The Masterpiece

The Masterpiece is a novel in Émile Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle. It follows Claude Lantier, a passionate but tormented painter, as he struggles to create a revolutionary masterpiece while his relationships, friendships, and sanity slowly unravel.

On a stormy July night in Paris, Claude, a young artist living in a garret studio on the Île Saint-Louis, discovers Christine Hallegrain, an 18-year-old orphan, huddled in his doorway. She has just arrived from Clermont-Ferrand to work as a reader for a wealthy widow but was stranded when her train was delayed and a dishonest cabman abandoned her. Claude reluctantly brings her upstairs and gives her his bed. The next morning, he finds her asleep with her chemise slipped down, exposing her bare bosom. Spellbound, he sketches her head and shoulders before she wakes. She is shocked, but he persuades her to hold the pose briefly. They exchange names and she departs.

Claude is at work on "Open Air," a large canvas depicting a nude woman reclining in a sunlit forest clearing beside a clothed man. His childhood friend Pierre Sandoz, an aspiring novelist, poses for the male figure, and Claude secretly uses Christine's likeness to rework the central nude's face. The two friends share memories of their boyhood in Plassans, a small Provençal town, where they and a third friend, Louis Dubuche, now an architecture student at the prestigious École des Beaux-Arts, dreamed of future glory. Claude expounds his artistic philosophy: He rejects academic classicism and fading Romanticism, calling instead for sunlight, open air, and the honest painting of modern life.

Their circle includes Henri Fagerolles, a clever painter who absorbs Claude's ideas while pursuing commercial success; Mahoudeau, a gaunt sculptor; Jory, a journalist who proclaims Claude the leader of a new "Open-Air School"; and Gagnière, a landscape painter whose true passion is music. They gather regularly at the Café Baudequin and at Sandoz's Thursday dinners, arguing about art and railing against the Salon's Selection Committee. Bongrand, an older, celebrated painter known for his masterpiece "The Village Wedding," occasionally joins them and confides his private terror of having peaked.

Christine begins visiting Claude's studio weekly. Initially repelled by his violent, unfinished paintings, she grows closer to him over months of walks along the Seine. Their relationship remains chaste but charged with unspoken desire. When Claude desperately needs a model for the nude figure's body, Christine silently undresses and takes the pose. He paints for three hours in rapt silence, producing a superb sketch.

Claude's painting, rejected by the official Salon, is exhibited at the Salon des Refusés, a special exhibition for rejected works decreed by the Emperor. The picture becomes the center of a stampede of mockery: The crowd ridicules the nude woman, the blue tonality, and the juxtaposition of a clothed man with naked figures. That evening, Christine, who attended alone and was mortified to see her body exposed to public ridicule, takes a cab to Claude's studio and waits in the dark. She tells him she came because she could not bear his suffering. They fall into each other's arms, and their love is consummated.

Claude takes Christine to Bennecourt, a riverside village, where they rent a cottage and live an idyllic life consumed by physical passion. Claude neglects his painting. Christine becomes pregnant, and their son Jacques is born the following February. She proves a reluctant mother, directing her devotion toward Claude rather than the child. After nearly four years, Claude grows restless, and Christine urges him to return to Paris.

Back in Paris, the old circle is fraying. Fagerolles produces paintings Claude recognizes as sanitized versions of his own ideas. Dubuche has married Régine Margaillan, daughter of a wealthy building contractor, for her father's fortune. Claude spends three years painting ambitious canvases, each rejected by the Salon, each deepening his despair. Poverty tightens around Claude and Christine as buyers vanish.

One September afternoon on the Pont des Saints-Pères, Claude gazes at the Île de la Cité and is seized by an overwhelming vision: the panorama of Paris with its bridges, wharves, and the island crowned by Notre-Dame. He decides this will be his great subject. He marries Christine in a quiet civil ceremony, motivated partly by Sandoz's advice and partly by pity, but the wedding night is a disaster: He works on his drawings until past midnight, ignoring Christine's pleas to come to bed.

Claude rents an enormous shed and stretches a massive canvas for his monumental painting. He produces a masterly preliminary sketch, but from that peak his work deteriorates. He labors for years, repeatedly scraping and repainting, missing Salon deadlines. Christine offers to pose nude for the central female figure, driven partly by jealousy of any other model. Posing becomes an ordeal as Claude treats her body as raw material, commenting clinically on her aging flesh and telling her she has lost the beauty she had at 18.

Jacques, whose head has grown disproportionately large while his health has declined, dies one morning in his sleep. Claude paints a study of the dead child, a powerful little picture that Sandoz later calls a masterpiece. He submits it to the Salon, where Fagerolles, now on the Selection Committee, uses his "charity" privilege, each member's right to accept one otherwise rejected work, to force it through. The painting is hung nearly at the ceiling in the great East room, completely ignored. The silence is worse than the mockery Claude suffered years earlier. Sandoz tries to comfort Claude by pointing out that the entire Salon has been transformed by his influence, with light colors and open-air effects everywhere. Claude replies bitterly that being the forerunner who cannot produce his own masterpiece is worthless.

Claude's obsession with his unfinished canvas intensifies. Sandoz organizes a Thursday dinner hoping to revive old bonds, but the evening disintegrates into bitter quarreling, with former allies blaming Claude for ruining their careers. After the dinner, Claude walks to the Pont des Saints-Pères and stands for over an hour gazing at the Cité in darkness, apparently contemplating suicide. Christine follows in terror. He staggers home.

Unable to sleep, Claude rises and paints by candlelight, transforming the nude figure into an extravagant idol covered in gold and jewels. Christine wakes and erupts in a passionate confrontation, denouncing painting as the monster that has destroyed their lives. She strips naked to prove she is still alive and beautiful, begging him to abandon art. Claude breaks down, and they make love with desperate intensity. She extracts an oath that painting is worthless. Christine falls into a deep sleep, but Claude cannot rest. As dawn breaks, he returns to the studio and hangs himself from the ladder, his dead face turned toward the painted woman. Christine wakes to find him and screams that the painted woman has killed him.

Sandoz arranges the funeral and places Christine, who has brain fever, in a hospital. About 20 people gather, though only Sandoz, Bongrand, and Mahoudeau from the old circle attend. Walking to the cemetery at Saint-Ouen, Sandoz and Bongrand agree that Claude was a great painter who left behind no finished masterpiece, only fragments and sketches: a forerunner who sowed the seed of a revolution in painting but could not produce the definitive work. Sandoz argues that Claude was the victim of his era, caught between Romantic idealism and the demand for scientific observation. As they leave the cemetery, past a bonfire of rotting coffin-boards exhumed from expired graves, Sandoz wipes his tears and says: "And now, back to work!" (363).