Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (10 page)

With his folded easel over his shoulder, Claude marched toward the Sorbonne, turning down the small rue Dante. The cat slumbered in the bookshop window on the second volume of the French encyclopedia and the fat uncle was arranging books on a shelf and puffing on a cigar whose acrid smoke circled above him.

“If you’re the artist,” he growled, “my niece and her parents have gone away to Lyon for a week. You know the girl’s mother wishes you to stay away from her. Do you understand me, monsieur?”

How had Camille described this renegade uncle? His values were as restrictive as those of the rest of her family. Gone away then; torn away. Claude crossed to the Île Saint-Louis but the shutters were closed outside their rooms. Looking up at them, he felt his sadness harden to anger.

As he and Auguste walked toward the colorist shop near the École des Beaux-Arts off the rue Bonaparte the next morning, Claude confided the whole story. “So she came like the night and fled with the dawn!” Auguste said compassionately as they opened the door. “Isn’t that what the girls do in the great ballets: dance away to the dawn, fluttering their arms to some virtuous end? She’s not coming back; it’s been three weeks. She’s thinking of her wedding trousseau. Isn’t that what girls think about? A ring, then clothes and furniture.”

“How could she?”

“Family pressure. She’ll have a bit to conceal on her wedding night, I imagine. She’ll probably close her eyes and dream it’s you, you devil. Come on, you’ll get over it. And anyway, you got a few more raves in the news journals for your picture. You can have anyone you want. Upper-class women!” Auguste shuddered and raised his eyes to the frames hanging from the ceiling. “Spare me! You know Frédéric would agree if he weren’t still home visiting his sick relative.”

Claude took up the parcel of paints from the shopkeeper. “Very well, then,” he said coolly. “Monsieur, I will pay you next week for this.”

H
E FORGOT HER:
he relegated her in his mind to the future, where she had faded, all her youthful beauty gone. He could not quite remember the sound of her voice. Then, just as he no longer thought of her several times an hour, the Salon ended and he brought his painting back to the studio and hung it up, hitting his thumb in the process.

After, he walked out to the street again.

The problem with having loved, however briefly, he thought reflectively, is that you can’t ever get back to yourself just as you were before. It changes you. He looked in the mirror and saw the same man but angrier, shoulders hunched, defensive. He sank into a terrace chair at a small café on the rue Jacob and ordered wine, and taking out a small pad of paper, began to make a list. He had had a success, and his family had sent him extra money. What should he do next?

I will go home for the summer, he said to himself resolutely. That’s first on the list. I will go home and paint the sea again because it calls to me. Hannah’s meals are excellent, and there’s plenty of wine. And in the autumn, I may come back here and I may not.

He looked up from his wine.

Camille Doncieux was standing at the edge of the café chairs.

S
HE WAS HOLDING
the same purse, looking lovelier than ever in a polka-dotted white dress, a folded parasol in her gloved hands. It is someone else, not her, Claude thought. He stood up, scraping back the chair on the cobbles as she hurried past the other tables to him.

She said, “I was going to your house to leave a letter for you.”

Ah, one of her passionate letters! he thought dryly.

He resolved to be formal and polite. He took her gloved hand and let his lips brush hers. She flushed and looked about. She must conceal me, he thought resentfully. The hidden boudoir, very much like a play. “What a surprise to see you,” he said. “Do sit down.”

She took the chair opposite him at the small table. “How have you been, Claude?” she asked, never taking her eyes from him.

“Oh, very well! I’m busy, very busy. Had you appeared a few days from now I wouldn’t have been here. Sorry you left. I do understand. A woman’s wedding is a great thing. I was, perhaps, your indiscretion.” He did not want to speak angrily, so he controlled his voice. He could feel a touching humility from her across the table. Pigeons pecked at crumbs between their feet. He raised his face and saw tears in her eyes.

“You’ve every right to be angry,” she said. “But where would you go?”

“Many places. I have to get back to my work. I’ve had a great success. I thank you very much for it. I truly mean that. Look, I’ve been making a list!” He turned it over. It was not much of a list, with only one item so far. How can I be at such loose ends? he thought.

Camille felt the edge of the table nervously. “I have to tell you this,” she said. “When I was away at my
grandmère’s
little house in the Rhône-Alpes, I thought of how the ceiling fell. I left my purse. I know you returned it. I know my mother was cold; she knows nothing. I have to explain. Please excuse me if I do it clumsily because I’ve never done anything like this before. I decided to forget you, but I can’t. I was all prepared to live the life of my mother and my sister if you hadn’t walked into my uncle’s bookshop that day. Something in me turned and went the other way and won’t turn back around.”

She raised her eyes for a moment, then looked down again. “I cried for you. I stifled my tears in my pillow. I wrote letters to you but didn’t send them. And I knew last night suddenly because it all burst out. I had to be with you again. No, Monsieur Monet, you are far more than my ‘indiscretion,’ as you called it. I almost wish you weren’t more because you were so haughty when I came across to you just now.”

“I …” He was stunned.

“I heard the Salon closed. Did my picture sell?”

“Not yet; it will.”

“I should have said your picture,” she added. Tears fell down her cheeks. He wanted to stand up and crush her against him, but he said cautiously, “My haughtiness is an old habit. I’m sorry. I was a little hurt. So here you are.”

Camille raised her face hopefully, her eyes still full of tears and her nose a little red. He did not have a handkerchief, but she pulled one from her purse, stained somewhat with powder and chocolate.

Claude looked down at a pigeon and asked cautiously, “But what does it mean that you’ve come for me after you disappeared? You’re engaged.”

“I don’t know if I want to be. Lucien Besique is good man, a kind man, and would give me whatever I wanted but I want only to be with you. He would never understand me; he would indulge me. He would say, ‘Oh, those are her little ways!’ I would have cards engraved like my mother and pay calls.”

She had anxiously pulled off her glove, and he could see her fingernails were bitten more closely than he recalled. She raised her chin and said tremulously, “Now you can send me away if you wish and I won’t come back. I’ve humbled myself. I want to be with you. I had a friend who died so suddenly, young, and she never had the chance to be with the man she was drawn to, but I took that chance. I went into your arms; I couldn’t help myself. I can’t now. You may send me away, but I won’t go on my own. I want to be with you for a little time, some days, a week. I can at least have that!”

He thought, She has yearned for me as I have for her. He exclaimed, “Yes, I want that too. The hell with everything else!” The heat of desire and relief so flooded him that his voice carried. The elderly waiter turned around and looked benignly at him as if to say, Young love.

“But where can we go?” he cried. He thought of the studio as it was now, without a cleaning woman for weeks and full of unwashed dishes and someone’s socks drying over the edge of a chair. Sometimes there was just he and Frédéric and other times two or three more artists sleeping all over the floor. He couldn’t take her there; besides, he couldn’t see his friends’ faces after he had sworn to them he had forgotten her utterly.

He took out his pad and pencil again. “I know. I have a friend who stayed in this lovely rural area just outside the city, Sèvres, in a farmhouse. We’ll go there, just us. We’ll hide. Come. What will your family say?”

She smiled slightly, so touching with the tears still wet on her face. “They won’t know where I’ve gone. I’ll send a note that I’m safe. Yes, let’s go away together where no one can find us.”

N
OTHING HAD EVER
happened so fast in his life. An hour later he and Camille caught the train together to Sèvres, where they walked to the farmhouse. Dusk was falling and smoke rising from the chimney over the tiled roof with the fields and hills and stone walls beyond. He signed the registrar Monsieur and Madame Claude Monet before they climbed the creaking stairs past the pregnant farm cat to their room, bolting the door behind them.

They lit no candle but immediately began to undress each other in the dark, not hastily this time, but contemplating every lace and button. He felt the air on his bare back and legs. She stood waiting as he unfastened the eight hooks of her corset. He slipped off her chemise. In the dim light her slender body with its large breasts was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and they were alone, alone. No one would bother them. Outside, they heard the goats coming down the road and the voice of the boy shepherd. A gate opened. Below, a pot was placed on a trivet; the smell of soup rose. The still, sweet night lay against the window listening to them.

He wanted to go slowly so that it would never end. He kissed her breasts and belly and thighs. She murmured and moved against him. As he entered her, he willed the very air to stand still. He felt he would remember always her softness, the bedposts, the cotton bed hangings, and the smell of cooking soup. When it was done he held her until he was ready to begin again.

An hour later hunger drove them downstairs, where the farmwife smiled at them and served them tenderly. His leg pressed against Camille’s under the table and they soon drew each other up the creaking stairs once more. The world became her body pushing against his, gasping in delight. The touch of her hand on his stomach made him cry out with longing.

On the third morning, as they still lay in bed, he said, “You were walking in the garden yesterday in the sun and I saw you as a painting of four women, all you. Will you model for me?”

“But we left so quickly I didn’t have time to try to run home and secretly take any other dresses but the one I’m wearing, and you didn’t bring your paints.”

“I can paint other dresses in later, and I’ll write Frédéric. He wrote me a week ago that he’d be back by now.” He sat down at the desk by the window, glancing back at her in bed. Already she was slowly and languidly turning into the painting for him, and on top of his letter he roughly sketched how he would place her on the canvas.

F.
, cher ami!
I’m so sorry I never even left you a note—you and our friends must have thought I drowned in the Seine. I went away quite suddenly with the enchanting Camille, the younger sister whom you met last summer in Fontainebleau (the older sister is fast become a terror of respectability) and whom I painted in your rented green promenade dress. Anyway, I did not bring my paints, so can you buy the enclosed list of colors and also a large canvas and stretchers and some new brushes and put them on the train? I’ll pay you back. I know I owe you a fortune already but it will be repaid in good time! I am on my way to remarkable success. Don’t tell a soul where we are, as her family doesn’t know. We are entirely happy together and she is in all ways
lovely.
Envy me!

CM

T
HE STRETCHED CANVAS
was so large he needed two boys to help him dig a ditch lined with oilcloth so that he could lower it a little when he needed to paint the top. He ran about gathering a huge bunch of flowers and placed them in Camille’s arms. He painted her that day and on the many that followed. She stood in a loose garment smelling another bouquet; she passed behind the tree, retreating. The four of her moved and blended into one. He would change the one dress into several in the final painting. That dress was now dingy at the hem.

“Can I see it, Claude?” she called.

“Later. Don’t move your mouth or I’ll kiss it.”

“Then I’ll talk away so you’ll kiss me!” She raised the flowers so that only her large eyes could be seen, following him as he worked. He smiled, slightly sweaty under his shirt. The sun was exquisite.

At night when they undressed he sometimes remembered that he was not the first man to make love to her. Who was your first lover? he wanted to ask. Surely not that old man, your fiancé? And were there others before him? To whom did you write letters from the bookshop, and who wrote them to you? As she lay on the sheets before him, naked but for her last petticoat and arms open to him, he bit his lip. His inquiry would come out strident and jealous. He would say nothing now but keep the question inside of him.

The painting was done; he had captured the last small white flower.

“Well,” he said a few nights later with a sigh when they returned to their room, “we must go home tomorrow. My money’s gone. How sad to leave this place. You belong in a garden.” He stood at the window, looking out at the dark night, and they fell asleep later without touching. In the morning he took his now dry canvas from the stretchers and laid large sheets of paper on top of the painted surface, rolling it loosely so that the paper was outside and tying it with rope. My love is inside there now, he thought sadly; my love is rolled away in darkness.