Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  He fell asleep with the letters. That night he was certain he heard someone calling him from the water garden. He rose from bed in his nightshirt and made his way with his cane across to the pond. The moon was on the lily pads, which had not yet blossomed. He splashed into the water. It was not very deep, up to his waist.

  He returned to the house, hoping no one would see him, ashamed of his actions. It was madness, he thought. I’m merely anxious about the exhibition.

  He stripped off his wet nightshirt and slept.

  Camille came to him in his dreams and pressed her soft body against his, and her long loose hair tickled him as she whispered into his ear. I’m not in the pond, darling Claude! I’m in the paintings. He woke suddenly, hours past his usual time. Then the paintings are mine alone and too private to show, he thought. He threw on his clothes and hurried downstairs.

  He was too late. They had been taken away by car half an hour before to Paris.

  Part Seven

  1877

  I remember that, although I was full of fervor, I didn’t have the slightest inkling, even at forty, of the deeper side to the movement we were pursuing by instinct.

  —CAMILLE PISSARRO

  IT HAD BEEN NEARLY THREE YEARS SINCE THE FIRST independent exhibition in the photography studio on the boulevard des Capucines had closed. The emotion that arose before and after Claude’s friends had risked their money and reputations on what a few frames could hold still stirred among them. They were bound together by the name Impressionists, and yet in spite of the many times they had painted the same snowy lane or bunch of flowers together, their styles and temperaments were very different.

  And what was this thing called the school of Impressionism composed of? It was always changing; if anyone expected it to stand still, they were wrong. There were the visible brushstrokes of pure color, the emphasis on changing light, the beautiful world of modern daily life throughout the country. There was also their now famous recognition for painting en plein air.

  A month before the latest exhibition, Claude had walked into the Gare Saint-Lazare and addressed the stationmaster. “I am the artist Claude Monet, my good man!” he had said. “And I wish to paint here. It is convenient for me to do so tomorrow morning at ten? Would you be so kind as to stop the trains at that time briefly so I can paint them?” His friends were amazed that the stationmaster complied. Claude had worked there many times over a few months. To capture the energy and shadow of the great glass roof and the smoke, he had created rich browns and grays from many colors. Even the shadows were shot with color. He was always exploring, always experimenting.

  At the opening day of the exhibition, with two of his finished train station pictures on the walls, he thought, Yes, for good or for worse we’re yoked together: Sisley, Cézanne, Auguste, Pissarro, and the others. He saw in their faces the weariness once more of brushing their best suits and smiling at strangers in the crowded rooms. Auguste complained of stiffness in his legs, though he was scarcely past his middle thirties. Pissarro’s beard was whiter and he had more children. Sisley’s beloved wife was ill.

  Later Claude walked through the streets alone to board the late train back to Argenteuil, sitting back on his plush seat as he sped through the night, already thinking of Camille. She had not been pregnant after all, or had miscarried early, and she struggled against her sadness, for she wanted a large family.

  She was waiting for him in the kitchen in her pink dressing gown, drinking a tisane and eating a cake. A cup had been left out for him. “How was the exhibition?” she asked, rising to kiss him. “I heard the train whistle and knew you’d be here. I’m sorry I didn’t feel well enough to come.”

  “You were missed! Some people reserved paintings to buy, never as many as we would like, of course, but the paintings will hang for a time and we’re sure to have more sales.”

  “There’s hot water. It’s lovely tea: chamomile blossoms with bits of dried apple and cinnamon. Sit down.”

  They drank the tisane and he took some sausage and cheese from the cupboard because he was suddenly hungry; the clock struck the hour and then again an hour later as they talked and laughed together. He teased her a little about spoiling Jean.

  He left the thing he hesitated to tell her until last. “I’ve had some good fortune,” he said, looking at the wet blossoms in the bottom of his cup. “My friend Caillebotte, who exhibited some of his work with us tonight, offered to give me a studio on the rue d’Isly. I’d like to paint there sometime; I want to finish more of my train station pictures.”

  She rose and settled herself on his lap. “I’m glad about that. You need time away from everyone. From all your friends, and from perhaps me.”

  “Oh, not from you, my love! I’ll be home every evening. I’ve also been thinking. You remain too alone here. As soon as I can afford it, let’s move back to Paris.”

  “I’d love that! I miss my friends, and I never can see my little niece enough. I don’t want to live away from there anymore. I didn’t want to tell you.”

  “But you can always tell me things,” he said. The clock was striking two in the morning when he rose, setting her on her feet, and led her upstairs.

  THAT WEEK HE took possession of the Paris studio. He shut the door behind him, bolted it, and sat down on a stool in the middle of the room, looking around with his hands on his knees. Some paintings he was working on stood against the wall. He could hear the sound of his own breath and his heartbeat and, underneath, the murmurs of all the paintings he wished to make.

  We are alone, you and I, he said to his paintings. No one can come here.

  Claude went home almost every night, but when work kept him late, he sometimes slept on a narrow cot in the studio. Once on waking he thought he was twenty-four again and in his first studio, on the rue de Furstenberg, and that Frédéric was calling him.

  Coffee’s ready. Don’t worry about me. I’ve too many things to do in this life to get killed. I’ll come back. I promise.

  On the cot, Claude stared at the early-morning sunlight through the curtains and the floorboards. He whispered, “You broke your promise, and I never had a chance to thank you for everything you did for me. Have you forgotten me, wherever you are? She and I stumble a little and you’re not here to steady us, for you always did in a way, you complicated fellow. I miss you, cher ami, and so does she.”

  1877–1878

  It’s on the strength of observation and reflection that one finds a way.

  —CLAUDE MONET

  ON A WARM SUMMER EVENING IN THE HOUSE IN ARGENTEUIL, Claude made his wife pregnant again. They did not know until she began throwing up in the mornings. Turning her head toward him, she began laughing. He laughed too and took her in his arms.

  “A girl!” she swore.

  “No, a boy,” he said, his hand over her belly. “I feel him!”

  But she was more ill from the start this time than she had been with Jean, and again Claude resolved she should not be in Argenteuil alone with the boy for another winter. There was something about her that made him uneasy. She seemed to search for her strength. All the dreams she had had for many things turned into the making of this child.

  “We’re moving back to Paris after Christmas,” he told her.

  He found elegant rooms on the rue Moncey in Paris and led her through them one by one, showing her the wood paneling, tall windows, and immense doors. Now in her sixth month, she followed him with her hand on the small of her back under her loose blue dress to ease the weight of her stomach. Jean ran ahead. “I’ll come as long as my friends from Argenteuil can visit me!” he exclaimed. “Did we ever live in Paris? I don’t remember.”

  With Camille, Claude rented furniture and arranged what things they had; she ordered calling cards engraved Madame Claude Monet. “Now you can call on your old friends,” he said a little wryly when she showed them to him. “Those women we met once at the opera when we were in the balcony and they were seated in the parterre boxes!”

/>   “Yes, I will sit there this season. I like engraved cards; my mother had them.”

  “I remember,” he said gravely.

  They gave their first soirée on a February evening; from the street below they heard carriages slowing in the snow in front of the house and the muted sound of horses’ hooves as they moved away again. Edmond Maître arrived with his new wife; Pissarro brought a painting, Sisley carried hothouse roses, and Auguste and Lise wore the indignant look of a couple whose fractious quarrel had barely ceased. A few other men who collected Claude’s work came: Dr. de Bellio and Comte Beguin Billecocq, who had met Claude many years before.

  Camille sat on the sofa in a loose silk-wool dress, charmingly swollen with child, and the others gathered around her, some sitting on chairs and leaning on the sofa back, one or two on the floor. After a time, she rose to the piano and sat down. She sang one song in English that she had learned in their days in London, leaning forward, fingers cautiously moving from one key to another as she accompanied herself.

  That night when Claude was sleeping soundly, he heard her cry out from another room. He leapt up, stumbling against a chair, stubbing his toe—he hardly knew what direction to take. His heart was beating fast. He ran into the parlor and saw her dark shape, her nightdress showing her swollen belly, standing on a chair with his painting of her in the green dress down from the wall, barely resting on the chair’s edge and leaning against her. She could not move for its weight.

  He cried, “What are you doing?” He ran forward and lifted down the heavy picture first and then her from the chair. “You could have asked me to take it down,” he said. “I would have. It’s the middle of the night! You could have hurt yourself and the child.”

  “I suddenly didn’t want it there. I’m fat now and she’s a reproach to me. When I’m old you won’t love me anymore.”

  “I’ll love you more!” he said tenderly, trying to control his voice. “And besides, you must be fat to have a baby. Even your blessed Virgin grew fat. We’ll put up another painting instead.”

  HER LABOR WAS longer than the first one; the baby did not want to come. Claude thought as he had the first time, I will never touch her again. He caught glimpses of her fierce, anguished face until Lise came running in at three in the morning and walked him gently back and forth across the parlor. Annette had arrived at once with a midwife she trusted. Jean wandered in and out in his nightdress, thin and barefoot. It was not until the next evening that Claude’s new son was born. When he heard the cry he went in to Camille and held her.

  HE HAD MANAGED to put away most thoughts of the Hoschedé family since Camille’s pregnancy and since the move to Paris. He did not see them, and oddly, he did not hear of them. It was a few months after Michel’s birth, reading the morning paper early in May with his coffee, that news of Alice and her husband and children came to him through a small article.

  Camille and the baby still slept and Jean had tied his books with a strap and left for school. Claude dressed rapidly and walked through the streets past shopkeepers washing their sidewalks to Durand-Ruel’s apartment. Waiting for his art dealer in his salon, he studied one of the many floral panels he had created on and above doors.

  Durand-Ruel came toward him pulling on his coat. “Claude,” he said, surprised. “I was on my way to the gallery. May I offer you a coffee? Is all well?”

  “I saw something in the paper this morning about my old patrons the Hoschedés. Can it be true?”

  Durand-Ruel’s round face grew somber and he nodded his head. “It’s true,” he said. “They’ve lost everything—the art collection with your pictures, the château. You know she had another child some eight months ago. She delivered the boy on a train, fleeing from her estate and the bailiffs. The conductor stopped the train and someone took the other children into another car. And Hoschedé is now serving a month in prison for financial fraud.”

  “Merde! I had hoped it wouldn’t happen!” Claude replied.

  “The poor woman must find herself in a strange world. She hasn’t a franc and she and the six children are living with her sister. I have asked her to my soirée in a few days and hope she’ll come.”

  That night in his own comfortable rooms in the middle of afterdinner coffee with guests, he rose and looked into the leaping fire in the fireplace. His glass of brandy was warm in his hand. His old protective affection for Alice Hoschedé came flooding back to him. What shall I do? he thought. I must see her again, at least to offer some kind words and find if I can help her in any way. And perhaps her child is mine, from the one time I took her in my arms. Perhaps he is mine.

  When he turned from the fire, the rest of the room blurred.

  CLAUDE HAD INTENDED to arrive early at the soirée, but then he walked about anxiously for a while, hesitant to go. By the time he mounted the steps, the salon with his painted panels was already crowded with artists and patrons and friends. He moved through the crowd, greeting people he knew, shaking hands or kissing cheeks, all the time looking for Alice Hoschedé.

  She was standing by herself in a small room off the salon near a harp, her fingers absently touching the strings. Her dark brown hair—hair that had tumbled over his shoulders amid the linen sheets that one night that now seemed a lifetime ago—was gathered at the back of her head. The sight of her brought a rush of confused feelings to him, among them the old peace he had felt with her at times, peace as simple as a child feels when he knows all the world about him is orderly and well.

  As he walked forward, she raised her face. Behind her rose shelves of books on the great artists of the past: Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo Buonarroti, Fra Angelico. He realized then he would rather read the titles than look at her. If only he could have looked at her without her looking at him! Claude thrust his hands in his pockets.

  “Alice,” he said.

  “I hoped you’d come,” she said simply. “I’m glad to see you, Claude.” He saw them both in an oval mirror, her back protected by her evening shawl, his shoulders hunched in his evening suit and gray silk tie, his face wary under his beard. He stood a few feet from her; he would not venture closer.

  He kept one hand in his pocket, reaching the other out to grasp the back of the harpist’s gilt chair. “I’m glad to see you too. Durand-Ruel told me some of the news. I can’t say how sorry I am. It’s beyond what could be conceived.”

  “Yes, my children won’t have the château now. I meant to keep it safe for them.”

  “He tells me you and the children are living with your sister.”

  “We are, but even before Ernest went to prison, she wouldn’t have let him stay, she’s so angry with him. I need to leave there when he comes out to be with him, but we don’t know where. It’s so odd we have no place to go. So many people who often dined with us won’t speak to us. Very few people here this evening have come to greet me.”

  Staring at the blue flowers in the Oriental rug, he said suddenly, “True friends don’t leave. What can I do for you? Alice, my hands are so empty. I have little money myself now. We men are wretches, aren’t we? We make promises and break them. We say, ‘I’ll manage!’ and then fall on our faces.”

  She was looking at him with her old sweet look. “You have another child, I hear.”

  “Yes, and you as well.”

  “I do.” He could not ask her now; he could not. Once again he was drawn to her quiet steadiness and wanted to pull her against him, but he could not do it here, and besides, he dared not. She spoke her husband’s name with love and sorrow. Still he felt, oh the pity of it! Oh, the pity of living, and yet she will at least have her husband again and I am loved more than I deserve to be.

  Someone called him and he excused himself. When he returned, the small room was empty and one of the maids said that Madame Hoschedé had left suddenly and alone.

  CLAUDE WALKED A long time through the city. He passed many a beautiful house, many churches, and the locked gates of parks. Ernest Hoschedé’s fall had both hurt and warned Cl
aude. He himself owed everyone here more than he ever had in his life; it was only a matter of time until it all closed in on him with bailiffs and an even more dreadful scene occurred to his wife and children than had occurred before. His Parisian life, which seemed always to call for another seat at the Opéra Garnier, another expensive dinner, was choking him. He had to leave here; he had to move again. Once more his painting had slowed. He wanted to escape to the country, far from all this, with only Camille and the children. They would live on next to nothing. They would read together. They would grow their own vegetables and drink fresh milk. He would paint the countryside every day.

  A lamp burned in the nursery when he came home, shining on Camille nursing her little child. “You’re so late!” she scolded. “You look tired. Give me a few minutes and I’ll make you a tisane. The maid’s long gone to sleep.”

  “Let me talk with you, Minou.”

  He pulled up a chair so that their knees touched, and he gazed at the lovely shape of her breast and the infant who did not bother to acknowledge him but remained absorbed in sucking, one little fist clenched. He heard the sound of the country inside of him so intensely that it seemed as if any moment she too would hear the crickets.

  She said, “Talk to me, Claude.”

  He said clumsily, “The truth is, I’ve failed again. I can’t keep us here. I finally was able to give you what you always deserved: calling cards, dresses, afternoon concerts. I see you’re happy, and yet for me … I’m not. I want to be away in the country to paint, in a deeper part of the country than our little town in Argenteuil. I feel like the mists of the river call me. I want to dig in a garden and walk out before dawn the way my old mentor and I used to do. It would be a nice life! You’d miss your operas and ballets, but I’d build a small riverboat and take you with me when I painted. And when I have money we can come back. I promise you. I swear it.”

  She hesitated a long time; he watched her breath rise and fall even as the child suckled, and her elegant profile turned to the window, outside of which lay the Paris street. She said, “I always know what you feel before you do. Some men came to the door today about what we owe. They’ll be back, I’m afraid.”