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

berth on ship, the mosquito netting blew back and forth, catching the sickly, dull, hot air. The sea rocked beneath him and death felt near. It descended upon him like the weight of stuffy still darkness, filling his mouth, filling his lungs, forbidding breath. This was it, then. He was only twenty-three and he would be carried off to where death takes a man, though he had no idea where that could be. Tears ran down his unshaven face, stinging it; he managed to turn his head. But I don’t want to die, he thought. This can’t be the end for me when my life has hardly started.
    Then he was back in Le Havre in his boyhood room.
    Lying in bed, he gazed miserably at his magazine pictures of beautiful women, which looked down at him from the wall, as did his old drawings and caricatures. A week later, he managed to stand for a moment. Ten days later he made his way down the steps and outside as far as the gate.
    His father visited him a few times a day, his weary face full of concern, and his aunt brought him trays of food and read him amusing stories from the local newspapers. Léon, his older, married brother, arrived weekly, looking the proper businessman in his dark suit and with short hair, having just opened his own engraving shop. “How’s the soldier?” he said with a slight smile. “Made commander yet?”
    Claude’s aunt mounted with the supper tray one evening, her face a little somber. “We’ve inquiries from the army, Oscar,” she said. “Someone came to the door a few hours ago, a corporal of some sort in uniform. As soon as you’re well enough, they want you back.”
    He was strong enough to walk as far as the wharf, leaning on a stick, staring out at the vast, churning water. He longed to be in that Paris café with his friends, the long marble-topped table cluttered with glasses of cheap wine and everything smelling of cigars and old coats and paint. He slid out a pad and charcoal from his bag and sketched their profiles from memory. Back in his room, he wrote a letter to Auguste Renoir, whose address he found on the flyleaf of a book.
You may as well know I have made a mess of everything. I got myself sick in Algiers and they had to send me home for a time. I miss you all so much I can’t stand it. What are you doing in Paris? How are Cézanne, Sisley, our medical student, and your homely self? Are you are cheerful and determined to put beauty into the world? Though why you should be cheerful with your poverty, I don’t know!
Why don’t I come and surprise you all? I can’t. I haven’t any money. I have to go back to the army again just as soon as I’m well. The life I planned won’t happen and I’ve been stupid enough these last days to want it again rather desperately. Yes, I want to create art more than anything else, and it was that that got me sick in the first place. It aches and aches in me and won’t go away. I figure I have about a month or so more before they put me on a ship for Algiers again. Here it’s a tomb! Even my old artist friend Boudin is traveling and there’s no one I can talk to about these things at all. I wish one of you would visit me. I am almost perfectly well and have to pretend that I’m not .
    Claude tacked his sketch of the artists on his wall where he could look at it from his bed. He drew his room in Paris from memory. And one late afternoon he looked up and saw the medical student Frédéric Bazille bending his head to step through the door as he did in Paris to enter the café.
    Claude jumped up and shouted, “You walked out of my drawing! I was two days away from expiring from loneliness!”
    “Ah, that would be a pity, Monet! Is there a bed here for me?” He looked around the room. “You know, I could see from the train window that your Normandy has the most amazing light.”
    T HEY HAD BARELY dragged the folding cot from the attic when the dinner bell rang below. “Ah connard —the ass!” Claude muttered, looking around for his dinner coat.