by Enrique Laso
-“I’ll get straight to the point, Mr. Claudel. I would like you to allow your sister to be transferred to another hospital near Paris, as it is unlikely that she will ever improve here,” I said suddenly, rather dryly and tactlessly.
-“That would be impossible...right now.”
-“It would be a great relief for her. She’s tortured here, not only because she’s in an asylum, but also because she’s so far from her loved ones. Surely being moved would be the best medicine we could possibly prescribe her,” I continued to try to persuade him, as my right hand gripped the armrest of my chair with unprecedented strength. An aggressive force, like nothing I had ever felt before, was contorting and wringing out my insides.
-“My mother would never allow it. She’s in a fragile state, and I don’t want to upset her any more than needs be. I’m sure that you understand.”
-“Upset her?! Why on earth would she be upset having her daughter close by, who she hasn’t seen in almost 15 years?!” I exclaimed, finally losing all control and passionately waving my arms about.
Instinctively, Mr Claudel took a step backwards, completely overwhelmed by my reaction and by my sudden outburst. He gulped back his annoyance and snapped back into his flawless poise.
-“Mr. Faret, this sort of behaviour is unacceptable for a man of such responsibility. I understand that you may have become too involved in your patients, perhaps even growing fond of my sister, but with all due respect, you are in no position to judge my family.”
The diplomat’s arguments were strong, but I was not going to be lured in by his eloquent, flowery language or by the politeness of his manners. But I did need to be careful, as I was not dealing with just anyone. Paul Claudel was a powerful, influential man and I could not let my behaviour give him the slightest reason to doubt my professionalism.
-“You’re absolutely right, Mr. Claudel,” I replied, lowering the tone of my voice considerably and addressing him politely. “The thing is, I’m faced with a dilemma. I do hope that between us we can find a solution.”
-“Go on,” he said, rather impatiently. I shuddered as I caught a glimpse of a pair of thin lips from underneath that styled moustache.
-“Your sister isn’t mad. I wouldn’t even go as far as to say she’s unstable. She has vastly improved, and clearly the worst treatment of all for her mental health would be to keep her in confinement.”
For the first time Paul Claudel avoided my gaze. I had certainly found the Achilles heel of this supposedly untouchable and immovable man. This slow, deliberate and honest statement had had much more impact on him than my hot-tempered rage.
-“I suffer a great deal from this situation. Camille is the most extraordinary woman I have ever met. When she was young she had the forces of nature at her fingertips, she possessed an unrivalled beauty and a daring, ambitious personality that enchanted me. It’s hard to believe that she’s locked up in a psychiatric hospital...”
-“Why did you allow her to be committed to Ville-Evrard?” I asked, jumping in just as he appeared to have lowered his guard, and the atmosphere settled into one of more mutual understanding. The last thing I wanted was for him to leave without being able to hear any kind of explanation.
The famous playwright and poet sank onto the sofa, the same one from which his sister had talked about her bitter, miserable existence. He held his head between his hands, trying to ease the burden of his conscience that weighed heavily on the rest of his body.
-“Camille had gone out of her mind. She was confined to her studio in Paris and hardly stepped outside. She scraped by with no heating and barely anything to eat in the company of a few cats. She spent part of the day sculpting and the rest of the time smashing up the finished pieces so no one would steal them. She was mostly afraid of August Rodin, imagine that! She said that he’d hired vandals to continually rob her of her maquettes. I never liked Rodin myself, as he hurt my sister a lot when he left her, but I do believe that after they separated, he tried to help her as best he could. She still loved him despite everything that had happened. Then there were the neighbours, who complained about her behaviour, her guttural shrieks, the smell of her studio, riddled with excrement, and that she went running about half-naked. She’d even set wolf snares outside the doors of her studio!”
I listened to these words that seemed to flow easily from Paul Claudel’s lips, filling the room with sorrow and shameful guilt. I believed he was being sincere with me.
-“I didn’t realise...” I confessed despondently. Perhaps there was more than one side to the story.
-“I went to see her just before I was persuaded by my mother to commit her to Ville-Evrard. I wanted to give her one last chance before having to humiliate her in such an awful way. She wouldn’t open the door to me. I had to shout from outside the door of her studio, knocking on the windows like a madman for close to an hour. In the end I thought perhaps she’d died, that the terrible cold of the winter of 1913 had finished her off. Eventually, she responded from inside, and told me to go to hell and to never come back.”
We both sat in an unbroken silence. We took a moment to address each other’s thoughts, as though trying to put ourselves in the other person’s shoes. Eventually Paul Claudel stood up and gave me his hand, with an ambiguous smile on his face that I did not know how to interpret.
-“I really must be going now. It has been a pleasure to speak with you. Don’t hesitate to contact me if you want to talk about matters further. Camille always has a place in my heart.”
The diplomat seemed satisfied with himself, and I found his attitude rather unsettling. Had I been the victim of a cunning ploy? Was Paul Claudel suddenly content with having reassured himself that after barely a few minutes with me, he had managed to intimidate and frighten me, in the same way as Cyril Mathieu?
-“One last question, Mr. Claudel. You have persuaded me, to a certain point, that there were reasons to place Camille in confinement, but I still don’t understand why you refuse to set her free now. Your sister, with all due respect, is saner than any of us, why not give her the greatest gift of all by removing her from Montdevergues?”
Paul Claudel abruptly withdrew his out-stretched hand, which I still had not taken. Then he pressed his thin lips together before he spoke:
-“My sister has caused more harm than you could ever imagine, Mr. Faret. I will try to come back to visit her in a few months, and I ask you to give her the best care possible.”
Before leaving the room, he placed an envelope on my desk with a good handful of francs inside. He vanished, as though his body, more used to Ministries halfway across the globe, could not stand a moment longer in a mental asylum. I sat for more than an hour in silence on my chair, going over our brief conversation. Paul Claudel had managed to open my mind to reasonable doubt, expressing his point of view as to why he had placed his sister in confinement. But now it was the act itself that made me hate him, rather than just the impression I had of him, which before was all I had.
Chapter 19
Cyril Mathieu
Montdevergues, 15th of January 1944
Today is Saturday. Ten days have gone by and not a single line written. I had to travel to Vichy to face those bureaucratic pencil pushers reclining on their cushioned chairs who assign the budgetary subsidies and items at random, swayed sometimes by the temptation of a tantalising reward. At least I did manage to increase the budget to run the institution, an asylum that is overcrowded and miserable like few others in France. Almost nothing remains of the exuberant place I once set foot in as a young man: the walls are shabby and crumbling; the gardens, now abandoned, have shrivelled up; the fetid, stuffy wings are tightly packed; the staff are unmotivated and sad, whilst the patients are subdued, neglected and starving. This is the spectacle I have to face every single day here.
But today, like a fugitive, I escaped to eat outside the asylum as per my usual Saturday routine, which I have abandoned somewhat recently. I went all the way to Nimes, and would have li
ked to keep going down towards Montpellier, following the line of the Mediterranean to reach the little town of Sète. Unlike the spring of 1928, there is no one there to host me anymore. Cyril Mathieu rests in peace now.
In February of 1928, I received a long letter from Mathieu, inviting me to spend a few days at his small house on the Cote d’Azur. A couple of months later I took a week’s leave and accepted his kind invitation. It had been a long time since I had seen the man who had been my superior for three years, and to be honest there were a good number of days that I missed his presence. It took some time to find his house, but in the end some locals gave me directions. It stood at the end of a beautiful, long canal that divided the town in two. He looked overjoyed to see me.
-“Edouard, my good friend Edouard...” he whispered in my ear as he hugged me, like a father and son who had been separated for many years. I could sense a deep sadness emanating from him as his skin touched mine.
-“Mr. Mathieu,” I mumbled, addressing him respectfully as in the old days.
- “Call me Cyril... please. I’m not your superior anymore,” he said smiling.
Mathieu had put a little weight on, but apart from that he was still the rather rough and frank man that I had known at Montdevergues. He took me by the arm for a stroll around the town. Sète was a fishing village, whose inhabitants were kind but simple folk that made him feel comfortable, but he had to admit he was in need of a bit more action. He was slowly but surely getting used to the good life, a daily routine that allowed him to enjoy old age, but at the same time he knew he was getting bored. He had barely made any friends, and reading and long walks were his only forms of entertainment. We reached a grand-looking cemetery that was near to the shore, and we sat down on a stone bench.
-“I like to come here to look at the sea. I feel at ease surrounded by the dead,” he said rather sullenly, as he gestured in the air with his hand, marking out an imaginary space.
-“The views are quite stunning,” I noted, feeling a little on edge in the graveyard. The dense, thick air of the humid Mediterranean climate filtered the sound of Mathieu’s voice before it reached my ears.
-“Did you know that Paul Valéry was inspired by this place when he wrote Le Cimitère Marin?” he asked me, his eyes wide open. He seemed such a dreamer sometimes, having left behind what he considered to be his entire life to dedicate it to the idle fantasies of an apathetic defeatist.
-“I haven’t the faintest idea,” I replied, surprised, waiting with bated breath for his next words.
-“Sometimes I come and read poems here, just as the sun is rising.”
-“That’s wonderfully romantic.”
Cyril rested his hands on his lap and fixed his gaze out to sea, which that morning was notably calm. You could just make out the tiny red and blue dots of fishing boats in the distance. I breathed in the sea breeze, filling my lungs with the wet, salty air of the Mediterranean.
-“How are things doing at the asylum?”
I was expecting this question, having prepared myself to answer it on our walk. I knew my reply had to be tactful so as not to hurt him, but I did not want to worry him unnecessarily either, because truthfully his presence was indeed missed, but was not essential.
-“It’s doing well. It still hasn’t sunk in that you’ve actually gone, but for now, Montdevergues is still standing,” I said light-heartedly.
Mathieu gave me a few pats on the back, still not taking his eyes off the sea, the deep blue merging with the horizon.
-“I knew I had left it in good hands. I’m sure you’ve changed a few things already, and that’s the way it should be,” he paused before continuing in a low voice, “I don’t like getting old...”
-“Don’t say that Cyril. You’re doing splendidly, you’re strong, you live in a lovely place and there’s still so much time left to do lots of things,” I said encouragingly.
Mathieu stood up, stretched his legs and began to walk around the polished tombs and gravestones. I followed him. He walked very slowly, with his hands clasped behind his back.
-“You’re so young... How is Miss Claudel doing?” he asked unexpectedly, out of the blue.
-“Good, good... Well, you know, pretty much the same,” I gabbled, awkwardly.
-“Did you burn her medical history in the end, or did you decide to read it?”
-“I read it,” I confessed.
-“I knew it. It’s only to be expected. Just as I was advising you to destroy it, I realised that it was probably the most tempting thing I could have said to make you read it. So you’re still obsessed...” Cyril said, giving me a wink.
- “It would seem so. I am still convinced a terrible injustice is being committed. I met her brother Paul recently. What a cretin.”
The former medical director of Montdevergues stopped to look into my eyes. One of his eyelids was trembling slightly, as though a nervous twitch had been triggered.
-“That isn’t true, Edouard. Paul Claudel is a great man, both cultured and intelligent. Don’t be so harsh and partial in your judgment, life is never as simple as it may seem, not for anyone.”
I knew that with those words Mathieu was not just weighing up the actions of Camille’s brother, but also his own. And he was surely already moving on to assess mine.
-“He told me why Camille was committed, and he managed to convince me,” I continued, as though not listening to his comments, “But eventually the hypocrite inside him shone through. He bears a serious grudge against his sister.”
-“Maybe, but don’t forget that neither you nor I experienced those childhood and adolescent years. Who knows what went on behind the walls that every family builds to protect themselves...”
As we walked, Mathieu would read the inscriptions on the tombstones, which I imagined by now he knew off my heart, instinctively cleared away with his hand the dust and leaves that had gathered on the marble.
-“Everyone consented to Miss Claudel being put away, as though no one cared in the slightest that it was an absolute atrocity. It’s no wonder why I’m confused. It’s the least I can feel. I feel ashamed every time I consult her, as though I’m not doing enough to being able to set her free,” I exclaimed, exasperated.
-“Not everyone abandoned her. There were critics and some sculptors who reported what had happened. Even her cousin Thierry published an article reviling his own family. And, especially at the beginning, many donations arrived at the asylum so that Miss Claudel could receive the best care and would want for nothing.”
-“And Rodin?”
-“He never visited, but he sent her money, and saved a space for some of her sculptures at his museum and asked after her almost until his very last days. Not everyone is as evil and as horrible as you might think. Don’t forget that from the very beginning her mother had banned any visits from her own family.”
I stopped Mathieu, taking him gently by the arm. He avoided my eyes, lowering his head like a warrior who had no choice but to admit defeat.
-“You can’t ask me to go on as if nothing was happening. It seems as though no one really cares about what happens to that poor woman.”
-“Edouard, I am just telling you one last time not to insist, otherwise the hell of Miss Claudel will end up becoming your own. It would be a shame to squander away your life on this affair that quite frankly doesn’t really concern you.”
I spent a couple more days in Sète. We never spoke again about Camille, or about Montdevergues. Instead we dedicated our time to eating well, fishing together and going for early morning walks through Paul Valéry’s Cimitère Marin. But behind every gesture, every look he gave me and between the lines of every sentence was concealed an untold and profound sense of guilt that tortured Cyril Mathieu, and which I am sure must have tormented him right up until the end.
Chapter 20
A fruitless gift
Montdevergues, 16th of January 1944
Thanks to the silent collusion of the two guards, slowly but surely over the
course of six or seven years, my small museum of Camille's art was growing at the rate of two pieces per year. I never knew when they would appear, and I would spend many a day without anything better to do but to wait in my office for the arrival of one of the bribed guards. Sometimes the wait seemed to go on forever and I would end up going to find them myself, suspecting that out of spite or simply carelessness they had forgotten about a clay figure in their quarters, or worse still, that they had already smashed it.
-“Any news from Miss Claudel?” I asked, without ever mentioning the real reason behind my interest.
-“No, Mr. Faret. You know that as soon as we hear anything at all we will come straight to you.”
The behavior of the guards had changed considerably towards me since I had risen to highest authority at Montdevergues. Sometimes I had the impression they tried to steer clear of me, avoiding my look, ashamed of their behavior and surely embarrassed by mine. At least they no longer jeered at me in my presence or made remarks behind my back. But who knows what they said when I was out of earshot.
On rainy days I was particularly on edge, and not only did I continually hound my partners in crime, the guards, but also the nurses in charge of caring for Camille.
-“Has Miss Claudel come out of her room?”
-“No, Mr. Faret, she’s shut herself away as usual.”
Sometimes I was sure I could detect certain disdain in the tone of the nurses' voice, as though my obsession for those simple pieces made from that coarse, almost revolting material was already an open secret. But it was not the dirty clay of the asylum that I was after, but rather the miraculous transformation of that damp earth in Camille’s hands.
I remember on those days when I was confined to my office, I would look out over the gardens from my window, watching as a downpour pelted the earth, turning it into a muddy bog. I would lie in wait, watching like a hawk for any sign of Camille who might appear at any moment to dig up a piece of mud with her bare hands to work on for a few days.