His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

difficulty amid that sea of surging shoulders. On entering the second gallery they gave a glance round the walls, but the picture they sought was not there. In lieu thereof they perceived Irma Bécot on the arm of Gagnière, both of them pressed against a handrail, he busy examining a small canvas, while she, delighted at being hustled about, raised her pink little mug and laughed at the crowd.

“Hallo!” said Sandoz, surprised, “here she is with Gagnière now!”

“Oh, just a fancy of hers!” exclaimed Fagerolles quietly. “She has a very swell place now. Yes, it was given her by that young idiot of a marquis, whom the papers are always talking about. She’s a girl who’ll make her way; I’ve always said so! But she seems to retain a weakness for painters, and every now and then drops into the Café Baudequin to look up old friends!”

Irma had now seen them, and was making gestures from afar. They could but go to her. When Gagnière, with his light hair and little beardless face, turned round, looking more grotesque than over, he did not show the least surprise at finding them there.

“It’s wonderful,” he muttered.

“What’s wonderful?” asked Fagerolles.

“This little masterpiece⁠—and withal honest and naif, and full of conviction.”

He pointed to a tiny canvas before which he had stood absorbed, an absolutely childish picture, such as an urchin of four might have painted; a little cottage at the edge of a little road, with a little tree beside it, the whole out of drawing, and girt round with black lines. Not even a corkscrew imitation of smoke issuing from the roof was forgotten.

Claude made a nervous gesture, while Fagerolles repeated phlegmatically:

“Very delicate, very delicate. But your picture, Gagnière, where is it?”

“My picture, it is there.”

In fact, the picture he had sent happened to be very near the little masterpiece. It was a landscape of a pearly grey, a bit of the Seine banks, painted carefully, pretty in tone, though somewhat heavy, and perfectly ponderated without a sign of any revolutionary splash.

“To think that they were idiotic enough to refuse that!” said Claude, who had approached with an air of interest. “But why, I ask you, why?”

“Because it’s realistic,” said Fagerolles, in so sharp a voice that one could not tell whether he was gibing at the jury or at the picture.

Meanwhile, Irma, of whom no one took any notice, was looking fixedly at Claude with the unconscious smile which the savage loutishness of that big fellow always brought to her lips. To think that he had not even cared to see her again. She found him so much altered since the last time she had seen him, so funny, and not at all prepossessing, with his hair standing on end, and his face wan and sallow, as if he had had a severe fever. Pained that he did not seem to notice her, she wanted to attract his attention, and touched his arm with a familiar gesture.

“I say, isn’t that one of your friends over there, looking for you?”

It was Dubuche, whom she knew from having seen him on one occasion at the Café Baudequin. He was, with difficulty, elbowing his way through the crowd, and staring vaguely at the sea of heads around him. But all at once, when Claude was trying to attract his notice by dint of gesticulations, the other turned his back to bow very low to a party of three⁠—the father short and fat, with a sanguine face; the mother very thin, of the colour of wax, and devoured by anemia; and the daughter so physically backward at eighteen, that she retained all the lank scragginess of childhood.

“All right!” muttered the painter. “There he’s caught now. What ugly acquaintances the brute has! Where can he have fished up such horrors?”

Gagnière quietly replied that he knew the strangers by sight. M. Margaillan was a great masonry contractor, already a millionaire five or six times over, and was making his fortune out of the great public works of Paris, running up whole boulevards on his own account. No doubt Dubuche had become acquainted with him through one of the architects he worked for.

However, Sandoz, compassionating the scragginess of the girl, whom he kept watching, judged her in one sentence.

“Ah! the poor little flayed kitten. One feels sorry for her.”

“Let them alone!” exclaimed Claude, ferociously. “They have all the crimes of the middle classes stamped on their faces; they reek of scrofula and idiocy. It serves them right. But hallo! our runaway friend is making off with them. What grovellers architects are! Good riddance. He’ll have to look for us when he wants us!”

Dubuche, who had not seen his friends, had just offered his arm to the mother, and was going off, explaining the pictures with gestures typical of exaggerated politeness.

“Well, let’s proceed then,” said Fagerolles; and, addressing Gagnière, he asked, “Do you know where they have put Claude’s picture?”

“I? no, I was looking for it⁠—I am going with you.”

He accompanied them, forgetting Irma Bécot against the “line.” It was she who had wanted to visit the Salon on his arm, and he was so little used to promenading a woman about, that he had constantly lost her on the way, and was each time stupefied to find her again beside him, no longer knowing how or why they were thus together. She ran after them, and took his arm once more in order to follow Claude, who was already passing into another gallery with Fagerolles and Sandoz.

Then the five roamed about in Indian file, with their noses in the air, now separated by a sudden crush, now reunited by another, and ever carried along by the stream. An abomination of Chaîne’s, a Christ Pardoning the Woman Taken in Adultery, made them pause; it was a group of dry figures that looked as if cut out of wood, very bony of build, and seemingly painted with mud. But close by they admired a very fine study of a woman,