Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (32 page)

Clemenceau may have claimed that afternoon, as he stood before the cheering deputies, that his duty was done, but the feeling was only temporary. Back in the terrible days of June he had announced to the Chamber of Deputies: “It remains for the living to complete the
magnificent work of the dead.”
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He would stay in office to complete his task. On the evening of November 11, as he returned to the rue Franklin, he was under no illusions about the almost insuperable difficulties. He suddenly appeared withdrawn and even depressed. Contrary to what he had said in the chamber, his duties, he knew, were far from finished. The words of Marshal Foch no doubt rang in his ears. “We have won the war,” he told one of his generals. “Now we have to win the peace, and it may be more difficult.”
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“THE GREAT CLEMENCEAU
came to have lunch with me,” Monet wrote to the Bernheim-Jeunes on November 24. “It was his first day off and I’m the one he came to visit, which makes me very proud.”
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Clemenceau went to Giverny on November 18, exactly a week after the armistice was signed. Monet had written to him on November 12, a day when newspapers such as
Le Petit Parisien
were hailing Clemenceau as the “liberator” of France. “Great and dear friend,” Monet wrote, “I am on the verge of finishing two decorative paintings that I want to sign on the day of Victory and have you offer to the State on my behalf. It’s not much, but it’s the only way I can take part in the Victory. I want the two panels placed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs and would be happy if you chose them. I admire you and embrace you with all my heart.”
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Clemenceau was eager to see the works, but even more eager to visit Monet, of whom he had seen little if anything during the previous year. What’s more, the “great Clemenceau” needed some respite from all of the acclaim and applause. A few days earlier he had tried to travel incognito through the crowds to take part in the victory celebrations by listening to the soprano Marthe Chenal, wearing a black Alsatian cap, sing in the place de l’Opéra. “But Monsieur Clemenceau cannot remain incognito for long,” reported a newspaper. The crowd, soon spotting him, tried to carry him in triumph through the streets, forcing him to take cover in a nearby house from whose window overlooking the place de l’Opéra he watched the performance. The day before traveling to Giverny he appeared with Poincaré and other dignitaries before the statues of Strasbourg and Lille in the place de la Concorde—only
to have the crowd repeatedly chant “
Vive Clemenceau! Vive Clemenceau!
” It must have been disconcerting for a man who thrived on controversy and invective, and who believed that life was a battle, suddenly to find himself almost universally adulated.
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So, on Monday the eighteenth, relieved of official obligations for the day, Clemenceau telephoned Gustave Geffroy at his home in the grounds of the Gobelins: “I shall pick you up,” he announced.
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A short time later he and Geffroy were speeding west, traveling with two cars and four chauffeurs, the extra vehicle and spare drivers accompanying them in case of a mechanical breakdown.
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No mishap was going to prevent Clemenceau from keeping his appointment with Monet.

Monet had been expecting to find his old friend aged, “but I think I can say,” he told René Gimpel a few days later, “that he has taken off ten years.” After an embrace, Monet told Clemenceau that he had saved France, but Clemenceau, ever the champion of the humble French soldier, replied: “No, it was the infantry.”
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Clemenceau then paid Monet a compliment of his own, telling him he was proud that Monet was a Frenchman.
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Monet’s paintings had long been for Clemenceau among the highest expressions of French art and civilization, feats of supreme beauty that were evidence of French cultural and moral superiority—the kinds of values that for the past four years had been defended by the heroic
poilus
against the terrible threat of German “barbarism.”

The visit must have followed the familiar routine of what another visitor called Monet’s “fraternal hospitalities,”
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starting with a long lunch on white porcelain in the yellow dining room, perhaps a belated celebration of Monet’s seventy-eighth birthday, which fell four days earlier. Then a tour of the gardens and a visit to the large studio. “War talk was taboo,” Clemenceau later told Sacha Guitry regarding this visit. “I went there to rest.”
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A journal would report on the encounter in its gossip column, relishing the image of the fearsome Clemenceau among the profuse greenery of Monet’s garden: “On that day, the Tiger inhabited the jungle, and he was perfectly happy.”
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However, there was business to discuss—in particular, the donation of the two paintings. Geffroy was, as usual, poetic in his account,
describing how Monet with this donation offered to France “a bouquet of flowers in tribute to the victorious war and triumphant peace.”
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Yet how this process of donation might have worked is unclear. Monet’s letter of November 12, with its invitation to Clemenceau, was slightly puzzling. The letter claimed that Monet had almost finished two canvases that he would sign and donate, via Clemenceau, to the state. This seemed to indicate that Monet had two specific paintings in mind, that the choice was fait accompli, and that they would be placed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Yet the letter then went on to say that Monet wanted Clemenceau to select the two paintings. Which two paintings Monet originally envisaged is unknown. Clemenceau duly chose two paintings on November 18, although these were quite possibly not the ones Monet had considered: he selected a water lily painting and a weeping willow.

Exactly which canvases Clemenceau selected is not known, either. However, the latter subject, with its connotations of grief, suffering, and defiance, was certainly appropriate for a work signed on the day of the armistice and donated to the nation. With the Grande Guerre finally over, the commemoration of the legions of French dead was a cultural priority—along with somehow making sense of the grotesque and almost inconceivable magnitude of these losses. Already debates were being held and plans mooted about how best to honor the dead. One project already floated in November was to place at the summit of Mont-Valérien, west of Paris, a gigantic monument with the words
À nos Morts
(To our Dead). The names of Paris’s dead soldiers would be inscribed on the marble, with their remains interred beneath. The exercise, it was hoped, would be duplicated in cities all over France.
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Monet’s two canvases, placed in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, were intended to make their own commemoration of France’s sacrifice and loss as well as of the Victory—with both of them selected by Father Victory himself.

THE MUSÉE DES ARTS DÉCORATIFS,
housed in the Louvre and overseen by Monet’s friend Raymond Koechlin, might once have seemed a logical choice to install some of the new paintings. Monet had courted Koechlin during the war years, inviting him to Giverny and giving him
lunches and private viewings of the Grande Décoration. Yet on that November afternoon Clemenceau must have realized, after seeing so many yards of painted canvas adorning Monet’s large studio, that there was scope for a larger donation than merely two paintings—and also, perhaps, the chance for a more conspicuous location than the Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Monet surely explained to his two friends what he had told Thiébault-Sisson a few months earlier: that he planned an ensemble of twelve canvases, each fourteen feet wide, of which at least eight were completed. To donate two canvases in honor of the French victory seemed a modest benefaction when these artistic riches would soon become available.

More grandiose plans were quickly proposed. The witness to the proceedings that afternoon, Geffroy, later wrote that Clemenceau came to Giverny “to choose some canvases from the new series of water lilies.” His use of the indefinite pronoun
quelques-uns
(some, a few) leaves open the possibility that either Monet or Clemenceau already had plans of expanding the donation beyond two canvases.
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Another of Geffroy’s accounts, published in 1920, was even more explicit about the expanding donation. “On that day,” he wrote of the November visit, “the gift to the State of a series of water lily paintings was decided, with the paintings to be selected by Clemenceau and accepted as a tribute to victorious France.” The donation, therefore, was no longer to consist of two paintings but rather an entire series. Geffroy went on to claim that these “immense decorations” produced by Monet during the war years were to be “kept together in this way, on the walls of quiet rooms where visitors could come to seek distraction from the social world, to ease their fatigues, to indulge their love of eternal nature. That is the vow,” he claimed, “that Monet formulated during the visit in November 1918, when I accompanied Clemenceau.”
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Geffroy therefore attributed the concept of an expanded donation to Monet himself, and these “immense decorations” were to be housed, he claimed, in several rooms. However, in another article, also published a few years later, Monet gave the credit for enlarging the donation to Clemenceau.
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Naturally Clemenceau would have had a great deal of sympathy for the plan, as his
decades-old dream of keeping together an ensemble of Monet’s paintings as a national monument was revived.

These were retrospective constructions, to be sure, composed at a time when the donation had certainly assumed a greater magnitude. How much of this new plan was actually discussed on November 18 is debatable. However, since the late 1890s Monet had dreamed of installing a series of his works on permanent exhibition in, as he always stipulated, a circular room. The time must have seemed right in November 1918, with Monet having completed so much “war work” and with Clemenceau in a position of such power and influence.

THERE WERE CERTAINLY
some recent precedents for such an ambitious plan. Monet and Clemenceau may have regarded with some envy the events unfolding in the rue de l’Université in Paris. Here the huge circular room had been inaugurated only a month earlier, on October 19, when the
Panthéon de la Guerre
was unveiled in its purpose-built panorama. The finished creation was 45 feet high, 128 feet across, and 402 feet in circumference. It incorporated five thousand full-length portraits of French and Allied leaders and soldiers, including the defiant-looking Clemenceau. The Tiger had not been present at the inauguration; Poincaré did the honors. Clemenceau seems not to have been a booster of Carrier-Belleuse’s great enterprise, and his portrait was conspicuously absent from the preliminary studies exhibited alongside the panorama.
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Nonetheless, the
Panthéon de la Guerre
offered a model of how such an artistic enterprise, linked to the Grande Guerre and offering an “immersive” experience to the public, could become a popular success. Archbishops, generals, visiting monarchs, numerous dignitaries and outof-towners, celebrities such as Sarah Bernhardt—all of them were making their way to the rue de l’Université. Here they scuttled through a narrow passageway before emerging on an elevated viewing platform from which they thrilled at the 360-degree view. There was even a guestbook to which they added their signatures “accompanied by the warmest praise.”
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The other precedent, even more germane, was the new Rodin museum, the driving force behind which was, of course, Étienne
Clémen tel. Rodin had died a year earlier, in November 1917, but preparations for the museum dedicated to his work in the Hôtel Biron were steadily progressing. The statues and busts had been tastefully arranged on pedestals in the capacious rooms, his casts placed in the chapel built by nuns a century earlier. A curator at the Luxembourg Museum wrote in eager anticipation of how pilgrims would “come from all intellectual centres of the world to admire in these rooms the creative power of the greatest poet of form in modern times.”
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Monet had gone to Meudon for Rodin’s funeral, which featured Poincaré, most members of the government, an enormous crowd, and an honor guard from a nearby garrison—pomp and circumstance surely befitting the grandiose pretensions of the deceased, above whose tomb loomed a cast of
The Thinker
. The funeral oration was delivered by the sculptor Albert Bartholomé, who had linked Rodin to the young soldiers dying in the field of battle. Just as these young men were making their “sublime sacrifice,” so, too, Bartholomé declared, “must go those magnificent elders who stood behind the flag of France.”
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Monet was one of the few magnificent elders who remained. He and Rodin had come a long way together. They were artistic twins—“friends forever,” as Rodin had declared.
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Their fame and fortunes had been forged in tandem. Rodin had gone before him, but the great sculptor now had his own museum, his shrine for pilgrims. It remained for Monet to follow with his own hostage to posterity.

A FEW DAYS
after Clemenceau and Geffroy departed, Monet keeled over while at work in his studio: “Some sort of fainting fit,” he later explained, “no doubt brought on by the cold weather.” His sudden collapse caused much alarm. He was forced to cancel a visit from René Gimpel and Georges Bernheim, sending a telegram to Paris: “Am sick. Don’t come.” But an apparent recovery meant a second telegram was soon winging its way over the wires: “False alarm. Come.”
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