Interlude
GIVERNY
July 1908
The old artist could not work well for some days after he received the cold letter from Camille’s sister, Annette. He left a canvas on the Japanese bridge where he had been painting, and the rain came suddenly before the gardener could retrieve it.
He mounted the stairs to his room and pulled out an antique lacquered Japanese box with two drawers he had discovered several months before when cleaning out some things. He had given it to Camille as a birthday present a long time ago, and the finding of it had precipitated his communication to her sister. Now he decided to look at it more closely; he had not done so in more than thirty years. Sitting on his bed, he opened it.
The drawers were jumbled. The first contained some letters from him to her and a bit of what Camille called her diaries. They were not proper diaries in a leather-bound book, but a few small portfolios of odd notes and impressions. The second drawer held small keepsakes: a candle stub, some seashells, a fan, calling cards, opera tickets. In touching these things he felt he touched her.
He read some of the papers here and there, only lightly because his eyes were tired. Each one opened a world of memories for him. Unfolding one scrap, he found the address and hour of a theater audition.
Here was a poem, also incomplete, written, he suspected, nearly half a century before because it was on the bookshop stationery. Quiet love, so quiet it is as if I am walking early in the morning, hearing the call of the blackbird. Which am I? On the back of this was a list for blue feathers and ribbons for hat trimming. There was a paper with the address in his handwriting of his Paris studio to guide her there the first time.
Each item led to another, some of which he did not understand. Everything moved him deeply. Yet only Camille’s sister would know the story behind some of these things.
No, he thought suddenly. Que le diable l’emporte! The devil can take her! She’ll have nothing more from me. I’ve allowed this woman to distract me when I’m working. What can these paintings of water lilies, which are such a struggle for me, have to do with my long-lost love? What has my past to do with me now?
He closed the box and stuffed it away in his wardrobe.
He would not risk another letter to her.
Part Two
1864–1866
My family at last begin to take me seriously …
—CLAUDE MONET
THE STUDIO CLAUDE AND FRÉDÉRIC RENTED TOGETHER was on the rue de Furstenberg on the Left Bank of the Seine. They walked through the huge porte cochere across the cobbled courtyard to the back house. The concierge gave them the key, and Claude took one of the tin candleholders with a slanted stub of candle.
Above them the wood stairs to the studio ascended into darkness. They began to mount, the tiny light showing them just one step at a time. Some steps were cracked. On the top landing, the iron key scraped in the lock and they walked into the room. The wallpaper was peeling, and the stove’s rusty pipe snaked up the wall. The floorboards were old, and the windowsills were stained from the dust of coal fires; when they opened the huge window, light poured in, and the roofs and chimneys of Paris stretched as far as they could see. There were two small bedrooms. Claude noticed that the ceiling sagged in his.
They carried up their bags and boxes. Frédéric knelt by one of his wicker trunks and withdrew a few small framed studio portraits of his family. Claude dropped beside him to pick up one of a lovely girl. “And who is this gorgeous creature?” he demanded. “Your sister? Introduce me! I promise I’ll behave horribly.”
“No, you merde! That’s Lily, the girl I’m going to marry when I move back home to begin my medical career.”
“The one you don’t particularly want to marry?”
“I don’t mind marrying her,” Frédéric said carefully. As he unpacked the trunk, his long fingers moved more slowly, a habit Claude had observed when Frédéric was unsure of himself. “I spoke rather rashly when we were drunk at your house. Lily and I have known each other since we were children; she used to follow me around. She plays the violin and she’s good and beautiful and besides, she adores me.” He gave one of his lopsided grins.
Claude shoved him lightly. “So you’re intending to move back home eventually? How does a slob like you merit such a girl? Is she nice to sleep with?”
“What? Sleep with her! She would never. I have to make my promises in church first and suffer until then.”
“Poor bastard. Are you still a virgin?”
“Certainly not, but I’ve no one now.”
“Well, I guess we’ll both have to keep our trousers buttoned for a bit. Damek’s found someone else. Don’t go with whores, Bazille; you’ll get syphilis, which can kill you. Maybe all the desire will go into the painting.”
“I intend to live a long time,” Frédéric replied and began to hang his clothes in the wardrobe. Since the days painting by the sea near Claude’s house and the leisurely barge journey back to Paris by the Seine, they had talked of many things, laying down the first path of a friendship. Now they could be utterly irreverent about the present one moment and more somber about the future the next. As hard as they tried to look into it, it did not seem very real.
They were hanging their paintings on the studio wall when Auguste Renoir and Pissarro came in with their own work in roped bundles. Auguste walked from room to room. “Surely you’ll need company here,” he called. “You don’t have enough pictures on the walls! I’ll bring some of mine to cover up the broken plaster. You don’t mind if I sleep under an easel now and then?”
“You don’t mind if we step on you when we get up?”
Pissarro put down his paintings and rubbed the rope marks on his palms. He said modestly, “I could also use a place to stay when it’s too late to go back to my mother’s house in Louveciennes. Besides, things there aren’t so cheerful since our maid Julie bore my child last month. Lucien keeps me up nights, but I’ve already made three drawings of him—best work I’ve done. Do you have any food? I can’t remember if I ate today.”
The four artists gathered around the small table with its green oilcloth, all talking at once. “But why can’t you remember?” Claude asked.
Auguste took a large bite of sausage and bread. “Because he’s not sleeping and we’ve both changed jobs again. We left that job at the wharf. A falling crate almost took off his arm: no arm, bad for a painter. So just an hour ago he found work painting blinds. I’m painting a large picture on a café wall, did I tell you?” He leaned back in the chair, thumbs in his trouser waistband, grinning at them, his small teeth a bit darkened from tobacco. “Lucky me! It’ll take a month and they feed me and give me a little money for my own canvases. There are ten thousand cafés in Paris, and by the time I’ve painted all their walls, somebody will know my presently obscure name.”
The studio became the meeting place for all their friends. It was cluttered with books, shawls, props, chairs; everyone’s work hung on the walls and leaned in piles against them. There were dirty glasses, a plate of drying bread and cheese rinds, greasy cheap sausage paper, and a few cracked saucers with cigar butts. The artists often stayed up very late talking over a keg of wine Frédéric’s family sent from their vineyards in Languedoc. Sometimes when they ran out of money for food, they had dinner at the hôtel particulier, the town house, of Frédéric’s bourgeois uncle and aunt, Commander and Madame Lejosne, who patronized the arts and whose rooms were full of musicians and actors. They took home leftovers and dined on cold pheasant, lamb, and cake for days after.
Toward the time the quarterly rent was due, Claude and Frédéric would sit across the rickety table from each other composing clever letters to their families, reading them aloud. Auguste Renoir, who slept on the floor more often than not, would pace the room extemporizing, suggesting florid phrases. Then they would run down to their mail slot as soon as they heard the postman’s bell. They pawned their good clothes, their watches, and once, their clean sheets. Someone go
t a portrait commission in the end and redeemed things. Sometimes several people came over and they talked about art until two in the morning. Frédéric’s friend Edmond would raucously play cheerful songs on the rented spinet piano.
CLAUDE WAS STANDING before his easel on a February day, fingernails embedded with paint, when Frédéric came slowly in with the post. “Of all bad fortune, I have to go home for a week to my family in Montpellier!” he groaned, dropping his long form into a chair. “I can’t put it off any longer. Come with me as a shield?”
“Now? You know we have less than a month to finish paintings to submit to the annual State Salon! I can hardly sleep thinking of it.”
“I thought you already chose your submissions. Anyway, we can paint there and maybe come up with something good.”
Claude hesitated. “Well,” he said carefully, “if we can paint, I don’t mind spending half an hour with your young lady. Is the light good? I shall do my best not to be rude.”
“That’s more than I can hope for myself,” Frédéric replied.
They threw their clothes in a couple of valises, packed their paint boxes and a few new stretched canvases, and caught the train. It was a journey of several hours to the old province of Languedoc.
Claude sensed the weight of the house when he entered it. Every chair and ancestral painting and the capacious library full of rare books seemed to say, “We are old France; we live as all men ought to live.”
When he came to dinner, he recognized his friend’s fiancée from her picture. There were many people at the table, but she sat between her parents as if protected by them. He took in her curled hair and ivory wool-silk dress, her small mouth. She looked curiously at Claude and gently at Frédéric.
After the meal they all moved to the music room, where coffee came on a silver tray and delicate cups were passed around. When they all had been served, Lily lifted a violin from its case and tuned it, and Frédéric took his place at the piano. “Mozart, violin sonata in B-flat major,” he announced. The firm sounds of piano and violin began together at once, followed immediately by a poignant soaring line from the violin. The instruments answered each other.
Lily’s curls trembled as she dipped and played; she was very skilled, but it was Frédéric who amazed Claude. After the last chord, Lily returned to sit between her parents on the sofa with the violin on her lap, but Frédéric did not rise. Suddenly he began to play again, and Madame Bazille’s shoulders grew tense at the thick, driving music.
“It’s Schumann,” Frédéric exclaimed over his shoulder. “He went mad.” He stood up and excused himself and bolted from the room, leaving the last unfinished chords of the phrase vibrating in the air over the coffee cups.
Everyone glanced at one another; Lily looked as if she was going to cry. She seemed to want to run after him. “What did we do?” Madame Bazille asked.
His father cleared his throat. “We let him go to Paris to study medicine, but between his passion for music, art, and amateur theater, I think he’s doing badly in his studies. I suspect he won’t pass this year again. Have you any influence on him, Monet?”
“Yes, his studies are likely weighing on my friend. I’m sorry, mademoiselle. If you’ll excuse me, I’ll go and find him and bring him back.”
Where the hell had Frédéric gone? Claude looked in his friend’s bedroom and saw hundreds of books and some of Frédéric’s earlier paintings on the wall. He was walking down the hall again when a door above opened and Frédéric’s voice whispered, “I’m here.”
Claude took the steep back stairs to the attic, which was lit only by one oil lamp. The large space was full of broken furniture, old toys, a dressmaker’s dummy, and many trunks. Frédéric was kneeling beside one, his shape long and thin in the shadow.
Gripping Frédéric’s shoulder, Claude said, “Courage, mon brave! The girl’s stunning and obviously mad about you.”
“Merde! Claude! My father’s already been lecturing me. It’s what they say, the way they say it. It’s all subtle. They mean well, and I love them, but sometimes I feel none of them knows me at all. I was born a Bazille. I know what my great ancestors did. I know what I’m supposed to do and to feel, but I don’t always. Your father wants something of you; mine wants something of me, but what am I? So I hide here as I did when a boy.”
Frédéric opened the trunk. “I wanted to show you this stuff anyway,” he said. “We could take some away to paint if we wanted to. These are my great-grandfather’s uniforms from the Napoleonic wars in Russia sixty years ago. He came back with the flag, but his foot and one arm were amputated for frostbite.”
Claude knelt to feel the stiff, tarnished gold braid, which crumbled a little in his fingers. He took up the rapier.
“That’s still sharp,” Frédéric said. “Never mind; I remember now you were in the army.”
Claude folded up the uniform and laid it in the trunk, closing the lid. “Come on,” he said. “I’m supposed to bring you downstairs. Your mother’s crying a little and your fiancée looks very sad. She’ll be up here looking for you any moment, I suspect. Tomorrow we’ll go out to paint. We must submit to the Salon when we get back. Frédéric, quit medical school. You want to. Listen to me. You have one life. Be what you are. You’re gifted, damn it. We’d manage somehow. We have to live just for our work.”
Frédéric shook his head. “I won’t submit this year.” They rose and went downstairs to the sound of chatter and the smell of coffee.
IN LATE MARCH, a month after his return from the Bazille home in Languedoc, Claude wrapped two of his paintings in canvas and set off. He could see the crowd at the door of the enormous Palais de I’Industrie between the Seine and the Champs-Élysées. Hundreds of artists were already lined up, squeezing in one at a time to submit their work and receive a numbered receipt. Men carting sculptures in wagons, some women carrying paintings almost larger than themselves, all pushing like people on a bread line. Two men began to shout, and one shoved the other. “I was standing here first, monsieur.”
“You are a pig, monsieur.”
Almost every artist he knew in Paris was there: the old hopeful ones, the successful painters, who barely glanced in his direction, the students from the art school, which had closed. They would have left anyway. The teacher had predicted no future for any of them if they insisted on painting in such a loose style.
Paul Cézanne called to him, “Pissarro’s submitted already and gone to work. Where’s Auguste?”
“Either already submitted or settling some problem with his mother and sisters.” They spoke briefly, and then fell into silence, inching forward slowly. When Claude looked back sometime later, a few hundred men had taken their place behind him. He put up his coat collar against the March wind.
A while later he passed through the enormous triumphal arch of the entrance. Within the arch high above, huge sculpted angels blew their stone trumpets and a heroic statue personifying France sat crowned with a halo of stars. Each artist fell silent at the grandeur.
A withered man sitting behind a table accepted his paintings, logging them into the large book with a slow, scratchy pen. “M-o-n-e-t,” he spelled, writing as carefully as an aged schoolboy. Then the two paintings were lifted onto a cart by a muscular workman and Claude walked away, hands in his pockets.
It was like leaving his soul to see his paintings stacked with so many others and wheeled away to echoing rooms. The judges will stare at them for a few minutes, he thought, and then pass on to other work. He could see the committee in their dark coats and hats. Everyone knew how it was in there when they chose among twenty thousand works of art: a minute’s glance, an off-the-cuff decision. Giving a shake of the head for a negative vote, then passing on to the next. A mark noted on a scrap of paper to be counted later. Was the work original but not too original? How was the perspective? Was the subject properly executed? Just the sort of things they wanted, in other words, something with a style of fifty years before. Nothing vivid and moving and real,
nothing like he and his friends were trying to create.
He paused, finger against his lips. Still, perhaps not; perhaps it would be different. Perhaps when looking at his they would stroke their beards and mutter among themselves, “A work of genius!”
Two weeks later the concierge yelled up that a letter had come for him, her voice echoing up the long flights. Claude rushed down, almost falling.
He walked back up the stairs, into the studio and into Frédéric’s bedroom, where his friend was studying at the desk; Claude leaned against a wall, covering his face with his hands. “Putain—the whore!” he cried bitterly. “Both declined! They’re good too.”
Frédéric leapt up. “The bastards. They don’t see. They can’t see! Listen to me, Claude. Just go on painting. I’ll pay the rent myself if I have to. I’ll lie to them at home.”
“You already lie to them at home. Suppose I’m not worth it? Suppose I’m fooling everyone?”
EVERYTHING HE PAINTED that spring displeased him, and the last thing he wanted to see was the barely disguised empathy of his friends. “You’re not fooling everyone!” Frédéric had shouted after him as he bolted down the stairs and ran he did not know where.
He took a wealthy woman he had met at the theater as his lover for several weeks and painted nothing until he was thoroughly disgusted with himself; by late autumn, he had decided to return to Le Havre to work. As he walked to his train in the Gare Saint-Lazare, he remembered the tall girl in the veiled hat he had seen three years before—recently he had been looking through old sketchbooks and found her picture, which he had tacked on the wall of his studio bedroom. He wondered what had happened to her. Was her life as unsettled as his was? He imagined meeting her and saying, “I am the famous artist Monet,” but of course he could not say that. He bit the edge of his thumb and looked out the window.
For many days after he arrived home he slept a lot and read. Then on a damp November morning he went off alone to the riverhead at low tide and began to create a new painting. A storm was coming; a horse and cart made its way through the low tide, and a few other weary horses lifted their hooves from the wet sand while the clouds almost fell into the sea. He took the painting back to his bedroom and worked on it there and then continued in the Paris studio when he returned. In March he submitted it to the Salon with a smaller painting of a road in Chailly.
Claude & Camille Page 4