Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  “What’s yours?”

  “Shame that I don’t do better.”

  “You will! This autumn! All of us. And women are secretive; they’re all like that. Maddening.” Bazille grinned and stretched; the lamp threw his shadow larger on the wall and the ceiling, and it seemed to hover above both of them as if it had a life of its own.

  TWO DAYS LATER, Claude found a thatched cottage in Montmartre to rent.

  With Jean, who was now six months old, he and Camille took the omnibus as far as it went up the hill and then climbed a snowy dirt path. Montmartre was not part of Paris: it stood alone, dotted with small farms.

  He watched her face uneasily as they entered the sagging cottage. If she felt a moment’s disappointment after living some days in her sister’s exquisite rooms, she quickly hid it. “It’s not too awful, is it?” he asked hopefully, noting how the odd snowflake drifted lazily through a broken windowpane. “It’s just for a little while until I get on my feet again.”

  “Oh no, it has such character, and besides, we’re near friends!” she replied gaily. She put Jean down on the sagging bed and took off the fur hat her sister had given her. “I can make it beautiful,” she said. “We’ll be happy here with you painting and I writing.”

  “Writing?” he asked.

  She shook her head mischievously. “Yes, of course,” she said. “I hope all our other things come tomorrow! I can hardly remember who we left them all with when we went away. Where are the sheets? My sister is sending our plates. Why yes, of course, I have my own plans.”

  “What?” he said, gazing at her elegant face so flushed with the cold and wind.

  “Never mind,” she said.

  The humble cottage with its sagging floor and walls took on its own charm. A hired donkey cart brought up their books, which had been stored with friends, and he hung his pictures, all of them crooked. The bed ropes creaked and mice chased each other under the scant furniture at night. In the day she sang snatches of Offenbach breathlessly in her slightly hoarse contralto, her voice dropping out and coming back again as if she had forgotten some words in each phrase. He went out to paint, but never farther than Camille could walk to him with some bread, cheese, and hot coffee at midday.

  “You don’t want to change your mind about the stage?” he asked her one late winter evening. The setting sun shone on the wide, rotting floorboards in a glorious way, and Jean tried to capture it with his small hands.

  She wiped her hands on her apron. “No,” she said. “I told you, mon cher! Do you remember that I started a novel in the bookshop? I’m going to complete it. I want to make it brilliant, the very best. Jean is chewing on something, Claude! Can you take him in your lap?”

  Later that evening he lay back in bed, hands under his head, and the baby asleep on his chest as she walked about the room, one hand behind her back, the other holding her few pages as she read him the opening chapter. It was about a girl who wanted to become an opera singer but who is trapped by her family’s expectations.

  When she had done, he exclaimed, “The characters are so real!” and she sat on the bed’s edge and kissed him. “I have found my true gift, I think,” she said a little wistfully. And that month and the next she sat at the table and wrote.

  When spring came, they wanted nothing more than to be outside and took long walks together, carrying Jean. Will the spring astonish me every year forever? Claude thought. The first buds on trees, the first dusting of green. All around them orchards, vineyards, and small pastures unfolded.

  He sold a few paintings and settled with his creditors, redeeming his maritime paintings, which were shipped to Paris by train and which now would take pride of place in the planned exhibition with his friends in the fall. He redeemed her dresses. He was relieved to receive a letter from his father saying that he and Claude’s aunt had returned and that she was better. Aunt Lecadre enclosed amusing articles from the local paper.

  More than twenty friends climbed the hill on the day of Camille’s twenty-second birthday and made a picnic under a huge old tree between vineyards and a wild field. Jean crawled about pulling up fistfuls of grass, following six-year-old Lucien Pissarro, who now and then sat down in the grass with him. The Pissarro family was back living in Louveciennes with Pissarro’s mother.

  Frédéric walked up the path in old green plaid trousers, bearing wine and cake, followed by his friend Edmond, who had a guitar slung across his back. Auguste brought Lise, who wore a straw hat with flowers; he now lived in Montmartre as well. Sisley came with his new wife and a few musician friends. They did not expect Camille’s parents, who were to take her for lunch the following day, or her sister, whose little girl was again sick.

  Lucien and the older children tried to catch butterflies and picked wildflowers. The sun shone on the leaves and the ground and the bright dresses of the women. A great number of cheeses and sausages and breads was laid on plates on the picnic rugs. Camille opened a few small presents. Edmond tuned his guitar and sang some songs by Schubert to his own accompaniment.

  But the subject of their first private exhibition that autumn drew the painters apart to one picnic rug, where they talked and smoked pipes. Claude sat with his back against the tree trunk and Frédéric stretched out on his side. “I found rooms for it yesterday,” Frédéric said excitedly. “I have to paint like a madman until then. I can start on the draft announcements to the news journals and magazines this summer. We need to invite all the gallery owners and art dealers, perhaps even Durand-Ruel, the most important art dealer in Paris now.”

  “He never wanted to see my work before,” Claude said ruefully. “He sent word by his assistant that he couldn’t sell it, it was too modern.”

  “He’ll change his mind,” Frédéric answered gravely. “They’ll all change their minds. What do we call ourselves?”

  They looked at one another. “The Society of Poor Broke Bastards?” suggested Sisley.

  “Shut up! How about The Society of Anonymous Artists—La Société anonyme coopérative d’artistes?”

  Claude glanced at the women, who were sitting close together with the children. How lovely they looked with their summer straw hats, the ribbons stuck with flowers. Camille lay on her stomach, her white dress floating about her. “I’m writing,” she was telling them. “Something magical will happen. I’m going to be like George Sand, who took a man’s name to publish. I find her smoking cigars and wearing trousers most alluring. But she’s old now, way over sixty. Terrible to be old. I can’t imagine it. I’m always going to be young and happy!” She burst out laughing and sat up, reaching for Jean, who was examining a fistful of grass.

  Pissarro fell asleep on a picnic cloth on his back with his hat covering his face, snoring slightly. The air was still sweet and the earth was warm, though the sun sank low in the sky over the vineyards. They packed the dishes and walked dreamily down the hill. Claude held his jacket slung over his shoulder; his sleeves were rolled up.

  They said good-bye at the turn and he watched his friends walking back to Paris, Frédéric with his hands in his pockets, Pissarro’s son riding on his shoulders and the others in front of them.

  Interlude

  GIVERNY

  December 1908

  Now that winter had come, the water lilies were long gone, but he continued to work on his paintings of them from memory in his studio. More requests had come for him to settle on a date to show them, and more than ever he deferred his promise. In his last major exhibition he had shown the Japanese bridge and the trees and pond surrounding it, and endured criticism for his shallow subject matter. Why paint only a bridge, a pond below, a willow tree? the critics had asked.

  What would they say now to an exhibition of nothing but lilies, water, and reflections? How great would be their contempt! And why did one ever give us the need to be understood? When was anyone ever indifferent to the opinions of others or the feeling that one should be better at work and with those one loved?

  When his work did
not please him and he thought of all the things that irritated him in his life, he sometimes remembered that Camille’s sister had not responded to his second letter, sent months before. Then it would not leave his mind. Finally he put down his brush and took up a pen, sitting at the table in the midst of his pictures.

  My dear madame,

  I am hurt and angered by your silence, and though I may be foolish to interrupt my work to write you again, I must do so. I still hope we may have some communication about some of your sister’s things that I have found. In particular, when I looked in the box again, I realized some papers were missing, a handful of love letters she wrote before I knew her and which she never sent. They may have been destroyed by her or perhaps are still in your possession. I would like to have them. It is odd for me to be jealous so many years after her death, but, as I said, discovering the Japanese box has awakened many old feelings.

  Yours, C. Monet

  He hesitated as he put the letter out to be mailed by his chauffeur. He had not told Annette the whole truth in his previous letter, for he had known very well that she had returned to Paris not recently but many years before.

  Part Four

  1869

  I’m chasing the merest sliver of color. It’s my own fault, I want to grasp the intangible. It’s terrible how the light runs out, taking color with it.

  —CLAUDE MONET

  AS THE OPENING OF THE FIRST EXHIBITION OF THE SOCIETY of Anonymous Artists approached that autumn, the artists themselves were so excited they could talk of nothing else. Claude and Auguste met at a new framing shop near the École des Beaux-Arts to decide how to frame their work. Each painter could contribute six or eight paintings, and Claude had decided on two of his redeemed seascapes from Le Havre, which were already framed. The others needed framing, including some he had made the past summer while staying with Camille and Jean in a small village near a little bathing spot on the Seine called La Grenouillère. Auguste, whose parents lived nearby, had painted with him.

  The two artists stood together under the hanging forest of frames hung on ropes from the ceiling: they were of every sort of wood and weight, painted or gilded, or carved with flowers. Each seemed to whisper, “Within me might live the work of a great artist.”

  Auguste asked, “Do you remember how we met in art class? You spoke to no one.”

  “I didn’t feel very confident.”

  They reached up to take down samples of one frame or another. They touched them gently and set them swinging like chimes, clinking into one another and moving away again. They knelt and tried the samples around the paintings.

  After several hours they chose, deliberating between beauty and cost, compromising.

  “Monsieur,” Auguste told the framer. “You will accept a small deposit from us, the rest payable in three months?”

  “Bien sûr,” replied the man. “Come back in a week and all will be ready for you.”

  ON THAT BRIGHT autumn day they went whistling up the street to their old café in the Batignolles district, leaping up like boys to touch branches of trees, knocking into a baby carriage and raising their hats, saying, “Pardon, madame!” Claude looked around the streets of Paris, at the churches, the shops, the chairs on terraces of cafés that would offer outdoor seating for a short time more. Glasses glittered on the tables, and the trees hung gravely in their late September fullness.

  The painters were waiting at their table with its cracked marble top, their hats hung on hooks above them. They shook hands and sat down and ordered. “Well, we’ve chosen our frames,” Auguste said, beginning to eat someone else’s bread.

  “What did you choose?”

  “Second-best for me, best for Claude. The dandy!”

  “I’m not worried. I’ll sell the ones we did over the summer for six hundred francs each. You’ll do the same. Have you seen the two rooms where we’ll exhibit? They’re right on the Champs-Élysées. I saw the first few posters for the show this morning, and the first newspaper announcement. But where are Sisley and Frédéric? We did say two o’clock.” They peered through the dirty window at the street and the tables and chairs outside.

  They had been there an hour or more when they spotted Sisley walking gravely past the inside tables toward them. He bit his lip, looked at them all, and took off his hat. Slowly he took a chair. “The exhibition is postponed,” he said. “I’ve just come from the studio. Frédéric was running out when I arrived. All he said was that his family’s gone back on their word about sponsoring our exhibition now. Something happened; he was terribly upset and said he was returning to Montpellier at once to talk with them.”

  Claude jumped up. “They’ve gone back on their word? Why didn’t he come to tell us? How he must feel! I’m going to find him.”

  “It’s too late. His train’s gone by now.”

  THE PAINTERS STAYED in the café talking for a time after they heard the news. “Well,” Pissarro said, “we are more of an anonymous society than I suspected. In all honesty, we are completely anonymous. In fact, we don’t exist. The newspaper announced what will not be.”

  Everyone began talking at once, but Claude took a deep breath and sank back on the worn velvet banquette. Now he understood that no one would see the exquisite paintings made in La Grenouillére that summer. All they had planned for this autumn was suddenly gone: the exhibition, the crowds, the celebrations, the contract with an art dealer, the sales. Most bewilderingly, he had no idea why. And what on earth had happened between Frédéric and his family now? He had no way of knowing.

  “The cost of framing,” Auguste said sadly, eating the last crumbs of the bread.

  Claude stood up. “I’d better tell Camille,” he said and set out walking back to the river. The very streets he had passed before seemed different, as if all the shape and color were gone. He saw no light or shadow anywhere as he crossed the bridge to the Left Bank and the Quartier Latin.

  On their return to Paris after the summer, he and Camille had moved into a medieval building near her uncle’s bookshop. Claude slowly mounted the stairs, but no one was home. He remembered then that she had gone with little Jean to her parents’.

  He walked about the two narrow rooms, looking at all their things, mostly still stacked against the walls in boxes. Camille’s little statue of the Virgin lay on its side on the bureau. He righted the lady, remembering the burning candle in the cottage and the shopkeeper demanding money it had brought. Would there be more such visitors? He cleared the second volume of Les Misérables from a chair and sat down with his head in his hands.

  He could not bear to be with his friends or to be alone. Perhaps he would go and have a glass of wine to calm himself. He remembered that Camille sometimes hid her money in the portfolio with her novel in progress. He found it under the bed and opened it. Several francs were there, but only a few pages of the novel that she had been writing all spring and summer. He wondered what she had done with the rest of it. He would go fetch her. Still dazed, he set out toward the river.

  With all his heart he did not want to enter her parents’ beautiful rooms on the Île Saint-Louis today; indeed, he had been there for dinner only a few times since the birth of his son. Now he walked heavily into the salon with its chairs and divans upholstered in pale rose silk. The Doncieuxs’ only concession to his relationship with their daughter was a painting he had given them of a sumptuous gathering of flowers in a vase.

  Madame and monsieur were sitting on the sofa before the silver coffee service and the delicate cups. “Monet,” Monsieur Doncieux said, rising and shaking Claude’s hand heartily. “Just the man we were speaking of! You had a good summer, I hear?” His words did not add “living over a shoemaker’s shop,” but his eyes added them.

  He said, “Sit down and join us, Monet. So tell us: Is all ready to proceed with your venturous exhibition?”

  “Nearly,” Claude murmured, sitting. Was it this they spoke of?

  “We’ll come, of course.”

  “Yes, o
f course.”

  Madame and monsieur looked at each other and monsieur sat down again, patting his mustache. He said, “So you both are perfectly happy and all your troubles will be over soon. Yes, we were speaking of you and our daughter. Minou’s gone out just now with the boy to buy him an ice and see a friend.” He nodded more seriously, like a doctor over a patient who is not well.

  That half hour was one of the longest Claude could remember. The Doncieuxs rambled on and on, contradicting each other, while he looked at the blowing window curtains and thought about painting them. He did not believe a word they said. It was just another incomprehensible thing in this incomprehensible day. To go away and paint would be easier, but where could he go? He must post a letter to Frédéric today. And where was his love? How could he get out of this room?

  The china clock struck three in its tedious way as if counting off another hour of life with some relief, and Claude jumped up, upsetting his coffee on the rug. As madame rushed to mop it with her tiny handkerchief and cried for the maid, he heard Victoire’s bark on the steps and his son’s voice. They tell ridiculous stories, Claude muttered angrily under his breath. He wanted to slam his fist into the glass cabinet of curiosities and gazed from the apartment door to the trembling maid who had brought a cloth and bowl of water. “Let me help you,” he said, kneeling. The tall doors opened and Camille came in.

  She was there, so pretty in her straw summer hat with flowing, pale blue ribbons, carrying Jean, whose face was smeared with white ice cream. Victoire scampered about in his usual excess, careening from his mistress to the bowl of coffee-tinted water, splashing it further. Claude gazed hungrily at Camille, who was the one reasonable, lovely thing in this room. “Claude!” she exclaimed happily. “Why, what are you doing here?”

  “Change of plans, must go back now,” he muttered. He thrust his hands into his pockets and then remembered and held his right hand out for monsieur to shake. “So sorry to leave you,” he said rapidly. “Wanted back at the gallery.” He could not wait to leave this room; if he never came back it would be too soon.