Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (11 page)

Slowly they walked away from the farmhouse and the garden to the station to catch the train back to Paris.

Her sister, Annette, was waiting for them at the Gare Saint-Lazare.

T
HAT TALL YOUNG
matron in her ornately decorated hat who looked so like Camille came rapidly toward them through the crowds under the huge glass domes of the station, calling over the shouting porters and screaming newsboys.

Claude whispered,
“Merde!
What’s she doing here?”

Camille gave him a quick, tragic look and stammered, “It’s my fault. I wrote her the day before yesterday that we were coming back this morning around eleven because I just knew how she’d worry. But … I
told
her to tell no one.”

Annette was within a few feet of them now, clutching her pink parasol so tightly that he felt she would hit him with it. “Are you out of your mind, Minou?” she exclaimed above the noise of the crowds. “To go off a whole month with no word? We finally traced you to this man’s studio and his peculiar friends. One of them told us you were with him. You’re fortunate we didn’t know exactly where until last night when your letter came!”

Claude opened his mouth to speak. “Madame,” he began, but Annette Lebois’ words rose over his. The sisters were now not a foot apart.

Annette’s slightly freckled face was pale with outrage. “What about your engagement, Minou? My husband wanted to go to the police but Father dissuaded him to avoid scandal. We have kept it from your fiancé; we told him you were away outside Lyon with our poor
grandmère
and likely too distraught to write. And how will he marry you after you have simply run off with some painter? Yes, monsieur, that is what you are indeed. Minou, you swore you’d never do this again!”

Camille stamped her foot. “This time has nothing to do with that!” she cried passionately. “You said you’d never mention it again; you broke your promise! I went away with Claude because that’s what I wanted to do.”

A porter with a trolley piled with luggage was trying to make his way around them, bumping against the standing rolled canvas, but neither sister paid him any attention. “Yes, you always do what you want!” Annette replied. “You always have! Are you planning on staying with this man? What proper home can he give you? What sort of income does monsieur have? Where does he live? In a studio with half a dozen other painters! And what sort of a man is he to take you away and cause you to lose your good name?”

Annette began to pull her sister’s arm. “You must come now and talk to Maman and Papa! And your dress is dirty! How could you be seen in public with such a dirty dress!”

Camille was crying now, tearing at her gloves and stamping her feet. “Leave me alone! I’ll go to them without you. I know what I’m doing. Go away, go away!”

“Madame,” Claude said, raising his voice. Several people had now stopped to stare at them. “I beg you, madame …”

Annette Lebois turned away from him; she was also crying now. “Your good name is lost unless we can conceal everything.”

C
LAUDE COULD FIND
no seats for them on the crowded omnibus. He kept one arm around Camille, while the other balanced the rolled painting, which was taller than he was by a few feet. A bit of the protective paper had ripped and showed a riot of painted white flowers. People climbed over them to descend. The stopping and starting of the horses in the heavy traffic threw them against each other and once nearly knocked him into an elderly man’s lap. He tried to find his handkerchief as the tears still ran down her face.

As the omnibus crept over the crowded bridge to the Left Bank, he whispered, “Did you really run off with someone before me?”

“I did, and it was a stupid thing,” she replied sadly. “I was sixteen, an innocent girl, and he lied to me.”

“Will you tell me about it sometime?”

“One day when I get the courage.”

“You can always tell me the truth.”

Her warm eyes looked at him as gratefully as they had many times before, but now it was more poignant because she had been weeping. She pressed his hand and whispered, “Oh, thank you! I know that and I will!”

More passengers squeezed on board and glanced angrily at the huge, rolled painting. He stared at the dirty floorboards and black shoes of the woman sitting in front of them. “Well, we’re back in Paris. Does this mean good-bye, Minou? If that’s the pet name your sister calls you, I’ll use it too. Do you intend to keep your engagement and marry that man?”

She stared at him, her long Grecian face indignant. “What? What do you think of me? Don’t you understand? I’m in love with you; I’m so much in love with you!”

They descended at their stop on the rue Jacob, where he took her face in his hands and kissed her. “I love you too,” he said. “I don’t want you to go away.”

She stepped back. “I’m going now to settle things with my mother and father,” she said quietly. And then she was gone, hurrying down the street.

H
E BALANCED THE
heavy canvas on his shoulder like an itinerant peddler to mount the stairs to the studio. His good friend the painter Sisley ran down to help him as he approached the top, but Claude shook his head. When he maneuvered his way into the room, he saw Frédéric standing by a new painting of a nude girl; he wore his old painting suit as if he had never left. “Claude!” he exclaimed. “You didn’t write. I see you got everything I sent you.”

Claude stared at Frédéric’s face and managed to catch his breath. “And I thought you all were my friends!” he shouted. “Which one of you or the other idiots told Camille’s family she was with me? Was it you, Bazille, when I wrote you for my paints and easels? You have a blissful time at home with your Lily and now you want to ruin things for me.”

“What? Let me help you with that!”

Claude shook his head, but together they brought the canvas to rest on the floor. “You’re wrong,” Frédéric said bluntly. “It wasn’t any of us on purpose. Pissarro saw your letter lying about and forgot he was supposed to be quiet about it. He was carrying his portfolio and his son the other day when someone stopped him in the street and asked him if he knew you. He said you were away with your pretty model and gave them the studio address because they said they wanted to commission a painting. He didn’t think; he’s so honest. Now he says he’d rather return to the West Indies than face you. Yesterday her family walked in our door, which we hadn’t locked. Auguste’s Lise was modeling naked on the stand. What a mess.”

Claude grunted. “Sorry,” he said. He walked back and forth, gently touching the bristles of the brushes in the jars, turning over a tube of paint to study the color label as if he had never seen it before, fingers drumming on the dresser and the table. “I mean it, I’m sorry. Come on, help me unroll this and put it on the stretchers again. Thanks for sending the paint.”

They unrolled the canvas on the floor and placed bricks carefully on the edges to keep it from curling. Claude stood between his friends, who were studying it. “What do you think?” he asked.

“It’s the best thing you’ve done,” Frédéric said after a time. “It’s far better than the portrait of her in the green dress. I don’t think anyone’s done anything like that, the movement of the women, the sun. So you went away with her, you lucky bastard. Of course I’d never betray your secret. So she’s ‘in all ways lovely,’ eh? But I’ve met her irate parents now and gotten an even clearer idea of her situation.”

Claude grunted. “So what idea do you have?” he asked.

Frédéric knelt to admire the painting. “It’s just girls like this. Good, upper-class girls. They’re raised like precious flowers to take their place in society, to live the lives of their mothers in paying calls, hiring carriages, eating dinner off fine china. You don’t know what trouble she’ll be in for climbing into your bed these weeks.”

Claude placed his hand on his friend’s shoulder and thought of Camille now with her family telling them the news. “It’s not for weeks, Bazille,” he said seriously, “it’s for always. We love each other. We want a life together. As for the things she’ll miss, I’ll make them up and more. I’m on the edge of doing very well. We all are. I’ll take care of her. I’ll find someplace to live. It would be too crowded here.” He nodded, suddenly filled with calm: he envisioned the world he would have with her eventually, the elegant city rooms and the house in the country with a garden.

“So you’re leaving here?” Sisley asked, looking up from the painting.

Claude looked around the studio at all the hanging paintings. “I bet I’ll be missed,” he said.

Frédéric shook his head, making a wry face. “I won’t miss your snoring,” he exclaimed. “Auguste is looking for a room and he can have yours. Besides, nothing much will change. You’ll be here every day to paint.”

“Yes, every damn day! Can you clean up the dirty socks if she comes too? What can you do? Friends fall in love and move on. Speaking of love, how’s your Lily these four months you’ve been home?”

Frédéric stood up. “She was sad when I left. She asked me when I’d come back to live. I said three years. So I have a little time to learn to be the artist I’d like to be with all of you before I become I don’t know what. I have a little more time.”

Interlude

GIVERNY
August 1908

The old artist put aside thoughts of Camille’s unforgiving sister. Something so large and extraordinary was happening in his painting; it was the most extraordinary work he had ever done. For four years steadily he had been painting the lily pond and little else; he felt that at the age of sixty-eight, the greatest challenge of his work was yet before him. He could not quite conceive when he would exhibit this work, which was so very personal.

And yet sometimes at the end of the day he also thought of the lacquered Japanese box and all its mysteries. One night after supper he put his pride aside and went to his room to write her once more.

My dear madame
,

I must tell you what a great hurt it was to me that after all these years you still hold me responsible for your sister’s death. I was also very angry and resolved never to try to contact you again as you wished, but that is impossible for me, so I am writing once more in hope of beginning a communication between us
.

I realize you did not even know I had moved to Giverny. It’s a small hamlet forty miles from Paris in farm country. You may remember I loved to garden, and over the years I have made a large and beautiful one. In varying seasons it is full of poppies, marigolds, sunflowers. I also have a lower garden with a pond and many paintings of this, which today I have understood I may not have the courage to exhibit next spring, though many people are urging me to do so. To show my heart, as my old mentor once told me to. Today I do not have that courage, but still I must write this letter
.

I did not even know you were in Paris until a friend mentioned that you had returned there a while ago and owned a successful millinery shop on the Champs-Élysées. It has been nearly thirty years since our last meeting. I am older than my years, paunchy and white-bearded, my just rewards from tramping long hours out in inclement weather to paint. My vision has also begun to trouble me
.

I cannot say how many memories opened to me when I first wrote you. All I have now of your sister are my many paintings and the contents of a box. It seemed impossible that all that is left of her can be crammed into two drawers. There are things I do not understand, and I believe you can explain them to me. Of all those who knew her well and loved her, we alone remain, but for my friend Auguste, who is now far from me and not well
.

Can we meet somewhere after all these years? Would you do me that kindness? For suddenly I must search for your sister
again. Perhaps it is my age—one knows one is not immortal and it is time to think back on all we loved
.

Yours sincerely, C. Monet

He enclosed a sprig of lavender before posting it.

Part Three

1867

Don’t work bit by bit, but paint everything at once by placing tones everywhere
.

—C
AMILLE
P
ISSARRO

T
HE ROOM HE AND
C
AMILLE MOVED TO A FEW DAYS LATER
was long and dark with only one small window. It was located in a workmen’s neighborhood of Pigalle above a laundry. She brought her beautiful dresses and her fluffy white dog, Victoire, who was getting on in years and peed wearily in corners. “Come, Victoire!
Viens, vite!”
she called and the hysterical little creature leapt after her, tongue out. The smell of hot water and heating irons rose up from dawn to dusk with the chatter of the laundry girls.

Claude received another check from his aunt. He wrote a gracious letter thanking her but decided not to tell her yet that he was living with Camille. To pay for immediate expenses, he drew portraits in red chalk of neighbors, and Camille contributed money she had accumulated from family gifts over the years, which she kept in a little black-beaded purse.

They were both astonished to have found each other. You are not a dream, they whispered to each other in the middle of the night. Still at times he woke and thought he was in the studio again, and he listened for his friends’ low voices in the other room.

They had been living together only a few weeks when her father showed up at the door. Monsieur Doncieux was a weary-looking and not large man of perhaps sixty years. He knocked very politely and Camille rose from mopping up after Victoire, crying, “Papa!”

“So this is where you …”

Claude put out his hand, but Monsieur Doncieux ignored it. Claude felt a rising anger but decided to say nothing for Camille’s sake. Hastily he cleared laundry and books from their chairs, saying, “Will you sit, monsieur?” They all sat, and Claude took Camille’s fingers, which were suddenly cold.

Monsieur looked about the room at the canvases and his daughter’s many dresses hung from hooks as they had no wardrobe. He glanced at the murals of the bucolic countryside on the cracking plaster walls that Claude and Auguste had painted together one night until four in the morning.

Her father began clumsily. “Minou, your mother’s desperate. We can only hope you’ll return soon. At least you’ve not married yet. You may have thought we preferred it, but we feel that step would be more irrevocable.” He added sadly, “I only hope you have enough to eat.”

She reached out her other hand for her dog to come and said uncomfortably, “Claude is a very good cook!”

“Your mother and I want you to know that we will receive you back home anytime and that though we have sent back the ring as you asked us, your fiancé says that he will excuse you this for your youth, and that he still loves you.”

“But I don’t love him,” Camille replied intensely. “And I love Claude and I love his work. I’m proud to stand beside him as he paints. You must not insult Claude. I won’t have it.”

Claude cleared his throat. “I shall take good care of her, monsieur,” he said. “And I shall do well.” He listened to more of the arguing back and forth, his body aching from withheld anger. When her father rose to leave, he did not offer his hand again, but when he and Camille were alone the blood rushed to his face and he hurled the pile of laundry to the floor, shouting,
“Merde! Merde!”
The terrified dog crept whimpering under the bed.

“Oh, Claude!” she said, her long face tragic. “He barely kissed me good-bye! I’ve hurt him and that poor dull man they wanted me to marry. I never wanted to hurt anyone, and yet I have, but I can’t live their lives. I can’t. And yet …” She covered her face with both hands.

He took her in his arms. For hours he seemed to hear her father’s footsteps descending the stairs.

T
HEY THOUGHT THAT
evening that they could not soon forget the visit, but within a few days they again plunged happily into their busy lives.

At first his friends mostly left them alone, but after a time they visited regularly. They came up the stairs bearing food and wine, and soon she was throwing her arms about them, kissing them, welcoming them. They treated her like something precious. If there had been any shyness between her and them, it had left. Only Paul Cézanne did she find odd.

Sometimes Claude took her with him over the bridge to the Right Bank and the café in the Batignolles district. She wore her blue and white striped dress and a little cloth hat with a feather. The artists all sat together at the same marble table in the back. She ordered cake and Auguste finished it; she drank from their glasses, putting her pretty lips to the rim. In her exquisite dresses she sat among them like the lady she was.

Other times he wished he had had finer friends to introduce her to: not the shabby, genial Pissarro, who looked like a farmer with his old boots and untrimmed beard, nor even Auguste. But she loved them. She learned to cook two dishes and invited them to dinner with their women: Pissarro’s outspoken Julie, who had been his mother’s maid and who gazed about her, saw what had to be done, and quietly accomplished it; and impulsive, idealistic, and volatile Lise, whom Auguste was falling more in love with every day. She was the eighteen-year-old daughter of a philosophy teacher who did not mind that his beautiful daughter had taken a thin, intense painter as her lover. Her mother had run off years before.

One bright, clear winter afternoon they all met in the studio to celebrate a portrait commission Auguste had just completed of a little girl. Several painters had work stored here or hung on the walls, and others had brought new paintings. They were discussing to whom they might market them and what they should submit to the Salon, now several months away in the spring.

Camille knelt to gaze at the new work; she studied the canvases of fields in flower, country paths, and Auguste’s portrait of the child, which he was to deliver the next day.

“It’s difficult, mademoiselle,” Pissarro said from his chair across the room. “We sell something and then nothing. Most people say what we do is a sketch and against all the rules of classical art. I can count on one hand those who really believe in us.”

“This is yours, monsieur, I think! Where did you paint it?”

“Louveciennes, where I live. It’s the village road.”

Still on her knees with her skirts flowing about her, Camille let the edge of her hand hover over the painting and then looked at all of the painters. She asked, “Don’t you all understand what you are doing, all of you? You can smell the earth and the moisture in the air; it’s all here. And oh, Monsieur Renoir, your pictures of young women! They’re so fresh and happy. Someday people will pay a fortune for all of your work, but only if you allow nothing to come between you; you must remain together. Do you remember the three Musketeers, who lived
un pour tous, tous pour un
—one for all, all for one?”

Auguste gave her his hand to help her rise. “Yes, that is the way, of course! How generous and kind you are, mademoiselle!” he said. “What can we do for you? Claude tells me you love theater. Would you like some tickets? Lise adores theater. I can get some free for the Théâtre de l’Odéon through an actress I know.”

She turned brightly to Claude. “I would love to go!” she said. “I love it more than anything.”

“I know you do!”

“It’s not exactly the expensive box seats,” Auguste added, reflecting, but she declared, “Will we be high up? I always wondered what it was like!”

A small group of them made their way into the theater the next evening, exclaiming over the ornate lobby with statuary and glistening chandeliers, then mounting to the highest gallery, where they squeezed into their seats. Frédéric had nowhere to put his long legs. Camille said, “I feel like a bird looking down on everyone, that this is a secret place.”

Auguste bought nuts to eat and trod on their feet during the interval trying to climb back to his seat. “Pig!” Lise cried, kissing him. They had a playful, sharp relationship.

The friends went again that week to
Le malade imaginaire
by Molière; the great actress Sarah Bernhardt played Angélique. Camille and Lise wept over the translation of Shakespeare’s
Le roi Lear
and of the tribulations of the king’s faithful daughter Cordelia. They were fascinated by
Passant
, in which Bernhardt appeared as a boy Florentine singer, her shapely legs in close-fitting leggings.

“Women should wear leggings,” Auguste whispered. “Down with skirts. I mean that in every sense of the word.”

After the play, they all walked to a cheap restaurant, where they were served bread and some meat that claimed to be pork. The rooms were full of poor writers and poets; the actors who had smaller parts came in as well and talked loudly about what roles they hoped to have. The gaslight was so scant that they could hardly see what they ate.

“I think it’s tree bark,” Lise said, poking with her fork.

Auguste shook his head. “No, likely a corpse, and not too fresh.”

Camille put down her spoon. “I’ll just have the bread,” she said and Claude cried out imperiously, raising his hand,
“Garçon!
Bring your best cheese for madame!”

They climbed back to the room above the laundry, where they lit lamps and Camille found a copy of a Molière comedy, which she persuaded others to read with her. “I want to study acting,” she cried breathlessly to Claude when everyone had left. “Lise and I discussed it when we were walking together. We’ll share lessons. My family never let me. Would you be proud of me?”

“I’m proud of you in all you do,” he said. “I know this is what you want.” He saw a paper under the table and retrieved Auguste’s sketch of the two young women bending their heads together over one play script. He kept it carefully among his things.

Camille and Lise began to study elocution and dramatic movement privately with an elderly retired actor. They went twice a week at five francs a lesson, and Claude sometimes came back from doing his chalk portraits or painting around the city to find the furniture pushed back and Camille and Lise reciting scenes with each other, one of the two dishes Camille could cook simmering on the stove.

One evening he found Camille crying out the last words of the tragic Phèdre, expiring in her dressing gown at the foot of the table set for dinner. Lise sat cross-legged on the floor prompting her and reading all the other roles. He leaned on the door, arms folded, portfolio at his feet, smiling at them. “Monsieur! Monsieur!” they called to him, laughing and giggling. They utterly charmed him. How happy I am, he thought.

S
NOW FELL OVER
the city one night in November until the steps and horse posts and signs were covered; it surrounded the chimneys on the roofs and piled outside windows slowly, sealing them inside. They fell asleep wrapped in blankets before the fire.

Claude woke to scratching noises, and in the shadows he saw Victoire worrying a paper that had been slipped under the door. He rubbed his eyes and crawled over to rescue it, knocking down a small pile of playbooks on the floor that rested on the large purple theatrical cape Camille had acquired somewhere to wear while practicing tragic queens. He leaned near the last of the firelight to open the paper. A flush of heat shot through him.
“Merde!”
he muttered.

Camille stirred from sleep. “What is it?” she asked in the more resonant voice of her training.

He rose, pushed aside the lethargic Victoire, who was settling in to sleep in their one armchair, and dropped heavily into it. He would have given anything not to tell her, but he could think of no way around it. “It’s about the damn rent,” he said. “We have to pay it all or be out by the morning.”

“But I never heard of such a thing.” She came across the room barefoot, wrapped in her blanket, and looked gravely down at him. “People don’t do things like that. It’s not civilized. Don’t we have the money to pay them? Oh, Claude! Is it because I bought that hat? It is my fault, isn’t it?”

“But that hat belonged to you,” he said. “It was wrong that any other woman should have it. Hats! I’ll buy you twenty of them, just wait!”

“I’ll hurry over in the morning and ask my father for a loan.” She had visited her family a few times since her father had come to them.

Claude cried, “Never! And it may be too late by then.” He jumped up, pulling the carpetbag from under the bed. “I’m sending you to your sister’s now,” he said over his shoulder. “Get dressed quickly. Get your hairbrushes and your good dresses. Now, dear, now. I’ll come later.” He threw a few of her dresses into wicker trunks and bundled her into her coat. She picked up Victoire.

“I want to stay!” she said steadily.

He shook his head. “I’ll leave as quickly as I can. I know these people.”

“What do you know?” she asked him fixedly.

He fell silent, thinking of friends tossed from their houses, two painters he had met. One was thrown out without his clothes. One had been beaten. He remembered a story told in art school of the sound of old copper pots hitting the courtyard as some sculptor’s wife threw them from the window to save them. “Come on!” he cried more harshly than he wished.