by Émile Zola
‘There. I spit on her. There’s nobody else but you.’
She gripped him so tightly in her arms, he could hardly breathe; he was hers; she took him and they started out together again on their vertiginous ride through the stars. Their raptures renewed, three times they felt they were soaring to the utmost heights of heaven. Here indeed was happiness! Why had he never thought before that happiness so certain could be the remedy of his ills? She was his for the taking; so now that he had discovered ecstasy he was saved, wasn’t he, and bound to be happy for the rest of his days?
It was almost daybreak when Christine dropped blissfully to sleep in Claude’s arms, still holding him close to her with one thigh across his legs, as if she wanted to be sure he would never escape her again. And, with her head comfortably pillowed on his chest, she breathed softly away and smiled as she slept. At first Claude, too, had closed his eyes, but heavy with fatigue though he was he soon opened them again and lay staring into the shadows. Sleep was passing him by and, though every muscle in his body felt shattered by his efforts, as he cooled down and his mind began to recover from its voluptuous intoxication he was aware, lying there dozing, of a subtle influx of strange, confused thoughts. When the first light of dawn showed like a dirty yellow smear, a trickle of liquid mud, on the window-panes, he shuddered, for he thought he heard a voice calling to him from the studio. That brought his thoughts flooding back to his mind, torturing thoughts that printed on his face such a bitter, hollow-cheeked expression of disgust that he looked like a careworn old man. The woman’s thigh across his own weighed down on him like lead; he felt as if, for his sins, his knees were being crushed by a millstone. Her head, too, weighed on his chest, slowing down his heart-beats, stifling him. For a long time, however, he hesitated to disturb her, though his whole body was being slowly exasperated and an irresistible feeling of repugnance and hatred was goading it into revolt. What irritated him more than anything else was the powerful yet natural smell of her streaming hair. Suddenly the voice from the studio called out again, louder this time and more imperative. Now his mind was made up; this was the end. He could bear no more; life itself was not worth living since everything in it was a worthless, hollow sham. Very gently he let Christine’s head, still vaguely smiling, slip off his chest; then, with infinite precaution, he began to release his legs from her thigh, easing it off very, very slowly, making it move as naturally as if she had moved it away herself. The chain was broken at last; he was free. At a third call from the studio he hastened into the adjoining room, saying: ‘Here I am! I’m coming!’
Dawn was slow in breaking and the day began in typical wintry gloom. After about an hour Christine awoke, shivering with cold. Why, she did not know. She did not know, either, why she was alone. Then she remembered going to sleep with her head on his breast, her limbs entwined in his. How, then, had he got away? Where could he be? All at once, numb though she was with cold, she leapt from the bed and rushed to the studio. Could he possibly have gone back to her? Could she have lured him away again? And she thought she had made him her own for ever!
At the first glimpse, she saw nothing; the studio looked empty in the cold, grey light. Then, feeling reassured, finding nobody there, she looked up at the picture, and a heartrending cry rose at once to her gaping lips:
‘Claude! Oh, Claude!’
Claude had hanged himself from the big ladder in front of his unfinished, unfinishable masterpiece. He had simply taken one of the ropes he used to attach the frame to the wall, climbed up the ladder to attach it to the big oak beam he had fitted up one day to strengthen the uprights, and then jumped off. And there he hung, in his shirt, barefooted, an agonizing sight, his tongue blackened and his eyes bloodshot and starting from their sockets, stiff, motionless, looking taller than ever. His face was turned towards the picture and quite close to the Woman whose sex blossomed as a mystic rose, as if his soul had passed into her with his last dying breath and he was still gazing on her with his fixed and lifeless eyes.
Christine stood terror-stricken, as grief and fear and wrath surged up within her, filling her whole body and finding expression in one long, uninterrupted howl. Turning to the picture, she lifted both her arms and cried as she shook her fists:
‘Oh, Claude! Oh, Claude! … She took you back! She killed you, the bitch! She killed you, killed you, killed you!’
Her legs gave way beneath her and, as she turned away, she crashed to the ground. Excess of suffering had drawn all the blood from her heart, and she lay in a dead faint, white and limp, pitiful to look on, a woman defeated, crushed by the tyrannical sovereignty of Art. Above her, in triumph, radiant with all the symbolic splendour of an idol, stood the painted Woman. Painting had won in the end, deathless and defiant even in its madness.
The following Monday morning—for suicide had meant formalities and delay—when Sandoz arrived for the funeral at nine o’clock, he found only about twenty people outside the house in the Rue Tourlaque. He had not been left unoccupied in his grief; for the last three days he had had no rest, he had had so many things to attend to. First he had had Christine, whom they had found lying half dead where she had fallen, taken to the Lariboisière Hospital; then he had done the usual round: registry, undertaker, Church, paying out right and left, making all the customary arrangements in complete indifference, since the clergy had deigned not to refuse their good offices to the corpse with a black ring round its neck. The group on the pavement, he discovered, consisted of a few neighbours and the usual onlookers; there were, too, some spectators craning out of windows and discussing the tragedy in excited undertones. Friends would be turning up any moment, he supposed. He had not been able to write to the family, as he had no addresses; but he stood aside when he saw two relatives arrive, drawn most likely by the curt announcement in the papers from the oblivion to which Claude himself had long ago consigned them. There was an elderly female cousin who looked like a rather shady second-hand dealer, and a second cousin, a man, obviously rich, wearing a decoration.* He was the owner of one of the big Paris department stores and very open-handed when he thought he had a chance to prove his enlightened taste for the arts. The woman went straight upstairs to the studio, took one glance at its stark poverty, sniffed and came down again, tight-lipped and annoyed at the thought of her thankless mission. The man, on the contrary, threw back his shoulders and took the head of the funeral procession, walking immediately behind the hearse, a proud, dignified, and even charming figure.
Just as the cortège was moving off, Bongrand joined it and walked with Sandoz after shaking his hand. He was in a gloomy frame of mind and, after casting an eye on the handful of mourners, he muttered:
‘Poor devil! … You don’t mean to say we’re the only two?’
Dubuche was at Cannes with his children. Jory and Fagerolles were not coming; one said he couldn’t stand deaths, the other was too busy. Of the rest, Mahoudeau fell into the procession as it was going up the Rue Lepic. Gagnière, he said, had almost certainly missed his train.
Slowly the hearse made its way up the steep, winding slope that leads to the top of Montmartre, cutting across streets that drop straight down the hill, revealing the vast, deep tract of Paris spreading like an ocean at its feet. When it reached the church of Saint-Pierre and the coffin was lifted out, for one short moment it dominated the mighty city. Under a grey, wintry sky, with great swathes of mist floating on an icy wind, Paris looked vaster than ever, its utmost limits lost in the mist that filled the horizon with its waves like an encroaching tide; while the poor dead wretch who had set out to conquer it and had broken his neck in the attempt, passed before it, nailed down beneath an oaken lid, returning to the dust, like the mud of the Paris streets.
When they came out of the church, the female cousin disappeared; so did Mahoudeau. The second cousin resumed his place behind the hearse; seven others, all strangers, decided they, too, would go on; and the cortège moved off again for the new cemetery at Saint-Ouen, vulgarly known by the siniste
r, disturbing name of ‘Cayenne’.* There were ten of them in all.
‘Well, it certainly looks as if we’re going to be the only two,’ Bongrand repeated as he moved along at Sandoz’s side.
Preceded now by the mourning-coach in which the priest and his acolyte had been accommodated, the cortège moved slowly down the other side of the hill of Montmartre where the streets are as steep and tortuous as paths on a mountain side. The horses drawing the hearse kept slipping and the wheels bumped clumsily over the muddy roadway, while the ten mourners following behind found the descent so difficult and were so preoccupied with picking their way through the puddles that they had not yet found time to talk. When they reached the bottom of the Rue du Ruisseau, however, and found themselves at the Porte de Clignancourt, on the broad, flat stretch that carries the outer boulevard, the suburban railway and the moats and embankments of the fortifications, there were sighs of relief; a few words were exchanged, and the little procession began to spread itself.
Sandoz and Bongrand soon found themselves at the tail end, as if to cut themselves off from all these people they did not know. Just as the hearse was going past the city barrier Bongrand said:
‘The wife. What’s going to become of her?’
‘It’s a sad case,’ Sandoz replied. ‘I went to see her at the hospital yesterday. She has brain-fever. The doctor says she’ll pull through, but it’ll take all her strength and put ten years on her age. … Her mind was a complete blank, you know. She couldn’t remember a thing, not even her A B C. It’s terrible to see anybody brought so low, so completely crushed as she’s been; a nice girl like that reduced to the mentality of a kitchen wench! Oh, if we don’t take very great care of her and treat her properly as an invalid, she’ll end up as a drudge in somebody’s scullery.’
‘Penniless, of course.’
‘Penniless. I hoped I should be able to find some of the studies he’d made from nature for his big picture; they were wonderful things, but he made such bad use of them. But I never found a thing; I looked everywhere. He used to give them away, and what he didn’t give people stole. No, there was nothing to sell; not a single decent canvas, nothing but that huge thing and that I destroyed and burnt with my own hands—and very glad I was to do it. It was like taking vengeance!’
They were silent for a moment or two as they trudged along the long, wide road to Saint-Ouen which seemed to run straight to infinity. It was a pitiful sight, the tiny funeral procession straggling across the open country along that dreary highway streaming with mud. Fences on either side separated it from vast stretches of waste land, with only here and there a factory chimney rising in the distance and a few tall, white houses built well away from the road. At Clignancourt they had to go through the fairground; past all the deserted booths and circuses and roundabouts, their canvas quivering in the cold; past empty refreshment stalls and rusty swing-boats and a stagey-looking farm, now dreary and desolate with its trellis-work torn off and smashed.
‘Ah, those early canvases of his, the ones he had at the Quai de Bourbon, remember? Extraordinary pieces, every one of them, weren’t they? Provençal landscapes, nudes done at Boutin’s, a little girl’s legs, I remember, and a woman’s belly, particularly. A marvel! … Old Malgras must have it somewhere. A study by a master hand that not one of the so-called “masters” of today could hope to equal. … Oh, there’s no doubt about it, the lad was no fool! He was a great painter, quite simply!’
‘And to think,’ added Sandoz, ‘that all the dabblers and scribblers at the Beaux-Arts and in the Press accused him of being lazy and ignorant, all repeating one after the other that he’d always refused to learn his job. Lazy! Why, good God, I’ve seen him faint away with fatigue after sittings lasting ten hours! Lazy, a man who put his whole life into his work, who was so mad on it that he killed himself for it! As for not knowing his job, of all the brainless accusations! Will people never understand that anyone who produces something new, and that’s an honour that doesn’t come to everybody, anyone who produces something new is bound to depart from received wisdom. Delacroix didn’t know his job because he couldn’t stick to exact lines. Oh, the fools, like a lot of good little schoolboys, scared to death of anything they’ve been taught is wrong!’
He walked on a little in silence, then added:
‘He’d a hero’s capacity for work; he was a brilliant observer with a brain packed with knowledge and the temperament of a great and gifted artist … and yet he has nothing to show.’
‘Nothing at all,’ Bongrand affirmed. ‘Not a single canvas; nothing, so far as I know, but a few notes and sketches that every artist turns out and are not meant for the public. No doubt about it, the man we’re burying today is a dead man; dead in the fullest sense of the word!’
As they talked the hearse had left them behind, and now they had to hurry to catch it up. After a slow progress between rows of alternating wine-shops and displays by monumental masons, it was now turning to the right, along the short avenue leading into the cemetery. They caught up with it just as it was going through the gateway and tacked themselves on to the little procession led now by the priest in his surplice and the acolyte carrying the holy water.
It was a vast, flat cemetery, still quite new, mathematically laid out on a stretch of suburban common and divided up like a draught-board by broad, symmetrical walks. An occasional tombstone had been erected here and there on the main pathways, but for the most part the graves, already far too closely packed, were simply low mounds of earth casually arranged and not intended to be permanent. The maximum grant obtainable was only for five years, so families hesitated to go in for expensive installations; stones gradually sank into the ground for lack of foundations; young trees never had the chance to mature, so there was a ‘here-today-and-gone-tomorrow’ feeling about the place, a sense of poverty, a cold, clean, bare look that made it as melancholy as a barracks or a charity ward. Not a scrap of poetry, no weeping willow, no solitary path beneath the boughs, no quiver of mystery, not a single family vault to speak of pride or life everlasting! This was the new cemetery, all carefully plotted and numbered; the cemetery provided by democracy, where the dead seem to sleep in official pigeon-holes, today’s batch taking the place of yesterday’s with clockwork regularity; everyone kept ‘on the move’, by order, like the crowd at a fair, to prevent a hold-up.
‘Hell!’ muttered Bongrand. ‘This is a cheerful sort of place!’
‘What’s wrong with it?’ Sandoz asked. ‘It’s convenient, it’s airy … and even though there’s no sun, it’s not without colour. Look at it.’
And indeed, beneath the grey November sky, swept by the keen winter wind, the low-lying graves covered with flowers and beaded wreaths provided a subtle picture full of delicacy and charm. Some were all white; others, according to the beads, all black, a contrast quietly framed in the pale green of the surrounding shrubs. As their grants were for five years only, families honoured their dead while the opportunity lasted and, as All Souls’ Day had just gone by, graves had been lavishly heaped with fresh tokens of family affection. The natural flowers, in their pots with paper frills, had already faded; a few wreaths of yellow immortelles shone out like freshly beaten gold; but most in evidence were the beads. The place was streaming with them; they hid the inscriptions, covered stones and graves, and overflowed on to the pathways. There were beads worked into hearts, festoons, medallions; beads framing a host of things in glass cases—bunches of pansies, pairs of hands affectionately clasped, bows of satin ribbon and even photographs, cheap, yellowing photographs of women, poor, graceless faces, all with awkward smiles.
As the hearse moved on towards the Rond-Point, Sandoz, reminded of Claude as he viewed the cemetery with his painter’s eye, said:
‘This is the sort of cemetery he would have understood, he was so keen on everything modern. … He must certainly have suffered a great deal from that kink in his genius, those three grammes more or less that would have made all the difference, as he used
to say when he accused his parents of making such an unsatisfactory job of him. But his trouble was not all personal by any means; he was the victim of his period. The generation we belong to was brought up on Romanticism; it soaked into us and we can do nothing about it. It’s all very well our plunging head first into violent reality, the stain remains and all the scrubbing in the world will never remove it.’
Bongrand smiled.
‘What about me?’ he said. ‘I was head over ears in it. My whole art grew from it, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. If that’s the reason for my ultimate failure, what does it matter? I can’t deny my religion at this stage! … But what you say about yourselves is very true; you are the younger generation in revolt. He, for example, with his great nude woman in the middle of the Cité, the wild, fantastic symbolism. …’
‘Oh, that Woman!’ Sandoz broke in. ‘It was she who strangled him. If you only knew what she meant to him, and how impossible it was to get him away from her! How could he be expected to take a clear, sane, balanced view of anything when his brain was never free of such weird and wonderful notions? … Even with your generation between us and the Romantics, ours is still too clogged up with lyricism to produce anything really sound. It’ll take another generation, probably two, before painters and writers work logically in the pure and lofty simplicity of truth. Truth and nature are the only possible bases, the essential controlling factors in art. Without them everything verges on madness, and no one need be afraid his work’s going to be insipid in consequence; temperament is always there, and temperament will out. Who would ever dream of denying personality? Why, it’s just that that puts the last instinctive touch on a man’s work and marks his production as his!’
Turning away suddenly he added:
‘What’s that burning smell? … Surely they’re not lighting bonfires in this place?’
The cortège had changed its direction, having reached the Rond-Point, in the middle of which, surrounded by lawn, stood the ossuary, the common vault in which the remains dug up from the graves were deposited and which was itself almost buried under the heaps of wreaths laid upon it by pious relatives who no longer had any dead to call their own. As the hearse was moving gently along Avenue No. 2, a loud, crackling noise had made itself heard and a dense cloud of smoke had begun to rise behind the young plane-trees that lined the side-walk. Gradually, as the cortège moved slowly towards it, a great smouldering heap of earthy-looking objects came into view. What was happening was now obvious. The burning heap was on the edge of a huge square patch of ground, dug very deep in broad parallel trenches to enable the coffins to be removed before the soil was prepared to receive a fresh consignment, just as a farmer ploughs up a stubble-field before he sows it again. Alongside the long, yawning trenches, mounds of soggy earth lay sweetening in the open air. The burning objects in one corner of the plot were rotten coffin-boards, piled up into an enormous bonfire of split and broken wood, reduced by the soil to the consistency of dull red mould. They refused to burn briskly, for they were damp with human clay; instead, they made dull, cracking noises and gave out vast clouds of smoke which rose, thicker and thicker, into the grey-white sky and were blown back by the November wind, torn into rusty-looking wisps and sent flying over all the flat and formless graves in one half of the cemetery.