Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (12 page)

She looked a little frightened at his tone and distractedly picked up the playbooks and the cape. He came forward swiftly and kissed her. “It’s all right,” he whispered.

Outside, the snow fell on her coat and hat and on his suit jacket. At last a carriage appeared, the driver huddled on the top seat. Claude settled her in with the paintings and boxes. “Ask your sister to pay for the cab,” he whispered. “I’ll be there shortly. I need to take some things to the studio.”

He stood for a moment watching the carriage turn the corner and then hurried inside again up the steps. There was such stillness about everything; the whole house was sleeping. He heard snoring from behind one door.

In his room, he stood looking at all his things, the murals on the wall, his clothes and dozens of paintings.
Women in the Garden
was already stored at the studio. He could not take everything at once; he had to choose what was most important and take it there tonight. He felt in the pocket of his overcoat, which hung by the door; he had a few francs for a wagon or carriage if he could find one.

Somewhere a clock struck one.

He wrapped several of his best paintings in oilcloth and packed a large valise. He would empty it at Frédéric’s, borrow money for another cab or two, and come back for more of his things. He could get back by half past two in the morning if he could find some transport now and the vehicle did not get stuck in a snowdrift.

As he shoved his mother’s picture into the valise, he heard the opening of the door far below, the sleepy murmur of the concierge, and then footsteps ascending. They mounted until they stopped on his landing. Someone knocked hard on his door. “Monsieur!” someone shouted. “Open up, monsieur. We know you’re in there!”

He sprang for the bolt, but someone had fitted a key to the lock. Claude threw his weight against the door to hold it closed. Someone pushed, and the door burst open, sending him sprawling back. Three strangers stood in his room, men in wet coats who looked as if they could get no better work to do.

One growled, “Was monsieur thinking of slipping out with something? Nothing belongs to monsieur anymore. Monsieur can redeem his things when the rent’s paid.”

Claude seized the tied canvases and pushed past them to the dark stairs, where he slipped. He got to his feet, cursing the sharp pain in his ankle, and half hopped down the remaining steps with the canvases. When he got to the bottom he realized no one had followed. I should have beaten them, he thought, his heart pounding. For a moment he was so appalled he had not that he could not move.

They might follow, he thought grimly. He had best go on.

The concierge had closed her door.

The snow was worse than before, swirling all around, obscuring the doors of the dirty brick buildings and the alleys. It was a while before the rage left him enough that he could think at all and remember that his hat and overcoat were upstairs, the few francs he had in the coat pocket.

He put up his collar and limped to the alley. An overhanging roof sheltered a cart, and he squeezed toward it to get out of the snow and stumbled against a bulky form under a blanket. It moved and cursed him.

Claude felt his way, trying to protect his paintings under his jacket, and took shelter in a church doorway to feel his ankle. A bad twist, likely not a sprain, and nothing broken. Still, it hurt like hell. I need to figure out what I can do, he thought. I can’t walk very much, but I’ll go as far as I can toward the Right Bank and try to make it across the river to the studio. It will take me a few hours to reach Frédéric’s in the snow. Suppose he and Auguste are not there and they have taken away the concierge’s key?

Claude limped on, staying as close to the buildings as he could, sheltering his paintings. Now and then a carriage passed him and drove on. What was worth noticing about a man limping somewhere at night without a coat?

He was heading toward the river when a solitary cart moving down the avenue slowed its old horse and the driver called out, “All right there, young fellow? Had too much to drink?”

Claude sheltered his eyes to look at the cloaked shape and the horse’s snowy back. “Not drunk, monsieur,” he called, his voice sounding lonely in the snow. “I’m trying to reach the rue de Furstenberg, across the river.”

“I’ll go as far as the Seine and turn west then. Come on.”

He parted from the man at the river and painfully made his way down under the bridge, where he saw the light of a crude fire and a number of men gathered around it. They moved to make a place for him, and he sat down on the stone. After a time, he broke the stretchers from his paintings and fed the wood to the flame. It was easier to carry the canvases rolled under his coat anyway.

He reached the rue de Furstenberg as dawn was breaking. The concierge came grumbling, awakened from her warm bed. “What a night!” she said crossly. “You’ll catch your death, young man! Imagine leaving this lovely neighborhood for Pigalle! Take the key. No one’s there, I think.”

There were the familiar steep stairs, and the same chamber pot someone always left out. In the studio, Claude crossed the darkness to his former bedroom, which Auguste Renoir now rented. He stripped off his suit and crawled under the covers.

He woke to the fragrant smell of coffee and pulled himself from bed.

The studio was filled with white light, which reflected from the snowy roofs. Pissarro and Auguste were at the table drinking black coffee and breaking off pieces of fresh bread.

Auguste reached over and slid out a chair. “I heard you snoring!” he said. “Lucky I didn’t come in drunk and fall on top of you. I spent the night with Lise, and Pissarro just arrived. Here’s a cup for you! Where’s Camille? What happened? You look like
merde.”

Claude wrapped his hands around the warm cup. “She’s at her sister’s; we were thrown out. The rent, you know.”

Pissarro shook his head. “Why didn’t you tell us there was a problem?”

“It happened very fast. It was …
putain!”

“Why are you limping?”

“Damn foot; it’s better now. A bruise, I think. Where’s our good Doctor Bazille?”

“Some relatives are in town and he’s taking them to a concert. Pissarro and I had better go over to your room and see what can be done.”

I
T WAS AFTERNOON
before Claude gathered the courage to fetch Camille. The omnibus moved slowly through the snowy streets, and he turned from the window, wincing. He did not want to remember how he had walked last night.

The omnibus left him near the Parc Monceau. He walked past the black and gold iron gates and crossed the slushy street, marked with horse droppings and carriage wheels. The apartment building rose with its mansard roofs high above him. He passed through the wide oak doors; the young, sharp-nosed concierge studied him doubtfully but motioned him up the polished wood stairs. He looked back at her critical face and the marks of his wet shoes.

Camille’s sister cautiously opened the door.

He glimpsed the parlor, the mauve-velvet-upholstered furniture, the silver coffeepot and porcelain cups set before a fire just before she closed the door behind her. She was not going to ask him in.

“What are these goings-on, monsieur!” she whispered. “Minou arrived half frozen past midnight. How could you take a girl from a good home to endure such an experience! My mother’s inside. We think it best, monsieur, if my sister never sees you again. Please send back her dresses if indeed you still have them.”

He said, “It was a misunderstanding; it was an oversight.”

“In fact, she doesn’t want to see you.”

“That’s a lie!” he shouted as he glanced down to see the concierge mounting the stairs toward him with a heavy stick in her hand. At that moment the apartment door opened and Camille ran out. She wore only her dress and held her corset, hose, and barking dog under one arm. She seemed like something wild and tangled. “I was looking from the window!” she cried. “I saw you crossing the street! I couldn’t sleep for worry! Did they come? Did they hurt you? I would kill them if they hurt you!” She threw her arms around him so hard he almost lost his balance. He could feel the wild beating of her heart.

N
IGHT HAD FALLEN
when they reached the studio. Their many boxes and wet bags and canvases and paintings were heaped in the hall and against the studio walls. Pissarro and Auguste and Sisley had rescued some things from the landlord of the Pigalle room, who promised to deliver the rest tomorrow when the remainder of the money was raised.
“Les putains!”
Pissarro said angrily. “The whores. Landlords should be exiled. Rent should be free.” He kicked the wall.

Frédéric said, “I’m so sorry, Claude. Are you both all right? She’s not!” Camille was sneezing and feverish. Lise took her into the other room to help her out of her wet clothes and into a dressing gown and then tucked her onto the sofa and covered her with blankets.

They pushed the table to the sofa and Claude coaxed her to eat a little chicken. They opened a new small keg of wine sent by Frédéric’s family. The room was made warm by the puffing stove.

Auguste said between mouthfuls, “You both take the bedroom again. I’ll sleep on the cot until you find another place.”

Frédéric was too angry to sit down; he walked back and forth between the easels. “We’ve got to prevent this from happening again,” he said. “It kills me when I think how gifted you all are. Claude couldn’t even sell
The Green Dress
after all the praise it got. And we never know if the Salon will deign to take us, and then if they do, most people can’t find our work amid all the other work.”

He sat down then, drumming his long fingers on the table. “We need to arrange our own independent exhibition: the lot of us, Manet too, and Degas and Cézanne. We have to show the public what we can do with our new style.”

“But how do we know it’ll succeed or if anyone will come?” Pissarro asked. “Manet had an independent exhibition and lost his shirt.”

“But he was alone and we’re all together.”

Camille leaned back, holding the pillow against her. She croaked, “Ah, you see, there’s your answer! I told you! As I said before: one for all, all for one. Whatever I can do to help, I will!”

Claude lifted her and carried her into his old bedroom, which was now half filled with her rescued clothes, and tucked her in bed. “Now you must rest,” he said softly. “If my friends talk too loudly, I’ll throw them out the window.”

“Our friends,” she corrected him.

“Are you sure you don’t want to stay with your sister until I do better?”

“Never. You’d forget me and I’d grow ugly missing you. I intend to be brave. We must all be brave together.”

“You’re so beautiful! You must rest now. Shall I sing you a song? One my mother used to sing with me?”

“Yes, do! That will make me sleep. I didn’t sleep at all last night worrying about you, my love.”

“Well, then,” he said. Stroking her hair, he began to sing softly.
“À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener … Ily a longtemps que je t’aime.”

From the other room he heard the voices of his friends taking animatedly about when they could have their exhibition and how they could afford it. She was asleep, her face in profile. He ran his finger down her nose to her chapped lips. As he sat watching her soft breath, he remembered something her mother had whispered as Camille had kissed her rapidly and hurried down the steps ahead of him that late afternoon. “Monet, take care of her. She’s delicate. There are things you don’t yet understand about our Minou.”

1867–1868

If God had not created women’s breasts, I don’t know if I would have been a painter
.

—A
UGUSTE
R
ENOIR

C
LAUDE TOOK
C
AMILLE TO LIVE IN A ROOM OWNED BY AN
ancient lady in a wheelchair until the woman insisted that the smell of paint made her ill. They left in haste and for one week lived on a damp, cold houseboat in the Seine. He liked to watch Camille looking over the river at sunset. He was twenty-seven and she just twenty.

He had made a tentative rapprochement with her family during a stiff Sunday dinner in their rooms on the Île Saint-Louis. He had sat back in what Auguste called his lordly way, lace cuffs showing, and exclaimed, “I am heir to a prosperous Le Havre business.”

“But do you intend to take it over from your father?” Madame asked as they sat down to dine later and the maid served them.

“Not exactly, no.”

“Le Havre is after all too provincial for Minou.”

“It is, of course! But I don’t have to think of that. I’m on the cusp of doing very well here, madame! My prospects are great. Just this month, several new patrons have expressed interest in commissioning my work.”

For some moments Claude felt he had convinced Camille’s parents of his future. Later, thinking over her father’s mumbled assent and her mother’s cold look, he realized they had temporarily given up in weariness and were merely biding their time until their errant daughter would come back to them with some of her good name intact and marry the sort of man who would not take her to live on a houseboat. Madame Doncieux said nothing of the odd remark she had made when he had fetched Camille from her sister’s apartment. It likely meant nothing.

I must make a life for her, he thought. I will soon.

Then Claude heard of a spacious room in what had been the ballroom of a sixteenth-century
grand hôtel
in the poorer section of the Marais district, now given largely over to immigrants, artists, and the Paris Jewish population. Though crumbling, the mansion still had its wide and grand marble staircase. They moved in at once. The windows stuck. Cherubs still decorated the ceiling, but they had been blackened by years of coal smoke from the capacious, cracking marble fireplace.

Lise fell in love with it. “It’s full of ghosts!” she said. “It’s so theatrical! Oh,
chérie
, we shall give tragedies here! I feel the ghost of some poor royalist who was guillotined in the Revolution!” She came by daily, walking impetuously in the door to take Camille away to their elocution and movement lessons. The theater books piled up among her poetry and novels; his and her books mingled again. The tattered purple cloak hung from a hook in the wall amid her beautiful dresses.

S
HE ROSE LATE
that January morning, stumbling about the room in her robe, wearing a pair of his warm socks, and gazing at the frost that clung to the windows. He had already brewed coffee and heated milk. Once more they had stayed up too late visiting with Pissarro and his Julie, who now lived upstairs with their little son. While Claude and his friend lingered at the table, Camille had disappeared with Julie to the sleeping alcove, where their whispers and giggles floated from behind the curtain.

Claude poured her coffee as she sank down at the table. He said, “I’m off to paint the boulevard des Capucines from a high window, and you have your lesson and something else with Lise. I forget. Well, what are you thinking? Did you dream of guillotined counts? Lise’s imagination is sometimes too much for me.”

Camille clasped her coffee cups with both hands and shook her head.

“You’ll never guess,” she said.

“I can’t. Tell me.”

“I’m pregnant.”

“You’re …? How many days since …?”

“Nearly two months, and my breasts ache so much.”

“Two months! You said nothing.”

“I wanted to be sure.”

“But we use the sheath.”

She bit her lip playfully and gave him that coy look, head to one side, hair tumbling down. “We haven’t
always
used the sheath, Claude! Perhaps once or twice we didn’t.”

This is me, he thought. This is me, sitting opposite her at our table drinking our coffee as we do every morning. This is our room and our life. The boulevard is waiting. He squeezed her hand and kissed it. “I don’t see how it could be!” he said lightly. “Your bleeding’s irregular sometimes.”

“But it’s got to be true! Julie read it in the tea leaves, Claude!” She searched his face, crossing her arms slowly over her dressing gown. She said thoughtfully, “Then you don’t think I’m …”

“Oh, likely not at this time,
ma très chère fille,”
he replied.

S
TANDING AT THE
window above the snowy boulevard later that morning, he thought at first, I can’t. Then the painting took him and swept him along, but when he paused a few hours later, his heart began to pound.

As the day ended, he left the unfinished painting in the empty room high above the boulevard and walked reflectively home. Camille was standing by the stove wearing an apron, stirring a pot. “I’ve made pot-au-feu,” she said cheerfully over her shoulder. “I bought the sausages. Our teacher is very pleased with us; he thinks we may be ready to audition soon! Oh, Claude! He thinks there may be places in the Comédie-Française or at the Odéon. I won’t tell my family until it happens. How did your work go?” She raised her face for him to kiss her.

“Well,” he answered. “I can sell this one with no trouble. My old framer Isaac Clément will exhibit it.” She was humming brightly and wore a secret smile that seemed to radiate from her entire body under the apron. She hovered over the pot and ground in a little pepper, dipping her hand in the water basin.

We will not discuss it, he thought. There’s nothing to discuss.

Then he thought, We have to discuss it.

He waited until they sat down at the table, a jug of wine between them. “Well, I suppose your time came as always?” he asked cheerfully, and she pressed her lips together as if she could not begin to keep the smile inside and shook her head.

He hesitated, speared a piece of sausage, and ate silently for a time. “I suppose you want a baby.”

She reached out to touch his hand. “It’s all so wondrously strange! A few months ago I did think when we were in bed together, ‘He could give me a child,’ and that made me feel warm all over. Aren’t you happy? Wouldn’t you like if our love turned into a child?”

“I hadn’t planned on it yet,” he muttered, looking down at his half-empty plate. His appetite had gone. “And the stage? You’ve been working so hard.”

“My audition would merely be deferred a little,” she said. “I didn’t tell you, did I, that my sister’s with child? Claude.” She looked at him hesitantly, her lips slightly parted. “You don’t sound happy.”

“Yes, of course I’m happy! Only I don’t want you to get your hopes up and then find it isn’t so.”

He took a deep breath, wanting only to escape into his painting of the snowy boulevard, to flee into its brushstrokes and disappear. It will come to nothing, he told himself firmly. She has whims and they pass, and this is likely just something she wants for now. Her sister is having it and she wants it.

How had he not noticed? he asked himself the next morning as he hurried down the stairs with his paint box. She loved children, stopping often when they walked in the Jardin du Luxembourg at the octagonal pond, the Grand Bassin, where children rented small boats and ran around in their pinafores while mothers and nursemaids watched them fondly. They sometimes took Julie’s son, Lucien. Once he had come home to find Camille minding a neighbor’s two little boys, sitting on the floor with them, cutting out shapes from scrap paper. With some chagrin she had told him she had missed her elocution lesson and that Lise was angry with her.

Each night that week he hardly dared ask her if her time had come as usual, and by Friday he only gazed beseechingly at her when he came in, hanging up his hat. He poured water in the basin and washed his hands, rubbing at the paint under his nails.

“Well then, it’s true,” he cried, turning to her as she set down the casserole for dinner. He threw himself into a chair. “I’m not as successful yet as your sister’s husband; one day I’ll be even more successful. But now, how can we manage? How can I take care of you and a baby? Yes, you would have to defer your audition. Don’t you care about that? You can’t go on stage looking like a Renaissance Madonna! I’d borrow again, but I haven’t even paid my friends back for the last time, and they’re struggling as well.”

His voice rose. “That woman who bought my work hasn’t introduced me to other patrons yet, but she might take this new work herself. And when
Women in the Garden
is accepted by the Salon this spring, things will change for me, but that’s months away. Until then—
merde!
What on earth are we going to do?”

“But none of these things matter!” she insisted calmly. “All will be fine. I know it; I sense it. It’s in the tea leaves. We’ll manage somehow. We always do.”

“What do you mean ‘somehow’? Do tell me, Camille!”

“Don’t you have faith in your gifts and in mine? I
will
go on the stage; I won’t always look like a Renaissance Madonna. It’s only seven more months.”

“I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what the hell to do!”

Camille jerked her hand away and snatched at her coat, and before he could get to his feet, she had flung open the door. He heard her footsteps before he was able to take the dinner from the fire and run after her. Now what? he thought. Where in Paris has she gone? Likely to her sister’s. Oh, not that; not that!

He hurried through the old palatial courtyard, now filled with peddler’s carts and a tent with some straw on the ground and a wretched horse pawing it. Claude ran into the street. There were fewer gas lamps in this part of the city. He hurried past a café with its dim light showing through the frosty window and saw her in front of the closed dairy shop, her face against the window, her shoulders shaking under her coat.

He approached her tentatively, but she did not turn away from the dark window with its tin milk containers. “Why did you follow me?” she sobbed. “You don’t want the baby! I don’t need you. I could go home to my family. Then I would never see you again. I would never want to see you. They’ve been right about you all along!”

A horse and carriage trotted by, splashing them. Claude stood erect; though only a few moments of silence passed, he felt them to be hours. “Why do you say I don’t want our child?” he said at last. “Even if we face some difficulties, it will work out.” Still, under his breath he murmured, “What am I saying? What have I said?” He stood smiling slightly until he felt he had disappeared and only a bit of air remained where he stood, hardly visible under the gas lamp on the filthy snow. At least her sobs had subsided. He would have done anything to stop them.

She turned from the window, wiping her cheeks with her hands, the faintest look of joy in her eyes again. “But how will we manage?” she asked. “I could try to find modeling work until I’m ready to audition. Shall I do that, Claude?”

“I don’t want you modeling for anyone but me and our close friends! And you’ll start to show soon, won’t you? Have you told your sister? Maybe your family will help us. I’ll go home and speak to my father. It’s just for a time until I can earn money more regularly. I’m trembling. I don’t think I could hold a paintbrush if I tried, Minou!”

D
URING THE TRAIN
ride home through the countryside to Normandy, Claude thought of what words to say, biting his fingernails. As he descended at Le Havre and walked toward his father’s shop by the water, he could not remember how long it had been since he’d written. And yet the letters from his aunt to him were affectionate, and his father’s postscripts were warm. They had been thrilled at the great success of
The Woman in the Green Dress
, and Claude’s father had written that perhaps he had been wrong to stand against his gifted son. The checks, never large, had mercifully continued, and for some time his aunt and his father had begged him to visit.

Large snowflakes drifted down here and there amid the masts and the water. He walked under the shop sign and opened the door.

Nothing had changed here; he peered into the shadows at the ropes, at the shelves of boxes, and then at the desk with its old paid bills speared on the iron spike of the paper holder. And there was his father, sitting back reading a newspaper through his spectacles. The lenses were not clean, and his old sweater was missing buttons.

Hearing the shop bell, he looked up. “Claude!” he exclaimed happily. “What a surprise! Your aunt will be delighted.”

Claude thought, Growing older is mellowing the old man. He kissed his father’s bristly cheeks and sank into the chair beside the desk beneath the hanging samples of rope. “How are you, Papa?” he asked.