Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (2 page)

Claude flushed as he accepted the palette and brushes. He stared from the dim apple trees to the empty canvas on the easel before him. What was this odd man in his muddy shoes fussing about? Landscapes! It was only a matter of putting the right color paint in the right place. Then he could win the challenge and go home to bed. By that time, his father would have left for work.

The rising day was emerging behind the trees, and the dark tips of the leaves began to glimmer. “It keeps moving!” Claude exclaimed after half an hour, pushing back his hair with the crook of his arm. “You didn’t tell me about this. How am I supposed to do this if the air keeps moving and changing and the light changes?”

The sun rose high above, warming him and the earth. His legs and right arm ached, his head pounded, and his eyes hurt from looking. A few hours later when he stepped back to study what he had done, he saw merely clumsy strokes of paint. The green was wrong. It had been right before and now it was wrong. If only the colors would stay the same; if only the air would stay the same!

“Pas mal
—not bad at all for a start,” Boudin commented, standing behind Claude to look at his canvas. “Your line’s good because you draw well, but painting is … ah, painting! If you keep going, you will improve. Eventually you may reveal a little of your heart.”

“That’s not what a man does, is it?” Claude replied bluntly. “My father says that. I think he’s right in that at least.”

They stopped only once, for some bread and cheese and wine that the older painter had packed. By early afternoon, they both were tired. Claude shook Boudin’s hand and limped back home, where he fell into bed and slept until morning.

When he opened his eyes he saw the painting on his bureau. The oddest thing was that as he gazed at it still half asleep, it seemed to gaze back at him. He rose somewhat shyly and approached it. Why, there’s nothing there! he thought. It’s all dead. Yet now a few branches of a tree seemed alive. There was a stiff cotton cloud and he thought, Perhaps I could make that a little better, as if it lived. Perhaps I could.

He looked down at his hands, intrigued.

Later that day Claude walked down to Gravier’s shop.

He moved down the aisles full of fat metal tubes of English paints, their thick colors dabbed on a wood board to identify them. Near the back were canvases stretched on plain wood frames, as well as rolls of unstretched canvas, leaning like rugs against a wall. Another aisle held thick pads of paper, smaller sketchbooks, jars of pencils, crumbling pastels in a wood box, brushes that ranged from the most slender sable for ink drawings to ones as wide as his hand. There were boxes of watercolor pigment, each little square separate from its fellows; palette knives of several sizes in a jar; palettes of every shape.

What could I do with these supplies? he thought. What could I do? I may be terrible at it, but I have to try. He felt this with every muscle of his slender chest.

A few days later he discovered Eugène Boudin on the wharf with his easel, painting the boats. “Monsieur,” Claude said politely, “I’d like to study with you if you’ll have me.”

The painter did not turn from his work, though he blinked a few times. He said finally, “I’m delighted, Monet. And the caricatures?”

“Maybe later.”

That spring Claude went everywhere with the older artist. The two of them painted in Honfleur across the estuary, and they painted the estuary itself. It was oils for Claude, and the occasional red chalk or pastels. Wherever he looked he saw shadow, shape, and color, things receding and rushing toward him again, and each day he thought, Today I’ll manage it; today I’ll seize it all. Yet each day he felt he was beginning again. What he saw today made yesterday’s work rubbish.

In the evening, during the peaceful hour before his father came home from work, Claude sat in the parlor with his mother as she embroidered. “I’m going to Paris one day to study,” he told her. “Would you come away from him for a while to stay with me? We’d go to the opera and the ballet.” By the lamplight, he looked at her more closely. Her face was in profile to him, and he could see that her neck was thinner under her high lace collar and her hands more fragile.

“What, aren’t you eating?” he demanded.

“I am, but I know I’m losing weight.”

The clock ticked; outside, the wind blew the trees and he breathed deeply to push away the sudden fear. He lowered his voice stubbornly and said, “You’ll come to Paris with me.”

F
ROM THAT DAY
he did not cease to worry about her. Every morning when he left the house early to paint, he looked back at the window of her room, but the closed shutters told him nothing. She’ll be in the parlor when I return this evening, he told himself, and I’ll show her what I’ve done.

He forced himself to concentrate on his painting, but the moment he ceased, his thoughts returned home. Then he stared at the half-finished canvas on his easel and cried, “The harder I work, the more I want from it. How long will it take me to be good?”

“It takes all your life, Claude.”

“There isn’t enough time. I’m worried about my mother. There’s the doctor coming in and out this whole month and no one tells me anything. And today I’m so uneasy I can’t do any more. I’ve got to go home and see how she is.”

As he hurried in the door, Aunt Lecadre was coming down the stairs, and when he climbed to meet her, her wrinkled face and pale mouth made her look as if all joy had seeped from her. “No one tells me things!” he whispered, looking up the darkness of the stairs to the landing.

“Claude, dearest, we hoped it wasn’t so.”

He rushed up past her. Wherever he looked, the hall turned into lines and colors and the shadows blended. In the bedroom, he pushed past the doctor and threw himself on the bed, burying his face in his mother’s loose hair.

Two weeks later Claude listened to the earth fall on her coffin like measured blows. He broke from his family around the open grave and ran up the hill until he could not run anymore. Under a group of trees he felt that dreadful rising breath in his throat that warned him that his grief could not be kept down. Holding on to a tree, he wept so harshly he felt his chest would break apart.

The house in Ingouville fell silent but for Claude playing songs softly on the piano in the small hours of the night until his father called down, “Stop!”

A few days after the funeral he went into his mother’s bedroom and put his face in her dresses, which hung in the wardrobe. He took out the gloves from her glove box and laid them on the bed. I never painted her, he thought bitterly. She saw only the very beginning of what I could do. I was going to paint the garden for her as a birthday present, and now it’s too late. I was right that there wasn’t enough time.

From behind his father’s closed bedroom door he heard no sound.

F
OR THE NEXT
few years he did little but paint. Sometimes he took food and stayed away for days, sleeping in little houses or inns. He and Boudin walked and painted together.

As they put their brushes away one late afternoon, Boudin said, “Listen, my young friend. You’re twenty now, and I can’t teach you much more. Go to Paris to study. Speak to your father.”

“He won’t approve,” Claude said. “Since I left school, he’s been urging me to join him in the shop. But I’ll ask again.” He wiped the sand from his feet, put on his socks and shoes, and walked back to the wharf and his father’s shop of nautical supplies.

Adolphe Monet looked up sharply from behind his desk under the hanging lanterns and ropes. “There you are, boy!” he cried. “This very morning one of the fishermen informed me you were sleeping with his daughter and wants to know when you’ll marry her. I haven’t laid eyes on you in a week, I told him.”

He tore off his spectacles, which fell on his papers. “Damn it, Claude!” he shouted, slapping the desk hard with both hands. “You’re gone when I get up and asleep when I come home. You’re throwing your life away and leaving me here to work alone, though I’m growing old and you know it! And you don’t earn so much as a franc from this new obsession. Landscapes!”

“I want to go to Paris to study art.”

Aunt Lecadre hurried toward them through the crates, looking anxiously from one to the other. Claude snatched up her rough hand and kissed it. “Talk to him, Tante! You must!” he begged. “I can’t put it off any longer. I’ve got to go to Paris. If I fail, I’ll come home again. I promise.”

The tall old woman touched his cheek.
“Alors
, Adolphe!” she said. “Let him go for a time and see what he makes of it. You know how mad I was about painting as a girl. I have artist friends in Paris. They could find him lodging.”

“I won’t give him any money!”

Claude said hotly, “I don’t need your money; I have a lot of my own left from my caricatures.”

Adolphe Monet felt for his spectacles amid the papers. “Then go,” he said wearily. “Perhaps things will blow over with your girl here by then. I tell you, though, my son: you’ll be back.”

1861–1862

When I’ve painted a woman’s bottom so that I want to touch it, then the painting is finished
.

—A
UGUSTE
R
ENOIR

I
T WAS THE IMMENSITY OF IT HE COULD NOT HAVE IMAGINED
: Paris, where the emperor and his wife rode through the streets in their carriage, where mansions and palaces rubbed walls with hovels. Thousands of cafés, their windows painted with wine advertisements; thousands of alleys, whose brick houses were pasted with posters. Filth ran in the streets in one neighborhood while those in others were washed daily; in stately green parks, sunlight danced through the trees onto the women’s fine dresses and onto the feathers and silk flowers on their hats. Clean, bright children skipped about with hoops. He had never seen so many people in his life.

About him whole neighborhoods were being torn down, and magnificent boulevards with elegant terraced houses were being erected, the work of the emperor’s deputy, Haussmann, who had vowed to make this cramped medieval city the most beautiful in Europe. Claude had read about it in the news journals for years.

He would not go straight to the room that his aunt had arranged for him to have in Pigalle; no, he would go first to the annual state Salon of French artists in the Palais de l’Industrie on the Right Bank. He got lost twice, and his arms were aching from carrying his suitcase and easel when he finally found it and, for a small fee, walked inside and climbed the broad stairs to the exhibition hall.

Claude moved carefully from room to room, gazing at the hundreds of canvases hung from floor to ceiling. Sculptures of dying heroes and quivering virgins loomed above him; it was not the sort of art he liked at all, for he found it artificial and suffocating. But here and there, amid huge, old-fashioned paintings of allegories of the gods, he found the bright, humble paintings of the artists of whom Boudin had spoken—Corot, Daubigny, Delacroix, Millet—with their dreamy forests, fields of hay, and a house by a canal at twilight that seemed to glow with an unearthly radiance. All were painted not within studio walls but outside,
en plein air
, in wet, cold, or glorious sun. He felt he did not stand there looking at them but instead that he stepped inside, where the light gathered about him. This is art, he thought, almost touching the canvases. This is the new, true way; this is the path I will follow.

The next morning he joined a small school to learn.

A model posed naked on a stand. Dust lay on everything, clinging to the windowsills and the lamps. The other thirty students seated on benches at the stained tables hardly bothered to look at him. Claude took his pad and charcoal and began, sometimes working quickly, sometimes erasing with a bit of rolled bread.

Many hours later when he left, he was so tired he could hardly climb the seven flights to his room in Pigalle. By his oil lamp, he saw that his lace cuffs were gray with charcoal. He washed them in the cold water of the basin and draped them over the back of a chair. All about him, every angle and every color was more vivid than before. Even the chair with the drying cuffs and the worn wicker bottom cried out to him. He lay down and covered his eyes with his arm.

He walked to the studio every day, passing the new horse-drawn omnibuses that made their way through the rubble of wrecked neighborhoods and across the bridge to the Left Bank. At night he went home alone, too overwhelmed to speak with anyone.

Boudin had told him last summer, “The only thing I see you lack, Claude, is humility. When you learn that, you will do your best.” Claude winced, thinking of it as he walked through the darkening streets. I’m humble enough, he thought wistfully. It should come easier.

H
E WAS YOUNG
, and he had not left sensuality behind; it followed him here, it hung about the studio. Amid the chalk and dust at the long tables of the art school, he looked from the model’s rich breasts to the few demurely clothed female art students who diligently sketched her. Seated quite close to him on his bench was a plump, blond student from the Netherlands called Damek; he could feel the warmth of her leg against his trousers.

When he looked up from his sketchbook one warm afternoon, a male model stood where the lovely female had lately displayed her beauty; he was not, however, naked, but wore large white under-drawers. At that moment Damek pressed so near to Claude that he felt the edge of her breasts. “Because women study here too, the government says it’s not decent to let us see what’s between a man’s legs,” she said. Her voice dropped discreetly lower as she felt for her charcoal. “I wouldn’t mind seeing what’s between yours, Monet. Shall we? I don’t live far away.”

The chalky air stood still for him. “I only sleep with duchesses and maids; a duchess’s maid would be ideal,” he blurted as coolly as he could.

She closed her sketchbook sharply. “Oh, very well, then!” she whispered. “Keep what’s there to yourself.”

He leapt up as she took her things and hurried from the class. He caught her on the stairs, taking her in his arms and kissing her long and hard. “Actually,” he gasped, “what I have is best shared, and I assure you, it’s more than worth a look.”

In her boardinghouse room, they latched the door. He was in her then, thrusting hard, gasping. After, Damek lay naked beneath him wonderfully contented, her finger running slowly down his bare back.

He took her again. The strange sensation came to him then: he was with her in the height of their shared sexuality—laughing, grasping, pulling together—and then they fell apart and the intensity was but a memory. It was the same with his painting. There was his passion, and then his energy was spent; he tried to hold it in and it was gone, leaving an odd sadness for his loss of power.

“This certainly does not mean,” he said practically as he buttoned his shirt at last, “that we’re falling in love. I’m so glad you agree.”

They were lovers through the hot summer when the class emptied and the city sweltered, and they remained lovers as autumn came on and then the winds of winter. He bought coal for his own fireplace as seldom as possible to save money, and he sometimes sat with his back against it, wrapped in blankets, reading. He bought sausages so cheap they tasted of fat and wood. One franc purchased a jug of bitter wine. Almost all his money went to canvases and paints. The room had a few rats, but they were friendly. He wrote home that he was doing brilliantly.

He was making friends.

“There’s a café in the Batignolles district on the Right Bank where a bunch of us go,” a cheerful, thin student told him after class. They stood in the street and shook charcoal-smudged hands. The dark-skinned young man wore his usual workman’s blue smock and always looked as if he needed a good meal. “Pierre-Auguste Renoir,” he said, introducing himself. “I used to paint china but gave it up for canvases. My saintly widowed mother and many sisters are pinning all their hopes on my success!
Allons-y!
Come on!”

The windows of the Café Guerbois in Batignolles were dirty, the letters half worn away from the advertisement for wine painted directly on the glass. Claude recognized a few students seated around a long, cracked marble table. Their coats hung on hooks on the wall above them.

One man with a long, black rabbinical beard spoke with the cadence of the West Indies. “Jacob-Abraham-Camille Pissarro,” he said, introducing himself.
“Plaisir!
You don’t want to sit next to my friend Cézanne from Provence because he hasn’t changed his clothes in two months. Perhaps it’s a custom there in the south.”

“You
merde;
this shirt is new,” growled the dark painter.

Édouard Manet extended his pale hand to shake Claude’s. Manet was the only one of them who had already gained some public recognition. He painted scandalously provocative nudes. Claude had seen him walking brusquely down the street in his top hat, swinging his walking stick as if clearing the street before him.

As the waiter took their order, Claude felt for his money. He was burning through it at a great rate with art supplies and presents for Damek, but he did not worry. Well, here I am, he thought. My path is clear before me. I’ll keep working until I’m good enough to be accepted by the annual Salon and I begin to earn a living. Nothing can stand in my way.

He ordered sausages, cheese, and wine for all and began to tell them about the sky in Normandy. Of his family he said nothing: the one he loved was in the ground and he could never speak of her.

The artists met several times a week. They always carried paint boxes or sketchbooks and sometimes tied canvases; they came from painting the cold winter river, trying for a portrait commission, or persuading some framer to let them have credit and display their work in his window. Except for Pissarro they were all under thirty.

Around the café table, they talked all at once, shouting one another down and then listening quietly, nodding their heads before breaking into argument again. They spoke of perspective and shadow, brushwork, priming, layers of paint, leaves dancing in the wind, the fresh colors of a woman’s bare arm, darkening skies over the water, mist on the roofs of village houses, and fields of new wheat. They discussed the shape of Parisian rooftops and the many colors of snow that lay over them this winter.

A new student from the school walked into the café one rainy day, bending to accommodate his height as he came through the door. He had a wide, crooked, endearing smile and such a wispy beard and mustache that it looked as if he had just been blown in from a storm. “Jean-Frédéric Bazille, from Montpellier,” he said in his light bass voice when they all shook hands. “I’m a medical student, but my only love is painting. I shall murder all my patients through incompetence!”

He blinked as he shook Claude’s hand, suddenly serious and a little shy. “I saw your work in class, Monet. You’re good!”

C
LAUDE STROLLED HOME
on a late spring evening and was halfway up the stairs when a hoarse voice called him down. The concierge did not take the cigarette out of her mouth but waved a thick letter in the air. Claude took it, mounting the stairs more slowly now. It had been forwarded by his family and bore the stamp of the department of the army at Le Havre. Inside his crowded room, he read the letter.

For a few hours he walked back and forth in the dark until the seamstress below shouted up for him to stop. When he finally fell into bed he did not sleep but stared at the cracked ceiling in the dim glow of the streetlamp far below.

Claude caught the morning train back to Le Havre in a crowded third-class compartment with a family who ate garlic sausage and drank thick wine. Arriving in midafternoon, he trudged up the hill to his family house. He felt he had been away for years.

He washed in the basin in his old room and paced again to calm himself. At eight he would go down. He studied himself in the bedroom mirror, arranging his face, trying to find an expression between indifference and self-assurance. That had been his face at seventeen, and he did not know where it had gone. He passed his hand over his mouth, but it was no use. Damn it, then, he thought, descending the stairs two steps at a time at the sound of the dinner bell.

Gaslight illuminated the photograph of his mother on the wall. The long polished table with its ten chairs now seated only his father on one side and his aunt in her white, frilled matron’s cap on the other. He kissed them and sat down before his soup.

“So you received the letter we forwarded,” his aunt said.

“I did, dear aunt, and I came at once.”

She shook her head, her soupspoon poised in the air. “Oh, Claude, such bad luck that your name was called in the army lottery! So many other boys here escaped it. We understand your training is to be in our French colony in Algiers. The seven years will pass quickly, we hope.”

“But surely you don’t expect me to go!” he exclaimed, appalled. “It will only cost you a thousand francs to buy me out. I don’t doubt you’ll do so. I’m on my way to great success!”

He waited in the silence, only the gas lamp sputtering.

His aunt and father were looking at each other.

“Yes,” said his aunt reflectively at last, fingering the edge of the embroidered tablecloth. “We have been discussing your prospects, dear Oscar. Paris is full of thousands of artists, I’m told. And you haven’t sold anything yet. We know also that you’ve met a Danish girl there; one of my old friends heard from your teacher. You oughtn’t be thinking of
les filles
. No, it won’t do. A thousand francs is a huge sum.”

“However,” his father said, clearing his throat, “if you stay here and work with me, we’ll buy you out. You can paint on Sundays. Many men do.”

Claude put down his napkin and stood up abruptly, startling Hannah, who was waiting with the dish of chicken. “Then I will go into the army,” he said coldly. “I will never waste my life in a dark shop selling nautical supplies.”