Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  He cried, “I’m so sorry, Minou!”

  She grasped his hand. “We’ll go,” she said. “You’ll sell more work and we’ll be back again. I love you.”

  “How can you love me when I fail?”

  “But you don’t fail, Claude,” she said. She rose to put the baby in his cradle and he watched her shape as she bent, the roundness of her bottom under her nightdress. “So it’s settled. We’ll go. Do you have a place in mind? Ah, I thought you did! If you’re inspired to paint we’ll soon pay these wretched people. Now, who did you see this evening? Tell me.”

  He stood, hands in his pockets, for a moment too moved to speak. “Many people,” he said casually. “I saw my old patron, Madame Hoschedé. They’ve lost all their money and property, and they were so wealthy! I used to draw the girls funny pictures in their château. They’re sweet: the eldest is perhaps fifteen and the littlest not yet six. There’s a boy a little younger than Jean and an infant too.”

  “Oh, how dreadful for her!” Camille cried. “All’s lost? What will she do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “She must feel as I do. Men have to work all the time, and most women can’t make their own way. I wish I could pay for things. I wanted to be a great actress or a novelist like George Sand or George Eliot; I know now those are only dreams. Sometimes I feel quite useless.”

  “Never!” he insisted. “You give me all the strength I have. We’ll rent a house this time, but someday we’ll buy our own and live in it forever.” In the lamplight she seemed pale, and she touched chairs and walls as she went as if she was very tired. She had seemed more tired since this last birth.

  1878–1879

  The pain passes, but the beauty remains.

  —AUGUSTE RENOIR

  THOUGH TWENTY MILES FROM THE CITY, THE VILLAGE of Vétheuil was remote. First there was the train to Mantes, which curved around the River Seine, and then a cart and horse or a regular local coach that took you on. Sitting on the cart’s hard bench beside the driver, Claude gazed out as they jerked up the slope of Saint-Martin-la-Garenne. There was little here but the water, fields, and woods. He descended the cart and walked to the old village with houses built around the church. Wherever he looked, he saw landscapes he wanted to paint.

  Even the smell of the air filled him with great joy. He would have liked to have begun painting at once, but he had to rent a house and bring his family here.

  He moved Camille and the children within days, leaving promises everywhere in Paris to pay what he owed when he could. He did not doubt he could. He felt in his body the paintings he would do. Also, the house held an enchantment for him the way new houses and rooms always did: new spaces, new ways to look at and paint the world.

  They went through the dark rooms with a lantern, Jean running ahead and shouting back. Claude felt for drafts and made a note to mend places in the walls. They had not brought the maid or the cook, but he had engaged one of the farm girls to cook and clean and her slow-witted brother to help about the house. Still, the house was so big it seemed to echo back to them.

  In the morning he ran down the steep stone steps that led from house to garden. “Do you mind if I go out to paint?” he called back to Camille, and her voice echoed from the kitchen. “No, do go. I’ll unpack.” He went then, striding through the village to the fields, his easel on his shoulder. Autumn was coming, and the haystacks were slowly forming. The trees were heavy with apples. He breathed in everything and set up his easel at last, painting as if starved. Some farm boys came to watch him. He heard the call of the men stacking the dry hay and the boys on top tamping it down; he heard the hay falling softly.

  He stayed away all day, then strode back, stomping up the steps from the garden. From inside came the smell of dinner and the clink of china. The hired girl had made a soup, and he and Camille and Jean sat down at the table in the unpainted kitchen to eat. The baby slept.

  He ate hungrily and asked, “And, both of you, how was your day?” He ruffled Jean’s hair and the boy shrugged away a little, offended. “I miss my friends in Paris already,” he said darkly. “And now I won’t see Pierre from Argenteuil anymore. How do I know if I’ll like the boys here? I don’t understand why we keep moving.”

  Claude put down his spoon. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “But it can’t be helped,” Camille said tenderly to her son. “And magical things will happen here too, as they always do. You know they always do.”

  She ate carefully, stopping now and then to look out the window at the darkening trees. She crumbled a bit of bread and said, “Claude, I keep thinking of Madame Hoschedé and her poor husband. You said he had been released from prison. I keep thinking she has no place to go, poor woman, and that perhaps they could come to us for a while.”

  He swallowed some wine. “You’d have them here? I don’t think that’s best, Minou.”

  “But it is!” she exclaimed, both hands on the table edge and her eyes very bright. “Imagine if it happened to you when you owed money, if you were sent to prison! And besides, it would be company for me. I’d love to meet her girls. One day perhaps I’ll have a daughter. I know you, how you paint and forget the world. I’d also like to ask my grandmère to come. Claude, let’s ask them all. This house is large enough for fifteen people. Shall I write?”

  “No,” he said. “If you think it best, I will.” He could eat no more.

  While she washed the dishes with Jean and the girl, he sat at the cleared table drinking his coffee and writing the letter. This is madness, he thought, the back of his neck warm. He walked to the village in the morning and reluctantly posted it to Durand-Ruel, asking him to forward it if he had an address for the Hoschedés.

  Three days later a reply came from Hoschedé himself, delivered by the local post boy. Claude drank his coffee and shook the letter open. The heavy script pierced the paper in a few places. “I have been through hell,” it said, “and you are most kind. C’est très gentil à vous, Monet! I insist on paying half the rent and expenses. Life delivers what you do not expect. We will come Saturday.”

  Camille looked back from arranging their dishes on a kitchen shelf; she wore a bright blue cloth over her hair and a blue apron. “Will they come?” she asked.

  He bit his lip, folding the letter. What would Alice, the former lady of a château, make of this old place that smelled of mildew? And for what deeper reasons had he agreed to this madness? He did not like Ernest Hoschedé—he never had—but that was the least of it. They should not come, he thought roughly: I shall write them not to come. Perhaps Hoschedé himself had changed his mind. He walked down the steps to pick flowers from the garden and put them in a glass.

  AS CLAUDE NEVER wrote the letter, the Hoschedés did come: two carts arrived in a few days, laden with trunks, Alice riding with the driver in her plain dark dress, her one-year-old son in her arms and the somber four young girls and their brother walking. Hoschedé strode among them as if shepherding them, carrying his fine ash walking stick with the lion’s-head handle. Claude watched them approach; he stood at the bottom of the stone steps, which were now lined with flowerpots.

  The two men shook hands.

  Hoschedé said, “Well, now we’ll be quite surrounded by your paintings, Monet! No need to commission them, eh? But I’m sorry to tell you our visit will be short. Yes, within a week or a little more, we’ll have a place in Paris again!”

  But what have they brought? Claude thought uneasily as he helped Hoschedé and the driver carry the trunks up the steps. Alice came after, clasping her baby, her daughters and older son following closely. Now Claude could see that she had been crying.

  Camille stood at the top of the steps in her blue apron, her own baby in her arms. She kissed each girl in turn as they slowly entered the kitchen, and she held Alice’s hand. “I welcome you, madame,” she said gravely. “You have had a terrible loss, and I’ll do my best to make you feel at home.”

  Alice raised her head and said softly, “You
are so very kind to have us, Madame Monet.” The clasp of hands and then the grave kiss between the two women took only a few moments, but Claude hardly breathed. He stared at the floor, hands in his pockets, and then gradually raised his eyes to the eager little boy who was struggling to be set down in the kitchen. The boy crawled happily toward Claude’s legs and pulled himself up on Claude’s trousers. He looked very much like Ernest Hoschedé. Claude sighed. At least he did not have to contend with that.

  “We all welcome you,” Claude said, picking up the boy.

  Hoschedé clapped Claude’s shoulder. “Poor mites!” he muttered. “I’ve put them through a lot. My wife’s a saint. I’m going back tonight. I have prospects. I’ll send on five hundred francs in the morning. This plain country living will be healthy for all of them, and they’re fond of you, Monet! My second daughter, Blanche, likes to draw a little, you know.”

  “I know; she showed me some of her sketches. A few days, then, and we’ll see you,” Claude replied. He stood on the steps as an old man from the village arrived with his cart and donkey to take Ernest Hoschedé back to the city.

  THE LARGE HOUSE was no longer empty: girlish voices called softly, timidly, uncertain of this new world. The oldest girl, Marthe, was fifteen and the youngest, called Germaine, was five; all followed their mother so closely they almost trod on her skirt. They kept to their rooms unless coaxed down, and then hardly said a word. By the end of the long afternoon Jean had decided the older Hoschedé son, Jacques, who was a couple of years younger than he was, might be worth knowing, and took him off to the riverbank to consider building a tree house.

  The rest of that day and in the evening as they made up beds and found towels, Claude made a great show of chasing away mice with a broom so that the girls would laugh. He often came near to Alice, brushing her arm in the hall or finding himself going through a door before her. “Will you excuse me, monsieur?” she murmured, her face flushing, and under his breath he muttered, “What is this ‘monsieur’? Alice! It’s not your fault.”

  Near tears, she murmured, “It’s difficult to accept such kindness from your wife. She’s so lovely.” Then the girls hurried up the stairs and he turned and smiled at their pale, timid faces.

  “More mice?” he cried. “Show them to me! Mice and spiders cringe when I come near them. I chase them away with a paintbrush; they fear me!” Marthe smiled a little, staying close to her mother, and then he led her, followed by the other girls, in a spider hunt.

  Afterward he trotted down the steps to the garden because he had promised to help with the tree house. Seated on a branch, securing the small wood platform to the trunk with the two boys looking up at him, he felt warm all over and strong. Just then two of the girls laughed brightly from inside the house.

  Sunday he woke early as always and had just made coffee when he saw Alice and her family in their best clothes, the older children carrying prayer books. They were going to church, of course. After that they had a Sunday dinner with both women cooking. They moved together as if they had always known each other.

  But days later, coming in with a pail of milk and a basket of eggs from a nearby farm followed by two of the girls, who had gone with him, he heard Camille weeping from their room. He ran up the stairs and then paused before the closed door. Within he could hear both women murmuring, and Camille’s choked phrases. This is it, then, he thought darkly, and opened the door.

  Both women were sitting on the bed, holding hands. “Oh, Claude!” Camille cried. “I just heard from my grandmère’s priest that she’s broken her hip and can’t come to see us!”

  “Well,” he murmured. From the kitchen he heard the girls discussing where to put the eggs and the sounds of the boys from the incomplete tree house. “I’m so sorry, Minou. She’ll come when she’s better. We can have omelets for supper if you like.”

  DURING THE NEXT several days Alice began to take over the management of the house, the days the laundress should come, the purchases of cloth, thread, coffee, and milk. First she planned the meals together with Camille and then more and more sat at the kitchen table with her Blanche and wrote out the menus. The small pile of what money he could give her sat on the table. Sometimes when he sat down to dinner he felt the lovely girls looking at him as if to say, “But monsieur le peintre! You used to make Maman laugh. Won’t you again?”

  Camille was teaching the girls to embroider.

  Blanche and Suzanne liked to paint; he began them in watercolors, and they often worked together by a window, whispering back and forth. Marthe was the best housekeeper, the most serious. Little Germaine often sucked her thumb and clung to her mother’s skirts. They sometimes laughed brightly and then seemed ashamed of it; he remembered them racing over the gardens of their château and his heart ached with a love for them he barely understood.

  No one went to school; they talked of hiring a tutor. Alice tried to arrange some regular lessons and gave up. They would be leaving any day now so it could be postponed.

  Every night when they all went to bed, carrying lamps up the creaking stairs, kissing in the hall, the girls separated with difficulty from their mother, and Alice’s son Jacques and Claude’s Jean slipped off in relief to the room they shared to whisper of pirates. “Good night! Sleep well! Bonne nuit! Couchez-vous bien!” they called.

  He lay awake, hearing once more in his mind the soft closing of Alice’s door and sensing her in her white soft nightdress alone in her bed with the tree branches moving outside and the moon shining softly through the almost closed curtains of her window.

  COLD CAME SUDDENLY and swiftly from the river, from the earth, from inside the trunks of trees. Leaves turned and fell. December had arrived, and Claude walked out every day to paint, coming back to the white house thoroughly chilled, walking up the garden steps with his easel on his shoulder, preparing to make his sometimes clumsy transition from color to words.

  All the children but the babies were gathered about the kitchen table. Camille kissed him and Blanche jumped up as well. “Hello, Monet! Papa wrote all of us and you. Your hands are cold, monsieur! I’m going to knit you some mittens.” She took his hands shyly and rubbed them.

  After supper he sat down at his desk in a small room off the kitchen. He did not make a fire, not wanting to use the extra wood. Lighting the lamp, he read the letter from Hoschedé, which was no different than the previous ones. “Monet, I know it has been several weeks since my family has lived in your care but now I am absolutely assured that we will have our Paris apartment within a week, at which time I will also reimburse you for any expenses. Meanwhile I send profound apologies that I have been unable to send my share of the rent and food as promised. Circumstances …”

  Claude clasped his hands behind his head. His thick hair was graying and curly, the front a little receded.

  He waited until he heard everyone going to bed, each tapping on the door and calling gently, “Goodnight, monsieur!” or “Goodnight, Papa!” He heard them climb the stairs.

  For a time he was too tired to move, and then he too climbed the stairs in the dark. He stood listening to whispers from the rooms and to late acorns falling on the roof. The wind seemed to speak. He closed his own bedroom door behind him.

  Camille was sitting in bed with her knees drawn up and her long hair in braids to her waist, a shawl around her shoulders. He pulled on his nightshirt and stretched out beside her on his back, looking up at her. “Is it soon?” she asked anxiously. “Is it soon he’s taking them away? Oh, I hope it’s not soon. I love having them here. It will be too quiet without them.”

  “I don’t think they’ll be going too soon.”

  “I thought Alice would be plain. She’s not beautiful, but she has a great deal of character. She endures everything without a murmur.”

  After she fell asleep with her head on his shoulder, he stared into darkness, listening to the sounds of the people in this house. Debts were beginning to pile up here too. He had been building the tree house and helping
the girls with their drawing, but now he had to get back to work. There were eight children and two women here and he had to provide for all of them. He would provide for them.

  HE HAD HOPED to leave for Paris before anyone was awake, but when he went downstairs he found Alice up already and grinding coffee. He felt he blushed a little when alone with her, and he tried not to look at her directly, though he sensed her now as he had those days in her château. She knocked the coffee grounds carefully into the pot to avoid spilling any.

  He said buoyantly, “I’m off to the city to see about selling my work. There’s a regular coach to the train now that I can catch.”

  “Do you have time for coffee and bread first? Marthe will bake more bread today. May I walk with you, Claude? I need to buy needles in the village.”

  “You may walk with me, of course,” he said with a slight frown. Nothing could cure her of addressing him with a slight formality, aware of her debt to him. He would have preferred to walk alone, but he could not refuse her.

  He fetched his paintings, protected by canvas and tied together with a rope, and they walked side by side down the dirt path to the village, where the coach would stop before the church at seven. But the shop is likely not open yet to buy needles, he thought. She just wanted to walk with me.

  They stood together before the twelfth-century church with its rising tower and surrounding graveyard, looking out for the coach. For a time they were silent and then he said, “I’m going to ferry across the Seine when it snows and paint the church again.”

  “I remember what a beautiful picture you made of it in autumn! Is that one of the paintings you’re carrying to sell?”

  “Among other things. I want to paint the same scene in different seasons. If you look at that tree, it is different than when passengers stood here yesterday. I see it more, not less. One day I thought I’d see it less, but the more I feel inside of me, the more it turns to color.” His voice dropped and he looked down at his new mittens, which Blanche had finished. “The subtleties of people elude me utterly, the subtleties of myself. I can’t explain it. I explain it when I paint. What good it does others I don’t know.”