Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  Claude stared at him. He said at last, “When we were in Paris you wouldn’t so much as look at my work, no matter how I tried. What has changed your mind, monsieur?”

  “Sometimes good things come out of great misfortunes, Monet. I did not expect any good to come out of this, but perhaps it has. I am sorry to have turned you away in Paris. I didn’t think I could sell your work there. I do believe I can sell it here. Daubigny guarantees it. I shall pay you in English pounds, of course.”

  AS THEY RODE away in a cab together, he thanked Daubigny until he had no more words, and when he found himself in Spitalfields again, he stood watching the cab wobble away with the great artist within. Here, in this strange and foreign place, one of the artists he most admired had stood up for him, and he now had more money in his pocket than he’d had since he left Trouville.

  He turned to the market, which spilled down the street in front of food shops. He carried his remaining paintings, and now he bought a wicker basket and hurried from shop to shop. From the dairy he bought eggs, cream, butter, and cheese; from the poulterer a freshly killed chicken; and from a sausage maker, two long ropes of sausage. Pissarro would need some too. He bought jars of asparagus and jams so sweet that the seeds seemed to press against the glass. He bought tobacco and English biscuits and hurried with the paintings and parcels down the street and through the restaurant to the kitchen.

  Camille had returned. She was washing dishes, her hair under a kerchief, a great apron covering her dress, her sleeves rolled up, and her hands plunged in hot water. “Minou!” he cried. “I’ve sold three pictures to the greatest art dealer in Paris! I’m sending Pissarro to see him tomorrow and the man will take my friend if he wants anything else from me! He’ll sell them all over the world. This is the beginning, here, today!”

  She looked at the baskets and parcels and then at him so tenderly. “Oh, Claude,” she said.

  His desire rose fiercely for having been hidden away these months. He half pulled her into their room, trying to manage her hand and the baskets and the canvases. She laughed first, and then her pretty face grew serious and she drew in her breath sharply, in longing. He stifled her mouth with kisses. He pushed her onto the bed. Her worn, mended stockings were scratchy and left her legs reddened. Her belly was the same beautiful shape, still faintly etched with stretch marks from bearing their son. He was not slow but rough and fast, and she gasped and rose breathless to meet his thrusts. The kerchief came off, and her hair was dirty. Her hands smelled of cheap soap.

  They lay close to each other for a moment when they were done, each in their own thoughts. Slowly she moved away and felt for her undergarments. Louis was calling her from the kitchen.

  “You’re my muse,” he whispered. “My woman in the green dress.”

  “I am a sad muse now, Claude,” she replied. “And all my pretty dresses are again pawned or sold. I don’t blame you. I only want to be home again. I only want this dreadful war to be over.”

  He nodded; he wished she would not go. He felt words forming in his throat but they had not time to come.

  At Christmas she placed a candle in the window once more to welcome the wandering Virgin and her child. By this time a few things had changed. He knew a little English, mostly curse words. He had sold a few more paintings, and she had stopped working in the restaurant. Through the one small window he saw the snow falling over London, and taking his coat and sketch pad, he went out. He stopped beneath an old market awning no one had taken down, sketching rapidly on a pad he held with the edge balanced on his chest, drawing the world as he wanted it.

  THE NEWS THAT France had conceded defeat came in late January as he walked home with his easel over his shoulder. He knew only that the headlines on the papers included the word Paris. “We have lost the war,” someone said, “but Paris is free.” Claude sank to the curb, leaning on the milk cart, stupidly watching the trickle of thin blue milk in the gutter.

  Friends gathered in the street, in rooms, in the restaurant that night. “We have lost Alsace-Lorraine to the bastards,” someone said. Claude mingled with them and then retreated to his room. Camille followed with their son; she stood with her back to the door as if keeping London away, her face glowing as he had seen it do when he had first taken her to the theater.

  He held out his arms and she came into them. “I’ll see my sister again,” she said. “I’ll see my friends.” There was a wonder and a determination in her voice; he laughed a little, feeling she would float away just then and go home. All night he heard happy voices outside. He barely slept. In his mind he was walking with his friends to their independent exhibition at last. He held her and his son, having no words for his joy.

  Then he slept so deeply he did not at first hear the knocking on the door. He woke to the first light coming through the one dirty window.

  Pissarro stood in the yard, his coat open, his head lowered. “What is it?” Claude asked sleepily. “Are the children all right?”

  The artist leaned against the door frame. The white hairs in his beard shone a little by the candle in the tin holder he held in his hand. He said, “Claude, it’s bad news. We had a letter late last night from Edmond Maître in Paris.”

  IT’S NOT TRUE, Claude told himself. It’s a mistake. They make these mistakes all the time. He’s there in the studio. Why didn’t I write him before?

  Camille was reading and rereading the letter by the window; he wanted to snatch it from her. “We’re returning at once!” he said. “I don’t believe it for a moment.”

  And yet as she packed it seemed that she did not even want him to touch her hand. He stayed across the room, arranging his own things in bags. Jean understood nothing but kept whimpering. “Be still!” she shouted at him in a terrible voice. Claude picked up the child and hushed him. Suddenly it seemed that every unsaid thing between him and Camille was about to come forth. I shall say nothing, he told himself. But he did not say her name under his breath, only that of his friend in the studio in the rue de la Condamine.

  The train station was nearly empty but for porters, and they boarded, carrying the sleeping Jean, dragging their suitcases and some paintings. He had asked Pissarro to bring the others to Durand-Ruel. On the boat to Calais he stood for a time leaning by the rail, watching the churning waters until he could no longer see England. Jean was crying with the cold, and Claude took him inside.

  The port of Calais was full of Prussian soldiers and French customs officials. One turned over their clothes and a few books. “Traveling is not easy,” he said. “The country is occupied, and some tracks have been destroyed.”

  Camille refilled her water bottle and bought thick soup from a Frenchwoman, who ladled it from a pot over coals. She stumbled a little; she had not slept the whole night on the ferry and little the night before on the train from London. Sometimes she leaned against Claude, and other times she sat apart from him, looking ahead of her.

  In the midst of a crowd they boarded the French train, whose doors and windows were icy to the touch. The train rocked through the night, stopping once for an inspection. Prussians came through, opening people’s wicker baskets.

  Parts of the tracks were gone, and dozens of passengers descended to wait for wagons. For a time they traveled that way, pulled by farm donkeys and then by ferry and wagon again, before rejoining a small, rough train. All the way he heard stories of how the crops had rotted in the field last autumn and the grapes had withered on the vine for lack of men to bring them in.

  THEY WERE SILENT as they approached the rue de la Condamine, though they walked quickly. In the end they were running, holding Jean in turn. The concierge was not there and the house door was unlocked. Claude used his iron key and entered the studio, calling, “Frédéric!”

  Late-afternoon light fell on all the paintings hung on the wall; dust motes danced in the air. The easels were empty, and the stove was cold. No one had made a fire there in a long time. Claude walked in slowly as if afraid to disturb anything. He sat down
in the chair he had sat in that night when he and his friend had quarreled.

  Above, someone moved.

  A thin soldier came down the stairs, and it was a moment before Claude recognized Auguste. His friend came straight toward them and embraced them. “I saw you across the street from the window,” Auguste said. “I’m sorry if I startled you. How did you get back so quickly? I returned yesterday. Well, now I have seen a little of war, but no action. That was left for others. Frédéric and I wrote to each other a bit, you know, saying the whole thing was not as glamorous as we had supposed. Then word came and we telegraphed London.”

  “It can’t be true,” Claude said stubbornly.

  “We had better sit down,” Auguste said. He pulled out a chair at the table for Camille and sat himself. Claude shook his head.

  Auguste said, “I came back last night to see how my mother was outside the city—she had no billeting and ate from her garden, bless her—and then I came to the city and went at once to his friend Edmond Maître, who had stayed during the siege. He knows the Bazille family, so I thought he’d have more information, and he did. He had just received a telegram from Frédéric’s father confirming the terrible news. So until then I also had some hope.”

  Claude sat down then. He leaned forward, arms on his knees and hands folded. “Tell me,” he said.

  “It was the end of November. His battalion was retreating near Orléans. He was tall, of course, so easy to pick out … shot in the head, the bastards. Monsieur Bazille traveled to the battlefield under a safe conduct and spent ten days finding him, and then he took his son home in a cart in the snow to bury him in Montpellier. He could get no other transportation. Frédéric’s family didn’t want him to go. They begged him not to go.”

  THEY STAYED CLOSE, talking softly for a long time as if afraid to disturb the air. Then Auguste kissed them both and the child, and left them. The sound of his army boots on the stairs faded away and the studio was absolutely still but for the slightly congested breathing of the little boy, who had fallen asleep in Claude’s lap.

  “He’s dead,” Claude said at last. “And yet it doesn’t seem possible. We fought, you know, about you, and I said stupid things. I said … that he had never had the courage to stand on his own two feet, and he went to war to prove me wrong.”

  Camille sat with her hands folded in her lap. The lovely hands were not clean, and her dress was dark in the seams from the soot of the journey. “Yes, he’s dead,” she said. “We’ve never talked about what happened. Months passed and we didn’t talk; not in Le Havre, not in that London room, which seems so far away now.”

  The child stirred, and Claude stroked the boy’s long, dirty hair. “Say what you want,” he replied. “I must hear it. I’ve waited a long time to hear it.”

  She did not unfold her hands, and she looked at a paint stain on the floor. Her voice was so soft he had to listen intensely. She said, “When we thought you weren’t coming back ever again from Le Havre, I turned to him. I was so lonely and frightened. We became lovers. He denied it to you, but it was true. He asked me to marry him and I wouldn’t give him an answer because I loved you so. Perhaps if I had agreed to marry him, he wouldn’t have enlisted. He wrote me when we were in Trouville and told me about your fight.”

  “Did he please you more than me?”

  He could have bitten his tongue at her horrified face.

  Jean woke and began to cry, confused, wondering what this place was with the big windows and the steps to a loft. Claude tried to hold him, but he wailed. “I’m sorry,” he managed. “I shouldn’t have said that. I left you. I went home to my father and left you and no one knew if I was coming back. I can’t blame you. And besides, he was lovely, gentle, kind. He was everything I’m not.”

  “Yes, you left me. You were in pain and I knew it; I knew it. But it is also true that all you thought of was that you couldn’t paint anymore. You couldn’t compromise, and you didn’t think of how cutting your wrist would make me feel, how it would make your friends feel. Then you came back after three months as if nothing had changed, as if I were one of the cutouts of women from the magazines you told me you pinned on your walls as a boy or the idealized drawing you made of me in a train station. You can close a sketchbook and the drawing doesn’t cry out in loneliness, missing you! You can scrub out a painting and it doesn’t feel it.”

  “I wonder if it does,” he said with a shudder. “If a painting feels things. Putain! So much is wrong with me, Minou. I did think of you. I feel so helpless when I can’t paint.”

  “Oh, Claude!” she cried, turning to him. “There were things he couldn’t tell you. Maybe if he had been able to he wouldn’t have gone away.”

  “What things?”

  “I can’t. I can’t!” she cried, bringing the side of her fist repeatedly to her knee.

  Claude rose and knelt by Camille’s chair, and she turned to gaze at him gravely. “Listen to me!” he said miserably, his hand on her shoulder. “We need to go away. Durand-Ruel thought I should go to Holland sometime to paint. This is a good time. I don’t want to be here without him. Come with me!”

  She stroked his cheek gently, and he seized her hand and kissed it. “I can’t,” she said.

  “Minou, what do you mean? What am I without you? I need you.”

  “Don’t you understand? I feel so weary. I can’t leave this city; I’m afraid it will disappear entirely if I do. I’ll work in the bookshop, if anything is left of it. I don’t even know where my sister and her child are. You may want to run away, but I need to gather what I can gather. I can’t go away again. And with you, sometimes … I don’t know.”

  He lowered his head to her hands. “But I know about you. I know how much I love you. Is this for a time or for always?”

  “I can’t tell you that. I will live above the bookshop and try to sell books.”

  He slowly rose to his feet. “Very well, then,” he said. “I’ll take this as a temporary separation only. I’ll send money when I can. And one day I’ll come back and make a home for you if you want one with me. I promise this.” He closed his coat. He saw her still seated with folded hands, looking toward the window with the boy now settling into sleep at her feet and thought, I shall never paint anything this terrible or this lovely.

  He opened the door but did not turn again, only said, “It’s me you love, Minou; it’s me.”

  1871

  The older I become the more I realize that I have to work very hard to reproduce what I search: the instantaneous. The influence of the atmosphere on the things and the light scattered throughout.

  —CLAUDE MONET

  THERE WERE WINDMILLS, AND THE COLORS WERE ALL different. There is enough to paint here for a lifetime, he thought grimly. At least he knew he could earn money. Durand-Ruel, who was still in London but preparing to return to Paris, wrote that he would buy as many paintings of the Netherlands as Claude could produce. People were interested in that country.

  It was winter when he came to the small town of Zaandam and found lodging in a private house. There was a high bed with thick white sheets and huge high pillows, all very clean. For a moment he wanted only to climb into it.

  He unpacked his clothes, clean canvases, and new paints and walked out again. The harbor was rich, lined with wood houses behind rising ships’ masts. He set up his easel and began to work at once. When he returned to his room at dark, solitude followed him. He did not want to remember the early-morning knock at the London door, the empty Paris studio, Camille’s confession and then her refusal to come. He did not even know if she had found her sister. He fell on his bed, burying his head in the great clean pillows. I’ll paint and forget, he thought.

  In the month or more following he walked or took a cart to the villages and unique windmills outside the city. No one knew his address but Durand-Ruel, to whom he sent pictures. He sent money on to Camille with no note or address. He avoided news of his own country and ate his cabbage-and-buttermilk soup alone in the t
avern each night, smoking his pipe.

  In the spring he broke his silence and wrote to Auguste. “How are Camille and the boy? You knew about our friend and my wife, I suppose, and never told me.” He wrote more and sent it to the Montmartre address Auguste had given him before Claude left the city.

  For a few weeks there was no response, and when one came he read it standing by the harbor, staring at the words. He had left a city that he thought would heal, but it had not healed; it had crumbled.

  Damn it, Claude, tu es fou!—You’re crazy, I did nothing; I was not complicit. You write so accusingly! I only learned about Frédéric’s feelings for Camille the night he went away to war. It’s almost hard to believe, and then again for many complicated reasons, it’s not. Mon Dieu! I also hoped for the old streets and cafés and our meetings again when this bloody war was over, but you fled and she’s buried beneath books and there’s rioting everywhere. So Paris is as mad as you are, my friend. Consider yourself punched for your words. And… I’m sorry, so sorry.

  We are falling away from the world of Frédéric’s painting of us all in his studio. Even that studio is gone; his father cleared it out and it is a workshop for glassblowing now. How the hell do we keep our dreams of being all together, of going on with our art? Sometimes I think we will never recover, and to be honest, I weep.

  If you haven’t read the papers, I’ll briefly recapitulate the continued sad story of beautiful Paris. The emperor’s fled to England and there’s a new government formed at Versailles. That government gave many concessions to the bastard Prussians, not to mention part of our country, Alsace-Lorraine. And the Parisians, never slow to react to that which they don’t like, have formed a strong guard for the Paris Commune to rise against the new government. Everyone we know has taken a different side, and neighbors report on each other. A dentist was shot by accident and his body left for hours in the street. Half the people have left the city, including you, my old, dear, steadfast friend, fled to the land of windmills. Half the houses on the boulevard Saint-Germain are empty. The artisans and tradesmen are gone, and the students. I am sure papers there carry the news, and I am too sick to write more of it here.