Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  He sat down then, drumming his long fingers on the table. “We need to arrange our own independent exhibition: the lot of us, Manet too, and Degas and Cézanne. We have to show the public what we can do with our new style.”

  “But how do we know it’ll succeed or if anyone will come?” Pissarro asked. “Manet had an independent exhibition and lost his shirt.”

  “But he was alone and we’re all together.”

  Camille leaned back, holding the pillow against her. She croaked, “Ah, you see, there’s your answer! I told you! As I said before: one for all, all for one. Whatever I can do to help, I will!”

  Claude lifted her and carried her into his old bedroom, which was now half filled with her rescued clothes, and tucked her in bed. “Now you must rest,” he said softly. “If my friends talk too loudly, I’ll throw them out the window.”

  “Our friends,” she corrected him.

  “Are you sure you don’t want to stay with your sister until I do better?”

  “Never. You’d forget me and I’d grow ugly missing you. I intend to be brave. We must all be brave together.”

  “You’re so beautiful! You must rest now. Shall I sing you a song? One my mother used to sing with me?”

  “Yes, do! That will make me sleep. I didn’t sleep at all last night worrying about you, my love.”

  “Well, then,” he said. Stroking her hair, he began to sing softly. “À la claire fontaine, m’en allant promener … Ily a longtemps que je t’aime.”

  From the other room he heard the voices of his friends taking animatedly about when they could have their exhibition and how they could afford it. She was asleep, her face in profile. He ran his finger down her nose to her chapped lips. As he sat watching her soft breath, he remembered something her mother had whispered as Camille had kissed her rapidly and hurried down the steps ahead of him that late afternoon. “Monet, take care of her. She’s delicate. There are things you don’t yet understand about our Minou.”

  1867–1868

  If God had not created women’s breasts, I don’t know if I would have been a painter.

  —AUGUSTE RENOIR

  CLAUDE TOOK CAMILLE TO LIVE IN A ROOM OWNED BY AN ancient lady in a wheelchair until the woman insisted that the smell of paint made her ill. They left in haste and for one week lived on a damp, cold houseboat in the Seine. He liked to watch Camille looking over the river at sunset. He was twenty-seven and she just twenty.

  He had made a tentative rapprochement with her family during a stiff Sunday dinner in their rooms on the Île Saint-Louis. He had sat back in what Auguste called his lordly way, lace cuffs showing, and exclaimed, “I am heir to a prosperous Le Havre business.”

  “But do you intend to take it over from your father?” Madame asked as they sat down to dine later and the maid served them.

  “Not exactly, no.”

  “Le Havre is after all too provincial for Minou.”

  “It is, of course! But I don’t have to think of that. I’m on the cusp of doing very well here, madame! My prospects are great. Just this month, several new patrons have expressed interest in commissioning my work.”

  For some moments Claude felt he had convinced Camille’s parents of his future. Later, thinking over her father’s mumbled assent and her mother’s cold look, he realized they had temporarily given up in weariness and were merely biding their time until their errant daughter would come back to them with some of her good name intact and marry the sort of man who would not take her to live on a houseboat. Madame Doncieux said nothing of the odd remark she had made when he had fetched Camille from her sister’s apartment. It likely meant nothing.

  I must make a life for her, he thought. I will soon.

  Then Claude heard of a spacious room in what had been the ballroom of a sixteenth-century grand hôtel in the poorer section of the Marais district, now given largely over to immigrants, artists, and the Paris Jewish population. Though crumbling, the mansion still had its wide and grand marble staircase. They moved in at once. The windows stuck. Cherubs still decorated the ceiling, but they had been blackened by years of coal smoke from the capacious, cracking marble fireplace.

  Lise fell in love with it. “It’s full of ghosts!” she said. “It’s so theatrical! Oh, chérie, we shall give tragedies here! I feel the ghost of some poor royalist who was guillotined in the Revolution!” She came by daily, walking impetuously in the door to take Camille away to their elocution and movement lessons. The theater books piled up among her poetry and novels; his and her books mingled again. The tattered purple cloak hung from a hook in the wall amid her beautiful dresses.

  SHE ROSE LATE that January morning, stumbling about the room in her robe, wearing a pair of his warm socks, and gazing at the frost that clung to the windows. He had already brewed coffee and heated milk. Once more they had stayed up too late visiting with Pissarro and his Julie, who now lived upstairs with their little son. While Claude and his friend lingered at the table, Camille had disappeared with Julie to the sleeping alcove, where their whispers and giggles floated from behind the curtain.

  Claude poured her coffee as she sank down at the table. He said, “I’m off to paint the boulevard des Capucines from a high window, and you have your lesson and something else with Lise. I forget. Well, what are you thinking? Did you dream of guillotined counts? Lise’s imagination is sometimes too much for me.”

  Camille clasped her coffee cups with both hands and shook her head.

  “You’ll never guess,” she said.

  “I can’t. Tell me.”

  “I’m pregnant.”

  “You’re …? How many days since …?”

  “Nearly two months, and my breasts ache so much.”

  “Two months! You said nothing.”

  “I wanted to be sure.”

  “But we use the sheath.”

  She bit her lip playfully and gave him that coy look, head to one side, hair tumbling down. “We haven’t always used the sheath, Claude! Perhaps once or twice we didn’t.”

  This is me, he thought. This is me, sitting opposite her at our table drinking our coffee as we do every morning. This is our room and our life. The boulevard is waiting. He squeezed her hand and kissed it. “I don’t see how it could be!” he said lightly. “Your bleeding’s irregular sometimes.”

  “But it’s got to be true! Julie read it in the tea leaves, Claude!” She searched his face, crossing her arms slowly over her dressing gown. She said thoughtfully, “Then you don’t think I’m …”

  “Oh, likely not at this time, ma très chère fille,” he replied.

  STANDING AT THE window above the snowy boulevard later that morning, he thought at first, I can’t. Then the painting took him and swept him along, but when he paused a few hours later, his heart began to pound.

  As the day ended, he left the unfinished painting in the empty room high above the boulevard and walked reflectively home. Camille was standing by the stove wearing an apron, stirring a pot. “I’ve made pot-au-feu,” she said cheerfully over her shoulder. “I bought the sausages. Our teacher is very pleased with us; he thinks we may be ready to audition soon! Oh, Claude! He thinks there may be places in the Comédie-Française or at the Odéon. I won’t tell my family until it happens. How did your work go?” She raised her face for him to kiss her.

  “Well,” he answered. “I can sell this one with no trouble. My old framer Isaac Clément will exhibit it.” She was humming brightly and wore a secret smile that seemed to radiate from her entire body under the apron. She hovered over the pot and ground in a little pepper, dipping her hand in the water basin.

  We will not discuss it, he thought. There’s nothing to discuss.

  Then he thought, We have to discuss it.

  He waited until they sat down at the table, a jug of wine between them. “Well, I suppose your time came as always?” he asked cheerfully, and she pressed her lips together as if she could not begin to keep the smile inside and shook her head.

  He hesita
ted, speared a piece of sausage, and ate silently for a time. “I suppose you want a baby.”

  She reached out to touch his hand. “It’s all so wondrously strange! A few months ago I did think when we were in bed together, ‘He could give me a child,’ and that made me feel warm all over. Aren’t you happy? Wouldn’t you like if our love turned into a child?”

  “I hadn’t planned on it yet,” he muttered, looking down at his half-empty plate. His appetite had gone. “And the stage? You’ve been working so hard.”

  “My audition would merely be deferred a little,” she said. “I didn’t tell you, did I, that my sister’s with child? Claude.” She looked at him hesitantly, her lips slightly parted. “You don’t sound happy.”

  “Yes, of course I’m happy! Only I don’t want you to get your hopes up and then find it isn’t so.”

  He took a deep breath, wanting only to escape into his painting of the snowy boulevard, to flee into its brushstrokes and disappear. It will come to nothing, he told himself firmly. She has whims and they pass, and this is likely just something she wants for now. Her sister is having it and she wants it.

  How had he not noticed? he asked himself the next morning as he hurried down the stairs with his paint box. She loved children, stopping often when they walked in the Jardin du Luxembourg at the octagonal pond, the Grand Bassin, where children rented small boats and ran around in their pinafores while mothers and nursemaids watched them fondly. They sometimes took Julie’s son, Lucien. Once he had come home to find Camille minding a neighbor’s two little boys, sitting on the floor with them, cutting out shapes from scrap paper. With some chagrin she had told him she had missed her elocution lesson and that Lise was angry with her.

  Each night that week he hardly dared ask her if her time had come as usual, and by Friday he only gazed beseechingly at her when he came in, hanging up his hat. He poured water in the basin and washed his hands, rubbing at the paint under his nails.

  “Well then, it’s true,” he cried, turning to her as she set down the casserole for dinner. He threw himself into a chair. “I’m not as successful yet as your sister’s husband; one day I’ll be even more successful. But now, how can we manage? How can I take care of you and a baby? Yes, you would have to defer your audition. Don’t you care about that? You can’t go on stage looking like a Renaissance Madonna! I’d borrow again, but I haven’t even paid my friends back for the last time, and they’re struggling as well.”

  His voice rose. “That woman who bought my work hasn’t introduced me to other patrons yet, but she might take this new work herself. And when Women in the Garden is accepted by the Salon this spring, things will change for me, but that’s months away. Until then—merde! What on earth are we going to do?”

  “But none of these things matter!” she insisted calmly. “All will be fine. I know it; I sense it. It’s in the tea leaves. We’ll manage somehow. We always do.”

  “What do you mean ‘somehow’? Do tell me, Camille!”

  “Don’t you have faith in your gifts and in mine? I will go on the stage; I won’t always look like a Renaissance Madonna. It’s only seven more months.”

  “I don’t know what to do! I don’t know what the hell to do!”

  Camille jerked her hand away and snatched at her coat, and before he could get to his feet, she had flung open the door. He heard her footsteps before he was able to take the dinner from the fire and run after her. Now what? he thought. Where in Paris has she gone? Likely to her sister’s. Oh, not that; not that!

  He hurried through the old palatial courtyard, now filled with peddler’s carts and a tent with some straw on the ground and a wretched horse pawing it. Claude ran into the street. There were fewer gas lamps in this part of the city. He hurried past a café with its dim light showing through the frosty window and saw her in front of the closed dairy shop, her face against the window, her shoulders shaking under her coat.

  He approached her tentatively, but she did not turn away from the dark window with its tin milk containers. “Why did you follow me?” she sobbed. “You don’t want the baby! I don’t need you. I could go home to my family. Then I would never see you again. I would never want to see you. They’ve been right about you all along!”

  A horse and carriage trotted by, splashing them. Claude stood erect; though only a few moments of silence passed, he felt them to be hours. “Why do you say I don’t want our child?” he said at last. “Even if we face some difficulties, it will work out.” Still, under his breath he murmured, “What am I saying? What have I said?” He stood smiling slightly until he felt he had disappeared and only a bit of air remained where he stood, hardly visible under the gas lamp on the filthy snow. At least her sobs had subsided. He would have done anything to stop them.

  She turned from the window, wiping her cheeks with her hands, the faintest look of joy in her eyes again. “But how will we manage?” she asked. “I could try to find modeling work until I’m ready to audition. Shall I do that, Claude?”

  “I don’t want you modeling for anyone but me and our close friends! And you’ll start to show soon, won’t you? Have you told your sister? Maybe your family will help us. I’ll go home and speak to my father. It’s just for a time until I can earn money more regularly. I’m trembling. I don’t think I could hold a paintbrush if I tried, Minou!”

  DURING THE TRAIN ride home through the countryside to Normandy, Claude thought of what words to say, biting his fingernails. As he descended at Le Havre and walked toward his father’s shop by the water, he could not remember how long it had been since he’d written. And yet the letters from his aunt to him were affectionate, and his father’s postscripts were warm. They had been thrilled at the great success of The Woman in the Green Dress, and Claude’s father had written that perhaps he had been wrong to stand against his gifted son. The checks, never large, had mercifully continued, and for some time his aunt and his father had begged him to visit.

  Large snowflakes drifted down here and there amid the masts and the water. He walked under the shop sign and opened the door.

  Nothing had changed here; he peered into the shadows at the ropes, at the shelves of boxes, and then at the desk with its old paid bills speared on the iron spike of the paper holder. And there was his father, sitting back reading a newspaper through his spectacles. The lenses were not clean, and his old sweater was missing buttons.

  Hearing the shop bell, he looked up. “Claude!” he exclaimed happily. “What a surprise! Your aunt will be delighted.”

  Claude thought, Growing older is mellowing the old man. He kissed his father’s bristly cheeks and sank into the chair beside the desk beneath the hanging samples of rope. “How are you, Papa?” he asked.

  Adolphe patted his rounder belly. “A little older and stouter, but the same, the same. Your brother’s well. Your aunt keeps all clippings of your Salon success. Poor woman: she’s living with me now all the time. Has rheumatism, walks with pain, stays home mostly. If business remains good I can help you a little each month for another year.”

  He folded his wide hands over his sweater vest and took off his glasses. “And you, my son? How is the rising young artist getting on?”

  Claude set both hands on his knees. “Pas mal—not badly! Since last spring’s success, I’ve had a great deal of interest in my painting. I was quite prepared to support myself without your kind monthly checks.” He studied the inkwell on the desk and his voice dropped. “Unfortunately, another small problem has arisen that makes me need to ask you for a little more each month.”

  He hesitated. “I’m going to be a father.” He looked harder at the desk, now touching the steel tips of the pens. “We didn’t mean for it to happen,” he said. “She’s my model, comes from a very good family; her father’s in silk exports. She’s the woman in the green dress. We fell in love; you know how that is. I need a loan until I can see us through. It’s a temporary thing.”

  Adolphe Monet rose. He paced the wide, creaking floorboards under the
hanging ships’ lanterns, hands clasped behind him, his heavy gray mustache concealing the expression of his mouth.

  He has not mellowed so much, Claude thought.

  His father said, “Ah, this isn’t good. I was glad to see you, and now what are you telling me? You make hardly any money, Claude; you’re all hope. Now you want a loan to help support some woman and child?”

  Claude cried, “She’s not just ‘some woman.’ She’s a good girl, a beautiful girl! You don’t know her.”

  “You can’t do this, Oscar. Send the girl home to her family. Where was her self-respect? If she chose to behave herself so loosely, she must bear the consequence.”

  Claude jumped up, clenching his fists. “How can you say that? Send her home? Never, never! I love her, Father. And what about your mistress? You have a love child, though you keep it hidden. You broke my mother’s heart.”

  “Claude,” said his father wearily, his voice echoing to the dusty hanging ropes. “Life is more complicated than you believe. What do you really know about me and your mother? You were a boy and judged things as a boy does. People’s hearts are more complicated.”

  Adolphe Monet leaned on some wood boxes. “So you love her, eh? I think you do. Will her family help her?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “This is bad. I need to talk things over with your aunt. Come to the house toward dinnertime. I’ll close early. I can’t think anymore.”

  Customers came into the shop and Claude nodded and left. Wrapping his scarf tighter, he walked quickly through the wind. Then through the wet window of a fishermen’s café, he made out his old schoolmate Marc reading a news journal. They had walked miles together, skipped school, once stolen a rowboat for an hour and took it so far out to sea that they almost were lost. His friend had grown fatter. He opened the door and walked in through the sawdust and the smell of fish soup, exclaiming, “Marc!”

  “Monet!” Marc exclaimed, shaking Claude’s hand vigorously. “What are you doing here in the dead of winter? I’m working at the family bank. Did you hear I’m engaged? Berthold’s daughter, the younger one.”