Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  He washed in the basin in his old room and paced again to calm himself. At eight he would go down. He studied himself in the bedroom mirror, arranging his face, trying to find an expression between indifference and self-assurance. That had been his face at seventeen, and he did not know where it had gone. He passed his hand over his mouth, but it was no use. Damn it, then, he thought, descending the stairs two steps at a time at the sound of the dinner bell.

  Gaslight illuminated the photograph of his mother on the wall. The long polished table with its ten chairs now seated only his father on one side and his aunt in her white, frilled matron’s cap on the other. He kissed them and sat down before his soup.

  “So you received the letter we forwarded,” his aunt said.

  “I did, dear aunt, and I came at once.”

  She shook her head, her soupspoon poised in the air. “Oh, Claude, such bad luck that your name was called in the army lottery! So many other boys here escaped it. We understand your training is to be in our French colony in Algiers. The seven years will pass quickly, we hope.”

  “But surely you don’t expect me to go!” he exclaimed, appalled. “It will only cost you a thousand francs to buy me out. I don’t doubt you’ll do so. I’m on my way to great success!”

  He waited in the silence, only the gas lamp sputtering.

  His aunt and father were looking at each other.

  “Yes,” said his aunt reflectively at last, fingering the edge of the embroidered tablecloth. “We have been discussing your prospects, dear Oscar. Paris is full of thousands of artists, I’m told. And you haven’t sold anything yet. We know also that you’ve met a Danish girl there; one of my old friends heard from your teacher. You oughtn’t be thinking of les filles. No, it won’t do. A thousand francs is a huge sum.”

  “However,” his father said, clearing his throat, “if you stay here and work with me, we’ll buy you out. You can paint on Sundays. Many men do.”

  Claude put down his napkin and stood up abruptly, startling Hannah, who was waiting with the dish of chicken. “Then I will go into the army,” he said coldly. “I will never waste my life in a dark shop selling nautical supplies.”

  1862–1864

  My family thought they would catch me when I was conscripted, because then I would sow my wild oats, come home, and settle down to a business career.

  —CLAUDE MONET

  LATER THE NEXT DAY IN HIS ROOM, CLAUDE PACKED THE uniform he had been given of his exotic Zoaves regiment: red billowing trousers, tight black jacket, fez, high boots, and a great curved sword. At least he looked handsome in it. As he sat wistfully on his bed selecting the books he would take, he raised his eyes to the old magazine pages of elegant women still tacked to his walls. Then he opened his sketchbook.

  He had missed his train to Le Havre by two minutes and, sitting on his box near the ticket windows in the great Gare Saint-Lazare to wait for the next one, he had sketched the tobacco and news-journal kiosk. When he looked up to catch the shadows of the stacked news journals, three women stood there, one older and the other two likely her daughters, both still in their adolescence. The younger yet taller girl was weeping beneath her blue hat veil. “But I won’t just do what you want me to,” she sobbed, bunching her glove in her hand. “All the social things you plan are so wretchedly tedious. I want to go to the theater; you promised me!” Her mother and sister tried to pull her away, but she shook her head and they hurried off without her. She stood alone then, pulling up her veil and drying her eyes with her handkerchief. Why she’s scarcely fifteen, if that, he thought, moved. Now she gazed about, her lovely, long desperate face wistful as if she hoped someone would rescue her. He turned the page and surreptitiously sketched her.

  As he was about to approach her, his train was called.

  Still sitting on his bed, he closed his sketchbook sadly, all his fond sketches of Paris within it. He straightened and tried on his hat. He thought, I am an army man now.

  WITH A FEW hundred new soldiers who had volunteered or whose names had been chosen in the lottery, Claude sailed away across the ocean. Toward sunset some days later he and his fellows crowded on deck for their first sight of the glistening white city of Algiers rising up before them from the bay of the Mediterranean Sea.

  They disembarked with their bags to the market amid French soldiers and men in colorful Arabic robes and merchants and horses and dust and walked to their barracks, set in the former receiving room of a crumbling Arabic mansion. Claude fell asleep that first night in a bed protected by netting amid the snores of others and woke thinking he was back in his room in Paris with the cries of the market outside.

  For months he threw himself into his new life. He excelled at rifle practice; he won most practice duels, marched stoutly and gracefully, executed complicated drills with his fellows. Sometimes in his mind he saw himself as a great military man saving his country.

  Yet the colors would not leave him alone.

  He felt the subtle shades of sand and crumbled walls, of trees, of brown feet in sandals, of veiled women, of music played by men on instruments whose chords quivered in the air as the musicians squatted in the dust: brilliant reds and thick, deep browns, gold embroidery, and a hot, burning, sleepy sun. He climbed the steep hills to the Casbah, from which the Sultan had ruled before France conquered the country, and wandered among the old mosques and minarets.

  He unpacked his sketchbook; he had to capture the city.

  After a time he visited the Casbah regularly, returning with chalk drawings in his book. He managed to buy some paints and some old canvases. When he worked, he drank freely from the wells because it was so hot, and one day, hurrying back late as always, he fainted and rolled down the street.

  Someone picked him up and half carried him to his bed.

  He vomited; his bowels turned to hot, sick liquid, and he crawled to the chamber pot. The barracks in the ornate mansion with the stained blue tiles faded, and he thought he was scrambling over huge rocks to get to the sea.

  “Typhoid,” a voice echoed above him. “Did you drink unboiled water? We’ll telegraph your family in Le Havre and you’ll leave on the next ship. You may die before you reach there.”

  “But where are my sketchbook and canvases?” he managed.

  On his berth on ship, the mosquito netting blew back and forth, catching the sickly, dull, hot air. The sea rocked beneath him and death felt near. It descended upon him like the weight of stuffy still darkness, filling his mouth, filling his lungs, forbidding breath. This was it, then. He was only twenty-three and he would be carried off to where death takes a man, though he had no idea where that could be. Tears ran down his unshaven face, stinging it; he managed to turn his head. But I don’t want to die, he thought. This can’t be the end for me when my life has hardly started.

  Then he was back in Le Havre in his boyhood room.

  Lying in bed, he gazed miserably at his magazine pictures of beautiful women, which looked down at him from the wall, as did his old drawings and caricatures. A week later, he managed to stand for a moment. Ten days later he made his way down the steps and outside as far as the gate.

  His father visited him a few times a day, his weary face full of concern, and his aunt brought him trays of food and read him amusing stories from the local newspapers. Léon, his older, married brother, arrived weekly, looking the proper businessman in his dark suit and with short hair, having just opened his own engraving shop. “How’s the soldier?” he said with a slight smile. “Made commander yet?”

  Claude’s aunt mounted with the supper tray one evening, her face a little somber. “We’ve inquiries from the army, Oscar,” she said. “Someone came to the door a few hours ago, a corporal of some sort in uniform. As soon as you’re well enough, they want you back.”

  He was strong enough to walk as far as the wharf, leaning on a stick, staring out at the vast, churning water. He longed to be in that Paris café with his friends, the long marble-topped table cluttered with glasses of
cheap wine and everything smelling of cigars and old coats and paint. He slid out a pad and charcoal from his bag and sketched their profiles from memory. Back in his room, he wrote a letter to Auguste Renoir, whose address he found on the flyleaf of a book.

  You may as well know I have made a mess of everything. I got myself sick in Algiers and they had to send me home for a time. I miss you all so much I can’t stand it. What are you doing in Paris? How are Cézanne, Sisley, our medical student, and your homely self? Are you are cheerful and determined to put beauty into the world? Though why you should be cheerful with your poverty, I don’t know!

  Why don’t I come and surprise you all? I can’t. I haven’t any money. I have to go back to the army again just as soon as I’m well. The life I planned won’t happen and I’ve been stupid enough these last days to want it again rather desperately. Yes, I want to create art more than anything else, and it was that that got me sick in the first place. It aches and aches in me and won’t go away. I figure I have about a month or so more before they put me on a ship for Algiers again. Here it’s a tomb! Even my old artist friend Boudin is traveling and there’s no one I can talk to about these things at all. I wish one of you would visit me. I am almost perfectly well and have to pretend that I’m not.

  Claude tacked his sketch of the artists on his wall where he could look at it from his bed. He drew his room in Paris from memory. And one late afternoon he looked up and saw the medical student Frédéric Bazille bending his head to step through the door as he did in Paris to enter the café.

  Claude jumped up and shouted, “You walked out of my drawing! I was two days away from expiring from loneliness!”

  “Ah, that would be a pity, Monet! Is there a bed here for me?” He looked around the room. “You know, I could see from the train window that your Normandy has the most amazing light.”

  THEY HAD BARELY dragged the folding cot from the attic when the dinner bell rang below. “Ah connard—the ass!” Claude muttered, looking around for his dinner coat. “Come down and meet my father. My aunt’s away tonight. We’ll have a meal of recriminations. Recriminations in the soup, the chicken, the salad, the cheese.”

  Frédéric changed his shirt and slipped in gold monogrammed cuff links. “The only reason these aren’t pawned yet is my grandfather just gave them to me,” he said with his lopsided grin. “Come on, Monet. I’m going to charm the hell out of your father. I’m sent on a mission here.”

  They descended the stairs, hands behinds their backs like lawyers. Frédéric Bazille did not walk shyly as he did into the art class but strode past the china hutch to shake Claude’s father’s hand, saying, “I am your son’s friend Frédéric Bazille from Montpellier. I am hoping you will extend your hospitality to me for a few days in your beautiful province.”

  Adolphe Monet studied the tall visitor with some bewilderment. “From Montpellier, monsieur?” he asked. “I have just read an article in the news journal that spoke of the scientist Bazille of Montpellier. Are you his son?”

  “I am, monsieur.”

  “And he has sent you to Paris to study art, monsieur?”

  “I study art only in my leisure hours, monsieur. I am a medical student; my family intends me to be a physician.”

  The three of them took their seats and shook out their napkins. Adolphe Monet poured the wine, and when the soup had been served, he said with a sigh, “Your father’s fortunate in you, Bazille, if I may say so. Medicine’s an honorable profession. My younger son wants to do nothing in life but paint clouds. Seven years in the army will make him a little more realistic. I also expect your serious studies will be a good influence on him.”

  “Do you want me to study medicine also, Father?” Claude asked. “After my years as a soldier are done?”

  “You know what I mean, Oscar.”

  “Yes, I suppose I must. What I want is not important.” Claude stared angrily at his wineglass until it wavered for him and he felt Frédéric kick him under the table.

  “I don’t think you understand, monsieur,” Frédéric said, his spoon poised neatly above his soup bowl. “Claude influences me. He’s the best of all of us. You must buy his freedom from the army. You must continue to support him. The world will later thank you. He’s a genius.”

  Adolphe Monet stared at him. “The world will thank me!” he exclaimed, throwing down his napkin. “You looked like a sensible fellow. A genius! He’s a dreamer! He’ll serve his seven years and make his own way in the world as I did. Landscapes and girls! Oscar, you’ll drive me to an early grave.”

  THREE HOURS LATER both young men had thrown off coats, ties, and vests and sat on their beds in Claude’s room in their shirts and trousers, a wine bottle on the table in front of them. They were drunk, and two empty wine bottles had already rolled under the bed. The clock downstairs struck eleven, and outside, the harbor city slept.

  Claude said, “So your family’s old? Respected?”

  “Both. I come from generations of men of great achievement, city fathers, benefactors of good public causes such as hospitals and the poor.”

  “That was kind what you said! I’m not better than the rest of you.”

  “You are. You have an uncompromising vision. I want to paint, but my style’s not free like yours. I wish I were like you.”

  “Don’t wish to be like me. If my friends think I’m any good, they’re almost the only ones.”

  “My mission was to get you back. I may have failed. I’ll be skinned alive with a dirty palette knife.”

  Claude stared down at his glass and then out the dark window. “Wind’s rising,” he said moodily. “A storm’s coming; I feel it. I always used to lie here when storms came after my mother died and wish the house would blow away to the harbor. Now you know how pleasant it is here. I bet you never have to compromise, Frédéric.”

  Frédéric frowned. “On the contrary; I do. Do you think I want to be a doctor? The professors in medical school hardly know my face except for the look of panic on it just before examinations. I only agreed to attend so I could come to Paris and study art. My family keeps me on a small allowance to rein me in, though they’re wealthy.”

  The lantern flickered, and the wind blew. Frédéric sat quietly with his knees drawn up, his voice low and words stumbling from the wine. “I’ll be … wealthy one day when I’m old or married. I’m engaged. I have a little time to live before I get shut up forever and become a Bazille.”

  AN HOUR OR SO before dawn, a tree branch banged against the window, leaves rustling. Claude sat up. On the cot across from him, he made out the shadow of Frédéric Bazille still sleeping, long bare feet hanging over the edge.

  The wind was pressing at the window, and somewhere a shutter swung and knocked. “Frédéric,” he whispered, shaking his friend. “Frédéric, wake up! Storm’s coming. Come on, get dressed. We’ll watch it over the sea.”

  He threw Frédéric’s trousers at him. In the dark, they banged into things and sent the water pitcher crashing. He hushed Frédéric and led him by the hand out of the house and across the garden to the stable, which housed old Mirabelle. The docile mare nuzzled him. Claude saddled her quickly and jumped up. “Come behind me,” he whispered. “Dépêchez-vous, Bazille! Hurry!” He felt pulled by the wind.

  Frédéric jumped behind him, throwing his arm around Claude’s chest. He whispered, “This is crazy, you know.”

  “I don’t care and neither do you! If they’re going to shoot me in some war, I might as well go now in my own way. Besides, it will be all right. I haven’t died yet.”

  Claude pressed forward, whispering in a seductive voice, “Mirabelle!” He thought she shifted a little, turning her old dignified brown face as if to say, “You’re crazy, my young master! Tu es fou!” They turned down the road, he kicking her gently to go forward. The wind whipped them, smelling of salt, blowing away his hat. The mare trotted fast now, her face down, the road rough, bouncing the riders. Claude and his friend heard the sea and slid down, tying the mar
e’s reins to a thick tree branch.

  They ran across the road and climbed down the wet, slippery rocks, holding the lantern, balancing in the fierce wind, shouting and laughing. The wind was full of cold, salty seawater. Claude grabbed Frédéric’s arm and shouted, “Look!”

  Dawn emerged from the sea with a streak of dark gray light blended with blue. Clouds pushed up from the darkness of the deep, hardly able to separate themselves from the heaving water that staggered toward the shore.

  Frédéric ran in the face of the wind and Claude ran after him until they came to the water’s edge and the waves hit them. Their wool trousers clung to their legs. Now for a moment sky and sea were one. A sudden wave knocked Frédéric off his feet. He fell to his side, clothes and beard drenched. Claude shoved him and they fell together with the tide dragging at them, shells and stones on their back, rolling over and shouting.

  Cold salty water filled Claude’s mouth; he spat.

  Above him, lightning split the sky in two until it seemed clouds and sky would fall on them and rise again, pulling him and Frédéric into them and melding them with the dark sea.

  HANNAH WAS ALREADY awake when they returned, shivering, to the house. They poured coffee in the kitchen, drawing their chairs as close to the fire as possible to dry themselves, laughing and eating bread and butter. The storm pelted the window. Under the noise of the thunder they heard footsteps and looked up to see Claude’s father in his dressing gown.

  Adolphe Monet poured his own coffee with hot milk, and sat down opposite them. He rubbed the side of his nose with his finger and said slowly, “I’ve come to a decision, Claude. When your aunt returned last night and you were both in your room, she and I talked about your future. She’ll buy you out of the army and I’ll support you for two years. I expect you to work and succeed as with any business and remember, no girls. Pas de filles! And Claude … if I ever need you, you will come?”

  Claude stared at his friend and then at his father. For a moment he could not speak, and then he said humbly, “Anything … always … as you wish, Father.”