# His Masterpiece — Character guide

> Key figures in His Masterpiece by Émile Zola.

- [Claude Lantier](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/claude_lantier.md): Claude belongs to the ragged brotherhood of Montmartre artists who once dreamed together and now watch each other starve, sell out, or go mad. He refuses every compromise the others make, painting with a fever that leave
- [Christine](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/christine.md): Alone in a sleepy provincial household, Christine craves friendship and takes her first day out straight to the studio of the strange painter she cannot forget. She finds herself already on his canvas, sprawled nude in t
- [Sandoz](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/sandoz.md): Sandoz works methodically at his novels while his friends burn out around him, and he carries their survival as a personal errand, dragging Claude from his easel and taking notes for fiction on the same afternoon. Christ
- [Mahoudeau](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/mahoudeau.md): Mahoudeau and Chaîne live together in the back shop, surviving on bread dipped in the olive oil Chaîne could not sell, and Mahoudeau narrates their misery with a numb, sardonic calm. He speaks of Chaîne's affair with the
- [Jory](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/jory.md): Jory circulates among the painters, sculptors, and dealers, taking the temperature of a scene that is always shifting beneath his feet. He is the friend Christine and Sandoz can rely on to notice when Claude is sinking, 
- [Fagerolles](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/fagerolles.md): Fagerolles receives Claude in a house of tapestries, dragons, and a couch under a tent, decorated with the Legion of Honour and portraits priced at ten thousand francs. He affects weariness at being begged to exhibit, ca
- [Dubuche](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/dubuche.md): Dubuche is the schoolfriend whose respectable trajectory — marriage, inheritance, a brickyard in Burgundy — looks like success until his grand theories and pitiful management turn every venture into catastrophe. He cling
- [Bongrand](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/bongrand.md): Bongrand wanders the Salon alone, bending his wrinkled face over Mahoudeau's figure and delighting in the scandal of the Salon of the Rejected, where his own colleagues rage against the young painters he privately champi
- [Irma Bécot](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/irma_becot.md): Irma Bécot is the flesh-and-blood woman behind the central figure Claude cannot finish, the feared and desired mistress Christine senses in every stroke he lays on that canvas. She moves on to the stage while the paintin
- [Mathilde](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/mathilde.md): The emaciated wife of Mahoudeau.
- [Naudet](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/naudet.md): An art dealer who handles Fagerolles' work.
- [Little Jacques](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/little_jacques.md): Claude and Christine's young son.
- [Courajod](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters/courajod.md): A member of the art establishment.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/his_masterpiece_se/characters