Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (6 page)

“I bet you your future prize in the Exhibition they do.”

Claude leapt up from the stone bench to pace the dirt road. A faint lamp glow was coming closer, illuminating the trunks of oaks. The horse stopped, the door opened, and two tall girls wearing bonnets and struggling with large wicker trunks cautiously put their feet on the step to descend. Both men ran forward to help and nearly toppled the luggage.

“We nearly couldn’t get away,” the girls cried, their words tumbling over each other. “And we’re so dreadfully tired! Did you get the hatbox?” He had a feeling they had been arguing on the way, and indeed when he and Frédéric carried the bags upstairs and closed the door, he heard the muffled intense voices.

H
E ROSE VERY
early and descended the stairs with his paint box. The sisters’ door was firmly closed, and no sound came from within. “Are the young women who came last night still here?” he asked the innkeeper’s wife as she came toward him carrying clean linen, and she replied,
“Bien sûr!
But of course! One of them has already walked in the garden; she’s below with her coffee. It will be a fine day, monsieur.”

Camille-Léonie Doncieux was standing by the window, two hands holding her coffee bowl; she held the curtain back just a little with her shoulder and was gazing out at the flowers. She turned to him with a smile and said cheerfully, if a little shyly, “Good morning, monsieur!”

“Good morning, mademoiselle.”

She put her coffee bowl on the table and gave him her bare hand.

She was young indeed and very lovely; hers was a strong, almost classical Grecian face with full eyebrows, beautiful eyes, and a strong nose. Neither was she too slender, he noted appreciatively: a full bosom pressed against the bodice of her blue and white striped dress. He had had the impression before she turned that she had been waiting for someone; under her outer restraint he sensed a certain anticipation that something she would like was hurrying toward her.

He felt a strong frisson of attraction and immediately frowned at himself. She must be only a model to me or I won’t do well, he thought.

He heard skirts on the stairs as her sister, Annette, descended, still looking half asleep. Frédéric came down shortly after and drank his coffee hastily. The four of them left a clutter of bread crumbs and empty coffee bowls on the table as they walked out to work on the painting.

Claude spread a picnic rug with dishes and food on the ground beneath the beech tree and set up his easel and the canvas. He called sternly, “Now, Mademoiselle Camille, if you please, over there. Sit on the rug. Yes. Now pick up that plate and hold it out a little. Very good. We’ll work this way for a while and then I’ll have you change places. I’ll paint you as different women. And you, Mademoiselle Annette, sit there if you will.” The women took their places, laughing a little, arranging their full dresses over their crinolines, which were fuller in the back in the new style, tidying their hair. Frédéric stretched his long body on the grass, propping himself up on both elbows.

Paris was full of professional models who knew how to hold a pose; would these girls be still? Yes, it appeared they would be still, though they did talk softly back and forth about the theater, which they both adored.

Sun touched the bright colors on Claude’s palette as he painted the first stroke, then the second. He always began in apprehension. If it worked, there would be a time when the painting took him, when it reached out and he became it, when he smelled of oil and mineral spirits, when he and the air became one.

His hours passed radiantly; with every stroke, he enclosed himself more in the canvas. By the afternoon’s end, he noted that his models had begun to sag this way or that, into the ground or leaning against the air. Claude sighed; he felt his own weariness with intense reluctance, but there it was. He could wring no more of himself from the day or his models. His arm ached and the light was going, going. He wanted to rush forward under the trees and snatch it in his arms.

T
HE SISTERS LOOKED
somewhat alike and were almost the same height. Both were beautiful. He saw that when he painted and again as they sat down in the inn kitchen for dinner that night. Annette sat quite straight, showing off her long, lovely neck above her high dress collar as if she might be presented to the nobility at any moment if someone from the ancien regime before the Revolution should sweep into this farmhouse kitchen past the blackened stove. Camille was more open; she broke into conversation and then pulled herself back with a shy smile. She picked up her fork and forgot to eat the bit of lamb. She wore her brownish-red hair in a thick bun at the back of her neck, with several shorter strands falling against her cheeks as if they resented being constrained.

They were well-bred young ladies suddenly stolen off for an adventure together. Their parents likely did not know they were here. Claude looked toward the dark window. If they should be followed!

He was still so much in his painting he had no idea how he would make conversation with them. He looked at his friend and at the girls at the table, rearranging them in his mind on the canvas as he had seen them that afternoon.

Frédéric poured the wine gallantly. “So, mesdemoiselles!” he said in his charming bass voice. “Have you both always lived in Paris?”

Annette shook her head. “No, monsieur; we’re from Lyon, where we studied at the convent school. We came four years ago. Our father’s a silk merchant and continues his work here.”

“Yes, everyone comes to Paris for art, for music, for theater! Do you go often to the Louvre?”

Camille leaned forward, both hands on the table. “We go to the Louvre all the time, and to the theater,” she replied, stammering slightly. “I love the theater so! Almost as much as books. I am always coming home with books, aren’t I, Annette? I have read a lot of Balzac, much to my mother’s disapproval, but I prefer the novels of George Sand. They’re more tender. And Victor Hugo makes me cry.”

“Do you read poetry too?”

“Oh, yes.”

They all ate hungrily. Annette glanced now and then at her engagement ring as if appraising it; Claude had heard she was to be married in the autumn.

When dessert was served, Frédéric exclaimed, “How can it be you’ve never modeled before?” He sat back boyishly, his thumbs in his suspenders, smiling happily, surveying the girls. “You’re both beautiful and sweet. Tenderhearted, I would say.”

Annette shook her head, pushing her wineglass away a few inches and then surreptitiously drawing it back. Her voice was now just the slightest bit unsteady. “Camille’s the one who’s tenderhearted! Why, if she likes someone, she gives everything.”

The younger sister flushed. “Really, it’s not so. But how odd we’ve been to the Louvre many times and not seen each other. Paris is so big. You see someone interesting and then they are gone, gone. I’ve seen faces and remembered them always. I wonder sometimes what I’ll do with my life. I have so many plans.”

“What plans?” Frédéric asked seriously.

“Oh, well,
plans!”
she said, flushing.

Claude was now so tired he could hardly follow the conversation. In addition, Camille kept changing for him: he recalled her in the train station and then the book shop and now here she was across the table from him in an inn kitchen in Fontainebleau, her eyes a little unfocused for the wine. He struggled for words and managed to ask Annette, “But if you are to be married so soon, mademoiselle, why did you come here?”

Annette raised her hand to tuck in any loose strands from her hair.
We regard it as an adventure
, the note of acceptance had said. “To chaperone my younger sister, of course!
Bien sûr!
She came home the day you asked her, monsieur, saying we must go, we must go, and I couldn’t let her go alone.” Ah, he thought. Camille wanted to come and so she did, and left behind her passionate letters. But to whom were they written?

Annette drank delicately and dropped her voice. “Camille is also expected to become engaged by summer’s end; actually my betrothed and hers know each other well.”

Camille’s face became serious. “Yes,” she replied. “Monsieur is a dear man, very kind. I didn’t expect my sister and I to find husbands so close together, but she’s engaged and will marry first.”

L
ATER IN HIS
narrow room he heard them below wishing each other goodnight and then Frédéric’s footsteps as he mounted to his own attic room. Claude put out his lamp and lay in the dark, his mind still seeing the heavy green trees of the painting, the little white flowers, the people moving languidly as if time had stopped and they would be there forever with Annette’s arms raised to unpin her hat and Camille in a white dress, leaning forward, offering a plate.

The opening of the inn door below woke him. He felt for his watch and read the hour by the moonlight: nearly one. He could hear Frédéric snoring through the wall. Claude rose in his nightshirt to look out the window.

Camille was standing alone on the path in the white light of the moon.

What was she doing down there by herself? He thought to call out and run down to her, but what then? He must maintain some distance between them, and though he so much wanted to go to her, he only bit his lip as she turned away and walked toward the woods, her pale dress disappearing around the bend. Now he regretted his decision. Should he run after her? He doubted anyone would come to disturb her, but still he was not certain she should be out alone.

I’ll go after her in ten minutes if she’s not returned, he thought. He slipped back into bed, his eyes on the hands of his pocket watch. The wind blew the tree branches a little, and out of exhaustion, he slept. When he woke he still held his watch, which read half-past nine in the morning. Light usually woke him, but today rain was beating relentlessly against the window.
Merde!
They would have to work in the kitchen without any real light at all.

Frédéric was painting a still life of vegetables at his own easel when Claude came down for coffee. Shortly after, he heard a door open above and the two sisters descended, still adjusting the pins in their hair. Annette looked as if she had a headache. “Rain,” she observed.

“It may clear,” said Frédéric, looking from the window to the sideboard, which held the plate of potatoes and onions.

All of them drank their coffee and ate their bread with few words, half watching Frédéric paint an onion. Camille rested her hand on the table and Claude, who sat next to her, noticed how closely her fingernails were bitten. She looked toward the wet window. “I couldn’t sleep last night,” she said dreamily. “So I went out. It was a little like being at my
grandmère’s
in the country the way the wind shook the trees. I was looking at the moon.”

“I wish you hadn’t!” replied her sister irritably. “You shouldn’t go walking alone; Mother wouldn’t approve.”

“She wouldn’t approve of anything about our being here,” Camille said. Her sudden joyful laughter rang brightly against the hanging pots and saucepans.

Claude began to make a neat pile of the bread crumbs near her plate. He said in a low voice, “Mademoiselle, you know I saw you one time before I came into your uncle’s bookshop. You were in a train station with your mother and sister. You wore a blue hat with a veil. It was four years ago. I sketched your picture and that’s how I remembered.”

Her face was quite close to his; he could see the few freckles on her nose and how the loose strands of hair danced against her cheek. He could smell the powder she used on her body. Her eyes were hazel. “Oh, did you?” she murmured. “How odd! Sometimes wonderful things can happen and we don’t know anything about them, perhaps never.”

T
HE SUN CAME
out shortly; they had sun for three more days and rain for two more. Then Claude hurt his leg and spent one rainy day sullenly in bed with his leg elevated and Frédéric painting him. The girls left on the sixth day, wishing them well.

After the coach rolled away, he limped to the kitchen with Frédéric to drink the rest of their coffee and watch the rain through the tree branches. He thought over the week. In spite of difficulties, he had accomplished a lot with his painting. Dinners, however, had been more discreet. Perhaps the older sister had reprimanded the younger.

The only sound was that of the innkeeper polishing the stove.

“Lovely, weren’t they?” Claude remarked. “Flirtatious and at the same time not to be touched in any way. What a pity!”

“It’s always that way with girls of their class. I told you. They don’t unfasten their collar buttons before marriage.”

Claude rubbed his leg. He said, “I’ll write them in Paris when I need them to model again, though I almost wish I didn’t have to: the older one’s chatter of china and silver patterns for her marriage puts me to sleep. What a thought that when a girl looks at us, she is thinking of what silver we can’t afford! I suspect the younger one really prefers other things but won’t quite say it.” Claude rearranged the bread crumbs between the table cracks as he had done some days before. There was only a swallow of his coffee left in his bowl.

He felt Frédéric’s silence and asked, “What about you,
cher ami?
Something’s been on your mind since yesterday. I saw you got a letter.”

Frédéric pushed away the bowl and unfastened his top shirt button; he leaned back his head and swallowed. “It’s all
merde
. Word came from the medical school: I failed my examination again worse than ever before. Damn it, Claude! I don’t want to be a doctor; I never did. All I want to do is paint. I need to go home and tell them.”

Claude exclaimed, “We’ve all been waiting for you to come to this decision! You’ll manage them. Do you want me to go with you?”

Frédéric stood up. “No, go back to Paris and finish the painting. We can’t live with you until you do. Never mind me. I’m just a dead man.” By now the coach was long gone and the rain fell steadily against the kitchen window.

1866–1867

We were all one group when we started out. We stood shoulder to shoulder and we encouraged each other
.

—A
UGUSTE
R
ENOIR

C
LAUDE RETURNED TO
P
ARIS ALONE ON A WARM SUMMER
day a week later. He had bought and stretched the enormous canvas on which he would repaint the smaller portrait of the picnickers. Hands in his pockets, he prowled before it. He worried he would run out of paint. He found a half-used tube of dark brown near the oil cruet in the cupboard. He took it as his own, though he could not remember which one of his friends had bought it. Under his brush, it grew into earth and trees.

He painted the picnickers, some strolling, some sitting. He painted flowers and shadow and movement. In the center, Camille Doncieux perpetually held out her empty plate.

At night, when the last summer light had faded away, he lit his pipe and for the first time that day was lonely. Where the hell was everyone this late summer? The clock ticked, noises of carts and quarrels from the street below moved through the open window, and a mouse scurried across the floor.

The burly artist Courbet, who had come to Fontainebleau to model for the painting, knocked on the door one day unannounced and came in. “Hot as hell in Paris this summer!” he said. “Here’s a letter from Bazille; the postman had just come below and I brought it up. So he’s home with his family?”

Claude took the letter. “Thanks. Yes, he’s gone home to tell them he wants to paint full-time.”

“Ah!
Abandon all hope, ye who enter here
, as Dante says. The same quote might apply to you and this painting you’re making. Manet’s painting of picnickers with the women naked caught more attention. Pity not to show a woman’s best qualities.”

“Well that’s Manet, and this is me!” replied Claude irritably. “I like the flow of dresses.”

Claude opened the envelope as soon as his visitor had left. I should not have let Frédéric go alone, he thought.

Claude! Well, it is over, and I am relieved enough to be able to hold a pen. I broke the news of my repeated failure to pass my examinations to my family and then—you will be proud of me—I told them I want to throw over medicine to the benefit of all healthy beings and paint full-time. My mother wept gallons. The maids came with buckets to clean up. My father puffed his pipe and failed to look stern and called me
cher ami
as he always does when he is not sure whether to take her side or mine. Still, all is well
.

So
, cher ami,
I have done some painting here; not very much. Now that I’ve won my freedom, I’m a bit afraid to try. I wish you’d come here! I have a cousin I’d like you to meet, a very pretty girl. And how are you getting on with the Doncieux sisters modeling for you in the studio as they said they’d do if asked? Send them my greetings. By the way, my Lily sends regards and says she looks forward to knowing you further. Not that she would understand you one bit: you are an incomprehensible wretch
.

F. Bazille

Claude studied the letter again. It was like Frédéric to lighten the difficult.

That night under the shadow of the huge canvas, he sat at a corner of the table cluttered with paint tubes and bits of old bread, and wrote a heartfelt response to his friend.

Frédéric, I’m happy for you and miss you a lot! I’m sorry I was so absorbed when we were away. I get so crazed I can only think of myself. I don’t even remember if I ate today. Courbet stopped by, the ass. If he wanted to unnerve me, he couldn’t have done better. Auguste isn’t here, though some of his clothes are, as always. He’s still somewhere for the summer. As for Cézanne, who knows what river he’s fallen into or if he’s begging his way through Provence. Pissarro wrote; he’s trying to earn some money. I think of you and wish you the best and am so glad things have worked out for you. I presume your words “all is well” mean that your family will continue your allowance and we will not have to sleep like beggars by a church door. You are really talented, you know. Now you have to get down to it and create a body of work, as do I!

I am going to try to do some chalk portraits for quick cash, and as soon as I get some, I’ll pay the next quarter’s rent. The butcher’s wife says perhaps, if I make her pretty. (She is not; you know her.) Come back and we’ll do a dozen things this autumn. We could hire models and split the cost
.

I can’t send your greetings to the Mesdemoiselles Doncieux because they have disappeared. I went to the bookshop but the younger one was gone and her bastard uncle would not give me her address. I am in a fine situation to go on without them, outside of the fact that Mademoiselle Camille keeps coming to my mind
.

CM

All that summer he worked on his canvas, painting, retouching, scraping, remembering. He worked on the dresses, the leaves, the couple strolling; he pushed away every other thing. Friends returning to the city in the autumn stopped by to admire it; they told others about his great painting. Frédéric came back triumphant from his visit to his family; within an hour he had stacked his medical books to sell, thrown on his old suit, and set a new canvas on his easel. Sitting at it, he began a still life of dead herons. He sat blissfully for so many hours that he was quite stiff when he rose.

He threw his arm around Claude’s shoulder as he surveyed the large painting of the picnickers. “It’s perfect,” he said. “I’ll never do anything half so rich!”

More friends visited, all giving advice. “It’s the best thing you’ve done!” “It’s wonderful but for …” Then Courbet came around with talk of some new commissions he had obtained and persuaded Claude to let him retouch some spots he said were clumsy.

The portrait of the eighteen-year-old Camille looked out at them all, well bred and polite, spots of sun on her white dress.

Colder winds blew from down the hills across the river, and the leaves on the trees, which he could see from the studio window, turned yellow; after a heavy autumnal rain, they fell in sodden heaps to the cobbled street. Claude painted into midwinter.

One dark morning, he stumbled out to his painting as soon as he came from bed, as always. The studio floorboards were cold to his bare feet and he wiggled his toes to lift them. He rubbed his eyes and raised them to his great canvas, then drew in his breath.

What he had seen so clearly on a summer’s day in the forest was not on the canvas before him. People were clumsily placed; the brushstrokes were all wrong. It had been repainted many times and he had never found the balance of human form and light. It was not a masterpiece at all. How could he not have seen it before? How could he have made such a mess of it?

With a shout he ripped the top of the canvas from the stretchers. The supporting boards shuttered. The frame cracked and fell amid the heavy canvas. Frédéric ran from his bedroom in his nightshirt crying, “You idiot!
Tu es fou!”
but it was too late.

Later Claude sadly rolled the painting up, and yet even then he could not escape its presence. He could still feel the strollers walking under the trees; he felt them escape and float around the room.

F
OR DAYS HE
walked moodily about or lay on the sofa trying to read, ignoring the brushstrokes of Auguste and Frédéric at their easels. As the short winter light was fading one late afternoon, Frédéric glanced over at Claude and called, “You haven’t left that sofa all day! Paint something else. Come on, Monet. I know it was eight months’ work and a fortune but you’re deader than the herons I’m painting, and they’re starting to stink.”

Auguste walked over to Claude, hands on his hips. “Get up, you sloth,” he said firmly. “I have an idea to make money since there’s nothing left to pawn. Let’s walk over to the Café des Ambassadeurs near the Champs-Élysées. We can solicit drawing quick chalk portraits for twenty francs each. We both need money. You owe everyone for what’s rolled up in the corner. You paid those girls and they probably spent it on new gloves. Frédéric can stay here with his stinking birds.”

“My stinking birds will win me a place in the Salon!”

“Oh, the hell with the Salon!” Claude cried savagely. He sat up. “
Merde!
I’m such bad company I could hire myself out as a professional mourner. I wish I could do caricatures, but I can’t stand the idea. Now you’re going to drag me someplace. Good-bye, birds.” He buttoned his coat reluctantly and, with Auguste’s arm in his, descended to the windy evening street with its torn blowing bits of news journal and smell of coal fires.

The Café des Ambassadeurs was the largest of the fashionable new
café-concerts
in Paris. Claude and Auguste squeezed in the door past a few drunken men smoking cigars and left their coats in the cloakroom before entering the enormous central room, which was ablaze with gaslight. Hundreds of people seated at tables talked at once, and a soprano tried to make herself heard over the orchestra; waitresses shouting orders pushed by him. Many more revelers sat at tables in the balcony, leaning on the rail and calling down to friends.

“Come on!” Auguste cried, taking his sketchbook from his bag. “You take the left side of the room and I’ll take the right. Go from table to table and ask if they want a fifteen-minute portrait.”

Claude pushed past a waitress and approached several people at a round table who were drinking champagne from fluted glasses. “I beg your pardon, mesdames and messieurs,” he asked, “but would you like a quick souvenir of this enchanting evening?”

He caught sight of his reflection in a wall mirror: untrimmed dark hair almost to his shoulders, angry eyes. It’s my sternness, he thought, retreating after a fourth table of friends had refused him, backing into waitresses carrying trays of foaming beer in glasses. Tonight, when I must be charming, I can’t. And there was Auguste across the large room, head bobbing convivially, already having begun a portrait of a young couple.

Claude elbowed himself through the crowd to the bar and threw down a coin for a glass of wine. No, he thought, swirling the wine, I’ve got myself into a very deep hole and there’s no way out of it. The Salon entries are in two months and all my friends will do well. Frédéric had begun that painting of a gorgeous model in a green dress playing his spinet and will redeem himself in the eyes of his family. But as for me …

He looked about the room, raising his eyes to the balcony.

Camille-Léonie Doncieux was sitting at a table there, her arm on the rail, gazing down at the crowd. She wore a pink dress cut low and seemed to slightly shimmer in the flickering gaslight.

Swallowing the last of his wine quickly, he elbowed his way past people to mount the stairs to the balcony, exclaiming breathlessly, “Mademoiselle Doncieux!”

She turned quickly. “Oh, Annette, do look who’s here!” she cried as the two men at her table and her sister turned to gaze at him.

He bowed to them. Annette, who had drunk wine so freely in the inn kitchen, had now turned into a matron. Though she was somewhat alluring in her low-cut pale blue evening dress, which showed off her long neck, she seemed, if possible, even more aloof than she had before. He also could find little interesting in either of the two men at the table, each near forty, obviously prosperous, and one of them married to her.

Annette took up her fan delicately. “Henri,” she said to the man at her side, “here’s the very artist who painted us last summer during our little adventure! Monsieur, we hope you and your friend have been well.”

“Quite well! And both of you?”

“Henri, I believe I saw monsieur come in before and solicit portraits below. Charming!” Annette added.

Camille had not ceased to smile shyly at him and now gently tapped the back of an empty chair at her side. He sat, tucking his sketchbook under the table, aware of a faint sweatiness under his shirt. He had worn it for five days; since he had destroyed his painting, he had hardly bothered to care about his clothes, nor had he shaved above his beard.

He asked, “Mademoiselle, where have you been all these months? Your uncle wouldn’t give me your address, so I supposed your family had found out about your modeling.”

She whispered, “Yes, we confessed and were scolded and I couldn’t write you because I lost the address.”

“Please forgive my shabbiness. I didn’t expect …”

“I can see our escorts are wondering who you truly are! My sister’s husband likely thinks you and your friend are gypsies.”

“No, not gypsies,” he protested, “but struggling artists.” His eyes were a little dazed by the shimmering fabric of her dress and her soft bare right arm, a flimsy mauve shawl touching it. His old fascination for her was returning; he felt it slowly moving through his body. “So one of these fine gentlemen has married your sister and, if I recall the conversation at the inn, perhaps the other will shortly be your fiancé.”