The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  It made his existence utterly wretched; never had he been so dogged by self-doubt. He would disappear for whole days at a time; once he stayed out all night and came home the following morning in a daze, unable to give any account of where he had been. Christine thought he had preferred to spend the night tramping the streets rather than face his unsatisfactory painting. Escape was his only relief when his work filled him with such hatred and shame that his courage failed him and he could face it no longer. When he came home again, even Christine did not dare to question him, but considered herself lucky to see him again after all her waiting and anxiety. He scoured all Paris in his furious wanderings, but a desire for self-abasement generally led him to the working-class suburbs to mix with dockers and labourers, for every crisis led him to express his old desire to be a builder’s hodman. Happiness, after all, meant having good, strong limbs, limbs made for doing a good job quickly. He had made a mess of his life; he ought to have got himself a job long ago when he used to go for his meals at Gomard’s ‘Chien de Montargis’, where he had made friends with a Limousin, a cheerful young fellow whose fine muscles he envied. Afterwards, when he had returned to the Rue Tourlaque, footsore and light-headed, he would fling himself into his painting, but with the same look of mingled grief and fear that one casts upon a corpse in a death-chamber, until once more the hope that he might yet bring it to life again revived the light in his eyes.

  One day Christine was posing and the female figure was practically finished when, gradually, Claude began to turn gloomy and to lose all the childish joy he had manifested at the start of the sitting.

  Sensing that all was not well, Christine hardly dared to breathe or move so much as a finger for fear of precipitating the catastrophe. Then, suddenly, there it was; with a groan of pain, flinging his handful of brushes to the ground, Claude roared in a voice like thunder: ‘God damn the thing to hell!’

  Then, blind with rage, with one despairing gesture he thrust his fist through the canvas.

  ‘Oh, Claude, Claude!’ cried Christine, holding out her quivering hands. But by the time she had flung a dressing-gown over her shoulders and moved over towards Claude, she was aware of a pang of joy in her heart at the release of all her pent-up rancour. His fist had smashed clean through her rival’s breast, ripped it open and left a great, gaping wound. She was killed at last!

  Realizing that his gesture amounted to murder, Claude stood transfixed, glaring at the hole he had made in the painted bosom and out of which the life-blood of his work was draining away. A feeling of tremendous sorrow descended on him as he wondered how he could possibly have slain what he loved best in all the world. His anger gave way now to stupefaction and he began to feel the canvas with his fingers, drawing together the torn edges as if he was trying to close a wound. Choking with sobs, his head swimming with gentle, infinite pain, he stammered:

  ‘Done her in … I’ve done her in. …’

  This stirred Christine to the very depths of her being, and all her motherly love went out to the childlike artist; she forgave him, as she had always forgiven him. Seeing that his one thought was to mend the torn canvas at once and undo his mischief, she went to his assistance. It was she who held together the strips of canvas while he stuck a patch of material on the back. When she got dressed again the other woman was back again, immortal, with just a faint scar over her heart—enough, however, to revive the artist’s passion for her.

  With his unbalanced state of mind becoming more and more marked, Claude developed a kind of superstitious devotion to new processes in painting. He condemned the use of oil and spoke of it almost as a personal enemy. Spirit, he decided, made for more solid, matt effects. He had carefully-hidden secret methods too, such as amber solutions, liquid copal and other types of resin which dried quickly and kept the paint from cracking. In consequence, he found himself engaged in a terrible struggle against flat or streaky effects, since his absorbent canvases soaked up the modicum of oil there was in the paint. Brushes were another of his problems; he insisted on a special grip and preferred oven-dried horse-hair to sable. Perhaps the most important thing was the palette knife; like Courbet, he used it for his ground-work and had quite a collection of long, flexible knives, broad, stubby ones, and in particular a specially made triangular one, similar to that used by glaziers and exactly like the knife employed by Delacroix. To use either a scraper or a razor he considered discreditable, though on the other hand he indulged in all kinds of mysterious practices when it came to applying his colours. He concocted his own recipes and changed them at least once a month, believing that he had suddenly discovered the best method of painting when he spurned the old, flowing style allowed by oil and proceeded by a series of strokes of raw colour juxtaposed until he obtained the exact tone-value he desired. It had long been a mania of his to paint from right to left; he never said so, but he was sure it was lucky.

  His latest terrible misfortune had been to be led astray by his fast-developing theory of complementary colours. He had heard of it first from Gagnière, who also had a weakness for technical experiments. Then, with characteristic over-indulgence, he had begun to exaggerate the scientific principle which deduces from the three primary colours, yellow, red, and blue, the three secondary colours, orange, green, and violet and from them a whole series of similar complementary colours obtained by mathematical combination. In that way science gained a foothold in painting and a method was created for logical observation. It meant that, by taking the dominant colour of a picture and establishing its complementary or cognate colours, it was possible to establish by experimental means all the other possible variations of colour, red changing to yellow next to blue, for example, or even a whole landscape changing its tone-values through reflection or decomposition of light due to the passing of clouds in the sky. From this true conclusion he argued that things have no fixed colour, but that their colour depends upon ambient circumstances.

  When, with all that science buzzing in his brain, Claude came back to direct observation, his eye, now biased, forced the more delicate shades and over-stated the theory by introducing certain garish notes, with the result that the originality of his colouring, once so light and so vibrant with sunshine, gave way to what looked like a stunt, overthrowing all the accepted habits of the eye and producing purple flesh-tints and tricolour skies.

  That way, it was obvious, madness lay.

  It was poverty, however, that struck the last blow. It had been approaching slowly but surely all the time they had recklessly been drawing on their capital, and when not a sou remained of their twenty thousand francs it pounced on them in all its inevitable horror. Christine felt she ought to take a job, but there was nothing she could do; she could not even sew. Wretched and idle-handed, she vented her frustration on her useless genteel education, which left her with no alternative but to enter domestic service if things continued to get worse. As for Claude, who had made himself the laughing-stock of Paris, he never sold a canvas. An independent exhibition to which he and some of his friends had sent a few canvases had ruined his reputation with collectors; the public had made fun of his pictures, which were nothing but a patchwork of all the colours of the rainbow. Dealers, too, had beaten a retreat. M. Hue was the only one who ventured as far as the Rue Tourlaque and stood in ecstasy in front of Claude’s wild productions with all their unexpected fireworks, lamenting the fact that he could not buy them for their weight in gold. It was in vain that Claude begged him to take them for nothing; M. Hue, with his modest means, displayed extraordinary delicacy in the matter and deprived himself even of essentials in order to put aside a sufficient sum to enable him, once in a while, to carry away, with religious solemnity, one of Claude’s more hectic canvases to hang alongside the acknowledged masterpieces in his collection. Such windfalls were too few and far between, however, and Claude had to resign himself to doing work on commission, which he loathed, finding himself thrust into a bondage to which he had sworn he would never stoop. Had it not been for th
e two creatures who shared his sufferings, he would have preferred starvation. He found himself turning out cheap and nasty Stations of the Cross, Saints of both sexes by the hundred, sunblinds for shops in all the stock designs, and a host of other odd jobs that reduce painting to the lowest level of cheapjack vulgarity. He even had to bear the shame of having some of his twenty-five-franc portraits refused because he failed to produce the ‘guaranteed likeness’. He plumbed the lowest depths when he began to work for the sort of obscure little dealers who sold their wares on bridges or provided flashy goods for barter with savages, and who paid him so much a canvas, two francs or three francs a time, according to size.

  Such work was not without its physical effects; his health began to fail and he felt physically incapable of carrying through a serious sitting. He would look at his great canvas in despair, with the eyes of a man condemned, unable to touch it for a week at a time, as if he felt his hands were blighted and clogged with filth. Bread was scarce, and, as the winter advanced, the great barracks of a studio grew less and less habitable, though Christine had been so proud of it when they first moved in. Once so industrious in her housework, she now hung about the place without even the heart to sweep the floor. As disaster approached the signs of neglect were more and more in evidence: little Jacques was under-nourished and sickly; their meals were reduced to a crust of bread eaten standing up; their whole existence, in short, devoid of care and organization was allowed to slip into the degradation and filth of the poor who have lost all vestiges of personal pride.

  Another year had gone by when, on one of his days of defeat, as he was fleeing his still unfinished picture, Claude met an old acquaintance. He had sworn he would never go back to his studio and had been tramping the streets since noon trying to shake off the pale ghost of his nude figure, still formless after endless recastings and pursuing him now with its aching desire to be born. It was nearly five o’clock and the fog, dispersing in fine, yellowish rain, was leaving the roadway muddy underfoot. As he was crossing the Rue Royale like a man in a dream, in great danger of being run down, his ragged garments now thickly bespattered with mud, a brougham suddenly drew up in front of him and a voice called out:

  ‘Claude, why, Claude! … Don’t you acknowledge your friends these days?’

  It was Irma Bécot, delightfully arrayed in grey silk covered with Chantilly lace, her beaming smile admirably displayed at the open window of her carriage.

  ‘Where are you going?’ she asked.

  Dumbfounded, he managed to reply that he was going nowhere, at which Irma laughed merrily. As she looked at him there was a glint of vice in her eyes and in her lip that perverse little curl that comes into any fine lady’s lip when she is suddenly overcome by the craving to get her teeth into something raw seen on a greengrocer’s stall.

  ‘Why don’t you get in?’ she ran on. ‘We haven’t seen each other for ages! Come on, get in. You’ll get run over,’ she added, for they were holding up the traffic and carriages were edging nearer and nearer to hers and the coachmen were beginning to grumble. His head in a whirl, Claude clambered in beside her, bedraggled and unkempt though he was and, sitting half on the lace of her skirt, let himself be carried away in the carriage with the blue satin cushions. The abduction scene raised quite a laugh from the neighbouring carriages as they lined up, ready to move forward now the jam had eased.

  Irma Bécot’s dream had materialized: she had a house of her own, in the Avenue de Villiers, but it had taken her years to get it. The ground had been bought by one lover, then the five hundred thousand building costs and the three hundred thousand for furnishings had been supplied by others, a little at a time, according to the prevailing passion of the moment. Now its luxury and splendour were worthy of royalty and its subtle refinements of sensual comfort made it one huge boudoir, one enormous bed of pleasure starting at the carpets in the hall and rising and spreading to the quilted walls of the bedrooms. The outlay involved had been tremendous, but now this haven for travellers was more than paying for itself; the privilege of enjoying the regal splendour of its beds and of spending a night under its roof was a costly affair.

  Now that she had captured Claude, Irma announced she was at home to nobody; she would rather have set fire to everything she possessed than have failed to satisfy her whim. As they were going into the dining-room together the gentleman who happened to be contributing towards the upkeep of the house at the moment tried to join them, but she ordered him to be sent away, and in a loud voice, without any pretence of discretion. At table, laughing occasionally like an excited child, she ate her share of everything, though usually she had no appetite at all, and between whiles gazed on Claude enraptured, amused at the same time by his unkempt beard and his old working jacket with the buttons missing. Claude, still in a dream, took everything for granted and devoured his food as he always did in his periods of crisis. Neither of them talked during the meal, which was served in haughty dignity by the butler, Louis, who was instructed to serve the coffee and liqueurs in Madame’s room.

  Though it was only shortly after eight o’clock, Irma insisted on carrying Claude off to her room, where she immediately shot the bolt with a gay: ‘Good night. Madame has retired to bed.’

  ‘Make yourself at home,’ she said to Claude. ‘You’re staying with me tonight. … We’ve talked about it long enough, so why not strike while the iron is hot?’

  So Claude calmly took off his jacket in Irma’s sumptuous bedroom with its mauve silk hangings trimmed with silver lace and its colossal bed draped with antique embroideries like a throne. He was used to being in his shirtsleeves and felt at home at once; besides, it was better sleeping there than spending the night under a bridge, since he had sworn he was never going back home. His life had so fallen to pieces that even this adventure provoked no surprise. Unable to understand anyone sinking quite so low, she simply thought he was ‘killingly funny’, and, half-naked already, determined to enjoy herself to the full, she began to pinch him, bite him, and engage him in violent horse-play, with all the abandon of a street-urchin.

  ‘You know what I call my mug for the mugs, what they call my “Titian image”? Well it isn’t meant for you. … Oh, no! You’re different, and you make me different too; true, you do!’ she said, and, seizing him with both her hands, she told him how much she had wanted him because he was so unkempt. Laughter came bubbling up, choking the words back in her throat, and she kissed him furiously all over, he was so ugly and so very comical.

  About three in the morning, as Irma lay naked between the rumpled and disordered sheets, gorged with physical pleasure and almost inarticulate with lassitude, she murmured:

  ‘What happened to your fancy woman, did you marry her after all?’

  Stupid with sleep, Claude opened his eyes for a second and answered: ‘Yes.’

  ‘And you still sleep together?’

  ‘Of course.’

  Irma had to laugh; her only comment was:

  ‘Poor old Claude! Poor old Claude! What a bore it must be for both of you!’

  The following morning she released him. Completely calmed now, fresh and rosy as after a good night’s rest, perfectly proper in her dressing-gown with her hair already done, she clasped his hands in hers for a moment, very affectionately, with a look that hovered between laughter and tears, and said to him:

  ‘Poor old Claude! You didn’t get much kick out of it, did you? Oh, don’t say you did, a woman can always tell, you know. But I did, a terrific kick … and I want you to know I’m grateful for it, Claude.’

  That was the end. Claude would have had to pay very dearly indeed to get her to do it all again.

  The shock of his happy adventure sent Claude straight home to the Rue Tourlaque with strangely mixed feelings of vanity and remorse. For the next two days they not only made him totally indifferent to painting, but also made him wonder whether, after all, he might not have made more of a success of his life. He behaved so queerly, being so obsessed by what had happene
d to him, that when Christine questioned him, though he hesitated a little at first, he confessed everything. There was a scene, of course. Christine wept bitter tears and then forgave him, full of indulgence and even worried lest his night’s activities should have over-tired him; while from the depths of her sorrow there sprang a certain unconscious joy compounded of pride in realizing that someone else could love him, amusement at his still being capable of such an escapade, and hope that, since he had been with another woman, he might yet come back to her. He had brought home with him an atmosphere of desire, and that thrilled her to the heart; for she was jealous of one thing, and one thing only, his painting; but that she loathed so much that rather than let him give in to it she would herself have given him to another woman.