Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet (8 page)

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Only one person in his world knew nothing about his fortune. She was the most important of all, and he did not have her address.

The cat was sleeping in the bookshop window on the rue Dante when he opened the door to the soft tinkle of the bell. A few students were browsing the shelves. Camille Doncieux was not there.

In her place sat a thin young woman with spectacles, the sort he thought went to meetings on women’s emancipation and poverty in the colonial world.

He walked up to the desk.
“Bonjour
, mademoiselle,” he said softly. “May I ask if you are acquainted with Mademoiselle Doncieux? If so, would you be so very kind as to give her a short letter from me?”

“Mais, oui,”
the girl replied, smiling. She gave him paper and pen and he wrote quickly while standing, leaning on the desk. “Mademoiselle Doncieux, your portrait is in the Salon, which opens in a few days. My heart is full of gratitude to you. Let me take you to see it. Send word when you can come. Yours sincerely, Claude Monet.”

The girl slipped the note inside a book. “Baudelaire’s poems,” she whispered confidentially. “Where I always leave her letters. But she’s not in as much these days.” Letters? he thought. What letters? Who else writes her here? That man who took her to the
café-concerts?

Three days passed with no reply. He prowled up and down the rue Dante, always seeing the girl at the desk, who smiled through the window at him and shook her head. I shall never see Camille Doncieux again, he thought.

Then she wrote: on fragile paper this time, scented with perfume, left modestly in the corner of their mail slot. She would wait for him in front of the Palais de l’Industrie for the festive opening day of the Salon at four the next afternoon; she was thrilled—she underlined the word twice.

A
H, THE CROWDS
in front of this immense structure built for the great Exposition twelve years before! He walked among them wearing a new dark suit and a mauve vest. He had visited here a few days before for the vernissage, when all the nervous painters had a last chance to dab at or varnish their work before it was viewed by the public. Now everyone in Paris was here, eager to be the first to see the new work.

Camille was standing by a streetlamp, wearing the blue and white striped dress in which she had modeled for him in Fontainebleau. A hat with white silk flowers was perched above her hair. Under it, her face seemed very young. “I came alone, you see!” she said. “I wanted to see it just with you.”

“News about the painting is already in the papers. The one this morning called you the Parisian Queen.”

She looked almost alarmed. “No, that can’t be,” she murmured, shaking her head and looking both anxious and delighted. “No, they can’t say that of me.”

He gave her his arm in his most courtly way and led her under the great archway to the crowded, echoing central hall. “Close your eyes! I want you to be surprised!” he whispered as they mounted the palatial stairway, brushing past the flowing dresses of visitors, of older women with lorgnettes and brusque men, most talking loudly and clutching programs.

At first they could not even get into the room he sought for the crowd of noisy schoolgirls pushing out. When an opening came, he guided her in.

The painting hung prominently on the far wall in its heavy frame. There she was, her head turned disdainfully, the gorgeous train of the green gown rippling out behind her. “Now,” he whispered, “open your eyes.”

She looked. “Oh, it’s me!” she whispered.

“Yes, it is you indeed,” he said close to her ear. “I’m so very grateful to you! I want to take you for an early supper to celebrate and to thank you.”

She gazed at the picture as if trying to understand it, clutching her purse, and finally she turned to him as if she had just heard his words. She stammered a little. “But I couldn’t now!” she exclaimed. “Please forgive me. My mother expects me in an hour; we’re to go to a friend’s for supper.”

“Mademoiselle, allow me! This day is a celebration of many years of effort, and the only person to truly share it with is you.”

She hesitated, looking down at the polished parquet floor. A small smile passed her lips. “Well, then,” she said. “I will come with you. For shortly after this, I don’t know … my whole life will be different. There will be fewer adventures. Isn’t that what proper life is?”

“I don’t know,” he replied passionately. “I’m certain I wouldn’t want it. Let’s go to the park, the Bois de Boulogne. We’ll walk and talk and rent a boat. There’s a little Swiss restaurant on a tiny island in the middle of the lake. And I’ll have you back by the time it’s dark.” All the time he was urging her from the room through the other Salon visitors, some of whom turned to stare at them.

He breathed more steadily once they were seated in the omnibus, bumping along the rough streets. She was not going to rise, ring the bell, and descend suddenly. She would stay by his side. All the thrilling energy of the Salon still poured through him. He wanted to seize her against him so that her hairpins fell down and her hair tumbled free. Did she like him? Did she see him? Was he so far from her class? Not by birth, but by circumstance—this little convent virgin who had come from one cell door and would soon enter another.

He thought, I’ve succeeded because of her kindness. I must take this day as it is and be glad for it and ask no more.

They entered the park via a huge avenue of trees and wandered arm in arm until they came to the edge of the lake. He said gallantly, “Here’s where we rent a boat.”

A little water on the boat’s bottom darkened her hem. He saw the edge of her lavender shoe and wondered if her mother was now impatiently looking out a window somewhere, waiting for her daughter to come. He wondered if Camille noticed how strong he was and how easily he rowed.

In the Swiss restaurant, they were seated at a little table and discussed the menu board. A pot of melted cheese came with bread and salad, and he found he was starving. He poured her wine and they both drank. The terrace band played.

“Will you explain Baudelaire’s poems to me?” she asked suddenly. “I heard you talk about them with your friend at the inn. I must confess a lot of them confuse me. For instance,
‘Je te donne ces vers afin que si mon nom.’
The part at the end where the poet cries to the accursed ghost.”

She wants to discuss poetry? But why not, he thought, when I feel I want to say so much to her and not one word will come? “Ah, yes,” he said, folding his hands on the table. “It has many meanings. I mean, it’s the way you interpret it. To tell you the truth, I’m not sure what it means. He writes most of his work on opium, friends tell me. A strange dark poet for a young woman!”

“I don’t understand him either, but still his words frighten and thrill me. They’re filled with experiences, even if dark ones. And because I don’t understand doesn’t mean I don’t want to. Even if I may have few experiences in my life, at least I can read about them.”

“Mademoiselle, surely you don’t want experiences like that!”

“No, if I could choose my experiences I wouldn’t choose those. It’s just that to be free to choose seems so wonderful.”

Camille’s eyes were very bright, her hand was half open on the table, and her lips were parted. He drew in his breath. “I wish I knew more about you!” he said. “Please tell me something. I looked at you so long when I was painting you and sometimes I thought, What’s she like? Now I want even more to know.”

She sat back, breathing a little deeper, carefully arranging the fork and the now empty wineglass before her. “Myself?” she said in a low voice. “There’s so little to know! My sister and I are the only children. She’s four years older. I loved the convent school. I love to learn things. Sometimes I wanted to be good the way girls are, to be approved of, to be loved—and sometimes I didn’t.”

She lowered her eyes, again moving the glass as if the exact distance of it from the plate was important. “My mother takes me into society, where we all talk politely of things that don’t matter. It bores me. Mostly I love working in the bookshop. My uncle who owns it has been somewhat estranged from our family since he and my father were young; he was the first to move to Paris and turn his back on bourgeois life. He’s led a secret life, we suspect; no, we don’t suspect. We know.”

She looked at her empty wineglass and he refilled it. She said firmly, “If I had my way, I’d be an actress and go on the stage, but the idea of it scandalizes my mother! Nothing but amateur theatricals for me, and only in the parlors of our good friends, of our own class,
comme il faut!”

Camille stumbled a bit over her words now with eagerness and she leaned a little forward, her full breasts pressing against the blue and white striped dress. “I’ve many plans for the future. I began a novel this past year but haven’t shown it to anyone. My family hopes all these yearnings will settle when I marry.” She looked down at the floral tablecloth, blinking gently as if trying to read her future in the pattern of violets.

“Do you
want
to be married?”

“I’d like to have my own home. My sister and mother say I’m not practical, and it’s true. I wish I had a great passion as you have, something to dedicate my life to.” She wound her fingers together, stammering a little. “I don’t want life to simply pass me by without my having any of it! I’d like to suffer for some great cause, to give all of myself!”

Claude crumbled a bit of bread. “Well, as to suffering, I’d prefer not to suffer for any reason. I find one needn’t look for it; it comes for you!”

“Then you think I’m silly?”

“Oh no, not at all,” he replied as the waiter swept away the bread and brought little plum cakes. “You’re wise. I think your imagination is very great indeed and you couldn’t be satisfied with a dull life.”

“No, truly! I never could. And yet I’ve been raised to …”

The side of his laced shoe touched hers under her full skirt beneath the table. He thought to withdraw it but instead let it remain. She looked harder now at the cake and the wineglass and he suspected that she also debated moving her own little lavender shoe and yet did not. What did this mean? He was too confused and thrilled to know.

He reached in his pocket for his briar pipe and began the careful process of lighting it, narrowing his eyes. He said, “Mademoiselle Camille, I must confess I’ve thought about you. I sensed a hidden passion in you when I rediscovered you in the bookshop. That’s why I wanted you for my model.”

“Did you really think of me for nearly four years after seeing me once?”

“Yes. Your spirit and your beauty.”

“Am I beautiful? I’d like to be; I have moments. It’s truly more important to be educated and wise.” She leaned forward, almost touching his hand, which lay a few inches from hers on the table between the coffee cups. She straightened then, her palm patting her hair, a gesture of women that he always felt meant that they were deliberating their next words. Her foot under the table moved away from his.

“Well, it’s late.” She sighed. “My poor mother! What excuses will I make now? She thinks I’m forgetful, which I’m not. I don’t forget things ever, ever.”

“Don’t you?” he asked sadly. The joy of the day was leaving him, and he felt tired.

Dusk was falling as they rowed back in silence. In the park again, he walked on by her side without a word, his hat low on his forehead. Every way he looked the paths turned under the heavy, hanging trees, and small clumps of flowers seemed to cup and hold the last of the day. Now a lamplighter had climbed his ladder to ignite a flame, which shone down on the empty bandstand.

She took his arm. “May I tell you something?” she said softly. “I think I can tell you things! I’ve always felt in my sister’s shadow; she always tells me what to do. Everyone at home thinks I’m not fit to make my own decisions about my life, but I’m perfectly fit. They worry about me; they say I’m moody. Women have such a short time to bloom, you know. Your portrait of me is the way I am inside: mysterious. You saw me inside. Do you think I’m silly?”

“No,” he said.

She spoke on, almost to herself. “They want to keep me in a little box, but it’s really so unnecessary. I don’t miss Lyon at all except for my widowed
grandmère
. I love it here. You’re from Normandy, right? From Le Havre? Do you miss it?”

“I do, so much! I miss the boats and the smell of the sea; I miss the country, and yet if I want to make a name for myself I must do it in Paris. I’d like to return to the country one day when I make my fortune. I’d like to live outside Paris in one of the little villages. I want desperately to have a garden.”

Claude felt the day slipping from him. It had been such a lovely adventure, but it would be put away and forgotten until a moment years later when he was old and something would remind him: the smell of the air, a lamplighter, the darkening trees above on a long walk. She would drift away, and the Salon would continue for a time and then be taken down and he would hear of the marriage of this lovely girl who wanted and would have beautiful things.

He said abruptly, “It’s late. I’ll take you home.”

The horses wearily pulled the omnibus through the city until Claude descended with her near the bridge, walking toward the seventeenth-century houses of the Île Saint-Louis. It’s almost done now, he thought. A minute more and she’ll disappear down the street into one of those formidable dwellings and be gone.

He took her arm and, as they leaned on the bridge railing over the Seine, suddenly demanded, “Camille, how much do you really like your old fiancé?”

“He’s not old. He’s very nice. He’s kind, a true gentleman.”

“Is he? Well …”

Claude drew her toward him and kissed her mouth. To his amazement she did not pull away but pulled him against her, her arms about him, returning his kiss. I am dreaming this, he thought. I am dreaming it.

She whispered against his lips, “I don’t want to go home to my family. I want to go home with you.”

He felt the shock of her words and his sudden, intensely rising desire. He thought, Is she willing? Can she be truly willing? He slipped his fingers through an opening in her dress buttons and felt the silk and whalebone of her corset. He undid another button and a corset hook. Now she will push me over the bridge rail into the river, he thought, but she did not. As his fingers moved down to her hardened nipple, she kissed him more deeply, pressing against him. At any moment all we are wearing will fall away, he thought, and be carried down the river to the sea: her cloth buttons, my vest …