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

each time that some visitor stopped short and glanced slowly from the line to the ceiling. He felt an unhealthy longing to hear one word, but one. Why exhibit? How fathom public opinion? Anything rather than such torturing silence! And he almost suffocated when he saw a young married couple approach, the husband a good-looking fellow with little fair moustaches, the wife, charming, with the delicate slim figure of a shepherdess in Dresden china. She had perceived the picture, and asked what the subject was, stupefied that she could make nothing out of it; and when her husband, turning over the leaves of the catalogue, had found the title, The Dead Child, she dragged him away, shuddering, and raising this cry of affright:

“Oh, the horror! The police oughtn’t to allow such horrors!”

Then Claude remained there, erect, unconscious and haunted, his eyes raised on high, amid the continuous flow of the crowd which passed on, quite indifferent, without one glance for that unique sacred thing, visible to him alone. And it was there that Sandoz came upon him, amid the jostling.

The novelist, who had been strolling about alone⁠—his wife having remained at home beside his ailing mother⁠—had just stopped short, heart-rent, below the little canvas, which he had espied by chance. Ah! how disgusted he felt with life! He abruptly lived the days of his youth over again. He recalled the college of Plassans, his freaks with Claude on the banks of the Viorne, their long excursions under the burning sun, and all the flaming of their early ambition; and, later on, when they had lived side by side, he remembered their efforts, their certainty of coming glory, that fine irresistible, immoderate appetite that had made them talk of swallowing Paris at one bite! How many times, at that period, had he seen in Claude a great man, whose unbridled genius would leave the talent of all others far behind in the rear! First had come the studio of the Impasse des Bourdonnais; later, the studio of the Quai de Bourbon, with dreams of vast compositions, projects big enough to make the Louvre burst; and, meanwhile, the struggle was incessant; the painter laboured ten hours a day, devoting his whole being to his work. And then what? After twenty years of that passionate life he ended thus⁠—he finished with that poor, sinister little thing, which nobody noticed, which looked so distressfully sad in its leper-like solitude! So much hope and torture, a lifetime spent in the toil of creating, to come to that, to that, good God!

Sandoz recognised Claude standing by, and fraternal emotion made his voice quake as he said to him:

“What! so you came? Why did you refuse to call for me, then?”

The painter did not even apologise. He seemed very tired, overcome with somniferous stupor.

“Well, don’t stay here,” added Sandoz. “It’s past twelve o’clock, and you must lunch with me. Some people were to wait for me at Ledoyen’s; but I shall give them the go-by. Let’s go down to the buffet; we shall pick up our spirits there, eh, old fellow?”

And then Sandoz led him away, holding his arm, pressing it, warming it, and trying to draw him from his mournful silence.

“Come, dash it all! you mustn’t give way like that. Although they have hung your picture badly, it is all the same superb, a real bit of genuine painting. Oh! I know that you dreamt of something else! But you are not dead yet, it will be for later on. And, just look, you ought to be proud, for it’s you who really triumph at the Salon this year. Fagerolles isn’t the only one who pillages you; they all imitate you now; you have revolutionised them since your Open Air, which they laughed so much about. Look, look! there’s an ‘open air’ effect, and there’s another, and here and there⁠—they all do it.”

He waved his hand towards the pictures as he and Claude passed along the galleries. In point of fact, the dash of clear light, introduced by degrees into contemporary painting, had fully burst forth at last. The dingy Salons of yore, with their pitchy canvases, had made way for a Salon full of sunshine, gay as spring itself. It was the dawn, the aurora which had first gleamed at the Salon of the Rejected, and which was now rising and rejuvenating art with a fine, diffuse light, full of infinite shades. On all sides you found Claude’s famous “bluey tinge,” even in the portraits and the genre scenes, which had acquired the dimensions and the serious character of historical paintings. The old academical subjects had disappeared with the cooked juices of tradition, as if the condemned doctrine had carried its people of shadows away with it; rare were the works of pure imagination, the cadaverous nudities of mythology and catholicism, the legendary subjects painted without faith, the anecdotic bits destitute of life⁠—in fact, all the bric-a-brac of the School of Arts used up by generations of tricksters and fools; and the influence of the new principle was evident even among those artists who lingered over the antique recipes, even among the former masters who had now grown old. The flash of sunlight had penetrated to their studios. From afar, at every step you took, you saw a painting transpierce the wall and form, as it were, a window open upon Nature. Soon the walls themselves would fall, and Nature would walk in; for the breach was a broad one, and the assault had driven routine away in that gay battle waged by audacity and youth.

“Ah! your lot is a fine one, all the same, old fellow!” continued Sandoz. “The art of tomorrow will be yours; you have made them all.”

Claude thereupon opened his mouth, and, with an air of gloomy brutality, said in a low voice:

“What do I care if I have made them all, when I haven’t made myself? See here, it’s too big an affair for me, and that’s what