Free Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet by Stephanie Cowell Page A

things have worked out for you. I presume your words “all is well” mean that your family will continue your allowance and we will not have to sleep like beggars by a church door. You are really talented, you know. Now you have to get down to it and create a body of work, as do I!
I am going to try to do some chalk portraits for quick cash, and as soon as I get some, I’ll pay the next quarter’s rent. The butcher’s wife says perhaps, if I make her pretty. (She is not; you know her.) Come back and we’ll do a dozen things this autumn. We could hire models and split the cost .
I can’t send your greetings to the Mesdemoiselles Doncieux because they have disappeared. I went to the bookshop but the younger one was gone and her bastard uncle would not give me her address. I am in a fine situation to go on without them, outside of the fact that Mademoiselle Camille keeps coming to my mind .
CM
    All that summer he worked on his canvas, painting, retouching, scraping, remembering. He worked on the dresses, the leaves, the couple strolling; he pushed away every other thing. Friends returning to the city in the autumn stopped by to admire it; they told others about his great painting. Frédéric came back triumphant from his visit to his family; within an hour he had stacked his medical books to sell, thrown on his old suit, and set a new canvas on his easel. Sitting at it, he began a still life of dead herons. He sat blissfully for so many hours that he was quite stiff when he rose.
    He threw his arm around Claude’s shoulder as he surveyed the large painting of the picnickers. “It’s perfect,” he said. “I’ll never do anything half so rich!”
    More friends visited, all giving advice. “It’s the best thing you’ve done!” “It’s wonderful but for …” Then Courbet came around with talk of some new commissions he had obtained and persuaded Claude to let him retouch some spots he said were clumsy.
    The portrait of the eighteen-year-old Camille looked out at them all, well bred and polite, spots of sun on her white dress.
    Colder winds blew from down the hills across the river, and the leaves on the trees, which he could see from the studio window, turned yellow; after a heavy autumnal rain, they fell in sodden heaps to the cobbled street. Claude painted into midwinter.
    One dark morning, he stumbled out to his painting as soon as he came from bed, as always. The studio floorboards were cold to his bare feet and he wiggled his toes to lift them. He rubbed his eyes and raised them to his great canvas, then drew in his breath.
    What he had seen so clearly on a summer’s day in the forest was not on the canvas before him. People were clumsily placed; the brushstrokes were all wrong. It had been repainted many times and he had never found the balance of human form and light. It was not a masterpiece at all. How could he not have seen it before? How could he have made such a mess of it?
    With a shout he ripped the top of the canvas from the stretchers. The supporting boards shuttered. The frame cracked and fell amid the heavy canvas. Frédéric ran from his bedroom in his nightshirt crying, “You idiot! Tu es fou!” but it was too late.
    Later Claude sadly rolled the painting up, and yet even then he could not escape its presence. He could still feel the strollers walking under the trees; he felt them escape and float around the room.
    F OR DAYS HE walked moodily about or lay on the sofa trying to read, ignoring the brushstrokes of Auguste and Frédéric at their easels. As the short winter light was fading one late afternoon, Frédéric glanced over at Claude and called, “You haven’t left that sofa all day! Paint something else. Come on, Monet. I know it was eight months’ work and a fortune but you’re deader than the herons I’m painting, and they’re starting to stink.”
    Auguste walked over to Claude, hands on his hips. “Get up, you sloth,” he said firmly. “I have an idea to make money since