The Masterpiece (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

By Émile Zola and Donna Campbell

Emile Zolas The Masterpiece (Loeuvre) is the story of a young artist, Claude Lantier, and his struggle against the indifference and hostility of an ossified art world. His aim is revolutionary, for he believes that his dream of representing "the whole of modern life" will yield "a series of canvases big enough to burst the Louvre." Yet as an artist ahead of his time, he cannot prevail against the hidebound standards of the Academie des Beaux Arts-and, increasingly, against the limits of his own ability to paint the grand works that he envisions. Set in the bohemian milieu of nineteenth-century Paris, The Masterpiece recreates the art world that Zola knew well, both as a journalist and as the boyhood friend of one if its premier artists, Paul Cézanne.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Sep 1, 2009
• ISBN: 9781411430242

Émile Zola

Émile Zola was a French writer who is recognized as an exemplar of literary naturalism and for his contributions to the development of theatrical naturalism. Zola’s best-known literary works include the twenty-volume Les Rougon-Macquart, an epic work that examined the influences of violence, alcohol and prostitution on French society through the experiences of two families, the Rougons and the Macquarts. Other remarkable works by Zola include Contes à Ninon, Les Mystères de Marseille, and Thérèse Raquin. In addition to his literary contributions, Zola played a key role in the Dreyfus Affair of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. His newspaper article J’Accuse accused the highest levels of the French military and government of obstruction of justice and anti-semitism, for which he was convicted of libel in 1898. After a brief period of exile in England, Zola returned to France where he died in 1902. Émile Zola is buried in the Panthéon alongside other esteemed literary figures Victor Hugo and Alexandre Dumas.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

EMILE ZOLA’S THE MASTERPIECE (L’OEUVRE) IS THE STORY OF A YOUNG artist, Claude Lantier, and his struggle against the indifference and hostility of a convention-worshipping art world. His aim is revolutionary, for he believes that his dream of representing the whole of modern life will yield a series of canvases big enough to burst the Louvre. Yet as an artist ahead of his time, he cannot prevail against the hide-bound standards of the Academie des Beaux Arts—and, increasingly, against the limits of his own ability to paint the grand works that he envisions. Although his meeting with Christine Hallegrain, who becomes his model, mistress, and wife, leads to temporary happiness, Claude persists in his futile attempts to create a masterpiece as fine in its execution as in its conception. In doing so, he transforms Christine and their son Jacques into mere subjects for his art, rejecting their humanity and the perishable, imperfect reality that it represents in his ultimately disastrous quest for artistic perfection. Set in the bohemian milieu of nineteenth-century Paris, The Masterpiece recreates in vivid terms the art world that Zola knew well, both as a journalist and as the boyhood friend of one if its premier artists, Paul Cézanne, who with the painter Édouard Manet served as a model for Claude Lantier. As a backstage view of the exciting period when impressionists like Manet, Cézanne, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir were about to transform the art world, and as a timeless rendering of the conflict between artistic ideals and the limitations of real life, The Masterpiece is one of Zola’s most compelling novels.

Born in Paris on April 2, 1840, the son of Venice-born engineer François Zola and his French wife, Emilie, Emile Zola grew up in Aix-en-Provence and attended the Lycée Bourbon, where he became friends with Paul Cézanne. In 1858 he moved to Paris, and by 1862 he had worked his way up from shipping clerk to the advertising department at the publishing firm Hachette, a position that enabled him to meet important literary men of the day. Leaving Hachette in 1865 after the publication of his first novel, La Confession de Claude, Zola began the dual careers of journalist and novelist that he would pursue for the rest of his life. Never reluctant to arouse controversy, in April 1866 he ruffled the feathers of the art establishment with a series of seven articles titled My Salon in L’Evénement. In this series, he excoriated the judges for refusing to admit works by Cézanne, Manet, and other new artists to the annual Salon exhibition, an episode that occurs in The Masterpiece.¹ Also controversial, even sensational, was Zola’s 1867 novel Thérèse Raquin, a study of passion, infidelity, obsession, and murder that established his reputation as a serious writer. By 1870, the year he married Eléonore-Alexandrine Meley, Zola was a rising man of letters, and the surprising success of his novel L’Assommoir in 1877 and its later dramatic adaptation allowed the couple to move to a country house, Médan. During this period, Zola described to a friend his process of writing: Using this method, Zola published a novel a year for the rest of his life, including his major achievement, the twenty novels in the Rougon-Macquart series.

I can’t invent facts, as I completely lack imagination. . . . I only know my principal character—my Rougon or my Macquart, male or female. . . . I reflect on his character, I think of the family in which he was born, on his first impressions, and on the class in which I have decided to place his life. . . . After spending two or three months in this study . . . I have in my head a quantity of types, of scenes, of fragments of dialogues

. . . which form a confused story. . . . Then there remains the most difficult task of all—to attach to a single thread . . . all these reminiscences. . . . I write a little everyday, three pages of print, not a line more, and I only work in the morning.²

Inspired by Honoré de Balzac’s multivolume La Comédie humaine, the Rougon-Macquart series traces the course of two families, the Rougons and the Macquarts, in the context of the Second Empire reign of Napoleon III (1852-1870) with most focusing on a large political issue, social institution, or historical event, such as a strike by coal miners (Germinal, 1885), peasant life in the countryside (La Terre, 1887), or the Franco-Prussian War (La Débâcle, 1892). The novels’ focus on environmental and social forces, the effects of heredity, the emphasis on determinism, and the workings of human desires and drives also marks them as classic examples of French naturalism, of which Zola was a leading proponent. In Le Roman experimental (1880), a naturalist manifesto, he had proposed that novelists treat their characters as subjects in an experiment and that through the novelist’s careful observation, the laws governing human behavior would be revealed, including inherited traits or flaws such as alcoholism that destroy lives in each generation. Because of this need to study the heredity of interconnected families, characters reappear in more than one novel: Claude, the hero of Masterpiece (1886), appears as a younger man in Le Ventre de Paris (1873) and briefly in L’Assommoir (1877), the story of Claude’s mother, Gervaise Lantier, later Coupeau, and Claude’s dissolute father; Nana (1880) treats the life and death of his half-sister Anna (Nana) Coupeau, a prostitute. By the 1890s, with the Rougon-Macquart series drawing to a close, Zola was a well-established writer whose circle of friends included Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant. On January 13, 1898, however, he thrust himself into the midst of controversy once more for the cause of justice with his polemic J’accuse. An open letter to the president of France, J’accuse condemned Army officials for the false conviction (driven by anti-Semitism) of Jewish Captain Alfred Dreyfus on charges of espionage, opening a furious national debate about the affair. Zola was promptly charged with and convicted of libel, avoiding a jail term only by escaping to England until the uproar over the case forced the government to give Dreyfus a new trial and Zola a pardon. Zola returned to Paris in 1899 and died of accidental asphyxiation from a blocked chimney on September 29, 1902.³

Although The Masterpiece resembles a roman á clef, a lightly fictionalized story based on real characters, it is actually more of a Künstlerroman, or the story of an artist’s growth and development, with its universal themes of a new artistic vision striving to break through conventional attitudes and the conflict between the ideal and the real. In keeping with that tradition, Zola provides a large cast of characters who serve as foils for Claude in addition to the many richly described spaces—cafes, the beautiful pastoral landscape at Bennecourt to which Claude escapes with Christine during their love affair, the scenery of the long walks that Claude takes with Sandoz, and above all the two different Salon exhibitions described in great detail—that mark his progress. The novel’s immediate source is clear: the growth of the impressionist movement as seen through Zola’s character Claude Lantier, and to a lesser extent through the comments of Claude’s close friend Pierre Sandoz, a journalist whom Zola modeled on himself. Like later painters Auguste Renoir and Claude Monet, Claude advocates painting outdoors, en plein air (in the open air), a style that favors heightened attention to light and shade over Courbet’s black painting [that] already reeks of the mustiness of a studio which the sun never penetrates. Yet unlike the style of the impressionists, who emphasized spatial impressions rather than temporal connections, Zola’s technique is marked by a postponement of identification and deferral of causes, a progressive style, as William J. Berg calls it in The Visual Novel: Emile Zola and the Art of His Times, that fits both naturalism’s grounding in reality and its emphasis on causation.⁴ In creating the character of Claude, Zola drew on the physical characteristics and lives of two artists he knew well: his boyhood friend Paul Cézanne, and Édouard Manet, who had painted his portrait in 1868. Despite Claude’s resemblance to Cézanne in physique, temperament, and family ties, his career more closely resembles Manet’s. For example, Claude’s first attempted masterpiece, which he calls Plein air (Open Air), recalls Manet’s famous Dejuner sur l’herbe (Luncheon on the Grass) in which a nude woman picnics on the grass with two fully clothed men; like Open Air, Dejuner sur l’herbe was turned down by the judges of the Académie des Beaux Arts for the Salon exhibition in 1863 and exhibited only later that year at the Salon des Réfuses, or exhibition of rejected pictures. Claude likewise shares with Manet an interest in the ordinary street scenes of Paris, including the intrusion of the mechanical into the landscape that is the subject of Claude’s last failed masterpiece, Port Saint-Nicolas, but unlike Manet, whose technique included sketchy, almost unfinished-looking canvases, Claude overworks his paintings, destroying any lightness of touch in his quest for a masterpiece. It is this obsessive quality of the process of art that is Zola’s real subject, for Claude’s plight is that of every artist—ever battling with reality, and ever beaten, it was a struggle with the Angel, a reference to the Biblical episode of Jacob wrestling with the angel. In its own time The Masterpiece was not much more well received than Claude’s paintings, even by the artists who saw themselves in the work. As Claude Monet wrote to Zola, I am afraid that our enemies in the press and public may drag Manet’s name or at least our names into it in order to make us out to be failures—something which I don’t want to think you intended.⁵ Serialized in the periodical Gil Blas before appearing in book form, it received mixed reviews, sold fewer copies than most other novels in the Rougon-Macquart series, and marked the end of Zola’s friendship with Cézanne.

One important theme in the novel, the tension between realism and romanticism, is expressed directly by the characters and indirectly by the narrative voice. Claude, Sandoz, and their friends ridicule romantic ways of seeing, and Claude protests the stale classicism that would allow the sculptor Mahoudeau to describe his statue of a woman as a Bacchante rather than as a simple grape-picker. Yet the novel is filled with descriptions of beautiful landscapes characteristic of a romantic perspective: From one end to the other the slanting sun powdered the houses on the right bank with golden dust, while, on the left, the islets, the buildings, stood out in a black line against the blazing glory of the sunset. Moreover, although the novel officially scoffs at romantic ideals of spontaneous genius, the actual process of artistic creation celebrated in the novel is closer to the workings of romantic inspiration than to the dogged work that Claude puts into his paintings. Similarly, the older artist Bongrand, having created a masterpiece, The Wedding Party, in his youth, learns that diligence is no substitute for genius when exhibiting a companion piece painted in old age, The Funeral Party. More pointedly, Claude is cast as the romantic visionary to Sandoz’s naturalist observer; as Sandoz remarks at his funeral, Our generation has been soaked in romanticism, and we have remained impregnated with it. It is in vain that we wash ourselves and take baths of reality.

Another of the novel’s principal themes is the tension between the ideal and the real, which is primarily expressed through the symbol of a woman’s body. For the artist, woman represents both ideal subject and treacherous reality: enshrined as an art object, a woman never ages or fades, and she is a blank slate for the artist’s idealism; as real human beings, however, women represent a dangerous realm of the flesh, pulling artists away from their calling into a time-bound world of sexuality, bourgeois materialism, aging, and death. The impossibility of reconciling these competing ideas is seen in the many examples of dismembered or fragmentary women’s bodies mentioned in the text. For example, Claude first meets Christine Hallegrain on the Rue de la Femme-Sans-Tete, or the street of the headless woman, and in his early efforts to complete Open Air he attempts unsuccessfully to paint a model’s body onto the head of Christine, which he had sketched while she was sleeping. Critics have also pointed out another form of fragmentation: Claude’s interest in women’s bellies as a site of creation.⁶ Throughout the text, women’s bodies defeat the artists; not only do real women entangle artists in destructive relationships, as happens with the architect Dubuche, but the artists’ representations of the female form also prove lethal, as when a huge clay statue of a woman thaws out and falls on its sculptor, Claude’s friend Mahoudeau, wrapping him in a dangerous embrace and nearly killing him. Equally deadly is Claude’s insistence on using the nude body of a woman, to which he adds increasingly fanciful details, as a tantalizing but incompletely realized figure of the romanticism that cannot coexist within the industrialized natural landscape in his last painting.

Christine Hallegrain seems at first an exception to this rule of dangerous women: a respectable, well-educated young woman, she poses nude for Open Air, sacrificing her modesty to do so, and as first friend, then lover, then wife does all she can to support Claude’s art. She even subordinates the interests of their child, Jacques, to those of Claude, and when she begins to pose for Claude again after a dozen years, she endures his cruelly dispassionate comparison of her nude body with his portrait of her twenty-year-old self. She suffers the loss of Jacques, the wasting of whose body beneath an abnormally large head allegorizes Claude’s neglect of the body in favor of the imagination, and does not even protest as Claude begins to sketch Jacques’ dead body for what will be his only Salon picture, Dead Child. For Claude, the making of art justifies all, even the metaphoric consumption of the bodies of those who love him; the transformation of these raw materials into art results in the only true flashes of genius he is ever to commit to canvas (Open Air, Dead Child). But as Claude transfers his affections from the real Christine to the woman in his picture, her jealousy drives her to desperate measures. Holding a candle up to his painting, she speaks at last, this time with the critical voice of realism: See what a monster you have made of her in your madness! Are there any women like that? Have any women golden limbs, and flowers on their bodies? Wake up, open your eyes, return to life again! Although she wins him back to her bed, her triumph is temporary, for having abandoned his art in a fit of renewed passion for Christine, Claude makes his way to the painting once more and hangs himself beside it, thus renouncing life itself in his devotion to art.

The Masterpiece is thus both a specific representation of a crucial period in the history of art and an insightful perspective on the plight of the artist who must tread a narrow path between fetishizing the body as an art object and ignoring art in favor of the pleasures of the flesh. More broadly, it deconstructs the differences between a committed and an obsessive devotion to one’s work. As Sandoz tells Claude, work has taken up the whole of my existence. Little by little, it has robbed me of my mother, of my wife, of everything I love. It is like a germ thrown into the cranium, which feeds on the brain, finds its way into the trunk and limbs, and gnaws up the whole of the body.

Above all, in its lightly fictionalized depiction of the artists who taught the world to see in ways that were modern—to see colors in shadows instead of the conventional black—it speaks to an age saturated in visual culture, reminding all that a focus on the elusive image at the expense of the real can come at too high a price.

Donna Campbell is associate professor of English at Washington State University. She is the author of Resisting Regionalism: Gender and Naturalism in American Fiction, 1885-1915, as well as articles on Frank Norris, Edith Wharton, Stephen Crane, and other writers of literary naturalism.

CHAPTER I

CLAUDE WAS PASSING IN FRONT OF THE HÔTEL DE VILLE, AND THE clock was striking two o’clock in the morning when the storm burst forth. He had been roaming forgetfully about the Central Markets, during that burning July night, like a loitering artist enamoured of nocturnal Paris. Suddenly the raindrops came down, so large and thick, that he took to his heels and rushed, wildly bewildered, along the Quai de la Grève. But on reaching the Pont Louis Philippe he pulled up, ragefully breathless; he considered this fear of the rain to be idiotic; and so amid the pitch-like darkness, under the lashing shower which drowned the gas-jets, he crossed the bridge slowly, with his hands dangling by his side.

He had only a few more steps to go. As he was turning on to the Quai Bourbon, on the Isle of St. Louis, a sharp flash of lightning illumined the straight, monotonous line of old houses bordering the narrow road in front of the Seine. It blazed upon the panes of the high, shutterless windows, showing up the melancholy frontages of the old-fashioned dwellings in all their details; here a stone balcony, there the railing of a terrace, and there a garland sculptured on a frieze. The painter had his studio close by, under the eaves of the old Hôtel du Martoy, nearly at the corner of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête.¹ So he went on while the quay, after flashing forth for a moment, relapsed into darkness, and a terrible thunderclap shook the drowsy quarter.

When Claude, blinded by the rain, got to his door—a low, rounded door, studded with iron—he fumbled for the bell knob, and he was exceedingly surprised—indeed, he started—on finding a living, breathing body huddled against the woodwork. Then, by the light of a second flash, he perceived a tall young girl, dressed in black, and drenched already, who was shivering with fear. When a second thunderclap had shaken both of them, Claude exclaimed:

How you frighten one! Who are you, and what do you want?

He could no longer see her; he only heard her sob, and stammer:

Oh, monsieur, don’t hurt me. It’s the fault of the driver, whom I hired at the station, and who left me at this door, after ill-treating me. Yes, a train ran off the rails, near Nevers. We were four hours late, and a person who was to wait for me had gone. Oh, dear me; I have never been in Paris before, and I don’t know where I am. . . .

Another blinding flash cut her short, and with dilated eyes she stared, terror-stricken, at that part of the strange capital, that violet-tinted apparition of a fantastic city. The rain had ceased falling. On the opposite bank of the Seine was the Quai des Ormes, with its small grey houses variegated below by the woodwork of their shops and with their irregular roofs boldly outlined above, while the horizon suddenly became clear on the left as far as the blue slate eaves of the Hôtel de Ville, and on the right as far as the leaden-hued dome of St. Paul. What startled her most of all, however, was the hollow of the stream, the deep gap in which the Seine flowed, black and turgid, from the heavy piles of the Pont Marie, to the light arches of the new Pont Louis Philippe. Strange masses peopled the river, a sleeping flotilla of small boats and yawls, a floating washhouse, and a dredger moored to the quay. Then, farther down, against the other bank, were lighters, laden with coals, and barges full of mill stone, dominated as it were by the gigantic arm of a steam crane. But, suddenly, everything disappeared again.

Claude had an instinctive distrust of women—that story of an accident, of a belated train and a brutal cabman, seemed to him a ridiculous invention. At the second thunderclap the girl had shrunk farther still into her corner, absolutely terrified.

But you cannot stop here all night, he said.

She sobbed still more and stammered, I beseech you, monsieur, take me to Passy. That’s where I was going.

He shrugged his shoulders. Did she take him for a fool? Mechanically, however, he turned towards the Quai des Célestins, where there was a cabstand. Not the faintest glimmer of a lamp to be seen.

To Passy, my dear? Why not to Versailles? Where do you think one can pick up a cab at this time of night, and in such weather?

Her only answer was a shriek; for a fresh flash of lightning had almost blinded her, and this time the tragic city had seemed to her to be spattered with blood. An immense chasm had been revealed, the two arms of the river stretching far away amidst the lurid flames of a conflagration. The smallest details had appeared: the little closed shutters of the Quai des Ormes, and the two openings of the Rue de la Masure, and the Rue du Paon-Blanc, which made breaks in the line of frontages; then near the Pont Marie one could have counted the leaves on the lofty plane trees, which there form a bouquet of magnificent verdure; while on the other side, beneath the Pont Louis Philippe, at the Mail, the barges, ranged in a quadruple line, had flared with the piles of yellow apples with which they were heavily laden. And there was also the ripple of the water, the high chimney of the floating washhouse, the tightened chain of the dredger, the heaps of sand on the banks, indeed, an extraordinary agglomeration of things, quite a little world filling the great gap which seemed to stretch from one horizon to the other. But the sky became dark again, and the river flowed on, all obscurity, amid the crashing of the thunder.

Thank heaven it’s over. Oh, heaven! What’s to become of me?

Just then the rain began to fall again, so stiffly and impelled by so strong a wind that it swept along the quay with the violence of water escaping through an open lock.

Come, let me get in, said Claude; I can stand this no longer.

Both were getting drenched. By the flickering light of the gas lamp at the corner of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête the young man could see the water dripping from the girl’s dress, which was clinging to her skin, in the deluge that swept against the door. He was seized with compassion. Had he not once picked up a cur on such a stormy night as this? Yet he felt angry with himself for softening. He never had anything to do with women; he treated them all as if ignorant of their existence, with a painful timidity which he disguised under a mask of bravado. And that girl must really think him a downright fool, to bamboozle him with that story of adventure—only fit for a farce. Nevertheless, he ended by saying, That’s enough. You had better come in out of the wet. You can sleep in my rooms.

But at this the girl became even more frightened, and threw up her arms.

In your rooms? Oh! Good heavens. No, no; it’s impossible. I beseech you, monsieur, take me to Passy. Let me beg of you.

But Claude became angry. Why did she make all this fuss, when he was willing to give her shelter? He had already rung the bell twice. At last the door opened and he pushed the girl before him.

No, no, monsieur; I tell you, no——

But another flash dazzled her, and when the thunder growled she bounded inside, scarce knowing what she was about. The heavy door had closed upon them, she was standing under a large archway in complete darkness.

It’s I, Madame Joseph, cried Claude to the doorkeeper. Then he added, in a whisper, Give me your hand, we have to cross the courtyard.

The girl did as she was told; she no longer resisted; she was overwhelmed, worn out. Once more they encountered the diluvian rain, as they ran side by side as hard as they could across the yard. It was a baronial courtyard, huge, and surrounded with stone arcades, indistinct amidst the gloom. However, they came to a narrow passage without a door, and he let go her hand. She could hear him trying to strike some matches, and swearing. They were all damp. It was necessary for them to grope their way upstairs.

Take hold of the banisters, and be careful, said Claude; the steps are very high.

The staircase, a very narrow one, a former servants’ staircase, was divided into three lofty flights, which she climbed, stumbling, with unskillful, weary limbs. Then he warned her that they had to turn down a long passage. She kept behind him, touching the walls on both sides with her outstretched hands, as she advanced along that endless passage which bent and came back to the front of the building on the quay. Then there were still other stairs right under the roof—creaking, shaky wooden stairs, which had no banister, and suggested the unplanned rungs of a miller’s ladder. The landing at the top was so small that the girl knocked against the young man, as he fumbled in his pocket for his key. At last, however, he opened the door.

Don’t come in, but wait, else you’ll hurt yourself again.

She did not stir. She was panting for breath, her heart was beating fast, there was a buzzing in her ears, and she felt indeed exhausted by that ascent in the dense gloom. It seemed to her as if she had been climbing for hours, in such a maze, amidst such a turning and twisting of stairs that she would never be able to find her way down again. Inside the studio there was a shuffling of heavy feet, a rustling of hands groping in the dark, a clatter of things being tumbled about, accompanied by stifled objurgations. At last the doorway was lighted up.

Come in, it’s all right now.

She went in and looked around her, without distinguishing anything. The solitary candle burned dim in that garret, more than fifteen feet high, and filled with a confused jumble of things whose big shadows showed fantastically on the walls, which were painted in grey distemper. No, she did not distinguish anything. She mechanically raised her eyes to the large studio-window, against which the rain was beating with a deafening roll like that of a drum, but at that moment another flash of lightning illumined the sky, followed almost immediately by a thunderclap that seemed to split the roof. Dumb-stricken, pale as death, she dropped upon a chair.

The devil! muttered Claude, who also was rather pale. That clap wasn’t far off. We were just in time. It’s better here than in the streets, isn’t it?

Then he went towards the door, closed it with a bang and turned the key, while she watched him with a dazed look.

There, now, we are at home.

But it was all over. There were only a few more thunderclaps in the distance, and the rain soon ceased altogether. Claude, who was now growing embarrassed, had examined the girl, askance. She seemed by no means bad looking, and assuredly she was young: twenty at the most. This scrutiny had the effect of making him more suspicious of her still, in spite of an unconscious feeling, a vague idea, that she was not altogether deceiving him. In any case, no matter how clever she might be, she was mistaken if she imagined she had caught him. To prove this he wilfully exaggerated his gruffness and curtness of manner.

Her very anguish at his words and demeanour made her rise, and in her turn she examined him, though without daring to look him straight in the face. And the aspect of that bony young man, with his angular joints and wild bearded face, increased her fears. With his black felt hat and his old brown coat, discoloured by long usage, he looked like a kind of brigand.

Directly he told her to make herself at home and go to bed, for he placed his bed at her disposal, she shrinkingly replied: Thank you; I’ll do very well as I am; I’ll not undress.

But your clothes are dripping, he retorted. Come now, don’t make an idiot of yourself.

And thereupon he began to knock about the chairs, and flung aside an old screen, behind which she noticed a washstand and a tiny iron bedstead, from which he began to remove the coverlet.

No, no, monsieur, it isn’t worthwhile; I assure you that I shall stay here.

At this, however, Claude became angry, gesticulating and shaking his fists.

How much more of this comedy are we to have? said he. As I give you my bed, what have you to complain of? You need not pay any attention to me. I shall sleep on that couch.

He strode towards her with a threatening look, and thereupon, beside herself with fear, thinking that he was going to strike her, she tremblingly unfastened her hat. The water was dripping from her skirts. He kept on growling. Nevertheless, a sudden scruple seemed to come to him, for he ended by saying, condescendingly:

Perhaps you don’t like to sleep in my sheets. I’ll change them.

He at once began dragging them from the bed and flinging them on to the couch at the other end of the studio. And afterwards he took a clean pair from the wardrobe and began to make the bed with all the deftness of a bachelor accustomed to that kind of thing. He carefully tucked in the clothes on the side near the wall, shook the pillows, and turned back a corner of the coverlet.

There, that’ll do; won’t it? said he.

And as she did not answer, but remained motionless, he pushed her behind the screen. Good heavens! What a lot of fuss, he thought. And after spreading his own sheets on the couch, and hanging his clothes on an easel, he quickly went to bed himself. When he was on the point of blowing out the candle, however, he reflected that if he did so she would have to undress in the dark, and so he waited. At first he had not heard her stir; she had no doubt remained standing against the iron bedstead. But at last he detected a slight rustling, a slow, faint movement, as if amidst her preparations she also were listening, frightened perchance by the candle which was still alight. At last, after several minutes, the spring mattress creaked, and then all became still.

Are you comfortable, mademoiselle? now asked Claude, in a much more gentle voice.

Yes, monsieur, very comfortable, she replied, in a scarcely audible voice, which still quivered with emotion.

Very well, then. Good night.

Good night.

He blew out the candle, and the silence became more intense. In spite of his fatigue, his eyes soon opened again, and gazed upward at the large window of the studio. The sky had become very clear again, the stars were twinkling in the sultry July night, and, despite the storm, the heat remained oppressive. Claude was thinking about the girl—agitated for a moment by contrary feelings, though at last contempt gained the mastery. He indeed believed himself to be very strong-minded; he imagined a romance concocted to destroy his tranquillity, and he gibed contentedly at having frustrated it. His experience of women was very slight, nevertheless he endeavoured to draw certain conclusions from the story she had told him, struck as he was at present by certain petty details, and feeling perplexed. But why, after all, should he worry his brain? What did it matter whether she had told him the truth or a lie? In the morning she would go off; there would be an end to it all, and they would never see each other again. Thus Claude lay cogitating, and it was only towards daybreak, when the stars began to pale, that he fell asleep. As for the girl behind the screen, in spite of the crushing fatigue of her journey, she continued tossing about uneasily, oppressed by the heaviness of the atmosphere beneath the hot zinc-work of the roof; and doubtless, too, she was rendered nervous by the strangeness of her surroundings.

In the morning, when Claude awoke, his eyes kept blinking. It was very late, and the sunshine streamed through the large window. One of his theories was, that young landscape painters should take studios despised by the academical figure painters—studios which the sun flooded with living beams. Nevertheless he felt dazzled, and fell back again on his couch. Why the devil had he been sleeping there? His eyes, still heavy with sleep, wandered mechanically round the studio, when, all at once, beside the screen he noticed a heap of petticoats. Then he at once remembered the girl. He began to listen, and heard a sound of long-drawn, regular breathing, like that of a child comfortably asleep. Ah! So she was still slumbering, and so calmly, that it would be a pity to disturb her. He felt dazed and somewhat annoyed at the adventure, however, for it would spoil his morning’s work. He got angry at his own good-nature; it would be better to shake her, so that she might go at once. Nevertheless he put on his trousers and slippers softly, and walked about on tiptoes.

The cuckoo clock struck nine, and Claude made a gesture of annoyance. Nothing had stirred; the regular breathing continued. The best thing to do, he thought, would be to set to work on his large picture; he would see to his breakfast later on, when he was able to move about. But, after all, he could not make up his mind. He who lived amid chronic disorder felt worried by that heap of petticoats lying on the floor. Some water had dripped from them, but they were damp still. And so, while grumbling in a low tone, he ended by picking them up one by one and spreading them over the chairs in the sunlight. Had one ever seen the like, clothes thrown about anyhow? They would never get dry, and she would never go off! He turned all that feminine apparel over very awkwardly, got entangled with the black dress-body, and went on all fours to pick up the stockings that had fallen behind an old canvas. They were Balbriggan stockings of a dark grey, long and fine, and he examined them, before hanging them up to dry.

The water oozing from the edge of the dress had soaked them, so he wrung and stretched them with his warm hands, in order that he might be able to send her away the quicker.

Since he had been on his legs, Claude had felt sorely tempted to push aside the screen and to take a look at his guest. This self-condemned curiosity only increased his bad temper. At last, with his habitual shrug of the shoulders, he was taking up his brushes, when he heard some words stammered amidst a rustling of bed-clothes. Then, however, soft breathing was heard again, and this time he yielded to the temptation, dropping his brushes, and peeping from behind the screen. The sight that met his eyes rooted him to the spot, so fascinated that he muttered, Good gracious! Good gracious!

The girl, amidst the hot-house heat that came from the window, had thrown back her coverlet, and, overcome with the fatigue of a restless night, lay steeped in a flood of sunshine, unconscious of everything. In her feverish slumbers a shoulder button had become unfastened, and a sleeve slipping down allowed her bosom to be seen, with skin which looked almost gilded and soft like satin. Her right arm rested beneath her neck, her head was thrown back, and her black unwound tresses enwrapped her like a dusky cloak.

Good gracious! But she’s a beauty! muttered Claude once more.

There, in every point, was the figure he had vainly sought for his picture, and it was almost in the right pose. She was rather spare, perhaps, but then so lithe and fresh.

With a light step, Claude ran to take his box of crayons, and a large sheet of paper. Then, squatting on a low chair, he placed a portfolio on his knees and began to sketch with an air of perfect happiness. All else vanished amidst artistic surprise and enthusiasm. No thought of sex came to him. It was all a mere question of chaste outlines, splendid flesh tints, well-set muscles. Face to face with nature, an uneasy mistrust of his powers made him feel small; so, squaring his elbows, he became very attentive and respectful. This lasted for about a quarter of an hour, during which he paused every now and then, blinking at the figure before him. As he was afraid, however, that she might change her position, he speedily set to work again, holding his breath, lest he should awaken her.

And yet, while steadily applying himself to his work, vague fancies again assailed his mind. Who could she be? Assuredly no mere hussy. But why had she told him such an unbelievable tale? Thereupon he began to imagine other stories. Perhaps she had but lately arrived in Paris with a lover, who had abandoned her; perhaps she was some young woman of the middleclasses led into bad company by a female friend, and not daring to go home to her relatives; or else there was some still more intricate drama beneath it all; something horrible, inexplicable, the truth of which he would never fathom. All these hypotheses increased his perplexity. Meanwhile, he went on sketching her face, studying it with care. The whole of the upper part, the clear forehead, as smooth as a polished mirror, the small nose, with its delicately chiselled and nervous nostrils, denoted great kindliness and gentleness. One divined the sweet smile of the eyes beneath the closed lids; a smile that would light up the whole of the features. Unfortunately, the lower part of the face marred that expression of sweetness; the jaw was prominent, and the lips, rather too full, showed almost blood-like over the strong white teeth. There was here, like a flash of passion, something that spoke of awakening womanhood, still unconscious of itself amidst those other traits of childlike softness.

But suddenly a shiver rippled over the girl’s satiny skin. Perhaps she had felt the weight of that gaze thus mentally dissecting her. She opened her eyes very wide and uttered a cry.

Ah! Great heavens!

Sudden terror paralysed her at the sight of that strange room, and that young man crouching in his shirt-sleeves in front of her and devouring her with his eyes. Flushing hotly, she impulsively pulled up the counterpane.

Well, what’s the matter? cried Claude, angrily, his crayon suspended in mid-air; what wasp has stung you now?

He, whose knowledge of womankind was largely limited to professional models, was at a loss to understand the girl’s action.

She neither spoke nor stirred, but remained with the counterpane tightly wrapped round her throat, her body almost doubled up, and scarcely showing an outline beneath her coverings.

I won’t eat you, will I? urged Claude. Come, just lie as you were, there’s a good girl.

Again she blushed to her very ears. At last she stammered, Oh, no, monsieur, no—pray!

But he began to lose his temper altogether. One of the angry fits to which he was subject was coming upon him. He thought her obstinacy stupid. And as in response to his urgent requests she only began to sob, he quite lost his head in despair before his sketch, thinking that he would never be able to finish it, and would thus lose a capital study for his picture.

Well, you won’t, eh? But it’s idiotic. What do you take me for? Have I annoyed you at all? You know I haven’t. Besides, listen, it is very unkind of you to refuse me this service, because, after all, I sheltered you—I gave up my bed to you.

She only continued to cry, with her head buried in the pillow.

I assure you that I am very much in want of this sketch, else I wouldn’t worry you.

He grew surprised at the girl’s abundant tears, and ashamed at having been so rough with her, so he held his tongue at last, feeling embarrassed, and wishing too that she might have time to recover a bit. Then he began again, in a very gentle tone:

Well, as it annoys you, let’s say no more about it. But if you only knew. I’ve got a figure in my picture yonder which doesn’t make headway at all, and you were just in the very note. As for me, when it’s a question of painting, I’d kill father and mother, you know. Well, you’ll excuse me, won’t you? And if you’d like me to be very nice, you’d just give me a few minutes more. No, no; keep quiet as you are; I only want the head—nothing but the head. If I could finish that, it would be all right. Really now, be kind; put your arm as it was before, and I shall be very grateful to you—grateful all my life long.

It was he who was entreating now, pitifully waving his crayon amid the emotion of his artistic craving. Besides, he had not stirred, but remained crouching on his low chair, at a distance from the bed. At last she risked the ordeal, and uncovered her tranquillised face. What else could she do? She was at his mercy, and he looked so wretchedly unhappy.

Nevertheless, she still hesitated, she felt some last scruples. But eventually, without saying a word, she slowly brought her bare arm from beneath the coverings, and again slipped it under her head, taking care, however, to keep the counterpane tightly round her throat.

Ah! How kind you are! I’ll make haste, you will be free in a minute.

He bent over his drawing, and only looked at her now and then with the glance of a painter who simply regards the woman before him as a model. At first she became pink again; the consciousness that she was showing her bare arm—which she would have shown in a ballroom without thinking at all about it—filled her with confusion. Nevertheless, the young man seemed so reasonable that she became reassured. The blush left her cheeks, and her lips parted in a vague confiding smile. And from between her half-opened eyelids she began to study him. How he had frightened her the previous night with his thick brown beard, his large head, and his impulsive gestures. And yet he was not ugly; she even detected great tenderness in the depths of his brown eyes, while his nose altogether surprised her. It was a finely cut woman’s nose, almost lost amidst the bristling hair on his lips. He shook slightly with a nervous anxiety which made his crayon seem a living thing in his slender hand, and which touched her though she knew not why. She felt sure he was not bad-natured,

Reviews for The Masterpiece (Barnes & Noble Library of Essential Reading)

[arubabookwoman · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

In this novel, Zola explores the art world of 19th century Paris, focusing on struggling (and failing) painter Claude Lantier, Christine, the woman who loves him, and a group of his friends, painters, sculptors, musicians, and a writer, Sandoz, who seems to be a stand-in for Zola himself. This was not my favorite Rougon Macquart, and at times I struggled with it, which surprised me since I love art and art history. I sometimes found the discussions of Claude's struggles in conveying his vision repetitive and boring, and I enjoyed the parts about his relationship with Christine much more.3 stars

[thorold_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

So, how do you follow a coup de force like Germinal? If you’re Zola, then apparently the way to do it is with a jolly little vie-de-Bohème tragedy of young artists. Something completely different, in any case, and it’s somehow rather fitting that the hero of this book, the painter Claude Lantier, has finished up as one of Zola’s least-known characters, whilst everyone remembers his brother and sister. The charm of this book comes from the way it draws so strongly on Zola’s friendship with his Aix-en-Provence schoolfellow Paul Cézanne. There are affectionate recollections of the walks they used to take in the hills around Aix, and glorious night-time rambles around Paris with a cantankerous bunch of young artists and writers. But of course Claude is a Zola character, so his artistic brilliance is offset by a powerful self-destructive instinct. His canvases, achieved with so much blood, sweat and tears, are invariably designed to be rejected by the academic jury of the Paris Salon, but ten years later everyone is borrowing from his ideas. And he’s sucked into a kind of distorted Pygmalion plot, where his passion for the image-woman he is painting draws all the life out of his relationship with his wife, the model for the picture. Not a top-flight Zola, perhaps, but probably deserves to be better known, not least for everything he tells us about the art-world in 1860s Paris.

[soylentgreen23 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Claude sees himself as an artistic genius, and in fact he does have considerable talent. But in late 19th century Paris, his talent is too modern, the paintings he wishes to produce unacceptable by the standards of the day, and his ambition therefore forever beyond his grasp. This is Zola's book about the world of art, and though it takes a critical look at the Impressionists - Claude is based in part on Cezanne and Manet - it is the perfect encapsulation of the horror that is true creative output, and the struggle that goes on in the mind and body of the artist so desperate to make real the creatures of their imagination.

[jannid-1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Enjoyed this. I can see why so many of the Impressionists were a bit upset about the book. I think Zola was just being a tad too honest in his word painting - or perhaps they did not like to see it succeed when success eluded most of them in life. Tragedy, celebration, anger, relationships that flourish and fade, death, and intense sadness add emotional richness to the heart of the novel - the struggle of genius vs paint and canvas.

[p_s_patrick · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This novel follows the struggle and tormenting passions of an artist in 19th Century Paris, his friendships, and what family life he has when not striving to produce his definitive masterpiece. There is psychological depth here in understanding the inner workings of a variety of extreme and ordinary personalities. Though what we have here is one of the great novels of self-destruction, it is not on the whole an unbalanced representation of artistic passion, as the other characters in the novel all scrape through life in their own different ways. Each has a slightly different view on art, and while to start with this fosters intellectual exchange and fires their artistic work, this changes throughout the novel as different personal motivations emerge. As the group grows apart, we see the tensions of jealousy due to their varying degrees of success and recognition. The main character Claude bears many similarities to the Impressionists and Post-impressionists who were among Zola's friends when he wrote the novel. This was at a point when Impressionism was maturing but not yet accepted by the establishment, and this fight to gain recognition in large part drives the story. Cezanne is perhaps the main inspiration for Claude and his artistic vision, though there are also definite aspects of Manet and other painters in evidence. Likewise, the other characters of the novel are also influenced by the author's contemporaries, and he writes himself into the story too in a somewhat autobiographical account as Claude's good friend Pierre.There is so much of interest here – an insight onto the life of an artist, the historical and social colour of 19th Century Paris, the nature of inspiration and obsession, human feeling and strife, wealth and poverty, and at least one exquisitely moving emotional scene. However for some this will be a challenging and depressing novel due to the suffering of the artist and those who are nearest to him. I would recommend it to anyone with at least a vague interest in this artistic and intellectual era, on its own merit as a novel of excellent literary quality, and as a brilliantly conceived tale of what could be described as a Pygmalion in reverse (which I won't explain to avoid spoiling the plot).

[jasonlf · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is a masterpiece, so to speak. It centers around the "open air" (i.e., impressionist) Claude Lantier and his struggles to create a masterpiece. The counterpoint is his depressing and tragic relationship with Christine, who ends up a near-martyr to his art. Claude is surrounded by a La Boheme-like group of artists, writers, journalists, and others--including a character based on Zola who is writing a cycle of novels like the Rougon-Macquart cycle.Zola sets out to write a naturalistic, scientific observation but can't help making it a true novel with a well-structured beginning, middle and end, and a certain amount of melodrama along the way. He also sets out to write a criticism of impressionism and the art world, but ends up making it more of an accidental tribute.More than the other two Zola novels I've read, this one truly is about Paris. The peripatetic characters traverse much of Paris, with Zola describing all the streets and landmarks they pass in their wanderings. And Lantier's attempted masterpiece is an enormous painting of the Île de la Cité, which is described from every angle and at every time.It is also much more of a novel of ideas, with long debates on the nature of art and its role in society.It is also a riveting, moving story from beginning to end.