His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

obstinately determined to finish everything else before repainting the central figure, the nude woman, which remained the dread and the desire of his hours of toil, and which would finish him off whenever he might again try to invest it with life. For months he had not touched it, and this had tranquillised Christine and made her tolerant and compassionate, amid her jealous spite; for as long as he did not return to that feared and desired mistress, she thought that he betrayed her less.

Her feet were freezing on the tiles, and she was turning to get into bed again when a shock brought her back to the door. She had not understood at first, but now at last she saw. With broad curved strokes of his brush, full of colour, Claude was at once wildly and caressingly modelling flesh. He had a fixed grin on his lips, and did not feel the burning candle-grease falling on his fingers, while with silent, passionate seesawing, his right arm alone moved against the wall, casting black confusion upon it. He was working at the nude woman.

Then Christine opened the door and walked into the studio. An invincible revolt, the anger of a wife buffeted at home, impelled her forward. Yes, he was with that other, he was painting her like a visionary, whom wild craving for truth had brought to the madness of the unreal; and those limbs were being gilded like the columns of a tabernacle, that trunk was becoming a star, shimmering with yellow and red, splendid and unnatural. Such strange nudity⁠—like unto a monstrance gleaming with precious stones and intended for religious adoration⁠—brought her anger to a climax. She had suffered too much, she would not tolerate it.

And yet at first she simply showed herself despairing and supplicating. It was but the mother remonstrating with her big mad boy of an artist that spoke.

“What are you doing there, Claude? Is it reasonable, Claude, to have such ideas? Come to bed, I beg of you, don’t stay on those steps where you will catch your death of cold!”

He did not answer; he stooped again to take some more paint on his brush, and made the figure flash with two bright strokes of vermilion.

“Listen to me, Claude, in pity come to me⁠—you know that I love you⁠—you see how anxious you have made me. Come, oh! come, if you don’t want me to die of cold and waiting for you.”

With his face haggard, he did not look at her; but while he bedecked a part of the figure with carmine, he grumbled in a husky voice:

“Just leave me alone, will you? I’m working.”

Christine remained silent for a moment. She was drawing herself erect, her eyes began to gleam with fire, rebellion inflated her gentle, charming form. Then she burst forth, with the growl of a slave driven to extremities.

“Well, no, I won’t leave you alone! I’ve had enough of it. I’ll tell you what’s stifling me, what has been killing me ever since I have known you. Ah! that painting, yes, your painting, she’s the murderess who has poisoned my life! I had a presentiment of it on the first day; your painting frightened me as if it were a monster. I found it abominable, execrable; but then, one’s cowardly, I loved you too much not to like it also; I ended by growing accustomed to it! But later on, how I suffered!⁠—how it tortured me! For ten years I don’t recollect having spent a day without shedding tears. No, leave me! I am easing my mind, I must speak out, since I have found strength enough to do so. For ten years I have been abandoned and crushed every day. Ah! to be nothing more to you, to feel myself cast more and more on one side, to fall to the rank of a servant; and to see that other one, that thief, place herself between you and me and clutch hold of you and triumph and insult me! For dare, yes, dare to say that she hasn’t taken possession of you, limb by limb, glided into your brain, your heart, your flesh, everywhere! She holds you like a vice, she feeds on you; in fact, she’s your wife, not I. She’s the only one you care for! Ah! the cursed wretch, the hussy!”

Claude was now listening to her, in his astonishment at that dolorous outburst; and being but half roused from his exasperated creative dream, he did not as yet very well understand why she was talking to him like that. And at sight of his stupor, the shuddering of a man surprised in a debauch, she flew into a still greater passion; she mounted the steps, tore the candlestick from his hand, and in her turn flashed the light in front of the picture.

“Just look!” she cried, “just tell me how you have improved matters? It’s hideous, it’s lamentable and grotesque; you’ll end by seeing so yourself. Come, isn’t it ugly, isn’t it idiotic? You see very well that you are conquered, so why should you persist any longer? There is no sense in it, that’s what upsets me. If you can’t be a great painter, life, at least, remains to us. Ah! life, life!”

She had placed the candle on the platform of the steps, and as he had gone down, staggering, she sprang off to join him, and they both found themselves below, he crouching on the last step, and she pressing his inert, dangling hands with all her strength.

“Come, there’s life! Drive your nightmare away, and let us live, live together. Isn’t it too stupid, to be we two together, to be growing old already, and to torture ourselves, and fail in every attempt to find happiness? Oh! the grave will take us soon enough, never fear. Let’s try to live, and love one another. Remember Bennecourt! Listen to my dream. I should like to be able to take you away tomorrow. We would go far