Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (29 page)

But hours passed and she did not come.

He mounted the stairs to the bedrooms with a candle. The master bedroom was to the left down the corridor and his was to the right. He stood in the hall with the wind outside the château walls, not knowing which way to go. He walked to the left, past the old green flocked wallpaper and the stiff portraits of her ancestors from centuries before, until he came to her door.

He put his hand on the handle and turned it. The door creaked, and he was caught momentarily against the portiere curtain. At once he heard her listening. “It’s Claude,” he said then.

Her voice from behind the bed hangings sounded far away. “I thought I was alone in the house but for the servants.”

“You knew I was here, surely!”

He approached the dark blue bed hangings, seeing the shape of the carved testers by his candle and the portraits on the wall and his own shape with the candle reflected back from the oval dresser mirror. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t be here, but I can’t help myself. I’ve waited days for you, sensing where you must be. I stayed in the library for hours not reading, waiting for you. I feel so tenderly for you, Alice! Tell me to go away, and I’ll go at once.”

She said nothing. He bent over the bed and touched her open hand and then bent forward to kiss her forehead. She reached up and drew him closer. How rich and deep and still she was, and would be that way today and tomorrow and always! I can ask no more than this, he thought.

He doused the candle and lay down near this rather plain chatelaine. They moved together and reached for each other, arms at first caught oddly beneath her cotton nightgown and his trousers. They made love then, at first cautiously, then their breath came faster as they pushed away all reticence. She was passionate; she cried out at the end, and he placed his hand over her mouth gently.

They lay looking at each other in the near darkness. “It was lovely,” she whispered. “We joined together; we melded. I thought of where you could be in the house and willed you to come here. It was the loveliest thing in the world, but it’s wrong.”

“Religion!” he said, still dazed by her touch. “Why doesn’t it stay on church walls where it belongs? What is it, to say that the coupling of two lonely people who see good and truth in each other is wrong?”

Her answer was patient. “Because we not only are promised elsewhere but we still love elsewhere. And those other people think we’re true. Forgive me; I needed you so! I called for you and you came. My husband’s been too unhappy to touch me for quite some time, but it’s more than that. You are somehow in my heart and have been since I first saw you. For some moments I knew what it was to paint, to be Claude Monet …”

“Don’t wish that,” he whispered. “I’ve no certainty, and my youth has left me. I started out determined to make no mistakes and now I have made so many I can’t escape them.”

Gently she pushed him away, sat up, and felt for her dressing gown. “We mustn’t do this again, Claude,” she said. “I love my husband, though he has turned from me, and you love your Camille. I’d better go now. Please don’t follow me!”

But he cried, “Wait!” hurrying after her as she went swiftly down the dark hall. He could have overtaken her, but he kept back a little. He was barefoot and only in his shirt. The house was full of servants. Though the clock showed three in the morning, one would come from a door or down a step, perhaps holding a lamp.

He caught her arm. “Where are you going?”

“I don’t know … to the chapel. How you move me! But why should we expect to be happy in this world?”

He stumbled back to his room and lay heavily down on his bed, his arms wrapped around himself, staring into the darkness. He saw Camille again waiting for him and beat the pillow with his fist time and again as if he struck himself.

He slept late and heard Ernest Hoschedé’s voice rising from the garden before he rose. From the bags in the hall, Claude knew the man had just returned, and when he came into the breakfast room, bright with sunlight, he saw that Alice was already at the table, hair neatly combed, wearing her loose morning gown.

“Ah, Monet!” Hoschedé cried. “How are the paintings coming? Have you seen them, Alice?”

Alice looked up from pouring the coffee. “I am quite pleased,” she said.

H
E PAINTED BRUTALLY
that day, unhappy with everything. Later he asked the servant for supper in his room and went there at twilight to find a letter from Camille on the table. It lay in its blue envelope, accusing him. She must know somehow, she must sense … what had he done? The best thing would be to finish the panels, take what money he could, thank monsieur and madame, and hurry away, not hearing the sound of rumbling and tears as this place was surrendered as once his paintings had been surrendered for debt. For he understood clearly from words that rang out down the hall how dire Alice Hoschedé’s situation would become.

He found in his shirt pocket a blue cloth button from her nightdress; he had no memory it had torn away. He stuffed it into the side pocket of his carpetbag, where it jammed under the lining folds.

The writing of the letter from his wife blurred for him; he looked away from it, walked back and forth, poured a little wine, and tried again to make sense of the words. Surely they said, “I accuse you,” but they did not. They said, “Dearest Claude, I long for you and I have lovely news to share.”

Yes, he thought, what madness! What madness it was to take someone else in my arms when she’s waiting for me. Now it is I who have a secret that can never be told.

He took the train home the next day. Camille ran out to meet him. He picked her up and swung her about, smelling her hair, feeling her warmth against him. Jean ran out as well, all thin and boyish, crying, “Papa! I have new friends …”

The new cook had prepared fish and they all three ate together, the boy chatting about his schoolmates. Gradually Claude quieted his terrible sense of shame. What had been between him and Madame Hoschedé anyway? Nothing, a shadow. Both pairs of lovers, both married couples, had been reunited. His essence left in the folds of her body would be buried under much else: duty, prayers, he could not say what. His face burned. And if the Hoschedés lost much, what was it to him? They could not begin to know of loss.

He walked upstairs with Camille, his arm about her waist.

She pulled on her nightgown and sat at the dressing table, brushing her hair. “Let me do that,” he exclaimed, rising. Her face in the mirror smiled back at him.

He demanded, “Tell me your news. Come! I’ll make love to you until you do, showing no mercy. Now at once, madame!”

She stood up and ran her fingers down his mustache. He bit her fingers gently. “I won’t tell you then for days because I’m longing to make love with you!” she said. “But I also can’t wait to say my news. I’m with child. My breasts are tender. Don’t squeeze so! Ouch! Are you happy?”

“Yes,” he said, and his voice broke. He cried firmly then, “Yes, so happy.”

Later he lay sleepless thinking with her beside him. He was glad the panels would take no more than a few more weeks to complete, and he suspected Madame Hoschedé would take the children and go to Paris during that time, absenting herself. The château would be his alone with the servants until he packed his clothes and paints for the last time and returned home to Argenteuil.

Interlude

GIVERNY
May 1909

As the exhibition drew closer he found he ate little; he walked back and forth in front of his selected forty-eight canvases, once more apart from them. The paintings had been framed, and people from the gallery were to take them away tomorrow to hang them.

When he returned to the house to put some distance between himself and his work, he found a small, thin parcel addressed to him on his dining table. He knew the handwriting. He carried it upstairs to his bedroom at once, closing the door before opening it.

There were no more than twenty letters tied together with a blue ribbon, some written on the bookshop stationery, some on pages from a school notebook, some on paper that he guessed had been scented but now just smelled rather musty. Some were dated, some not. Because of the handwriting and style he guessed they all had been written between her sixteenth and eighteenth years, before and at the time she first met him. They were passionate letters, full of girlish longing. “I am thinking of you today. The spring is sweet, and you’re not here. How tired I am waiting for you! I think I will give up courage and turn to someone else.” Likely they were meant for her fiancé, that ridiculous old man. Or perhaps for schoolboys or a dead actor.

He fell asleep with the letters. That night he was certain he heard someone calling him from the water garden. He rose from bed in his nightshirt and made his way with his cane across to the pond. The moon was on the lily pads, which had not yet blossomed. He splashed into the water. It was not very deep, up to his waist.

He returned to the house, hoping no one would see him, ashamed of his actions. It was madness, he thought. I’m merely anxious about the exhibition.

He stripped off his wet nightshirt and slept.

Camille came to him in his dreams and pressed her soft body against his, and her long loose hair tickled him as she whispered into his ear.
I’m not in the pond, darling Claude! I’m in the paintings
. He woke suddenly, hours past his usual time. Then the paintings are mine alone and too private to show, he thought. He threw on his clothes and hurried downstairs.

He was too late. They had been taken away by car half an hour before to Paris.

Part Seven

1877

I remember that, although I was full of fervor, I didn’t have the slightest inkling, even at forty, of the deeper side to the movement we were pursuing by instinct
.

—C
AMILLE
P
ISSARRO

I
T HAD BEEN NEARLY THREE YEARS SINCE THE FIRST
independent exhibition in the photography studio on the boulevard des Capucines had closed. The emotion that arose before and after Claude’s friends had risked their money and reputations on what a few frames could hold still stirred among them. They were bound together by the name
Impressionists
, and yet in spite of the many times they had painted the same snowy lane or bunch of flowers together, their styles and temperaments were very different.

And what was this thing called the school of Impressionism composed of? It was always changing; if anyone expected it to stand still, they were wrong. There were the visible brushstrokes of pure color, the emphasis on changing light, the beautiful world of modern daily life throughout the country. There was also their now famous recognition for painting
en plein air
.

A month before the latest exhibition, Claude had walked into the Gare Saint-Lazare and addressed the stationmaster. “I am the artist Claude Monet, my good man!” he had said. “And I wish to paint here. It is convenient for me to do so tomorrow morning at ten? Would you be so kind as to stop the trains at that time briefly so I can paint them?” His friends were amazed that the stationmaster complied. Claude had worked there many times over a few months. To capture the energy and shadow of the great glass roof and the smoke, he had created rich browns and grays from many colors. Even the shadows were shot with color. He was always exploring, always experimenting.

At the opening day of the exhibition, with two of his finished train station pictures on the walls, he thought, Yes, for good or for worse we’re yoked together: Sisley, Cézanne, Auguste, Pissarro, and the others. He saw in their faces the weariness once more of brushing their best suits and smiling at strangers in the crowded rooms. Auguste complained of stiffness in his legs, though he was scarcely past his middle thirties. Pissarro’s beard was whiter and he had more children. Sisley’s beloved wife was ill.

Later Claude walked through the streets alone to board the late train back to Argenteuil, sitting back on his plush seat as he sped through the night, already thinking of Camille. She had not been pregnant after all, or had miscarried early, and she struggled against her sadness, for she wanted a large family.

She was waiting for him in the kitchen in her pink dressing gown, drinking a tisane and eating a cake. A cup had been left out for him. “How was the exhibition?” she asked, rising to kiss him. “I heard the train whistle and knew you’d be here. I’m sorry I didn’t feel well enough to come.”

“You were missed! Some people reserved paintings to buy, never as many as we would like, of course, but the paintings will hang for a time and we’re sure to have more sales.”

“There’s hot water. It’s lovely tea: chamomile blossoms with bits of dried apple and cinnamon. Sit down.”

They drank the tisane and he took some sausage and cheese from the cupboard because he was suddenly hungry; the clock struck the hour and then again an hour later as they talked and laughed together. He teased her a little about spoiling Jean.

He left the thing he hesitated to tell her until last. “I’ve had some good fortune,” he said, looking at the wet blossoms in the bottom of his cup. “My friend Caillebotte, who exhibited some of his work with us tonight, offered to give me a studio on the rue d’Isly. I’d like to paint there sometime; I want to finish more of my train station pictures.”

She rose and settled herself on his lap. “I’m glad about that. You need time away from everyone. From all your friends, and from perhaps me.”

“Oh, not from you, my love! I’ll be home every evening. I’ve also been thinking. You remain too alone here. As soon as I can afford it, let’s move back to Paris.”

“I’d love that! I miss my friends, and I never can see my little niece enough. I don’t want to live away from there anymore. I didn’t want to tell you.”

“But you can always tell me things,” he said. The clock was striking two in the morning when he rose, setting her on her feet, and led her upstairs.

T
HAT WEEK HE
took possession of the Paris studio. He shut the door behind him, bolted it, and sat down on a stool in the middle of the room, looking around with his hands on his knees. Some paintings he was working on stood against the wall. He could hear the sound of his own breath and his heartbeat and, underneath, the murmurs of all the paintings he wished to make.

We are alone, you and I, he said to his paintings. No one can come here.

Claude went home almost every night, but when work kept him late, he sometimes slept on a narrow cot in the studio. Once on waking he thought he was twenty-four again and in his first studio, on the rue de Furstenberg, and that Frédéric was calling him.

Coffee’s ready. Don’t worry about me. I’ve too many things to do in this life to get killed. I’ll come back. I promise
.

On the cot, Claude stared at the early-morning sunlight through the curtains and the floorboards. He whispered, “You broke your promise, and I never had a chance to thank you for everything you did for me. Have you forgotten me, wherever you are? She and I stumble a little and you’re not here to steady us, for you always did in a way, you complicated fellow. I miss you,
cher ami
, and so does she.”