Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (47 page)

The Orangerie des Tuileries

Monet’s concerns about the Orangerie during the visit in February 1923 involved how his canvases should be fixed to the walls. Wooden stretchers and frames were obviously out of the question, because the paintings needed to be placed on curving walls. He therefore opted for a technique called marouflage in which the backs of the canvases were coated with glue and then fixed directly to the wall, rather like sticking an advertising poster on a billboard. The process was tried and trusted, having been used prolifically in the nineteenth century to fix many of the large canvases to the walls and ceilings of the Panthéon, the Sorbonne, the Hôtel de Ville, and the vault of the foyer in the Théâtre-Français, which featured a canvas mural that was eight meters (twenty-six feet) wide. However, Monet wished to meet the
maroufleur
personally, and he exacted from Léon a promise to bring both Camille Lefèvre and the
maroufleur
to Giverny for a consultation at the earliest possible opportunity “in order to allay any anxiety about the process.”
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One of his
inviolable rules for the donation had been that the paintings would never be removed from the Orangerie, and his keen interest in making sure the technique was carried out properly surely demonstrated his fear that his canvases, unless permanently fixed to the walls, might, after his death, end up languishing in a dark and dusty basement.
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Léon and Clemenceau were, at this point, more anxious about Monet’s eyesight than anything else. Clemenceau was keeping in close touch with Dr. Coutela. “I cordially thank you for your valuable information,” he wrote to the ophthalmologist a week after Monet’s release from the clinic. “Like you, I think that the morale of our friend must be carefully managed, because he could resist a second intervention.”
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Another intervention began to look increasingly likely as the weeks passed and Monet’s vision did not significantly improve. By April, as Clemenceau explained to him, “a kind of vascularization caused by the devil knows what has caused an opacity that restricts your vision.”
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In fact, the opacity was caused by a secondary cataract developing in his right eye, a not uncommon complication of the surgery but one causing the reluctant patient a great deal of distress. Monet suffered from “bad days of pain and sensitivity,” which forced him to don dark glasses, remain indoors, and dictate his letters to Blanche. “Today,” he recited on April 9, in a long letter to Coutela, “I have had sharp electrical pains shooting up the centre of the eye itself, and, in addition, my eyes water all the time.” Coutela made his way to Giverny on several occasions in the months following the surgery, although he irritated Monet by postponing several consultations and then, at Easter, leaving for a holiday in Morocco. “I await your visit,” Monet seethed in the letter dictated on Palm Sunday, “which, this time, will not be postponed.”
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By the spring of 1923, Monet was entering what Jean-Pierre, another witness to these frustrations, called the “dark days”: a period of “discouragement, despair and panic.”
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Clemenceau, as usual, did his best to stiffen the sinews. “Whether it rains or shines,” he wrote to Monet in April, “my rule is to accommodate myself.”
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Such, alas, was not Monet’s approach. As he had done in the dark days of 1913, Clemenceau took him for what he called “a visit to Japan,”
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a trip to
see Edmond de Rothschild’s Japanese garden at Boulogne-Billancourt. He also brought several beautiful and glamorous women to Giverny: Charles Dana Gibson’s wife, Irene (a Southern beauty whose sister was Nancy Astor), and the Duchess of Marchena, “a great lady and a humble millionairess,” as Clemenceau explained, “who loves flowers and paintings, especially those of Monet. She has asked me with irresistible insistence if I could drive her to your house.”
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The estranged wife of the brutal and feeble-minded Francisco María de Borbón y Borbón, a cousin of the king of Spain, the duchess had for many years been the mistress of Clemenceau’s fabulously wealthy friend Basil (“Zed”) Zaharoff, who loaned him the Rolls-Royce.

But Monet remained, as he informed Dr. Coutela, “absolutely discouraged.” By the middle of June he was able to read with the help of glasses—fifteen or twenty pages a day, he claimed—but his distance vision remained poor, especially outdoors. Soon black dots began appearing before his eyes. Perhaps worst of all, five months after his surgery he had begun to lose faith in Coutela. He regretted having undergone “this fatal operation” and bluntly told the doctor that “it is criminal to have me put in this situation.” Coutela made an appointment for him in Paris for June 22, but on the day Monet—despite his frequent appeals to the doctor for help—failed to show. The consultation was rescheduled for the following week, and this time the secondary cataract was diagnosed and surgery scheduled for the middle of July. Monet was glumly reconciled to the procedure. “Since I know the truth about my fate,” he wrote to Coutela, “I await the day when I am delivered from the fatal protuberance and I need not tell you of my regret that this did not take place earlier.”
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This time, the surgery was performed in Giverny. On Wednesday, July 18, Dr. Coutela arrived at the station in Vernon at nine twenty
A.M.
“My visit to Giverny was satisfactory,” he later reported to Clemenceau, who was at Belébat. “Excellent morale...Everything is for the best.” He noted, however, that Monet once again had difficulties with faintness, nausea, and vomiting.
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The patient was well enough on the day following the operation to walk in his garden with Blanche, and a return visit from Coutela two days after the surgery confirmed that matters
had gone well. Before setting off for an August holiday in Brittany, the doctor decided that on his return he would prescribe Monet a pair of remedial spectacles.

“Now you’re done with it,” Clemenceau wrote to Monet a few days later, gently chastising him for being “a nervous man who, in spite of himself, creates complications.” He signed off the letter by calling Monet a “
mauvais petit gamin
”—a bad little boy.
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“NOW YOU’RE DONE
with it”: Clemenceau himself probably did not dare believe these words even as he wrote them. Nonetheless, he continued to encourage Monet and to urge patience. Monet was initially optimistic. Once more dictating to Blanche, he informed the Bernheim-Jeunes that this latest operation had been more painful than the previous two, having left him in “some suffering and distress,” but he eagerly awaited the arrival of the “lifesaver spectacles” on which he was pinning his hopes for improved vision.
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An examination in the third week of August led Dr. Coutela to pronounce, in a letter to Clemenceau, the satisfactory outcome of this latest surgery, although both men recognized that an operation on the left eye was inevitable if Monet were truly to have his vision restored. Clemenceau gently broached the topic, telling Monet that he wanted “to make sure that, like everyone else, you can see with both eyes.”
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The odds of Monet submitting to another operation suffered a blow when, at the end of August, the “lifesaver spectacles” finally arrived. “What a disappointment,” he declared to Clemenceau, while to Coutela he dictated: “I am absolutely devastated because, despite all my good intentions, I feel that, if I took a step, I would fall on my face. Whether near or far, everything is distorted, I see double, and it’s intolerable to keep wearing them. To continue with them seems to me to be dangerous. What shall I do? I look forward to your response. And I am most unhappy.”
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Coutela instructed him to persist, and two days later a slightly cheerier letter arrived reporting that, “my goodness, I have been able to read, a little bit at first...with a little fatigue, naturally. Distortion as before, but I endured courageously.” He took to liberally dosing his left
eye with drops and covering it with a patch while wearing the glasses.
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At the end of August, Monet received a telegram from Clemenceau offering yet another pep talk. “The fact that you can see is absolute proof that your sight is returning...Success is assured.”
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Such optimistic reports and opinions were reminiscent of the pronouncements—such as “Things are going well”—that he confidently issued in March 1918 when the Allied line collapsed, German soldiers swarmed toward Paris, and Le Supercanon began bombarding the city. The energies that had once inspired a nation were now turned on Monet, albeit so far with somewhat limited success.

Although the glasses allowed Monet to read, the latest problem was a severe disturbance of his color perception. It was an alarming development for a connoisseur of nature and an artist whose works expressed the most subtle nuances of color and light. On August 30 he reported to Clemenceau, via Blanche, that “the distortion and exaggerated colors that I see absolutely terrify me.” So lurid and off-key were these colors that he claimed (not without a certain self-dramatization) that he would prefer to go blind in order to keep unsullied his memories of the beauty of nature. Clemenceau dismissed this pose as absurd (“Is there any more room in the madhouse?”), but the serious fact was that, as Monet pointed out, “both nature and my paintings look hideous to me.”
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Compounding matters was the fact that his left eye had now deteriorated to the extent that he could see nothing without eyedrops, which Coutela, much to Monet’s annoyance, had strictly rationed. After this catalogue of visual disturbances, his statement to Clemenceau that he had several canvases in need of retouching must have sounded alarm bells.
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These efforts could only have ended, it seemed clear, with the slashing of knives and the crackling of bonfires.

Dr. Coutela made a trip to Giverny in early September.
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He tested Monet’s vision by making him read him a letter from Clemenceau, which, Coutela remarked in his report to Clemenceau, he himself had difficulty deciphering (“You don’t mind me saying that your handwriting is small and difficult to read”). But Monet read the letter without hesitation. Coutela confided a touching detail: “He is very pleased with the
letters that you write to him.” He noted, however, that Monet’s distance vision was poor, although it would, he surmised, improve with time and habituation. In the meantime he worried about Monet doing such things as climbing the ill-lit stairs to his bedroom.

Monet was less concerned about flights of stairs than by the fact that poor distance vision meant he could no longer appraise his work by stepping back from the canvas. Even more, he was panicked by what he called his “upheavals” in color balance: he told Clemenceau that he no longer saw thirty-six colors but only two: yellow and blue.
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Coutela reassured Clemenceau that such distortion was not uncommon following cataract surgery, causing little alarm to patients who did not possess Monet’s “marvellous gift of color analysis.” To rectify the situation, he proposed a selection of tinted lenses, although Monet, after the letdown with the lifesaver spectacles, was staunchly pessimistic about the odds of their working. He was also irked by the fact that Coutela seemed “to care very little” about his problem with color.
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Making Coutela’s task difficult was the fact that Monet’s claims about his disordered color perception were ambiguous and sometimes contradictory. “He sees everything in yellow tones,” observed Coutela following this consultation. He therefore diagnosed xanthopsia, a condition caused by the ageing of the lens and often exacerbated by cataracts (and, in a posthumous diagnosis of Vincent van Gogh, possibly by substance abuse).
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However, Monet’s statement to Clemenceau about seeing only two colors, yellow and blue, had originally read “yellow and green” before Monet struck out “green” and wrote “blue,” while a few days later he wrote to Coutela that he saw “yellow as green and everything else more or less blue.”
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This predominance of blue sounds more like cyanopsia, often the temporary side-effect of a cataract operation. Meanwhile, Sacha Guitry arrived at Giverny during this time of troubles, finding Monet in a dreadful state, sitting alone in his studio “with the look of a man overwhelmed by misfortune.” Guitry kissed his cheek and Monet lamented: “My poor Sacha! I can’t see yellow anymore.”
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Clemenceau continued to send letters and telegrams to Giverny, offering his usual combination of morale-boosting optimism and gentle
reproof. “Stay calm, my sweet, furious brother,” he urged. Or again: “Have a bit of patience, little baby.”
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He had become increasingly concerned about the fate of the donation of the Grande Décoration. For the past year Monet had been able to do little if any meaningful work on his canvases; meanwhile the April 1924 deadline was little more than six months hence. He therefore wrote to Coutela two days after the consultation in Giverny, pointing out that Monet needed to be “in fine fettle” for the inauguration. Would it be possible, he asked Coutela, for Monet to make the necessary corrections to his panels with vision in only one eye? If not, an operation on the left eye would be necessary. But would Monet recover from this procedure on time to work on the panels? And would he even consent to a further operation? There was, as Clemenceau tactfully pointed out, the “psychology of the patient” to consider. “The ball,” he told Coutela, “is in your court.”
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