Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  Then with a cry he pounced on something that had fallen beneath the bed. In leaving quickly, Camille had forgotten her little bag. He spread the contents on the covers. Powder, lip rouge, a little mirror, a handkerchief, the studio address, a few chocolate sweets, which were partially unwrapped and had smudged the calling cards. He arranged these things, trying to make some sense of them. One of the calling cards was her mother’s and bore her address; a small shopping list for hose and a parasol was scribbled on the back. Powder and chocolate smeared his fingers and nearly obscured the house number.

  HE WOULD HAVE liked to have gone at dawn, for as soon as he made up his mind to do something, he wanted to have it done. However, he felt it best to be mannerly. Milkmen came before sunrise, not gentlemen. Dressed carefully in his new suit and the shirt with the lace cuffs he had worn the day before, he did not present himself at the third-floor apartment in the house on the Île Saint-Louis until the church clock struck the hour of ten.

  A maid peered around the door and, perhaps impressed by his cool manner, admitted him while she went to call madame. Claude looked about the salon with its chairs and divans carved with lyres and urns reflecting the classical style of the deposed monarchy. All were upholstered in fine pale silk, reminding him of the family business. There was not a single painting of any merit on the wall, only mediocre work from the last century, which the family likely had brought from Lyon. It was all very formal, as if royalty was expected. All in all he could not imagine the bright girl who had cried out in his arms walking impetuously through these rooms.

  Madame Doncieux approached him in her dark dress. He assessed her quickly: her thick hair was neatly piled on her head, her lace collar starched. She looked as if she had never eagerly pulled the shirt off a man in her life. Still, something of her nose and mouth confirmed that she was her younger daughter’s mother.

  “Monsieur,” Madame Doncieux said. “My maid told me you wished to see me. I do not believe we know each other.”

  He inclined his head; he was not sure if he should kiss her hand. “I have not yet had the pleasure of meeting you, madame,” he replied. “I am the man who painted the picture of your daughter that hangs in the current Salon.”

  Her back stiffened as her eyes swept from his newly washed hair to his polished shoes. “So you’re the artist,” she said. “My daughter finally confessed that she had modeled twice for you. It was indiscreet on her part, to say the least, and unwise. What can it say of her good name? A girl who received holy pictures while at school for her piety!” Madame Doncieux blew the last words out as if she wished to blow him away. “I am amazed you come here.”

  If Camille was convent bred, it was one with wide windows, he thought wryly. Well, if he had expected any welcome, he had been wrong. Even his fine clothes did not excuse his questionable profession.

  Claude glanced at the door that madame had closed behind her and that likely led to the bedrooms. Perhaps Camille was in there, listening. He wanted to rush through that door to find her, but madame would cry for help. And then—Merde!—suppose Camille herself did not want him there, that she had taken pleasure in him for one night the way he had a few times with women, and now returned to her own world? He imagined her room with a wardrobe full of dresses, floral curtains, a dressing table with a large oval mirror, and books. What kind? Baudelaire? She had said she read the novels of Balzac but preferred George Sand. Did she have theater programs autographed by actors? When you saw someone’s room, you knew her. He would have liked to see it even if he could not see her.

  He held out the bag. “But I have stopped by for a very ordinary reason, madame—to return this to her.”

  “This was the bag my daughter had with her two days ago. How did you come by it?”

  “She went to see her picture at the Palais. I happened to be there, as I might be. When she left, I found it beneath the chair where she’d been sitting. She was hurrying off to meet you to pay a call on friends.”

  “What? We were to make no call that day!” Madame Doncieux shook her head as she accepted the bag. “She left here two days ago to go straight to her sister’s and has been there since. I hope your picture is a good likeness; she told me you’re very drawn to painting trees and air.”

  His artist’s pride intervened. “True, madame, but I believe I drew her well.”

  She smiled a little. “Now, I know nothing about you, monsieur,” she said, “but that you take good girls from their family homes without permission. Let this be an end of communication between you both. If you attempt to see my daughter again, my husband will be forced to have words with you. I trust this warning is all you need as I see that, in spite of your profession, you are a gentleman.”

  AS CLAUDE WALKED away from the Île Saint-Louis, he said to himself: But Camille will write to me. Yes, for I miss her with a strange ache that was not there before, and she must feel the same. She cried when she left me. He could still feel her kisses on his mouth. What did it matter if she told him she was to meet her mother when it was her sister who expected her? She had only said it to avoid spending the day with him, knowing perhaps in advance that it might end in such intimate passion on his narrow bed.

  Days passed, though, and there was no word; the situation was made worse by the presence of other women in the studio. Auguste brought a plump, dark-haired beauty called Lise home and slept with her on his cot near the easels, both breathing gently under the blankets. Once someone stayed behind Frédéric’s closed door all night.

  Perhaps it is true, then, Claude thought, as I suspected when I stood amid her mother’s silky classical chairs: she had her fun with me and now has hurried off to her proper marriage. One day our paths will cross on one of the great boulevards or perhaps at the annual Salon. I will be famous then and she will arrive on the arm of her husband and lower her eyes when she sees me. She will flush and murmur and I will keep my hands behind my back and nod coldly and say, “Madame.”

  Claude imagined her years from now approaching him across a parlor as her mother had done, saying, “My maid told me you wished to see me. I do not believe we know each other.” She would be near fifty then as her mother was now, all her heedless charm gone, turned into the proper matron, upholding the values of the empire and French petite bourgeoisie, not ever remembering she had thrown off her clothes to the last petticoat for him.

  To escape her memory he began a painting in a park, yet every woman walking down the path reminded him of her. He could do nothing well. That’s it, then! he thought, putting down his brushes. He would have no peace until he found her again.

  With his folded easel over his shoulder, Claude marched toward the Sorbonne, turning down the small rue Dante. The cat slumbered in the bookshop window on the second volume of the French encyclopedia and the fat uncle was arranging books on a shelf and puffing on a cigar whose acrid smoke circled above him.

  “If you’re the artist,” he growled, “my niece and her parents have gone away to Lyon for a week. You know the girl’s mother wishes you to stay away from her. Do you understand me, monsieur?”

  How had Camille described this renegade uncle? His values were as restrictive as those of the rest of her family. Gone away then; torn away. Claude crossed to the Île Saint-Louis but the shutters were closed outside their rooms. Looking up at them, he felt his sadness harden to anger.

  As he and Auguste walked toward the colorist shop near the École des Beaux-Arts off the rue Bonaparte the next morning, Claude confided the whole story. “So she came like the night and fled with the dawn!” Auguste said compassionately as they opened the door. “Isn’t that what the girls do in the great ballets: dance away to the dawn, fluttering their arms to some virtuous end? She’s not coming back; it’s been three weeks. She’s thinking of her wedding trousseau. Isn’t that what girls think about? A ring, then clothes and furniture.”

  “How could she?”

  “Family pressure. She’ll have a bit to conceal on her wedding night, I imagine
. She’ll probably close her eyes and dream it’s you, you devil. Come on, you’ll get over it. And anyway, you got a few more raves in the news journals for your picture. You can have anyone you want. Upper-class women!” Auguste shuddered and raised his eyes to the frames hanging from the ceiling. “Spare me! You know Frédéric would agree if he weren’t still home visiting his sick relative.”

  Claude took up the parcel of paints from the shopkeeper. “Very well, then,” he said coolly. “Monsieur, I will pay you next week for this.”

  HE FORGOT HER: he relegated her in his mind to the future, where she had faded, all her youthful beauty gone. He could not quite remember the sound of her voice. Then, just as he no longer thought of her several times an hour, the Salon ended and he brought his painting back to the studio and hung it up, hitting his thumb in the process.

  After, he walked out to the street again.

  The problem with having loved, however briefly, he thought reflectively, is that you can’t ever get back to yourself just as you were before. It changes you. He looked in the mirror and saw the same man but angrier, shoulders hunched, defensive. He sank into a terrace chair at a small café on the rue Jacob and ordered wine, and taking out a small pad of paper, began to make a list. He had had a success, and his family had sent him extra money. What should he do next?

  I will go home for the summer, he said to himself resolutely. That’s first on the list. I will go home and paint the sea again because it calls to me. Hannah’s meals are excellent, and there’s plenty of wine. And in the autumn, I may come back here and I may not.

  He looked up from his wine.

  Camille Doncieux was standing at the edge of the café chairs.

  SHE WAS HOLDING the same purse, looking lovelier than ever in a polka-dotted white dress, a folded parasol in her gloved hands. It is someone else, not her, Claude thought. He stood up, scraping back the chair on the cobbles as she hurried past the other tables to him.

  She said, “I was going to your house to leave a letter for you.”

  Ah, one of her passionate letters! he thought dryly.

  He resolved to be formal and polite. He took her gloved hand and let his lips brush hers. She flushed and looked about. She must conceal me, he thought resentfully. The hidden boudoir, very much like a play. “What a surprise to see you,” he said. “Do sit down.”

  She took the chair opposite him at the small table. “How have you been, Claude?” she asked, never taking her eyes from him.

  “Oh, very well! I’m busy, very busy. Had you appeared a few days from now I wouldn’t have been here. Sorry you left. I do understand. A woman’s wedding is a great thing. I was, perhaps, your indiscretion.” He did not want to speak angrily, so he controlled his voice. He could feel a touching humility from her across the table. Pigeons pecked at crumbs between their feet. He raised his face and saw tears in her eyes.

  “You’ve every right to be angry,” she said. “But where would you go?”

  “Many places. I have to get back to my work. I’ve had a great success. I thank you very much for it. I truly mean that. Look, I’ve been making a list!” He turned it over. It was not much of a list, with only one item so far. How can I be at such loose ends? he thought.

  Camille felt the edge of the table nervously. “I have to tell you this,” she said. “When I was away at my grandmère’s little house in the Rhône-Alpes, I thought of how the ceiling fell. I left my purse. I know you returned it. I know my mother was cold; she knows nothing. I have to explain. Please excuse me if I do it clumsily because I’ve never done anything like this before. I decided to forget you, but I can’t. I was all prepared to live the life of my mother and my sister if you hadn’t walked into my uncle’s bookshop that day. Something in me turned and went the other way and won’t turn back around.”

  She raised her eyes for a moment, then looked down again. “I cried for you. I stifled my tears in my pillow. I wrote letters to you but didn’t send them. And I knew last night suddenly because it all burst out. I had to be with you again. No, Monsieur Monet, you are far more than my ‘indiscretion,’ as you called it. I almost wish you weren’t more because you were so haughty when I came across to you just now.”

  “I …” He was stunned.

  “I heard the Salon closed. Did my picture sell?”

  “Not yet; it will.”

  “I should have said your picture,” she added. Tears fell down her cheeks. He wanted to stand up and crush her against him, but he said cautiously, “My haughtiness is an old habit. I’m sorry. I was a little hurt. So here you are.”

  Camille raised her face hopefully, her eyes still full of tears and her nose a little red. He did not have a handkerchief, but she pulled one from her purse, stained somewhat with powder and chocolate.

  Claude looked down at a pigeon and asked cautiously, “But what does it mean that you’ve come for me after you disappeared? You’re engaged.”

  “I don’t know if I want to be. Lucien Besique is good man, a kind man, and would give me whatever I wanted but I want only to be with you. He would never understand me; he would indulge me. He would say, ‘Oh, those are her little ways!’ I would have cards engraved like my mother and pay calls.”

  She had anxiously pulled off her glove, and he could see her fingernails were bitten more closely than he recalled. She raised her chin and said tremulously, “Now you can send me away if you wish and I won’t come back. I’ve humbled myself. I want to be with you. I had a friend who died so suddenly, young, and she never had the chance to be with the man she was drawn to, but I took that chance. I went into your arms; I couldn’t help myself. I can’t now. You may send me away, but I won’t go on my own. I want to be with you for a little time, some days, a week. I can at least have that!”

  He thought, She has yearned for me as I have for her. He exclaimed, “Yes, I want that too. The hell with everything else!” The heat of desire and relief so flooded him that his voice carried. The elderly waiter turned around and looked benignly at him as if to say, Young love.

  “But where can we go?” he cried. He thought of the studio as it was now, without a cleaning woman for weeks and full of unwashed dishes and someone’s socks drying over the edge of a chair. Sometimes there was just he and Frédéric and other times two or three more artists sleeping all over the floor. He couldn’t take her there; besides, he couldn’t see his friends’ faces after he had sworn to them he had forgotten her utterly.

  He took out his pad and pencil again. “I know. I have a friend who stayed in this lovely rural area just outside the city, Sèvres, in a farmhouse. We’ll go there, just us. We’ll hide. Come. What will your family say?”

  She smiled slightly, so touching with the tears still wet on her face. “They won’t know where I’ve gone. I’ll send a note that I’m safe. Yes, let’s go away together where no one can find us.”

  NOTHING HAD EVER happened so fast in his life. An hour later he and Camille caught the train together to Sèvres, where they walked to the farmhouse. Dusk was falling and smoke rising from the chimney over the tiled roof with the fields and hills and stone walls beyond. He signed the registrar Monsieur and Madame Claude Monet before they climbed the creaking stairs past the pregnant farm cat to their room, bolting the door behind them.

  They lit no candle but immediately began to undress each other in the dark, not hastily this time, but contemplating every lace and button. He felt the air on his bare back and legs. She stood waiting as he unfastened the eight hooks of her corset. He slipped off her chemise. In the dim light her slender body with its large breasts was the most beautiful thing he had ever seen, and they were alone, alone. No one would bother them. Outside, they heard the goats coming down the road and the voice of the boy shepherd. A gate opened. Below, a pot was placed on a trivet; the smell of soup rose. The still, sweet night lay against the window listening to them.

  He wanted to go slowly so that it would never end. He kissed her breasts and belly and thighs. She murmured and m
oved against him. As he entered her, he willed the very air to stand still. He felt he would remember always her softness, the bedposts, the cotton bed hangings, and the smell of cooking soup. When it was done he held her until he was ready to begin again.

  An hour later hunger drove them downstairs, where the farmwife smiled at them and served them tenderly. His leg pressed against Camille’s under the table and they soon drew each other up the creaking stairs once more. The world became her body pushing against his, gasping in delight. The touch of her hand on his stomach made him cry out with longing.

  On the third morning, as they still lay in bed, he said, “You were walking in the garden yesterday in the sun and I saw you as a painting of four women, all you. Will you model for me?”

  “But we left so quickly I didn’t have time to try to run home and secretly take any other dresses but the one I’m wearing, and you didn’t bring your paints.”

  “I can paint other dresses in later, and I’ll write Frédéric. He wrote me a week ago that he’d be back by now.” He sat down at the desk by the window, glancing back at her in bed. Already she was slowly and languidly turning into the painting for him, and on top of his letter he roughly sketched how he would place her on the canvas.

  F., cher ami! I’m so sorry I never even left you a note—you and our friends must have thought I drowned in the Seine. I went away quite suddenly with the enchanting Camille, the younger sister whom you met last summer in Fontainebleau (the older sister is fast become a terror of respectability) and whom I painted in your rented green promenade dress. Anyway, I did not bring my paints, so can you buy the enclosed list of colors and also a large canvas and stretchers and some new brushes and put them on the train? I’ll pay you back. I know I owe you a fortune already but it will be repaid in good time! I am on my way to remarkable success. Don’t tell a soul where we are, as her family doesn’t know. We are entirely happy together and she is in all ways lovely. Envy me!

  CM