Zola grew up with Paul Cézanne in Aix-en-Provence. Upon moving to Paris, Zola hung out with his painter friend’s painter friends, ate and drank with them, eavesdropped on their conversations, and soaked up their theories of a revolutionary art form that would capture the evanescence of light flickering across surfaces. Zola wrote about the evolving Paris art scene for Le Figaro while working on his twenty-volume Rougon-Macquart series, of which L’Oeuvre was the fourteenth. His own prose imitating their brushwork, Zola fictionalized his friends and their paintings, Manet’s and Cézanne’s in particular. No wonder that, given a gift copy in 1886 of the newly published L’Oeuvre (in English The Masterpiece), Cézanne tersely thanked his life-long friend and never wrote to him again.
In all weather and at all hours of day and night, Zola’s characters – the intense painter Claude Lantin and his model-mistress-wife Christine and childhood friend, the journalist Pierre Sandoz, whom Zola modeled after himself – crisscross Paris to the pulse of the city’s hastening heartbeat. They note clouds scudding overhead and the rippling texture of air and water. In smoky cafés they argue aesthetics while sharing flavorful ragouts, bottles of wine, glasses of absinthe. The wonder is that they have any time left over to paint.
Our homage to L’Oeuvre began over breakfast at an outdoor café in Place de l’Alma. Across the Seine we saw the profile of the Left Bank, haunt of generations of artists and intellectuals. The new leaves of the plane trees overhead trembled with creative energy and simultaneously softened the roar of 21st-century traffic. We imagined ourselves transported to the 1860’s. That dark dome beneath the hastening clouds: is it the Institut des Beaux Arts, where the plein air artists broke from the fusty style of the past? Pont de l’Alma here before us: is that Claude leaning over the balustrade, Christine and Pierre beside him, studying the shifting light on the Seine below? We traced their footsteps. It was the best trip to Paris we ever had. I remember it as if it were yesterday. . . .
WALK #1. Ile St.-Louis: La Femme-sans-Tête and White Asparagus. Ascending from the Métro at Pont Saint Michel, we cross the Seine for our first L’Oeuvre walk, admiring the flower-laden barges and the bookstalls lining the quais of Île de la Cité. We slip through the crowd of pedestrians, then follow the massy south wall of Notre Dame past the children’s playground, the gardens, and the tracery of the east-facing apse to the footbridge, Pont Saint-Louis, that connects Île de la Cité to Île St.-Louis. Here L’Oeuvre begins in a violent thunderstorm, Quai de Bourbon illuminated in blue-white lightning.
We pause to read Zola’s text:
A flash of lightning lit up the long straight line of big old houses and the narrow roadway that runs along the bank of the Seine. It was reflected in the panes of their tall, shutterless windows and revealed for a moment their ancient, melancholy-looking facades, bringing out some of their details – a stone balcony, a balustrade, a festoon carved on a pediment – with amazing clarity. It was there Claude had his studio, in the garret of the old Hotel du Martoy, on the corner of the Rue de la Femme-sans-Tête. . . . A mighty clap of thunder shook the whole neighborhood from sleep.
Here is what we have come for! Not twenty steps ahead, carved into the wall in antique spelling is the old name of the street – an alley, really: Rue de la Femme sans Teste. Above it is the statue of a headless woman embedded in the building’s corner. We turn the page, imagining the young faces of Claude and Christine, rain-streaked and terrified, alit in the lightning flash that sets their torrid love affair on its tragic trajectory:
Claude, blinded by the driving rain, groped for the bell-pull, but recoiled in amazement when he felt, huddled up in the corner, against the woodwork, a human body. Then, as the lightning flashed a second time, he caught sight of a tall girl, dressed in black, soaking wet and trembling with fright. The thunder made them both start.
Grateful that no such storm disturbs our afternoon, we walk arm in arm along the quai.
In the novel’s next scene, Christine sleeps, nude and chaste, in Claude’s bed while he tosses, aroused, in his armchair beside his easel. The studio is thick with summer heat. In the morning’s first light Claude glimpses Christine’s bare arms, her breasts. Before she wakes he fills in details on the canvas before him.
We are hungry. It is the season of white asparagus. Here is Brasserie le Lutétia, where the western prow of the little island faces bravely downriver toward the Hôtel de Ville. Parisian workmen in bright green overalls are enjoying after-work beers at the counter.
The waiter attends patiently to my schoolgirl French – deux Sancerres, un demi de l’eau, deux asperges blanches, deux soupes à l’oignon, s’il vous plait. Before our meal arrives, we read the next page, in which Claude allows Christine her first glimpse of his masterpiece-in-progress, the oil still wet from his fevered brush strokes:
It was a big canvas, five metres by three, all planned out, though parts of it were still hardly developed beyond the rough stage. . . . It showed the sun pouring into a forest clearing. . . . Lying on the grass in the foreground, among the lush vegetation of high summer, was the naked figure of a woman. One arm was folded beneath her head, thus bringing her breasts into prominence; her eyes were closed and she was smiling into space as she basked in the golden sunlight. In the background, two other nude women, one dark and one fair, were laughing and tumbling each other on the grass, making two lovely patches of flesh-colour against the green, while in the foreground, to make the necessary contrast, the artist had seen fit to place a man’s figure. He wore a plain black velvet jacket, and was seated on the grass so that nothing could be seen but his back and his left hand upon which he was leaning.
I draw from my pocket a small reproduction of Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (The Bath). Zola has slightly transformed it. Amid the buzz of the workmen’s voices, we note Zola’s changes and relish our wine and bread. The waiter returns with our order. Onion soup has never tasted so good. Nor has white asparagus.
Walk #2: Quartier Latin: Parapluies & Ombrelles and the Musée d’Orsay. 1860’s Paris was eminently walkable, centered in the first nine of the twenty arrondisements that spiral outward from Île de la Cité. Our route this morning focuses on the Left Bank, starting at the Pont des Arts, the footbridge crossing the Seine between the Louvre’s easternmost edge and the Institut de France, the black-domed home of the Academie des Beaux-Arts, which Zola’s artists loved to hate because its teachers advocated “run-of-the-mill, made-to-measure Beaux-Arts stuff.”
Claude jeers at the Academy as he and Pierre pass it on their way along Rue Jacob. “We’re still wallowing in Romanticism,” he says. “That’s what’s wrong with us. . . . What we need is a thorough scrubbing!” Instead of the formulaic work advocated by his Academy instructors, Claude longs
to see everything and paint everything. . . . Life as it’s lived in the streets, the life of rich and poor, in market-places, at the races, along the boulevards, and down back streets in slums; work of every kind in full swing; human emotions revived and brought into the light of day; the peasants, the farmyards and the countryside. . . . Modern life in all its aspects!
We walk along Rue Jacob, past trendy galleries and decorators’ shops. At a decrepit window we watch workmen scraping a wooden floor, turning a shabby hole-in-the-wall into a chic architectural studio. Along the sidewalk well-dressed mothers propel their children schoolward. The district has changed from the one Claude loved, where
a handcart, pushed and pulled with increasing vigor, bumped madly over the uneven pavings. . . . Students racing hell-for-leather forced everyone else to stand well out of the way to avoid being run down, while tradesmen stood open-mouthed in their shop doorways, thinking revolution had broken out. . . .
Life has changed, but not completely. We glance into narrow courtyards, any one of which could jump off the page of Zola’s novel.
We turn onto the wide thoroughfare of Boulevard Saint Germain. The boutiques are just opening. At No. 218 the shopkeeper unlocks the door for two Japanese ladies. The sign over the doorway reads
Alexandra Sojfer
Paris
Parapluies & Ombrelles
Cannes
Maison fondée en 1834
I insist on entering. The two customers select identical parasols, small blue-and-white striped cotton models with pale wood handles and sporty rope ties.
I feel my cheeks flush with envy. “The prices are astronomical,” my husband whispers. “Be sensible.” He hustles me out onto the pavement. I make a mental note of the little sign in the window: 218, Boulevard Saint-Germain. La boutique est ouverte tous les jours de 9h30 à 19h. We walk on, following Rue des Saints Pères to Quai Voltaire, where we join the line at the Musée d’Orsay.
Our tickets are good for the whole museum, but we have only one destination in mind, the top-floor Impressionist Galleries, where every painting is a familiar friend. Here is Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe (The Bath), the one that so shocked the Selection Committee of the 1863 Salon that Emperor Napoleon III intervened and permitted it to be hung in an adjacent gallery at the Grand Palais, in what was soon dubbed the Salon des Refusés. Here is Caillebotte’s Raboteurs de Parquet, its workmen planing and sanding a floor like the one we had seen not an hour before. They are shirtless, the hair on their arms glistening with sawdust in the morning sunlight. Here is Renoir’s Portrait de Frederic Bazille, the cover image on my Penguin edition copy of The Masterpiece. Here, too, are two versions of Monet’s Femme à l’Ombrelle, one tournée vers la droite, the other tournée vers la gauche – both with the very parasol I had coveted on the Boulevard Saint Germain. The pensive woman in Degas’ Au café, dit l’Absinthe, reflects my mood of suppressed longing. If only my life could be lived in such a novel, in such paintings, in such a city!
To be continued. Let me know if you’ve walked Paris – or any other beautiful city – with a great novel as your guidebook.
