The Masterpiece

by Émile Zola

  Yet when she spoke her words were words of despair and supplication, the words of a mother admonishing her headstrong child.

  ‘Claude, what are you doing?’ she said. ‘You’re not being very reasonable, are you, Claude, behaving like this? … Please come back to bed. Don’t stay up there on that ladder, you’re bound to catch cold.’

  He did not answer, but bent down again to fill his brush; then, with two firm strokes, brought out the lines of the groin with two streaks of flaming vermilion.

  ‘Claude, do listen! Come back, Claude, please,’ she went on. ‘I love you, Claude, you know that, so why do you do things to upset me so? … Please come back, unless you want me to catch my death as well, through waiting for you.’

  In his frenzy he did not even look at her, but rapped out, in a voice choking with fury, as he marked in the navel with a flourish of carmine:

  ‘For God’s sake leave me alone, can’t you! I’m busy!’

  For a moment Christine said nothing, but a dark flame kindled in her eyes and her whole gentle being flared up in revolt. She braced herself, then burst out, with all the pent-up hatred of a slave goaded beyond endurance.

  ‘No! I can’t leave you alone, and I won’t leave you alone! … I can stand it no longer! I’m going to tell you now what it is that’s been choking the life out of me ever since I met you. … It’s this painting, your painting! It’s killing me, poisoning my whole life. And I knew it would happen from the very first. It’s like a monster; I was afraid of it as soon as I saw it; I thought it was horrible, loathsome. But I was a coward; I was in love with you, so I couldn’t afford not to like it, and I made myself get used to it, though I knew it would kill me in the end, it tortured me so! I can’t remember a single day in the last ten years when it hasn’t reduced me to tears. … No, don’t stop me now! It’s a relief to talk, now I’ve the strength to do it. … Ten whole years of neglect and repression; ten years of meaning nothing to you, of being cast further and further aside and reduced to being nothing but a servant; seeing this other creature stealing you from me, thrusting herself between us and flaunting her triumph in my face! … For you daren’t deny she’s taken possession of every inch of your body, brain and heart and all! She’s like a vice; you can’t shake her off, and now you’re hers to devour. … But she’s your wife now, isn’t she, not me? She’s the one who sleeps with you now, not me, the hateful bitch!’

  Her outburst, her cry of suffering had surprised Claude into listening to her, although, since half his mind was still engrossed by the task of creation, he did not really understand why she was talking as she did. His blank amazement and slight tremor of impatience that made him look like a man surprised and disturbed in an act of debauchery made her angrier than ever. She climbed up the ladder, wrenched the candle from his fist and used it, as he had done, to light the picture.

  ‘Look at this,’ she cried, ‘and see what you’ve come to! It’s lamentable, it’s hideous, it’s grotesque, and it’s time you knew it! There! Isn’t it ugly? Isn’t it mad? … You can see for yourself you’re finished, so why go on struggling? … It’s so pointless, isn’t it? And that’s what’s so revolting about it. … If you can’t be a good painter, we still have life! Ah, life, life!’

  She put down the candle on the platform at the top of the ladder, and since he had clambered down she jumped down to join him. Kneeling at his feet as he sat down on the bottom rung, she took his helpless hands and held them tight between her own.

  ‘Remember that, Claude; we have our lives to live,’ she went on, ‘so let’s go and live them together, and forget about your nightmares. … It’s silly, don’t you think, for us to grow old before our time, torturing each other and forgetting we could be happy? We shall be dead and buried soon enough, so let’s be warm as long as we can. Let’s live, Claude, and love each other, as we used to do at Bennecourt, remember? … Listen. I’ll tell you my dream. It’s to take you away from here first thing in the morning, right away from this loathsome Paris to somewhere quiet and peaceful, and show you what I could do to make life worth living. It would be so wonderful, to forget everything else and just be in each other’s arms! We should sleep in our big double bed, spend our mornings lounging in the sun enjoying the smell of lunch cooking; then, after a lazy afternoon, we’d spend the evening quietly in the lamplight, and there would be no more worries and torments, nothing but life for the pleasure of living! … What more could you ask? I love you. I adore you. I’ll be your slave, I’ll exist only for your pleasure. … Do you hear? I love you, I love you, I love you! Isn’t that enough?’

  He released his hands from hers, and with a gesture of refusal, answered glumly:

  ‘No, it isn’t enough. … I don’t want to go away with you. I don’t even want to be happy; all I want is to paint.’

  ‘And to kill me as well as yourself, and make us end our days in blood and tears! … Art alone exists, Art is all-powerful, Art is the jealous god who strikes us both down, the god you worship! Art is your master; it can destroy us both, and you’ll offer up a prayer of gratitude!’

  ‘Yes. Art is the master, my master, to dispose of me as it pleases. If I stopped painting it would kill me just the same, so I prefer to die painting. … My own will doesn’t really enter into it. That is the way things are; nothing else matters, and the world can go to blazes!’

  She leapt to her feet at once as her anger flared up again.

  ‘But what about me?’ she cried, in a voice now hard again with fury. ‘I’m alive, but the women you’re in love with are dead! … Oh, don’t try to deny it, they’re your mistresses, I know they are, every one of your painted ladies. I’ve known it from the start, before you and I were lovers; I’d only got to see the way you caressed their naked bodies, the way you sat mooning over them afterwards for hours on end. It was a morbid, stupid thing for any man to do, falling in love with a lot of pictures, trying to embrace an illusion. What’s more, you know it was, and that’s why you were always on the defensive, because you didn’t dare to admit it. … Then you fell in love with me, or thought you did, and told me a lot of nonsense about your love-affairs with the women in your paintings and tried to pass it off as a joke. Do you remember the way you used to pretend to be sorry for them when you were making love to me? … And you were sorry for them, or you wouldn’t have gone back to them as quickly as you did, like a maniac to his mania! I was real, but I didn’t matter any more. They, the dream women, were the only real things in your life. … What I’ve suffered on their account you’ll never know, because you know nothing about real women. I’ve lived with you all these years, but that doesn’t mean you understand me. I was jealous of them, did you know that? And when I posed for you, on this very spot, stark naked, I found courage to do it because I’d only one thing in mind. I wanted to beat them at their own game; I wanted to win you back; but what did it bring me? Nothing. Not even a kiss on the shoulder before I put on my clothes again. Oh, the shame I’ve had to hide, the bitterness I’ve had to swallow, when you not only ignored me but despised me as well! … And since then you’ve despised me more and more; so that now we go to bed together, night after night, lie down side by side and never lay a finger on each other. That’s how it’s been for eight months and seven days. I’ve counted them. Eight months and seven days since we last made love to each other!’

  Sensual though she was, Christine was also modest, and, though ardent in the act of love, her lips swelling with cries of pleasure, she was discreet and disliked to talk about these things afterwards, turning away her head in smiling confusion. But now, impassioned by her own desire, outraged by her husband’s abstinence, she spoke her mind frankly and boldly. Her jealousy had not deceived her in her accusations against Claude, for the virility he withheld from her he expended on her rival, the woman he preferred. She knew, too, exactly how he had come to forsake her. It had begun by his refusing her when she nestled close to him in bed the night before he had important work to do; he said it tired hi
m. Later he pretended that when they made love it took his brain three days to clear sufficiently for him to produce anything worth while. That was how they had gradually drifted apart; a week would go by while he was finishing off a picture, then a month while he was preparing and starting work on another, and so, with postponements and neglected opportunities, abstinence had grown to be a habit and ended in complete estrangement. Now she found herself at grips with the theory she had heard expounded hundreds of times before: genius must be chaste, its only love must be work.

  ‘You push me away,’ she cried, ‘at night when I want to be near you, or else you edge away from me as if I were loathsome to you, and you turn to something else for your love. And to what? To something and nothing, a bit of oil and colour on a canvas! … Now look at her, look at her, I say, up there, the woman you love, and see what a monster you’ve made of her in your madness! Was any woman ever that shape? Did any woman have bright gold thighs and flowers growing out of her loins? Wake up! Open your eyes and come down to earth again! You’re lost!’

  Automatically obeying her commanding gesture, Claude stood up to look at his picture. The candle, which had been left on the top of the ladder, lighted up the female figure like an image on an altar, while the rest of the vast studio remained in total darkness. He was beginning now to awaken from his dream, and as he looked at his painted Woman from where he was standing, below and at a certain distance away from her, he was dumbfounded. Who could have painted what looked like an idol belonging to some unknown religion? Who could have made her of marble and gold and precious stones and shown the mystic rose of her sex blooming between the precious columns that were her thighs, beneath the sacred canopy that was her belly? Could he himself have unconsciously produced this symbol of insatiable desire, this extrahuman image of the flesh turned to gold and jewels in his hands as he strove in vain to bring his work to life? It frightened him, as he stood there gaping in amazement and trembling to realize how he had plunged into something beyond reality, and how completely reality itself had evaded him despite his fruitless efforts to master it and improve it with the aid of ordinary human hands.

  ‘Now do you see?’ said Christine in triumph.

  And he murmured quietly in reply:

  ‘What have I done? … Is creation impossible? Are human hands powerless to make things come to life?’

  His courage was flagging and, realizing it, Christine took him warmly in her arms.

  ‘Why worry about such foolish things,’ she said, ‘so long as you have me? … You’ve made me pose for you; you wanted to make copies of my body, but why? Surely I’m worth more than all the copies you could ever make! At best they’re ugly, besides being as cold and stiff as so many corpses. … But I love you. I want you. Don’t you understand? Why do I have to tell you all the time? Can’t you feel it when I’m always near you, when I offer to pose for you, when I’m always wanting to touch you? Do you understand now? I love you. I’m alive and I want you,’ she ended desperately, twining her naked limbs about him as she spoke.

  Her nightgown torn half off, she pressed her naked bosom against him as if she would have ground her flesh into his. Now her passion was aroused for its last determined onslaught. She was passion itself as she fought; passion unbridled and devastating, freed from all the chaste reserve she had used to show; passion burning to say everything and do everything, intent on conquest. Her whole face flushed and her gentle eyes and limpid brow were hidden by her loosened hair, giving full prominence to her square jaw, her resolute chin and her blood-red lips.

  ‘Don’t! Let me go!’ Claude murmured. ‘I’m too wretched.’

  ‘Maybe you think I’m old,’ she went on heatedly. ‘You do. You’ve told me I wasn’t what I once was, and I thought you were right, and I used to look myself over as I was posing, looking for wrinkles. … But there weren’t any. It wasn’t true! I can feel I haven’t aged. I’m still young, and strong. …’

  Then, as he was still struggling to free himself from her embrace, she cried:

  ‘There! Look for yourself!’

  She stood away from him, and with one gesture ripped off her nightgown and stood before him naked in the pose she had held for so many lengthy sittings. With a tilt of her chin she drew his attention to the figure in the picture.

  ‘Now you can compare, and you’ll find I’m still younger than she is. You can cover her all over with jewels, she’ll still be as wizened as a dead leaf. … I’m still as I was at eighteen, and the reason is: I love you.’

  And indeed, as she stood in the pale candlelight, she looked radiant with youth. As her love welled up within her, her legs looked longer and finer as they swept up to the broader, silky curve of her hips, and her breasts stood out firm and erect, as they throbbed with the pulse of her desire.

  She took him at once in her arms again, clinging to him, unhampered now even by her flimsy nightgown, caressing him without restraint, his thighs, his shoulders, as if she were searching out his heart in her determination to possess him entirely and make him her own, kissing him ravenously with hungry, insatiable lips, on his skin, his beard, his sleeves, and even on the air around him. Her voice faded to less than a whisper; her speech was just a series of excited gasps punctuated by sighs.

  ‘Come with me,’ she murmured, ‘and love me. … Aren’t you human? Is that what makes you be satisfied with pictures? Come with me, and you’ll see life’s still worth living. … It is, you know, if we live it in each other’s arms, if we spend all our nights wrapped up in each other, like this, for ever and ever. …’

  She felt a thrill run through his body and some slight response to her embrace, for the other woman, the idol, had frightened him. Sure now that his resistance was wavering, she continued her blandishments, knowing she was bound to conquer in the end.

  ‘I know the dreadful thought you’ve got in the back of your mind,’ she whispered. ‘I’ve never dared to speak of it because it doesn’t do to provoke bad luck, but it keeps me awake at night, I’m so terrified. … Tonight I followed you all the way down to that terrible bridge. Oh, how I hate it! And I trembled with fear because I thought it was the end. I thought I was losing you. … Oh, God! What should I do without you? I need you so badly, it’s killing me, killing me, do you hear? … Love me again, Claude, and let me love you, as we used to do!’

  Such boundless passion was too much for him; he broke down completely, feeling himself and the whole world swept away as by some tremendous sorrow, and clung distractedly to her, sobbing and stammering:

  ‘It’s quite true; that dreadful thought was in my mind. … I should have done it, too, if the thought of this picture unfinished hadn’t helped me to resist. … But how can I go on living if there’s no point in going on working? How can I go on living after what I did just now, after spoiling my greatest effort?’

  ‘You can go on living because I love you.’

  ‘Ah, but you’ll never love me enough! … I know that because I know myself. The only thing that could make life worth living would be something that doesn’t exist, the sort of joy that would make me forget everything else. … You’ve already proved you couldn’t give me that, and I know you never will.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I will! I will, and I’ll prove it. … This is what I’ll do. I’ll take you in my arms like this and I’ll kiss you on your eyes and your lips and on every part of your body. I’ll warm you at my breast; I’ll twine my legs round yours and clasp my arms around you and I’ll be you; I’ll be your breath, I’ll be your flesh, I’ll be your blood. …’

  This time he was conquered; filled with the warmth of her desire, he gave himself up to her entirely, burying his head in her bosom, covering her body with his kisses.

  ‘Save me then, take me,’ he murmured, ‘if you don’t want me to do away with myself. … Produce your happiness, if you can; see what you can devise to make me think life’s worth while after all. … Coax my mind into submission, reduce me to insignificance, make me your slave, your thing,
to be worn and trodden on like the sole of your slipper! Oh, the marvel of being able to live by the scent of your body, obey you like a faithful dog, eat, love you and sleep, nothing more! If only I could! If only I could!’

  Her reply was a shout of victory:

  ‘You’re mine at last! Now I know I’m the only one! She’s dead, now and for ever!’

  She tore him away from the sight of the hated picture, and with one inarticulate cry of triumph drew him towards the adjoining room and her bed. On the ladder the guttering candle flickered for an instant behind them and died out. The cuckoo clock struck five. There was not the faintest sign of dawn in the misty November sky, so the studio was left to the darkness and the cold.

  Christine and Claude groped their way back to their room and flung themselves across the bed. Never, even in their earliest days, had they been swept away by such raging passion. The whole of their past pulsed back through their hearts, but renewed and so intensified that their senses floated away in delirious ecstasy. The darkness around them glowed as they were carried aloft on wings of flame, far away, far above this earth, in smooth and rhythmic flight. Even Claude could not refrain from crying aloud as he felt himself leaving his sorrow behind and rising to a new and happier existence. It was then that Christine provoked him, forced him even, to blaspheme.

  ‘Say that painting’s a fool’s game,’ she said, with a laugh full of sensual pride.

  ‘Painting’s a fool’s game,’ he repeated.

  ‘Say you’ll never paint again; say you despise it; say you’ll burn all your pictures to please me.’

  ‘I’ll burn all my pictures. I’ll never paint again.’

  ‘And say there’s nobody else but me, and that holding me as you’re holding me now is the one and only happiness; and say you spit on the other one, the bitch you painted on canvas. Spit then! Go on, spit; let me hear you!’