Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (29 page)

Paint, canvas, transport vehicles—all were desperately needed for the war effort. But of course Monet, too, was doing war work. In January he had received a letter from Clémentel, who claimed to be looking forward to “the consecration to the entire world of your splendid war work. I hope that this spring you will continue raising a corner of the veil, exposing the wonders that to this day only friends have been allowed to admire.”
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The “war work” (
oeuvre de guerre
) to which the minister referred was evidently not the recent Reims commission but instead the Grande Décoration.

So began the transfer from Reims to the Grande Décoration. These great canvases of water lilies and weeping willows were “war work” insofar as they had been painted during the war, but they were not done as
part of the war effort, and indeed they had been begun before the first guns were fired. By the beginning of 1918, however, Clémentel appears to have been entertaining the possibility that the Grande Décoration, like the ill-fated Reims commission, might serve as a powerful propaganda tool, announcing the glory of French culture. Not unreasonably, having seen the yards of painted canvas, he believed Monet’s work was nearing completion and might be ready for a more public unveiling by the spring of 1918. Clémentel may have had in mind something similar to the official visits paid by visiting dignitaries to the work in progress that was the
Panthéon de la Guerre
. Viewings of the giant panorama in the rue de l’Université had become almost mandatory stops for delegations visiting Paris. Tours were likewise conducted for interested private citizens, such that the panorama was rarely out of the news, with distinguished visitors gushing to the newspapers about the “noble and patriotic inspiration” of the Carrier-Belleuse and his team of painters.
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Monet did nothing to disabuse Clémentel of the notions of an imminent unveiling while making no further mention of expeditions to Reims. He did, however, continue using the commission to gain certain privileges. By the beginning of 1918, coal was extremely expensive and strictly rationed. Gendarmes were obliged to guard the Bois de Boulogne to stop freezing Parisians from chopping down its trees to use as firewood.
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Even Clemenceau’s ex-wife, Mary, living in Sèvres, was forced to send her maid into the street to forage for wood chips and rubbish to burn as fuel.
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Monet had no such difficulties. “I finally received the coal,” he wrote to Clémentel in January, “which I greatly appreciate.”
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As one resident wrote of the first months of 1918: “All over Paris, it was
faire la queue
for everything, even for tobacco and matches.”
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Many queued in the bitter cold in vain. A report prepared by Clémentel stated that in early 1918 the troops in the trenches could be provided with two thousand tons of tobacco per month, “but on the condition that supplies for the civilian population are almost completely removed.”
⁶²
A tobacco-starved journalist for
Le Gaulois
humorously described his frantic attempts to buy a pack of cigarettes in Paris following “a sleepless night, crossed by the wildest hallucinations, where I saw a packet
of tobacco again and again escape my greedy clutches and vanish into thin air.” In every shop he tried—including a tobacconist in the boulevard Poissonnière outside of which a hopeful and desperate crowd had gathered—he was given the same reply: “None left.”
⁶³

Yet one civilian was not forced to
faire la queue
for cigarettes or rebuffed with the dreaded phrase
Il n’y a plus
. Inside his well-heated studio, Monet was able to smoke to his heart’s content. He sent a letter of thanks to Clémentel for taking “so much trouble” in getting him a supply of cigarettes. “You know very well,” he told the minister, “how much I love to smoke.”
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CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE WEEPING WILLOW

THE GERMAN PILOTS,
in the end, had not been deceived by the acres of canvas and paint with which the
camoufleurs
were creating their fake Paris. As midnight approached on January 30, four squadrons of Gotha bombers zeroed in on the real thing. For the next two hours sirens wailed, antiaircraft guns barked, and French warplanes buzzed through the skies. Many Parisians gathered outside in the crisp night air to watch a spectacle that Marcel Proust, observing from a balcony in the Ritz, called the “admirable Apocalypse.”
¹
By morning, 36 people were dead and 190 wounded, while the wreckage of a French airplane occupied the place de la Concorde. As in the terrible days at the end of August in 1914, the train stations were suddenly besieged with would-be evacuees.

In December 1917, Georges Clemenceau had warned the Army Committee: “I believe the Germans will make their greatest effort since the beginning of the war, greater than at Verdun. There is no doubt of it.”
²
This alarming claim may have come as a surprise to those who heard it. Following more than three years of gory stalemate, the idea that the war might actually end was almost unfathomable. One British officer even calculated that, based on the average gains at the Somme, Vimy Ridge, and Messines, the Allies could not expect to reach the banks of the Rhine for another 180 years.
³
Moreover, by 1918 the Germans, having made a separate peace with Russia, were free to concentrate their efforts on the western front, attempting to crush the Allies with a rapid offensive.

The attacks on Paris increased with the coming of spring. At seven o’clock in the morning of March 21, a massive artillery shell exploded in Paris. It was followed by twenty-one more over the course of the day, all of them fired from a wooded hillside seventy-five miles away. This was
the work of a fearsome new weapon, the Paris-Geschütz, or the Paris Gun, a 138-ton cannon with a barrel almost 40 yards long. The biggest piece of artillery used in the entire war, the huge cannon (soon named Le Supercanon and La Grosse Bertha by the Parisians) was capable of propelling a 234-pound shell into the stratosphere, 25 miles above the ground. For days on end its shells pounded Paris, killing scores of people and causing more panicked evacuations. In the deadliest incident, at four twenty in the afternoon of March 29, a shell struck the church of Saint-Gervais, causing the roof to collapse on the congregation attending a Good Friday service. “The miserable wretches,” cried the archbishop of Paris. “They chose the date and time of Christ’s death to commit their crime!”
⁴
A total of eighty-eight people were killed and sixty-eight wounded.

The ruins of a Paris shoe store destroyed by Le Supercanon

Clemenceau remained optimistic and defiant. “I am delighted,” a newspaper quoted him as saying. “Things are going well.”
⁵
To David Lloyd George, his opposite number in London, he sent a telegram: “We are calm, strong and confident about tomorrow.”
⁶
He made weekly trips to the front and toured Paris to witness the ravages of the Paris Gun. Seeing the Tiger covered in mud following a visit to the front line or standing amid the bombed-out buildings inspired those who remained
in the city. Soon he began reminding them of one of the greatest figures in French history: “We believed in Clemenceau rather in the way that our ancestors believed in Joan of Arc,” claimed Maurice Barrès, the novelist and right-wing deputy. Another writer, the Goncourtiste Léon Daudet, claimed that one constantly heard the same thing in the Métro and on the omnibuses: “The old man’s there. We’ll beat them!”
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Winston Churchill, who toured the front with Clemenceau at the end of March, was awestruck by Clemenceau’s energy, courage, and unflappable determination. “He is an extraordinary character,” he wrote home to his wife. “Every word he says—particularly general observations on life & morals—is worth listening to. His spirit & energy are indomitable. 15 hours yesterday over rough roads at high speed in motor cars. I was tired out—& he is 76!”
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The German onslaught continued. At the end of May, following the most intense artillery bombardment of the entire war—when two million shells were fired by the Germans in the span of four hours on the morning of the twenty-seventh—the Allied line finally broke. The western front suddenly bulged inward along almost one hundred miles of trenches, from Quéant to Reims, as the Germans swept across the Aisne and reached the Marne at Château-Thierry, less than forty miles from Paris. Once more the city was threatened with invasion. Churchill later admiringly recorded the combative words Clemenceau spoke before the Chamber of Deputies in those terrible days: “I will fight in front of Paris. I will fight in Paris. I will fight behind Paris.”
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MONET ANXIOUSLY FOLLOWED
events from Giverny. He briefly considered the possibility that he might be forced to flee, leaving house, garden, and paintings behind. “I sometimes ask myself,” he wrote to Georges Durand-Ruel, one of Paul’s four sons, “what I would do if the enemy launched another attack. I suppose then, like so many others, I would have to abandon everything.” He admitted that “it would be hard to surrender everything to the dirty Krauts.”
¹⁰

The bombardment and the threat of invasion made Monet nervous about the fate of his paintings in Paris as well as those in Giverny. In
the middle of March a German airplane bombed the rue Laffitte, across the street from Durand-Ruel’s premises, which held as many as a hundred of his canvases. A month later a strike by Le Supercanon destroyed several banks in the street.
¹¹
Joseph Durand-Ruel began evacuating his firm’s store of paintings, while Gaston Bernheim-Jeune offered to collect Monet’s canvases from Giverny and take them for safekeeping to the museum in Rouen, used to shelter many of Paris’s treasures. But Monet declined the offer, striking a defiant pose. Both he and his paintings would stay to face down the invaders. “I don’t believe I shall ever leave Giverny,” he told Gaston. “As I’ve said, I would still prefer to perish here in the midst of all I have done.”
¹²

Monet continued to endure the inconveniences of wartime. Having evidently depleted his supply of tobacco from Clémentel, he began trying to cadge cigarettes from his friends. “Now, if you can get any Bastos cigarettes,” he wrote to the Bernheim-Jeunes in March, “think of me.” Sacha Guitry’s chauffeur did manage to furnish him with cigarettes, but Monet wrote back requesting not the cheap and nasty ones that came in blue packets but rather a “much better” variety, Scaferlati, which he called “elegant cigarettes of superior tobacco.”
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It is unclear if the chauffeur managed to lay hold of any of these elegant cigarettes. In January a magazine claimed Scaferlati tobacco was so expensive that the poor were forced to go without its “pungent sweetness,” and so rare that to flourish a packet in a café was “testimony of ingenuity without equal.”
¹⁴

If Monet was not in the least uneasy about making these demands, he felt somewhat sheepish about continuing to paint. “I confess to feeling a little embarrassed about working,” he told Joseph Durand-Ruel in the middle of June.
¹⁵
As always, however, he worked best in a crisis, throwing himself into his work to escape the calamities that were virtually within earshot of his garden. He was therefore extremely busy with his paints and canvases throughout the frantic and perilous spring of 1918. In April he placed an order for twenty canvases and two new palettes, which he asked to be wrapped well and delivered “as soon as possible” to the train station in Limetz.
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