by Émile Zola
When Claude started out in search of his picture he tried to locate it by taking the rooms in alphabetical order, but he made a mistake and began with the rooms on the left. As all the doorways opened ahead of each other he was faced with a long vista of antique tapestry hangings broken only by a corner of an occasional picture. He went all the way down it as far as the great West room and returned by the rooms on the other side without even finding the one that corresponded to his own initial letter. By the time he had reached his starting-point again the crowd had grown and circulation was already noticeably restricted. This gave him time to look about him again and now he recognized a number of painters, all of them doing the honours of the house, for today, after all, was their day.
One young man, an old acquaintance from the Boutin days, obviously eaten up with a desire for publicity and determined to get himself a medal, was very busy roping in visitors who were likely to have any influence and almost dragging them to look at his pictures. Then there was the wealthy celebrity, a smile of triumph on his lips, holding a reception against a background of his own works, and being ostentatiously gracious to the ladies who flocked to pay court in an endless procession. He noticed rivals who he knew hated each other exchanging loud-voiced compliments; diffident ones hanging round the doorways watching their friends being congratulated; shy ones who would not for the world have gone into the room where their pictures were hung; others cracking a joke to hide their great disappointment; earnest ones completely absorbed, going round trying to make sense of everything and forecasting which would be the medallists. Artists’ families were there in force too; a charming young mother with her baby, all dainty and beribboned; a sour-faced, ultra-respectable mamma, flanked by a pair of ugly daughters wearing black; a big blousy body resting on a bench with a tribe of snotty-nosed youngsters clambering over her; a middle-aged lady, with still some claim to beauty, her grown-up daughter by her side, smiling calmly at each other as they passed a lady of the town, the father’s mistress. The models were there, too, dragging each other round to look at pictures of themselves in the nude, talking at the tops of their voices and all deplorably dressed, distorting their magnificent figures in dresses that made them look like hunchbacks compared with the well-turned-out Parisian dolls who would have had nothing to show once their clothes were removed.
When at last Claude managed to force his way through the crowd he made for the rooms on the right of the central hall. His letter was on that side, but he went round all the sections marked ‘L’ and found nothing. Perhaps, he thought, his picture had been misplaced, or used to fill up some small gap in another room. So, as he had now reached the great East room, he ventured into the suite of little rooms which runs behind the bigger and busier ones, where pictures seem to darken out of sheer boredom, and which all painters regard as one of the terrors of the Salon. There again his search was unrewarded. Bewildered, on the point of despair, he wandered out on to the garden balcony and continued his quest there, where the overflow from the inside rooms was accommodated and looked very pale and chilly in the broad light of day.
In the end his peregrinations brought him back a third time to the central hall. This time he found it packed with a swaying mass composed of all that was famous, rich, or fashionable in Paris, including everyone with any claim to being a ‘big noise’—talent, millions or good looks, being a leading novelist, playwright, or journalist, or being well-known in clubland, on the turf or on the Stock Exchange—the whole freely sprinkled with women of all ranks, prostitutes, actresses, and society matrons. His temper frayed by his fruitless wanderings, Claude was surprised by the general vulgarity of faces seen like this, in the mass, by the uneven standard of the fashions which ran more to dowdiness than elegance, and by the complete absence of any form of dignity, with the result that his fear of high society gave way to contempt. Were these the people, he asked himself, who were going to scoff at his picture, if ever they found it? Nearby two little flaxen-haired reporters were busy compiling lists of celebrities present; a critic was pretending to make notes in the margin of his catalogue; another was airing his views in the middle of a group of amateurs; a third, his hands clasped behind his back, stood completely detached in front of each picture, majestically refusing to let himself be in any way impressed.
What struck Claude most was the general herd-like movement of the crowd, its mass curiosity devoid of all youth and enthusiasm, its harsh voices and drawn faces, the universal air of pained malevolence. Envy was clearly at work already – in the gentleman making skittish remarks to the ladies, in the man who, without saying a word, gave a terrific shrug of the shoulders and turned away, in the two people who spent a quarter of an hour huddled together over one little picture, whispering like a couple of grim conspirators.
Fagerolles had just arrived. Immediately he became the centre of interest first of one group then another, shaking hands all round, apparently being everywhere at once, putting his whole heart and soul into playing the double rôle of budding celebrity and influential Committee-man. Bombarded with congratulations, thanks, requests, he responded to them all with perfect composure, though ever since early morning he had been hounded by all the minor painters of his connection who thought their pictures badly placed. It was the usual opening-day rout, with everybody looking for his own picture and running round to see everyone else’s, bursting with resentment, and with voices raised in furious and apparently unending complaints – they were hung too high, the light was bad, their effect was killed by the pictures on either side, they had a good mind to remove their pictures altogether. One lanky young man was specially persistent and followed Fagerolles wherever he went, in spite of the latter’s vain endeavour to explain that what had happened was not his fault and that he could do nothing about it. The pictures were hung, he explained, according to a numbered list; the exhibition panels were laid out on the floor and the pictures arranged on them before they were attached to the wall, and nobody’s was given preference. He even went so far as to promise to lodge a complaint when the rooms were reorganized after the medals were awarded, but did not satisfy the lanky young man, to whose badgering powers there seemed to be no limit.
Claude was just on the point of breaking his way through the crowd to ask Fagerolles what had happened to his picture when a flash of pride stopped him. Fagerolles was so much in demand, and besides it was both foolish and humiliating to be perpetually dependent on somebody else. It struck him, too, at that moment that he must have missed one whole series of rooms on the right of the hall, as indeed he had, for when he went into them he discovered a host of other pictures. He ended up in a room filled with people milling in front of a huge canvas that filled the place of honour in the centre. It was impossible at first to see the picture itself over the heaving mass of shoulders, the mighty wall of heads and the battlement of hats, for it had caused a stampede of panting admirers. By standing well on the tips of his toes, however, he did at last manage to get a glimpse of the wonderful work; he recognized the subject at once remembering what he had already heard about it.
It was Fagerolles’s picture ‘The Lunch Party’, on which Claude saw at once the stamp of his own ‘Open Air’. The light effect was the same, the theory behind it was the same, but toned down, faked, warped to produce a skin-deep elegance, cleverly arranged to satisfy the taste of an untutored public. Fagerolles had not made the mistake of posing his three women naked, but he had none the less managed to make them look undressed in their daring, fashionable clothes. The bosom of one of them was perfectly visible through the fine lace of her bodice; another one was showing her right leg up to the knee as she stretched backward to pick up a plate, and the third, while she did not reveal even a square inch of bare flesh, was encased in a gown so clinging that there was something alarmingly indecent about the way it made her hindquarters reminiscent of a fine, sleek mare. Their two gentlemen companions were the very acme of distinction in their smart sports jackets. In the background a manservant
was lifting another hamper from the carriage drawn up under the trees. Everything – figures, materials, the still-life study of the food – stood out in the full sunlight against the darker background of trees and greenery; but the supreme touch of smartness lay in the artist’s brazen assumption of originality, the false pretences on which he bullied his public just enough to send it into ecstasies. It was like a storm in a jug of cream.
As he could get no closer to the picture, Claude listened to what was being said about it. Here at last was somebody who could make reality look real! He didn’t pile it on like those heavy-handed moderns; he could get everything out of nothing. There were nuances for you! … the fine art of suggestion … respect for the public … and such delicacy, such charm, such wit! He’s not the kind to let himself go in for a lot of incongruous, high-flown bravura pieces, or to let his creative power run away with him. No, if he noted three points from nature, he produced three points, no more, no less. One columnist who happened to be there went off into raptures and then found just the words for the occasion: ‘truly Parisian painting’. The expression caught on and after that nobody thought of looking at the picture without saying that it was ‘truly Parisian’.
The thought of all the admiration rising from the sea of rounded shoulders and craning necks so exasperated Claude that he felt he must see what sort of faces go to make a triumph. So he worked his way round the fringes of the crowd until he was able to stand with his back to the picture. There he had the public in front of him, in the greyish light that filtered through the sun-blind, leaving the centre of the room dim, while the bright daylight that escaped round the edges of the blind fell sheer on the pictures on the walls, putting the warmth of sunshine into the gilt of the frames. As soon as he saw the faces, Claude recognized the people who had once laughed his own picture to scorn; at least, if it was not the very same people, it must have been their brothers, now in serious mood, enraptured, graced by their air of respectful attention. The malignant looks, the marks of overstrain and envy, drawn features, and bilious colouring he had noted earlier were all softened and relaxed in the communal enjoyment of a piece of amiable deception. Two very stout ladies he saw simply gaping in beatitude, and several old gentlemen narrowing their eyes and trying to look wise. There was a husband quietly explaining the subject to his young wife, who kept tilting her chin with a very graceful movement of the neck. There was admiration on every face, though the expression varied; some looked blissful, others surprised or thoughtful or gay or even austere; many faces wore an unconscious smile, many heads were plainly swimming in ecstasy. The shiny black toppers were all tipped backwards, and the flowers on the women’s hats all dropped well down towards their shoulders, while all the faces, after a momentary halt, were pushed along and replaced by others in a never-ending stream, and all exactly the same.
Bemused by the passing of the triumphal rout, Claude forgot his own quest for a time. The room meanwhile was getting too small for the crowds of visitors who still kept piling in in greater and greater numbers. There were no little isolated groups now, as there had been earlier in the day, no breath of cool air from the garden, no lingering odour of varnish; the air was hot and the atmosphere soured by perfume which soon gave way to a predominating smell of wet dog. It was evidently raining outside, a sudden spring shower it seemed, for the latest arrivals were very wet, and their heavy garments soon began to steam in the heat of the room. Patches of darkness had been crossing the sun-blind overhead for some time, and as Claude looked up he imagined great rain-clouds scudding across the windswept sky and deluges of rain beating on the skylights in the roof. The walls, too, were mottled with floating shadows and the pictures grew more and more dim, while the crowd itself was lost in darkness until the cloud had passed. Then Claude saw all the faces emerge from the dusk, all round-eyed and open-mouthed with the same idiotic rapture.
There was yet another bitter shock in store for him. On the left-hand panel, paired with Fagerolles’s picture, was Bongrand’s painting. But in front of it there was no crush, merely a passing stream of indifferent visitors; and yet it was Bongrand’s mightiest effort, the blow he had been longing to strike for years, one last great work conceived in his desire to prove that his virility was still unimpaired. His pent-up hatred for the ‘Village Wedding’, his first masterpiece, which had been allowed to overshadow all the rest of his career, had at last impelled him to produce a directly contrasting subject, a ‘Village Funeral’, showing a young girl’s funeral procession straggling through fields of oats and rye. It was to be his reaction against himself, his proof that he was not played out and that his experience at sixty was as good as the happy vigour of his early years. But experience had lost the day and his work was proving a dreary failure, one of those quiet, old man’s failures, which do not even catch the visitors’ eye. It was not without its masterly touches, however, such as the little chorister with the Cross, the Children of Mary carrying the bier, their white frocks and ruddy countenances making a lively contrast with the stodgy Sunday black of the rest of the procession against the background of green fields. But the priest in his surplice, the girl carrying the banner, the dead girl’s family, the entire canvas, really, were lifeless creations, rendered ugly by an excess of technique and stiff with the painter’s own obstinacy. It was an unconscious but inevitable return to the tormented romanticism from which the artist’s early work had developed, and therefore the saddest part of the whole story; for the cause of the public’s indifference lay in the painting itself. It belonged to an older generation, it was too static, too dull in colouring to catch the eye now that dazzling sunlight had come into fashion.
At that moment Bongrand himself came into the room, as shy and hesitant as any unfledged novice, and Claude’s heart ached to see the way he glanced first at his own neglected picture, then at Fagerolles’s, the centre of a riot. At that moment he must have been acutely aware that, as a painter, he was finished. Hitherto the gnawing fear of slow decay had been nothing more than a doubt; now, all at once, it had become a certitude; he knew he had outlived himself, his genius was dead, he would never beget another living work. He turned very pale and was just turning to make his escape when Chambouvard the sculptor, with his usual train of disciples, came in at the opposite door and called across to him in his thick, booming voice, ignoring the roomful of people:
‘Aha, you old rascal! Caught you red-handed this time, admiring your own work!’
His own contribution that year was an abominable ‘Harvester’, one of those stupid, unconvincing female figures that his powerful hands managed to turn out so unexpectedly. He was nevertheless beaming with satisfaction, convinced he had produced another master work, and so eagerly parading his godlike infallibility in front of the crowd that he did not hear the laughter he provoked.
Bongrand made no reply; he simply looked at him, his eyes burning with emotion.
‘What do you think of my effort downstairs?’ Chambouvard ran on. ‘You’ve seen it, I expect. … These young things have a lot to learn yet! We’re still the only ones who count, you know, the Old School!’ he added, as he moved on, still followed by his train and bowing to the crowd as he went.
‘Swine!’ Bongrand muttered to himself, choking with grief and as revolted as if he had witnessed some thoughtless boor bursting in on the peaceful sanctity of a death-chamber.
On noticing Claude he went over to him. It was cowardly, after all, to retreat, so he decided to show his courage and to prove that his mind, as always, was above envy.
‘Friend Fagerolles appears to be a success!’ he said. ‘I should be lying if I went into ecstasies over his picture, because I don’t think much of it, but Fagerolles is a nice fellow. … By the way, he was damned decent about you. … Did his absolute utmost for you.’
Claude made a point of saying something complimentary about the ‘Funeral’.
‘The little graveyard in the background is beautifully done,’ he said. ‘How people can possibly …’
Bongrand stopped him.
‘No condolences, please, my lad,’ he said in a harsh voice. ‘I’m not blind.’
As he spoke someone acknowledged the pair of them with a familiar gesture, and Claude at once recognized Naudet, looking bigger and showier than ever now that he was making a success of handling big business. Ambition had gone to his head and he talked glibly of sweeping every other art-dealer out of the market. He had built himself a palace where he had set up as king of the art world, running a vast clearing-house for painting and opening a number of great modern galleries. That there were millions in the offing was obvious the moment one crossed his threshold. He organized exhibitions under his own roof as well as in galleries in town, and annually, in May, he awaited the arrival of American collectors to whom he sold for fifty thousand what he himself had bought for ten. He lived like a prince, complete with wife, children, mistress, horses, estates in Picardy, and hunting-lodge. He had begun to make his money when works by dead masters such as Courbet, Millet and Rousseau, who had been neglected during their lifetime, began to fetch high prices, with the result that he now despised all works signed by artists who were still in the thick of the fight. But already there were a number of ugly rumours abroad. The number of known canvases was limited, as was also in some degree the number of possible collectors, so the time was not far off when business would not be so easy. There was even talk of a syndicate and an agreement with certain bankers to keep up the high prices. At the Salle Drouot they were having to resort to faked sales, the dealer buying back his own stock at very high prices. Bankruptcy seemed to be the inevitable conclusion to all this speculation and outrageous jobbery.