His Masterpiece - Émile Zola (ebook reader 8 inch .txt) 📗

its place, or dusted a piece of furniture; she left the place to go to wreck and ruin, scarcely having the strength to drag herself about. And it was enough to break one’s heart to behold that misery ending in filth beneath the glaring light from the big window; to gaze on that ill-pargetted shanty, so bare and disorderly, where one shivered with melancholy although it was a bright February afternoon.

Christine had slowly sat down beside an iron bedstead, which Sandoz had not noticed when he came in.

“Hallo,” he said, “is Jacques ill?”

She was covering up the child, who constantly flung off the bedclothes.

“Yes, he hasn’t been up these three days. We brought his bed in here so that he might be with us. He was never very strong. But he is getting worse and worse, it’s distracting.”

She had a fixed stare in her eyes and spoke in a monotonous tone, and Sandoz felt frightened when he drew up to the bedside. The child’s pale head seemed to have grown bigger still, so heavy that he could no longer support it. He lay perfectly still, and one might have thought he was dead, but for the heavy breathing coming from between his discoloured lips.

“My poor little Jacques, it’s I, your godfather. Won’t you say how d’ye do?”

The child made a fruitless, painful effort to lift his head; his eyelids parted, showing his white eyeballs, then closed again.

“Have you sent for a doctor?”

Christine shrugged her shoulders.

“Oh! doctors, what do they know?” she answered. “We sent for one; he said that there was nothing to be done. Let us hope that it will pass over again. He is close upon twelve years old now, and maybe he is growing too fast.”

Sandoz, quite chilled, said nothing for fear of increasing her anxiety, since she did not seem to realise the gravity of the disease. He walked about in silence and stopped in front of the picture.

“Ho, ho! it’s getting on; it’s on the right road this time.”

“It’s finished.”

“What! finished?”

And when she told him that the canvas was to be sent to the Salon that next week, he looked embarrassed, and sat down on the couch, like a man who wishes to judge the work leisurely. The background, the quays, the Seine, whence arose the triumphal point of the Cité, still remained in a sketchy state⁠—masterly, however, but as if the painter had been afraid of spoiling the Paris of his dream by giving it greater finish. There was also an excellent group on the left, the lightermen unloading the sacks of plaster being carefully and powerfully treated. But the boat full of women in the centre transpierced the picture, as it were, with a blaze of flesh-tints which were quite out of place; and the brilliancy and hallucinatory proportions of the large nude figure which Claude had painted in a fever seemed strangely, disconcertingly false amidst the reality of all the rest.

Sandoz, silent, fell despair steal over him as he sat in front of that magnificent failure. But he saw Christine’s eyes fixed upon him, and had sufficient strength of mind to say:

“Astounding!⁠—the woman, astounding!”

At that moment Claude came in, and on seeing his old chum he uttered a joyous exclamation and shook his hand vigorously. Then he approached Christine, and kissed little Jacques, who had once more thrown off the bedclothes.

“How is he?”

“Just the same.”

“To be sure, to be sure; he is growing too fast. A few days’ rest will set him all right. I told you not to be uneasy.”

And Claude thereupon sat down beside Sandoz on the couch. They both took their ease, leaning back, with their eyes surveying the picture; while Christine, seated by the bed, looked at nothing, and seemingly thought of nothing, in the everlasting desolation of her heart. Night was slowly coming on, the vivid light from the window paled already, losing its sheen amidst the slowly-falling crepuscular dimness.

“So it’s settled; your wife told me that you were going to send it in.”

“Yes.”

“You are right; you had better have done with it once for all. Oh, there are some magnificent bits in it. The quay in perspective to the left, the man who shoulders that sack below. But⁠—”

He hesitated, then finally took the bull by the horns.

“But, it’s odd that you have persisted in leaving those women nude. It isn’t logical, I assure you; and, besides, you promised me you would dress them⁠—don’t you remember? You have set your heart upon them very much then?”

“Yes.”

Claude answered curtly, with the obstinacy of one mastered by a fixed idea and unwilling to give any explanations. Then he crossed his arms behind his head, and began talking of other things, without, however, taking his eyes off his picture, over which the twilight began to cast a slight shadow.

“Do you know where I have just come from?” he asked. “I have been to Courajod’s. You know, the great landscape painter, whose Pond of Gagny is at the Luxembourg. You remember, I thought he was dead, and we were told that he lived hereabouts, on the other side of the hill, in the Rue de l’Abreuvoir. Well, old boy, he worried me, did Courajod. While taking a breath of air now and then up there, I discovered his shanty, and I could no longer pass in front of it without wanting to go inside. Just think, a master, a man who invented our modern landscape school, and who lives there, unknown, done for, like a mole in its hole! You can have no idea of the street or the caboose: a village street, full of fowls, and bordered by grassy banks; and a caboose like a child’s toy, with tiny windows, a tiny door, a tiny garden. Oh! the garden⁠—a mere patch of soil, sloping down abruptly, with a bed where four pear trees stand, and the rest taken up by a fowl-house, made out of green boards, old plaster, and wire network, held together with bits of string.”

His words