His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

whom I love like a brother. And you, my boy; let me introduce my wife. And you have got to give each other a kiss.”

Christine began to laugh outright, and tendered her cheek heartily. Sandoz had pleased her at once with his good-natured air, his sound friendship, the fatherly sympathy with which he looked at her. Tears of emotion came to her eyes as he kept both her hands in his, saying:

“It is very good of you to love Claude, and you must love each other always, for love is, after all, the best thing in life.”

Then, bending to kiss the little one, whom she had on her arm, he added: “So there’s one already!”

While Christine, preparing lunch, turned the house upside down, Claude retained Sandoz in the studio. In a few words he told him the whole of the story, who she was, how they had met each other, and what had led them to start housekeeping together, and he seemed to be surprised when his friend asked him why they did not get married. In faith, why? Because they had never even spoken about it, because they would certainly be neither more nor less happy; in short it was a matter of no consequence whatever.

“Well,” said the other, “it makes no difference to me; but, if she was a good and honest girl when she came to you, you ought to marry her.”

“Why, I’ll marry her whenever she likes, old man. Surely I don’t mean to leave her in the lurch!”

Sandoz then began to marvel at the studies hanging on the walls. Ha, the scamp had turned his time to good account! What accuracy of colouring! What a dash of real sunlight! And Claude, who listened to him, delighted, and laughing proudly, was just going to question him about the comrades in Paris, about what they were all doing, when Christine reappeared, exclaiming: “Make haste, the eggs are on the table.”

They lunched in the kitchen, and an extraordinary lunch it was; a dish of fried gudgeons after the boiled eggs; then the beef from the soup of the night before, arranged in salad fashion, with potatoes, and a red herring. It was delicious; there was the pungent and appetising smell of the herring which Mélie had upset on the live embers, and the song of the coffee, as it passed, drop by drop, into the pot standing on the range; and when the dessert appeared⁠—some strawberries just gathered, and a cream cheese from a neighbour’s dairy⁠—they gossiped and gossiped with their elbows squarely set on the table. In Paris? Well, to tell the truth, the comrades were doing nothing very original in Paris. And yet they were fighting their way, jostling each other in order to get first to the front. Of course, the absent ones missed their chance; it was as well to be there if one did not want to be altogether forgotten. But was not talent always talent? Wasn’t a man always certain to get on with strength and will? Ah! yes, it was a splendid dream to live in the country, to accumulate masterpieces, and then, one day, to crush Paris by simply opening one’s trunks.

In the evening, when Claude accompanied Sandoz to the station, the latter said to him:

“That reminds me, I wanted to tell you something. I think I am going to get married.”

The painter burst out laughing.

“Ah, you wag, now I understand why you gave me a lecture this morning.”

While waiting for the train to arrive, they went on chatting. Sandoz explained his ideas on marriage, which, in middle-class fashion, he considered an indispensable condition for good work, substantial orderly labour, among great modern producers. The theory of woman being a destructive creature⁠—one who killed an artist, pounded his heart, and fed upon his brain⁠—was a romantic idea against which facts protested. Besides, as for himself, he needed an affection that would prove the guardian of his tranquillity, a loving home, where he might shut himself up, so as to devote his whole life to the huge work which he ever dreamt of. And he added that everything depended upon a man’s choice⁠—that he believed he had found what he had been looking for, an orphan, the daughter of petty tradespeople, without a penny, but handsome and intelligent. For the last six months, after resigning his clerkship, he had embraced journalism, by which he gained a larger income. He had just moved his mother to a small house at Batignolles, where the three would live together⁠—two women to love him, and he strong enough to provide for the household.

“Get married, old man,” said Claude. “One should act according to one’s feelings. And goodbye, for here’s your train. Don’t forget your promise to come and see us again.”

Sandoz returned very often. He dropped in at odd times whenever his newspaper work allowed him, for he was still free, as he was not to be married till the autumn. Those were happy days, whole afternoons of mutual confidences when all their old determination to secure fame revived.

One day, while Sandoz was alone with Claude on an island of the Seine, both of them lying there with their eyes fixed on the sky, he told the painter of his vast ambition, confessed himself aloud.

“Journalism, let me tell you, is only a battleground. A man must live, and he has to fight to do so. Then, again, that wanton, the Press, despite the unpleasant phases of the profession, is after all a tremendous power, a resistless weapon in the hands of a fellow with convictions. But if I am obliged to avail myself of journalism, I don’t mean to grow grey in it! Oh, dear no! And, besides, I’ve found what I wanted, a machine that’ll crush one with work, something I’m going to plunge into, perhaps never to come out of it.”

Silence reigned amid the foliage, motionless in the dense heat. He resumed speaking more slowly and in jerky phrases:

“To study man as he