Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (34 page)

“No,” he whispered.

The priest came again and anointed her with oil, burning a candle and praying. Everyone knelt. Then Marthe led Jean away, the baby Michel in her arms. Gradually the other children slipped away. Only Alice remained.

They listened to Camille’s shallow breaths. By that time he was too weary to hope, and yet he did. It was a time after the breaths ceased before he understood. Camille’s chest was still but her hand was warm. Alice held her rosary on her lap, her fingers on the last bead she had prayed. Her face was wet with tears. She held him close to her, whispering, “My dear, I’m so very sorry!”

He broke gently from her and left the room, returning with his easel and canvas and paints from the attic and setting them up by the bedside. He said, “Will you be so kind as to leave us for a little? And say nothing to anyone yet?”

“I will. You’ll call me when you need me?”

“Yes.”

She touched his arm as she went, closing the door behind her.

Camille was absolutely still. “I am going to paint you, dearest,” Claude murmured.

He had never painted anything like that in his life.

She lay there very pure and pale and still but he saw colors rise and swirl about her. He painted her face as almost a spirit, with a violence of color about her, slashed and feathered with his brush. He painted against time. You are light, he murmured, and if something of you remains here yet, it is leaving me. He gritted his teeth as he painted, murmuring, “Stay, stay. I don’t want life without you. Is this all that life is, then, Minou, in the end, suffering? Do we ever know another person truly? It is better to go than to feel this.”

He heard only the sound of his brush. As long as I paint, she’s not yet gone, he thought. And then the painting was done and still she lay there.

Later that night he beat the wall with his fists. Young Blanche clung to him and cried, “I will always stay with you, Monet.”

F
OR DAYS AFTER
the funeral Claude lay in bed unable to sleep, then sleeping a little and afterward saying, “Why? I am awake, but why should I rise?” He saw Camille’s dresses in the half-open wardrobe, her brushes and powders on the table as if waiting for her. If he looked in the mirror, he could see her reflection; he could see himself come behind her, his arms about her.

Hoschedé visited for a while and did his best to be comforting. He left, and Alice and her daughters kept the house. Sometimes Claude came to dinner, but he could eat little. Many letters of condolence came for him, but he could not even read them. Then he jumped up and looked for everyone he loved. They were there when he needed them; they stayed away when he had to be alone. From one of the trees Jean whispered to Jacques in their half-built tree house.

Claude sought Alice; he only touched her arm or sometimes held her.

“Listen to me,” she said gently. “Go work in the garden. A garden is healing.” He nodded and went outside in his oldest clothes with his old black brimmed hat jammed on his head. He heard the voices of the children from another part of the garden. The tree house above the swing was empty. He knelt in the dirt and began to cry. He sat on his knees helplessly gasping with sobs.

After a time he raised his face. Camille’s sister, Annette, was standing near him in a black mourning dress. He rose clumsily, wiping his cheeks, and stammered, “How did you find me here! Oh my dear, I’m so very sorry!”

“Are you, Monet?” she replied.

He blinked. He would have kissed her, but her tone was so cold that he drew back, studying her as best he could. Her dark skirt was spattered here and there as if she had knelt on the ground. He supposed she had been to the graveyard. He said, “It took a while for you to come from Rome, I know. I also wrote to your parents. They couldn’t come because of your father’s heart condition. I don’t even know if your mother has told him. I wrote your
grandmère’s
priest.”

He indicated a chair by the white wicker table and brushed away some leaves from the cushion. “Come, sit down,” he said compassionately.

Annette seated herself carefully and looked around her. “So this was my sister’s final home,” she said. “A rather remote one for a girl who lived for the world of Paris.”

“We were going back eventually. There were circumstances …”

She held her gloved hands tightly together on her lap, her lip raised slightly. “Ah, but with you there have always been circumstances,” she said abruptly. “I have merely come to see my sister’s grave. You also wrote I could have one of your paintings of her. Then I’ll go away again.”

“Come and choose, then,” he said, holding out his hand. She shook her head and indicated that he should go before her. So unforgiving and so easy to judge, he thought as he walked wearily into the house and up the stairs to the attic. Her first husband had felt it and her second marriage also did not go well. Camille had worried about it.

Opening the door of his studio, he motioned her inside. “Take any one you want,” he said. “She made me take them all down from our walls. If it’s too large, we can send it.” He leaned against the wall, unable to raise his eyes for the beauty of his wife, whom he had painted so often.

He heard Annette’s footsteps on the floor and when she stopped. “There she is with that little dog. She looks so serious.” She walked on, her voice floating back to him, a little softer now. “And the one in the green dress, of course. I won’t take that.”

The footsteps ceased and he heard her gasp. “What is this thing …”

He had forgotten his deathbed painting on the easel. He rushed forward to throw a cloth over it, but it was too late. Annette stood before it, sobbing in rage; her voice rose. She cried, “What is this thing? What is it? Is it …” and he said, “Yes.”

She shoved him hard. “What kind of monster are you that everything, my sister’s life and now her death, must be consumed by your work? If she had stayed with your friend, she would have been alive and happy.”

He cried, “She loved me.”

“Loved you, the foolish girl! I know all about you, as does half of Paris. I saw de Bellio in Paris before I came here and he told me you asked him to redeem Minou’s locket from a Paris pawnshop so that you could bury her in it. She died as she lived, impoverished by your ridiculous dreams. And then that woman and her children live with you and her husband never comes. Minou knew you loved that woman; she knew you would leave her for her.”

“What!” he cried. “I would never have done that.”

Annette shouted, “She wrote me privately when I was in Rome. She told me she’d known she was sick for a while before you chose to notice it, before you wrote de Bellio to come. She wrote, ‘I don’t much care what happens to me because he no longer loves me.’”

“Come, choose your picture! For God’s sake, take one and stop wounding me when I can’t bear it.”

“I don’t want any of them!” Annette ran out to the stairs and almost fell. He put out his hand to stop her, but she struck him away and sat down on a middle step, weeping. She cried, “Did you sleep with Madame Hoschedé while my sister was alive? Did you? Did you?”

“Annette, I wish I were a better man than I am; I could wish it a thousand times,” he replied. “All I know is that Minou loved me and I loved her. You wanted a certain life for her, but she had to choose her own. She chose me and my work. I’m not separate from my work. She was very clear in what she chose, and she didn’t choose to die. I’ll never believe that. And if I ever betrayed her, I’m sorry a thousand times. Did you see all the pictures? Do you know how many more I made and painted over, or those I made that I kept only in my heart? And that never will I do anything worthy of her, ever.”

She looked at him. “And the last painting? How could you?”

“To keep her … the last one. To keep her.”

C
LAUDE WOULD HAVE
walked Annette to the coach that stopped before the church, but she refused him. She did, however, accept a chalk portrait of Camille, which he wrapped in paper as best he could. After she left, he stood by the swing and saw that the table had been cleared of coffee cups and plates. The children and Alice were still in the other part of the garden and likely had heard the shouting.

He walked past the garden down to the river, where he gazed at all the wildflowers he had painted with such joy. That joy seemed remote to him now. Never had he felt so empty. He was not even air—he was less than air.

He sat down on the riverbank with his head in his hands.

“You loved her,” Alice had said earlier that morning. “You loved each other, but so much was against you. We try to love each other and we never do perfectly, but what we cannot do doesn’t erase what we have done.”

If only, Claude thought as he looked at the flowing river, in the end the good I have done in this life outweighs the bad, if I have succeeded more than I have failed, not only in my work but in my life. My love for you is deep, deep inside myself like something below the water. Only with my brush when I can paint again will I express it. Whatever I do in the rest of my life, my love for you is part of it, and in everything I paint I will remember you and say with my work what you were to me.

His mind, exhausted by his emotions, turned to the practical. He was, after all, his father’s son, and he sat a little straighter on the riverbank. I have to shelter those I promised to, he thought. I will keep my promises.

His body ached. He leaned on his stick as he mounted to the road and walked toward his house, where his son Jean and young Blanche were calling for him. He replied as loudly as he could, “I’m coming,” and continued along the path home.

Epilogue

GIVERNY
1909

This endless measure of his dream and of the dream of life, he formulated, reprised, and formulated anew and without end in the mad dream of his art before the luminous abyss of the
Water Lilies
pool
.

—G
USTAVE
G
EFFROY

A
T THE LAST MOMENT THE OLD ARTIST DECIDED TO
attend the opening of his water lily exhibition; he dressed in his best suit with his lace cuffs and climbed into his car for his chauffeur to drive him into Paris. During the ride he felt anxious, often on the verge of telling the driver to take him home again.

When he walked into the gallery with his cane, he saw that the rooms were already quite full. What he had created from his own dream was now on the walls for everyone to see. In every painting he felt Camille’s presence. Of all his portraits of her, these paintings of the water lilies were the truest ones, for within them he had captured her beauty, her variability, and her light.

Some people had tears in their eyes; some pressed his hand. Did they see her as well? Perhaps and perhaps not, he thought. They would see their own dreams and losses and hopes and the terrible brevity of life and imperfection of love.

During those hours in the gallery he also felt the ghosts of all the young painters. One ghost moved among the crowd, taller than anyone else there. Claude wondered if his friend also saw Minou in the paintings in all her infinite variety.

T
HREE DAYS LATER
amid many words of praise and offers for purchase and positive critical reviews, a letter he could not have expected arrived for him. He had stayed long at the opening, hoping she would come. When she did not, he did not expect to hear from her again. Sitting at his table with his wine, hearing the sounds of the gardeners outside the window, he opened the letter slowly.

Monet
,

I write you because of something I have learned that came as a great surprise to me. I don’t know how to take it. My daughter, who admires your work, insisted we go to your exhibition, of which everyone in Paris is speaking. Your art dealer, Durand-Ruel, was there and knew me. He told me that when I returned to Paris almost penniless ten years ago, the anonymous benefactor who gave me the means to begin my business was you
.

Since you have showed me such an unexpected kindness, I will tell the story behind the letters I sent on to you last month, which Camille confided to me the night she came to me in the snow. They were not written to her actor or her fiancé or any Sorbonne student. Before she had met you, she wrote them to the great love she hoped to have one day, to a young man she sensed
would come into her life. Then you walked into the bookshop. So these letters are for you, and belong to you alone
.

I will say more. She never wrote me when she was ill that she wanted to die because she had lost your love; she never thought that. I lied to you
.

One day perhaps we will meet again. I miss her too, every day of my life
.

Through most of the next few months he was very busy with responses to the exhibition, the many articles sent him, and the news of sales. When all that settled down he reread Camille’s youthful letters, with their eroticism and tenderness. He read them until he memorized them, and then he fit them in the lacquered box.

One day if he became ill and his eyesight deteriorated further, he would cease to paint and be unable to see the letters and the other things in the box. Perhaps he would die before Alice. She might find them and be hurt by them; she had been mostly a calm and loving wife these many years, understanding his moods, raising their children, and he did not wish to hurt her. He never told her he thought often of Camille.

Autumn was coming in. He could sense it at every moment; the flowers sensed it. It would soon be time for the last water lily blossom, and then the gardeners would take the tubs in which they were planted from the water to keep the roots from freezing over the winter. The leaves would fall from the trees and the pond would freeze on cold mornings. For months most of the garden would be still.

One late afternoon he placed the letters in the Japanese box and wrapped the box well in oilcloth. Everyone was in the parlor after dinner when he slipped from the house down the stairs and along the path, walking down to the water lily garden.

He looked about, choosing carefully until he decided on the foot of one of the willow trees. He knelt and began to dig a hole with his small shovel. He had to try a few places, for he struck roots. He touched the oilcloth over the box and lowered it into the earth, covering it quickly. He sat on his knees for a while afterward, his hand on the place where he had buried it.

He rose stiffly. Ah, he thought, old age. Still, perhaps I will ride into Paris this winter to see her sister. We can talk further then of things we do not want to forget or things we never understood. I do not need the things in the box; I have memorized them.

He stood on the bridge. I am not done painting my lilies, he thought. There is always, as there is with love, more to say, but now I am tired and pleased. Yes, I am pleased.

He left his shovel leaning against the tree and walked back through the upper flower garden toward his supper and his waiting family.