by Émile Zola
‘He certainly would,’ said Claude. ‘That’s a lovely bit of work.’
As they were talking they saw Mahoudeau himself, just inside the entrance hall, making for the staircase. They called out and hurried to meet him, and the three of them stood talking for several minutes. Standing in the long, empty ground-floor gallery, newly sanded, lighted by great round windows, was rather like standing under a railway bridge. It was built of steel girders supported by heavy metal pillars, and there was a perpetual icy blast from above which helped to make the ground damp and soggy underfoot. At the far end, behind an old, ragged curtain, were rows of statues, the rejects from the sculpture section, plaster casts which some of the poorer artists did not trouble to fetch away; the whole effect was of a sadly neglected, dirty-white morgue. The most surprising thing, however, was the ceaseless din overhead made by the public tramping through the galleries upstairs. At times it was deafening; it went on and on as if endless trains running at full speed were rattling over the network of girders.
When the others had congratulated him, Mahoudeau told Claude he had looked in vain for his picture and asked him where the devil they had stuck it. Then he began to enquire after Gagnière and Dubuche and to sentimentalize about the old days: the way they used to invade the Salon in a body, stalking provocatively through the rooms as if they were enemy territory, scorning everything, then talking their heads off in violent discussions afterwards! Nobody ever saw Dubuche these days. Two or three times a month Gagnière rushed in from Melun for a concert, but he had so lost interest in painting that he had not even come in for the Salon, although, as he had done for the last fifteen years, he had sent in his customary landscape: the banks of the Seine, very pleasantly grey and conscientious and so very discreet that no one had even noticed it.
‘I was just going upstairs,’ said Mahoudeau. ‘Do you feel like coming with me?’
Claude, deathly pale, kept looking up towards the terrible roar of tramping feet, the passing of the monstrous, all-devouring mob, for he could feel it beating in his very bones. He said nothing, but held out his hand.
‘You’re not leaving us?’ cried Sandoz. ‘Come round with us again, then we’ll all leave together.’
Then, seeing him so weary, he felt sorry for him, realizing that his courage had run out and that all he wanted now was to be alone, to hide his wounds in solitude; so he said:
‘Goodbye, then, old chap. … I’ll be round to see you tomorrow.’
Claude staggered away, pursued by the thunder from above, and was soon lost to sight in the garden.
Two hours later, after losing Mahoudeau and finding him again in the company of Jory and Fagerolles, Sandoz discovered Claude in the East room standing gazing at his own picture, exactly as he had found him the first time. The poor wretch, instead of going home, had been unable to help himself and had wandered back to the place, obsessed.
The sweltering five o’clock crush was at its height, for by this time the mob was worn out and dizzy with doing the round of the galleries and beginning to panic and jostle like cattle making futile attempts to find the way out of a pen. The early morning chill had gone, and the heat of human bodies and the smell of human breath had made the atmosphere thick with a brownish-yellow vapour, while fine dust kept rising up from the floor like mist to join the exhalations from the human stable. Occasional visitors would still stop to look at the pictures, though only for the sake of the subjects now; but in general people were either simply wandering aimlessly about or marking time where they stood. The women, in particular, were proving obstinate, refusing to budge until the last moment when the attendants would usher them out on the stroke of six. A number of the stouter ladies had been driven to find seats, while others, having failed in their quest for somewhere to sit down, bravely propped themselves up on their sunshades, exhausted but undaunted, and keeping a keen or suppliant eye on the closely packed benches. Not a head in all those thousands but was throbbing with the last symptoms of fatigue: legs turned to water, features drawn, forehead splitting with headache, that brand of headache peculiar to Salons, brought on by perpetually staring upwards at a blinding conglomeration of colours.
The only persons who were apparently unaffected were the two gentlemen wearing decorations who were still on the same seat where they had been in earnest converse since midday, and still leagues removed from their immediate surroundings. They might have moved in the meantime and returned, but they might just as easily never have stirred.
‘So you went straight in,’ the fat one was saying, ‘as if you noticed nothing amiss?’
‘Exactly,’ the thin one answered. ‘I looked straight at them and raised my hat. … What else could I do?’
‘Amazing! Absolutely amazing!’
All Claude could hear was the gentle beat of his own heart; all he could see was his own picture away up near the ceiling. He stood there fascinated, unable to take his eyes off it, as if he were nailed to the spot and without the will-power to tear himself away. The jaded crowd swept round him unheeded, trod on his toes, jostled him, carried him along. Like some inanimate thing, he offered no resistance, but let himself float and always found himself back in the same place, still with his head in the air, unaware of what was going on down below, living only away up there with his work and his child, his poor, bloated little Jacques. Two great tears hovered on his eyelids, blurring his vision, but he still stared on, as if he could never see too much of him.
His heart wrung with pity, Sandoz pretended not to see his old friend, as if he thought it wiser to leave him in solitude, lamenting at the tomb of his fruitless life. As in the old days, the gang was going around again, this time together, Fagerolles and Jory leading; but when Mahoudeau asked him where Claude’s picture was Sandoz lied, drew his attention to something else and so got him out of the room.
That evening all Christine could get out of Claude was a few brief remarks; everything was all right, the public had taken it very well, the picture made a good show, hung a little on the high side, perhaps. But in spite of his deliberately cool, collected manner, he seemed strange, and she was afraid.
After dinner, coming back from taking some plates into the kitchen, she found he had left the table. One of the windows looked out on to a piece of waste land; he had opened it and was leaning so far out that at first she did not see him. Then, terrified, she rushed up and dragged him in by his coat tail.
‘Claude!’ she cried. ‘Claude! What are you doing?’
He turned to face her, white as a sheet, his eyes blazing like a madman’s.
‘Just looking,’ he answered.
With trembling hands she closed the window, but the shock had been so great that she lay awake the whole night long.
Chaptper 11
The following day Claude was back at work again. The days flowed by and the whole summer passed in sluggish tranquillity. He found himself a job, doing small flower paintings for the English market, which brought in enough to keep the two of them; but all his spare time he devoted to his big canvas. His fits of anger and frustration now seemed to be a thing of the past, and he appeared calmly resigned to his endless task, to which he applied himself with great determination though with little hope of success. There was still a strange, mad look in his eyes, though the light in them seemed to die out whenever he contemplated his abortive master work.
About this time, too, a great sorrow overshadowed Sandoz’s life. His mother died, and his whole mode of life was disturbed. He had grown so used to the three of them sharing their happy intimacy with a few chosen friends. He came to hate their house in the Rue Nollet. But as success suddenly came his way and, after a rather difficult start, his books began to sell, he put his newly acquired wealth to good use and rented a huge apartment in the Rue de Londres, the installation of which kept him occupied for several months. His bereavement and his consequent disgust with things in general brought him and Claude together again. After what he had seen at the Salon, Sandoz had been very a
nxious about his old friend, for he realized then that his being had split irreparably apart and there was an open wound through which Claude’s life was ebbing slowly and imperceptibly away. Then, seeing him so calm and diligent, he began to feel more reassured, though he still paid frequent visits to the Rue Tourlaque, and whenever he happened to find Christine alone he questioned her, for he could see that she, too, was living in dread of something she never dared to put into words. She had that nervous, tortured look of a mother nursing her sick child and trembling lest the slightest sound should mean that death was close at hand.
One July morning when he called, he said to her:
‘You must feel much happier now, Christine, now that Claude’s really settled down to work again?’
‘Oh, yes, he’s working again,’ she answered, with a glance at the picture, her usual glance, sidelong and full of hatred and dread. ‘He wants to get everything else finished before he starts on the woman.’
She still refrained from putting her obsessive fear into words, but she added in a quieter voice:
‘His eyes, have you noticed his eyes lately? He’s still got that look in them. Oh, he can’t take me in! I know he’s shamming, pretending to be calm and collected. … He wants taking out of himself, Pierre, that’s what he needs. … So please come and fetch him out whenever you can. You’re all he has now, so please, please help me.’
After that, Sandoz invented endless reasons for long walks. He would call on Claude early in the morning and drag him away from his work, for he practically always found him firmly settled on his ladder, sitting on it when he was not actually painting. Fits of lassitude often rendered him inactive and sometimes a strange feeling of numbness would so befog his brain that for minutes on end he was quite incapable of wielding his brush. In those moments of silent contemplation there was even a certain religious fervour in his glance as it kept reverting to the female figure which he still left untouched. Aware that his desire was hovering on the brink of blissful death, he deliberately withheld himself from a love so infinitely tender and yet so awe-inspiring, which was bound to cost him his life. Then he would go back to the other figures and the backgrounds, still aware of her presence, his eye so unsteady when it lighted on her that he knew he would avoid losing his head only so long as he never touched her body and she did not take him in her arms.
One evening at Sandoz’s, Christine, who was welcomed there now and who never missed a Thursday, hoping it might help to cheer up her ailing grown-up child, took her host on one side and begged him to ‘drop in’ on them the following morning. So the next day, as he had to go out beyond Montmartre to make some notes for a novel, Sandoz descended on Claude, dragged him away from his work and kept him out the whole day.
They went down to the Porte de Clignancourt, where there was a fairground with roundabouts, shooting galleries, and cafés open all the year round, and suddenly, to their amazement, they found themselves face to face with Chaîne lording it over a large and prosperous-looking booth. It was like a very ornate sort of chapel enshrining a row of four turntables loaded with glass and china ware and all kinds of knick-knacks which flashed like lightning and tinkled like musical glasses when a customer set them spinning and rattling against the pointed feather. There was even a white rabbit, the first prize, on one of them, all decked out with pink ribbons and quivering with fear as it whirled round and round with the crockery. All this wealth was framed in red curtains and draperies, in the midst of which, at the back of the booth, in a kind of holy of holies, hung Chaîne’s three masterpieces of painting which followed him round from fair to fair, from one end of Paris to the other: the ‘Woman taken in Adultery’ in the centre, the copy from Mantegna on the left, and on the right Mahoudeau’s stove. At night, when the naphtha flares were lit and the wheels were whirling and sparkling like stars, nothing looked more beautiful than those three paintings against the rich blood red of the draperies; they never failed to draw a crowd.
It was the sight of them in all their splendour that made Claude exclaim:
‘Good God, but they’re wonderful … and perfect for that job!’
The Mantegna especially, with its gaunt simplicity, was rather like a faded print nailed up for the enjoyment of simple folks, while the meticulous, lop-sided rendering of the stove, balanced by the ginger-bread Christ, looked unexpectedly funny.
As soon as he saw his two friends Chaîne greeted them as if they had parted only a matter of hours ago, quite calmly and without any indication that he was either proud or ashamed of his present circumstances. He looked no older but just as leathery as ever; his nose was still lost between his two cheeks, and his uncommunicative mouth hidden in the scrub of his beard.
‘Well, well, it’s a small world!’ said Sandoz cheerfully, ‘… and those pictures of yours look wonderful up there.’
‘Yes, and what do you think about him setting up a Salon of his own like this? Very clever, I call it,’ Claude added.
Chaîne’s face beamed with delight and he managed to answer:
‘Isn’t it?’
Then, as his artist’s pride was aroused, he forgot his usual grunting monosyllables and even spoke a whole sentence:
‘Oh, if I’d had money behind me like you two, I should have made my mark like you have.’
He was convinced of that fact. He had never doubted his own talent; he had simply given up because he could not make a living by it. To produce masterpieces like those in the Louvre, he was positive, was only a matter of time.
‘Why worry, anyhow?’ said Claude, now serious again. ‘You’ve no cause for regrets, you’re the one who’s made a success of things. … Business is good enough, isn’t it?’
There was an undertone of bitterness in Chaîne’s mumbled reply. Not a bit of it; nothing was doing well, not even the lucky wheel business. The working-classes had stopped spending their money on that sort of thing so as to have more to spend on drink. You could buy third-rate junk for prizes and work for all you were worth the old trick of slapping the table to prevent the feather stopping at the big ones, but there was only the bare bones of a living in it these days, he said. Then, as there were a number of people in front of the booth, he broke off and startled his friends by suddenly shouting in a voice which they would never otherwise have associated with him:
‘Try your luck, ladies and gentlemen, try your luck! Every number guaranteed a winner!’
A man carrying a sickly-looking little girl with big, greedy eyes paid for two goes. The table whirled and rattled, the ornaments flashed as they spun, and the live rabbit, its ears well back, went round and round at such a rate that it lost all semblance of a rabbit and became just a blurred white circle. There was a moment of hideous tension; the little girl nearly won it.
Then, after shaking Chaîne’s still trembling hand, the two friends resumed their walk. It was Claude who broke the silence.
‘He’s happy, anyhow!’ he said.
‘Happy!’ exclaimed Sandoz. ‘He thinks he might have got into the Institut, and it’s killing him!’
Some time after their encounter with Chaîne, about the middle of August, Sandoz thought it might be amusing to go and spend a whole day in the country. He had met Dubuche not long before and found him very depressed and feeling rather sorry for himself, but very eager to talk about the old days; so, as he was going to be out at ‘La Richaudière’ for another fortnight with his two children, he had invited his two old friends to go out there to lunch one day. Sandoz therefore suggested that, since Dubuche was so keen to see them both again, they should pay him a surprise visit. But although he insisted that he had sworn not to go without Claude, Claude obstinately refused to go with him. It was as though he were afraid at the thought of seeing Bennecourt again and the Seine and the islands and all the countryside where his years of happiness had died and been buried. It was only after Christine had intervened that he gave way, though very reluctantly. He was going through one of his periods of feverish activity and had work
ed very late the previous night and was still eager to paint again that morning, which was a Sunday, so he found it almost physically painful to tear himself away. What was the use of going back to the past? he argued. What was dead was dead and didn’t exist any more. The only thing that existed now was Paris, and in Paris only one prospect: the Ile de la Cité, the vision that haunted him always and in all places, the one bit of Paris to which he had lost his heart.
In the train he was still so obviously agitated and stared so ruefully out of the window, as if he were leaving the city for years, watching it gradually recede into the distant haze, that Sandoz, to distract him, started to tell him all he knew about Dubuche’s affairs. Delighted to have a medallist for a son-in-law, old Margaillan had begun by taking him everywhere and introducing him as his partner and prospective successor, a young fellow who knew how a business ought to be run and all about cheaper and better building, who had burnt the midnight oil, damn it all, and got his diplomas! Unfortunately, Dubuche’s first idea had been a miserable failure. He had invented a brick-kiln and had it built on some of his father-in-law’s land in Burgundy, but on such disastrous terms and to such unsatisfactory plans that the whole affair was written off for two hundred thousand francs. After that he turned to building with the idea of trying out some personal theories which would revolutionize the whole art of construction. They were the old theories he had picked up from the revolutionary friends of his youth; they stood for everything he had promised himself he would do when he was free to act upon his own initiative, but they were badly digested and applied with the typical well-intentioned clumsiness of the plodder without a spark of creative faculty. He went in for tiling and terra-cotta decorations, vast constructions of glass and iron, especially iron—iron beams, iron staircases, iron roofs—and since all these materials increase costs, he had ended once more in disaster, and all the more rapidly because he was a hopeless administrator and wealth and advancement had gone to his head and robbed him of all aptitude for work. This time old Margaillan lost all patience, as well he might, since for thirty years he had been buying land, building, re-selling, estimating at a glance for blocks of flats—so many metres at so much a metre, making so many flats at a rent of so much—and there he was saddled with a duffer who underestimated for lime and bricks and grit, put in oak where pine would have done and treated floor space as if it was sacred, afraid of cutting it up into a maximum number of rooms! No wonder he said he was sick of the whole thing and refused to have anything more to do with Art, though up to then he had always had a lurking ambition, being an uneducated man, to introduce what he called ‘a touch of Art’ into his otherwise routine jobs! From that point relations between the old man and his son-in-law began to deteriorate. They quarrelled violently, one haughtily entrenched behind his superior knowledge, the other crying aloud that a common labourer knew more about building than any new-fangled architect. In the end his millions were in jeopardy, so one fine day Margaillan threw Dubuche out of his office and forbade him ever to set foot there again, telling him he hadn’t gumption enough even to manage a couple of men and a boy. That meant the end of Dubuche and a serious come-down for the Beaux-Arts, discredited like that by a glorified mason!