His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

He shook the ashes from his pipe on to his left palm, and then, suddenly raising his voice⁠—“I almost forgot. I have had a letter from Pouillaud.”

“You, too!⁠—well, I think he’s pretty well done for, Pouillaud. Another good fellow gone wrong.”

“Why gone wrong? He’ll succeed his father; he’ll spend his money quietly down there. He writes rationally enough. I always said he’d show us a thing or two, in spite of all his practical jokes. Ah! that beast of a Pouillaud.”

Sandoz, furious, was about to reply, when a despairing oath from Claude stopped him. The latter had not opened his lips since he had so obstinately resumed his work. To all appearance he had not even listened.

“Curse it⁠—I have failed again. Decidedly, I’m a brute, I shall never do anything.” And in a fit of mad rage he wanted to rush at his picture and dash his fist through it. His friends had to hold him back. Why, it was simply childish to get into such a passion. Would matters be improved when, to his mortal regret, he had destroyed his work? Still shaking, he relapsed into silence, and stared at the canvas with an ardent fixed gaze that blazed with all the horrible agony born of his powerlessness. He could no longer produce anything clear or lifelike; the woman’s breast was growing pasty with heavy colouring; that flesh which, in his fancy, ought to have glowed, was simply becoming grimy; he could not even succeed in getting a correct focus. What on Earth was the matter with his brain that he heard it bursting asunder, as it were, amidst his vain efforts? Was he losing his sight that he was no longer able to see correctly? Were his hands no longer his own that they refused to obey him? And thus he went on winding himself up, irritated by the strange hereditary lesion which sometimes so greatly assisted his creative powers, but at others reduced him to a state of sterile despair, such as to make him forget the first elements of drawing. Ah, to feel giddy with vertiginous nausea, and yet to remain there full of a furious passion to create, when the power to do so fled with everything else, when everything seemed to founder around him⁠—the pride of work, the dreamt-of glory, the whole of his existence!

“Look here, old boy,” said Sandoz at last, “we don’t want to worry you, but it’s half-past six, and we are starving. Be reasonable, and come down with us.”

Claude was cleaning a corner of his palette. Then he emptied some more tubes on it, and, in a voice like thunder, replied with one single word, “No.”

For the next ten minutes nobody spoke; the painter, beside himself, wrestled with his picture, whilst his friends remained anxious at this attack, which they did not know how to allay. Then, as there came a knock at the door, the architect went to open it.

“Hallo, it’s Papa Malgras.”

Malgras, the picture-dealer, was a thickset individual, with close-cropped, brush-like, white hair, and a red splotchy face. He was wrapped in a very dirty old green coat, that made him look like an untidy cabman. In a husky voice, he exclaimed: “I happened to pass along the quay, on the other side of the way, and I saw that gentleman at the window. So I came up.”

Claude’s continued silence made him pause. The painter had turned to his picture again with an impatient gesture. Not that this silence in any way embarrassed the newcomer, who, standing erect on his sturdy legs and feeling quite at home, carefully examined the new picture with his bloodshot eyes. Without any ceremony, he passed judgment upon it in one phrase⁠—half ironic, half affectionate: “Well, well, there’s a machine.”

Then, seeing that nobody said anything, he began to stroll round the studio, looking at the paintings on the walls.

Papa Malgras, beneath his thick layer of grease and grime, was really a very cute customer, with taste and scent for good painting. He never wasted his time or lost his way among mere daubers; he went straight, as if from instinct, to individualists, whose talent was contested still, but whose future fame his flaming, drunkard’s nose sniffed from afar. Added to this he was a ferocious hand at bargaining, and displayed all the cunning of a savage in his efforts to secure, for a song, the pictures that he coveted. True, he himself was satisfied with very honest profits, twenty percent, thirty at the most. He based his calculations on quickly turning over his small capital, never purchasing in the morning without knowing where to dispose of his purchase at night. As a superb liar, moreover, he had no equal.

Pausing near the door, before the studies from the nude, painted at the Boutin studio, he contemplated them in silence for a few moments, his eyes glistening the while with the enjoyment of a connoisseur, which his heavy eyelids tried to hide. Assuredly, he thought, there was a great deal of talent and sentiment of life about that big crazy fellow Claude, who wasted his time in painting huge stretches of canvas which no one would buy. The girl’s pretty legs, the admirably painted woman’s trunk, filled the dealer with delight. But there was no sale for that kind of stuff, and he had already made his choice⁠—a tiny sketch, a nook of the country round Plassans, at once delicate and violent⁠—which he pretended not to notice. At last he drew near, and said, in an offhand way:

“What’s this? Ah! yes, I know, one of the things you brought back with you from the South. It’s too crude. I still have the two I bought of you.”

And he went on in mellow, long-winded phrases. “You’ll perhaps not believe me, Monsieur Lantier, but that sort of thing doesn’t sell at all⁠—not at all. I’ve a set of rooms full of them. I’m always afraid of smashing something when I turn round. I can’t go