Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (24 page)

Two days later, Sacha Guitry’s offer of two free tickets to his new play at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens failed to tempt Monet to Paris. “I am going through a very bad period with my work,” he explained. “I’m in a state of impossible anxiety. I’ve ruined the good pieces by trying to improve them, and now I have to try to fix it at all costs...For the time being, I can’t leave here and I can’t see anyone.”
¹⁹

For the previous two and a half years, Monet had worked happily and productively despite the anxieties and upheavals of the war, the
periodic problems with his eyes and his teeth, his frustrations with the uncooperative weather, and the occasional bouts of discouragement that, nonetheless, always seemed to pass. He had delighted in showing the Grande Décoration to friends and gauging their reactions, which he always interpreted as positive; and he even sent out feelers to cultural entrepreneurs such as Raymond Koechlin and Maurice Joyant, planning (or at least dreaming of) a future exhibition or installation of his work. By November 1916, indeed, he appeared to think he was reaching the end of his labors. Yet uncertainty about his achievement suddenly took hold, apparently precipitated by the prospect of Matisse’s scrutiny, which appears to have unnerved him or made him look at his paintings anew.

This crisis persisted through the Christmas period and into the New Year. Not even the highly successful sale of twenty-four of his works in New York, held over two days in mid-January, could lift his mood. This auction, conducted in the Grand Ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, was billed in the
New York Herald
as “the most notable sale of Monet paintings ever held in the world”, and his paintings, all from James F. Sutton’s collection, fetched what the
Herald
called record prices: a total of $161,600, or more than 800,000 francs. The sight of the paintings on the auctioneer’s easel “elicited much applause from his admirers in the audience.”
²⁰
But the spectacle of wealthy Americans opening their checkbooks and applauding his paintings did little to cheer Monet, who once gracelessly complained that many of the people who bought his works were “idiots, snobs, and hucksters.”
²¹
When the Bernheim-Jeune brothers excitedly gave him news of the auction, he sniffed: “The prices were a bit excessive, in my opinion,” although he frankly admitted to them: “I’m in the state of mind to find everything absolutely wrong.”
²²
As he informed Geffroy a short time later, he was “saddened by this dreadful war, worried about my poor Michel, who risks his life at every moment, and...disgusted with everything I’ve done, which I now see I won’t be able to finish. I feel that I’m at the end of my tether and no good for anything anymore.”
²³

*

A FEW DAYS
after penning these lines, Monet overcame his bad temper and began planning a trip to Paris to visit Geffroy. But at the last minute he canceled, citing the difficulties of the journey: the trains were running late, there were no waiting rooms on the Paris-bound platforms at Bonnières and Mantes-la-Jolie, and he would therefore have been forced to expose himself to the cold and wind, “which would be imprudent for an old man like myself.”
²⁴

He was right about the cold. By the end of January, the weather was frigid, with the temperature in Paris failing to rise above minus 5 degrees Celsius (23 degrees Fahrenheit) for days on end, and dropping as low as minus 10 degrees Celsius (14 degrees Fahrenheit) during the night. The fountains in the Place de la Concorde froze solid; so did the canals and the narrow arm of the Seine on the south side of the Île de la Cité. Transport along the rest of the river was made treacherous by ice floes—indeed, all river traffic was halted between Paris and Rouen, where the ice closed the port. To add to the misery, coal was in desperately short supply, forcing some Parisians to chop up their furniture as firewood. “How long will it continue?” asked a newspaper in despair.
²⁵
On that day, the first of February, a heavy snow fell across the region, and on the second, Candlemas, people nervously recited an old proverb:
“À
la chandeleur, l’hiver se passe ou prend vigueur”
(“At Candlemas, winter either passes or takes hold”). On that day, ominously, the temperature at sunrise was minus 6 degrees Celsius (21 degrees Fahrenheit) and the weather (as
Le Matin
reported) “remained rigorously cold.”
²⁶

At the Villa des Brillants, his house in Meudon, Auguste Rodin coped with the freezing weather and lack of coal by staying in bed all day with his longtime companion and onetime model, seventy-two-year-old Rose Beuret. The pair had wed only a few days earlier. Rose, feverish with bronchitis at the ceremony, soon fell ill with pneumonia; then Rodin himself was stricken. At the end of January,
Le Figaro
anxiously reported that “the master is very weak.”
²⁷
Rodin began a slow recovery, but Rose died on February 14, barely a fortnight after the nuptials for which she had waited more than fifty years.

Two days later, another death in Monet’s circle affected him much more profoundly: that of Octave Mirbeau. On February 16 Monet wrote to Geffroy asking for the date of the next Goncourt dinner, “because the weather is improving and, having several important things to do in Paris, I intend to go there soon.”
²⁸
These urgent tasks had nothing to do with his paintings: he was still dismissive and despairing of his efforts, which he had not resumed in any force. Joseph Durand-Ruel had recently approached him regarding the possibility of selling some of these new works. He asked Monet for permission for his brother to send a photographer to Giverny: “He believes that he would have opportunities to sell them if he had photographs of the decorations and the prices that you would wish to have.”
²⁹
But Monet was having none of it: neither a photographer nor sales to Durand-Ruel’s clients. “I will not have any photographs done until this work—which, incidentally, does not always go to my liking—is more or less finished,” he curtly informed the dealer. He added: “Moreover, for the same reason I cannot think of selling, since I do not know if I will finish it.”
³⁰

Monet did go to Paris, as he promised Geffroy, although not for the merriment of a Goncourt dinner. On February 16, Mirbeau died at his apartment in Paris, on his sixty-ninth birthday. The funeral was held on the afternoon of the nineteenth at the Cimetière de Passy. Geffroy, Clemenceau, the Goncourtistes, les Guitry—all were present along with Monet, who in his grief clung desperately to Charlotte Lysès as the distinguished band of mourners followed the wreath-laden funeral cart to the grave. One of the other mourners was struck by Monet’s aged appearance and his unabashed distress at the loss of his old friend: “Bareheaded under the misty winter sky, this rough-mannered but sincere man stood and sobbed. From the depths of his eyes, red with grief, tears rolled into the thickets of his long beard, which was now quite white.”
³¹
Such was Monet’s grief, as he later explained to Geffroy, that he wandered away from the cemetery “without knowing what I was doing” and without bidding farewell to his friends.
³²

If Mirbeau’s death was not unexpected, then what happened next certainly took some of his friends and readers by shocked surprise. On
the day of his funeral,
Le Petit Parisien
, a newspaper with (as its banner proudly declared) “the largest print run in the entire world,” published on its front page what it billed as Mirbeau’s “political testament.”
³³
Despite his infirmity, Mirbeau had already written on the war for
Le Petit Parisien
, in a front-page article published eighteen months earlier in the summer of 1915. Entitled “To Our Soldiers,” it had supposedly been coaxed out of him by “a woman of great heart” who asked him for “a few lines, a few sentences, even a word” for the men at the front. As someone who had condemned heroism in battle as absurd, “a dangerous and disturbing form of banditry and murder,” Mirbeau might have been the last person expected to offer a few comforting lines to the men in the trenches. But he had duly produced, undoubtedly with the help of an amanuensis, a salute to the heroism and bravery of the young men fighting the war. He gave a poignant mention of a wounded young soldier whom he met by his garden gate in Cheverchemont. “He told me of the most incredible things and I felt moved to tears.”
³⁴

These sentiments, with their eloquently expressed sympathy for the common soldier, caused no controversy. The article published on the day of his funeral was a different matter. The short introduction by the editor of
Le Petit Parisien
stated that Mirbeau had “yielded to the prayers of a compassionate woman”—that is, to Madame Mirbeau—and offered his “last thoughts” on France and the war: a testament that (so the editor assured his readers) expressed Mirbeau’s patriotism, idealism, and confidence in the impending victory of France’s “holy cause.” In the article Mirbeau denounced “the greatest crime in the history of the world, the monstrous aggression by Germany,” and advocated “sacrificing everything for France.” He assured his “old and dear comrades” that France’s preeminent moral position in the world offered the hope of a regenerated humanity.

Monet cannot have been especially perturbed by these sentiments, some of which he shared and some of which Clemenceau had already repeatedly voiced. But these words astounded and appalled some of Mirbeau’s “old and dear comrades” on the left, who had known him as a committed pacifist and antimilitarist. Indeed, as
Le Petit Parisien
noted:
“Of all the detractors of war who, in times of peace, launched their anathemas against the dreaded goddess, Monsieur Octave Mirbeau was the most vehement.”
³⁵
Yet now the great detractor seemed to be worshipping at the goddess’s shrine. Barely had he been laid into the ground than he was denounced as a worthless hypocrite, “the sum total of whose works amount to nothing.”
³⁶

The testament was soon condemned as a forgery cooked up by his wife and a journalist named Gustave Hervé, a political turncoat (from socialist to ultranationalist) who formed part of “an abominable intrigue around the bedside of the dying man” and who delivered a rambling, reactionary eulogy at the graveside.
³⁷
Mirbeau in his last days was incapable of recognizing his closest friends, let alone expostulating political and moral philosophy, and there can be little doubt that the article was composed by other hands.
³⁸
But the damage done to his reputation was considerable. Monet was therefore left to mourn, not only the death of a friend whose physical and mental deterioration had caused him so much worry and grief, but also the fatal tarnishing of his name.

THE COLD WINTER
turned slowly into spring. Still Monet did little or no work on his Grande Décoration. He made frequent trips to Paris (“which turns my life upside-down”) in order to visit his dentist—although his dental problems did not prevent him from enjoying the occasional meal at the restaurant Drouant or the sweets sent to him by Gaston Bernheim-Jeune’s wife. “She spoils me so much,” he confessed to Gaston, “but she knows how greedy I am.”
³⁹
He also read books: Théophile Gautier’s
Le Capitaine Fracasse
, a swashbuckling novel set in seventeenth-century France; and Sainte-Beuve’s
Galerie de femmes célèbres
, with its biographies of illustrious Frenchwomen such as Marguerite of Navarre, Madame de Sévigné, and Madame de Maintenon. In despair over his work, Monet was losing himself in the rustling silk and clashing swords of France’s ancien régime.

At some point he did pick up his brush and palette, but it was to paint something quite different from his lily pond: he began several self-portraits. The act was highly uncharacteristic. No painter was ever less
interested in self-portraits than Monet, who was far more intrigued by the reflective surface of his pond than by his own image in the looking-glass. Occasionally he posed for his friends, such as Carolus-Duran in 1867 and, five years later, Renoir, who showed him hunched over a book, smoking a long-stemmed pipe. In 1886 he had painted his self-portrait wearing a black beret, looking serious and askance. His 1917 self-portraits were also uncompleted. Two of them he destroyed: they “perished on an unhappy day,” according to Clemenceau, who managed to rescue the third before it, too, could suffer Monet’s destructive wrath.
⁴⁰

Freely and even frantically painted, with slashing, stabbing brushwork, the surviving self-portrait shows Monet with ruddy cheeks and a large, yellowish beard. He would claim that a photograph taken of him later that year, though “very lifelike,” made him “look a little like an escaped prisoner.”
⁴¹
His self-portrait shows him to be nothing so desperate or sinister. Rather, he looks every inch the weather-beaten peasant—the same figure who, a year later, would impress a visitor for whom his vitality so belied his white beard that he seemed to be “a young father on Christmas Day wearing a false white beard to make his children believe in old Father Christmas.”
⁴²
For Clemenceau, this ruddy-cheeked self-portrait revealed Monet’s “superhuman ambition.”
⁴³
However, as he worked in front of his mirror, Monet had in fact been drained of ambition and self-confidence.