Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (23 page)

Lucien knelt on his chair and hit the table violently with his spoon. “They haven’t eaten the zoo animals!” he cried frantically. “They haven’t eaten my lion! They wouldn’t eat my lion.”

Pissarro drew his son on his lap, rocking him and kissing him. “What can we do but have courage?” he asked. “Every man in the French army is now on French soil. They’ll liberate Paris. Let me tell you the story of the first day I arrived in Paris from the West Indies with this mad desire to be an artist …”

When he had finished his story, he sang to them traditional songs his dark childhood nurse in the West Indies had taught him; he did not have a musical voice, but it was comforting. They all sat for a long time listening to the softly falling rain outside, with only a few candles they had taken from the synagogue supply lighting the empty soup bowls and glasses. They watched the candles burn low before saying it was late. Lucien had finished his lion picture.

Claude and Camille left to walk to their room, she holding a little bread wrapped in cloth, he carrying the sleeping Jean. The rain had almost stopped. He thought, It’s the same rain that falls on Frédéric in his regiment as he makes his way toward Paris to free it. He knew his friend was in France now.

“Soon it will be winter,” he said.

C
LAUDE WAS GONE
every day and often did not come home until dark; he was painting. There was something in the air he had never seen before: the thick, yellowish gray fog that hung over the whole city so that the sunlight was strained as through a dirty brown cloth. You could not part it with your hands. Beneath and through this aberration of light struggled the form of the immense gothic Houses of Parliament behind Westminster Bridge and the tumbling, shuddering water of the Thames, which rolled downstream to the sea. He painted both passionately.

He had brought some canvases and paint from France. He and Pissarro hoarded them, sometimes painting over one. Sometimes he walked around in the parks and saw artists following wealthy people, crying, “Sir, sir, two shillings for a drawing. One shilling …” Day after day he became more aware of the poverty of London: the dark, narrow alleys; the rotten food; the naked children; the hands sliding in his empty pockets to find what they could there. He became aware of the hundreds of beggars.

The cold came and the skies were cloudy again. Winter settled in and he and Pissarro ran out of canvases. When they had no more they could sacrifice to paint over, they did not paint but stood on Brick Lane talking about the latest news from Paris. Camille was not in the restaurant; she had likely gone somewhere with Julie. Claude was suddenly very tired. He made his way to his room and lay down, covering himself with the blanket and his coat, and immediately fell asleep.

Someone was knocking at the door, waking him.
“Entrez! La porte est ouverte!”
he called irritably.

On the threshold, wearing a fine cashmere fur-trimmed coat and a top hat and looking about curiously, stood the great painter Daubigny.

Claude rose, stumbling over a shoe. “Monsieur,” he stammered. “I didn’t know you were in London. Come in. I can’t excuse this humble place, but we all do the best we can. If you’ll wait, I’ll go out for some wine. I’m happy to see you; I can’t tell you how happy.”

Daubigny glanced discreetly about, and then looked at Claude. “I heard a rumor you were in London but only found you now. I may have an opportunity for you. My art dealer has moved here from Paris as so many of us have. I tried to get him interested in your work a few years ago and now he wants to meet you. You have undoubtedly heard of him: Paul Durand-Ruel. You have been painting London? Good.”

H
E SELECTED HIS
paintings hastily; he could not find a clean shirt. He climbed into a hansom cab after Daubigny and they maneuvered through the heavy traffic, descending at New Bond Street and entering a gallery with the walls full of paintings and racks of drawings. It was so like the Paris gallery where he had tried to show his work and met only refusal from the art dealer’s assistant.

On one wall hung a painting by the beloved artist Corot of a forest with trees in blossom. It brought such a longing for rural France to Claude that his eyes filled with tears. He wanted to climb inside the picture. The slightly plump man with prematurely white hair who walked toward him blurred for him. Claude murmured,
“Bonjour;
I am Claude Monet.”

“I am Paul Durand-Ruel, monsieur,” replied the art dealer, shaking his hand. “How odd we two should meet in this strange city! I see you have brought some of your work. Will you show it to me?”

Claude leaned his canvases against the wall one by one, and the art dealer walked back and forth in front of them, taking in the oil painting of the port of London with all its ships’ masts, churning water, and intense clouds above, the Thames at Westminster Bridge with a few distant boats, and a somber, lonely painting of a scarcely populated Hyde Park. At last Durand-Ruel turned to him. He said, “I think I can sell them. I’ll take all three at two hundred francs each.”

Claude stared at him. He said at last, “When we were in Paris you wouldn’t so much as look at my work, no matter how I tried. What has changed your mind, monsieur?”

“Sometimes good things come out of great misfortunes, Monet. I did not expect any good to come out of this, but perhaps it has. I am sorry to have turned you away in Paris. I didn’t think I could sell your work there. I do believe I can sell it here. Daubigny guarantees it. I shall pay you in English pounds, of course.”

A
S THEY RODE
away in a cab together, he thanked Daubigny until he had no more words, and when he found himself in Spitalfields again, he stood watching the cab wobble away with the great artist within. Here, in this strange and foreign place, one of the artists he most admired had stood up for him, and he now had more money in his pocket than he’d had since he left Trouville.

He turned to the market, which spilled down the street in front of food shops. He carried his remaining paintings, and now he bought a wicker basket and hurried from shop to shop. From the dairy he bought eggs, cream, butter, and cheese; from the poulterer a freshly killed chicken; and from a sausage maker, two long ropes of sausage. Pissarro would need some too. He bought jars of asparagus and jams so sweet that the seeds seemed to press against the glass. He bought tobacco and English biscuits and hurried with the paintings and parcels down the street and through the restaurant to the kitchen.

Camille had returned. She was washing dishes, her hair under a kerchief, a great apron covering her dress, her sleeves rolled up, and her hands plunged in hot water. “Minou!” he cried. “I’ve sold three pictures to the greatest art dealer in Paris! I’m sending Pissarro to see him tomorrow and the man will take my friend if he wants anything else from me! He’ll sell them all over the world. This is the beginning, here, today!”

She looked at the baskets and parcels and then at him so tenderly. “Oh, Claude,” she said.

His desire rose fiercely for having been hidden away these months. He half pulled her into their room, trying to manage her hand and the baskets and the canvases. She laughed first, and then her pretty face grew serious and she drew in her breath sharply, in longing. He stifled her mouth with kisses. He pushed her onto the bed. Her worn, mended stockings were scratchy and left her legs reddened. Her belly was the same beautiful shape, still faintly etched with stretch marks from bearing their son. He was not slow but rough and fast, and she gasped and rose breathless to meet his thrusts. The kerchief came off, and her hair was dirty. Her hands smelled of cheap soap.

They lay close to each other for a moment when they were done, each in their own thoughts. Slowly she moved away and felt for her undergarments. Louis was calling her from the kitchen.

“You’re my muse,” he whispered. “My woman in the green dress.”

“I am a sad muse now, Claude,” she replied. “And all my pretty dresses are again pawned or sold. I don’t blame you. I only want to be home again. I only want this dreadful war to be over.”

He nodded; he wished she would not go. He felt words forming in his throat but they had not time to come.

At Christmas she placed a candle in the window once more to welcome the wandering Virgin and her child. By this time a few things had changed. He knew a little English, mostly curse words. He had sold a few more paintings, and she had stopped working in the restaurant. Through the one small window he saw the snow falling over London, and taking his coat and sketch pad, he went out. He stopped beneath an old market awning no one had taken down, sketching rapidly on a pad he held with the edge balanced on his chest, drawing the world as he wanted it.

T
HE NEWS THAT
France had conceded defeat came in late January as he walked home with his easel over his shoulder. He knew only that the headlines on the papers included the word
Paris
. “We have lost the war,” someone said, “but Paris is free.” Claude sank to the curb, leaning on the milk cart, stupidly watching the trickle of thin blue milk in the gutter.

Friends gathered in the street, in rooms, in the restaurant that night. “We have lost Alsace-Lorraine to the bastards,” someone said. Claude mingled with them and then retreated to his room. Camille followed with their son; she stood with her back to the door as if keeping London away, her face glowing as he had seen it do when he had first taken her to the theater.

He held out his arms and she came into them. “I’ll see my sister again,” she said. “I’ll see my friends.” There was a wonder and a determination in her voice; he laughed a little, feeling she would float away just then and go home. All night he heard happy voices outside. He barely slept. In his mind he was walking with his friends to their independent exhibition at last. He held her and his son, having no words for his joy.

Then he slept so deeply he did not at first hear the knocking on the door. He woke to the first light coming through the one dirty window.

Pissarro stood in the yard, his coat open, his head lowered. “What is it?” Claude asked sleepily. “Are the children all right?”

The artist leaned against the door frame. The white hairs in his beard shone a little by the candle in the tin holder he held in his hand. He said, “Claude, it’s bad news. We had a letter late last night from Edmond Maître in Paris.”

I
T’S NOT TRUE
, Claude told himself. It’s a mistake. They make these mistakes all the time. He’s there in the studio. Why didn’t I write him before?

Camille was reading and rereading the letter by the window; he wanted to snatch it from her. “We’re returning at once!” he said. “I don’t believe it for a moment.”

And yet as she packed it seemed that she did not even want him to touch her hand. He stayed across the room, arranging his own things in bags. Jean understood nothing but kept whimpering. “Be still!” she shouted at him in a terrible voice. Claude picked up the child and hushed him. Suddenly it seemed that every unsaid thing between him and Camille was about to come forth. I shall say nothing, he told himself. But he did not say her name under his breath, only that of his friend in the studio in the rue de la Condamine.

The train station was nearly empty but for porters, and they boarded, carrying the sleeping Jean, dragging their suitcases and some paintings. He had asked Pissarro to bring the others to Durand-Ruel. On the boat to Calais he stood for a time leaning by the rail, watching the churning waters until he could no longer see England. Jean was crying with the cold, and Claude took him inside.

The port of Calais was full of Prussian soldiers and French customs officials. One turned over their clothes and a few books. “Traveling is not easy,” he said. “The country is occupied, and some tracks have been destroyed.”

Camille refilled her water bottle and bought thick soup from a Frenchwoman, who ladled it from a pot over coals. She stumbled a little; she had not slept the whole night on the ferry and little the night before on the train from London. Sometimes she leaned against Claude, and other times she sat apart from him, looking ahead of her.

In the midst of a crowd they boarded the French train, whose doors and windows were icy to the touch. The train rocked through the night, stopping once for an inspection. Prussians came through, opening people’s wicker baskets.

Parts of the tracks were gone, and dozens of passengers descended to wait for wagons. For a time they traveled that way, pulled by farm donkeys and then by ferry and wagon again, before rejoining a small, rough train. All the way he heard stories of how the crops had rotted in the field last autumn and the grapes had withered on the vine for lack of men to bring them in.

T
HEY WERE SILENT
as they approached the rue de la Condamine, though they walked quickly. In the end they were running, holding Jean in turn. The concierge was not there and the house door was unlocked. Claude used his iron key and entered the studio, calling, “Frédéric!”

Late-afternoon light fell on all the paintings hung on the wall; dust motes danced in the air. The easels were empty, and the stove was cold. No one had made a fire there in a long time. Claude walked in slowly as if afraid to disturb anything. He sat down in the chair he had sat in that night when he and his friend had quarreled.

Above, someone moved.

A thin soldier came down the stairs, and it was a moment before Claude recognized Auguste. His friend came straight toward them and embraced them. “I saw you across the street from the window,” Auguste said. “I’m sorry if I startled you. How did you get back so quickly? I returned yesterday. Well, now I have seen a little of war, but no action. That was left for others. Frédéric and I wrote to each other a bit, you know, saying the whole thing was not as glamorous as we had supposed. Then word came and we telegraphed London.”

“It can’t be true,” Claude said stubbornly.

“We had better sit down,” Auguste said. He pulled out a chair at the table for Camille and sat himself. Claude shook his head.