Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  She whispered conspiratorially, “Oh, yes, it’s expected, but one never knows. Monsieur Lucien Besique has indicated as much to my father concerning me. But Monsieur Monet, I often wondered what happened to you. I imagine your painting was a great success.”

  “No,” Claude replied, shaking his head. “I gave up on it. It didn’t do justice to you.” He leaned closer to her, his arm on the table between her wineglass and the thick white napkin on which she had undoubtedly wiped her lips. He murmured, “If you had been there, the painting wouldn’t have failed.”

  “Then I wish with all my heart I’d been there!”

  He touched the edge of the napkin and drew it stealthily toward him as if he would pocket it. He leaned so far forward that his lips were only a few inches from her ear with the little pearl earring. “I could do better,” he said softly, “if you would give me a chance. You remember the studio my friend and I have on the Right Bank near Saint-Germain? He rented a sumptuous green dress to paint and hasn’t returned it. He wouldn’t mind if I kept it for a bit. It’s for a tall young woman and would suit you; you would look beautiful in it. I could make an unforgettable picture of you in that dress.” The vision had formed in a moment and left him almost breathless. The whole large and noisy café dissolved to nothing but the green train of the dress draped across the studio floor.

  Claude lowered his eyes and asked, “Can I prevail upon your kindness to endure the weary task of modeling for me just once more?”

  The chanteuse had ended her song, and the piano and horn took up a dance melody while below the dance floor filled quickly. A chair scraped and Monsieur Besique’s pale leather glove descended to the pink frills of Camille’s shoulder. “If monsieur does not mind,” the gentleman said scathingly, “I would borrow mademoiselle to dance.”

  “Monsieur,” replied Claude, standing proudly.

  He retrieved his sketchbook and followed them down the stairs. Leaning against the bar with his second glass of wine, he watched Camille Doncieux move among the other dancers in her pink dress. Could this lovely girl be almost engaged to this forty-year-old dullard? Did she want to be? Could this man be the recipient of those passionate letters she was writing when he found her in her uncle’s bookshop? And here he was in his old shirt and wrinkled coat, not even able to ask her to dance.

  He’d had enough then.

  He pushed past the others to the men’s cloakroom to claim his coat and was buttoning it when Camille Doncieux came to the door.

  “But where are you going?” she whispered. “I wanted to say that I will come to your studio to model. I’ll tell my mother I’m visiting a friend. Is tomorrow at nine good? Give me the address again.”

  He took a book from his pocket and scribbled his address on the endpaper, tearing out the page. She folded it neatly and undid the strings of her silk purse, dropping it inside. The strings drew together and she was gone amid the crowd.

  SHE WON’T COME, he thought. But she did.

  He was looking out the window when she emerged through the porte cochere of the courtyard, lifting her skirt above the muck. He opened the door. He could hear her low-heeled shoes tapping on the wood stairs as she mounted with a candle until he could see her, slightly breathless, the silk flowers in her hat bobbing. She climbed the last steps and at once smiled at the caricature on his door of two men, the first scowling, and the other very tall, reading, “Monet and Bazille.”

  “Oh, it’s clever!” Camille said. “It’s not like the forest painting, though.”

  She stepped in, looking about at the paints and books crowded on the dresser top and the dozens of pictures hung on the walls. He watched her as he took her coat. She was not quite the shy girl he had engaged to paint over the summer. Girls at that age changed quickly as they understood their beauty. They glided into the world in their lovely dresses and hats as if it had been waiting for them and then disappeared with rings on their fingers behind the door of matrimony and grew severely into matrons as her sister had begun to do.

  Camille Doncieux was not there yet. She was now gazing with particular fascination at nudes by Auguste and Frédéric. Claude studied the floor.

  She exclaimed, “What an enchanted place! I’ve never been in an artist’s studio before. There are so many paintings!” She glanced at the closed bedroom doors and hesitated, asking, “But where’s your friend?”

  He took her arm, fearing she would turn and leave. “Frédéric went home very early this morning; he got a telegram that his grandfather had had a stroke. It’s quite all proper to be here with me. In my bedroom there you’ll find the gown. I think it will fit you perfectly. Close the door.” He added meticulously, “Your privacy will be undisturbed.”

  Shortly after, she emerged in the green and black taffeta promenade dress with its train and the fur-trimmed jacket and hat.

  He studied her, arms folded across his chest, walking this way and that, moving his hand to touch the edge of her shoulder, arranging the hat, and helping her mount a little platform that had been standing against a wall. He placed the train of the dress behind her. “Turn this way,” he ordered. “No, more, more. I want to see your back so I can get the sweep of the fabric, but I’d like you turning as if someone has just called you. Look back but keep your eyes lowered. You’re haughty; you’re a little annoyed at being called.”

  “Like this?”

  The sweet face turned disdainful and the girl became a woman of the privileged haute bourgeoisie who expects everything will be given to her. “That’s it!” he cried. He began with a quick charcoal outline and then dipped his brush into the paint.

  Time passed and she did not move. Outside, carts clopped along, and somewhere someone practiced the violin. “Break and stretch,” he said, unwillingly. “Your neck will cramp badly after a time. Unfortunately I will need you to again look over your shoulder. I want you to look as if the world’s too dull to notice. You’re a woman of riches; you have everything.” He bit his lip under his mustache; he had almost added, ma chère, and he wondered if she guessed it as she once again assumed her sullen look.

  The distant sun of late February retreated. He breathed in cold air and the smell of turpentine and paint and the warm scent of her. He felt as if he rose above his body, looking down at both painter and model, a young woman dressed for the opera but in reality standing in an artist’s studio with smudgy walls.

  She turned, hand on her back. “It’s too much,” she said. “My back aches.”

  “Yes, it must!” he replied, putting down his brush. “Are you hungry? I have some beans. I buy them by the sackful; they’re cheap. Sometimes we live off them for weeks. You better keep that jacket on. I’m sorry it’s cold. I meant to buy more coal.” He glanced at the stove, which gave off only the remnants of heat as if it had betrayed him.

  The beans were yesterday’s, mushy and dressed only with a flicker of oil and no herbs, but she ate them hungrily. Now and then, she raised her eyes to look at him. He smelled her faint scent: she wore a floral perfume. Again, as in the Ambassadeurs, he felt her presence through his body, and to put distance between them he jumped up to examine his painting. She rose as he did and began to study all the paintings on the wall more closely. “Well, what do you think of them?” he asked.

  Her voice was more quiet and serious than he had ever heard it. “They’re so real, so beautiful! I feel the wind. They’re not like the paintings we have. I’m not sure people want real things. My mother wants life to be just as she arranges it; she wants to arrange mine too, so that I’ll live undisturbed by anything unpleasant—not cold, or want, or heartbreak. She’d like me never to encounter anything that might hurt me or make me live differently than the way I’ve been brought up. Sheltered, you might say, as most girls are.” She looked down.

  He stayed across the room. “Ah, does she want that for you?” he replied. “If we can’t risk, we can’t have anything real, can we?”

  The striking church clock made her start.

&nb
sp; “Oh, I must go,” she said. “I had no idea it was so late! I’m very sorry, but I need to meet someone! I must take off this dress at once.” She unpinned the hat, put it down, and then disappeared into his bedroom.

  He bit his lip, standing outside. “But the painting!” he called. “I’m afraid I’ve just begun. Please tell me you’ll come back tomorrow.”

  The voice moved within his room. “Yes, I’ll come,” she called, and in a few moments she emerged in her dark day dress again, looking about for her own hat with the flowers. As she pinned it on she gazed toward the easel and he implored, “Before you go, look what we’ve made today.”

  She slowly took in the sketched face and the bold strokes of the dress. She stood so close that the buttons of her nearly closed coat almost touched him. He only needed to encircle her waist with his arm and pull her in, but then what? He closed his eyes, imagining her lips against his. When he looked again, she was already at the door, her cheeks flushed. And then she was gone.

  HE MISSED HER; there was a silence in the studio that he seldom had minded before, but that evening he counted the hours until she would come again.

  She returned exactly as promised, but if she had ever come close to kissing him, she obviously did not want to recall it. Oddly, she seemed a little removed from him this day and a little sad, as if struggling inside herself. Sometimes she did not look at him directly. Perhaps her sister knew Camille was modeling again and had spoken sharply to her. Then he reconsidered and thought that no one in the world knew they were here alone together.

  If I ask her too many questions I will alarm her, he thought, and then she will go and my painting will remain forever unfinished.

  He said, “I believe you told me your father came to Paris for his work?”

  “Yes; he’s the representative of an old silk manufacturing firm.”

  “May I ask where your sister lives now?”

  “She has beautiful rooms on the Parc Monceau. What woman could want more?”

  “Indeed, what more?” he replied. She said nothing of the man who had been her escort at the café-concerts and he could not bear to ask. But at times she did talk freely of books. She had read a huge amount and could quote a lot of poetry by heart.

  “Did you ever draw a little?” he asked. “Most young women do.”

  “I tried watercolors, but I have no gift for it.”

  After the last session he thanked her and tried to believe she let her gloved hand remain a longer time than necessary in his. There was no movement toward a kiss, though he felt the impulse between them. He heard her footsteps descending his stairs, and she was gone. She never had been and never would be his chère.

  “IT’S NOT LIKE anything you’ve done,” his friends remarked as one after another they came to see the portrait of a woman in a green dress. “There’s such longing in it, and she’s such a mystery! I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a chance to get it taken by the Salon.” Claude nodded. He would have liked Frédéric’s opinion, but his studio mate still had not returned from Montpellier. Frédéric wrote that he would miss the Salon submission and hated to be apart from his unfinished still life. He would return with more birds. He wished Claude all good fortune and sent two hundred francs, an impulsive gift from his family, for rent or other needs.

  On the last day of general submissions, Claude brought the painting over to the Palais de l’Industrie in a wheelbarrow; Pissarro walked with him, talking of playing with his three-year-old son. They stood on line once more, and when they passed through the enormous triumphal arch of the door under the statue of France crowned with stars and reached the acceptance desk, both Claude’s and Pissarro’s paintings were taken away.

  Claude locked himself in his room for the next few days and reread favorite books. He heard the chatter of his friends from the studio but could not bear to go out to them.

  Auguste finally struck open the door. He fidgeted when anxious, swinging his arms, dancing a little on his narrow feet. “I can’t stand to wait another day to find out if any of us got in. Let’s try to waylay someone from the judging committee at the Palais and grovel at his feet to tell us something.”

  Hands behind their backs, the two artists walked solemnly under the lovely new spring trees to the Palais on the Right Bank and climbed the steps. The choosing of work among the thousands of submissions was in progress. They ambled as indifferently as they could past a stack of paintings marked for acceptance, hardly daring to glance. One was of ravished naked virgins against a ruined temple. “Pissarro would throw up,” Auguste muttered. His loose shoe sole flapped slightly on the floor. “When will people ever see that good art is living and real, intimate, not grand? That real beauty is in ordinary life? Not in a palace built to the great grandeur of France and her immortal emperor, I’m afraid.”

  They went from room to room.

  Finally someone referred them to the next room, where the committee was even now selecting whose work would be accepted. Auguste held up the straight pin that had belonged to his tailor father and that he always carried in his pocket for good luck. His eyes met Claude’s and they went forward, as directed, past a crated statue of an angel. The great painter Daubigny noticed them and came forward smiling with his hands extended, saying, “Ah, Monet and Renoir! Good news for both of you …”

  CLAUDE SAT BY his window, gazing down at the blossoming spring trees. When he went out in the streets it seemed every other artist he knew and men he didn’t think he had ever seen before had heard about the annual Salon’s acceptance of his painting; they stopped him as he left the charcuterie with his sausages or shook his hand when he entered the local fragrant boulangerie to buy his fresh bread.

  Pissarro had had a painting taken as well. Frédéric wrote effusively from Montpellier.

  I am so happy for both of you! I sensed it; I knew it. So the great Daubigny and Corot both fought for your acceptance! Their work with its softer, more realistic style paves the way for yours. Maybe your father will extend your stipend for a bit longer. As for me, I’m painting here a lot and can’t wait to see all your sorry faces again. My grandfather’s a little better. Lily is well.

  FB

  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.

  AH, 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.”