Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  He shook his head and smiled. He found himself breathing more quietly than he could ever recall. He was tired and yet alert. He watched her hands, the freckles on the back of them, and the meticulous way she stitched.

  THEIR RELATIONSHIP WAS delicate; even when she called him Claude there was a formality in it, as if she was aware of the intimacy. He felt so odd calling her by her Christian name that he generally mumbled and called her nothing.

  She never gave him the weekly money herself; the house steward left it each Friday morning in an envelope on his breakfast tray, which held brioche, warm milk, hot coffee, jams, and butter. Yet even in the lovely breakfast china he felt her presence, as if someone watched over him. He had not felt that way in a long time. On weekends going home he was more thoughtful.

  Slowly he began to form the conceit that she somehow needed him, though he realized this was probably nothing but pride. Why should she need him or anyone? She came from wealth, and her husband adored her. Claude was a painter struggling on the edge of security and growing weary: he was not the young man he had been. His shoulders were a little bent. And yet as he rode the train back to the château on Sunday nights, his thoughts went not only to his work, which compelled him, but to the suspicion that Alice Hoschedé needed him.

  When he arrived on a cool late autumn day with the wind blowing up from the river, the housekeeper told him, “Madame and the children left for Paris. Your meals will be served at the same hour in the dining room or on a tray brought to you, as you wish. She asked me to convey that she sends all good wishes for your work this week.” And he felt as he mounted the stairs to his room that Alice had perhaps gone for many reasons and one was to avoid him.

  IT WAS LONELY suddenly without her there; he felt her in every tree and in the fountain filled with leaves. He received a long letter from Camille saying she had been twice to see Lise in her comedy and truly hoped to gather the courage to audition once more. Her parents were not very well, and her grandmère begged them to visit. For a moment his eyes filled with tears, and he felt his distance from her, a distance far greater than a short train ride. He was relieved to read the funny and badly spelled letter from his son, full of puzzles and riddles about snails and old men. Claude saved both and reread them a few times.

  Still, as he painted, thoughts of Madame Hoschedé would not leave him. By Wednesday he could not see his work anymore and took the train to Paris to visit Durand-Ruel in his art gallery on the rue Lafitte. He had promised to visit and he had some questions forming in his mind.

  As always, he first surveyed the walls of paintings to see what was new and what had not yet sold. A few new paintings by Pissarro had just arrived and he helped uncrate them. “How is my old friend?” he asked. “We only meet when we exhibit these days.”

  “He’s looking for fortune still, as we all are. Renoir does better with his beautiful rosy-cheeked girls and dancers and lovers; he has several commissions to paint children. People would rather have that than Pissarro’s country market women and abbeys. How are your panels coming?”

  “Slower than I expected,” Claude said.

  They walked out down the street to a modest restaurant and ordered fish and chicken and the house wine in a carafe. A few young men played chess in a corner. There were new possibilities of American sales, the art dealer told him.

  At the end of the meal, Claude said casually, “I’m curious about my patrons. They are ever kind and generous, but she intrigues me. She seems too fine for him, and yet she loves him.”

  Durand-Ruel sank back in his chair and lit a cigar. “Yes, it’s a love match, or it was one. Years change things, I think, though she still adores him. She married him at seventeen against the wishes of her family, but then she has old money and he was merely a very bright entrepreneur. He was rising fast and building his fortune, and she joined hers to his. Recently—this stays between us, Monet—there have been distressing rumors.”

  “What rumors?” Claude asked, lighting a cigarette.

  Durand-Ruel kept his voice low. “He’s in financial difficulties. How much we can’t say, but we hear it’s not good. He’s handled his affairs rashly, ineptly; he’s spent much more than he’s earning. This has been going on for some years, apparently, and he covered it all up. His partners, one of whom is a client of mine, have discovered some crisis in his mismanagement and want him out of the business. Her family will have nothing to do with her now, as she married against their wishes, so she’s dependent on him. I have always liked her better than him. She’s very loyal and will stand by him if he goes down. I find it sad indeed.”

  “Is there any danger they will go down?”

  “No one knows. Are you being paid?”

  “Yes, actually.”

  “Good.”

  Claude took the train back to the château, feeling a great heaviness of heart as he walked the long road and saw the house rise before him between the trees. That this beautiful place that seemed to promise the most envied stability might be endangered! He was being paid; how were they managing it? Did even these people pay some bills and not others? How much of what he had heard was true and how much rumor? How much did Hoschedé know, and how much did he conceal from his family? And how could it be? He could not imagine Madame Hoschedé apart from this world she loved.

  The rest of the week he sometimes stopped painting and then, too distracted by his thoughts to work, sat in the château salon reading, listening to the ticking clock. He could feel this place considering leaving, as if the very stones and carved headboards could shake themselves loose and walk away.

  When he returned the following Monday she was still not there, and he set to work. At midday his concentration was broken by the sound of the carriage and voices. The girls hurried into the gazebo to greet him, commenting on his work, taking his hand. He heard Alice’s voice, and the hair on the back of his neck quivered. He hardly saw her as she came toward him and he felt bad that he had asked Durand-Ruel about her.

  “Are you well?” she asked him. “Don’t let the girls bother you!”

  “They’re not bothering me. And you, are you well?”

  “Quite well,” she said, and he breathed, much relieved. My art dealer saw things as worse than they are, he told himself. Everything here would remain as it had always been for generations to come.

  SHE STAYED AT the château but her husband did not come. Letters from husband to wife arrived daily, and Claude saw Alice Hoschedé pacing in the long salon reading them with a frown and once again felt something was wrong indeed. Still, the space between him and her was great. She was his patron also in a way, and thus he was her servant. She read, her hand to her lips, as he passed the room, but she took no notice of him.

  She has no one, he thought; no one but the children.

  He remained reading in the library every evening, hoping she would come in. The hundreds of old books surrounded him as he sat in the fraying chair with his feet on an embroidered footstool, eating cakes and drinking wine from the tray a servant had left for him.

  On the third evening she came across the carpet with her slightly clumsy walk. She wore a dark shawl, as if she could not be warm enough; she held it close the way women do who feel alone. He put down his book and stood slowly.

  “I’ve disturbed you,” she said, looking at him anxiously.

  “Not in the least.”

  She motioned for him to sit again and took the chair near him. She sank back, pulling the brown shawl tighter, and gazed up at all the books.

  “It’s odd,” she said. “I’m a little afraid tonight, a little lonely. This beautiful château! I’m afraid it will somehow disappear if I leave it. I didn’t see you at dinner. I hoped you’d come in. The children hoped you would.”

  He replied, “I forget the time when I paint.” He did not want to say he had avoided her.

  She took out her one of the girls’ plaid pinafores and began to mend the pocket seam. She sewed as practically as a nursemaid in some uppe
r room might by candle. He said, “I’m also a little lonely tonight. I sometimes don’t remember people exist when I paint, and when I stop I look up and wonder why they’ve deserted me! I’ve always been like that.”

  She nodded. “You’ve heard rumors, I’m sure,” she said softly. “My husband’s finances, which I trusted, are in disarray. There may be some losses. We sit here in my family’s beautiful house, which has been ours forever, and I don’t know what will happen. He’s too ashamed and uncertain to do anything but cut himself off from me.”

  HE LOOKED BACK on the next few days as something out of time. He felt her in the air, when he woke, when he breathed. He could neither paint nor read. He positioned himself in the house or the garden in respect to where she was. Then two days passed and he did not see her. Where could she be? She was in the house. Neither did he hear the children. He realized at last that they had gone away, but where and when he did not know; he knew only that she remained. He sensed it.

  At dinner alone at the great table, he asked the servant, “Madame does not come to dinner?” and the man replied, “Madame is a little tired tonight and dines alone.” Then his heart leapt. In his mind he swept away the servants, maids, cooks, and gardeners. He was here alone with her in the château by the river. He finished eating and went to the library to wait. She will come to me, he thought.

  But hours passed and she did not come.

  He mounted the stairs to the bedrooms with a candle. The master bedroom was to the left down the corridor and his was to the right. He stood in the hall with the wind outside the château walls, not knowing which way to go. He walked to the left, past the old green flocked wallpaper and the stiff portraits of her ancestors from centuries before, until he came to her door.

  He put his hand on the handle and turned it. The door creaked, and he was caught momentarily against the portiere curtain. At once he heard her listening. “It’s Claude,” he said then.

  Her voice from behind the bed hangings sounded far away. “I thought I was alone in the house but for the servants.”

  “You knew I was here, surely!”

  He approached the dark blue bed hangings, seeing the shape of the carved testers by his candle and the portraits on the wall and his own shape with the candle reflected back from the oval dresser mirror. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “I shouldn’t be here, but I can’t help myself. I’ve waited days for you, sensing where you must be. I stayed in the library for hours not reading, waiting for you. I feel so tenderly for you, Alice! Tell me to go away, and I’ll go at once.”

  She said nothing. He bent over the bed and touched her open hand and then bent forward to kiss her forehead. She reached up and drew him closer. How rich and deep and still she was, and would be that way today and tomorrow and always! I can ask no more than this, he thought.

  He doused the candle and lay down near this rather plain chatelaine. They moved together and reached for each other, arms at first caught oddly beneath her cotton nightgown and his trousers. They made love then, at first cautiously, then their breath came faster as they pushed away all reticence. She was passionate; she cried out at the end, and he placed his hand over her mouth gently.

  They lay looking at each other in the near darkness. “It was lovely,” she whispered. “We joined together; we melded. I thought of where you could be in the house and willed you to come here. It was the loveliest thing in the world, but it’s wrong.”

  “Religion!” he said, still dazed by her touch. “Why doesn’t it stay on church walls where it belongs? What is it, to say that the coupling of two lonely people who see good and truth in each other is wrong?”

  Her answer was patient. “Because we not only are promised elsewhere but we still love elsewhere. And those other people think we’re true. Forgive me; I needed you so! I called for you and you came. My husband’s been too unhappy to touch me for quite some time, but it’s more than that. You are somehow in my heart and have been since I first saw you. For some moments I knew what it was to paint, to be Claude Monet …”

  “Don’t wish that,” he whispered. “I’ve no certainty, and my youth has left me. I started out determined to make no mistakes and now I have made so many I can’t escape them.”

  Gently she pushed him away, sat up, and felt for her dressing gown. “We mustn’t do this again, Claude,” she said. “I love my husband, though he has turned from me, and you love your Camille. I’d better go now. Please don’t follow me!”

  But he cried, “Wait!” hurrying after her as she went swiftly down the dark hall. He could have overtaken her, but he kept back a little. He was barefoot and only in his shirt. The house was full of servants. Though the clock showed three in the morning, one would come from a door or down a step, perhaps holding a lamp.

  He caught her arm. “Where are you going?”

  “I don’t know … to the chapel. How you move me! But why should we expect to be happy in this world?”

  He stumbled back to his room and lay heavily down on his bed, his arms wrapped around himself, staring into the darkness. He saw Camille again waiting for him and beat the pillow with his fist time and again as if he struck himself.

  He slept late and heard Ernest Hoschedé’s voice rising from the garden before he rose. From the bags in the hall, Claude knew the man had just returned, and when he came into the breakfast room, bright with sunlight, he saw that Alice was already at the table, hair neatly combed, wearing her loose morning gown.

  “Ah, Monet!” Hoschedé cried. “How are the paintings coming? Have you seen them, Alice?”

  Alice looked up from pouring the coffee. “I am quite pleased,” she said.

  HE PAINTED BRUTALLY that day, unhappy with everything. Later he asked the servant for supper in his room and went there at twilight to find a letter from Camille on the table. It lay in its blue envelope, accusing him. She must know somehow, she must sense … what had he done? The best thing would be to finish the panels, take what money he could, thank monsieur and madame, and hurry away, not hearing the sound of rumbling and tears as this place was surrendered as once his paintings had been surrendered for debt. For he understood clearly from words that rang out down the hall how dire Alice Hoschedé’s situation would become.

  He found in his shirt pocket a blue cloth button from her nightdress; he had no memory it had torn away. He stuffed it into the side pocket of his carpetbag, where it jammed under the lining folds.

  The writing of the letter from his wife blurred for him; he looked away from it, walked back and forth, poured a little wine, and tried again to make sense of the words. Surely they said, “I accuse you,” but they did not. They said, “Dearest Claude, I long for you and I have lovely news to share.”

  Yes, he thought, what madness! What madness it was to take someone else in my arms when she’s waiting for me. Now it is I who have a secret that can never be told.

  He took the train home the next day. Camille ran out to meet him. He picked her up and swung her about, smelling her hair, feeling her warmth against him. Jean ran out as well, all thin and boyish, crying, “Papa! I have new friends …”

  The new cook had prepared fish and they all three ate together, the boy chatting about his schoolmates. Gradually Claude quieted his terrible sense of shame. What had been between him and Madame Hoschedé anyway? Nothing, a shadow. Both pairs of lovers, both married couples, had been reunited. His essence left in the folds of her body would be buried under much else: duty, prayers, he could not say what. His face burned. And if the Hoschedés lost much, what was it to him? They could not begin to know of loss.

  He walked upstairs with Camille, his arm about her waist.

  She pulled on her nightgown and sat at the dressing table, brushing her hair. “Let me do that,” he exclaimed, rising. Her face in the mirror smiled back at him.

  He demanded, “Tell me your news. Come! I’ll make love to you until you do, showing no mercy. Now at once, madame!”

  She stood up and ran her fingers down his
mustache. He bit her fingers gently. “I won’t tell you then for days because I’m longing to make love with you!” she said. “But I also can’t wait to say my news. I’m with child. My breasts are tender. Don’t squeeze so! Ouch! Are you happy?”

  “Yes,” he said, and his voice broke. He cried firmly then, “Yes, so happy.”

  Later he lay sleepless thinking with her beside him. He was glad the panels would take no more than a few more weeks to complete, and he suspected Madame Hoschedé would take the children and go to Paris during that time, absenting herself. The château would be his alone with the servants until he packed his clothes and paints for the last time and returned home to Argenteuil.

  Interlude

  GIVERNY

  May 1909

  As the exhibition drew closer he found he ate little; he walked back and forth in front of his selected forty-eight canvases, once more apart from them. The paintings had been framed, and people from the gallery were to take them away tomorrow to hang them.

  When he returned to the house to put some distance between himself and his work, he found a small, thin parcel addressed to him on his dining table. He knew the handwriting. He carried it upstairs to his bedroom at once, closing the door before opening it.

  There were no more than twenty letters tied together with a blue ribbon, some written on the bookshop stationery, some on pages from a school notebook, some on paper that he guessed had been scented but now just smelled rather musty. Some were dated, some not. Because of the handwriting and style he guessed they all had been written between her sixteenth and eighteenth years, before and at the time she first met him. They were passionate letters, full of girlish longing. “I am thinking of you today. The spring is sweet, and you’re not here. How tired I am waiting for you! I think I will give up courage and turn to someone else.” Likely they were meant for her fiancé, that ridiculous old man. Or perhaps for schoolboys or a dead actor.