Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  What I regret most is not confiding more in you in the past several months, but then neither do you confide in me as you go forward in your marriage, which I feel can’t make you happy! One day I came to the studio hoping to find you, but you weren’t there. I saw your painting of the girl in the pink dress with the village far behind her and understood again what a fine painter you are.

  The truth is, I believe our independent exhibition to be the fantasy of a group of tired, struggling artists who will one by one find this whole thing too difficult and give up. I write different things to Minou every day; she must think I’ve lost my mind. Don’t come here, any of you. Don’t fetch me again; don’t rescue me! What for?

  Right now I don’t think I’m coming back. Please make sure Minou and my son don’t lack for anything.

  Claude

  That was that, then. Outside, men in weatherproof coveralls shouted above the rain and ran for shelter, wet fish glistened, and the dark gray clouds paused and thickened and rained harder into the sea. He rose and cleared a place in the glass to look at the colors. Some man ran past the window, shouting something, his voice lost in the thunder and rain, and then he was gone.

  The rain ended after several days. The thick gray clouds were silent, the air was cold and damp, the water lapped uneasily. Men walked in wet footsteps down the wharf. As Claude watched them through the window, he heard the shop door open, and his old friend Boudin came in.

  Claude stood up from the creaking chair.

  Boudin greeted him with a brief handshake and turned to examine some hanging nets. Men who lived in these parts were not quick to words: they did not hurl them out and knock them about for the pleasure of it, but took them carefully from their pockets and laid them on the table before them. Boudin said lightly, “So, my young friend! I’m back from wintering in warmer parts and was surprised to find you here. How’s the painting going?”

  “It’s not. I can’t,” Claude said. He stayed by the desk. “It’s stopped and with it I’ve stopped as well. I’m not there if it’s not there.” He reached down to feel the edge of an accounting book. “I’m sorry to tell you this above all men, believe me. I will never forget your kindness to me, arrogant boy that I was.”

  Boudin nodded. “To be honest, the painter Daubigny wrote and told me,” he said. “One of your friends must have told him. It happens, you know, but never before for you, eh?”

  Claude shook his head slowly; he folded his arms across his chest. He frowned and looked out the window. Boudin’s voice carried to him over the damp wood of the shop.

  “Happened to me three or four times … maybe a dozen. Threw down my hat, locked up the paints, tried to tell my wife, and found my throat closing.”

  Claude sat down in the chair again, stroking his beard. Boudin sat down as well, taking off his old brown hat and looking from the window now and then.

  “It gets battered,” he said after a time, scratching his thick gray curly hair. “The part of us that paints—if not by want of success, then by us always demanding more from it. Not enough to paint the same thing for us, but we always want to do better. And so we have to …” he raised his hands and shaped the damp air “… let it rest wherever it’s hidden and after a while coax it a little. Coax it out. Life makes one humble, doesn’t it? You have a great gift, Claude. It’s what you are. I sensed it from the first time I saw your drawings and, yes, you were arrogant but you were young and unhappy. You have open seas now, my friend. I hear your father’s ill, poor man.”

  The concluding words were few and yet they touched Claude so he could hardly respond to them. In a way he dreamt of them. As he slept, the harbor water seemed to lap at his bed until it reached the edges of his blanket and his dangling hand. Outside, the wind, which troubled the sails, knocked also on his window.

  He woke in darkness one morning to the sound of a pebble against glass. Climbing from bed and going to the window, he made out Boudin below with a lantern. “Claude,” the voice whispered, rising past the winter trees. “Come with me. I have a room overlooking the harbor I paint from early mornings. The sun will rise within an hour. Just to keep me company, if you will.”

  They turned down the road from the hill to the harbor, where they drank coffee at a fishermen’s café before climbing the stairs of the old hotel.

  He looked out the window in the room. There was the dark sea, and on the horizon, far away, the first hint of orange-gold light. He slouched in a chair and watched his mentor paint. “It’s gone for me; it’s gone,” Claude said.

  “Be still and wait. I’m here every morning in this hotel room for the next week.”

  For two more days Claude woke before dawn. On the third morning he threw on his clothes and made his way down to the harbor with his lantern. It was still perfectly dark. He went to the room and saw that Boudin was sleeping. Instead of one easel facing the window there were two.

  From the depths of the blankets, the older artist stirred. “Monet,” he said, “I challenge you.”

  Claude took up the palette, which was not his, and prepared it by the lantern light; he felt the weight of his teacher’s brush.

  Far across the water, low on the horizon stretched a thin line under the clouds of rosy orange gold, and the sun rose. As he worked, his brush became the sea and dark bits of boats and the spreading light. He raced the color; he snatched at it as it changed.

  When he paused for breath he felt Boudin standing behind him. “Not bad for a start, Monet,” he said.

  HE KNEW CAMILLE’S uncle had suffered a heart attack and retired to the country and that she had decided to take over the bookshop and had moved into the rooms above it with Jean. Claude had written to her often, and then, for a time, seldom. He said he was coming back, and then he said he wasn’t. She answered him that she would wait for him. He wrote her passionately. Then she was silent for three days and her letter, when it arrived, was cautious.

  He read it several times in his boyhood room in his father’s house, walking up and down. Had he really been away more than three months, the period of his terrible darkness and then the rapturous reunion with the world through his art? Having that again, his heart opened to everyone. Now he reread her last several letters and saw them for what they were. A sentence at a time, they had ceased to implore.

  “Do you want me again?” he wrote wistfully from his desk, but he could not wait for an answer. He paced and chewed his nails, which always smelled of paint. No, he could not wait anymore; he must go to Paris and find the truth though he was sick to do it. His heart was heavy that evening as he told his father that he was returning. “I shall close the business,” the old man said. “But it’s right that you return to your woman and child. Bring them here to meet me soon.”

  Do I have a woman? Claude thought.

  The four hours of the train ride seemed days, and then when he arrived he could hardly make his feet go quickly enough to the rue Dante.

  The ancient cat was sleeping in the window on one of the volumes of the encyclopedia in the bookshop when he walked cautiously through the door with his paintings and bag on an early May day. A young man who had worked here before sat behind the desk. Claude glanced up the stairs and asked, “Madame has gone out? She expects me.”

  The young man replied, “She’s gone out with the little one. Go up, monsieur, if you like, and wait for her.”

  Some of her things in her rooms were still in boxes, but others lay scattered about: her pink petticoat, her hair combs. He picked up one of her white chemises and held it to his nose. His paintings were stacked against the wall, and his son’s wooden wagons and donkeys were heaped in a corner under the window. He lay down on the bed, her dressing gown in his arms, and slept until he felt his little son climbing on his chest, exclaiming, “Papa! Papa!”

  He said, “You darling. Yes, it’s me.” Holding his wiggling son passionately against him, he turned his head to see Camille standing tall and gravely at the door in a little gray veiled hat, something s
o very removed about her. He knew then he had been away too long. He rose, forcing himself across the room. She stood as if waiting. He lightly kissed her mouth as an inquiry. He could feel her shudder slightly with emotion, but she did not move, only waited as if watching them both.

  His voice was unsteady. “Have I lost you by what I’ve done?” he murmured, his forehead against hers. “In going to recapture who I am, have I lost what I love? In some weeks more would it have been too late, and you would have gone on without me?”

  She put her hand on his. “I would have come back,” she said. “I would have come after you, but I couldn’t bear it if you sent me away.”

  Later, when night had fallen and the child was asleep, he came cautiously into the bed where she lay smiling, her hair loose on the pillow, arm behind her head. He kissed her tentatively then, thinking, but what if I am not able to make love to her as I mostly could not in the months before I left? Then he forgot and it returned naturally. The bed creaked and she clung to him.

  They lay together as if listening to all the books below them. Shadows hovered on the ceiling from the streetlamp below.

  “I’ve done so much clumsily,” he whispered. “But I can take care of you now. Boudin introduced me to some possible patrons; they’re commissioning me to paint several pictures of the resort of Trouville just across the estuary from Le Havre this summer for a good deal of money, but I’ll go only if you go. I want you to meet my father … and I want to take you there as my wife. It will be our honeymoon.”

  He rose and felt in his trouser pockets, taking out a tiny box. By the streetlamp he opened it. “This was my mother’s betrothal ring,” he whispered, lifting out the gold band with its one small pearl. “It’s not dried grass, it’s real.”

  ALMOST EVERYONE HE knew came to the restaurant in the Batignolles district for the wedding reception. The private room glittered with brass fixtures, engraved glass, and polished wood. He often sought her hand, because the secular wedding ceremony had dazed him.

  Her parents had come from Lyon. They brought Camille’s grandmere, a tiny, intelligent woman, her back crooked and her smile wide and generous. She gave her granddaughter one of her own brooches and kissed Claude warmly. Annette came with her husband, who frowned at everyone. On Claude’s side of the family, his brother arrived with his wife, a bit bewildered by Claude’s boisterous friends but impressed enough by Frédéric, who carried himself gravely as best man. Claude’s father sent money and his regrets; he was too ill to travel that day. Claude’s old friend Marc from Le Havre walked about telling everyone of Claude’s wild boyhood days, drinking a great deal.

  Little Jean, who was running as fast as he could around the table, collided with Claude’s legs. Claude picked him up and tossed him in the air, and the boy shrieked happily, ran away, and climbed on Frédéric’s lap. Frédéric clasped him tightly and whispered in his ear.

  Their good friend Edmond Maître played Offenbach for an hour or more until Camille rose and took her sister’s hand. “Let’s sing the aria from La Périchole together,” she begged. “Let’s sing together as we did as girls back in Lyon!” They stood together by the spinet, Camille in her dusty pink silk wedding dress with delicate silk roses in her hair. Claude sat back in his chair and watched her. He remembered the first day they had spent alone together and how she had gone home with him impulsively and thrown off all her clothes.

  As the song died away to whistles of approval, Claude glanced down the room. Frédéric’s napkin lay on the table, his glass of champagne half drunk, and his chair pushed back and empty. He was gone.

  Claude rose at once, a bit unsteadily. He looked around the restaurant and finally pushed open the street door to the soft early-evening air. He was now in a state so strange for him, so emotional, so precarious, that his friend’s leaving affected him deeply. His homecoming and the marriage had been so sudden that he had had no time to speak to Frédéric about what was happening to him. Once more Frédéric had managed everything, and though he did not seem a ghost anymore, he seemed a little dazed, especially this evening.

  Claude sent word by a waiter that he would be back directly.

  It was three streets to the new studio on the rue de la Condamine where Frédéric had now moved, and Claude walked them carefully, crossing once between the early-evening traffic and the omnibuses carrying clerks and shopgirls on their way home from work. He mounted the building steps, fumbled with the key in the lock, and pushed open the door to the large studio.

  An unfinished painting rested on Frédéric’s easel, and his coat was thrown over a chair. “Damn it, Bazille! Where are you?” Claude cried as he climbed the open wood steps to the sleeping loft, holding a little to the wall.

  Frédéric was lying facedown in his bed. He raised himself on his elbow and blinked. “Sorry,” he murmured. “I drank too much. What are you doing here? Isn’t everyone still celebrating?”

  “Why did you disappear?”

  “I’m wretched, Claude. I got a letter from home this morning. Lily’s changed her mind about living in Paris half the year. She wants me to live there full-time.”

  Claude pulled off his tie impatiently and opened a few of the buttons on his satin floral vest. “What did I tell you?” he exploded. “That’s it, then. Damn it, Frédéric! Tell her to go to hell. Stay with us. Stay with us.”

  “I don’t know what I’ll do. The world’s a little crazy now. Did you see the newspapers today? The Prussians want to put one of their princes on the Spanish throne, which means another country could align against us. What I do seems insignificant next to the decisions of our emperor, who says we will go to war to prevent them.”

  “Merde! I don’t give merde for the emperor! What do we have to do with this anyway?”

  “Nothing!” Frédéric said, rising. “You’re too drunk to be walking the streets. Let’s go downstairs and make some coffee, and then you should go back.”

  Hand on the wall, Frédéric descended the steps before Claude. “What answer will I give them at home? It keeps rolling around in my mind,” he said over his shoulder. “Damn it, I have to start the stove to boil water.” Below, he picked up the bag of coffee beans on the shelf. He said, “Maybe I’ll come with you. I knew you’d worry when I left, but there’s nothing to worry about.”

  “You’re my best friend, so I worry.” Claude felt for a chair and sat.

  Frédéric hurled the coffee grinder, which clattered across the floor and came to rest, rocking, beneath the table. He shouted, “Stop thinking that! There are things I haven’t told you. Do you remember when we went to Fontainebleau for you to make that painting?”

  Claude said, bewildered, “Of course I remember. What’s the matter?”

  “I made love to Camille that night.”

  Claude shook his head and laughed. “You’re drunk. Now I know it.”

  “I’m telling you the truth,” Frédéric exclaimed. “It wasn’t planned.”

  “You’re not drunk.”

  “I’m drunk enough to tell you the truth.”

  Claude stared at him. “I think you’d better tell me then,” he said.

  Frédéric crossed the room, so close that his arm brushed against Claude’s shoulder. “I had gone outside to smoke alone because I couldn’t sleep, and she was there, crying. We started to talk and suddenly we were pouring out all sorts of things. We found a little deserted chapel and went inside. She didn’t want her fiancé and I’d just had a bad letter from home. She told me she had already had lovers.”

  He picked up a tube of paint and turned it over, staring at the label. “It was the first time for me and then, damn it, it seemed she had lied and it was the first time for her. I knew what that meant in our class. I felt then I should marry her, tell them at home and marry her, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She said we should never refer to it again. And she went home with her sister and I went home to my fiancée, but I thought of her. I have never stopped thinking of her, though I have been a perfect gen
tleman, except of course with you, my best friend…. I’ve held this secret. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have told you, but I was sick with jealousy tonight and sick of all my broken plans. She had made me promise never to tell you. She knew it would upset you.”

  The chair wobbled as Claude jumped up. He wrapped his arms around his chest and walked back and forth, kicking the coffee grinder. “It’s true, it has upset me,” he answered. “Then again, should I blame you? You didn’t know back then, of course, that later she and I would fall in love. Only it makes me damn uncomfortable.”

  He stared at his friend, who remained by his easel with his half-completed painting of a fisherman. Frédéric had taken up a tube of paint and was turning it over and over in his hands; he kept his eyes lowered.

  Claude cried, “So it’s the truth. You made love to my wife. My wife—ma femme … but she wasn’t my wife then. But when I went away those two times over the past few years, you and she were alone. I know you helped her, looked after her, took her to dinner, but was there more? Was there?” He forced himself to stay by the table.

  “The first time, when she was pregnant, no. We were shy with each other. And she loved you so.”

  “Very good, but then? This last time? This past winter? Tell me!”

  Frédéric reached out and put his hand on the top of the canvas on the easel. He cried, “Damn it, you said you weren’t coming back. That’s the last thing you said. I wanted to and she wouldn’t; then once she wanted to, and I said no. The main reason was you. She loves you. And I love you. I do, damn it. If you came back I knew she’d return to you. If you came back.”

  His head shot up; a dark patch of his chest hair showed where he had opened his white shirt, and his neck seemed very thin. He cried, “But I couldn’t stop thinking about her. I bought the picture of her in the garden for that reason. Four women in the garden. After we had made love that one time and I returned to Montpellier, I thought I’d break my engagement to Lily and find Camille. Then suddenly she was yours.”