Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (34 page)

Despite his bad cough, Clemenceau was working as hard as ever, attending celebrations in the December cold in Metz, Strasbourg, and Liège, and only taking a short break in the rainswept Vendée in early January. An English correspondent was astonished by his “marvellous vigour of mind and body,” watching in awe as he remained at the Palais-Bourbon until one o’clock in the morning and then returned at eight thirty
A.M.
The Tiger’s friends, noted the reporter, were anxious for him to economize his strength in view of the inevitable strain that awaited when the Peace Conference opened.
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An English newspaper dubbed him “The Grand Young Man of Europe.”
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The peace talks had barely begun when, on the morning of February 19, Clemenceau left his apartment in the rue Franklin and climbed into a Rolls-Royce driven by his faithful chauffeur, Albert Brabant.
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The limousine headed south before turning left into the boulevard Delessert. Suddenly a young man, tall and blond, with long hair and baggy velvet trousers, rushed out from behind a public urinal and discharged seven shots, two while standing in the boulevard and five more as he ran after
the fleeing vehicle. The Rolls-Royce accelerated away but then, as policemen seized the shooter, wheeled around and headed back to the rue Franklin. “Go easy,” Clemenceau remarked as he was assisted from the automobile by Brabant. “I must have been hit in the shoulder.” He then proceeded to walk at a steady pace into his apartment.

Over the next few hours a succession of physicians, surgeons, and military men, and even President Poincaré, rushed to his small apartment. They found Clemenceau sitting peaceably in an armchair, saying, “It’s nothing, it’s nothing,” and protesting that he had urgent business to attend to. The first official bulletin was issued at eleven thirty
A.M.
, as a huge crowd gathered outside in the rue Franklin: “Penetrating wound to the back of right shoulder blade without visceral injury. General and local condition perfect.” By one o’clock he was eating soup, drinking mineral water, and smoking cigarettes. He told Marshal Foch when he came to visit: “I have dodged bigger ones than that at the front.” In fact, he had been struck by three bullets. Two simply caused abrasions on his hand and arm, but a third, more serious, had struck his shoulder blade and lodged near his lung. Two more had passed through his clothing, while another two missed entirely. Clemenceau pretended to be disgusted at such poor marksmanship at point-blank range.

A nun, Sister Théoneste, was summoned from the
maison de santé
at the convent of Très-Saint-Sauveur in the rue Bizet, where Clemenceau had recuperated from his prostate operation in 1912. On that occasion his political enemies had taken much delight in learning how the recovery of this rabid anti-Catholic had been superintended by nuns. Clemenceau was typically unmoved by their criticism: “I don’t care,” he retorted. “I want to be well cared for.”
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He had a huge respect and affection for Sister Théoneste, an Alsatian whom he called “a brave soul and a gentle heart.”
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He had personally delivered a bouquet of flowers to her on the day following the armistice. “On the day when you reenter your country,” he told her, “I want you to be on my arm.”
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She was perhaps the only person in France capable of handling such a stubborn patient.

Another person to whom Clemenceau turned was Monet, who received a telegram from officials at the Ministry of War: “The President
sends you his affectionate greetings,” it read. “The state of his health is satisfactory and all danger seems to have passed.”
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The bullet, however, was judged by doctors to be too close to his heart to permit removal: he would go through the rest of his life with a souvenir of the incident embedded in his chest.

The attempt had been what
L’Homme Libre
called “the isolated act of a madman.” The gunman, a twenty-two-year-old anarchist named Émile Cottin, was protesting what he regarded as Clemenceau’s suppression of anarchists, and in particular the violent strike-breaking at an aviation factory in May 1918. He would be condemned to death four weeks later. Clemenceau took a more charitable view. “I suggest he should be locked up for about eight years, with intensive training in a shooting gallery.”
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In fact, Cottin would be reprieved by Clemenceau and serve, in the end, only five years in prison.

DIPLOMATS AND DELEGATES
arriving in Paris for the peace conference had been greeted by posters plastered on kiosks and buildings:
QUE L’ALLEMAGNE PAYE D’ABORD
(
LET GERMANY PAY FIRST
).
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Among Clemenceau’s greatest ambitions for the peace talks was for Germany to pay reparations to France for the four years of unprecedented destruction. “A most terrible account between peoples has been opened,” he had told the Chamber of Deputies back in December. “It shall be settled.”
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The Germans had occupied almost an eighth of France: some 25,000 square miles, equivalent to the areas of Connecticut and Massachusetts combined. Almost 300,000 French homes had been completely destroyed, another 435,000 badly damaged. More than 6,000 churches, town halls and schools were destroyed; 10,000 more were seriously damaged. Some 1,500 rail stations and railway bridges needed repairs, as did more than 3,000 miles of railway lines and 30,000 miles of roads.
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Entire French villages had been wiped off the face of the earth; others, such as Douai, with their missing façades and still, deserted houses, had been turned into what the historian Gregor Dallas has poetically described as “little Vermeers of ruin.”
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The countryside was scarred by shells, poisoned by gas, and crossed by hundreds of miles
of trenches and barbed wire. Meanwhile, Germany’s factories, fields, railways, roads, and urban infrastructures remained intact and untouched. It was Clemenceau’s fear that Germany would emerge from the peace talks economically and militarily stronger than France, ready to strike again. The economist John Maynard Keynes, in Paris with the British delegation, summed up his position (with which he strongly disagreed): “Clemenceau’s aim was to weaken and destroy Germany in every possible way...He had no intention of leaving Germany in a position to practise a vast commercial activity.”
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Clemenceau, back at work within weeks of the assassination attempt, faced a battle with France’s own commercial activity. The wartime strikes in 1917 and 1918, which began with Paris seamstresses and workers at a Renault factory, led to a rebirth of industrial militancy. In 1919, two thousand separate strikes in France involved hundreds of thousands of people demanding higher wages as a response to inflation: steel-workers, coalworkers, construction workers, and mechanical engineers. On the Métro, workers blocked and sometimes set fire to trams. Even bank employees went on strike in Paris, congregating in their bowler hats and milling politely together in the street. When waiters walked off the job in Paris’s cafés, they were attacked by enraged patrons.

Labor problems were not confined to Paris. In Giverny, Monet was experiencing difficulties of his own. “Seeking a very good cook between 30 and 40 years of age, for the country,” read an advertisement in
Le Figaro
that spring. “Good wages. Good references required. Write to Claude Monet at Giverny, near Vernon.”
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But a good cook proved hard to find, since a few months later he wrote despairingly that he had “no cook, no housemaid, in fact, absolutely no staff whatsoever.”
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By the beginning of summer he had lost every one of his gardeners, including men who had served him for twenty years. His head gardener, Félix Breuil, went back whence he had come: to Rémalard, eighty miles southwest of Giverny, where he had once worked for Octave Mirbeau’s father. “I’m in complete disarray,” Monet wrote. “I thought for a moment I would have to abandon the garden and Giverny.”
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Help was at hand, however, and soon afterward he acquired the services of a gardener named Léon Lebret.

Meanwhile the wine he ordered from the Durand-Ruels finally arrived, several months after he ordered it. To his extreme disappointment the cask was “virtually empty”: it contained only thirty liters of wine, forcing him to refuse the delivery and then spend time trying to get to the bottom of “this unfortunate affair.” He suspected someone of having siphoned off the precious liquid, “an evil that comes about because of our great drought.”
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IF MOST OF
France seemed to be on strike by the summer of 1919, Monet at least was hard at work. As in 1917, several months of discouragement were followed by frantic and enthusiastic labors at the easel. At the end of August he reported that he was working “in a state of euphoria, favoured by the splendid weather.”
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In fact, the weather had been blisteringly hot for weeks on end, with France registering its highest temperatures in forty years. In the middle of the August, Paris reached 33 degrees Celsius (92 degrees Fahrenheit) in the shade. People took to sleeping in the open air, and Paris was so hot and empty of people that
Le Figaro
dubbed it “Paris-Sahara.”
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Undaunted by the heat wave, Monet declined an invitation to enjoy cooling breezes at the Bernheim-Jeunes’ seaside villa. He donned his hat, opened his parasol, and sat painting beside his pond for hours on end. “I’ve started a series of landscapes that I love and that I hope will interest you,” he told the Bernheim-Jeunes, explaining that he had “postponed” further work on the Grande Décoration until winter.
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These new paintings were done in a smaller format, most on canvases some three feet wide by six and a half feet high. Similar in theme to the Grande Décoration insofar as they showed the reflective surface of the pond dotted with water lilies, they were intended to be sold on the art market. Monet felt the need to raise money, no doubt because his donation to the state—especially if expanded to include a good part of the Grande Décoration—meant he would earn nothing from his time-consuming labors of the previous five years. He therefore sent four of these new paintings to the Galerie Bernheim-Jeune.

Ominously, none of the four works managed to find a buyer, an indication of how artistic tastes were changing in the aftermath of the war. The decade before the Grande Guerre had been the heroic age of modern art, with the scandalous successes of Fauvism, Cubism, Expressionism, Futurism, and Vorticism. But appetites, attitudes, and artistic practices had shifted dramatically by the time the war ended. More than 350 French artists had died in battle.
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Among the dead on both sides had been many apostles of modern art: Umberto Boccioni, Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, August Macke, Franz Marc, Isaac Rosenberg, and Raymond Duchamp-Villon (brother of the more famous Marcel). Others, such as Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, and Guillaume Apollinaire, had perished from the Spanish flu.

“The war has not killed Cubism,” a literary magazine declared in the summer of 1918.
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But in fact the horrors of the Grande Guerre meant that, as the art historian Kenneth Silver has amply demonstrated, both the public and the painters themselves turned their backs on daring innovations in a process that Jean Cocteau, in a lecture at the Collège de France, would soon call
le rappel à l’ordre
(the call to order).
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As the derogatory references to “Kubism” revealed, the wilder artistic experiments and adventures of the prewar years were seen by many in France as specifically German and, therefore, abhorrent. In 1919 a commission in Paris tasked with erecting triumphal arches and other “great monuments to the glorious dead” appealed to French artists for their help. But a particularly conservative and patriotic kind of art was preferred. As one city councillor thundered: “France must not produce or celebrate any art except French art.”
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Monet’s art was certainly French. Indeed, many of his landscapes had captured quintessentially French scenes. However, Impressionism was still a controversial movement in some quarters. At the height of the war in 1916, the art critic and ardent French nationalist Marius Vachon condemned what he saw as the widespread idea that Impressionism was France’s “official art”—that it was patriotic and in some way symbolic of France as a whole. Vachon complained that Impressionism was, on the contrary, “essentially international,” with adherents scattered all over
the world. Worse still, it was a “combat organization” whose followers were “violent, aggressive, revolutionary, demagogic, and even anarchist,” bent on “attacking and destroying all artistic traditions.”
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Vachon was an extreme case, but his virulent criticism revealed that opposition to Impressionism was still very much alive in the second decade of the twentieth century, its antipathy suddenly nourished by the xenophobic forces unshackled by the war.

It would have been difficult to construe the Claude Monet of 1919—the well-fed and well-upholstered
bourgeois gentilhomme
presiding over his grand and beautiful domain—as a dangerous anarchist. However, his hazy visions were not the kind of art beloved of either artistic conservatives or a youthful avant-garde. What Louis Gillet called Monet’s “upside-down paintings” offered few certainties in a confused and traumatized postwar world in search of steady assurances. His canvases of water lilies may not have been as outrageous or controversial as the Cubist or Futurist visions of the world, but they left the viewer uneasily adrift, with no clear footholds. As Gillet and Kandinsky recognized, Monet’s works verged on a kind of abstraction in which the brushstrokes seemed to liberate themselves from the duty of representing a stable and recognizable natural world in any obviously realistic fashion.
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Moreover, his views of his pond were not typically or even discernibly French, failing to evoke the soil and toil of the countryside in the way that his wheat stacks, poplars and views of the Seine unquestionably did.