His Masterpiece, Émile Zola [essential reading txt] 📗

seemed to be drifting, although she was so near to Claude. He was, indeed, on the other side of the table, yet how far away she felt him to be! He was yonder before that point of the Cité, he was even farther still, in the infinite inaccessible regions of art; so far, indeed, that she would now never more be able to join him! She several times tried to start a conversation, but without eliciting any answer. The hours went by, she grew weary and numb with doing nothing, and she ended by taking out her purse and counting her money.

“Do you know how much we have to begin our married life with?”

Claude did not even raise his head.

“We’ve nine sous. Ah! talk of poverty⁠—”

He shrugged his shoulders, and finally growled: “We shall be rich some day; don’t fret.”

Then the silence fell again, and she did not even attempt to break it, but gazed at her nine coppers laid in a row upon the table. At last, as it struck midnight, she shivered, ill with waiting and chilled by the cold.

“Let’s go to bed, dear,” she murmured; “I’m dead tired.”

He, however, was working frantically, and did not even hear her.

“The fire’s gone out,” she began again, “we shall make ourselves ill; let’s go to bed.”

Her imploring voice reached him at last, and made him start with sudden exasperation.

“Oh! go if you like! You can see very well that I want to finish something!”

She remained there for another minute, amazed by his sudden anger, her face expressive of deep sorrow. Then, feeling that he would rather be without her, that the very presence of a woman doing nothing upset him, she rose from the table and went off, leaving the door wide open. Half an hour, three-quarters went by, nothing stirred, not a sound came from her room; but she was not asleep, her eyes were staring into the gloom; and at last she timidly ventured upon a final appeal, from the depths of the dark alcove.

An oath was the only reply she received. And nothing stirred after that. She perhaps dozed off. The cold in the studio grew keener, and the wick of the lamp began to carbonise and burn red, while Claude, still bending over his sketch, did not seem conscious of the passing minutes.

At two o’clock, however, he rose up, furious to find the lamp going out for lack of oil. He only had time to take it into the other room, so that he might not have to undress in the dark. But his displeasure increased on seeing that Christine’s eyes were wide open. He felt inclined to complain of it. However, after some random remarks, he suddenly exclaimed:

“The most surprising thing is that her trunk wasn’t hurt!”

“What do you mean?” asked Christine, in amazement.

“Why, Mahoudeau’s girl,” he answered.

At this she shook nervously, turned and buried her face in the pillow; and he was quite surprised on hearing her burst into sobs.

“What! you are crying?” he exclaimed.

She was choking, sobbing with heartrending violence.

“Come, what’s the matter with you?⁠—I’ve said nothing to you. Come, darling, what’s the matter?”

But, while he was speaking, the cause of her great grief dawned upon him. No doubt, on a day like that, he ought to have shown more affection; but his neglect was unintentional enough; he had not even given the matter a thought. She surely knew him, said he; he became a downright brute when he was at work. Then he bent over and embraced her. But it was as if something irreparable had taken place, as if something had forever snapped, leaving a void between them. The formality of marriage seemed to have killed love.

IX

As Claude could not paint his huge picture in the small studio of the Rue de Douai, he made up his mind to rent some shed that would be spacious enough, elsewhere; and strolling one day on the heights of Montmartre, he found what he wanted half way down the slope of the Rue Tourlaque, a street that descends abruptly behind the cemetery, and whence one overlooks Clichy as far as the marshes of Gennevilliers. It had been a dyer’s drying shed, and was nearly fifty feet long and more than thirty broad, with walls of board and plaster admitting the wind from every point of the compass. The place was let to him for three hundred francs. Summer was at hand; he would soon work off his picture and then quit.

This settled, feverish with hope, Claude decided to go to all the necessary expenses; as fortune was certain to come in the end, why trammel its advent by unnecessary scruples? Taking advantage of his right, he broke in upon the principal of his income, and soon grew accustomed to spend money without counting. At first he kept the matter from Christine, for she had already twice stopped him from doing so; and when he was at last obliged to tell her, she also, after a week of reproaches and apprehension, fell in with it, happy at the comfort in which she lived, and yielding to the pleasure of always having a little money in her purse. Thus there came a few years of easy unconcern.

Claude soon became altogether absorbed in his picture. He had furnished the huge studio in a very summary style: a few chairs, the old couch from the Quai de Bourbon, and a deal table bought secondhand for five francs sufficed him. In the practice of his art he was entirely devoid of that vanity which delights in luxurious surroundings. The only real expense to which he went was that of buying some steps on castors, with a platform and a movable footboard. Next he busied himself about his canvas, which he wished to be six and twenty feet in length and sixteen in height. He insisted upon preparing it himself; ordered a framework and bought the necessary seamless canvas, which he and a couple