His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

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 windowpanes 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 had already been opened, and Mahoudeau’s neighbour, Madame Jabouille, or Mathilde, as she was familiarly called, appeared on the threshold. She was about thirty, with a flat face horribly emaciated, and passionate eyes, the lids of which had a bluish tinge as if they were bruised. It was said that some members of the clergy had brought about her marriage with little Jabouille, at a time when the latter’s business was still flourishing, thanks to the custom of all the pious folk of the neighbourhood. The truth was, that one sometimes espied black cassocks stealthily crossing that mysterious shop, where all the aromatic herbs set a perfume of incense. A kind of cloistral quietude pervaded the place; the devotees who came in spoke in low voices, as if in a confessional, slipped their purchases into their bags furtively, and went off with downcast eyes. Unfortunately, some very horrid rumours had got abroad⁠—slander invented by the wine-shop keeper opposite, said pious folks. At any rate, since the widower had remarried, the business had been going to the dogs. The glass jars seemed to have lost all their brightness, and the dried herbs, suspended from the ceiling, were tumbling to dust. Jabouille himself was coughing his life out, reduced to a very skeleton. And although Mathilde professed to be religious, the pious customers gradually deserted her, being of opinion that she made herself too conspicuous with young fellows of the neighbourhood now that Jabouille was almost eaten out of house and home.

For a moment Mathilde remained motionless, blinking her eyes. A pungent smell had spread through the shop, a smell of simples, which she brought with her in her clothes and greasy, tumbled hair; the sickly sweetness of mallow, the sharp odour of elderseed, the bitter effluvia of rhubarb, but, above all, the hot whiff of peppermint, which seemed like her very breath.

She made a gesture of feigned surprise. “Oh, dear me! you have company⁠—I did not know; I’ll drop in again.”

“Yes, do,” said Mahoudeau, looking very vexed. “Besides, I am going out; you can give me a sitting on Sunday.”

At this Claude, stupefied, fairly stared at the emaciated Mathilde, and then at the huge vintaging woman.

“What?” he cried, “is it madame who poses for that figure? The dickens, you exaggerate!”

Then the laughter began again, while the sculptor stammered his explanations. “Oh! she only poses for the head and the hands, and merely just to give me a few indications.”

Mathilde, however, laughed with the others, with a sharp, brazen-faced laughter, showing the while the gaping holes in her mouth, where several teeth were wanting.

“Yes,” resumed Mahoudeau. “I have to go out on some business now. Isn’t it so, you fellows, we are expected over yonder?”

He had winked at his friends, feeling eager for a good lounge. They all answered that they were expected, and helped him to cover the figure of the vintaging girl with some strips of old linen which were soaking in a pail of water.

However, Mathilde, looking submissive but sad, did not stir. She merely shifted from one place to another, when they pushed against her, while Chaîne, who was no longer painting, glanced at her over his picture. So far, he had not opened his lips. But as Mahoudeau at last went off with his three friends, he made up his mind to ask, in his husky voice:

“Shall you come home tonight?”

“Very late. Have your dinner and go to bed. Goodbye.”

Then Chaîne remained alone with Mathilde in the damp shop, amidst the heaps of clay and the puddles of water, while the chalky light from the whitened windows glared crudely over all the wretched untidiness.

Meantime the four others, Claude and Mahoudeau, Jory and Sandoz, strolled along, seeming to take up the whole width of the Boulevard des Invalides.