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

there’s nothing left to pawn. Let’s walk over to the Café des Ambassadeurs near the Champs-Élysées. We can solicit drawing quick chalk portraits for twenty francs each. We both need money. You owe everyone for what’s rolled up in the corner. You paid those girls and they probably spent it on new gloves. Frédéric can stay here with his stinking birds.”
    “My stinking birds will win me a place in the Salon!”
    “Oh, the hell with the Salon!” Claude cried savagely. He sat up. “ Merde! I’m such bad company I could hire myself out as a professional mourner. I wish I could do caricatures, but I can’t stand the idea. Now you’re going to drag me someplace. Good-bye, birds.” He buttoned his coat reluctantly and, with Auguste’s arm in his, descended to the windy evening street with its torn blowing bits of news journal and smell of coal fires.
    The Café des Ambassadeurs was the largest of the fashionable new café-concerts in Paris. Claude and Auguste squeezed in the door past a few drunken men smoking cigars and left their coats in the cloakroom before entering the enormous central room, which was ablaze with gaslight. Hundreds of people seated at tables talked at once, and a soprano tried to make herself heard over the orchestra; waitresses shouting orders pushed by him. Many more revelers sat at tables in the balcony, leaning on the rail and calling down to friends.
    “Come on!” Auguste cried, taking his sketchbook from his bag. “You take the left side of the room and I’ll take the right. Go from table to table and ask if they want a fifteen-minute portrait.”
    Claude pushed past a waitress and approached several people at a round table who were drinking champagne from fluted glasses. “I beg your pardon, mesdames and messieurs,” he asked, “but would you like a quick souvenir of this enchanting evening?”
    He caught sight of his reflection in a wall mirror: untrimmed dark hair almost to his shoulders, angry eyes. It’s my sternness, he thought, retreating after a fourth table of friends had refused him, backing into waitresses carrying trays of foaming beer in glasses. Tonight, when I must be charming, I can’t. And there was Auguste across the large room, head bobbing convivially, already having begun a portrait of a young couple.
    Claude elbowed himself through the crowd to the bar and threw down a coin for a glass of wine. No, he thought, swirling the wine, I’ve got myself into a very deep hole and there’s no way out of it. The Salon entries are in two months and all my friends will do well. Frédéric had begun that painting of a gorgeous model in a green dress playing his spinet and will redeem himself in the eyes of his family. But as for me …
    He looked about the room, raising his eyes to the balcony.
    Camille-Léonie Doncieux was sitting at a table there, her arm on the rail, gazing down at the crowd. She wore a pink dress cut low and seemed to slightly shimmer in the flickering gaslight.
    Swallowing the last of his wine quickly, he elbowed his way past people to mount the stairs to the balcony, exclaiming breathlessly, “Mademoiselle Doncieux!”
    She turned quickly. “Oh, Annette, do look who’s here!” she cried as the two men at her table and her sister turned to gaze at him.
    He bowed to them. Annette, who had drunk wine so freely in the inn kitchen, had now turned into a matron. Though she was somewhat alluring in her low-cut pale blue evening dress, which showed off her long neck, she seemed, if possible, even more aloof than she had before. He also could find little interesting in either of the two men at the table, each near forty, obviously prosperous, and one of them married to her.
    Annette took up her fan delicately. “Henri,” she said to the man at her side, “here’s the very artist who painted us last summer during our little adventure! Monsieur, we hope you and your friend have been well.”
    “Quite well! And both of you?”
    “Henri, I believe