Chapter 26

Montmartre, Paris

1929

Suzanne poured me some wine. All around us, on every wall of her studio, La Valadon’s younger self was immortalised by some of the world’s most famous artists. She was still handsome for a woman in her sixties, but her beauty had faded. It was disconcerting to see how the years had changed everyone. Meeting Georges in particular had taken it out of me and I’d rested up for a day before going to Montmartre to find Suzanne.

She pointed at two of the portraits. ‘That one was painted by my son, Miguel Utrillo, and that by my husband, André Utter.’ She smiled over the rim of her glass. ‘He’s my second husband. Unlike Camille, I never had any problem persuading men to marry me. You did come here to talk about Camille, didn’t you?’

I put down my glass untouched; I was too old to drink cheap wine. ‘Georges told you.’

She shrugged and smiled coyly. I wondered if they’d slept together, and supposed it was more likely than not. ‘He wrote me a note to tell me you were coming, something about finding out more about Camille.’ She made a face at the wine. ‘This wine would thin paint, but if I buy the good stuff Miguel or André just polish it off.’ She knocked it back anyway and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. ‘So, what do you want to know about that stuck-up bitch? I’m sorry, she was your friend. But I never had much time for Camille. She was a man’s woman.’ My eyebrows shot up and she had the grace to laugh. ‘I know, I know, I’m one to talk. But I’ve always been loyal to my friends, and Camille, well, she was a cold one.’

I was surprised – I had never thought of Camille as cold. Passionate, yes, and hot tempered, but never cold.

Suzanne frowned. ‘I know you always thought she was your friend, Jessie, but I never trusted her, and in the end, the two of you fell out, didn’t you? What was it over, a man?’ I made a non-
committal noise. I didn’t want to talk about that now; it was buried in the past. Suzanne shook her head. ‘Camille was ruthless when it came to getting her own way, and she couldn’t stand not to be in the limelight.’

A skinny black cat jumped into her lap and butted her with its head. She stroked it and it settled into a purring cushion. ‘I’ll try to help you, for old times’ sake,’ she said, ‘but I don’t know how much I can tell you. We were never close, as you know, but we did run in the same circles, particularly when she became Rodin’s official mistress.’ She looked up at the portraits and sighed. ‘It seems so long ago. It was a different world before the War.’

‘Anything you can tell me about Camille and her life before she disappeared would be helpful,’ I said.

Suzanne picked up her palette and began daubing green and violet onto the nude she was working on. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’

I shook my head. Her work was bold, colourful, coarse, even. She’d become a successful artist since I’d known her, the first woman painter admitted to the Société Nationale des Beaux Arts. Mind you, it couldn’t have hurt that her former lover Puvis de Chavannes was president. I was being uncharitable – her work was undoubtedly powerful, better than some of the portraits by prominent artists that hung on her walls. Camille used to say Suzanne slept with artists to get what she wanted, but that was unfair. It was inevitable her lovers would be other artists when she mixed so freely with them. I’d often wondered if Camille’s antipathy to Suzanne stemmed from the fear that she too would be known only as Rodin’s lover, rather than the artist, Camille Claudel.

Another cat, a tabby, wound its way around my leg. I scratched it behind its ears and its chest began to rumble. ‘How did you do it, Suzanne?’

‘Hmm? What?’

‘Become an artist and be a mother. Camille always said you couldn’t do both. I didn’t believe her, until I had my own children.’

Suzanne swivelled around from her easel and glared at me. ‘You think I got by on my looks, is that it?’

‘No, of course not. I didn’t mean to offend you, I was curious, that’s all.’

But Suzanne crashed on as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘I know that’s what Camille used to say – that I was only a jumped-up model and the only reason I got anywhere was by opening my legs. What? You don’t think I heard her vile slanders? Quelle salope! As if she was any better! You think my life has been easy?’

Suzanne didn’t wait for me to answer. She picked up her glass and drained it before pouring another. Her speech was thickened but otherwise she didn’t show the least sign of being drunk. ‘I got here by my talent, through sacrifice and hard work, just like all the other artists who made it, and that’s the simple truth. Camille, she could talk the talk but she wasn’t tough enough. She wasn’t brought up on the streets like me,’ she thumped her chest. ‘Me, the bastard daughter of a sewing maid, I was sent out to work in a milliner’s workshop when I was eleven, a mere child. By the time I was sixteen, I was a model and the plaything of every artist who thought painting my body gave them the right to fuck me.’

I flinched, more at her bitterness than at her language. I realised the same well of bitterness lay inside me, the dark waters a deep and constant reminder of what I had not achieved because of my sex. A beam of sunlight came through the studio window and lit up Suzanne’s face, showing her jowls and the red veins spidering across her cheeks, the grey roots showing underneath the brown dye. I pitied us both: two disappointed old women who had once dreamed of greatness. My sadness must have shown because Suzanne’s mood changed abruptly. She laughed, that great shout of laughter I remembered so well, still as joyful as ever.

She patted me on the knee. ‘Jessie, don’t feel sorry for me. I’ve had a marvellous life, full of art and love and adventure. Did you know I used to be a circus acrobat, walking the tightrope? Can you imagine?’ I shook my head and smiled. But I could just picture Suzanne balanced on a rope between two lampposts with the fire-eaters and jugglers who performed in the streets of L’Opera, posing on one leg above a gasping crowd. She guffawed. ‘You should have seen me – Berthe Morisot herself painted me on the tightrope when I was fifteen.’ She waved her glass in the air and some of it spilled on the sleeping cat. ‘Ah Berthe, she was something else. Those were the days – I knew all the greats, the artists, writers and musicians of our time. So what if my heart was broken a few times along the way?’ She slapped her thigh and the little cat lifted its head and mewed. ‘I broke a few myself, mind you. Erik Satie never got over me after one night together, the poor little thing.’ She smiled at the memory, and grew serious again. She leaned towards me and the cat wriggled off her lap and landed lightly on the floor. ‘What I’m trying to say to you, Jessie, about Camille, she thought she was better than me, but in the end, she was no different.’

The wine was taking hold, and I thought Suzanne was going to drift off into her reminiscences again. I prompted her. ‘Camille was no different?’

‘Yes, we were the same, you know, her affair with Rodin, and wasn’t she with Debussy too?’ She waved her hand and began to slur. ‘The thing is, the thing is, Camille, she wasn’t strong enough to do what I’ve done, live my own life, an outsider and the rest of them can go to hell. Respectable society? Pah! What did I ever care for those bastards? They couldn’t touch me because I didn’t care what they thought of me.’ She burped gently and slopped some more wine into her glass. ‘I did try it once, the respectable life, but it wasn’t for La Valadon. My first husband – God rot him ­– was a stockbroker. I moved out of Paris and became the dutiful wife, but it nearly killed me. Then I met André and he saved my life.’ Her eyes swam and I thought she was going to cry. She wiped her eyes and carried on. ‘He brought me back to Montmartre, where I belong. But Camille, she was different. She came from the bourgeoisie, and that lot, they’d eat their own children before they’d let them taint the family name. She never stood a chance, the poor bitch.’

I thought of Camille in the asylum, her hands clasped in her lap, staring out over that desolate valley, shut up and abandoned. I wondered if Suzanne was right, if her family had shut her away because she was an embarrassment.

‘But Camille had friends, powerful friends,’ I said. ‘Surely Rodin would have protected her.’

Suzanne shook her head. ‘She played it all wrong. You could see how things changed between Camille and Rodin – at first she was the young beauty with all the power, he the desperate older man. Then she made the mistake of falling in love with him.

‘By the time she realised she was his creature, his little ape, it was too late. No one would take her seriously, and then, once it was too late, she tried to strike out on her own, without a patron. She had no income of her own – her family gave her a pittance, hardly enough to pay for marble and forge fees. This life,’ she gestured around the studio, ‘it’s a hard one, full of little failures and disappointments, a constant struggle to pay the bills. Camille wasn’t strong enough. It’s enough to drive anyone mad.’

Suzanne could be right – after all, there were artists who took their own lives because they couldn’t face failure and the grim poverty that came with it. There was one who was found frozen to death in his studio, his jacket wrapped around his sculpture to save it from being damaged by the cold. But I knew that Camille, the Camille I knew, would not have cared about poverty or discomfort, or what the critics said; she would have carried on working in her studio as long as she could. She had been ripped away from everything she loved. I thought again of Camille in that place, living out her days locked up, far from Paris, when she should be in a studio like this, working.

‘Camille, she should have what you have, Suzanne,’ I said. ‘And I, I’m jealous, too, of your life as an artist.’

She stared at me, her eyes hard. She was more sober than I’d realised. ‘Are you really, Jessie? Think carefully before you wish to swap places with me. I have earned my name, but after all these years of hard work, I’m overshadowed by my son’s fame, the son whom I taught to paint when he became a drunk, neglecting my own work to care for him. Now all I hear is: There goes Utrillo’s mother! Used to be a stunner in her day, slept with all of them, Renoir, Toulouse-Lautrec, de Chavannes. And that’s how I’m remembered, my work forgotten while people gossip about who I fucked.’ She shrugged and went back to her canvas. ‘I don’t care what those connards say about me. I live by my art and that’s enough for me. And unlike Camille Claudel, I survived.’

I stood up to go and asked the question I’d put to Georges. She took her time considering it.

‘No, I don’t think she was mad. Weak, yes, and angry, but not mad. Maybe you should talk to her brother. I hear he’s in town.’

‘I didn’t know Paul was in Paris. Thank you, Suzanne.’ I put out my hand.

When I was at the door, she looked up from her painting. ‘Hein, Jessie, we had some good times, didn’t we? Remember that night at Le Chat Noir?’

I looked at a painting of Suzanne bathing, her famous bottom shaped like a cello. ‘How could I forget – you and the banister?’

She laughed and slapped her solid haunch in its unflattering checked skirt. ‘I think I still have the splinters in my magnificent arse.’