Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (19 page)

He left the house in the dark, feeling his way down the stairs without a candle. Once in a cab he slept; he woke to the driver shouting at him that they had reached the train station. Dawn was rising over Paris as he saw the train roar toward him majestically, filling the air with noise and smoke. Hiding his bandaged wrist under his coat, he boarded the third-class car and slumped on the seat as the countryside rolled past him.

He went home to Le Havre.

I
N A WAY
he hoped to go home as if he were seventeen again and just returning from painting with Boudin: to find his mother singing at the piano and his aunt sewing in the corner. Many visitors would be expected, and his cousin might let him kiss her. He wanted it so much he almost thought it would happen.

It was not that way, of course. Only his father came anxiously from the shadows of the house as if he feared a thief. “Claude,” he said. And Claude saw that his father was sick indeed, his formerly full face haggard, his trousers held up by suspenders.

Claude said abruptly, “I’ve come to help you. I’m done with painting. I’ll take over the shop.”

They stood a few feet apart, unwilling to come closer. “You’re done with painting? What do you mean you’re done with painting? What have you done there with your wrist? But what about the young woman and your son?”

Claude shook his head; he remembered his words in the letter and knew she had read them by now. He looked down the hall to the back garden door. Any moment his younger self would rush in the door, mud on his shoes. Then his father said, “Claude,
mon fils
—my son!” and he felt he could not bear it.

I
T WAS AS
if his father’s ship chandlery on the wharf had waited for him—the nautical lanterns, drying rope, and paint. Sails rolled in the back. Claude sat down clumsily in the swivel chair behind the desk, pulling out old letters and bills.

The air was musty and cold because the shop had been locked for some weeks since the last assistant had gone away. Seeing the lantern in the window this dull day, a few men came in wanting small items but mostly to talk and warm their hands by the stove. The talk was of fishermen and boats and prices and someone they knew who had gone down with his boat the month before and had not been found.

He walked to the shop every morning through the winter wind. More old customers stopped by, having heard that Adolphe Monet’s son had returned. At night he went home to eat what Hannah had cooked. Once or twice his brother came, bringing his wife and their twin girls, who reminded Claude so much of his son.

Two days after he had come he received her letter.

I cried and cried at your words. What do you mean you aren’t coming back? You’re my life and I’m yours. All our friends
are very kind to me, but I want you. You wrote no one is to visit you. I don’t know what to do. I know you’ll be back. I know you will
.

He missed her so; he went to sleep that night holding the pillow against him and pretending it was her. He kept her letter under the pillow.

Every day letters came from her and his friends, and sometimes he did not read them. He could feel the compassion and love and disappointment and hope seep from under the envelopes, and he could not bear it. He forbade them to visit. When he wrote to her he hardly remembered what he said. He said he was coming back; he said he would not come back.

If only I could paint again, he thought. I must try. At least I can try. Then I can think.

One morning three weeks after he had arrived, he left the house before breakfast, taking his easel and a canvas and some paints from a few years before that he had forgotten in a burlap bag at the bottom of the wardrobe. He walked until he came to the sea, and then he walked over the sand, choosing a place to set his easel. There was the white wild surging of the sea, sometimes darting so close to his shoes it washed over them. It half dared him and half regarded him coolly.

He raised his hand with the charcoal, but it did not meet the canvas.

He stared down at his tubes of colors and at his hand.

He waited for nearly an hour, but the world that had leaned into him like a lover and flowed out again through his brush did not approach him. He cried aloud, hurled the canvas into the high grass, and went home.

Mon cher
Frédéric, This will be sad, so prepare yourself. Drink a little brandy, perhaps. How to begin? I owe you so much. Perhaps you saved my life. Can there be more than that?

What I regret most is not confiding more in you in the past several months, but then neither do you confide in me as you go forward in your marriage, which I feel can’t make you happy! One day I came to the studio hoping to find you, but you weren’t there. I saw your painting of the girl in the pink dress with the village far behind her and understood again what a fine painter you are
.

The truth is, I believe our independent exhibition to be the fantasy of a group of tired, struggling artists who will one by one find this whole thing too difficult and give up. I write different things to Minou every day; she must think I’ve lost my mind. Don’t come here, any of you. Don’t fetch me again; don’t rescue me! What for?

Right now I don’t think I’m coming back. Please make sure Minou and my son don’t lack for anything
.

Claude

That was that, then. Outside, men in weatherproof coveralls shouted above the rain and ran for shelter, wet fish glistened, and the dark gray clouds paused and thickened and rained harder into the sea. He rose and cleared a place in the glass to look at the colors. Some man ran past the window, shouting something, his voice lost in the thunder and rain, and then he was gone.

The rain ended after several days. The thick gray clouds were silent, the air was cold and damp, the water lapped uneasily. Men walked in wet footsteps down the wharf. As Claude watched them through the window, he heard the shop door open, and his old friend Boudin came in.

Claude stood up from the creaking chair.

Boudin greeted him with a brief handshake and turned to examine some hanging nets. Men who lived in these parts were not quick to words: they did not hurl them out and knock them about for the pleasure of it, but took them carefully from their pockets and laid them on the table before them. Boudin said lightly, “So, my young friend! I’m back from wintering in warmer parts and was surprised to find you here. How’s the painting going?”

“It’s not. I can’t,” Claude said. He stayed by the desk. “It’s stopped and with it I’ve stopped as well. I’m not there if it’s not there.” He reached down to feel the edge of an accounting book. “I’m sorry to tell you this above all men, believe me. I will never forget your kindness to me, arrogant boy that I was.”

Boudin nodded. “To be honest, the painter Daubigny wrote and told me,” he said. “One of your friends must have told him. It happens, you know, but never before for you, eh?”

Claude shook his head slowly; he folded his arms across his chest. He frowned and looked out the window. Boudin’s voice carried to him over the damp wood of the shop.

“Happened to me three or four times … maybe a dozen. Threw down my hat, locked up the paints, tried to tell my wife, and found my throat closing.”

Claude sat down in the chair again, stroking his beard. Boudin sat down as well, taking off his old brown hat and looking from the window now and then.

“It gets battered,” he said after a time, scratching his thick gray curly hair. “The part of us that paints—if not by want of success, then by us always demanding more from it. Not enough to paint the same thing for us, but we always want to do better. And so we have to …” he raised his hands and shaped the damp air “… let it rest wherever it’s hidden and after a while coax it a little. Coax it out. Life makes one humble, doesn’t it? You have a great gift, Claude. It’s what you are. I sensed it from the first time I saw your drawings and, yes, you were arrogant but you were young and unhappy. You have open seas now, my friend. I hear your father’s ill, poor man.”

The concluding words were few and yet they touched Claude so he could hardly respond to them. In a way he dreamt of them. As he slept, the harbor water seemed to lap at his bed until it reached the edges of his blanket and his dangling hand. Outside, the wind, which troubled the sails, knocked also on his window.

He woke in darkness one morning to the sound of a pebble against glass. Climbing from bed and going to the window, he made out Boudin below with a lantern. “Claude,” the voice whispered, rising past the winter trees. “Come with me. I have a room overlooking the harbor I paint from early mornings. The sun will rise within an hour. Just to keep me company, if you will.”

They turned down the road from the hill to the harbor, where they drank coffee at a fishermen’s café before climbing the stairs of the old hotel.

He looked out the window in the room. There was the dark sea, and on the horizon, far away, the first hint of orange-gold light. He slouched in a chair and watched his mentor paint. “It’s gone for me; it’s gone,” Claude said.

“Be still and wait. I’m here every morning in this hotel room for the next week.”

For two more days Claude woke before dawn. On the third morning he threw on his clothes and made his way down to the harbor with his lantern. It was still perfectly dark. He went to the room and saw that Boudin was sleeping. Instead of one easel facing the window there were two.

From the depths of the blankets, the older artist stirred. “Monet,” he said,
“I challenge you.”

Claude took up the palette, which was not his, and prepared it by the lantern light; he felt the weight of his teacher’s brush.

Far across the water, low on the horizon stretched a thin line under the clouds of rosy orange gold, and the sun rose. As he worked, his brush became the sea and dark bits of boats and the spreading light. He raced the color; he snatched at it as it changed.

When he paused for breath he felt Boudin standing behind him. “Not bad for a start, Monet,” he said.

H
E KNEW
C
AMILLE’S
uncle had suffered a heart attack and retired to the country and that she had decided to take over the bookshop and had moved into the rooms above it with Jean. Claude had written to her often, and then, for a time, seldom. He said he was coming back, and then he said he wasn’t. She answered him that she would wait for him. He wrote her passionately. Then she was silent for three days and her letter, when it arrived, was cautious.

He read it several times in his boyhood room in his father’s house, walking up and down. Had he really been away more than three months, the period of his terrible darkness and then the rapturous reunion with the world through his art? Having that again, his heart opened to everyone. Now he reread her last several letters and saw them for what they were. A sentence at a time, they had ceased to implore.

“Do you want me again?” he wrote wistfully from his desk, but he could not wait for an answer. He paced and chewed his nails, which always smelled of paint. No, he could not wait anymore; he must go to Paris and find the truth though he was sick to do it. His heart was heavy that evening as he told his father that he was returning. “I shall close the business,” the old man said. “But it’s right that you return to your woman and child. Bring them here to meet me soon.”

Do I have a woman? Claude thought.

The four hours of the train ride seemed days, and then when he arrived he could hardly make his feet go quickly enough to the rue Dante.

The ancient cat was sleeping in the window on one of the volumes of the encyclopedia in the bookshop when he walked cautiously through the door with his paintings and bag on an early May day. A young man who had worked here before sat behind the desk. Claude glanced up the stairs and asked, “Madame has gone out? She expects me.”

The young man replied, “She’s gone out with the little one. Go up, monsieur, if you like, and wait for her.”

Some of her things in her rooms were still in boxes, but others lay scattered about: her pink petticoat, her hair combs. He picked up one of her white chemises and held it to his nose. His paintings were stacked against the wall, and his son’s wooden wagons and donkeys were heaped in a corner under the window. He lay down on the bed, her dressing gown in his arms, and slept until he felt his little son climbing on his chest, exclaiming, “Papa! Papa!”

He said, “You darling. Yes, it’s me.” Holding his wiggling son passionately against him, he turned his head to see Camille standing tall and gravely at the door in a little gray veiled hat, something so very removed about her. He knew then he had been away too long. He rose, forcing himself across the room. She stood as if waiting. He lightly kissed her mouth as an inquiry. He could feel her shudder slightly with emotion, but she did not move, only waited as if watching them both.

His voice was unsteady. “Have I lost you by what I’ve done?” he murmured, his forehead against hers. “In going to recapture who I am, have I lost what I love? In some weeks more would it have been too late, and you would have gone on without me?”

She put her hand on his. “I would have come back,” she said. “I would have come after you, but I couldn’t bear it if you sent me away.”

Later, when night had fallen and the child was asleep, he came cautiously into the bed where she lay smiling, her hair loose on the pillow, arm behind her head. He kissed her tentatively then, thinking, but what if I am not able to make love to her as I mostly could not in the months before I left? Then he forgot and it returned naturally. The bed creaked and she clung to him.

They lay together as if listening to all the books below them. Shadows hovered on the ceiling from the streetlamp below.

“I’ve done so much clumsily,” he whispered. “But I can take care of you now. Boudin introduced me to some possible patrons; they’re commissioning me to paint several pictures of the resort of Trouville just across the estuary from Le Havre this summer for a good deal of money, but I’ll go only if you go. I want you to meet my father … and I want to take you there as my wife. It will be our honeymoon.”