Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (24 page)

Auguste said, “I came back last night to see how my mother was outside the city—she had no billeting and ate from her garden, bless her—and then I came to the city and went at once to his friend Edmond Maître, who had stayed during the siege. He knows the Bazille family, so I thought he’d have more information, and he did. He had just received a telegram from Frédéric’s father confirming the terrible news. So until then I also had some hope.”

Claude sat down then. He leaned forward, arms on his knees and hands folded. “Tell me,” he said.

“It was the end of November. His battalion was retreating near Orléans. He was tall, of course, so easy to pick out … shot in the head, the bastards. Monsieur Bazille traveled to the battlefield under a safe conduct and spent ten days finding him, and then he took his son home in a cart in the snow to bury him in Montpellier. He could get no other transportation. Frédéric’s family didn’t want him to go. They begged him not to go.”

T
HEY STAYED CLOSE
, talking softly for a long time as if afraid to disturb the air. Then Auguste kissed them both and the child, and left them. The sound of his army boots on the stairs faded away and the studio was absolutely still but for the slightly congested breathing of the little boy, who had fallen asleep in Claude’s lap.

“He’s dead,” Claude said at last. “And yet it doesn’t seem possible. We fought, you know, about you, and I said stupid things. I said … that he had never had the courage to stand on his own two feet, and he went to war to prove me wrong.”

Camille sat with her hands folded in her lap. The lovely hands were not clean, and her dress was dark in the seams from the soot of the journey. “Yes, he’s dead,” she said. “We’ve never talked about what happened. Months passed and we didn’t talk; not in Le Havre, not in that London room, which seems so far away now.”

The child stirred, and Claude stroked the boy’s long, dirty hair. “Say what you want,” he replied. “I must hear it. I’ve waited a long time to hear it.”

She did not unfold her hands, and she looked at a paint stain on the floor. Her voice was so soft he had to listen intensely. She said, “When we thought you weren’t coming back ever again from Le Havre, I turned to him. I was so lonely and frightened. We became lovers. He denied it to you, but it was true. He asked me to marry him and I wouldn’t give him an answer because I loved you so. Perhaps if I had agreed to marry him, he wouldn’t have enlisted. He wrote me when we were in Trouville and told me about your fight.”

“Did he please you more than me?”

He could have bitten his tongue at her horrified face.

Jean woke and began to cry, confused, wondering what this place was with the big windows and the steps to a loft. Claude tried to hold him, but he wailed. “I’m sorry,” he managed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I left you. I went home to my father and left you and no one knew if I was coming back. I can’t blame you. And besides, he was lovely, gentle, kind. He was everything I’m not.”

“Yes, you left me. You were in pain and I knew it; I knew it. But it is also true that all you thought of was that you couldn’t paint anymore. You couldn’t compromise, and you didn’t think of how cutting your wrist would make me feel, how it would make your friends feel. Then you came back after three months as if nothing had changed, as if I were one of the cutouts of women from the magazines you told me you pinned on your walls as a boy or the idealized drawing you made of me in a train station. You can close a sketchbook and the drawing doesn’t cry out in loneliness, missing you! You can scrub out a painting and it doesn’t feel it.”

“I wonder if it does,” he said with a shudder. “If a painting feels things.
Putain!
So much is wrong with me, Minou. I did think of you. I feel so helpless when I can’t paint.”

“Oh, Claude!” she cried, turning to him. “There were things he couldn’t tell you. Maybe if he had been able to he wouldn’t have gone away.”

“What things?”

“I can’t. I can’t!” she cried, bringing the side of her fist repeatedly to her knee.

Claude rose and knelt by Camille’s chair, and she turned to gaze at him gravely. “Listen to me!” he said miserably, his hand on her shoulder. “We need to go away. Durand-Ruel thought I should go to Holland sometime to paint. This is a good time. I don’t want to be here without him. Come with me!”

She stroked his cheek gently, and he seized her hand and kissed it. “I can’t,” she said.

“Minou, what do you mean? What am I without you? I need you.”

“Don’t you understand? I feel so weary. I can’t leave this city; I’m afraid it will disappear entirely if I do. I’ll work in the bookshop, if anything is left of it. I don’t even know where my sister and her child are. You may want to run away, but I need to gather what I can gather. I can’t go away again. And with you, sometimes … I don’t know.”

He lowered his head to her hands. “But I know about you. I know how much I love you. Is this for a time or for always?”

“I can’t tell you that. I will live above the bookshop and try to sell books.”

He slowly rose to his feet. “Very well, then,” he said. “I’ll take this as a temporary separation only. I’ll send money when I can. And one day I’ll come back and make a home for you if you want one with me. I promise this.” He closed his coat. He saw her still seated with folded hands, looking toward the window with the boy now settling into sleep at her feet and thought, I shall never paint anything this terrible or this lovely.

He opened the door but did not turn again, only said, “It’s me you love, Minou; it’s me.”

1871

The older I become the more I realize that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout
.

—C
LAUDE
M
ONET

T
HERE WERE WINDMILLS, AND THE COLORS WERE ALL
different. There is enough to paint here for a lifetime, he thought grimly. At least he knew he could earn money. Durand-Ruel, who was still in London but preparing to return to Paris, wrote that he would buy as many paintings of the Netherlands as Claude could produce. People were interested in that country.

It was winter when he came to the small town of Zaandam and found lodging in a private house. There was a high bed with thick white sheets and huge high pillows, all very clean. For a moment he wanted only to climb into it.

He unpacked his clothes, clean canvases, and new paints and walked out again. The harbor was rich, lined with wood houses behind rising ships’ masts. He set up his easel and began to work at once. When he returned to his room at dark, solitude followed him. He did not want to remember the early-morning knock at the London door, the empty Paris studio, Camille’s confession and then her refusal to come. He did not even know if she had found her sister. He fell on his bed, burying his head in the great clean pillows. I’ll paint and forget, he thought.

In the month or more following he walked or took a cart to the villages and unique windmills outside the city. No one knew his address but Durand-Ruel, to whom he sent pictures. He sent money on to Camille with no note or address. He avoided news of his own country and ate his cabbage-and-buttermilk soup alone in the tavern each night, smoking his pipe.

In the spring he broke his silence and wrote to Auguste. “How are Camille and the boy? You knew about our friend and my wife, I suppose, and never told me.” He wrote more and sent it to the Montmartre address Auguste had given him before Claude left the city.

For a few weeks there was no response, and when one came he read it standing by the harbor, staring at the words. He had left a city that he thought would heal, but it had not healed; it had crumbled.

Damn it, Claude
, tu es fou!—
You’re crazy, I did nothing; I was not complicit. You write so accusingly! I only learned about Frédéric’s feelings for Camille the night he went away to war. It’s almost hard to believe, and then again for many complicated reasons, it’s not
. Mon Dieu!
I also hoped for the old streets and cafés and our meetings again when this bloody war was over, but you fled and she’s buried beneath books and there’s rioting everywhere. So Paris is as mad as you are, my friend. Consider yourself punched for your words. And… I’m sorry, so sorry
.

We are falling away from the world of Frédéric’s painting of us all in his studio. Even that studio is gone; his father cleared it out and it is a workshop for glassblowing now. How the hell do we keep our dreams of being all together, of going on with our art? Sometimes I think we will never recover, and to be honest, I weep
.

If you haven’t read the papers, I’ll briefly recapitulate the continued sad story of beautiful Paris. The emperor’s fled to England and there’s a new government formed at Versailles. That government gave many concessions to the bastard Prussians, not to mention part of our country, Alsace-Lorraine. And the Parisians, never slow to react to that which they don’t like, have
formed a strong guard for the Paris Commune to rise against the new government. Everyone we know has taken a different side, and neighbors report on each other. A dentist was shot by accident and his body left for hours in the street. Half the people have left the city, including you, my old, dear, steadfast friend, fled to the land of windmills. Half the houses on the boulevard Saint-Germain are empty. The artisans and tradesmen are gone, and the students. I am sure papers there carry the news, and I am too sick to write more of it here
.

“Steadfast!” Claude thought wistfully. It’s kind of him to think of me that way when sometimes I wonder if I’m more than chaff in the wind.

He continued to read closely.

I have not been left peacefully to paint amid all of this. I was working on a picture of the Seine when along came the Commune guards thinking I was a spy! And many others have suffered. Cézanne’s in the south of France; Manet had a breakdown from the strain of the siege, as did pretty Mademoiselle Morisot, whose family paintings you so much admire. Pissarro returned to Louveciennes and found that his house had been used by the Prussians and that most of his paintings and yours had been destroyed
.

But now, back to beautiful Camille, you poor, jealous man. She and Jean are once more living above the shop with her sister and her sister’s child; the sister had left her husband, who turned traitor and had to flee. Camille keeps the shop exquisitely, as if it were peacetime, slipping books in place to keep her world sane while outside people bleed to death on the street. I know she would not come with you but she was wrong. Your son is charming. Do you want to sell him? Seriously, I envy you a son. I am an old bachelor and will never marry. The theaters have closed and Lise is working as a nursemaid, which she hates. She has pretty muchgiven up on me. I am wise enough, unlike you, to know that a passion for painting and an erratic income would not keep a wife content. But if I had a love like yours, I would not throw it over
.

Claude hardly knew where he was for a few moments as he tried to see the scenes described in his beloved city.

He wrote her that day, underlining much. “My love, I am enclosing money for tickets. I beg you, close up the shop and join me here. I will come and fetch you. Only say you won’t turn me away.”

No reply came. But why won’t she come? he thought. Does she still love my friend? Did she ever? Will I ever know? With all that he was he wanted to go to her and drag her away, but he could not bear the thought that she would refuse him. He wrote more letters to the shop. Then finally she began to answer. Her letters were maddeningly vague. The bookshop cat wasn’t well, and Jean was talking a lot. Nothing about the riots and the deaths and the fires set here and there, as if the bookshop on rue Dante were in another world than the rest of the city. He wrote her desperately: Why won’t you come? I have reasons, she said vaguely, and he became depressed. She is impossible, he thought.

Only underneath these things did he think that he had lost many beautiful paintings in the Prussian occupation of the house in Louveciennes.

It was a Parisian man, stopping by the tavern in early June, who told him that the Paris Commune had been overthrown and hundreds of insurgents shot in Père-Lachaise cemetery. The riots in the city had ended.

Auguste wrote sadly:

Some say we have peace again after these horrible few months. What peace can we have with the Hôtel de Ville and the Palais des Tuileries burned to the ground? With men I knew rounded up and shot? And yet in this sadness, what can we do? We must be able to do something. Now, damn it, will people see
what we have been trying to show them in our paintings for so long—the ordinary daily beauty of our country—which they took for granted and almost lost? Did we have to nearly lose it forever to appreciate it?

Claude packed his things then and thanked his landlady. On a late June day he set out for France by train. We must build our world again, he thought. I will have my love, for love between a man and a woman can also heal what has been destroyed. Neither we nor our art nor our world will ever blow away like chaff in the wind.