Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (13 page)

*
  Blanche Hoschedé-Monet’s works can be found in a number of public collections in France: the Musée Clemenceau and the Musée Marmottan Monet, both in Paris; the Musée Toulouse-Lautrec in Albi; the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Rouen; the Musée des Augustins in Toulouse; the Musée de la Cohue in Vannes; and the Musée A.G. Poulain in Vernon.

CHAPTER FIVE

INTO THE UNKNOWN

“AS FOR ME,
I shall stay here regardless, and if those barbarians wish to kill me, I shall die among my canvases, in front of my life’s work.”
¹

So wrote Claude Monet almost a month into the war. Two weeks later he echoed this solemn defiance in a letter to Geneviève Hoschedé, the wife of his stepson Jean-Pierre, who, like 3 million other Frenchmen, was already in uniform. “If there is disorder or danger,” he informed her, “I would understand if Blanche leaves, but I shall stay regardless. Too many memories keep me here. More than half of my life has been spent here and, in short, I should prefer to die here in the midst of my work rather than to save myself and leave everything that has been my life to thieves or enemies.”
²

Monet’s determination to stand fast in the face of the enemy contrasted starkly with his behavior in 1870, the last time German soldiers set foot on French soil. On that occasion he had been honeymooning with Camille and three-year-old Jean in the seaside resort of Trouville. When two hundred thousand heavily armed Prussian troops descended on Paris and began besieging the city, he hastily slipped across the channel to England. There he sat out the entirety of the Franco-Prussian War strolling through London’s parks—of which he made several fine canvases—and developing tastes for Constable, Turner, and marmalade.

In August 1914 the situation looked equally bleak for the French. Hundreds of trains had rushed to the German frontier the French soldiers in the kepis and red pantaloons that had so impressed the visiting Boy Scouts. The cavalry wore shining breastplates and the officers brandished canes. “All the men sang,” reported
Le Matin
, “because they knew themselves to be serving a sacred cause—the cause of human civilization.”
³
They were also, of course, serving the cause of their country.
“Mourir pour la Patrie,”
they sang.
“C’est le sort le plus beau
...
”
Tens of thousands met this supposedly enviable fate as German guns—the massive field guns that Clemenceau had heard clattering on the other side of the Vosges—remorselessly scythed them down. On August 22, twenty thousand French soldiers died in the Battle of Charleroi, the largest single-day loss in the history of the French Army. Two days later a million German troops poured across the French frontier.

A French bayonet charge, Battle of the Marne, 1914

A French newspaper reported that Parisians were reacting to events with “
le superbe sang-froid
.”
⁴
But in fact panic was the order of the day. By the end of August, German gunfire was audible in Paris and a Taube airplane was dropping bombs on the city. Parisians anxiously scanned the sky for Zeppelins. As the minister of war predicted the arrival of the Germans in Paris within the week, the evacuations hastily commenced. As in 1870, the government decamped to Bordeaux, while Parisians flocked to the Gare d’Austerlitz and the Gare d’Orléans, turning them into hubbubs of luggage-stacked motorcars and embattled gendarmes. Others tried to catch boats to Rouen or Le Havre, where base hospitals were hastily prepared to deal with the wounded. Thousands of others took to the roads in farm carts, on bicycles, or pushing perambulators.
⁵
Works of art joined the exodus. More than 2,500 paintings were taken from the Louvre, packed in boxes sealed with passwords and guarded by soldiers, and dispatched for safekeeping to Toulouse and Blois. Included among the evacuees were the fourteen Monet paintings in the Camondo collection, which had lasted little more than two months on the walls of the Louvre.
⁶

In Giverny, trains carrying troops in cattle-cars trundled along the bottom of Monet’s garden, heading east. Meanwhile, many farmers and villagers headed west, fleeing Giverny and environs for safety in what Monet later called “a moment of terrible and ridiculous panic.”
⁷
One witness described the roads of Giverny that August as “filthy with dust and invaded by hordes of poor people driving their flocks before them, with children weeping noisily on carts and old people, broken by pain and emotion, sobbing silently, heads buried in their hands.”
⁸
Soon a family of Belgian refugees arrived in the village, accommodated in the house owned by Delphin Singeot, from whose family Monet had bought Le Pressoir.
⁹

More than thirty men in Giverny had enlisted or been mobilized. The American colony vanished virtually overnight. Among them were Monet’s stepdaughter Marthe, with her husband Theodore Earl Butler and his two children: they fled Giverny for New York City. One American who remained, at least for a few more months, was Frederick William MacMonnies, a sculptor from Brooklyn who since 1901 had occupied a seventeenth-century monastery near the church. He improvised a fourteen-bed hospital in an ivy-covered house named Le Pilotis. It quickly filled with wounded soldiers.

Giverny’s makeshift hospital soon found itself with a celebrity for its head nurse: Eugénie Buffet, a “street singer” whose performances in Parisian cabarets and cafés-concerts had made her a national sensation in the 1890s. Having qualified as a nurse a few weeks earlier, Mademoiselle Buffet, now forty-eight, was sent to change bandages and comfort wounded soldiers in Giverny. “God, what a sight!” she later wrote. “What nights I spent listening to the moaning of the poor soldiers...Those who went mad in the first offensive used to get up in the middle of the night, despite our surveillance, screaming as if they were still in the trenches.” She noted that many of the young soldiers gave the same pitiful cry: “
Maman
.” One night she began singing to them and, “lulled, relieved and calmed, they fell asleep.”
¹⁰

This hospital with its grim scenes of misery and death stood less than half a mile from Monet’s house. The people of Giverny donated
linen and mattresses, and Monet, too, made his own contribution: the wounded and shell-shocked soldiers were nourished on vegetables from his garden. These peas and beans came not from the famous garden of Le Pressoir but rather, because Monet believed vegetable foliage to be unsightly, from the vegetable patch his gardeners cultivated in the garden of a house he rented nearby, La Maison Bleue. Monet’s gardens were threatened with some distress due to the war, since several of his gardeners had gone off to the front. “We are well and continue to receive good news about our loved ones,” he wrote to Joseph Durand-Ruel, the son of his longtime picture dealer, “but we live in constant anguish and worry.”
¹¹

IN EARLY JULY,
in buoyant spirits, Monet had announced to Gustave Geffroy that he was at “the beginning of a great work.”
¹²
Now, however, in the first terrible weeks of conflict, with Jean-Pierre in uniform along with his stepdaughter Germaine’s husband, Albert Salerou, he had more to worry about than the fate of his grand new project. “Be brave and careful,” he wrote to Jean-Pierre, “and know that our hearts are with you.”
¹³
His son Michel had been exempted on medical grounds, possibly due to either a surgical operation a few months earlier or an old injury, a broken femur suffered when he crashed his car in Vernon in 1902.
¹⁴
He was, however, once again attempting to enlist. Monet also worried about his friends. He sent telegrams to inquire after Sacha and Charlotte, tried to track down Octave Mirbeau, and wrote friends in Paris to discover news of Renoir, two of whose sons were in uniform.
¹⁵

Monet also worried about his paintings. With the enemy only thirty miles from Paris, and with airplanes bombing the capital and dropping sacks of sand with notes attached announcing the forthcoming arrival of the Germans, he fretted that his canvases might fall prey to the Huns, whose destruction in 1870 of many of Camille Pissarro’s paintings he no doubt remembered: the Prussians had used his house at Louveciennes as a butcher shop and his canvases as carpets. On the last day of August he wrote to Joseph Durand-Ruel, asking if a “secure place” might be found for “a certain number of my canvases...Perhaps you could rent
an automobile,” he suggested, “that would come with a reliable person who could take whatever might be possible.”
¹⁶
Monet’s canvases, if he got his way, were, like the treasures of the Louvre, about to join the mass exodus.

No automobile came from Paris to evacuate the paintings, but on the following day one did arrive carrying Octave Mirbeau from his home at Cheverchemont, twenty-five miles upstream from Giverny. Few visitors could have been as welcome, especially in such a time of such anxiety. Mirbeau had undoubtedly been sincere when he wrote to Monet that “of all human beings, you’re the one I like the best.”
¹⁷
For Sacha Guitry, their mutual affection was touching: “Nothing has ever seemed more beautiful than the look in their eyes when they exchanged a glance.”
¹⁸

Their friendship stretched back more than thirty years, when Mirbeau wrote his first rapturous lines of prose about Monet’s paintings in the early 1880s. One of France’s most astute and articulate art critics, he made himself the most hated man in Paris, according to Guitry, thanks to his early support for Monet, Cézanne, and Van Gogh.
¹⁹
Monet called him “a discoverer in painting.”
²⁰
He was also a novelist of striking and sometimes bizarre originality. In 1913 a newspaper called him “the great Octave Mirbeau, the most powerful writer of our time.”
²¹
Above all, he was a tireless campaigner for the causes of truth, justice, and the downtrodden—a man with (as the same newspaper reported) “very advanced ideas.”
²²
A fellow novelist once said of him that every morning he got up angry and then spent the rest of the day looking for excuses to stay that way.
²³
As a child he used to bombard unsuspecting passersby with apples from his family’s orchard,
²⁴
and for the rest of his life he continued to lob missiles at moving targets. Chief among them was the Church, whose cover-up of sexual abuse by its priests (a fate he suffered as a schoolboy in Brittany) he exposed with horrifying frankness in his 1890 novel
Sébastien Roch
, subtitled
The Murder of the Soul of a Child
.

Mirbeau shared Monet’s love of food. In the 1880s he had founded a literary dining club, the Bons Cosaques (Good Cossacks), to which Monet was promptly invited. Gardening was another shared passion,
with Mirbeau by the 1890s becoming almost as fanatical a gardener as Monet. “I love flowers with an almost single-minded passion,” he declared in a newspaper in 1894. “Flowers are my friends...All joy comes from them.”
²⁵
He also loved the earthier aspects of gardening, once confiding to Monet: “I find a clod of earth admirable and can contemplate it for hours on end. And compost! I love compost as one loves a woman. I spread it and see in the steaming pile the beautiful forms and gorgeous colors that will emerge from it!”
²⁶
Mirbeau spread his compost on a number of gardens as he moved from one home to another, with Monet offering him endless advice and in return receiving comical accounts of his failures and frustrations (“I do not have a flower, not one!...As for the poppies, the slugs eat the tops, the grubs their roots”).
²⁷
When Mirbeau’s father died in 1900, he had recommended the family gardener, Félix Breuil, to tend Monet’s plants—and, more than a decade later, Breuil was still in Giverny, ensconced in a small house on the property.