The Masterpiece by Émile Zola & Thomas Walton & Roger Pearson

Author:Émile Zola & Thomas Walton & Roger Pearson
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780192593177
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2019-06-22T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

With one last flick of Christine’s feather duster, their installation in the Rue de Douai was completed. Besides the small, inconvenient studio, they had only a tiny bedroom and a kitchen no bigger than a cupboard, and as the studio served as both living-room and dining-room, the child was always in the way. Christine had done her best with their few sticks of furniture, in her effort to keep down expenses, but she had had to buy an old bed, second-hand, and she had even succumbed to the necessary luxury of white muslin curtains at seven sous a metre. Once they were installed, the place looked pleasant enough, she thought, in spite of its drawbacks, and she made a point of keeping up a high standard of cleanliness, though she had decided to do without a servant, as living was going to be more costly now they were in town.

Claude spent the first few months in Paris in a state of increasing nervous tension. The din and excitement of the streets, visits to friends, hectic discussions, anger, indignation, and all the newly-fledged ideas he brought home from the outer world kept him arguing at the top of his voice, even in his sleep. Paris had got him in its grip again; he could feel it in the very marrow of his bones. It was like going through a furnace and emerging with his youth renewed, full of enthusiasm, ambitious to see everything, do everything, conquer everything. Never had he experienced such an urge to work, never had he known such hope or felt that all he had to do was stretch out his hand and produce masterpieces which would put him in the rank which was his by right, the first rank. As he walked about Paris he discovered pictures everywhere; the whole city, its streets and squares and bridges and its ever-changing skyline opened out before him gigantic frescoes which, in his intoxication with the colossal, he always found too small. He would return home in high spirits, his brain bubbling over with plans which, in the evening, in the lamplight, he would sketch on bits of paper, but without ever being able to make up his mind how or where he would set to work on the series of great works he so often dreamed of.

One serious obstacle was the restricted size of his studio. If only he could have had the old garret on the Quai de Bourbon, or even the huge dining-room at Bennecourt! But what could he do in a long narrow room like this? It was nothing more than a corridor, really, though the landlord had had the impertinence to let it as a studio at four hundred francs a year once he had put in a skylight. What was worse, the skylight, with its northern aspect, was hemmed in between two high walls, so the only light it admitted was of no more value than the dull, greenish light of a basement.

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