His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

three francs to buy me that book. Each time he was to have sent me a bouquet, he had dropped it under the wheels of a carriage, or there were no flowers to be had in all Paris. Ah! there’s a fellow who only cares for himself, and no mistake.”

Jory, without getting in the least angry, tilted back his chair and sucked his cigar, merely saying with a sneer:

“Oh! if you see Fagerolles now⁠—”

“Well, what of it?” she cried, becoming furious. “It’s no business of yours. I snap my fingers at your Fagerolles, do you hear? He knows very well that people don’t quarrel with me. We know each other; we sprouted in the same crack between the paving-stones. Look here, whenever I like, I have only to hold up my finger, and your Fagerolles will be there on the floor, licking my feet.”

She was growing animated, and Jory thought it prudent to beat a retreat.

“My Fagerolles,” he muttered; “my Fagerolles.”

“Yes, your Fagerolles. Do you think that I don’t see through you both? He is always patting you on the back, as he hopes to get articles out of you, and you affect generosity and calculate the advantage you’ll derive if you write up an artist liked by the public.”

This time Jory stuttered, feeling very much annoyed on account of Claude being there. He did not attempt to defend himself, however, preferring to turn the quarrel into a joke. Wasn’t she amusing, eh? when she blazed up like that, with her lustrous wicked eyes, and her twitching mouth, eager to indulge in vituperation?

“But remember, my dear, this sort of thing cracks your Titianesque ‘makeup,’ ” he added.

She began to laugh, mollified at once.

Claude, basking in physical comfort, kept on sipping small glasses of cognac one after another, without noticing it. During the two hours they had been there a kind of intoxication had stolen over them, the hallucinatory intoxication produced by liqueurs and tobacco smoke. They changed the conversation; the high prices that pictures were fetching came into question. Irma, who no longer spoke, kept a bit of extinguished cigarette between her lips, and fixed her eyes on the painter. At last she abruptly began to question him about his wife.

Her questions did not appear to surprise him; his ideas were going astray: “She had just come from the provinces,” he said. “She was in a situation with a lady, and was a very good and honest girl.”

“Pretty?”

“Why, yes, pretty.”

For a moment Irma relapsed into her reverie, then she said, smiling: “Dash it all! How lucky you are!”

Then she shook herself, and exclaimed, rising from the table: “Nearly three o’clock! Ah! my children, I must turn you out of the house. Yes, I have an appointment with an architect; I am going to see some ground near the Parc Monceau, you know, in the new quarter which is being built. I have scented a stroke of business in that direction.”

They had returned to the drawing-room. She stopped before a looking-glass, annoyed at seeing herself so flushed.

“It’s about that house, isn’t it?” asked Jory. “You have found the money, then?”

She brought her hair down over her brow again, then with her hands seemed to efface the flush on her cheeks; elongated the oval of her face, and rearranged her tawny head, which had all the charm of a work of art; and finally, turning round, she merely threw Jory these words by way of reply: “Look! there’s my Titianesque effect back again.”

She was already, amidst their laughter, edging them towards the hall, where once more, without speaking, she took Claude’s hands in her own, her glance yet again diving into the depths of his eyes. When he reached the street he felt uncomfortable. The cold air dissipated his intoxication; he remorsefully reproached himself for having spoken of Christine in that house, and swore to himself that he would never set foot there again.

Indeed, a kind of shame deterred Claude from going home, and when his companion, excited by the luncheon and feeling inclined to loaf about, spoke of going to shake hands with Bongrand, he was delighted with the idea, and both made their way to the Boulevard de Clichy.

For the last twenty years Bongrand had there occupied a very large studio, in which he had in no wise sacrificed to the tastes of the day, to that magnificence of hangings and knicknacks with which young painters were then beginning to surround themselves. It was the bare, greyish studio of the old style, exclusively ornamented with sketches by the master, which hung there unframed, and in close array like the votive offerings in a chapel. The only tokens of elegance consisted of a cheval glass, of the First Empire style, a large Norman wardrobe, and two armchairs upholstered in Utrecht velvet, and threadbare with usage. In one corner, too, a bearskin which had lost nearly all its hair covered a large couch. However, the artist had retained since his youthful days, which had been spent in the camp of the Romanticists, the habit of wearing a special costume, and it was in flowing trousers, in a dressing-gown secured at the waist by a silken cord, and with his head covered with a priest’s skullcap, that he received his visitors.

He came to open the door himself, holding his palette and brushes.

“So here you are! It was a good idea of yours to come! I was thinking about you, my dear fellow. Yes, I don’t know who it was that told me of your return, but I said to myself that it wouldn’t be long before I saw you.”

The hand that he had free grasped Claude’s in a burst of sincere affection. He then shook Jory’s, adding:

“And you, young pontiff; I read your last article, and thank you for your kind mention of myself. Come in, come in, both of you! You don’t disturb me; I’m taking advantage of the daylight to the very last minute, for there’s hardly time to do anything in