Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (51 page)

WHILE CLEMENCEAU, ANGRY
and hurt, kept his distance in the first months of 1925, other visitors continued to arrive in Giverny. On the last Saturday in January, an automobile appeared in the village after following the meanders of the Seine from Paris. Along the journey, the two passengers had been offered through their windows brief but startling glimpses of Impressionist landscapes: beautiful parks enclosed by walls, charming country inns that looked like stage sets, barges and tugboats plying the rain-stippled waters. But so modest was the pink and green house in the rue de Haut that for a moment the men, as they climbed from the automobile, doubted they had found the right place.
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The two men, Sébastien Chaumier and Jacques Le Griel, were municipal councillors from the city of Saint-Étienne. They had made the 350-mile journey north in hopes of purchasing one of Monet’s paintings for their museum. Like Kojiro Matsukata, they had asked Monet to make a selection for them. Unlike Matsukata, they did not have deep pockets. However, they had managed to scrape together 30,000 francs to purchase a painting from what they called “the last survivor of the masters who, seduced by divine light, wished to capture its dazzling radiance for the eyes of others.”

The prospect of this visit had thrown Monet into a dreadful panic. “These people are coming in a mob,” he raged, as if a swaggering band of marauders were advancing on Giverny, rather than a pair of provincial worthies. “They’ll get everything dirty, they’ll pillage everything.” Four days earlier he had sent an urgent telegram to Saint-Étienne urging them not to come. Either it had failed to arrive on time or the two eager delegates had chosen to ignore it.

After knocking on the narrow door, Chaumier and Le Griel were greeted by Blanche, who told them in a “sweet and friendly voice” that Monet was afraid of them, that he never received visitors, and that he worked all day on his decorations for the Orangerie. “But since there are only the two of you, and since you don’t look wicked, I shall search him out. I think he’ll be glad you came anyway.”

The two men were conducted into Monet’s studio, whose walls, they noted, were covered with half-finished paintings hung closely together without frames, including ones of the banks of the Seine at Vétheuil, through which they had passed barely a half hour earlier. The furniture was modest except for a mahogany bureau on which sat an india ink drawing of Monet by Édouard Manet, a portrait of Manet by Edgar Degas, a photograph of Clemenceau, and a reproduction of a Corot painting. In the center of the room, on an easel, there sat for their appraisal the canvas with which Monet would be (as he wrote on the label in his own hand) “worthily represented in the museum of Saint-Étienne.” It was a water lily painting from 1907, done on a circular canvas some two and a half feet in diameter.

Presently the master appeared on the threshold, looking as youthful, Le Griel later claimed, as in his decades-old portrait on the bureau. “Gentlemen,” he greeted them, “you are welcome here. I was afraid of not being able to receive you, and I’m pleased you didn’t receive my telegram.” After Chaumier and Le Griel politely deplored the telegraph service, Monet peppered them with questions. Was their journey difficult? By what means did they travel? Was Saint-Étienne far away? Did their museum possess an interesting collection?

The councillors explained that Saint-Étienne could boast 200,000 inhabitants. Coal was mined in the vicinity. Ribbons and weapons were manufactured. “How curious!” exclaimed the master. Their museum, they further elucidated, was poor; however, it would greatly be enriched by Monet’s canvas. They proceeded to rattle off some of the painters in their collection: Henri Martin, Hippolyte Flandrin, Dubois-Pillet (“at whose name Claude Monet nodded and smiled”), and a series of works by Alexandre Séon (at whose mention
Monet intervened: “Séon?...I don’t know him”). Monet asked why the councillors had come to purchase a painting directly from the artist rather than going to a dealer but, before they could reply, proceeded to answer his own question. “The merchants sell my work at very high prices,” he noted, adding: “For far more than they’re worth.”

The two councillors respectfully disputed this point but acknowledged that the works in the galleries in the rue La Boétie, which they had visited the day before, came with eye-watering price tags. Monet declared that he had not set foot in Paris for four years (which was not quite true). Had they seen any nice pictures there? Of course, they replied: some beautiful Monets in the Galerie Rosenberg. In that case, he declared, they must have seen Corot’s
La Femme à la Mandoline
in the same gallery. “I have a reproduction,” Monet told them (and, indeed, the two men had already spied it on the mahogany table). “It’s one of the best paintings of the nineteenth century. It’s bloody beautiful. Here is my canvas,” he abruptly announced, turning to the easel. “Do you like it?”

They did indeed approve. “Who, master, could better choose than you?”

“Well, then, take it away.”

“But we have no packaging,” they pointed out, “and the proper administrative forms must be filled out.”

“How curious,” remarked Monet, “but I suppose that must be the case.” He then pointed out that they could not take the circular frame, which he was keeping because it was old. The councillors protested that they would happily have it restored. “But then I would be obliged to charge you for it,” Monet explained, “because it’s very expensive.” So they agreed on a price: 200 francs. “Ah, master,” they murmured, “such a bargain.”

The two men were then treated to a tour of the gardens. In the bleak depths of winter, there was little more to see than the naked branches of the rose trellises and the shriveled remnants of the water lilies tracing their black initials on the gray surface of the pond. “Ah! gentlemen, if only you knew,” Monet enthused, “in summer I have such
beautiful flowers! Come back this summer and you will see my garden. It’s my pride and joy!”

But in their circular painting on the easel, the councillors from Saint-Étienne had already caught a glimpse of Giverny in all its vibrant glory. “On the canvas by Monet that will leave for our museum,” wrote Le Griel, “it is and always will remain, despite the winters outside, an eternal feast of an ideal and dream-like springtime.”

OTHER MORE CUSTOMARY
visitors—André Barbier, Gustave Geffroy—also made their way to Giverny that grim winter. Then, in February, a huge automobile roared through the narrow streets. At the wheel was the painter Maurice de Vlaminck, accompanied by the critic Florent Fels. The forty-eight-year-old Vlaminck, one of the Fauves, was paying homage to the master in the same way that his friend Matisse had done eight years earlier. Like Matisse, he had regarded Monet as his guiding star, once declaring: “I owe the first great enthusiasms and the first revolutionary certitudes of my twenties to Monet.”
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His career as a painter had begun one morning in June 1900 when he and André Derain, who had met only one day earlier, took themselves off to paint at La Grenouillère, on the spot that today the Musée de la Grenouillère in Croissy calls, not without justification, the “birthplace of Impressionism.” On that bright June day at the beginning of a fresh new century, Vlaminck and Derain, setting up their easels by the Seine, had been following, quite literally, in the footsteps of Monet and Renoir, and those same few square yards of riverbank might equally be called “the birthplace of Fauvism.”

Monet left a memorable impression on his two visitors. Fels described him as “a proud, small old man, who dodged the obstacles in his path uncertainly. Behind the thick lenses of his spectacles, his eyes appeared enormous, like those of an insect searching for the last light.” Monet told his two visitors—possibly exaggerating somewhat—that he could not see them at all. His eyesight was still poor despite his latest pair of Meyrowitz spectacles, for which, as usual, his initial burst of enthusiasm had rapidly dwindled into fits of frustration and impatience.
“For two years now, since my operation,” he told them, “I have been able to see only a sort of fog in which, from time to time, certain details appear more precisely...With my eyes as they are, it is useless for me to continue painting.”
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Yet Monet continued to paint. Chaumier and Le Griel had been informed that the master was toiling nonstop on his canvases for the Orangerie, and, around the time of their visit, Monet informed Louis Gillet that despite a “crisis of profound discouragement” he was struggling to bring his Grande Décoration to completion.
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To Pierre Bonnard he wrote that he was obsessed with his panels, that the date on which he had to deliver them was fast approaching, and that he cursed his idea of donating them to the state. He lamented to Bonnard that he would be forced to hand them over “in a deplorable state, which truly makes me sad. I make every effort to pull myself together a bit, but without much hope.”
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He made no mention to either of them, nor to Vlaminck and Fels, that he had canceled his donation. The absence of his letters to both Léon and Clemenceau—neither of which has been located—raises the question of whether he was entirely serious about abandoning the donation or whether his threatened cancelation was simply (like so many of his letters) a plea for help, understanding, and yet more time.

A VISIT THAT
spring caused Monet even more anxiety than that of the municipal councillors from Saint-Étienne. On March 22, a cool day with showers and sleet, Clemenceau made his first trip to Giverny since the breach. He had preserved a long silence throughout January before writing to Blanche in the middle of February to report that he would have nothing more to do with “this unhappy affair.”
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A few days later he wrote to Monet himself, more in sorrow than in anger: “It’s true, my dear friend,” he told him, “that I hold against you the fact that you’ve harmed yourself and thereby hurt your friends. But I did not stop admiring and loving you as always. Even in the state of distress into which you’ve put yourself, I wanted to help you, and I would continue to do so if you had made it possible. I respect your scruples, but I see the effect of an unhealthy state of mind which I cannot change.”
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A few days later
another letter, this one fruitlessly revisiting painful territory: “You made a formal commitment with me, then you broke it without even doing me the honour of telling me. So your monomania outweighs your conscience. I can do nothing, and neither can you. You created the situation. I can only accept it with a sadness I cannot describe.”
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But Clemenceau could neither stay away from Giverny nor let the project die. At the end of February he wrote: “I’m in so much pain that I’m ready, if you agree, to make one last try. You have only to telegraph me your answer. But if you feel your decision is unchangeable, do not make me suffer the grief of an increasingly painful recommencement.”
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These tense and crestfallen missives were not an encouraging prologue to the visit to Giverny. However, the two men agreed not to discuss the status of the donation during the visit and to keep their conversation to safer topics, such as gardens, the “horrid weather” that prevented Clemenceau’s departure for the Vendée, and even the international political situation. The dismal failure of the Treaty of Versailles was evidently a happier subject for Clemenceau than the state of the Grande Décoration.
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Clemenceau also, no doubt, had little wish to hear about Monet’s continuing problems with his eyesight. However, around the time of the visit, Monet finally received his Zeiss glasses, which had been seven or eight months in the making. At first there was little improvement. He wrote to Dr. Mawas regretting that the spectacles had not performed the miracles for which he had been hoping. He claimed that they caused blurred vision, while the subtler colors were “fragmented and distorted.” Moreover, they had arrived “at a very bad time, when I was very discouraged and no longer able to believe in better results, so I did not persist with the use of these glasses.” He promised to give them another try when he was in a “better frame of mind...although I am more convinced than ever that the lost sight of a painter cannot be found. When a singer loses his voice, he retires. The painter after cataract surgery should abandon painting.”
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Monet was still in this state of discouragement when, in early May, he was struck by yet another severe blow. He had already outlived his son Jean and his stepdaughter Suzanne. Now he lost a second stepdaughter,
Marthe, who passed away suddenly in Giverny at the age of sixty-one. She had been the eldest of Alice’s children and the wife of Theodore Earl Butler, who found himself a widower for the second time. Monet was badly shaken by her death. He canceled visits from friends such as Geffroy, Helleu, and Joseph Durand-Ruel, lapsing into “sadness and discouragement”
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and maintaining a long silence that, by June, began to concern Clemenceau. The Tiger had sent his commiserations from Belébat: “I’m sorry about this sudden blow that has struck so cruelly. Our poor Blue Angel did not need this pain after so many others. There are no comforting words.”
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Furthermore, Clemenceau was, almost for the first time, forced to confront his own failing health. He had suffered from a bad cough for much of the previous year. He summoned a doctor, Antoine Florand, from Paris, and then complained, quite ungraciously after the doctor endured the long train journey, that he was annoyed by his presence.
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Clemenceau believed the problem was the bullet from the 1919 assassination attempt, still lodged in his chest. Then in the spring he began suffering from infections in one of his eyes followed by a heart condition that obliged him to undergo a “medical torture” in Paris.
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