Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet Read Online Free PDF Page A

billowing trousers, tight black jacket, fez, high boots, and a great curved sword. At least he looked handsome in it. As he sat wistfully on his bed selecting the books he would take, he raised his eyes to the old magazine pages of elegant women still tacked to his walls. Then he opened his sketchbook.
    He had missed his train to Le Havre by two minutes and, sitting on his box near the ticket windows in the great Gare Saint-Lazare to wait for the next one, he had sketched the tobacco and news-journal kiosk. When he looked up to catch the shadows of the stacked news journals, three women stood there, one older and the other two likely her daughters, both still in their adolescence. The younger yet taller girl was weeping beneath her blue hat veil. “But I won’t just do what you want me to,” she sobbed, bunching her glove in her hand. “All the social things you plan are so wretchedly tedious. I want to go to the theater; you promised me!” Her mother and sister tried to pull her away, but she shook her head and they hurried off without her. She stood alone then, pulling up her veil and drying her eyes with her handkerchief. Why she’s scarcely fifteen, if that, he thought, moved. Now she gazed about, her lovely, long desperate face wistful as if she hoped someone would rescue her. He turned the page and surreptitiously sketched her.
    As he was about to approach her, his train was called.
    Still sitting on his bed, he closed his sketchbook sadly, all his fond sketches of Paris within it. He straightened and tried on his hat. He thought, I am an army man now.
    W ITH A FEW hundred new soldiers who had volunteered or whose names had been chosen in the lottery, Claude sailed away across the ocean. Toward sunset some days later he and his fellows crowded on deck for their first sight of the glistening white city of Algiers rising up before them from the bay of the Mediterranean Sea.
    They disembarked with their bags to the market amid French soldiers and men in colorful Arabic robes and merchants and horses and dust and walked to their barracks, set in the former receiving room of a crumbling Arabic mansion. Claude fell asleep that first night in a bed protected by netting amid the snores of others and woke thinking he was back in his room in Paris with the cries of the market outside.
    For months he threw himself into his new life. He excelled at rifle practice; he won most practice duels, marched stoutly and gracefully, executed complicated drills with his fellows. Sometimes in his mind he saw himself as a great military man saving his country.
    Yet the colors would not leave him alone.
    He felt the subtle shades of sand and crumbled walls, of trees, of brown feet in sandals, of veiled women, of music played by men on instruments whose chords quivered in the air as the musicians squatted in the dust: brilliant reds and thick, deep browns, gold embroidery, and a hot, burning, sleepy sun. He climbed the steep hills to the Casbah, from which the Sultan had ruled before France conquered the country, and wandered among the old mosques and minarets.
    He unpacked his sketchbook; he had to capture the city.
    After a time he visited the Casbah regularly, returning with chalk drawings in his book. He managed to buy some paints and some old canvases. When he worked, he drank freely from the wells because it was so hot, and one day, hurrying back late as always, he fainted and rolled down the street.
    Someone picked him up and half carried him to his bed.
    He vomited; his bowels turned to hot, sick liquid, and he crawled to the chamber pot. The barracks in the ornate mansion with the stained blue tiles faded, and he thought he was scrambling over huge rocks to get to the sea.
    “Typhoid,” a voice echoed above him. “Did you drink unboiled water? We’ll telegraph your family in Le Havre and you’ll leave on the next ship. You may die before you reach there.”
    “But where are my sketchbook and canvases?” he managed.
    On his