ‘Life! Life! Life! What it is to feel it and paint it as it really is! To love it for its own sake; to see it as the only true, everlasting, ever-changing beauty, and refuse to see how it might be “improved” by being emasculated. To understand that its so-called defects are really signs of character. To put life into things, and put life into men! That’s the only way to be a God!’

  His faith in himself was reviving, aroused by the long walk across Paris, and now he was warming again to his passion for full-blooded nature. The others listened in silence, then, after one last, wild gesture, he went on in a quieter voice:

  ‘Ah, well, everybody has a right to his own ideas, but the trouble is, at the Institut, they’re even less tolerant than we are … and the Institut is the Salon Selection Committee, so I’m sure that fool Mazel’s going to turn me down again.’

  That released all their wrath; the question of the Selection Committee always did. They wanted reforms, and each had his own ready-made solution, varying from the election by universal suffrage of a very liberal committee to complete freedom, with the Salon open to all comers.

  While the others were deeply involved in their discussions Gagnière had drawn Mahoudeau towards the open window, and as he looked away out into the night he was murmuring in a vague, far-away voice:

  ‘It’s hardly noticeable, really, just the faintest impression, a mat
ter of four bars. But it’s the amount of meaning he’s got into it! … It makes me think first of a fleeting landscape, with the shadow of a hidden tree at the turn of a melancholy bit of road, and then of a woman passing by, just the faintest glimpse of a profile as she goes away, away into the distance, never to be seen again …’

  Just then Fagerolles called out.

  ‘Gagnière, what are you sending to the Salon this year?’

  But Gagnière did not hear; he was too enraptured.

  ‘In Schumann,’ he went on, ‘there’s everything. He’s infinite. … And Wagner! … They hissed him again last Sunday!’

  Another shout from Fagerolles brought him up with a start.

  ‘What? Eh? What am I sending to the Salon? Oh, a landscape, probably, a bit of the Seine. It’s hard to know, really. I’ve got to feel satisfied with it myself first,’ he replied, suddenly shy and diffident again.

  His scruples of artistic conscience often kept him for months working over a canvas no bigger than a man’s hand. Following the example of those masters who first made the conquest of nature, the French landscape painters, his chief preoccupations were accuracy of tone and exact observation of values, but he worked as a theorist whose integrity made him heavy-handed with his brush. It often happened that he was too timid to risk a really vibrant note and produced something surprisingly grey and sad, in spite of his revolutionary passion.

  ‘Wait till they see my piece,’ put in Mahoudeau. ‘That’ll give ’em something to think about.’

  ‘Oh, you’ll get in all right,’ said Claude. ‘The sculptors are always more open-minded than the painters. Besides, you know what you’re after, and you’re bound to bring it off … you’ve got it in your fingers. … She’s going to be worth looking at, that grape-picker of yours.’