Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (21 page)

“Nothing to speak of.”

There was, of course, and it was of such magnitude he had not been able to form the words; he felt oddly that if he said nothing it would go away. He had told Camille that Frédéric had felt sick from his news from home and she shook her head in disbelief and wanted to know if he was better. He watched her face closely, but it registered nothing but loving concern. Then what had happened? Had Frédéric told him the truth?

We will talk in the fall when we return, Claude thought.

He could not bear to recall that he had struck his best friend in the face.

1870

Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains
.

—J
EAN
-J
ACQUES
R
OUSSEAU

H
E HAD SEEN THE RESORT AT
T
ROUVILLE SEVERAL
times but had never stayed there. Now he walked down the wide boardwalk with his little family and their dog, Victoire, the sea on one side and the hotels rising like castles on the other. His father was not in Le Havre; Adolphe Monet was away in Orléans visiting his brother. But Claude was comforted by word left for him that that his father was eager to meet Claude’s wife and son as soon as he returned.

He and Camille moved into a modest hotel off the main boardwalk.

In the weeks that followed Claude threw himself with great passion into his commissions of elegant people on the beach, the sand, the hotels, and the huge, wind-pushed flags of the boardwalk. He painted Camille in a beach chair under an umbrella with Jean digging in the sand at her side. At night they sometimes left Jean with one of the hotel maids and danced under the stars, he somewhat clumsily, laughing. Other evenings they dined with his old friends, among them Boudin and his wife and Claude’s friend Marc. A few times they delightedly gambled small amounts at the casino.

He accompanied her to a dressmaker and a hatmaker and, in another pretty shop, bought her pink shoes. He sat waiting in a chair in all the shops, biting his lip, rubbing his head and mustache, almost afraid to leave her. She glittered and laughed, so utterly happy trying on an Indian fringed silk shawl. She turned this way and that before the shop mirrors, and he saw his reflection in the mirror as well, sitting sideways in the back, a moody man who looked a little tired.

She had received a portion of her dowry; he noted wryly to himself that her parents, who lived so well, could only give her that. Still, he was determined that it be spent all on her so that her clothes would be as lovely as they had been when he first found her.

Sometimes, leaving the shop with a hatbox, she touched his cheek and asked brightly, “What’s the matter?”

“Nothing! Should there be?”

Silence held between them for a moment. She lowered her eyes and looked away. Her smile faded. He clumsily took her hand and kissed it. They strolled and he bought her a pink parasol. Once when he stopped to purchase tobacco and she went on a little ahead on the boardwalk, he saw her and his son in a new way, as you do sometimes when you see people you love from a distance.

Two months more here will heal us, he thought. Sometime on that hotel bed on a warm afternoon with the curtains drawn and Jean away with other children, we will hold each other and tell each other everything.

He did not know they would not have those months.

W
ALKING DOWN THE
boardwalk on an August day, his easel on his shoulder, he was intensely aware of groups of people gathered here and there at café tables or on the boardwalk; they were poring over newspapers, their faces startled.

He picked up a newspaper that had been left on a bench and read the front page. When he looked up, the very air seemed to have changed. He forgot his easel in his haste to return to their room and had to run back for it, quickening his step as he passed through the lobby of their hotel.

Camille had already dressed and was pacing the room. Her white parasol lay on the bed. “I heard them talking about it from the window!” she exclaimed. She looked at him fixedly, biting the edge of her finger. “I hoped you’d come back. Oh, Claude, what can it mean?”

He put his arm around her, drawing her tightly against him, looking at the bright day beyond the window and then at his son, who was seated on the floor trying to put on his shoes. He said, “The emperor’s declared war against Prussia.”

“The maid said people will start leaving at once.”

“For where? I think they may call it all off.” He did not want her to see that he felt shaken. He helped the protesting Jean with his shoe and then sat down by the window to reread the paper. The words did not seem real: “France may be invaded.” The sound of the great flapping flags he had painted turned in his mind to what he had read of the cries of war and women sobbing and fleeing before the enemy. He thought of soldiers marching through the mud, the air acrid with gunpowder, fields and vineyards burning. He had heard these things in his days in Algiers. He also knew stories of the Paris government overthrow in 1848, but he had been far away in Le Havre and only a little boy.

I
N THE NEXT
few days Trouville turned from a crowded resort filled with prosperous vacationers to a fading, half-empty town. Claude’s patrons left. Hotels were closing, and the carousel ceased to turn. The painted wood animals stood silent, waiting for their joyful little riders. Hardly anyone splashed in the waves.
War
, everyone said. In the few occupied tables of restaurants you could hear little else. Still, the bands continued to play each night, and people still gambled with a sort of defiance in the half-empty casino.

What was happening in Paris? He could not see it otherwise than he had left it: a world of artists, cafés, galleries, colorists’ shops, a life lived from one canvas to the next with a great deal of hope. It was beyond belief that it could change.

He read the letter that finally came from Auguste while walking on the emptying boardwalk. Camille was beside him, holding her pink frilled parasol to protect her from the sun, and Jean was ahead of them, chasing seagulls.

Claude, I received your letter but we have been so frantic that my mother left it in the kitchen and just this morning remembered to give it to me. You know that I moved home again, having run out of money once more, but I go to Paris every day
.

My friend, this is not the city you left six weeks ago. I hardly know the boulevards, for they’re full of marching men and flags flying and people standing on boxes making speeches for and against the war. On every corner men bellow for conscripts. Manet and Degas have joined the national guard to protect the city, and Cézanne has fled to the south of France. Pissarro is so distressed he only mumbles into his beard and says he does not know how he can leave his paintings. His house is in the path the bastards will take if they invade us and reach the city
.

To the horror of my mother and my sisters, who are so dependent on what I may do one day with my poor paintbrush, I have been conscripted, though I hope I will not have to fire at anyone, as I am incapable of it. And what about you? I know you were bought out, but there are rumors that such things will be disregarded in time of war
.

I am aggrieved and bewildered about Bazille! After you left, he broke off his marriage plans completely and began to drink a lot and not paint at all. Now he’s enlisted and left to train in the Zoaves in Algiers, though we begged him not to go and his family bought him out years ago. Wasn’t that your regiment? He said to tell you that he now has proven he has the courage to stand on his own two feet. What is he talking about? He seemed very angry. Did you fight with him?

By the water, one little girl was intensely digging a deep hole, and as he gazed at her he wondered if she might try to reach the other side of the earth as he had tried to do for hours as a boy. He turned to Camille, who had touched his arm. “What news?” she asked. “Oh, Claude, is it bad?”

He replied roughly, “They’re all damn going in one way or another, all enlisting or conscripted. I should go too. How will I manage later if I don’t go and my friends are hurt? I had my training.”

“You mustn’t go! You mustn’t!”

She clutched her parasol as if she would hold him as hard as she held it. In a voice so soft he could hardly hear her, she asked, “Is Frédéric going?”

“I don’t know,” Claude said coldly. He looked at her briefly, and then he looked away.

H
E WALKED ABOUT
the resort with his hands in his pockets during the next days; sometimes he strolled on the empty sand, kicking it, watching it fly in heaps in the air and settle again. What if the Prussians do invade? he thought. We’ll be at war; I likely won’t earn any money with my work, and we may be in danger.

When he felt he could walk no more, he stood still for a moment and looked out over the water. Boats were crossing the estuary every day for the port of Le Havre; people had already booked passage on ships abroad.

Claude thought, I’ll send her and the little one on alone to England and stay here myself to enlist. What would she do there? We know no one. Where would they go? Still, I must fight. If he’s gone, then so must I, for I’m no less a man! Then he flung himself down on the sand and buried his head in his hands.
Putain!
Frédéric! he thought. Why him and not me?

He turned resolutely to the ticket office and then walked slowly back to the nearly empty hotel. Camille was helping Jean make a picture with bits of chalk, and her fingers were dusted with pale green. She looked up at him, biting her lip. Several strands of hair fell down her neck for she had made her knot hastily that morning as if she must be prepared to leave quickly.

“We need to leave the country,” he said. “I thought to send you on alone but I can’t. I’ve got to go with you to look after you and I also don’t know if my exemption from the military will remain valid in this emergency. I’ve booked passage for us to England from Le Havre.”

“England!” she cried. “So far? I must telegraph my sister and niece. I shouldn’t leave them.”

“Suggest they leave the city. Paris may be invaded.”

“Do you think so? Oh, that can’t be!”

Camille ran downstairs to send the telegram. He looked about, not knowing what to pack first. Kneeling, he opened a small trunk and gazed down into its floral paper lining, feeling only confusion and shame.

As the ship made ready to sail from Le Havre the next day, Victoire jumped from Camille’s arms, waddled through the crowd and down the walkway, and disappeared. Jean burst into tears, but the ship was pulling away and all Camille could do was weep. Claude kept his arm about her, yet as he looked out he thought,
Frédéric
. I hit you and you have gone away I don’t know where, hating me.

Interlude

GIVERNY
January 1909

As the winter progressed, he worked obsessively on his canvases of the water lily pond. In them time was suspended; he painted the sun and the mist, the movement of the water by the wind or the wavering of the submerged water lily stems, the changing light. The canvases were horizontal, circular, and square. Some had the effects of evening: colors muting and darkening, water still reflecting.

Each day he tried to see the paintings anew.

Some horrified him and sent him into despair. Was this all he could do at this age? One day he slashed several to pieces, amid the protests of his family, and later he stood trembling as if he had destroyed part of himself. I will never exhibit any of these paintings, he thought bitterly, for they all may be bad, even the ones that remain. How do I know what is good or bad? All I have done may have come to nothing and my life may be nothing but a failure.

He stormed into the house and into the kitchen and sat down for a glass of wine. He was still distraught when his chauffeur brought in the day’s mail. Among the many letters he saw one he had ceased to expect. Would it be another bitter few sentences? Of all days, he could not bear it! Still, he had to open it, even against his better judgment.

Monet
,

Though I had resolved not to write you again, I will break that resolve but briefly to answer your question of what happened to the letters my sister wrote around the time she first met you. She brought them to my house that snowy night when you and she had to flee your rooms. She forgot them and at one time asked me to destroy them, but I did not. However, I can’t find them. Why you would want letters written to another man is something I can’t understand. I supposed she bewitched you as she did so many
.

If I find the letters I will write you again. I cannot give you more
.

Annette Lebois

He stuffed the letter in his pocket and made his way heavily back to the studio. One of the gardeners had taken away the pile of slashed canvases stacked outside. He went inside, closed the door, and stood looking at his remaining water lily paintings. More than forty of them had survived his rampage.

He thought, If my work is futile, I might as well let the critics tell me—they have never hesitated to do so. He sat down and wrote hastily to Paris and then looked for his chauffeur to take the letter to be posted.

You may exhibit the paintings in May, his letter had said, with the last words underlined.
But I will not be there
.