Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (44 page)

An even more ghastly image of water lilies was to be found in Mirbeau’s
The Torture Garden
. This horrifying novel of sex, death, and horticulture was first serialized in
Le Journal
in 1898 and then published in book form the next year, followed in 1902 by a deluxe edition featuring gruesomely voluptuous illustrations by Rodin. Mirbeau described a garden in the middle of a prison in China, constructed for the emperor in a previous century at the cost of the lives of thirty thousand laborers, whose corpses, along with the excrement of the present-day prisoners and the blood of the torture victims, were used to nourish the soil. Thanks to this uniquely fertile environment, the garden was home to “the rarest and most delicate species of flowers,”
¹⁸
among which were interspersed dead and dying bodies, as well as the instruments of torture and death from which the exotic plants and flowers took their sustenance. Torture and water lilies came together as the narrator stood on a wooden bridge and gazed down into a pond: “The water lilies...with their big blooming flowers ranged across the golden water,” he observed, “made me think of severed, floating heads.”
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Mirbeau’s dark parable was nourished in the rotten humus of the Dreyfus Affair: “To priests, soldiers, judges, to the men who raise, lead or govern men,” he wrote, “I dedicate these pages of murder and blood.” His image of flowers thriving in excrement may have come in part from the fact that at Carrières-sous-Poissy, to which he had moved in 1893, the sanitation department spread human excrement on the
fields as fertilizer. But his image of the wooden bridge, the pond, and its water lilies all come from his visits to Giverny. Mirbeau gave the first ever description of Monet’s garden following a visit in 1891. His write-up used words such as
dégringolée
(tumbled),
mêlée
,
orgie
, and
inépuisable floraison
(inexhaustible flowering)
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—not words normally used to describe nineteenth-century French gardens. A visiting poet, Émile Verhaeren, described Monet’s garden in a similar fashion a decade later, writing of “the beautiful vegetal violence, the mad abundance, the tightly woven enlacement of colors and lights! One would say a congestion of flowers, of grasses, of shoots, and of branches.”
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One of Rodin’s illustrations for a 1902 edition of Octave Mirbeau’s
The Torture Garden

Whether or not Monet’s garden was truly an orgiastic melee of vegetal violence, it certainly inspired something in Mirbeau’s imagination. Indeed, in 1903 the writer Edmond Pilon, after describing a visit by Mirbeau to Giverny, asked a rhetorical question: “Who knows if it is not the dear memory of these flowers that one day exhaled over the mass grave of
The Torture Garden
its scent of lotus and mangroves.”
²²
In the novel, the wooden bridge spanning the pond is painted green, like the Japanese bridge in Monet’s garden, and the surrounding garden features irises, canopies of artfully pruned wisteria, and water lilies. As the literary scholar Emily Apter has noted, Monet’s garden at Giverny and Mirbeau’s fictional torture garden “exhibit a disturbing similarity,” with Mirbeau’s brutal garden mirroring Monet’s layout “virtually element for element.”
²³

None of this suggests, of course, that Monet should have glimpsed in his pond or shrubbery the same deathly specters that his friends
Mirbeau and Rollinat, with their brilliantly depraved imaginations, were able to conjure from the sight of lily ponds. But it does indicate that the garden in fin de siècle France could be more complicated and disturbing than merely a blissful reflection of Paradise. Even Monet’s beautiful pond of water lilies could become, as Geffroy suggested, a place for tormented meditations on annihilation and the abyss. Such, certainly, was all too often the case—as his frequent references to suffering and torture suggest—when Monet confronted his garden with his paints and palette: “Ah, how I suffer, how painting makes me suffer! It tortures me. The pain it causes me!”
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ANOTHER FRIEND OF
Monet’s, Stéphane Mallarmé, likewise wrote evocatively about water lilies. In 1885 he published a prose poem called “The White Water Lily,” later collected into an anthology that he sent to Monet in 1891. His strange little story describes a man rowing a skiff along a stream in search of both water flowers and the property of an unnamed woman to whom he plans to pay his respects. As the river widens into a pond, the rower recognizes the bridge, hedges, and lawns as belonging to the park of the mysterious woman. As he bends over his oars, daydreaming about her, he hears a noise that may or may not be her—although he does not look up to confirm her presence, and instead turns his skiff and rows stealthily away. Mallarmé ends with one of his dazzling metaphors: the rower will gather up the woman’s “virginal absence...just as, in memory of a special site, we pick one of those magical, still unopened water lilies which suddenly spring up there and enclose, in their deep white, a nameless nothingness made of unbroken reveries, of happiness never to be.”
²⁵

The water lily became, in Mallarmé’s vision, a substitution or replacement for the hidden or absent woman. Mallarmé died in 1898, just as Monet was beginning to paint his water lily pond, but the hidden or absent woman features in many interpretations of Monet’s paintings of his pond. Emily Apter goes so far as to say that Monet’s water lilies are “an evident sign of the feminine” serving as substitutes for the female models denied to Monet by the jealous Alice.
²⁶
(“If a model comes in
here,” Alice once declared, “I walk out of the house.”)
²⁷
The French poet and critic Christian Limousin has likewise argued that Monet’s water lilies take the place in his paintings of the female figure, “prohibited by the sick jealousy” of Alice: “Behind every flower is a woman—or, rather, her absence, her hollow—a corpus of inaccessible woman, forbidden, blocked. Cézanne and Renoir worked on their bathers, Monet on his water lilies, which are at the same time both flowers and women.”
²⁸
Art historian Steven Z. Levine, meanwhile, has claimed to see in three of Monet’s paintings of his pond “a human figure or face floating in a nimbus of reflections.”
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These modern critics were not the first to glimpse women hidden behind or beneath Monet’s water lilies. When he went to Monet’s landmark 1909 exhibition, Lucien Descaves thought he glimpsed happy female faces and disrobing bodies. “I leave your exhibition dazzled and amazed!” he wrote to Monet. “I can say that I have seen in painting, in the living water, mobile like the face of happy young woman, water whose mysteries are revealed to me, water that the shadows drape and the sun unclothes, water on which all hours of the day are inscribed, like the age on a human face.”
³⁰
Descaves was not alone. A female critic at the same exhibition, as she stared at the paintings, felt herself turning into a water nymph: “One has a sensation of being in the water, of being an inhabitant of the ponds, the lakes, and pools, of being a nixie with glaucous hair, a naiad with fluid arms, a nymph with fresh legs.”
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Another writer was confident that, if he kept painting them, Monet’s water lilies would ultimately assume human form, mutating into “deities and nymphs.”
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Women, it seemed, were never far below the surface of the pond.

Nymphs lurked in Monet’s pond for these viewers not least, perhaps, because the most common French name for a water lily was
nymphéa
. Jean-Pierre Hoschedé told the story that a “complete ignoramus” once came and asked to fish in the pond at Giverny, asking if this was the spot “where Claude Monet painted his nymphs.”
³³
The ignoramus may have spoken truer than either he or Jean-Pierre knew. The word
nymphéa
obviously evokes nymphs (
nymphes
in French), the female deities of place, always represented as young girls, graceful and naked, who personify
the forces of nature, haunting the waters, woods, and mountains. The word comes from the Latin
nympha
, meaning a bride, mistress, or young woman; it is etymologically linked to the Latin verb
nubere
, to marry or wed, from which we get the words “nubile” and “nuptial.”
Nymphes
also had another meaning, as a nineteenth-century French textbook on anatomy carefully explained: the
nymphes
were the membranous folds lining “the upper half of the vulva inside the labia majora.”
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A link between water lilies and the female sexual organs was graphically spelled out by J.-K. Huysmans in his 1884 novel
À Rebours
, which described how when the ancient Egyptians mummified a woman they placed her on a slab of jasper and inserted into her sexual parts, as a purification ritual, “the chaste petals of the divine flower”—that is, the lotus blossom.
³⁵

The critic Louis Gillet, a friend of Monet, made a metaphorical link between nymphs and water lilies at Giverny, writing that his lily pond was “the nymph with whom Monet was in love.”
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He also wrote regarding Monet’s water lily paintings: “It is always the same fairy, the same fleeing ondine whom he attempts to seize.”
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An ondine was a water nymph, and so Monet’s act of painting was akin, in Gillet’s reckoning, to trying to catch a fleeing maiden. But chasing after water nymphs was a dangerous business, as mythology attested. “To see them,” a nineteenth-century French encyclopedia soberly reported, “was to risk madness.”
³⁸
The perils of water nymphs were spelled out in the story of one of the Argonauts, Hercules’s beautiful and beloved page, Hylas. Many ancient writers told the story of how the golden-haired youth, sent in search of freshwater, came upon a grotto filled with nymphs. In the version of Apollonius of Rhodes, one of them, admiring his beauty, “raised her left arm over his neck in her longing to kiss his tender mouth, while with her right hand she pulled on his elbow and plunged him into the midst of the swirling water.”
³⁹

The story of the capture and drowning of Hylas was a favorite of painters, the most famous example being John William Waterhouse’s
Hylas and the Nymphs
, painted in 1896: it shows bare-breasted young lovelies lurking among the lily pads, drawing the youth into the water. But before Waterhouse came French artists such as Jules-Eugène
Lenepveu, whose
Hylas Lured by the Nymphs
was exhibited at the Paris Salon in 1865, winning praise (in the year of the scandal over Manet’s
Olympia
) for its sensual depiction of pearly flesh and lascivious poses.
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It showed Hylas bending over a pool filled with come-hither beauties and, of course, water lilies. But Hylas was not always needed by artists, and clean-limbed nymphs disporting themselves in ponds, among the water lilies, were a mainstay of the Paris Salon. They were the kind of soft-focus mythological scenes against which, ironically, Monet and his friends had been rebelling. These nymphs lingered in the waters of Giverny, if not in Monet’s imagination, then at least in those of the spectators and critics. Meanwhile, Monet, with his obsession, forever risked being drawn by them into the luminous abyss.