His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

who was already wearing his frock-coat and kicking his heels impatiently, to go and fetch Mahoudeau, for the latter, he asserted, was quite capable of forgetting all about the appointment. Since autumn, the sculptor had been living at Montmartre, in a small studio in the Rue des Tilleuls. He had moved thither in consequence of a series of affairs that had quite upset him. First of all, he had been turned out of the fruiterer’s shop in the Rue du Cherche-Midi for not paying his rent; then had come a definite rupture with Chaîne, who, despairing of being able to live by his brush, had rushed into commercial enterprise, betaking himself to all the fairs around Paris as the manager of a kind of “fortune’s wheel” belonging to a widow; while last of all had come the sudden flight of Mathilde, her herbalist’s business sold up, and she herself disappearing, it seemed, with some mysterious admirer. At present Mahoudeau lived all by himself in greater misery than ever, only eating when he secured a job at scraping some architectural ornaments, or preparing work for some more prosperous fellow-sculptor.

“I am going to fetch him, do you hear?” Claude repeated to Christine. “We still have a couple of hours before us. And, if the others come, make them wait. We’ll go to the municipal offices all together.”

Once outside, Claude hurried along in the nipping cold which loaded his moustache with icicles. Mahoudeau’s studio was at the end of a conglomeration of tenements⁠—“rents,” so to say⁠—and he had to cross a number of small gardens, white with rime, and showing the bleak, stiff melancholy of cemeteries. He could distinguish his friend’s place from afar on account of the colossal plaster statue of the Vintaging Girl, the once successful exhibit of the Salon, for which there had not been sufficient space in the narrow ground-floor studio. Thus it was rotting out in the open like so much rubbish shot from a cart, a lamentable spectacle, weather-bitten, riddled by the rain’s big, grimy tears. The key was in the door, so Claude went in.

“Hallo! have you come to fetch me?” said Mahoudeau, in surprise. “I’ve only got my hat to put on. But wait a bit, I was asking myself whether it wouldn’t be better to light a little fire. I am uneasy about my woman there.”

Some water in a bucket was icebound. So cold was the studio that it froze inside as hard as it did out of doors, for, having been penniless for a whole week, Mahoudeau had gingerly eked out the little coal remaining to him, only lighting the stove for an hour or two of a morning. His studio was a kind of tragic cavern, compared with which the shop of former days evoked reminiscences of snug comfort, such was the tomb-like chill that fell on one’s shoulders from the creviced ceiling and the bare walls. In the various corners some statues, of less bulky dimensions than the Vintaging Girl, plaster figures which had been modelled with passion and exhibited, and which had then come back for want of buyers, seemed to be shivering with their noses turned to the wall, forming a melancholy row of cripples, some already badly damaged, showing mere stumps of arms, and all dust-begrimed and clay-bespattered. Under the eyes of their artist creator, who had given them his heart’s blood, those wretched nudities dragged out years of agony. At first, no doubt, they were preserved with jealous care, despite the lack of room, but then they lapsed into the grotesque honor of all lifeless things, until a day came when, taking up a mallet, he himself finished them off, breaking them into mere lumps of plaster, so as to be rid of them.

“You say we have got two hours, eh?” resumed Mahoudeau. “Well, I’ll just light a bit of fire; it will be the wiser perhaps.”

Then, while lighting the stove, he began bewailing his fate in an angry voice. What a dog’s life a sculptor’s was! The most bungling stonemason was better off. A figure which the government bought for three thousand francs cost well nigh two thousand, what with its model, clay, marble or bronze, all sorts of expenses, indeed, and for all that it remained buried in some official cellar on the pretext that there was no room for it elsewhere. The niches of the public buildings remained empty, pedestals were awaiting statues in the public gardens. No matter, there was never any room! And there were no possible commissions from private people; at best one received an order for a few busts, and at very rare intervals one for a memorial statue, subscribed for by the public and hurriedly executed at reduced terms. Sculpture was the noblest of arts, the most manly, yes, but the one which led the most surely to death by starvation!

“Is your machine progressing?” asked Claude.

“Without this confounded cold, it would be finished,” answered Mahoudeau. “I’ll show it you.”

He rose from his knees after listening to the snorting of the stove. In the middle of the studio, on a packing-case, strengthened by crosspieces, stood a statue swathed is linen wraps which were quite rigid, hard frozen, draping the figure with the whiteness of a shroud. This statue embodied Mahoudeau’s old dream, unrealised until now from lack of means⁠—it was an upright figure of that bathing girl of whom more than a dozen small models had been knocking about his place for years. In a moment of impatient revolt he himself had manufactured trusses and stays out of broom-handles, dispensing with the necessary iron work in the hope that the wood would prove sufficiently solid. From time to time he shook the figure to try it, but as yet it had not budged.

“The devil!” he muttered; “some warmth will do her good. These wraps seem glued to her⁠—they form quite a breastplate.”

The linen was crackling between his fingers, and splinters of ice were breaking off. He was obliged