Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (20 page)

He rose and felt in his trouser pockets, taking out a tiny box. By the streetlamp he opened it. “This was my mother’s betrothal ring,” he whispered, lifting out the gold band with its one small pearl. “It’s not dried grass, it’s real.”

A
LMOST EVERYONE HE
knew came to the restaurant in the Batignolles district for the wedding reception. The private room glittered with brass fixtures, engraved glass, and polished wood. He often sought her hand, because the secular wedding ceremony had dazed him.

Her parents had come from Lyon. They brought Camille’s
grandmere
, a tiny, intelligent woman, her back crooked and her smile wide and generous. She gave her granddaughter one of her own brooches and kissed Claude warmly. Annette came with her husband, who frowned at everyone. On Claude’s side of the family, his brother arrived with his wife, a bit bewildered by Claude’s boisterous friends but impressed enough by Frédéric, who carried himself gravely as best man. Claude’s father sent money and his regrets; he was too ill to travel that day. Claude’s old friend Marc from Le Havre walked about telling everyone of Claude’s wild boyhood days, drinking a great deal.

Little Jean, who was running as fast as he could around the table, collided with Claude’s legs. Claude picked him up and tossed him in the air, and the boy shrieked happily, ran away, and climbed on Frédéric’s lap. Frédéric clasped him tightly and whispered in his ear.

Their good friend Edmond Maître played Offenbach for an hour or more until Camille rose and took her sister’s hand. “Let’s sing the aria from
La Périchole
together,” she begged. “Let’s sing together as we did as girls back in Lyon!” They stood together by the spinet, Camille in her dusty pink silk wedding dress with delicate silk roses in her hair. Claude sat back in his chair and watched her. He remembered the first day they had spent alone together and how she had gone home with him impulsively and thrown off all her clothes.

As the song died away to whistles of approval, Claude glanced down the room. Frédéric’s napkin lay on the table, his glass of champagne half drunk, and his chair pushed back and empty. He was gone.

Claude rose at once, a bit unsteadily. He looked around the restaurant and finally pushed open the street door to the soft early-evening air. He was now in a state so strange for him, so emotional, so precarious, that his friend’s leaving affected him deeply. His homecoming and the marriage had been so sudden that he had had no time to speak to Frédéric about what was happening to him. Once more Frédéric had managed everything, and though he did not seem a ghost anymore, he seemed a little dazed, especially this evening.

Claude sent word by a waiter that he would be back directly.

It was three streets to the new studio on the rue de la Condamine where Frédéric had now moved, and Claude walked them carefully, crossing once between the early-evening traffic and the omnibuses carrying clerks and shopgirls on their way home from work. He mounted the building steps, fumbled with the key in the lock, and pushed open the door to the large studio.

An unfinished painting rested on Frédéric’s easel, and his coat was thrown over a chair. “Damn it, Bazille! Where are you?” Claude cried as he climbed the open wood steps to the sleeping loft, holding a little to the wall.

Frédéric was lying facedown in his bed. He raised himself on his elbow and blinked. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I drank too much. What are you doing here? Isn’t everyone still celebrating?”

“Why did you disappear?”

“I’m wretched, Claude. I got a letter from home this morning. Lily’s changed her mind about living in Paris half the year. She wants me to live there full-time.”

Claude pulled off his tie impatiently and opened a few of the buttons on his satin floral vest. “What did I tell you?” he exploded. “That’s it, then. Damn it, Frédéric! Tell her to go to hell. Stay with us. Stay with us.”

“I don’t know what I’ll do. The world’s a little crazy now. Did you see the newspapers today? The Prussians want to put one of their princes on the Spanish throne, which means another country could align against us. What I do seems insignificant next to the decisions of our emperor, who says we will go to war to prevent them.”

“Merde!
I don’t give
merde
for the emperor! What do we have to do with this anyway?”

“Nothing!” Frédéric said, rising. “You’re too drunk to be walking the streets. Let’s go downstairs and make some coffee, and then you should go back.”

Hand on the wall, Frédéric descended the steps before Claude. “What answer will I give them at home? It keeps rolling around in my mind,” he said over his shoulder. “Damn it, I have to start the stove to boil water.” Below, he picked up the bag of coffee beans on the shelf. He said, “Maybe I’ll come with you. I knew you’d worry when I left, but there’s nothing to worry about.”

“You’re my best friend, so I worry.” Claude felt for a chair and sat.

Frédéric hurled the coffee grinder, which clattered across the floor and came to rest, rocking, beneath the table. He shouted, “Stop thinking that! There are things I haven’t told you. Do you remember when we went to Fontainebleau for you to make that painting?”

Claude said, bewildered, “Of course I remember. What’s the matter?”

“I made love to Camille that night.”

Claude shook his head and laughed. “You’re drunk. Now I know it.”

“I’m telling you the truth,” Frédéric exclaimed. “It wasn’t planned.”

“You’re not drunk.”

“I’m drunk enough to tell you the truth.”

Claude stared at him. “I think you’d better tell me then,” he said.

Frédéric crossed the room, so close that his arm brushed against Claude’s shoulder. “I had gone outside to smoke alone because I couldn’t sleep, and she was there, crying. We started to talk and suddenly we were pouring out all sorts of things. We found a little deserted chapel and went inside. She didn’t want her fiancé and I’d just had a bad letter from home. She told me she had already had lovers.”

He picked up a tube of paint and turned it over, staring at the label. “It was the first time for me and then, damn it, it seemed she had lied and it was the first time for her. I knew what that meant in our class. I felt then I should marry her, tell them at home and marry her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said we should never refer to it again. And she went home with her sister and I went home to my fiancée, but I thought of her. I have never stopped thinking of her, though I have been a perfect gentleman, except of course with you, my best friend…. I’ve held this secret. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you, but I was sick with jealousy tonight and sick of all my broken plans. She had made me promise never to tell you. She knew it would upset you.”

The chair wobbled as Claude jumped up. He wrapped his arms around his chest and walked back and forth, kicking the coffee grinder. “It’s true, it has upset me,” he answered. “Then again, should I blame you? You didn’t know back then, of course, that later she and I would fall in love. Only it makes me damn uncomfortable.”

He stared at his friend, who remained by his easel with his half-completed painting of a fisherman. Frédéric had taken up a tube of paint and was turning it over and over in his hands; he kept his eyes lowered.

Claude cried, “So it’s the truth. You made love to my wife. My wife
—ma femme
… but she wasn’t my wife then. But when I went away those two times over the past few years, you and she were alone. I know you helped her, looked after her, took her to dinner, but
was
there more? Was there?” He forced himself to stay by the table.

“The first time, when she was pregnant, no. We were shy with each other. And she loved you so.”

“Very good, but then? This last time? This past winter? Tell me!”

Frédéric reached out and put his hand on the top of the canvas on the easel. He cried, “Damn it, you said you weren’t coming back. That’s the last thing you said. I wanted to and she wouldn’t; then once she wanted to, and I said no. The main reason was you. She loves you. And I love you. I do, damn it. If you came back I knew she’d return to you. If you came back.”

His head shot up; a dark patch of his chest hair showed where he had opened his white shirt, and his neck seemed very thin. He cried, “But I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I bought the picture of her in the garden for that reason. Four women in the garden. After we had made love that one time and I returned to Montpellier, I thought I’d break my engagement to Lily and find Camille. Then suddenly she was yours.”

But all Claude could think of was the many months in which he could not make love and that perhaps she had confided this to his best friend, and that perhaps when he could not, his friend could very well. He fiddled with his vest buttons, flushed with shame, and shouted, “You wanted to take her from me, you … !”

“We thought you weren’t returning. I could give her what she needed, which you have tried so hard to do. A calm, pleasant life.”

“You …” Claude pushed Frédéric against the wall near the window, and the back of his hand struck his friend’s face. He felt the cheekbone. The easel wobbled and Claude caught it. Frédéric put up his hand.

“Did you have to hit me?” Frédéric asked. “Damn you!” He pushed past Claude to the table and sat down.

Claude dropped down on the chair next to him. He muttered, “How could you? Nothing can ever be the same now between us.” He let his hand hover over Frédéric’s shoulder.

Frédéric jerked away. “Don’t touch me!” he gasped.

Claude shouted, “You’ve hurt me! Bad enough you slept with my wife in Fontainebleau, but then she and I weren’t lovers. Worse for you both to lie about it to me these past few years and, yes, to ask her to come to you. What about your marriage? You’re ending that possibility and helping yourself to mine!”

“You have never understood anything!” Frédéric shouted, looking up.

Claude slammed one hand on the table. “I understand you tried to persuade Camille to come with you. That’s all very well and good with all your family money. Of course, you were thrown together when I was away. When she was pregnant and I stayed with my family for a time, when I went back again because I couldn’t paint anymore, I trusted you. I thought you were …”

“Utterly honorable?”

Claude flung back his head and cried out to the sleeping loft above, “I did, God help me. But you spent a great deal of time together. Or maybe there are more times with her you haven’t told me about.”

“One time. I told you the truth.”

“How do I know? You could give her just what she needed, a lovely life. It’s easy for you, damn it! Everything’s always been easy for you. You’ve never had the courage to stand on your own two feet.”

Frédéric reared up and shoved him so that Claude’s chair almost fell over. “I have more courage than you know!” he shouted. “I have the courage to paint and yet not to walk away from my family. I love painting and I love people, but the truth about you is that all you really love is what you can create. You went away this past winter once more, to leave everyone waiting. ‘Oh, it’s all right!’ you’d say. ‘I’m a genius. Everyone will wait for me!’”

“You called me a genius, not me!”

They stood glaring at each other. Claude said bitterly, “So you thought to relieve me of the burden of Camille and my son by taking them over! I should never have let you pay our rent, or lend me money. One day I’ll pay you back for everything. I swear it. I want no obligation to you. I came after you tonight because I was worried about you. You had some fantasy about your very provincial Lily living in a house in Paris with a bunch of grubby painters.”

Claude wiped his mouth. Once more he was aware of the wedding party at the restaurant, that people by now must be wondering when he would return, and that Camille was laughing and dancing, quite unaware of any of this.

He said stiffly, “I think I’ll go off with her and pretend you never told me this. That painting you made of all of us and our friends here last week: It’s not true. It was a vision. You’ll knuckle under and go home. Likely when I come back you’ll have moved back to Montpellier. I wish you well. I do.”

“You have never understood anything, least of all what you are to me.”

“I understand you live in a dream of all of us. I have to go on, and I expect you will too. I will read about you in the news journals one day: the successful Dr. Bazille, kindly, aged, stooped, father of eight children, off to church each Sunday, city father, benefactor of this and that, because in the end that’s really what you want most.”

His words dried. He said,
“Putain!
I have to get back. Everyone will be wondering. Let’s shake hands at least.”

Frédéric extended his cold hand without emotion. “There.”

“Why didn’t you hit me back?”

“I wouldn’t have stopped, Claude. For lots of reasons.”

C
LAUDE CAME BACK
to the wedding dinner dazed, not realizing how long he had been gone. He fell into bed that night and dreamt nothing. The next day he was in a hurry to put their things in storage. Camille was busy too, arranging for a cousin to keep the bookshop open. They were to honeymoon in Trouville, where he would paint.

He left some of his paintings at the shop. Many were at Frédéric’s; he did not know what to do about that. The last few dozen, including the one he had made with Boudin of the rising sun, he brought to Pissarro’s house in Louveciennes, walking from the train station up the road in the bright morning to the stone cottage.

“We’ll put them in the empty stable, where I store mine,” Pissarro said.

Light poured through the stable windows, and in each of the four standing stalls Claude saw hundreds of his friend’s paintings, mounted or rolled on low wood stands, endless landscapes of the French countryside with its village roads and abbeys and markets and trees in spring. “It’s my life’s work,” Pissarro said. “Put yours here. When you come back I’ll bring them to you. Good luck you have your commissions this summer. We’ll see each other in the fall. Is something on your mind? You look as if there is.”