Claude & Camille

by Stephanie Cowell

  “I wish you all happiness, Marc. As for me …” Claude fell into a chair, patting his cold beard and blowing on his hands. He ordered soup, his face stern, and as he ate it, he told Marc a little of the story.

  Marc slapped his hands on his knees. “You always had all the luck with girls, Monet! Your father will relent, of course. He’s always relented with you. He brags about you all over town. It was just a shock to him, that’s all: the son becoming a father. By the way, my older brother’s in banking in Paris now. If you ever want work …”

  “That sort? No, thanks!”

  “Good luck, Monet.”

  “Yes, good luck to you too,” Claude replied.

  Darkness was falling as he walked up the hill to his old house. From outside he could hear the voices of his father and his aunt, and the sound of her cane as she walked back and forth. Poor woman! She had bought him his first colors and canvases. He mounted the stairs and sank into a hall chair, biting his lip. His right hand stretched inside his pocket, the thread pulled.

  Finally a door opened and his father came through the shadows.

  Claude stood. “Well, Father?” he asked, almost wistfully.

  “Claude, your situation’s impossible. Send the girl home to her family and we’ll continue to help you as long as we can. Admit you have made a mistake. Don’t go forward with this thing that you cannot do.”

  THE WATER SLOSHED against the pilings, the gentle night wind nudged the sails, and the blue-black water lifted and released the boats by the wharf as an afterthought. The boards smelled of old fish and seaweed and all was deserted but for a watchman, whose pipe bowl glowed. A church bell rang two in the morning. Claude sat on a pile of nets, as he had for some hours, muttering under his breath, “What shall I do? What on earth shall I do?”

  Finally he returned to his father’s dark house and fell into bed fully dressed, feeling the presence of some of his old caricatures, which he had tacked on the walls years before. Maybe he could still sell them; he had to raise money.

  Early in the morning he sat at his boyhood desk to write Camille. Six drafts he tore up and crumpled on the floor. “Sweetest love of my life,” he wrote once more. “Ma très chère fille!”

  My father won’t help us. This is unexpected and terrible but we must make the best of it. I agree you should put off your theater audition until you feel more ready. Now you must go to your parents if you haven’t done so already and see if they will do something. If they will not, go to the art schools and post that you are available to model but only clothed, dearest, or I couldn’t bear it. A lot of artists know that painting of you and will be glad to have you as a model. My friends can’t pay, but they may know others who can. You said you weren’t averse to the idea. We must bring in some money. Don’t go to Manet or Degas, because I would not trust them with any beautiful girl, let alone mine.

  Now I hope you will hear me with patience and fortitude, darling Minou. I think I had best remain here for a few weeks. I want to paint some more seascapes and harbor views, which will surely sell in Paris, as I’ve sold a few there before. I intend to paint the lighthouse; you should see how marvelous it is. I also can slowly work on my father’s good heart. Enclosed is all the money I have for now. Please take good care of yourself, and I send a thousand kisses on every part of your lovely body. By the way, have you finished reading Zola’s Thérèse Raquin? You were nearly done and you’re such a fast reader.

  Claude

  She will write back soon and tell me I have made the right decision, he thought as he mailed the letter and took his easel to the wharf. From there, over the tumbling water, he had a good view of the stone jetty reaching out into the sea with the rising white lighthouse. Lamps dotted the jetty, and warmly wrapped women walked carefully, sprayed by the sea. The water rose to the sky, the sky eased to the water.

  Acquaintances stopped by to watch him, young sailors and captains, holding on to their hats. After a while he breathed more easily, slowly becoming the painting that had its own reason and was an entire world that held him. The people he painted quickly as outlines: it was sea and air that beckoned and left him breathless. He thought of nothing but that: the whole rest of his world disappeared. He vaguely felt the comforting daily presence of his father in his shop of nautical supplies and that there had been a truce. There would be enough time to make everything right.

  Claude was so swept away by his work that it was not until late afternoon when cleaning his brushes that he remembered why he had come to Le Havre. She will agree with me, he thought.

  Three days passed and neither she nor anyone else wrote him.

  He wrote a second letter and sent it with the picture of the lighthouse that was propped on his bureau and again went out to paint, once more blissful until he saw a man and his pregnant wife walk by and sharply remembered. By the time he had been home five days, his concentration had left him. Coming back to his father’s house on the hill late that day, he thought, surely a letter would be waiting.

  More days passed and still there was no reply. Now the anxiety of it was mingled with the water and jetty each day, and his brush staggered a little. Surely the postman today had brought something from her, he thought. However indignant it might be, just to see his name in her hand would soothe him. He returned to the house early and wrote yet again, underlining much.

  Why haven’t you written? We are in an impossible situation. What has your family said? What of the modeling? I am painting here, trying to do something deep and dramatic enough to catch the attention of some Paris art dealer or gallery so that we can live a better life together. Don’t you know I love you?

  He went on for several pages and posted the letter at the post office in the center of the town, also mailing intense letters to his friends.

  Then he went out to paint the estuary but could not even see it. Staring at the waters, he saw only his room in the Marais. He imagined Camille sitting on the bed’s edge crying, unable to be comforted. She rose to pack, hurling her things in a trunk. Their room was left empty, the windows open. She had moved back to her parents’. Claude threw all his paints into the box and hurried back to his father’s house, his long dark hair blowing against his unshaven face.

  His aunt was making an apple tart in the kitchen, moving slowly, holding on to the stove, her cane resting against the table. She poured him a glass of wine and pulled a letter from her apron pocket for him.

  Frédéric had written. He tore it open at once.

  Claude, mon ami, you know I was away, and as soon as I came back and got your note I hurried over to your room, where I found the poor girl sick, confined to bed, throwing up a lot, weeping. Her sister was there yesterday and told me I must not dare mention your name! Her family has sent food but says they will do nothing more unless she forgets you and goes away to have the child in secret and gives it up for adoption when it is born. Needless to say, this made her quite hysterical.

  The poor girl, Claude! She’s so distraught none of us knows what to do. She believes you have deserted her forever in spite of your loving letters, and talked of ending the pregnancy. Do you remember that pretty blond model who did that and bled to death? I don’t believe Camille would do such a thing. If no one else has written to you, it’s because they don’t know whether to take her side or yours.

  Well, my friend, you have got yourself into a damn mess, but what can be done? Come back and we’ll all stand beside you in this as we can.

  Yours in all affection, F. Bazille

  Claude did not see the kitchen then, but only his Minou lying on the sheets of some abortionist, pale in death. He saw her limp hand dangling off the bed’s edge.

  When he looked up he noticed his aunt gazing down at him tenderly, a few stands of her gray hair escaping from her white cap. “I must go home,” he said, standing slowly.

  “Yes, we knew you would.”

  “You needn’t help me anymore. I’ll do this on my own.”

  “I also knew you’d sa
y that, Oscar,” said his aunt, kissing him.

  The next morning Claude packed his things, took his new paintings, and caught the first train to Paris, sitting in a third-class car, hand clenched on his knee. The winter sky outside was dull, and the sound of the gulls was soon lost under the wheels of the train. He whispered, Frédéric’s right. We’ll manage. I have nothing to give her now, but I will one day. I love her. I love her.

  1868

  I would have bought paint but your mother needed the money.

  —CAMILLE PISSARRO IN A LETTER TO HIS SON LUCIEN

  CAMILLE DID NOT WELCOME HIM; SHE PUSHED HIM SO hard when she opened the door of their room that he almost lost his balance. All his clothes were heaped in a pile by the door, a few of the lace cuffs of which he was so proud half hidden under his new trousers. “There you are!” she cried, her mother’s contemptuous look about her mouth, her pale face flushed with anger. “If you’d returned one moment later, they would have been given to the ragman!”

  “The ragman!” he cried, putting down his easel. He stood between her and his best suit. “You didn’t answer my letters. I was painting. I really was coming back almost at once.”

  “I don’t believe you!” she shouted.

  “I needed only a little more time.” He felt both righteous and humble, but when he glanced up again he saw the terror in her eyes. She fought tears; he could see how angry she was at herself for weeping. “You make me pregnant and then leave me,” she gasped. “You can go back to … that place and paint again. That place where your philistine father won’t help us.”

  “Your family won’t help either.”

  They stood glaring at each other and she plucked a crumpled handkerchief from his pile of clothes and wiped her eyes. “I didn’t want to throw them out,” she said. “I wouldn’t have in the end, but I have no one really but you now. No one. You understand that. I want to see where you were born and stand at your side when you paint. You are … all the baby and I have in the world.”

  Slowly they gathered his clothes, folded them, and humbly returned them to the wardrobe and drawers. He found the shirt she had bought him last Christmas. They laughed a little about his passion for his lace cuffs. They stood close, almost knocking into each other, apologizing with another small laugh, putting the room in order. He watered the potted plant, which had withered in his absence. The clutter of dresses and paintings and books seemed to close in around him to protect both of them. By nightfall he felt he had never been away.

  “How is your dear aunt?” she asked as she shook out her hair to brush it before bed. “Oh well, well,” he replied. Now the sound of the sea had utterly left him, and all the world extended no further than her once again gentle looks and the corners of this room.

  SLOWLY THAT SPRING their lives began to change.

  Camille’s body swelled every day, and as it did she moved farther away from her family. Before her pregnancy she would sometimes meet with friends from her former life, drinking coffee or shopping with them. She drew away from this also. In late spring, when she was visibly with child, she and Claude encountered two young women she knew at the theater. The women looked oddly at Camille’s figure and at her finger, which was bare of any wedding ring. When they had entered their box and she and Claude began the steep climb to the high gallery where they were sitting, she whispered, “Did you see how they looked at you, Claude? In their narrow hearts, they envied me!” Yet there was a slight breathiness in her voice that showed their expressions had hurt her in spite of her light defiance.

  She did not go for coffee with them again, but spent many hours with Julie and Lise sewing baby clothes. She embroidered exquisitely. She went a few times to see her sister’s fragile newborn baby girl but did not ask Annette or her parents to visit her. She knew very well what they thought of where she lived, amid bricklayers and craftsmen and seamstresses.

  CAMILLE’S WATER BROKE on an early hot August morning when she was walking across the floor while flies buzzed about the room. Claude sent a boy from the café with messages and the midwife arrived shortly. “This is no place for you, monsieur!” she told him. “Go for a walk. Take the dog. Come back in a few hours.”

  “Hours?” he murmured.

  He took Victoire on the leash, but did not go far; he sat down on the stairs, wincing each time he heard Camille scream. He left, walked about the neighborhood, and hurried back. “It is progressing,” the midwife told him when he opened his door a little.

  I will never touch her again, never, he thought. He went out once more with Victoire until he began to count how shadows moved on the stones of buildings as the day wore on. He sat down at a café table and ordered wine and left without drinking it. He ran back.

  He heard her cry out and then another, higher-pitched cry.

  He raced up the stairs.

  Camille lay in bed, one fair plump arm outside the cover, her face dark and tired. By her, wrapped tightly in a soft cloth, was a wizened face with a bit of black sticky hair. The basin of water the midwife had left on the table was tinged as if scarlet paint had been mixed with it. He knelt and covered Camille’s hand with kisses. As he rocked his newborn son, he thought: Thus we begin, so small and unblemished, and how complicated we become!

  He woke at two, reaching for her, but she was a dark shape pacing the room holding this small, strange new thing. “Oh, look at him, Claude!” she whispered, lighting the lamp and sitting down beside him with the tiny baby. “Have you ever seen anything so beautiful? It was worth any pain; it was worth everything. I care only about him and you!”

  “Yes, he’s beautiful,” he whispered with awe.

  But for weeks after, the baby cried half the night. Just as Claude got to sleep, he would be startled by the piercing shrieks. “It’s crying,” he muttered, exhausted.

  Camille rose and walked the child, but the little one would not cease to cry. “Well, what is the matter with it? What does it want?” he glowered from his pillow. “Can’t you do something?”

  “They cry. Haven’t you heard them in the house?”

  “It doesn’t mean ours has to.”

  “And his name is Jean!” she said fiercely and protectively.

  “Merde!” he muttered. He stumbled into his clothes and went out, but he could hear the howling as if it persecuted him. The child seemed to cry down to him, You don’t love me. He made his way back and took up the light, little thing. “How can anyone so small cry so loudly?” he whispered. “Did you feed him?”

  “Of course I fed him,” she replied.

  “How long are they like that?”

  “They change, Julie says.”

  Not only life changed in those months, but his room as well. His paintings were pushed to the corner as the room filled with so many things. There were baby garments from her sister; from Julie came hand-knit baby caps, from Auguste’s mother pots of food and advice, from Lise constant visits and cooking, from Sisley’s sweetheart a carriage to walk the baby, which Claude carried up and down the stairs. His aunt sent a generous check, not telling his father. Camille’s parents sent a cradle draped with printed cotton. Once, passing it when his son was not there, he kicked it slyly. It rocked; the fabric danced. He resented that they had to accept help from anyone.

  Once more the play scripts and props were piled on the dining table, and Lise came regularly to practice. She had presented two monologues before the directors at the Odéon last spring and been engaged as an ingenue. Together at the table with coffee bowls amid the scripts, she and Camille wrote to the Comédie-Française on Camille’s behalf. They were also looking for an ingenue. Ten weeks after Jean had been born, a letter came saying that they would hear her Thursday morning.

  Claude walked with her to the venerable theater and inside past the huge painted sets on their rollers. He and Camille stood in the wings between a tangle of rope on the floor and an intricately painted set of ancient Rome. “Wait outside,” she begged him. “I’m too nervous.” Then she kissed hi
m and walked on toward the stage with a few other actors who were also being heard that day.

  He was pacing back and forth in the alley behind the theater near trash boxes and an old cart when she came from the door, calling his name. She walked swiftly toward him, her face very bright. “Oh, Claude!” she said. “They liked me. I’m engaged to begin rehearsals after Christmas. Now you need only support us until I can help!” He nodded. He knew from Auguste how little young actresses were paid but decided to say nothing. Not for the world would be disturb her happiness, and besides, he did not need her to earn a living. He would do it.

  LATE NOVEMBER, AS dingy as the skirts of a prostitute. Crowded omnibuses moved through the streets, the drivers huddled on their high seats outside above the horses, reins in their gloved hands. In such wet, muddy weather he would rather have stayed home painting by the window, but their money was low. The few paintings Claude had sold during the pregnancy had carried them through, and he had paid some old bills with the gift from his aunt.

  Wearing his best suit and with his portfolio in hand, he walked over the Seine to the rue Saint-Germain and through the courtyard of a hôtel particulier where he had sold his work before. He was always fascinated by the apartments of the middle and upper classes, so beautiful with their tall doors, their molding, their wainscoting. So will our Paris rooms look soon, he thought as the maid took his coat and hat.

  Madame Mathieu and another woman were embroidering together behind a silver chocolate pot. “Why Monsieur Monet!” she cried. “Will you have a cup of chocolate and a cake? Do you recall, Susanne, that lovely painting of the church in our bedroom that we bought from monsieur last year?”

  The chocolate was creamy and sweet. Claude dabbed at his upper lip and mustache with his handkerchief. “I have some more paintings to show you, this time of Paris parks in summer,” he said charmingly. “You said you would like more.”

  “How kind of you to remember!” the woman exclaimed.