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

for information, but a feeling of shame restrained him. Besides, as the committee proceeded in alphabetical order, nothing perhaps was yet decided. However, one evening, on the Boulevard de Clichy, he felt his heart thump as he saw two broad shoulders, with whose lolloping motion he was well acquainted, coming towards him.

They were the shoulders of Bongrand, who seemed embarrassed. He was the first to speak, and said:

“You know matters aren’t progressing very well over yonder with those brutes. But everything isn’t lost. Fagerolles and I are on the watch. Still, you must rely on Fagerolles; as for me, my dear fellow, I am awfully afraid of compromising your chances.”

To tell the truth, there was constant hostility between Bongrand and the president of the hanging committee, Mazel, a famous master of the School of Arts, and the last rampart of the elegant, buttery, conventional style of art. Although they called each other “dear colleague” and made a great show of shaking hands, their hostility had burst forth the very first day; one of them could never ask for the admission of a picture without the other one voting for its rejection. Fagerolles, who had been elected secretary, had, on the contrary, made himself Mazel’s amuser, his vice, and Mazel forgave his old pupil’s defection, so skilfully did the renegade flatter him. Moreover, the young master, a regular turncoat, as his comrades said, showed even more severity than the members of the Institute towards audacious beginners. He only became lenient and sociable when he wanted to get a picture accepted, on those occasions showing himself extremely fertile in devices, intriguing and carrying the vote with all the supple deftness of a conjurer.

The committee work was really a hard task, and even Bongrand’s strong legs grew tired of it. It was cut out every day by the assistants. An endless row of large pictures rested on the ground against the handrails, all along the first-floor galleries, right round the Palace; and every afternoon, at one o’clock precisely, the forty committeemen, headed by their president, who was equipped with a bell, started off on a promenade, until all the letters in the alphabet, serving as exhibitors’ initials, had been exhausted. They gave their decisions standing, and the work was got through as fast as possible, the worst canvases being rejected without going to the vote. At times, however, discussions delayed the party, there came a ten minutes’ quarrel, and some picture which caused a dispute was reserved for the evening revision. Two men, holding a cord some thirty feet long, kept it stretched at a distance of four paces from the line of pictures, so as to restrain the committeemen, who kept on pushing each other in the heat of their dispute, and whose stomachs, despite everything, were ever pressing against the cord. Behind the committee marched seventy museum-keepers in white blouses, executing evolutions under the orders of a brigadier. At each decision communicated to them by the secretaries, they sorted the pictures, the accepted paintings being separated from the rejected ones, which were carried off like corpses after a battle. And the round lasted during two long hours, without a moment’s respite, and without there being a single chair to sit upon. The committeemen had to remain on their legs, tramping on in a tired way amid icy draughts, which compelled even the least chilly among them to bury their noses in the depths of their fur-lined overcoats.

Then the three o’clock snack proved very welcome: there was half an hour’s rest at a buffet, where claret, chocolate, and sandwiches could be obtained. It was there that the market of mutual concessions was held, that the bartering of influence and votes was carried on. In order that nobody might be forgotten amid the hailstorm of applications which fell upon the committeemen, most of them carried little notebooks, which they consulted; and they promised to vote for certain exhibitors whom a colleague protected on condition that this colleague voted for the ones in whom they were interested. Others, however, taking no part in these intrigues, either from austerity or indifference, finished the interval in smoking a cigarette and gazing vacantly about them.

Then the work began again, but more agreeably, in a gallery where there were chairs, and even tables with pens and paper and ink. All the pictures whose height did not reach four feet ten inches were judged there⁠—“passed on the easel,” as the expression goes⁠—being ranged, ten or twelve together, on a kind of trestle covered with green baize. A good many committeemen then grew absentminded, several wrote their letters, and the president had to get angry to obtain presentable majorities. Sometimes a gust of passion swept by; they all jostled each other; the votes, usually given by raising the hand, took place amid such feverish excitement that hats and walking-sticks were waved in the air above the tumultuous surging of heads.

And it was there, “on the easel,” that The Dead Child at last made its appearance. During the previous week Fagerolles, whose pocketbook was full of memoranda, had resorted to all kinds of complicated bartering in order to obtain votes in Claude’s favour; but it was a difficult business, it did not tally with his other engagements, and he only met with refusals as soon as he mentioned his friend’s name. He complained, moreover, that he could get no help from Bongrand, who did not carry a pocketbook, and who was so clumsy, too, that he spoilt the best causes by his outbursts of unseasonable frankness. A score of times already would Fagerolles have forsaken Claude, had it not been for his obstinate desire to try his power over his colleagues by asking for the admittance of a work by Lantier, which was a reputed impossibility. However, people should see if he wasn’t yet strong enough to force the committee into compliance with his wishes. Moreover, perhaps from the depths of his conscience there came a cry for justice, an