Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (20 page)

A few weeks later, plagued by reports of munitions shortages and the lack of success at the front, René Viviani resigned as prime minister and Aristide Briand, a fifty-three-year-old socialist, formed a national unity coalition. He included politicians of every stripe, from Louis Malvy, a radical socialist, to a right-wing Catholic, Baron Denys Cochin, a collector of modern art who owned paintings by Monet, Manet, Van Gogh, Cézanne, and Paul Signac. Briand invited Clemenceau to join this disparate group, but Clemenceau replied that he would never enter a cabinet of which he was not the head.
³⁸
The political battles and long hours of work began to take their toll on his health, and by 1915 he was suffering from diabetes.

MONET MADE A
second trip to Paris in November, this time in the company of Blanche. “Try to find out in advance,” he wrote to the Bernheim-Jeunes on the fifteenth, “if the première of the famous film will take place next Sunday.”
³⁹

Sacha Guitry’s
Ceux de chez nous
was to debut at the Théâtre des Variétés. During Monet’s youth in Paris in the 1860s, this theater had
been the venue for Jacques Offenbach’s extraordinarily successful operas, such as
La Belle Hélène
and
La Grand-Duchess de Gérolstein
. It is, however, unlikely that Monet had ever settled down into one of its plush seats. Unlike Renoir and Degas—producers of beautiful paintings of dancers, orchestras, and opera boxes—he never displayed the slightest interest in either painting or participating in the nightlife of operas, ballets, or the new entertainment of cinema. “The cinema barely interested him,” claimed Jean-Pierre.
Ceux de chez nous
would be, in fact, the only film he ever saw.
⁴⁰
Monet’s apparent lack of interest in technologies such as photography and film is curious and even paradoxical in someone otherwise so obsessed with the immediacy of the visual impression.

The film was screened at four fifteen
P.M.
and lasted for twenty-two minutes, giving the audience moving images in flickering black and white of France’s greatest living cultural treasures. Among the illustrious cast dutifully playing themselves were Sarah Bernhardt, a vivacious figure reciting verses on a bench beside Guitry, and Camille Saint-Saëns, filmed tickling the ivories and then wielding his baton before an imaginary orchestra. An awkward-looking Mirbeau was interviewed in his garden, looking (as
Le Figaro
put it) “like he was sitting in a torture chamber,” while Anatole France appeared at a desk in his study, writing industriously on a piece of paper and “trying hard not to smile.”
⁴¹
Other cultural celebrities persuaded to pose for Guitry’s camera were the theater director André Antoine and the playwright Edmond Rostand, whose
Cyrano de Bergerac
was providing competition at another theater.

“The name Sacha Guitry on a poster,” declared
Le Gaulois
, “is a guarantee of originality, since this young man does not follow the beaten path.”
⁴²
It is safe to assume that the audience for
Ceux de chez nous
had never experienced anything quite like this production. “What makes this cinematograph so exciting for the public,”
Le Gaulois
went on, “is Monsieur Guitry’s commentary.” Guitry and Charlotte concealed themselves in the wings of the theater and, as the film played, provided a live running commentary. “His life is the simplest in the world,” Guitry intoned over the footage of Monet. “He watches, eats, walks, drinks and
listens. The rest of the time, he works.” The audience may have been startled to learn the dubious fact, aired by Guitry in his voice-over on his Renoir segment, that Monet and Renoir as young men once spent an entire year living on potatoes.

Guitry was most innovative in the production in his use of what
Le Figaro
called a “new and wonderful application of cinematography.”
⁴³
As the film played, he lip-synched the voices of his on-screen subjects and, in so doing, created one of cinema’s earliest talkies. As
Le Petit Parisien
reported: “From the shade of the wings, Guitry and Madame Lysès, in flesh and blood, replicate the speech of their subjects by lending their voices to the figures projected onto the screen.”
⁴⁴
Thus the spectators at the Théâtre des Variétés witnessed a “conversation” between Monet and a boater-wearing Guitry, with Monet recounting the story of the American woman who asked him for one of his paintbrushes. “People have the strangest ideas, don’t you think?” Monet asks. “No, not at all,” replies Guitry. “And as proof I asked him for one myself.” Guitry recounts how he examined a handful of used brushes, but Monet instructed him: “Take a new one, you can use it for something.”

The film enjoyed an “enthusiastic reception” from the public and critics alike.
⁴⁵
“Sudden emotions stir your heart,” wrote Régis Gignoux, a critic in
Le Figaro
. He was entranced in particular by the footage of Monet and Renoir. “We see these masters at their easels, with Monet, out of doors, painting as he breathes, as he eats, and as he drinks—with gusto.” Gignoux had reservations that the camera might expose the “secret of their genius”, but took heart that the spectator was left with an insight into “the eye of the painter before the canvas, its possession of light, space, form—and the joy of painting!”
⁴⁶

Ceux de chez nous
ran for the rest of the year and into early 1916, with both evening and matinee performances. When his latest play,
Il Faut l’Avoir
, opened in December at the Théâtre du Palais-Royale, Guitry spent a week bustling back and forth between the two venues before his film migrated to the Palais-Royale, giving him some slight respite. He was justifiably proud of his achievement—he would resurrect the film in 1939 and again in 1952—but he had no immediate further plans for cinema
work. He was, in fact, pessimistic about the future of the medium: “I consider,” he declared, “that the cinema is already past its best.”
⁴⁷

The giant painting
Le Panthéon de la Guerre
in progress

AS CINEMAGOERS FLOCKED
to
Ceux de chez nous
throughout December, a smaller throng was discreetly making its way to the boulevard Berthier, to an obscure address in the northwest corner of the city.
Le Figaro
reported that the locals were intrigued by the comings and goings of military leaders and staff officers, “whose presence in this peaceful area was quite unusual.” Rumors spread that a war council was meeting in the “mysterious little building” into which all of them quietly slipped. But the paper then enlightened its readers. For here, in the boulevard Berthier, another commemoration of France’s glories was under way: a tribute to its men of war. “This rally of generals and officers of all arms,” reported the newspaper, “was for the benefit of the artists Carrier-Belleuse and Gorguet.”
⁴⁸
The two painters were convening France’s most distinguished soldiers in Carrier-Belleuse’s workshop in order to include them in their giant panorama, the
Panthéon de la Guerre
.

The two men had accomplished much on their enormous project over the previous year. In June, a journalist from
Le Figaro
had visited the studio and reported that he had seen the fully completed sketch of the panorama. “Even in its limited dimensions,” he wrote, “this sketch gives a good first impression of the work, which will present a painted surface of nearly two thousand square meters, exactly 115 metres in circumference and 15 metres in height.” Carrier-Belleuse anticipated that it would cover, in total, some two thousand square meters of canvas. Thousands
of portraits were planned, with the heroic figures to be grouped “in a splendid architecture beyond which appears, on the horizon, the whole theater of war, where we can distinguish the silhouettes of Ypres, Arras, Soissons, Reims, Nancy, Metz and Strasbourg.” Despite the assistance of a large team of collaborators, Carrier-Belleuse predicted that the project would take another year of work.
⁴⁹

One of the visitors to Carrier-Belleuse’s studio at this time was a French general, Louis de Maud’huy, one of the heroes of the Victory of the Marne. As the general sat for his portrait, a soldier arrived in the studio, a young lieutenant with his head bandaged and his arm in a sling. Maud’huy observed with emotion that the young man was injured. “Oh, a little bit, sir,” the lieutenant replied. “I lost an eye and got a bullet through my arm.” But it did not matter, he claimed, because he was off to the front again in a few days. After this brief exchange, General Maud’huy embraced him, his face wet with tears. “I’ve embraced so many children whom I shall never see again,” he explained to Carrier-Belleuse.
⁵⁰

Claude Monet had been hoping to embrace his own soldier. At the end of November he made his way to Versailles to bid farewell to his son Michel, who, having finished his training, was on his way to the front. Alas, because of a mix-up, it proved a disappointing journey: Michel had departed the day before. Monet was left to return to Giverny “sheepish and sad. At my age,” he wrote to Geffroy, “it’s difficult.” He had passed his seventy-fifth birthday two weeks earlier. As the year dragged to a close he wrote: “I’ve had enough of this horrible war.”
⁵¹

CHAPTER EIGHT

UNDER FIRE

A FEEBLE OPTIMISM
stirred briefly in France in the first days of the New Year. On the Jour de l’An, a former prime minister, Louis Barthou, wrote that “1916 will see our liberation and victory.”
¹
It was a bold prediction. By this point, 50 percent of the French officers were either dead or wounded, and the German general Erich von Falkenhayn, chief of the general staff, had informed Kaiser Wilhelm: “France has been weakened almost to the limits of endurance.”
²
Falkenhayn’s plan for 1916 was to stage a massive attack that would force the French to defend and—in Falkenhayn’s chilling phrase—to “bleed themselves white.”
³
To that end, in early January, the Germans began excavating gun pits and tunnels and transporting to the front, on ten purpose-built railway tracks, hundreds of the heaviest guns ever used in land warfare.

As the massive artillery was maneuvered into position, Zeppelins took to the air. On the evening of January 29, people strolling the boulevards of Paris and enjoying the mild, springlike temperatures were surprised to see teams of men frantically extinguishing gas lamps and cutting the ignition on electric lights. Firefighters rushed through the streets in their vehicles, blowing bugles. For the past twelve months London and the English coast had been bombed by zeppelins, but a Paris newspaper had calmed its readers: “Rest assured, Parisians, you will not be hearing the hum of Zeppelin engines.”
⁴
Of the four Zeppelins that lumbered through the clouds toward Paris in March 1915, two had turned back before reaching their destination, while the others haphazardly bombed suburban homes in the Pays des Impressionnistes. “The population of Paris was, as always, perfectly calm,” a newspaper proudly reported.
⁵
Now, after a lull of ten months, the hum of a Zeppelin engine was again heard in the skies. Instead of dispersing at the alarm,
the people on the boulevards looked to the skies—crisscrossed by searchlights—and chanted: “Death, death to the Huns!”
⁶
Soon the unmistakable sounds of explosions could be heard. In total, eighteen bombs were dropped by the 536-foot-long cigar-shaped behemoth, leaving twenty-six dead and another thirty-two wounded.