The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  ‘Oh, and monsieur, don’t you feel that that slow, funeral-knell passage in Beethoven’s Seventh is like something knocking on your own heart? … Oh, I can see you feel exactly as I do, that music is really a sort of communion! … Beethoven, don’t you know, I think there’s something so wonderful, and at the same time sad somehow, in sharing your appreciation of him with someone else and knowing that you’re both simply dying …’

  ‘And what about Schumann, madame, and Wagner! … Oh, that Reverie of Schumann’s. The unaccompanied strings, you know; it’s just like soft, warm rain on acacia leaves brushed away by a sunbeam; just a faint, faint suggestion of a tear. … Then Wagner, madame, the overture to the Dutchman. You do like it, don’t you? Oh, say you do! I find it really overwhelming, shattering, madame. It simply takes my breath away.’

  And their voices dwindled into enraptured silence as they sat there, elbow to elbow, not even looking at each other, but gazing far away into realms beyond the bounds of space.

  Sandoz, taken completely by surprise, wondered where Mathilde had picked up all her jargon. From one of Jory’s articles, perhaps, though he had often noticed that women could talk music quite convincingly without knowing the first thing about it. Grieved already by the acrimonious bickering of his other guests, he found Mathilde’s affected languishing more than he could endure. If the others liked tearing each other to pieces, all well and good, but this middle-aged harlot gushing and working herself up over Beethoven and Schumann, no! It needed only that to put a preposterous end to such an evening.

  Gagnière, fortunately, suddenly sprang to his feet; even in ecstasy he was aware of the time and realized he would have to hurry now to catch his train. So after flabby handshakes and silent leave-takings, away he went to his bed at Melun.

  ‘There’s a dud for you,’ said Mahoudeau when he had gone. ‘His music’s killed his painting, and now he’ll never be any good at either.’

  When it was his turn to leave, the door had hardly closed behind him before Jory remarked:

  ‘And there’s another dud. Have you seen his latest paperweight? He’ll end up modelling cuff-links, and he had the makings of something really powerful.’

  Now Mathilde was on her feet; after taking a court leave of Christine and treating Henriette with what she considered well-bred familiarity, she bundled her husband into the hall where he humbly helped her into her cloak, terrified by the look in her eyes which indicated trouble in store.

  Sandoz could not prevent himself, when they had gone, from exclaiming:

  ‘We might have expected that. It would be the journalist, the scribbler who battens on the stupidity of the public, who describes everybody else as “duds”! Still, we must always remember that Mathilde’s motto is “Vengeance is mine!”’

  Christine and Claude still lingered. Since the drawing-room had begun to empty Claude had subsided into an armchair in another of his trances, saying nothing, but just gazing stiffly into the remote distance, far beyond the walls of the room. From the tense expression on his face and the way he kept craning his neck, it was clear he could see the invisible and hear the silence calling to him.

  When Christine got up to go, full of apologies for being the last to leave, Henriette took both her hands in hers and begged her to come again often and to treat her as a sister, while poor Christine, looking very touching in her black dress, nodded her gratitude and smiled.

  ‘Listen, Christine,’ Sandoz said to her quietly, after a glance in Claude’s direction. ‘You must try not to worry so much. … He’s talked quite a lot and been much more cheerful this evening. Everything’s all right, really.’

  ‘It isn’t, Pierre,’ Christine answered in a terrified voice. ‘Look at his eyes. As long as he has that look in his eyes I shall be afraid. … You’ve been very helpful; you’ve done your best. Thank you. What you can’t do, nobody else can. If you only knew how it hurts to feel you don’t count any more, to feel as helpless as I do!’

  Then, turning to Claude, she added: ‘Are you coming, Claude?’

  She had to repeat her question, for he heard nothing the first time. Then, with a shudder, he stood up and said: ‘Yes, I’m coming, I’m coming,’ just as if he were answering some distant call from far away beyond the horizon.

  When they had gone and Sandoz and his wife were left alone in their drawing-room, stifling now with the heat from the lamps and heavy with melancholy silence after the recent clamour of furious voices, they looked at each other and let their arms drop to their sides in dismay at their evening’s failure. Henriette did her best to make light of it, and said quietly:

  ‘I did warn you; I felt it might happen. …’

  Her husband interrupted her with a gesture of despair. Why should she feel like that about it? Did she mean this was the end of his illusions, the end of the eternity he had always dreamed of, believing that happiness was made of a few friendships chosen in one’s youth and cherished into old age? A lamentable choice his had been if this was all it added up to—liquidation, failure, bankruptcy, you might call it! A heart-breaking prospect. He could not understand how he could have left so many of his friends behind and broken so many strong attachments; why the affections of others seemed to be perpetually changing while he noticed no change in his own. The thought of his poor Thursday evenings moved him almost to tears. What had they been but the protracted death of something he had loved, leaving him only with a host of memories to mourn? Did it mean that now his wife and he must resign themselves to living in the wilderness, cut off by the hatred of the world around them? Or did it mean they would now open their doors to a flock of indifferent strangers? Slowly, in the depths of his grief, he began to realize one thing: in life everything comes to an end, but nothing is ever repeated. Accepting the apparently inevitable, he sighed and said to Henriette:

  ‘You were right. … We’ll never invite them all together again. They’d devour each other.’

  No sooner had Claude and Christine reached the Place de la Trinité than Claude let go of Christine’s arm, mumbled something about having some business to attend to and begged her to go home without him. She had felt a violent shudder run through his body and, in surprise and apprehension, asked him what business at this time of night, after twelve o’clock; where was he going, and why? But he had already turned and left her. She ran after him and, pretending she was frightened, begged him not to let her make her way back to Montmartre alone, so late. That was the only argument he seemed prepared to listen to. He took her arm again and they climbed up the Rue Blanche and the Rue Lepic together. On their doorstep in the Rue Tourlaque, he rang the bell for the concierge, then turned and left her again.

  ‘There, you’re home. Now I’ll attend to my business,’ he said, and started off down the street at a tremendous pace, gesticulating like a madman. The door had been opened, and Christine made no attempt to close it again, but started in pursuit. In the Rue Lepic she could have overtaken him, but as she was afraid of upsetting him even more she thought it better not to let him know she was there but simply to follow him and not let him out of her sight. When he left the Rue Lepic he turned down the Rue Blanche again, then went along the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and the Rue du Quatre Septembre till he came to the Rue Richelieu. When she saw him turn down there her blood ran cold; he was making for the river, the very thing she was afraid of, the haunting dread that kept her awake at night. What should she do, she wondered—go with him, cling to him to the bitter end, or try to hold him back? She staggered on in his wake, feeling the life ebbing out of her limbs as every step brought them nearer the river; for that was where he was going, past the Théâtre Français, across the Place du Carrousel to the Pont des Saints-Pères. He walked a few paces along the bridge, then went up to the parapet and looked down into the water. She was sure he was going to throw himself over and would have cried out to him, but her strength failed her, her throat was paralysed.

  She was mistaken. He had stopped and was now looking straigh
t up the river. She knew then what he had had in his mind. It was the Cité haunting him, the heart of Paris that filled his thoughts incessantly, the place he could see when he gazed through walls into space, the place he alone could hear calling to him wherever he happened to be. Still she did not dare to hope, and hung back watching him closely, though her head was in a whirl, for she imagined that even now he might fling himself into the water, yet she had to resist the urge to go up to him lest her appearance on the scene should precipitate disaster. Her womanly passion outraged, her motherly heart bleeding for him, there was nothing for her to do but watch, without even being able to lift a finger to stop him.

  He, meanwhile stood, a tall, motionless figure, gazing into the night.

  It was a wintry night, pitch dark, with a cloudy sky above and an icy west wind blowing. Paris was asleep, and the only signs of life were the street lamps, discs of scintillating light shrinking away in the distance to a dusting of fixed stars. Along the embankments they were like double strings of luminous pearls lighting with their glow the fronts of the nearby buildings: on the left the houses on the Quai du Louvre, on the right the two wings of the Institut, then, beyond that, a confused mass of bricks and mortar lost in deeper shadow, dotted with distant sparks. Between the two retreating strings of lamps ran lines of lights on the bridges, each tinier than its predecessor, each like a cluster of spangles hanging in the air. Down below, the Seine was ablaze with the nocturnal splendour known only to the waters of cities, reflecting every lighted lamp as a comet with a streaming tail. The nearest ones, overlapping, lit up the water in regular, symmetrical fans, while those in the far distance were tiny points of stationary fire. The great, flaming tails, however, were never still, but lashed about the water, the quivering of their black and gold scales revealing the ceaseless flowing of the stream. Along the whole of its length the Seine was ablaze, its depths mysteriously illumined beneath its glassy surface, as by some brilliant celebration or sumptuous transformation scene. Over this conflagration and the embankments bespangled with lights, a red haze hovered in the starless sky: the hot, phosphorescent vapour that nightly rises out of the sleeping city as from a dormant volcano.

  The wind began to blow colder. Her teeth chattering, her sight blurred with tears, Christine felt as though the bridge was swaying beneath her and everything was being swept away in some tremendous débâcle. Claude had moved. He was climbing over the parapet! No! Everything was still again suddenly, and there he was still at the same spot, obstinate as ever, peering through the darkness towards the point of the invisible Cité.

  He had answered its call, though it was too dark now for him to see; all he could distinguish at this hour was the bridges, their framework delicately etched against the glowing stream. Beyond that, all was lost; the island itself was sunk in darkness, and he would not even have been able to say where it lay but for an occasional belated cab trundling its lights across the Pont-Neuf, like sparks running over dying embers. Down on the weir near the Monnaie, a red lantern shed a trail of blood upon the water, while some enormous, sinister object, a corpse perhaps, or, more likely, a drifting boat, floated slowly down through the reflected lights, visible for a moment, then swallowed up again by the shadows. What had become of his proud and stately island? Where had it sunk? Into the blazing depths of the Seine? As he peered in vain into the shadows, he gradually became aware of the rippling of the river as it flowed through the night, and he began to lean over towards the great, chill, apparently unfathomable moat with the dancing mystery of its lights, drawn by the melancholy sound of its waters, ready—so deep was his despair—to respond to their call.

  This time Christine knew, by the way her heart throbbed, that the terrible thought had flashed into his mind, and she held out her quivering hands towards him through the stinging wind. But Claude made no move, drawn up now to his full height, struggling against the proffered sweetness of death. For another full hour he stood, oblivious of time, gazing towards the Cité as if, by some miracle, his eyes might of their own accord create the light by which to see it.

  When at last he staggered back off the bridge, Christine had to pass him and run on ahead, to be home in the Rue Tourlaque before him.

  Chapter 12

  It was three o’clock before they went to bed that morning in their icy room off the studio swept by the sharp November wind. Still breathless from hurrying, Christine had slipped hastily under the blankets so that Claude should not know she had been following him; and Claude, when he came in, exhausted, had quickly undressed without saying a word. For many months now theirs had been a cold, loveless couch on which they lay down like two strangers since they had gradually sundered all carnal bonds through the self-imposed chastity which, in theory, was to enable him to put all his virility into his painting and which, in spite of her torturing passion, she had accepted with proud, unspoken grief. But never, until this particular night, had she been aware of such an obstacle, such coldness between them, as if nothing could ever make them warm to each other again and fall into each other’s arms.

  For a good quarter of an hour she struggled to ward off sleep, though she was very weary and her mind was already numb; but she refused to let herself give way so long as Claude was still awake. As on every other night she knew she could never settle to rest without being sure that he was asleep first. Still he did not blow out the candle, but lay with eyes wide open, letting himself be blinded by the flame. What could he be thinking about now? Was he still down there in the darkness, in the cold, damp breath of the river, looking at Paris riddled with stars like a frosty sky? What inner debate, what resolution to be taken so convulsed his face? The question still in her mind, she succumbed at last to her weariness and fell fast asleep.

  An hour later, a sudden, anguished sensation, a feeling of loneliness, awakened her with a violent start. Immediately she reached out with her hand and felt the place beside her already cold; Claude had gone, and in her sleep she had been aware of it. Half awake, her head heavy and throbbing with sleep, she was just beginning to panic when she noticed a thin shaft of light shining through the open doorway from the studio. That reassured her; she thought he had gone to fetch a book to read himself to sleep. Then, as he did not come back, she got up very quietly to see what he was doing. The sight that met her eyes so startled her that she stopped dead, too scared to show herself.

  Cold though it was, Claude, clad only in shirt and trousers, his feet in slippers, was standing on his big ladder in front of his picture. With his palette at his feet, he was holding the candle in one hand and painting with the other. His eyes were wide open, like a sleepwalker’s, and his stiff, precise gestures as he bent down to fill his brush, then straightened up again, cast on the wall a big, fantastic shadow with staccato movements like a mechanical doll. Not a sound, not a breath even broke the awful silence of the huge, dark room.

  As she stood shivering in the doorway Christine realized what had happened. It was his obsession, the hour he had spent down on the Pont des Saints-Pères that had made it impossible for him to sleep and driven him back to his picture, determined to see it again in spite of the dark. Perhaps when he climbed up on to his ladder it was simply to get a closer view; then, irritated by some slight defect that so preyed upon his mind that he was unable to wait to remedy it until it was daylight, he had picked up a brush, intending only to touch it up in that one place; and, as one correction had led to another, he had ended up by painting like a madman, candle in hand, in the pale, inadequate light made fearful by his gestures. In the throes of his impotent urge to create, oblivious both of time and place, he was wearing out body and soul to give his work the breath of life.

  Her heart wrung with pity, her eyes streaming with tears, Christine stood and watched him. For a moment she thought she would leave him to his ill-timed task, as one humours a maniac in his madness. One thing was certain now: his picture would never be finished. The harder he worked on it the more incoherent it was becoming, deteriorating into
an inextricable mass of dull, drab colours, devoid of all sense of drawing. Even the background, the group of dock porters especially, which had once been so well drawn, was beginning to lose its original firmness. But his mind was made up; he was determined to finish off everything else before he would touch the central figure, the naked Woman, now as always the desire and torment of his working hours, the flesh that would turn his brain and encompass his destruction the day he tried to bring it to life. For months he had not touched it, and the knowledge of that fact was a comfort to Christine and made her much more tolerant and sympathetic in her gnawing jealousy. So long as he kept away from that desired but dreaded mistress, she did not feel quite so forlorn.

  Her bare feet numb with cold, she was turning to go back to bed when she noticed something which instantly changed her mind. She had not realized at first what was happening; now she suddenly saw, and understood. His brush filled with flesh colour, Claude was painting madly away with rounded, caressing gestures. There was a fixed smile on his lips and he was not even aware of the hot wax from the candle trickling over his fingers as the great, black shadow of his impassioned movement was cast on to the canvas, grappling with the painted limbs and coupling with the painted body in a violent embrace. He had gone back to the naked Woman.

  Pushing the studio door wide open, Christine walked in, impelled by the irrepressible fury of a wife affronted under her own roof, deceived while she lay asleep in the next room. Yes, there he was with the other woman, painting her legs and body like some infatuated visionary driven by the torments of the real to the exaltation of the unreal, making her legs the gilded columns of a temple and her body a blaze of red and yellow, a star, magnificent, unearthly. Nudity thus enshrined and set in precious stones, demanding to be worshipped, was more than Christine could tolerate. She had gone through too much already; she would put an end to this betrayal.