Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (28 page)

“Yes, I generally walk that way to listen to it in the dark.”

“I used to come outside with my sisters at night and exchange secrets. We also hid about the house; it was our special place, full of hidden rooms and stairs. My girls think they know them all, but I discovered them first.” She laughed and he looked down at her. She was a little dowdy and plump, her brown hair in a loosely gathered lump at her neck and her walk a bit clumsy.

As they came closer to the river they heard the flowing water. “I feel this place isn’t ours, really,” she added. “We’re keeping it for the children and their children. Many generations will play here. I’ll be old and watch them.”

When they walked back, he felt the darkness about them and the huge bulk of the château with its many secrets, all preserved somehow in hidden drawers, chests, and corners where children ran and hid and were happy.

A
T FIRST HE
said to himself, I am not drawn to her. He had to say it, as he had noticed her coming into his thoughts frequently. Sometimes he wondered, What can she think of me? He no longer felt young; he was thirty-six years old, and his age was beginning to show. Auguste said his face had increased in interest. He seldom thought about it, but he did now. How was he seen? Now when she was not there he was sorry. Sometimes he turned around to see if Alice Hoschedé had come in, but it was only his wish. He listened for her voice.

She was so steady. She seemed happy with her husband; she seemed contented. They laughed a little at the table and had their private references. Sometimes she blushed. He felt then bitterly that he had wrong thoughts about someone who was happy, that he stood at the gate looking in, never knowing what he would find in his own home, admiring the security of hers. He knew she was deeply religious, and was rather appalled to realize there was a chapel in the house and that a priest came to say Mass there when the family was at home. He smelled the incense. He remained defensively atheistic. He suspected his mother’s faith had kept her unhappily with his father. He was polite enough to say nothing and yet he wondered if some of Alice Hoschedé’s stability came from the deep order of things her religion gave. There was an answer to everything and some celibate priest to explain it. He doubted it and yet envied its comfort.

“You seem so happy,” he said to her one day as she sat with her sewing in the gazebo as he painted.

She carefully took another stitch with the blue silk thread on the pattern that would decorate the sleeve edge of a child’s dress. “I am! I don’t know if there is such a thing as perfect happiness, though; not on this earth. We have to keep it within ourselves, a little steady flame. Perhaps your painting does that for you.”

“I am merely a craftsman,” he said gruffly.

“A little more than that. You show me the beauty of this place. I hope one day you’ll paint my children. Do you paint people?”

“Yes, I have painted my wife a great deal.”

“What is she like, your wife?”

He hesitated, the white paint on his brush not yet descending to the turkey feathers. “She’s lovely and radiant and at times incredibly courageous.”

“I see you bring letters down each morning as I send mine to Paris. I saw the portrait of her in the green dress years ago when it was first exhibited. Monsieur Durand-Ruel has said she acts and sings; he saw her in Paris a few weeks ago and she told him she was planning to go on the stage.”

“Ah, did she.?”

Alice Hoschedé leaned forward, blinking a little shyly. “My only gift is for sewing, which I can’t claim to do very well. Claude … I may call you Claude? I am fortunate to have been born to such a good family because really, I have no gifts. If I were a man, I think I would like to do what you do, to paint such wonderful things.”

He shook his head and smiled. He found himself breathing more quietly than he could ever recall. He was tired and yet alert. He watched her hands, the freckles on the back of them, and the meticulous way she stitched.

T
HEIR RELATIONSHIP WAS
delicate; even when she called him Claude there was a formality in it, as if she was aware of the intimacy. He felt so odd calling her by her Christian name that he generally mumbled and called her nothing.

She never gave him the weekly money herself; the house steward left it each Friday morning in an envelope on his breakfast tray, which held brioche, warm milk, hot coffee, jams, and butter. Yet even in the lovely breakfast china he felt her presence, as if someone watched over him. He had not felt that way in a long time. On weekends going home he was more thoughtful.

Slowly he began to form the conceit that she somehow needed him, though he realized this was probably nothing but pride. Why should she need him or anyone? She came from wealth, and her husband adored her. Claude was a painter struggling on the edge of security and growing weary: he was not the young man he had been. His shoulders were a little bent. And yet as he rode the train back to the château on Sunday nights, his thoughts went not only to his work, which compelled him, but to the suspicion that Alice Hoschedé needed him.

When he arrived on a cool late autumn day with the wind blowing up from the river, the housekeeper told him, “Madame and the children left for Paris. Your meals will be served at the same hour in the dining room or on a tray brought to you, as you wish. She asked me to convey that she sends all good wishes for your work this week.” And he felt as he mounted the stairs to his room that Alice had perhaps gone for many reasons and one was to avoid him.

I
T WAS LONELY
suddenly without her there; he felt her in every tree and in the fountain filled with leaves. He received a long letter from Camille saying she had been twice to see Lise in her comedy and truly hoped to gather the courage to audition once more. Her parents were not very well, and her
grandmère
begged them to visit. For a moment his eyes filled with tears, and he felt his distance from her, a distance far greater than a short train ride. He was relieved to read the funny and badly spelled letter from his son, full of puzzles and riddles about snails and old men. Claude saved both and reread them a few times.

Still, as he painted, thoughts of Madame Hoschedé would not leave him. By Wednesday he could not see his work anymore and took the train to Paris to visit Durand-Ruel in his art gallery on the rue Lafitte. He had promised to visit and he had some questions forming in his mind.

As always, he first surveyed the walls of paintings to see what was new and what had not yet sold. A few new paintings by Pissarro had just arrived and he helped uncrate them. “How is my old friend?” he asked. “We only meet when we exhibit these days.”

“He’s looking for fortune still, as we all are. Renoir does better with his beautiful rosy-cheeked girls and dancers and lovers; he has several commissions to paint children. People would rather have that than Pissarro’s country market women and abbeys. How are your panels coming?”

“Slower than I expected,” Claude said.

They walked out down the street to a modest restaurant and ordered fish and chicken and the house wine in a carafe. A few young men played chess in a corner. There were new possibilities of American sales, the art dealer told him.

At the end of the meal, Claude said casually, “I’m curious about my patrons. They are ever kind and generous, but she intrigues me. She seems too fine for him, and yet she loves him.”

Durand-Ruel sank back in his chair and lit a cigar. “Yes, it’s a love match, or it was one. Years change things, I think, though she still adores him. She married him at seventeen against the wishes of her family, but then she has old money and he was merely a very bright entrepreneur. He was rising fast and building his fortune, and she joined hers to his. Recently—this stays between us, Monet—there have been distressing rumors.”

“What rumors?” Claude asked, lighting a cigarette.

Durand-Ruel kept his voice low. “He’s in financial difficulties. How much we can’t say, but we hear it’s not good. He’s handled his affairs rashly, ineptly; he’s spent much more than he’s earning. This has been going on for some years, apparently, and he covered it all up. His partners, one of whom is a client of mine, have discovered some crisis in his mismanagement and want him out of the business. Her family will have nothing to do with her now, as she married against their wishes, so she’s dependent on him. I have always liked her better than him. She’s very loyal and will stand by him if he goes down. I find it sad indeed.”

“Is there any danger they will go down?”

“No one knows. Are you being paid?”

“Yes, actually.”

“Good.”

Claude took the train back to the château, feeling a great heaviness of heart as he walked the long road and saw the house rise before him between the trees. That this beautiful place that seemed to promise the most envied stability might be endangered! He was being paid; how were they managing it? Did even these people pay some bills and not others? How much of what he had heard was true and how much rumor? How much did Hoschedé know, and how much did he conceal from his family? And how could it be? He could not imagine Madame Hoschedé apart from this world she loved.

The rest of the week he sometimes stopped painting and then, too distracted by his thoughts to work, sat in the château salon reading, listening to the ticking clock. He could feel this place considering leaving, as if the very stones and carved headboards could shake themselves loose and walk away.

When he returned the following Monday she was still not there, and he set to work. At midday his concentration was broken by the sound of the carriage and voices. The girls hurried into the gazebo to greet him, commenting on his work, taking his hand. He heard Alice’s voice, and the hair on the back of his neck quivered. He hardly saw her as she came toward him and he felt bad that he had asked Durand-Ruel about her.

“Are you well?” she asked him. “Don’t let the girls bother you!”

“They’re not bothering me. And you, are you well?”

“Quite well,” she said, and he breathed, much relieved. My art dealer saw things as worse than they are, he told himself. Everything here would remain as it had always been for generations to come.

S
HE STAYED AT
the château but her husband did not come. Letters from husband to wife arrived daily, and Claude saw Alice Hoschedé pacing in the long salon reading them with a frown and once again felt something was wrong indeed. Still, the space between him and her was great. She was his patron also in a way, and thus he was her servant. She read, her hand to her lips, as he passed the room, but she took no notice of him.

She has no one, he thought; no one but the children.

He remained reading in the library every evening, hoping she would come in. The hundreds of old books surrounded him as he sat in the fraying chair with his feet on an embroidered footstool, eating cakes and drinking wine from the tray a servant had left for him.

On the third evening she came across the carpet with her slightly clumsy walk. She wore a dark shawl, as if she could not be warm enough; she held it close the way women do who feel alone. He put down his book and stood slowly.

“I’ve disturbed you,” she said, looking at him anxiously.

“Not in the least.”

She motioned for him to sit again and took the chair near him. She sank back, pulling the brown shawl tighter, and gazed up at all the books.

“It’s odd,” she said. “I’m a little afraid tonight, a little lonely. This beautiful château! I’m afraid it will somehow disappear if I leave it. I didn’t see you at dinner. I hoped you’d come in. The children hoped you would.”

He replied, “I forget the time when I paint.” He did not want to say he had avoided her.

She took out her one of the girls’ plaid pinafores and began to mend the pocket seam. She sewed as practically as a nursemaid in some upper room might by candle. He said, “I’m also a little lonely tonight. I sometimes don’t remember people exist when I paint, and when I stop I look up and wonder why they’ve deserted me! I’ve always been like that.”

She nodded. “You’ve heard rumors, I’m sure,” she said softly. “My husband’s finances, which I trusted, are in disarray. There may be some losses. We sit here in my family’s beautiful house, which has been ours forever, and I don’t know what will happen. He’s too ashamed and uncertain to do anything but cut himself off from me.”

H
E LOOKED BACK
on the next few days as something out of time. He felt her in the air, when he woke, when he breathed. He could neither paint nor read. He positioned himself in the house or the garden in respect to where she was. Then two days passed and he did not see her. Where could she be? She was in the house. Neither did he hear the children. He realized at last that they had gone away, but where and when he did not know; he knew only that she remained. He sensed it.

At dinner alone at the great table, he asked the servant, “Madame does not come to dinner?” and the man replied, “Madame is a little tired tonight and dines alone.” Then his heart leapt. In his mind he swept away the servants, maids, cooks, and gardeners. He was here alone with her in the château by the river. He finished eating and went to the library to wait. She will come to me, he thought.