Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (35 page)

If Monet was disappointed by his failure to find buyers, his new paintings left him with an even more disagreeable legacy. For the previous five years he suffered very few problems with his cataracts, partly because of the precautions he took: his hat, his parasol, his habit of working only early in the morning or later in the afternoon. Moreover, his enthusiasm for work left him determined to overcome or ignore any physical disabilities. However, the good weather in the summer of 1919 had coaxed him out of the shadows and into the bright light, and the many hours of staring at the sparkling surface of his pond exacerbated his eye condition. During a visit to Giverny in November, Clemenceau advised an operation, but Monet was wary of submitting himself so
readily to the surgeon’s knife. “I’m very worried that an operation might be fatal,” he wrote to Clemenceau, “and that once the bad eye has been cured the other eye will follow. So I prefer to make the best of my bad sight, such as it is, and give up painting if necessary, but at least be able to see something of the things I love, the sky, water and trees, not to mention my nearest and dearest.”
⁴¹

The thought of a Monet who was blind and unable to paint must have horrified Clemenceau, who could well imagine the madness and mayhem such a state of affairs would unleash. But he could do little to convince his friend of the benefits of an operation. And so began what Clemenceau called the “unspeakable drama” of the cataracts.
⁴²

ONE REASON WHY
Monet painted a new series of canvases in the summer of 1919 was that he had, for all intents and purposes, completed the Grande Décoration. Little remained to be done, beyond touch-ups and tinkerings, on these vast surfaces the obsessive covering of which had seen him through the terrible years of the war. Their completion, together with the loss of so many contemporaries and the steady approach of his eightieth birthday, enhanced his feeling that the shadows were lengthening. Two further events at the end of 1919 only served to amplify the impression.

First came the ghost of an old friend. In November, Gustave Geffroy sent him an edition of the poet Maurice Rollinat’s final writings, entitled
Fin d’Oeuvre
(
Last Work
), for which Geffroy had composed the preface. For Monet, the volume made poignant reading. He had been good friends with Rollinat, whose letters he carefully preserved in a folder marked, in violet ink, “Lettres de Rollinat.”
⁴³
“While it brought me great pain,” he wrote to Geffroy, “it has been a great pleasure to read your beautiful preface, and to relive the wonderful hours spent with such a lovely but unfortunate man. What a sad end!”
⁴⁴

Maurice Rollinat had been one of those figures whose doomed life of tormented brilliance stood out even in the absinthe-soaked, syphilis-infected world of nineteenth-century Paris. A disciple of Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe, he had entranced Oscar Wilde, who
eagerly scribbled down his maxims and emulated his flamboyant coiffure. He was a star turn at Le Chat Noir, the celebrated cabaret in Montmartre where his songs about death, hallucination, and disease mesmerized audiences in performances that featured him crashing violently away on the piano and imitating the wild gesticulations of the inmates he had carefully studied in the local insane asylum. “Day and night, through all the earth,” ran a typical poem,

He dragged his lonely heart

In fright and mystery

In anguish and remorse
.

Long live death! Long live death!
⁴⁵

One critic exulted that Rollinat exceeded Baudelaire “by the sincerity and depth of his diabolism,” while another champion, Mirbeau, found in his poetry “an explosion of masturbatory joy.”
⁴⁶

Perhaps surprisingly, Monet had enjoyed the company of this morbid, exotic creature. In 1889, when he painted his series of canvases of the Creuse valley, he spent much time at the remote cottage in Fresselines, two hundred miles south of Paris, to which Rollinat had repaired with his partner, an actress named Cécile Pouettre. Here the poet known for his macabre visions happily fished, walked in the hills, kept animals, sang in the local church, and clattered around in wooden shoes—all (except for the churchgoing) equally congenial pastimes for Monet, who was full of admiration for his host. “What a true artist,” he wrote. “At times he is thoroughly discouraged, full of bitterness and sadness precisely because he is an artist and therefore never content and always unhappy.”
⁴⁷
As such Rollinat was, as the Monet scholar Steven Z. Levine has noted, “the perfect masochistic double of Monet’s perpetually anxious artistic self.”
⁴⁸

Rollinat’s removal to Fresselines had been aimed at protecting his “ultra-sensitive temperament” from the anxieties, neuroses and overwork of Paris.
⁴⁹
He could not escape the demons, however, and his life followed an all too predictable pattern as he became addicted to both
absinthe and opium. However, the true cause of his downfall was the agonizing death from rabies of Cécile, who had become a nurse in Fresselines. The horrendous spectacle of her suffering unhinged Rollinat. After several suicide attempts, the grief-stricken poet died in a clinic at Ivry-sur-Seine in 1903 at the age of fifty-six.

Maurice Rollinat: “What a sad end!”

Rollinat’s death was not the only sad end that Monet forlornly contemplated as 1919 drew to a close. “As for me, my poor friend, I live in complete distress,” he wrote to Geffroy in the same letter in which he acknowledged the receipt of
Fin d’Oeuvre
. “Once again my sight is altered and I shall have to give up painting, and leave half-finished the work I have begun. What a sad end for me.”
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MONET WAS SOON
confronted with a more immediate death: that of Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Having suffered respiratory problems ever since catching pneumonia while painting outdoors with Paul Cézanne in the winter of 1881–82, Renoir came down with pneumonia again in December 1919. On December 3, in bed at his home in Cagnes-sur-Mer, he called for a pencil so he could sketch some flowers at his bedside. Legend has him finishing the drawing (or sometimes a painting) and handing the pencil (or brush) back to his nurse while uttering his last words: “I think I am beginning to understand something about it.”
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He passed away soon afterward, at the age of seventy-eight.

The story is an appealing one that accords well with the image of the decrepit Renoir courageously continuing to paint despite his infirmities. It also appeals because of its implication that becoming a great artist takes time and patience—that it takes, indeed, an entire lifetime.
The anecdote probably derived from the story about the French painter J.-A.-D. Ingres, who, a few days before his death in 1867 at the age of eighty-seven, took up a pencil and began making a sketch of a Holbein portrait. Asked what he was doing, he replied: “I’m learning.”
⁵²
The story may also have drawn on comments by the Japanese artist Hokusai, who in old age (he lived to eighty-nine) signed his works “The Old Man Mad About Painting.” “I have drawn things since I was six,” Hokusai supposedly reported. “All that I made before the age of sixty-five is not worth counting. At seventy-three I began to understand the true constructions of animals, plants, trees, birds, fishes and insects. At ninety I will enter into the secret of things. At a hundred I shall certainly have reached a magnificent level. And when I am a hundred and ten, everything—every dot, every dash—will live.”
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Still shot of Sacha Guitry and Pierre-Auguste Renoir from Guitry’s film
Ceux de chez nous

Renoir, like Monet, was an old man mad about painting. However, reliable accounts of his death fail to confirm the story that he was finally beginning to understand his art. Paul Durand-Ruel reported that the painter muttered
“Je suis foutu”
(“I’m done for”)—once the refrain of the ailing Mirbeau—and then smoked a cigarette. He hoped to sketch a vase of flowers but failed because—alas for the legend—a pencil could not be found.
⁵⁴
Another account comes from Renoir’s eldest son, Pierre, in a letter to Monet a few days after his father’s death. There is no mention
of flowers, sketches or pencils, only a gentle quietus. “The consolation we can have is that he died without suffering,” Pierre wrote, “carried away in two days by pulmonary congestion from which he was recovering when his heart stopped. His last moments were agitated, and he talked a lot in a semi-conscious delirium, but when direct questions were put to him, he replied that he felt fine. He then dozed off and about an hour afterward his breathing stopped.”
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Although hardly unexpected, Renoir’s death was a terrible blow to Monet. “You can imagine how sad the death of Renoir has been for me,” he wrote to a mutual friend. “He takes with him a part of my life. In these past three days I’ve constantly been reliving our younger years of struggle and hope.” To Geffroy he wrote sorrowfully: “It’s very hard. There’s only me left, the sole survivor of the group.”
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Monet did indeed become, with the death of Renoir, the last of the Impressionists. As a newspaper reminded its readers, Renoir had been part of a “unique generation that revived French painting...He was, with Monet, the sole survivor of this heroic epoch.”
⁵⁷

Adding to Monet’s foreboding, perhaps, was the end of a decade: one that had encompassed the deaths of his wife and eldest son, the loss of many close friends, the periodic failing of his own health, as well as the inconceivable horrors of the Grande Guerre.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

MEN OF IMPECCABLE TASTE

ON SUNDAY MORNING,
January 18, 1920, Georges Clemenceau arrived by motorcar at the Élysée Palace. His ministers and undersecretaries of state, by prior arrangement, were awaiting his arrival. All of them had added their signatures to the letter he was carrying. Addressed to Raymond Poincaré, it read simply: “Mr President: We have the honour of offering you our resignations. Please accept, Mr President, the tribute of our respectful devotion.”
¹
With those laconic words, Clemenceau’s government was dissolved and his long political career finished. “What a trick they played on him!” fumed Monet.
²

Clemenceau had been right to worry that winning the peace would be almost as difficult as winning the war. The Treaty of Versailles, after much negotiation, had finally been signed at the end of June 1919. Among its hundreds of clauses were ones calling for German disarmament, the return to France of Alsace-Lorraine, a fifteen-year occupation of the Rhineland, the payment of reparations, and the establishment of the League of Nations. In order to take effect, the treaty needed to be ratified by the Germans and three of the Allied powers. The German government ratified it almost immediately, the British a few weeks later, and then the Chamber of Deputies in October. On that same day Woodrow Wilson suffered a massive stroke in the White House, having just returned from a 9,500-mile cross-country tour in which he tried to sell the treaty to the skeptical American people. In November, the United States Senate—whose irreconcilable members, led by Henry Cabot Lodge, Wilson had unwisely dismissed as “contemptible... narrow...selfish...poor little minds that never get anywhere but run round in a circle and think they are going somewhere”
³
—rejected the treaty.
Le Temps
reported hopefully that this setback “did not deal any
irreparable blow to the treaty,”
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but Clemenceau hurried across the channel to London to confer with the British.