Sacré Bleu

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.”