the whim of almighty Work!

An excerpt from Zola's The Masterpiece about the trials and tribulations of being an artist. The character speaking these lines, Sandoz, is a thinly veiled self-portrait of Zola himself.

The thing is, work has simply swamped my whole existence. Slowly but surely it’s robbed me of my mother, my wife, and everything that meant anything to me. It’s like a germ planted in the skull that devours the brain, spreads to the trunk and the limbs, and destroys the entire body in time. No sooner am I out of bed in the morning than work clamps down on me and pins me to my desk before I’ve even had a breath of fresh air. It follows me to lunch and I find myself chewing over sentences as I’m chewing my food. It goes with me when I go out, eats out of my plate at dinner and shares my pillow in bed at night. It’s so completely merciless that once the process of creation is started, it’s impossible for me to stop it, and it goes on growing and working even when I’m asleep. … Outside that, nothing, nobody exists. I go up to see my mother, but I’m so absorbed that ten minutes afterwards I’m asking myself whether I’ve been up to her or not. As for my wife, she has no husband, poor thing; we’re never really together any more, even when we’re hand-in-hand! Sometimes I feel so acutely aware that I’m making them both unhappy that I’m overcome with remorse, for happiness in a home depends so much on kindness and frankness and gaiety. But do what I will, I can’t escape entirely from the monster’s clutches, and I’m soon back in the semiconscious state that goes with creation and just as sullen and indifferent as I always am when I’m working. If the morning’s writing’s gone smoothly, all well and good; if it hasn’t, all’s not so good; and so the whole household laughs or cries to the whim of almighty Work! … That’s the situation. I’ve nothing now I can call my own. In the bad old days I used to dream about foreign travel or restful holidays in the country. Now that I could have both, here I am hemmed in by work, with no hope of so much as a brisk walk in the morning, a free moment to visit an old friend, or a moment’s self-indulgence! I haven’t even a will of my own; it’s become a habit now to lock my door on the world outside and throw my key out of the window. … So there we are, cribbed and confined together, my work and me. And in the end it’ll devour me, and that will be the end of that! 

One of the recurring themes in the novel is the critique of romantic conception of the "Artist" as someone hankering after an impossible ideal, a kind of mystical and harmonious whole. Zola instead wanted writers and artists to be like sober-minded scientists, (or "naturalists" in its original sense) but like all true artists he gives the best lines to characters speaking against his own view.