Sacre Bleu: A Comedy d'Art Page 22

  From the station at Vernon, he walked the two miles into the countryside to Giverny—less a village, really, than a collection of small farms that happened to perch together just off the river Seine. Monet’s place lay on a sunny rise above a grove of tall willows that had once been a marsh that the painter had converted into a water garden, with two wide lily ponds with an arched Japanese bridge at their intersection.

  The house was a sturdy two-story of pink stucco with bright green shutters.

  Madame Monet, who was, in fact, not yet Madame Monet, met Lucien at the door. Alice Hoschedé, a tall, elegant, dark-haired woman, her chignon now beginning to streak with gray, had been the wife of one of Monet’s patrons, a banker. She had now been with the painter for fifteen years, but they were not married. Monet had been living and painting commissions on the Hoschedés’ estate in the South when the banker suddenly fell into ruin and abandoned his family. Monet and his wife, Camille, invited Alice and her four children to live with them and their own two sons. Even long after Camille died, and she and Monet had become a couple, Alice, a devout Catholic, insisted they keep up the ruse that their relationship was platonic, and they still kept separate bedrooms.

  “These are lovely, Lucien,” she said, accepting the basket of baked goods. A teenage daughter, Germaine, whisked them off to the kitchen. “Perhaps we can all share them for lunch,” said Alice. “Claude’s in the garden, painting.”

  She led him through the house, the foyer and dining room of which were painted bright yellow. Nearly every wall was covered with framed Japanese prints by Hokusai and Hiroshige, with the odd Cézanne, Renoir, or Pissarro hung here and there among them as accents, or vice versa. Lucien peeked into a large parlor as they passed, the walls of which were lined floor to ceiling with Monet’s own work, but Lucien didn’t dare stop to lose himself in the master’s paintings as Alice was already on the back porch, presenting the garden with a wave, as if ushering an ascended soul into paradise.

  “I think he’s back by the bridge today, Lucien.”

  Lucien walked through the back garden, rows upon rows of blooming flowers, built from the ground up on trellises and tripods, so that from eye level to the lawn, there was nothing but color, roses and daisies and dahlias the size of dinner plates, all mixed wildly by color, if not species, so that there was no gradation, no pink next to a red, no lavender next to a violet, but contrast in size and color, blues over yellows, oranges nesting among purples, reds framed in greens. Lucien realized that from any window at the back of the house, one could look out upon nature’s palette exploding across the landscape. This was a garden designed by and for a painter, someone who loved color.

  He came out of the mounds of color and into a cool grove of willow trees, and there, by the two mirror-calm lily ponds, he found Monet at his easel. Lucien made no attempt to approach in stealth; instead he shuffled his feet on the path and cleared his throat when he was still a good twenty meters away from the painter. Monet glanced quickly out from under the wide brim of his straw gardener’s hat, then went right back to applying paint to canvas. A finished painting leaned against the trunk of a nearby willow.

  “So, Lucien, what brings you out to the country?” There was welcome and warmth in Monet’s voice, but he did not pause a second in his work. Lucien took no offense. Once, while painting his enormous Luncheon on the Grass, near the forest of Fontainebleau, with Frédéric Bazille and his beloved Camille as models, Monet had become so engrossed in his work that he’d neglected to notice a team of athletes had come to the field to practice, and so had been quite surprised when an errant discus shattered his ankle. Bazille had painted the scene of Monet convalescing, his leg in traction.

  “I’m looking for a girl,” said Lucien.

  “Paris has finally run out, then? Well, you could do worse than a girl from Normandy.”

  Lucien watched the master laying down the color, the white and pink of the water lilies, the gray-green of the willows reflected on the surface of the water, the muted umber and slate blue of the sky in the water. Monet worked as if there was no thought process involved at all—his mind was simply the conduit to move color from his eye to the canvas, like the court stenographer who might transcribe a whole trial, every word going from his ear to the paper, yet remain unaware of what had transpired in the courtroom. Monet had trained himself to be a machine for the harvest of color. With brush in hand, he was no longer a man, a father, or a husband, but a device of singular purpose; he was, as he had always introduced himself, the painter Monet.

  “A particular girl,” said Lucien, “and to find her, I need to ask you about blue.”

  “I hope you’re going to stay the week, then,” said Monet. “I’ll have Alice make up the guest room for you.”

  “Not blue in general, Oncle. The blue you got from the Colorman.”

  Monet stopped painting. There was no doubt in Lucien’s mind that he knew which Colorman.

  “You have used his color, then?”

  “I have.”

  Monet turned on his stool now and pushed back the brim of his broad hat so he could look at Lucien. His long black beard was shot with gray, but his blue eyes burned with a fierce intensity that made Lucien feel as if he’d been stripped naked for some sort of examination. He had to look away.

  Monet said, “I told you never to buy color from him.”

  “No you didn’t. I didn’t remember ever seeing you with him until yesterday.”

  Monet nodded. “That happens with the Colorman. Tell me.”

  And so Lucien told Monet about Juliette and painting the blue nude, about Henri and Carmen, about their loss of memory, about the Professeur’s hypnotic trance and the phantom rain on their shoulders, about the death of Vincent van Gogh and the letter to Henri, how Vincent had been afraid of the Colorman and had tried to escape him by going to Arles.

  “So he’s gone now, you think?” asked Monet.

  “Along with Juliette, and I have to find her. You know, don’t you, Oncle? When you painted Gare Saint-Lazare, six paintings in a half an hour, you knew?”

  “Not a half an hour, Lucien, four hours. For me it was four hours, maybe more. You know what time is like when you are painting.”

  “I looked at the station clock.”

  “The Colorman’s blue can stop time,” said the painter, as if he were declaring something as obvious and accepted as the sky being blue.

  Lucien sat down in the grass abruptly, feeling as if his knees would not support him; the nerves in his legs had been suddenly severed. “That’s not possible.”

  “I know. Nevertheless, it’s true. You’ve used it, so you know. It’s in the feel of the paint, the behavior of the surface. Critics never see that, never account for that. They always think we are trying to say something with the paint; they don’t know the paint itself speaks to us, by touch, by reflection. You have felt it, no?”

  “Oncle Claude, I don’t understand. We thought there was some kind of drug in the color, that we were hallucinating.”

  “I understand. And at the time, I thought I had gone mad, but I pushed through. An artist can’t let madness stop him from making art, he simply has to channel it. That’s what I thought I was doing.”

  “For how long? How long did you think you were mad?”

  “Until about two minutes ago,” said the older painter.

  “You never said anything.”

  “What was I to say? ‘Oh, Lucien, by the way, I realize the clock has only moved a half an hour, but I managed to paint six paintings of Gare Saint-Lazare, and the smoke was kind enough to hold still while I painted.’”

  “I suppose I would have thought you mad,” said Lucien.

  “That was the only time I bought paint directly from the Colorman. That day at Gare Saint-Lazare. And he knew what I was trying to do. I remember him saying that if I washed my canvas with his blue, it would make what I was doing easier.”

  “You said that was the only time you got color ‘directly’ from
him. You had used his color before?”

  “Before and after then. My wife, Camille. It was Camille who brought it to me, and it was she who paid for it. I fear in more than just money.”

  Lucien shuddered. He hadn’t bought paint from the Colorman either. It had always come through Juliette. He might never have connected the two of them if Henri hadn’t pointed it out. He said, “So your Camille knew the Colorman?”

  Monet slouched on his stool and looked at the ground in front of him. “From when I met her, the early days, running out on hotel bills, dragging that twenty-foot canvas all over France with me, Camille was like some wild wood nymph, but always interested in the painting, pushing me to go farther, do more, even after she became pregnant and it would have been so much easier for us if I had taken other work. But I remember how she brought me a box full of color early on, right after I first met her, and from then on, she would coyly present me with tubes of paint, like little love gifts. ‘Make me a beautiful picture, Claude,’ she would say. Sometimes we would go on adventures and I would paint for what seemed like months, in the forest at Fontainebleau, or the beaches at Honfleur and Trouville, and I would wonder why the innkeeper at the Cheval Blanc was putting up with us for so long, only to find out that we had been on his books for only a day or two. It went on for years like that. Camille would go for months playing the role of the dutiful wife, the good mother—she would fret about money and the future—then suddenly she would be the carefree girl again, and we would be like new lovers, at each other every moment I wasn’t painting and she wasn’t taking care of the children. I would lose weeks in the color and in her flesh, happy, ecstatic to do so. I would get to where I was about to drop with exhaustion, and suddenly she would be the responsible wife again, taking care of the family while I either recovered, as if from a fever, or simply slept for days.”

  “And you think it was the Colorman’s blue that made her this way?”

  “I didn’t at first; who would have thought such a thing? But after the Gare Saint-Lazare paintings, I came to believe it. But even then, if someone had told me I was somehow cheating time, I don’t know that I would have changed anything. I was painting. Always painting. Painting well. Why would I change that? How could I? But eventually, I think the painting killed Camille.”

  Monet’s voice broke at the end, almost as if he was suppressing a sob. Lucien didn’t know what to do. Should he embrace his mentor? Offer sympathy? Pat his arm and tell him all would be well? As it had been with his own father, Lucien felt wrong consoling his painter “uncles.” They were pillars of strength, resolve, and genius—how could he presume to offer them anything but admiration? But then he thought of his friends who were painters, Vincent, Henri, Bernard, even Seurat, walled into his intellectual fortress of color theory and optics—all were plagued by fits of hubris followed by soul-crushing self-doubt. Were Monet, Pissarro, and Renoir any different? Really?

  Lucien said, “Everyone knows it’s not easy to be the wife of an artist, but you—”

  Monet held up his paintbrush to interrupt Lucien. “Your girl, this Juliette? Is she ill?”

  “What?” Lucien was casting his gaze around the lily pond, looking for some order to manifest itself. What had he expected to hear? “Juliette? No, she wasn’t sick.”

  “Good,” said Monet. “Perhaps she left you before it happened. With Camille it was years and years. But I tried to save her. I did hope.”

  At that, Monet set his palette on the ground, dropped his brush into a can of turpentine that hung from a chain on his easel, and stood.

  “Come with me.” Monet led Lucien back through the garden to a large, plain block building adjacent to the house. The painter unlocked the door with a key on his watch chain and let them into a studio with high ceilings and skylights draped with white linen to diffuse the light, not unlike the lighting in Lucien’s own storeroom studio.

  There were wooden racks against one wall to keep canvases separated while they dried, but dozens upon dozens of paintings, most of Monet’s garden and the countryside around Giverny, were hung edge to edge all the way to the ceiling on the end wall. Finished canvases were leaned at the foot of the wall in rows, ten-deep, with the painted side facing in so dust couldn’t settle on the surface before it had cured enough for varnishing.

  “I suppose I should ship most of these off to Durand-Ruel,” said Monet. “It’s not good to keep so many in one place. Pissarro lost sixteen hundred paintings when the Prussians took his house during the war. They used his paintings as aprons in the slaughterhouse they set up. Lined the floors with them against the blood.”

  Lucien shuddered at the thought. “I heard Monsieur Renoir’s brother-in-law used some of his paintings to waterproof the roofs of his rabbit hutches. Madame Renoir boxed her brother’s ears and you could hear the commotion all over the butte.”

  “Ah, Aline,” said Monet. “Renoir was lucky to find that one when he did.”

  Monet flipped through the stacked canvases and finally stopped and pulled out a portrait of a woman. He stood it against the others, then stepped back. She was sleeping, her face surrounded by a storm of color, slashes of blue and white, laid down even more furiously than Monet’s usual style. “See,” the painter said. “I tried to save her. I tried to bring her back.”

  Lucien didn’t understand. The face in the portrait wasn’t clearly rendered, just the hint of features among the color. “Madame Monet?” he asked.

  “Camille on her deathbed,” said Monet. “The last time I used that blue. Alice’s daughter Blanche was in the room. She had been caring for Camille. I thought she would think I was some kind of ghoul. My wife slips away and I am painting her corpse. I told her I had to capture the shade of blue Camille was turning, before it went away. She never questioned it. She just left me to paint. But I was trying to bring her back, trying to stop time the way that I had stopped it at Gare Saint-Lazare that day, the way it had stopped all those times when Camille and I were traveling, when she was modeling for me. Anything, just to have another moment with her, to keep her with me.”

  The painting changed for Lucien now. He could see in the brushstrokes what Monet had always stated as his purpose: to capture the moment. He was trying to keep her alive.

  “Make me a beautiful picture, Claude. Make me a beautiful picture.” Madame Monet on Her Deathbed—Claude Monet, 1879

  He could think of nothing to say about the painting. To comment on it as art would have seemed cold; to comment on the subject, well, nothing was really enough in the face of such grief. “I’m sorry,” Lucien said finally, and let that hang in the air for a moment before pressing on. He remembered Madame Monet from when the Monets had lived on Montmartre, and although he hadn’t known her well, she had always been kind to him. “How did you know? She had been sick for a long time, hadn’t she? How did you think to try to use the blue again?”

  “She told me,” said Monet. “She was fighting for breath, gasping, and she had been for a time. Not even life enough to cough. But then she took my hand, and the light came back into her eyes; just for a moment, she was that wild girl who had been coming to me all those years, and she said, ‘Make me a beautiful picture, Claude. Make me a beautiful picture.’ That is how I knew. All those years, she hadn’t been saying make a beautiful picture for her, she was asking me to make her into a picture. It sounds mad, even now, saying it out loud.”

  “No,” was all Lucien said, and he let the silence settle on the room.

  Monet tucked the picture of Camille back into the stack, then shuffled about, arranging brushes in jars, gathering rags, and rolling up paint tubes, while Lucien pretended to be looking at the paintings on the wall so he didn’t see the tears in his mentor’s eyes.

  Lucien had a thousand questions, but he didn’t want his fear for Juliette to drive him to be unkind. When he heard Monet strike a match to light his pipe, he let fly.

  “What of the others? Renoir? Cézanne? Did they do business with the Colorman?”
>
  Monet puffed on his pipe as if considering an academic question, not something so close to his heart as his Camille. “You remember Renoir’s Margot, don’t you?”

  “Of course. She lived on Montmartre.”

  “She died a few months after Camille. Her death nearly destroyed Auguste, he was so heartbroken. I came to her funeral, and that night we drank, Renoir and I, and some of the others, and he talked about painting her, about not being able to find paintings that he knew he had made of her. It was so close after the time Camille died that I thought then his false memories might be caused by that same blue—that Renoir had somehow discovered by accident what I had. But I didn’t have the courage to ask him, and soon he went away, traveling all of the Mediterranean, I think to escape it. We have never spoken of it since.”

  “And the others?”

  Monet rolled his eyes and drew a spiral in the air with the stem of his pipe, as if he were directing the orchestra of his memory. Finally he said, “Could be everyone, could be none of them, Lucien. You know painters. If the Louvre should offer to buy this Blue Nude of yours, declare it a national treasure, would you look for some way to give credit to this magical paint?”

  “No, I suppose not, but Pissarro—”

  “Lucien, look.” With his pipe, Monet directed Lucien’s gaze to the wall of paintings, touching each in the air as if it were a musical note on a staff. “In my lily ponds, there is a big gray carp. I think he must have come in from the Seine when we first built them. He is the same color as the mud at the bottom of the pond, the same color as the shadow of the willows. Sometimes all you can see of him is a light gray line that is the edge of his dorsal fin. Every time I paint the garden, I paint the light on the surface of the pond, the reflections, the lilies floating above, the sky and sun reflected on the water, and even as I paint, he is there. I have to look to see him, and sometimes I don’t know he’s there until he moves, but he is there. There’s no image of him in any of these paintings, but he is in every one of them, under the surface. I know he was there. I can feel him there in these paintings, even if you cannot see him. Do you understand?”