Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet and the Painting of the Water Lilies (5 page)

Among Monet’s numerous blessings was a close and sympathetic extended family. Another stepdaughter, Marthe, lived nearby with her American husband, the painter Theodore Earl Butler, whose first wife,
Suzanne, Marthe’s younger sister, had died in 1899. Butler and Suzanne had two children together, the eldest of whom, Jacques, had exhibited landscapes at the 1911 Salon d’Automne, aged only eighteen. Jean-Pierre, thirty-six years old, lived nearby with his wife, as did Monet’s surviving son, Michel, likewise thirty-six, a quiet and reclusive bachelor. Michel added an intoxicating whiff of petrol and engine oil to the scent of the flowers in Giverny. Sharing Monet’s love of motorcars, he bought and sold a succession of automobiles, motorcycles, auto parts, and once a six-seater omnibus. A clever engineer, he built his own motor-powered “quadricycle” on which he navigated the streets of Giverny.
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He possessed an enthusiasm for speed that surpassed his father’s and alarmed even Clemenceau. “Unfortunately there he is, in his car, running about the country—he’ll break his neck one of these days,” the Tiger once complained.
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Michel Monet on his quadricycle in front of the Hôtel Baudy in Giverny.

Jean-Pierre was yet another speed freak. He operated a garage, auto dealership, and cycle shop in Vernon, even assisting with the 1910 Tour de France when it passed through the area.
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He also shared Monet’s love of plants, parlaying youthful expeditions with his stepfather through Giverny’s marshes and meadows into a career as an amateur botanist. A corresponding member of the Linnean Society of Normandy since the age of nineteen, he published articles in distinguished journals on the weeds and flowers of Vernon and surrounding area. He also raised
prizewinning Irish water spaniels—although Monet banned dogs and cats from his garden “because,” as Jean-Pierre explained, “he feared the damage they would cause.”
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Guests to Giverny would be conducted into the presence of this extended household’s paterfamilias, who was usually found in his garden, “in shirt sleeves, suntanned, his hands black with earth,” as one friend described him.
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Clemenceau’s 1895 article in
La Justice
had celebrated Monet as
le paysan de Vernon
(the peasant of Vernon). A visitor once described him as looking like “a rough farmer, a hunter of wolves and bears, the sturdy branch of an ancient lineage.”
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It must have seemed appropriate that this greatest of French landscapists, the man who so intuitively interpreted the country’s rural delights, should have looked like a robust, weather-beaten, hardworking man of the soil. Others compared him to, or mistook him for, a sailor or sea captain.
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This comparison, too, seemed apt. He was such a renowned painter of seascapes that Rodin, seeing the ocean along the Brittany coast for the first time, exclaimed: “Oh, how beautiful—it’s a Monet!”
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Although born in Paris, Monet had, in fact, grown up beside the sea in the bustling port of Le Havre on the Normandy coast, 125 miles downstream from Paris, at the mouth of the Seine. Here his father had worked for a wholesale grocer supplying the local clipper ships, and the family lived in the working-class suburb of Ingouville, known for its brothels, cabarets, and “shady places of all kinds.”
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Monet later told a friend that the sea, with its waves and clouds, had been the backdrop to his entire existence.
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Some of his earliest known sketches were coastal scenes with sailboats, and his attachment to the sea—which he continued to paint throughout his life—was such that he said that when he died he wanted to be buried in a buoy.
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Monet had moved from Le Havre to Paris at the age of eighteen, in the spring of 1859, to study painting. Here he quickly immersed himself in the cosmopolitan world of art, politics, and literature. He soon left this bohemian world of his youth behind, moving to the Paris suburbs following his marriage to Camille, and then afterward to Giverny. However, something of the eccentric dress sense of his companions
of the boulevards and brasseries—the capes and caftans of the critic Théophile Gautier, the suede gloves and “intentionally gaudy trousers” of Édouard Manet
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—stayed with him. His hardy, rugged looks were offset by his herringbone tweed suits, which came from a fine English tailor in Paris, and by his made-to-measure boots of ruddy leather from a firm that supplied the French cavalry. His ruffled shirts were of pastel hues with cuffs of frilly tulle that gave him what one visitor called a “touch of dandyism.”
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Jean-Pierre aptly summed up this unusual look as
campagnard chic
(rustic chic).
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Clemenceau later offered a picture of his friend: “Medium sized, with a beautifully poised, well-built frame, an aggressive but twinkling eye, and a firm and sonorous voice.”
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Monet was, in fact, short, and wide of girth, with a thick crumb catcher of a beard in the yellow-stained middle of which burned an “eternal cigarette.”
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His aquiline nose reminded one visitor of an Arabian sheik’s.
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His advancing years and roly-poly physique belied his bustling energy. Everyone noted his keen, intelligent eyes, although no one could agree on their color. Clemenceau called them “black steel” and Edmond de Goncourt found them a “frightening black”; others described them as blue, steel-gray, or chestnut brown.
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The ambiguity was perhaps fitting for someone who believed that our perception of color was always affected by light, and that the visual effect varied from one minute to another.

“LUNCH FIRST,” MONET
used to tell his guests.
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The words must always have been welcome. One of the great attractions of Giverny was the food. “You get the best cuisine in France at his house,” enthused an art dealer who was forever trying to wangle invitations for himself.
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The meals were prepared by Monet’s cook of many years, Marguerite, whose husband, Paul, the butler and general factotum, ferried steaming dishes from the kitchen while the chauffeur, Sylvain, fetched bottles of wine from the cellar.

Clemenceau would have been conducted into a room he knew well, the
salle à manger
, the entirety of which—walls, sideboards, chairs, ceiling beams, wainscoting—was painted what a guest called “a Monet
yellow.” The copper hood of the fireplace was so bright it made people squint.
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More than fifty of Monet’s Japanese prints hung on the walls, spilling into the other rooms and progressing up the stairs of the studio. Monet owned several Manet lithographs, but visitors encountered these little masterpieces only when visiting the
cabinet de toilette
.
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Lunch chez Monet was a delightful but demanding gastronomical odyssey. Renoir used to seize upon the fish, fruits, and vegetables brought back from the market by his cook—not to eat but to paint, his dinner having to wait until the painting was finished.
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Monet’s voracious appetite kept him from detaining his cook or from producing many still lifes. Jean-Pierre claimed that Monet was not a gourmand: someone who ate and drank in huge quantities. He was, Jean-Pierre insisted, a gourmet: someone with refined and discriminating tastes.
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But Monet was actually a combination: he ate and drank in huge quantities the kinds of food and wine that satisfied his refined and discriminating tastes. “He eats like four,” one amazed guest reported. “I promise you, that’s not just a manner of speaking. He’ll take four pieces of meat, four servings of vegetables, four glasses of liqueur.”
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He loved foie gras from Alsace, truffles from Périgord, mushrooms that he picked himself at dawn in a chestnut grove outside Giverny. Dishes that featured at his groaning table included beef tongue, oxtail stew with frankfurters, calf’s liver in aspic, chicken in a crayfish sauce, and a bouillabaisse whose recipe came courtesy of Cézanne. He ate feathered game that had been hung for at least a week—the gamier the better. On one occasion Clemenceau gave him a woodcock, which he stuffed into the pocket of his overcoat and promptly forgot about. Several days later, when he discovered the festering bird, “he did not disdain taking it to the kitchen, where it was cooked and he ate it with pleasure.”
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In the middle of a hearty meal, Monet observed
le trou Normand
(the “Norman break”), a shot of apple brandy that served to cleanse the palate and stimulate the appetite for further bouts of gluttonous indulgence. Wine was served, of course—not the local plonk but better vintages brought up from his cellar. For a digestif there was his homemade plum brandy. Coffee was taken in the erstwhile barn-studio, which had long since been converted into an unpretentious drawing room and
furnished with rustic chairs, a marble statue by Rodin, and an old mirror into whose frame he inserted creased and yellowed photographs of friends. The walls were crammed with the master’s unframed paintings. A bay window overlooked the garden into which, once the coffee was finished, Monet would conduct his well-fed guests.

Monet in the alley of roses in his flower garden.

Monet’s garden was what, in truth, most visitors hoped to see. Numerous newspaper articles had been written about it, scores of photographs taken, profuse requests for viewings granted (and many others declined). The chief attraction was not even the section of garden seen from the windows of the house, spectacular though it was: the former orchard and vegetable patch that Monet had transformed with islands of multicolored flower beds and, at the center, a grand alley flanked by a pair of yew trees and festooned with roses spiraling over metal frames. The main attraction, beyond, was reached by means of an underground passage in the southwest corner. The passageway led under a road, the
chemin du Roy, on which automobiles often stopped so their occupants could stare in wonder through a gap in the stone wall that Monet, in a concession to his celebrity, had opened to offer weary travelers a glimpse of his garden.
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The tunnel also passed beneath the railway tracks from which, on that fateful expedition in 1883, Monet had first spotted the pink grandeur of Le Pressoir. Emerging from the tunnel, one reached what a journalist called “the domain of the water lilies.”
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MONET HAD BEGUN
creating this magical domain in 1893, when he bought a parcel of marshland on the other side of the road and railway tracks, beside the river Ru, and immediately sought planning permission to divert part of the river to create a lily pond. But because the river was used to water cattle, wash laundry, and power two mills on Giverny’s eastern outskirts, the townspeople complained, fearful that Monet’s exotic flowers—which had, as far as they could see, no commercial value—might overrun the banks and poison the water. Monet was unsympathetic to their concerns: “To hell with the natives of Giverny,” he retorted.
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Monet’s relations with the locals had never been especially good. He was what they called a
horzin
—an outsider or incomer. As an artist, he was an object of suspicion. Little impressed by his celebrity, the locals were largely unsympathetic to his artistic pursuits. Farmers charged him a fee to cross their pastures or paint in their fields. A few years earlier, when one of his paintings of a wheat stack was half-finished, the farmer informed him that the twenty-foot-high rick would be demolished for threshing unless he paid for a stay of execution.
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The villagers,
who called themselves
cultivants
, could not understand the point of his flower garden, which yielded nothing to eat or sell. He for his part did not condescend to participate in what Jean-Pierre called “the exchange of banal pleasantries,” which he found pointless and uninteresting.
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