Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  He thought, If my work is futile, I might as well let the critics tell me—they have never hesitated to do so. He sat down and wrote hastily to Paris and then looked for his chauffeur to take the letter to be posted.

  You may exhibit the paintings in May, his letter had said, with the last words underlined. But I will not be there.

  Part Five

  1870—1871

  Cher ami, the more I live, the more I regret how little I know.

  —CLAUDE MONET, IN A LETTER TO FRÉDÉRIC BAZILLE

  FROM DOVER, THEY FOUND THE TRAIN TO LONDON along with another refugee, a young printer who was fleeing conscription. Among them, only Camille knew some English, which she had learned in the convent.

  Claude stared out the window at the countryside, which was beautiful but different from that in France. Then he turned morosely away. He had brought several paintings and his paints and a few changes of clothes; he had left the rest in Le Havre and Paris and its environs. Still, to the rhythm of the train wheels he murmured to himself, “Where is my country? Where are my friends?”

  The printer told them, “You’re likely to find lodgings in the old French immigrant area called Spitalfields. At least we’ll be among countrymen there. I’m staying with a cousin. I beg you, madame, be of good cheer! The war won’t last long and we’ll all be home again.”

  Claude had never seen such crowds as when they emerged from the train station in London. Someone helped them find a porter and then a cab. They rattled past immense churches and mansions; buses bumped by them with printed advertisements on their sides that he could not read. Two-year-old Jean sucked a piece of shimmering rock candy on a stick, looking around him darkly from under his hair, which partly covered his small face. The boat passage had been rough and overcrowded with fleeing Frenchmen; he had vomited over the rail.

  “Spitalfields,” said the driver. They dragged themselves out to the street, where Claude shuddered with relief to hear his own language about him once more. The area was old and overcrowded. After a few hours of asking, they found a place behind a restaurant owned by a Marseilles man who had come here years before. The room was small and dark, the one window looking out at a yard filled with barrels and crates and smelling of cat.

  Camille put down her bag and leaned against a wall. She had wept so much for her family and for her dog, Victoire, that her handkerchief, which she clutched in her fist, was a crumpled rag.

  Claude looked about, hands on his hips. The room was sparsely and badly furnished; the mattress on the one bed was scarcely an inch thick. He sank down on it, and one of the ropes that held it broke. “That’s it!” he cried scathingly. “How can I take care of both of you here? I can’t even speak the language.”

  She cried, “If they invade France, my grandmère will take Grandpère’s hunting gun down from above the fireplace and stand at her door. He’s long dead, but she always kept his gun. I’m here, here, and not protecting her. And my sister and her little Nannette and our friends …”

  He held his breath and let it out. “I didn’t tell you about Frédéric. He damn enlisted! What will he do with a rifle? He’s never shot anything but a duck.”

  She stepped toward him, blinking, terror in her face. “Oh, Claude, he’s gone to fight? I didn’t know that.”

  He knelt to open a wicker trunk, trying to keep his voice gruff. “Don’t worry, the bastard will make a good enough soldier! He enlisted for nothing; we came for nothing. We’ll manage here and everyone will be safe. I promise you. You mind Jean. I’ll earn money for us.”

  They hung a few of his pictures that they had brought with them on the wall.

  Claude set off early the next morning. The streets off Brick Lane were squalid, lying like narrow black trenches; two hundred years earlier French silk weavers had come here fleeing religious persecution. Now the weaving industry was dead and the community half Jewish. He wondered what he looked like to people. His beard was untrimmed, and his clothes were wrinkled. He asked several Frenchmen if they knew of work and they all said there was none. “I paint,” he said, and one asked, “Houses?” He winced and replied, “I could do that.” But there was no opening for a housepainter.

  He walked far that day and the following ones, asking directions back to the old weavers’ houses in Fournier Street. That much English he learned, but the way he pronounced it must have been odd because people looked at him strangely. He finally just asked for “Fournier” and even then was once sent some miles out of his way. A few weeks passed and he had found nothing.

  As he walked home one September day he saw Pissarro and his family making their way down the street. Julie clasped her smaller son and looked weary and bewildered. Her older, Lucien, held his ragged stuffed dog and clung to her side. “There you all are!” Claude cried, pushing past a rag collector’s wagon to reach them. “I can’t say how glad I am to see you! I wondered when you were coming!” He seized up a roped bundle of paintings. “Have you a room?”

  Pissarro pointed down the street. “Yes, in that synagogue,” he said sadly. “A distant relative here arranged for us to live above it in exchange for cleaning it. An odd event for me, as I have never been a very religious Jew. You’ve heard the grim news of our forces? The emperor and his troops were captured by the Prussians at Sedan. They were surrounded. We lost seventeen thousand Frenchmen before he ran up the white flag. The emperor!” He spat. “This is what I think of power!”

  Claude said, “I heard and hoped it wasn’t so. I hardly know how to take that. How can seventeen thousand men be killed? I can’t think of so many lives snuffed out.”

  Pissarro shook his head. “Neither can I, but our friends are safe and so are we, though we have to bear this news in our hearts. One man was from my village. As I was locking our paintings in my stable, his mother was crying, and we are here, living our little lives with the sole justification to paint. Why? Is a painter more than a farmer? Can you work here?”

  “No,” Claude replied abruptly.

  At least our friends are safe, he thought grimly, but for how long?

  He hoisted the small trunk to his shoulder and helped the little Pissarro family up the stairs to the rooms above the synagogue. A bookcase held prayer books in Hebrew, and from below came the sound of droned singing.

  The weather was warm, and his countrymen lingered in the street when they weren’t working or looking for work, talking about home. Many were from Paris, others from around the country. He met a clarinetist who had played in a Trouville restaurant. Some had immigrated here a generation before.

  Weeks passed. They gathered every morning after coffee in front of the restaurant; the owner, Louis, would unfold the limp newspapers and translate news of home. Claude stood near Pissarro staring at the cobbles as the news was read, their shoulders tense as the sentences unfolded, none of them good; each sentence broke open his chest and settled inside.

  Louis was grimmer than usual one morning. “My friends,” he said, shaking his head. “I wish I didn’t have to translate this. I’d prefer to burn it. I’d prefer to piss on it. Paris is completely surrounded by the enemy; it is under siege. No one can come out, and no one or nothing can come in. No food can come in, my friends.”

  A hot, bruised murmur rose among the group until it became a cry. Everyone was talking at once. Many were crying. Claude thought, bewildered, But how can my free city be under siege? That is a medieval thing. What can it mean, “No food can come in”? Very few kitchen gardens were kept in the city; there was little room. Paris was completely dependent on the surrounding farms, which sent food in the earliest hours of the morning to the great market at Les Halles. Could there really be no piles of vegetables so plentiful that cabbage leaves and carrot greens littered the ground? No baskets of fresh eggs, no pungent cheeses of goat’s and cow’s and sheep’s milk? No lambs hanging from hooks in the butcher shop, no flour in the bins of his favorite baker? It did not seem possible.

  Camille clutched his hand. “My sister’s th
ere, and my little niece.”

  Julie clasped her and rocked her slightly; “Come, Camille.” she urged. “No matter how bad things sound, you know our country will win in the end. I will make you a nice coffee. It will be all right.” Julie led her friend away, coaxing her, with Camille looking back as if somehow more news might come shortly that there really was no siege so far away.

  A few weeks later a letter finally arrived from Auguste; he drew sketches of his camp, which was stationed well away from Paris, and said he was becoming a horseman. He added that Paris was receiving and sending news by hot-air balloon, which he thought was marvelously innovative, and that he had received word from Frédéric, who was still in training in Algiers.

  His friend’s name on paper broke something in Claude and the sudden silence between them was too heavy to bear. Not a day had passed when Claude had not thought of the regiment there and his friend.

  He penned a letter sitting at a table in the empty restaurant at midday. “Bazille, I hope this reaches you. We are in London and reasonably well. Pissarro’s here also. How are you?” It won’t reach him, he thought as he posted it to Algiers in the red postbox. But a few weeks later, a wrinkled envelope arrived for him. He walked with it for some time down Commercial Street, past the half-broken houses, until he had courage to open it.

  Claude, Auguste told me you were in London, but I was very grateful to hear from you directly and to know you are safe. I am humbled that you were the one to write first and break our silence. We are training now and soon will ship out to France. I am up at dawn to peel potatoes, which I actually do very well. I had visions of riding a white steed, delivering a message that would save my battalion, but all I deliver is potatoes. I expect you will find this amusing.

  There are things I need to tell you. I can’t say them in a letter, Claude. I’m sorry if I did anything to hurt you. Don’t worry about me. I’ve too many things to do in this life to get killed. I’ll come back. I promise.

  As he stood under the spire of Christ Church, Claude said under his breath, “So this is all you say? And will you ever tell me more of what happened between you and her, you bastard?” There had been more; it was over now, but there had been more. Claude sensed it. He tore the letter in two, and then ruefully fitted it together again.

  He kept it in a book; he did not share it.

  That day he began to paint again.

  AS CLAUDE HAD in his early days as a struggling art student, he and Camille ate beans and dry bread, and sometimes the remains of a stew from the restaurant. They cleaned the restaurant to pay for their room. Late at night when he came home he would see her mopping the floors and washing the pots, a scarf around her head; he would take the mop from her hands and finish himself.

  Tenderly he would kiss her hands and rub cream into them. She pulled them away quickly, and he flushed. She is avoiding me, he thought sadly. She is worried about him. She blames me for many things.

  She was always with Julie these days; they shopped together and sewed and sometimes laughed in the private way of women, sitting close and talking of children. In Paris it had been her sister and Lise with her love of dresses and wild theatrical aspirations who had been Camille’s closest friends; now it was Julie, the daughter of farmers, with her rough rural accent, her strong hands that could mercilessly wring wet laundry or a chicken’s neck, and her blunt, sometimes tactless judgments of the artists, the English, all religious belief, and any garments for children but strong, simple ones that could be readily mended.

  Claude heard these opinions frequently, for he and Camille spent most evenings with the Pissarros in their rooms, the sound of men praying in Hebrew rising up from the synagogue. A few of the artist’s landscapes hung over a bookshelf of Hebrew books and boxes of candles that had been stored there.

  He and Pissarro sat by the window on stools or chairs, smoking their pipes frugally. If they closed the drapes they could pretend they were in the Marais again and one of them might go down shortly to the café to fill their wine jug. It seemed as if they’d hear voices from the stairs and Sisley would come in, throwing off his white scarf, or Édouard Manet would come with top hat and cane. At any moment the English Channel would dwindle to no more than a puddle to step across and all the Prussian soldiers would be blown away to their own land.

  Rain fell against the window.

  Julie was cooking beans with a bit of meat. Camille set the apple tart she had baked on a sideboard to cool and sat down on a low stool. “My English is getting better,” she told them shyly. “I’ve learned some useful phrases. ‘Please, sir, where are the Houses of Parliament?’ ‘I desire to engage a nursemaid.’ ‘Yes, sir, I accept your kind invitation to the ball.’”

  When she translated they all broke into laughter. They became wild with laughter after a time; they gasped with it until they noticed furious tears running down Julie’s face. “Why are we laughing?” she shouted. “Don’t you know the news from Paris? The shops are empty; they’ve nothing to eat. It’s been weeks now! Someone told me today they’re eating rats and horses there. The zoo’s been long emptied.”

  Lucien knelt on his chair and hit the table violently with his spoon. “They haven’t eaten the zoo animals!” he cried frantically. “They haven’t eaten my lion! They wouldn’t eat my lion.”

  Pissarro drew his son on his lap, rocking him and kissing him. “What can we do but have courage?” he asked. “Every man in the French army is now on French soil. They’ll liberate Paris. Let me tell you the story of the first day I arrived in Paris from the West Indies with this mad desire to be an artist …”

  When he had finished his story, he sang to them traditional songs his dark childhood nurse in the West Indies had taught him; he did not have a musical voice, but it was comforting. They all sat for a long time listening to the softly falling rain outside, with only a few candles they had taken from the synagogue supply lighting the empty soup bowls and glasses. They watched the candles burn low before saying it was late. Lucien had finished his lion picture.

  Claude and Camille left to walk to their room, she holding a little bread wrapped in cloth, he carrying the sleeping Jean. The rain had almost stopped. He thought, It’s the same rain that falls on Frédéric in his regiment as he makes his way toward Paris to free it. He knew his friend was in France now.

  “Soon it will be winter,” he said.

  CLAUDE WAS GONE every day and often did not come home until dark; he was painting. There was something in the air he had never seen before: the thick, yellowish gray fog that hung over the whole city so that the sunlight was strained as through a dirty brown cloth. You could not part it with your hands. Beneath and through this aberration of light struggled the form of the immense gothic Houses of Parliament behind Westminster Bridge and the tumbling, shuddering water of the Thames, which rolled downstream to the sea. He painted both passionately.

  He had brought some canvases and paint from France. He and Pissarro hoarded them, sometimes painting over one. Sometimes he walked around in the parks and saw artists following wealthy people, crying, “Sir, sir, two shillings for a drawing. One shilling …” Day after day he became more aware of the poverty of London: the dark, narrow alleys; the rotten food; the naked children; the hands sliding in his empty pockets to find what they could there. He became aware of the hundreds of beggars.

  The cold came and the skies were cloudy again. Winter settled in and he and Pissarro ran out of canvases. When they had no more they could sacrifice to paint over, they did not paint but stood on Brick Lane talking about the latest news from Paris. Camille was not in the restaurant; she had likely gone somewhere with Julie. Claude was suddenly very tired. He made his way to his room and lay down, covering himself with the blanket and his coat, and immediately fell asleep.

  Someone was knocking at the door, waking him. “Entrez! La porte est ouverte!” he called irritably.

  On the threshold, wearing a fine cashmere fur-trimmed coat and a top hat and looking about
curiously, stood the great painter Daubigny.

  Claude rose, stumbling over a shoe. “Monsieur,” he stammered. “I didn’t know you were in London. Come in. I can’t excuse this humble place, but we all do the best we can. If you’ll wait, I’ll go out for some wine. I’m happy to see you; I can’t tell you how happy.”

  Daubigny glanced discreetly about, and then looked at Claude. “I heard a rumor you were in London but only found you now. I may have an opportunity for you. My art dealer has moved here from Paris as so many of us have. I tried to get him interested in your work a few years ago and now he wants to meet you. You have undoubtedly heard of him: Paul Durand-Ruel. You have been painting London? Good.”

  HE SELECTED HIS paintings hastily; he could not find a clean shirt. He climbed into a hansom cab after Daubigny and they maneuvered through the heavy traffic, descending at New Bond Street and entering a gallery with the walls full of paintings and racks of drawings. It was so like the Paris gallery where he had tried to show his work and met only refusal from the art dealer’s assistant.

  On one wall hung a painting by the beloved artist Corot of a forest with trees in blossom. It brought such a longing for rural France to Claude that his eyes filled with tears. He wanted to climb inside the picture. The slightly plump man with prematurely white hair who walked toward him blurred for him. Claude murmured, “Bonjour; I am Claude Monet.”

  “I am Paul Durand-Ruel, monsieur,” replied the art dealer, shaking his hand. “How odd we two should meet in this strange city! I see you have brought some of your work. Will you show it to me?”

  Claude leaned his canvases against the wall one by one, and the art dealer walked back and forth in front of them, taking in the oil painting of the port of London with all its ships’ masts, churning water, and intense clouds above, the Thames at Westminster Bridge with a few distant boats, and a somber, lonely painting of a scarcely populated Hyde Park. At last Durand-Ruel turned to him. He said, “I think I can sell them. I’ll take all three at two hundred francs each.”