Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (33 page)

Even so, Monet was still unwell when the two picture dealers arrived a week later. Gimpel, who had been so impressed by the painter’s robust appearance in August, was taken aback by his weakened state. He was
also alarmed by Monet’s despondency. “I am unhappy,” the painter told his guests, “very unhappy.” Surprised, they asked him why, to which he replied with his customary lecture about the mental horrors of a man’s reach exceeding his grasp—how painting made him suffer, how he was unsatisfied with all his previous works, how “each time I begin a canvas I hope to produce a masterpiece, I have every intention of it, and nothing comes out that way. Never to be satisfied—it’s frightful. I suffer greatly.” He told them that he was much happier in the days when he sold his canvases for only 300 francs: “How I miss those days.”
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This nostalgic recollection of his supposedly impecunious but happy youth conveniently overlooked his frequent episodes of anger and despair in those days.

Although Monet soon recovered from his fainting fit, in the middle of December he complained of “sharp rheumatic pains.”
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These health problems became the nominal source of yet another request to Étienne Clémentel. The minister had recently pulled strings in the case of Michel, who was not yet demobilized, and who had faced—until Clémentel’s timely intervention—an unappealing change in duties. Now a ministerial decree taking effect at the beginning December made it necessary for anyone wishing to travel by road or rail to seek a safe-conduct pass from the civil authorities.
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Such a restriction seriously cramped Monet’s style. He disliked traveling to Paris or more distant environs but loved pootling along the lanes near Giverny with his chauffeur Sylvain at the wheel. “I have another service to ask of you,” he therefore wrote to Clémentel. “It would be nice of you to recommend me to the Prefect of the Eure to see if he could give me a permit to travel, not throughout the country—I don’t ask for such a favour at the moment—but only to Vernon and Bonnières, to see my doctor, and as far as Mantes, from where I can catch the train to Paris.” Monet’s letter also reminded the minister about a shipment of coal that was due to him: he had received “a portion, half of it, only the anthracite, but the coal for the house has not arrived.” Perhaps Clémentel could have a word with Louis Loucheur, the new minister of Industrial Reconstruction?

Monet’s other concern, as the year wound down, was money. He wrote to Georges Durand-Ruel on the day after Christmas, noting that
Georges had mentioned sending him “a little money.” He therefore took him up on the offer, asking him “to send me a cheque, if you are able, for 30,000 francs.”
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He explained that he had some big bills to pay, which may well have been the case, though he could hardly have been strapped for cash. A check from the faithful Durand-Ruels was with him in less than forty-eight hours.

Monet duly penned a letter of thanks to which he appended yet another request. As if the other shortages of coal and tobacco were not bad enough, France now faced what a newspaper called a “crisis of wine.”
³⁹
Much of the supply had been requisitioned for the military (the 1917 mutinies had been suppressed, in part, by the troops receiving better and more generous rations of wine as well as tobacco), along with the
wagons-foudres
, the giant barrels in which wine was transported by rail throughout the country. The wine merchants were therefore able to command, as a newspaper deplored, “very high prices, the demand greatly exceeding the supply.”
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This shortage was drastic for Monet, a man who liked to start his day with a glass of white wine and to wash down his lunch with great swigs of a fine vintage. He therefore found himself wondering what treasures might be lurking in the Durand-Ruel cellars. Could they possibly part with some of their wine, letting him know the price and the quality? “The wine merchants rob us blind,” he complained. If the Durand-Ruels could therefore send a shipment to the station at Vernonnet “
as soon as possible
,” he would be much obliged.
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AT THE END
of the year, Monet entertained a most welcome visitor, a young man whom he proudly called his grandson. The twenty-five-year-old Jacques Jean Philip Butler, better known as James or Jimmy, had come to Giverny for Christmas, on leave from service in the United States Army.

Jimmy was the son of Theodore Earl Butler and Monet’s stepdaughter Suzanne Hoschedé. After Suzanne died in 1899, Butler had married her older sister, Marthe, who helped him raise Jimmy and his other child, Lili. Over the years Theodore painted many landscapes in and around Giverny, frequently exhibiting in Paris, sometimes in the same salons as
his sister-in-law, Blanche. Among the most talented of all the American Impressionists, he nonetheless suffered because of his perceived imitation of Monet. One critic claimed that Butler “clings to the example of Claude Monet like a remora, with a conviction and literal obedience that raises painful comparisons.”
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Everyone was a critic: when Butler and Marthe arrived in New York for a visit, bringing with them thirty of his paintings, the customs inspector carefully scrutinized these masterpieces of American Impressionism before asking: “Are these finished?”
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The Butler family had lived a stone’s throw from Monet’s house, down the street and around the corner, in the rue du Colombier. In 1914 they joined the American exodus, crossing the ocean and eventually taking up residence in Washington Square in New York. Butler eked out a living painting murals for public buildings, and once America entered the war he designed recruitment posters for the United States Signal Corps. Butler clearly brought his Impressionist lessons to bear on these posters, painting them, according to the
New York Sun
, “in vibratory tones of violet and purple, harmonizing with the olive drab of the uniforms and the yellow glow of the lamp.”
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By the spring of 1918, he was busy painting targets for the United States Army, creating landscapes and cityscapes for the recruits to practice firing at. Here, it seems, hardwon Impressionist techniques were frowned upon: “A house must be a house in this kind of art,” sniffed an observing journalist, “and not look like a scrambled egg going up a stepladder, as it might if some disciple of the New Impressionism were thumbing the palette.”
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Jimmy Butler, whose bath times had been immortalized by his father in dozens of canvases, continued the family tradition. He painted Giverny landscapes, exhibiting them as early as 1911 in the Salon d’Automne before crossing to New York with his father and stepmother. In 1917 he volunteered for the U.S. Army, and in September 1918 Monet proudly reported to Georges Durand-Ruel that “the young Butler” was back in France.
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He became the fourth member of Monet’s extended family—along with Michel, Jean-Pierre, and Albert Salerou—to serve on the western front. Miraculously, all of them survived, something for which Monet frequently expressed gratitude and relief. A
commemorative plaque in the church down the street would later be inscribed with the names of the thirteen men from Giverny who died in the war—a wretched toll in a village of fewer than three hundred people.

Jimmy Butler spent the Christmas of 1918 with Monet and Blanche. Monet greatly enjoyed reacquainting himself with his grandson. “He’s a nice boy and we have been very lucky to have him with us for a few days,” he wrote to Georges Durand-Ruel. While in Giverny, Jimmy received orders to report back to his company within twenty-four hours and prepare for a return to the United States. As ever, Monet tried to pull some strings. “I immediately tried to see if he could be demobilized in France, as some of his comrades have been, but I don’t know if it will succeed.”
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His pessimism was well warranted. The United States Army was one of the few places where the name Claude Monet did not carry much clout.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

AN OLD MAN MAD ABOUT PAINTING

HEAVY RAINS FELL
throughout the Christmas period, causing the rivers to swell and the meadows to fill. In Paris, the Seine burst its banks, inundating the quays and preventing barges from unloading their precious cargoes of coal. Bread ran short as bakeries were engulfed by the floods. Beside the Pont National, a barge sank with a load of wine, which the resourceful and the desperate managed to salvage. Downstream in the suburbs, floodwaters flowed through the Pays des Impressionnistes, turning the streets into rivers, the squares into lakes. In Asnières, people boated through the streets; others were evacuated from their homes.
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Giverny was soon cut off from the outside world. “We are surrounded by water,” Monet wrote on January 10.
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Fortunately, the inundation was not as severe as the legendary flood of January 1910, when Monet’s Japanese bridge was partly submerged and the floodwaters crept halfway up the garden toward his house before receding weeks later, leaving behind a stinking horticultural wreckage. On that occasion Monet had been predictably distraught; now, however, he was resigned to his losses. “My pond has become part of the Seine,” he wrote to the Bernheim-Jeunes. “It is very beautiful, but very annoying and sad. We had no need of this.”
³

Monet may have been wistfully reconciled to his swamped garden because he was doing very little painting. He had neither the morale nor the physical health for much hard work. In January he confessed to Clémentel that he had been unwell for a while, by which he probably meant as far back as his collapse in November.
⁴
He may have been suffering from a milder bout of what he took to calling “this nasty flu.”
⁵
The epidemic was still raging throughout France despite experimental new treatments such as injections of colloidal gold, silver, and rhodium.
It temporarily felled members of both the Durand-Ruel and Bernheim-Jeune households.

Monet’s poor health led to a low morale, and soon he claimed to be suffering from “the most complete discouragement and disgust.” As he explained to Josse Bernheim-Jeune: “I feel that everything is breaking down, my sight and all else, and that I’m no longer capable of doing anything worthwhile.”
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Bernheim-Jeune gently challenged this pessimism: “You are still in such good shape that many young people envy you your health, and yet you let yourself be invaded by dark thoughts!” His prescription for the painter was the same one that Mirbeau had given so many times in the past: “My dear Sir, I think you isolate yourself too much, and a stay of about a week in Paris, in the midst of friends who love you, would dispel your little troubles.”
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Monet took courage, however, from news of Renoir, who was continuing to paint despite his infirmities. “How I pity him,” he explained to Josse Bernheim-Jeune, “and yet how I admire him for being able to overcome his sufferings in order to paint.”
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He could also take courage from another example of fortitude in trying times: that of Clemenceau. The Tiger had survived not only the Spanish flu but also, in February, an assassination attempt.

IN EARLY DECEMBER,
Clemenceau had gone to London to meet with Lloyd George. Received at Buckingham Palace, he enjoyed “an extraordinary demonstration of popular enthusiasm,” not the least of which was, courtesy of the Royal Horticultural Society, a mauve and yellow orchid named in his honor. Reporters noticed that he was suffering from a slight indisposition that left him with a bad cough, but a new serenity had come over him. Asked by reporters what was left for him to do, he replied jovially: “Oh, the Tiger has now no teeth or claws. He has nothing but smiles left.”
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Yet in the months ahead there would be plenty of need and opportunity for the Tiger to show his teeth and claws. The Earl of Derby wrote in his diary that Lloyd George “is very much anti-Clemenceau and it is not to be surprised at as both of them are men who like to be
top dog.”
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Meanwhile, Woodrow Wilson arrived in France for peace talks in the middle of December, to be greeted with a rapturous welcome by Parisians: cheering crowds, a horse-drawn procession along the Champs-Élysées, signs declaring
VIVE WILSON
. He was received with a dose of skepticism from Clemenceau, who believed the American president had little grasp of the scale of the destruction in France. According to the Earl of Derby, Clemenceau called him an idiot.
¹¹
In the Chamber of Deputies he spoke of the
noble candeur
of Wilson’s mind, which much of the French press—and, consequently, Wilson himself—took to mean that Clemenceau thought him naïve and ingenuous.
¹²
Wilson for his part had not wanted to come to Paris: he had favored holding the peace talks in Switzerland. Paris was, his advisors informed him, a “belligerent capital.”
¹³
Only fears of a Bolshevik-style revolution in Switzerland persuaded him to make his way to Paris, and when in Paris he declined the opportunity—pressed on him by Clemenceau and Poincaré—to visit the war-devastated French towns and cities. “I could not,” he shrugged to an advisor, “despise the Germans more than I do already.”
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