His Masterpiece. Emile Zola
For the last six months, however, he had experienced a revival of ambition, on finding himself once more among his comrades of Provence, the eldest of whom he was – fellows whom he had known at Geraud’s boarding-school for little boys, and who had since grown into savage revolutionaries. At present, through his constant intercourse with impassioned artists, who troubled his brain with all sorts of wild theories, his ambition aimed at the gigantic.
‘The devil!’ said Claude, ‘there’s a lump.’
The sculptor, delighted, gave a long pull at his pipe, and blew a cloud of smoke.
‘Eh, isn’t it? I am going to give them some flesh, and living flesh, too; not the bladders of lard that they turn out.’
‘It’s a woman bathing, isn’t it?’ asked Sandoz.
‘No; I shall put some vine leaves around her head. A Bacchante, you understand.’
At this Claude flew into a violent passion.
‘A Bacchante? Do you want to make fools of people? Does such a thing as a Bacchante exist? A vintaging girl, eh? And quite modern, dash it all. I know she’s nude, so let her be a peasant woman who has undressed. And that must be properly conveyed, mind; people must realise that she lives.’
Mahoudeau, taken aback, listened, trembling. He was afraid of Claude, and bowed to his ideal of strength and truth. So he even improved upon the painter’s idea.
‘Yes, yes, that’s what I meant to say – a vintaging girl. And you’ll see whether there isn’t a real touch of woman about her.’
At that moment Sandoz, who had been making the tour of the huge block of clay, exclaimed: ‘Why, here’s that sneak of a Chaine.’
Behind the pile, indeed, sat Chaine, a burly fellow who was quietly painting away, copying the fireless rusty stove on a small canvas. It could be told that he was a peasant by his heavy, deliberate manner and his bull-neck, tanned and hardened like leather. His only noticeable feature was his forehead, displaying all the bumps of obstinacy; for his nose was so small as to be lost between his red cheeks, while a stiff beard hid his powerful jaws. He came from Saint Firmin, a village about six miles from Plassans, where he had been a cow-boy, until he drew for the conscription; and his misfortunes dated from the enthusiasm that a gentleman of the neighbourhood had shown for the walking-stick handles which he carved out of roots with his knife. From that moment, having become a rustic genius, an embryo great man for this local connoisseur, who happened to be a member of the museum committee, he had been helped by him, adulated and driven crazy with hopes; but he had successively failed in everything – his studies and competitions – thus missing the town’s purse. Nevertheless, he had started for Paris, after worrying his father, a wretched peasant, into premature payment of his heritage, a thousand francs, on which he reckoned to live for a twelvemonth while awaiting the promised victory. The thousand francs had lasted eighteen months. Then, as he had only twenty francs left, he had taken up his quarters with his friend, Mahoudeau. They both slept in the same bed, in the dark back shop; they both in turn cut slices from the same loaves of bread – of which they bought sufficient for a fortnight at a time, so that it might get very hard, and that they might thus be able to eat but little of it.
‘I say, Chaine,’ continued Sandoz, ‘your stove is really very exact.’
Chaine, without answering, gave a chuckle of triumph which lighted up his face like a sunbeam. By a crowning stroke of imbecility, and to make his misfortunes perfect, his protector’s advice had thrown him into painting, in spite of the real taste that he showed for wood carving. And he painted like a whitewasher, mixing his colours as a hodman mixes his mortar, and managing to make the clearest and brightest of them quite muddy. His triumph consisted, however, in combining exactness with awkwardness; he displayed all the naive minuteness of the primitive painters; in fact, his mind, barely raised from the clods, delighted in petty details. The stove, with its perspective all awry, was tame and precise, and in colour as dingy as mire.
Claude approached and felt full of compassion at the sight of that painting, and though he was as a rule so harsh towards bad painters, his compassion prompted him to say a word of praise.
‘Ah! one can’t say that you are a trickster; you paint, at any rate, as you feel. Very good, indeed.’
However, the door of the shop had opened, and a good-looking, fair fellow, with a big pink nose, and large, blue, short-sighted eyes, entered shouting:
‘I say, why does that herbalist woman next door always stand on her doorstep? What an ugly mug she’s got!’
They all laughed, except Mahoudeau, who seemed very much embarrassed.
‘Jory, the King of Blunderers,’ declared Sandoz, shaking hands with the new comer.
‘Why? What? Is Mahoudeau interested in her? I didn’t know,’ resumed Jory, when he had at length grasped the situation. ‘Well, well, what does it matter? When everything’s said, they are all irresistible.’
‘As for you,’ the sculptor rejoined, ‘I can see you have tumbled on your lady-love’s finger-nails again. She has dug a bit out of your cheek!’
They all burst out laughing anew, while Jory, in his turn, reddened. In fact, his face was scratched: there were even two deep gashes across it. The son of a magistrate of Plassans, whom he had driven half-crazy by his dissolute conduct, he had crowned everything by running away with a music-hall singer under the pretext of going to Paris to follow the literary profession. During the six months that they had been camping together in a shady hotel of the Quartier Latin, the girl had almost flayed him alive each time she caught him paying attention to anybody else of her sex. And, as this often happened, he always had some fresh scar to show – a bloody nose, a torn ear, or a damaged eye, swollen and blackened.
At last they all began to talk, with the exception of Chaine, who went on painting with the determined expression of an ox at the plough. Jory had at once gone into ecstasies over the roughly indicated figure of the vintaging girl. He worshipped a massive style of beauty. His first writings in his native town had been some Parnassian sonnets celebrating the copious charms of a handsome pork-butcheress. In Paris – where he had fallen in with the whole band of Plassans – he had taken to art criticism, and, for a livelihood, he wrote articles for twenty francs apiece in a small, slashing paper called ‘The Drummer.’ Indeed, one of these articles, a study on a picture by Claude exhibited at Papa Malgras’s, had just caused a tremendous scandal; for Jory had therein run down all the painters whom the public appreciated to extol his friend, whom he set up as the leader of a new school, the school of the ‘open air.’ Very practical at heart, he did not care in reality a rap about anything that did not conduce to his own pleasures; he simply repeated the theories he heard enunciated by his friends. ‘I say, Mahoudeau,’ he now exclaimed, ‘you shall have an article; I’ll launch that woman of yours. What limbs, my boys! She’s magnificent!’
Then suddenly changing the conversation: ‘By the way,’ he said, ‘my miserly father has apologised. He is afraid I shall drag his name through the mud, so he sends me a hundred francs a month now. I am paying my debts.’
‘Debts! you are too careful to have any,’ muttered Sandoz, with a smile.
In fact, Jory displayed a hereditary tightness of fist which much amused his friends. He managed to lead a profligate life without money and without incurring debts; and with the skill he thus displayed was allied constant duplicity, a habit of incessantly lying, which he had contracted in the devout sphere of his family, where his anxiety to hide his vices had made him lie about everything at all hours, and even without occasion. But he now gave a superb reply, the cry of a sage of deep experience.
‘Oh, you fellows, you don’t know the worth of money!’
This time he was hooted. What a philistine! And the invectives continued, when some light taps on one of the window-panes suddenly made the din cease.
‘She is really becoming a nuisance,’ said Mahoudeau, with a gesture of annoyance.
‘Eh? Who is it? The herbalist woman?’ asked Jory. ‘Let her come in; it will be great fun.’
The door indeed