Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (5 page)

A withered man sitting behind a table accepted his paintings, logging them into the large book with a slow, scratchy pen. “M-o-n-e-t,” he spelled, writing as carefully as an aged schoolboy. Then the two paintings were lifted onto a cart by a muscular workman and Claude walked away, hands in his pockets.

It was like leaving his soul to see his paintings stacked with so many others and wheeled away to echoing rooms. The judges will stare at them for a few minutes, he thought, and then pass on to other work. He could see the committee in their dark coats and hats. Everyone knew how it was in there when they chose among twenty thousand works of art: a minute’s glance, an off-the-cuff decision. Giving a shake of the head for a negative vote, then passing on to the next. A mark noted on a scrap of paper to be counted later. Was the work original but not too original? How was the perspective? Was the subject properly executed? Just the sort of things
they
wanted, in other words, something with a style of fifty years before. Nothing vivid and moving and real, nothing like he and his friends were trying to create.

He paused, finger against his lips. Still, perhaps not; perhaps it would be different. Perhaps when looking at his they would stroke their beards and mutter among themselves, “A work of genius!”

Two weeks later the concierge yelled up that a letter had come for him, her voice echoing up the long flights. Claude rushed down, almost falling.

He walked back up the stairs, into the studio and into Frédéric’s bedroom, where his friend was studying at the desk; Claude leaned against a wall, covering his face with his hands.
“Putain
—the whore!” he cried bitterly. “Both declined! They’re good too.”

Frédéric leapt up. “The bastards. They don’t see. They can’t see! Listen to me, Claude. Just go on painting. I’ll pay the rent myself if I have to. I’ll lie to them at home.”

“You already lie to them at home. Suppose I’m not worth it? Suppose I’m fooling everyone?”

E
VERYTHING HE PAINTED
that spring displeased him, and the last thing he wanted to see was the barely disguised empathy of his friends. “You’re not fooling everyone!” Frédéric had shouted after him as he bolted down the stairs and ran he did not know where.

He took a wealthy woman he had met at the theater as his lover for several weeks and painted nothing until he was thoroughly disgusted with himself; by late autumn, he had decided to return to Le Havre to work. As he walked to his train in the Gare Saint-Lazare, he remembered the tall girl in the veiled hat he had seen three years before—recently he had been looking through old sketchbooks and found her picture, which he had tacked on the wall of his studio bedroom. He wondered what had happened to her. Was her life as unsettled as his was? He imagined meeting her and saying, “I am the famous artist Monet,” but of course he could not say that. He bit the edge of his thumb and looked out the window.

For many days after he arrived home he slept a lot and read. Then on a damp November morning he went off alone to the riverhead at low tide and began to create a new painting. A storm was coming; a horse and cart made its way through the low tide, and a few other weary horses lifted their hooves from the wet sand while the clouds almost fell into the sea. He took the painting back to his bedroom and worked on it there and then continued in the Paris studio when he returned. In March he submitted it to the Salon with a smaller painting of a road in Chailly.

Again the concierge yelled up to him one morning as he was shaving. There were three letters in their slot, including one from Frédéric’s wealthy aunt and uncle, presumably inviting them to dinner again. He stood in the hallway to open the one addressed to him, using the ragged letter opener that hung from a string on a nail. He read it several times. Half an hour later he was still sitting on the stairs, flushed and breathless.

Claude went with his friends on the opening day of the spring Salon to see his work hung. They looked for the paintings for half an hour until they discovered both twenty feet above them, just under the ceiling, where little could be seen of them at all.

A party of men and women pushed past them on the way out of the room, knocking into them. “It’s not a failure,” Auguste cried above the noise. “Come back here, Monet! At least you got in. That’s more than the rest of us can say. Success takes a long time.”

“I haven’t got a long time,” Claude cried as he strode out under the great arched entrance. “I’ve got six more damn months of money from home and then I’ll have to find a doorway to sleep in.”

Auguste threw his arm around Claude’s back as they walked. “Look, Claude!” he said. “Start planning for a submission next year. Never mind painting seascapes and shores for now, even though they’re the best around. Paint beautiful women and paint a big canvas. If you do it well enough, the world will notice you. Find some models. You’ll do it. We’ll help.”

F
OR HOURS HE
wandered alone. When he was troubled, he always sought refuge in the streets and by the river. Sometimes he saw everything; other times he saw nothing. Dusk was falling when he entered the bookshop on the rue Dante near the Sorbonne; the window lamp had been lit and an elderly cat was sleeping on a French encyclopedia. The hand-painted hanging sign read Libraire Doncieux.

A young woman was seated behind the desk. She was so absorbed in writing a letter that she did not hear him come in. Her thick, brownish-red hair, which was secured demurely in a topknot on her head with combs and a heavy black velvet bow, glistened in the light of the desk lamp. She wore a little gold cross against the high lace collar of her dress, and she bit her lip as she wrote.

“Bonjour
, mademoiselle,” he said.

She raised her face. It was the veiled girl he had seen in the train station on his way to join the army nearly four years before.

Claude was so startled that his heart began to beat a little faster. She was looking at him oddly now.
“Bonjour
, monsieur,” she said in a clear, sweet voice. “May I help you?”

“I merely came to look.”

“Very well.
D’accord.”

“Do you carry any secondhand books?”

“Some, in the box against that wall.”

A few customers came in as he browsed the shelves, glancing back at her secretly several times. She was so much lovelier than he remembered her because she was real. There was a sort of warmth from her as from the earth on a summer day. He felt it drift across the shop and cause the titles of the books to blur before him.

The customers departed, and he heard the rapid scratch of her pen again until it stopped. The silence was potent. She called,
“Je suis desolée
, monsieur! I’m sorry, but we’re closing in a few minutes.”

He pulled an old book from a box and walked toward her with it. She looked at the title and smiled.
“Birds of Central France,”
she said. “That will be two francs, monsieur.”

Now the day was ending outside and the bookshop grew darker. Behind her was a staircase leading to the upper shelves and then above to he did not know where. He had the odd sensation that she would go up those steps, her skirts trailing, and disappear as she had before.

He said, “What’s up there?”

“Books people seldom buy, and above that, my uncle’s rooms. He’s rather the black sheep in my family to own a shop like this, but I like it.”

“I’ve shopped here before. I’ve not seen you here until now.”

“My uncle’s not well, poor thing! I’ve come to help for a few days. My parents don’t let me do too much because I’m just eighteen, but this time they said I might in compensation for …” She pressed her lips together and shook her head.

“You were writing passionately to someone and I interrupted you.”

“I have passionate words to say.”

“Ah, do you?” Claude could see from the quality of her dark wool dress and the real gold cross about her neck that she was not one of the harried Parisian shopgirls struggling to buy a pretty pair of shoes but some daughter of the petite or even haute bourgeoisie whose father had plenty of income. She likely spent most of her days drawing a little or playing the piano or deciding what she would wear. He knew that if she really looked at him, she might see a somewhat shabby young man who had just endured a moment of tremendous disappointment and who, under his slight bluster, was deeply sad.

He walked home by gaslight and then through the studio into his room, where he stared again at the sketch on his wall, which he had made of her when he had first seen her. Marvelous—but what could it mean for him? He locked his door and lay down on the bed with his copy of
Birds of Central France
lying open on his chest.

His mind was not still, though. Ideas for paintings moved in the dark room before him. He jumped up and flipped through his sketchbooks to find a rough sketch for a huge painting of picnickers under a tree. He had made it the year before and forgotten all about it, but now it came to life for him. The room changed: trees grew, people ate and drank on a picnic cloth, and everything was dappled by sunlight. And the girl in his drawing was in the middle of it.

H
E WAS SWEATY
and sensually excited; he tried to sleep and ended up making further sketches. His hopelessness of the day before was swept away. He was up by dawn, though he had hardly slept at all. He endured the hours until the shop opened. Suppose she was not there? For it was her face and figure and no other that he saw in the great painting he would make.

She was at the bookshop desk again, writing another letter, but when he came close she quickly turned it facedown. What was in it? It did not matter. He had nothing to do with her personal matters; he did not even know her.
“Bonjour
, mademoiselle,” he said in a more charming way than he had the previous day. “I did not mention this yesterday.
Je suis peintre
—I’m a painter.”

Her large brown eyes studied him, her hand over the turned letter. “Are you, monsieur?” she asked.

“I’m planning a huge picture of picnickers on the grass to be painted outside,
en plein air
, in the forest of Fontainebleau, a short train ride from Paris. I need a young woman to model. You’re very lovely. It would take a few weeks. I plan it for June. I would of course pay for your time and your lodging. Would you model for me?”

“But I am not a model, monsieur,” she replied demurely. “And I don’t know what my parents would say if I went from the city alone.” From her now downcast eyes, he could imagine exactly what they would say.

He flapped his hat against his trouser leg, keeping the other hand securely in his pocket. “I assure you I’ll ask nothing that could be considered immodest or offensive. You would be fully clothed; I would ask you to bring your loveliest dresses. As for my references, others can speak well of me. My family has a prosperous business in Le Havre. My best friend, also from a fine family, is coming to model. Look, here’s my address. Will you send word to me if you decide you can come?”

He walked home and through the studio, where his friends were painting, and threw himself on the bed. He wondered why she had been allowed to work in the bookshop, in compensation for what, and to whom she had been writing. She would not come, of course, and she was the one he wanted. He was uncomfortably aware of something about her that had haunted him since he had first seen her with the family.

But at twilight, when he was hurrying out to buy sausages before the shops closed, he noticed a sheet of blue stationery in the mail slot. “Dear Monsieur Monet,” it said in neat handwriting. “I could come for one week only if I can bring my sister as chaperone. We regard it as an adventure and hope it will be of help to you and further the cause of art. Sincerely, Camille-Léonie Doncieux.” The other side of the paper had a few words crossed out. He thought they said, “My dear love,” but it did not matter, for they were not for him.

F
ONTAINEBLEAU WAS AN
ancient royal forest that artists had discovered more than a generation before. Claude wandered about until he found the place he wanted to paint, then set up his easel and a small canvas to begin to capture the leafy beech trees in the foreground and the background that he would need for his picture of picnickers. Later in the studio he would repaint everything on a very large canvas that no one in next spring’s Salon could possibly ignore.

He had taken places in a rustic inn that catered to artists: two tiny rooms in the attic for himself and Frédéric, and one lovelier and larger room for the girls to share. Everything was ready when Frédéric arrived a few days later. He had brought his paints and easel, hoping to have time to work himself.

That night they smoked their pipes outside the inn in the warm air, waiting for the Doncieux sisters to arrive by coach from the local train. The young women did not come on the first coach or the second. Already it was ten o’clock at night.

“They’re not coming!” Claude said. “It’s all over for me.”

“They’re coming. There’s one more coach.”

“I bet you a pack of tobacco they don’t.”