Chapter 45

Asylum of Montdevergues

April 1930

I gave up on Paris, disheartened, and returned home to Peterborough. A few months later, I went back to the asylum, a desperate plan hatching in my mind. Camille was waiting for me in the hospital’s parlour, a dingy little room where the patients could receive visitors. She wore a crumpled hat and the same shabby coat.

She reached for my hands. ‘Jessie, ma petite anglaise.’

We embraced and I whispered to her: ‘Go and pack, Camille, I’m taking you away from here. We’ll run away together. You can live with me in England.’

Camille began to tremble violently and grew agitated.

‘Are you all right?’ I said, panicked. I helped her sit down and held her hand as the colour slowly returned to her face.

‘I can’t, Jessie, I can’t.’

She began to cry and I realised how selfish I had been. Camille had been in an institution since 1913. Outside these walls, the world had changed. Her world, the world I returned to again and again in my dreams, had gone forever. She was too weak and frail. If I took her away it would kill her.

I watched the relief in her eyes as I told her I could not take her with me after all.

‘I’m sorry, Camille.’

She nodded her head and closed her eyes as if weary. We sat in silence for a while. When she spoke, Camille’s voice was distant, as if she were half-asleep.

‘Do you remember the last time we saw each other? In Paris, I mean, not here.’

How could I forget that morning? I didn’t trust my voice.

Her hand crept into mine. ‘Are you still angry with me? I’m sorry, Jessie. I was upset, but not with you. You see, I had just found out I was pregnant.’

I turned in my seat and brought her hand to my lips. ‘Oh, Camille.’

She dropped her eyes. ‘I didn’t tell anyone, not even Rodin. Not that time anyway. In the end, it didn’t matter. I lost the child. And the next one, and the one after. I thought at first it was some kind of judgement.’

‘It’s only natural to feel like that, but it wasn’t your fault.’ I pressed her hand, but she withdrew it.

She clenched her fist, shook it in the air, for a moment no longer a weak asylum patient, but spirited Camille once more. ‘You are right, Jessie, it wasn’t my fault. It was that bastard Rodin’s. After I lost the first one, I told him and I thought he would be sad, but he was relieved, I could see it in his face, le connard. When I lost the others he didn’t bother to hide his satisfaction, said it was better that way.’

‘Men don’t feel it the same as we do,’ I said. William had explained to me that miscarriage was natural selection, a way of weeding out the deformed. When I’d had one, he’d drawn diagrams and spoken to me as if I were one of his students. I had wanted to strike him.

Camille’s voice dropped to a whisper and she put her face close to mine so I could see the stumps where her teeth had once been. ‘Rodin poisoned me, and he poisoned my babies. What a monster! A monster!’ She began to weep and I put my arms around her thin shoulders.

These must be delusions, a symptom of the paranoia Dr Charpenel had warned me about. I murmured to her, as I used to soothe my children, and she grew quiet. I thought the storm had abated, but I was wrong.

Camille stood up and began to pace up and down. ‘I’ve worked it all out – why he was doing it. You see, he couldn’t steal my ideas any more if I was nursing a baby. He needed me working, thinking, creating. As soon as the doctor left me in my bed, a covered metal dish in his hand, the sheets still running with blood, Rodin would be back at my side, telling me that work was the answer, the only cure for my sorrow.’

Camille beat the air with her fists. ‘Like a fool, I believed him and went back to my sculptures, which he copied, every single one of them. Oh, he was clever about it, so clever that at first I didn’t notice. We shared the same models, you see, and I’d suggest the poses, talk through my ideas while he nodded his head and I’d be thrilled he approved. Idiot! And all the time he was stealing from me.’

Camille sat down again and scrabbled at my hands; I shrank from her, I couldn’t help it. Her eyes were unfocused, as if she couldn’t see me, and she was ranting, spittle flying from her mouth. I couldn’t untangle the truth from her delusions.

She seemed to sense my disbelief and threw my hands away in disgust. ‘I’m wasting my breath on you, you were always on Rodin’s side, you worshipped him like a schoolgirl with a crush.’

Even weak and broken, Camille had the power to wound me. I could feel my temper rising, old resentments breaking the surface.

‘I was always on your side,’ I said. ‘Though, much good it did me.’ I had had enough of her temper. She’d raved at me once before and I’d put up with it, but this time I would argue back, rationally. ‘As for these accusations of stealing your ideas – they don’t hold water. Artists steal from each other all the time, work on the same subjects, it’s not fair to blame one’s failure on another’s success.’ I thought of my Giganti. I had worked so hard, but it never made the cut at the Paris Salon, while Camille’s version was declared a work of genius. That was no one’s fault, other than God’s for giving her more talent than me.

Camille narrowed her eyes. ‘You don’t think I know that artists borrow from each other? Do you think I’m an imbecile? But this was different, I tell you.’ She banged her fist into her palm. ‘Rodin stole my ideas. Why don’t you believe me, if you’re such a good friend? All you have to do is look at my Sakuntala and his Éternelle Idole – the exact same pose, the man begging forgiveness. It was my idea. Mine! Mine! Mine!’ She jabbed her finger at her chest and I winced at the force she used. ‘I was blind, I couldn’t see it. Not until the critics saw my Sakuntala and mocked me for copying Rodin. But who do you think gave him the idea for that piece and for so many others?’

She grasped my arm and I was amazed by the strength in her bony fingers. ‘Rodin took everything from me,’ she said, her breath rank in my face. ‘He was getting older and losing his inspiration. I was young, my creativity strong. He sucked it out of me and injected it into his own dry husk. Rodin stole everything: my ideas, my youth, even my children.’

All of a sudden she lost her wild anger and stared bleakly at her hands in her lap.

I was sorry then. I had been too hard and expected too much from her poor injured mind. She looked weighed down by misery. If only I could draw the bitterness from her wounds, help her remember the sweetness of the past.

‘Camille, you loved Rodin once. Won’t you tell me about the times you were happiest with him?’

She sat back in the chair and closed her eyes. I thought she’d fallen asleep but she spoke softly, as if a young woman again.

‘Rodin rented this house for us, La Folie Le Prestre, where George Sand used to meet de Musset. When he led me through the garden and through the doors, he covered my eyes. When I opened them it was like being in a fairy tale, you know the one, where the princess wakes up after a hundred years. It was a ruin, dust everywhere, crumbling plaster, statues of goddesses in alcoves. I loved it, our atelier, Rodin’s and mine, our secret place in the middle of Paris.

‘We would lie naked in each others’ arms in this great ruined chateau…the overgrown vines in the windows turned the light green, as if we were underwater…the only sound was his heart beating…his eyes were pale as opals and burned with the same cold flames…’

She shook her head as if to clear water from her ears. ‘No. Not that. His spell is still on me, the poison he fed me still in my veins. He whispered his lies in my ears while he stroked my skin, white as marble…my dream in stone, he called me. We’ll be married soon, soon ma belle rêve, spend the rest of our lives together. We’re partners you and I, twin geniuses, we’ll rise together, our powers entwined like flames.’ She opened her eyes as if waking from a dream and gave a strange metallic laugh. ‘And I believed him.’

There was a sadness about her now but a luminosity, too, like light shining through a Bernini. I could see once more the Camille I knew in Paris and I wanted to kiss her ruined face. Rodin was a fool to have let her go.

‘What changed?’ I said. ‘Why did you leave him?’

Her shoulders dropped and she seemed to age again before my eyes. ‘I got pregnant again. I had lost so many babies and I was thirty-six, but this one was a survivor. I could feel him kicking inside me, strong, full of life, a child of my own.’ She placed her hands over her belly and smiled. ‘Rodin wanted to fix me up with a doctor, some butcher who took care of the models. I said I would do it, agreed to everything, even told Paul. He was shocked, of course, called me a murderer.’

I put my hand over hers, where it rested on her stomach. ‘Paul told me, when I met him in Paris.’

She looked into my eyes. ‘Were you shocked?’

‘No, I just thought about you, how terrible it must have been.’

Camille touched me lightly on the cheek. She walked towards the window and looked through the bars to the bleak garden. When she turned around she was radiant.

‘I left Rodin. Found my own apartment and locked myself away. A long illness, I told everyone. Paul and Rodin thought I was ill after the abortion. But I had the child. I have a son, Jessie.’

In Camille’s room, she pulled the box out from under the iron bed. Inside was the head of a young boy of about five with a tilt to his chin and a bold look. His resemblance to Camille was unmistakable. She took a slip of paper from the pocket in her skirt: an address in Villeneuve.

‘I gave him to my old nursemaid to look after. She was always kind to Paul and me. I wanted to hide the baby from Rodin, I didn’t want him to come to any harm. Will you take this to him?’

She handed me the bust. ‘Jessie, mon amie, will you find him for me and tell him about his mother?’

‘How will I find him?’ I said.

‘It’s a small village.’

I cradled the bust in my arms and looked at Camille’s son. It seemed too perfect, like an image of a dream child. Like the poisonings and Rodin’s conspirators, was this child also a figment of her broken mind? I put the bust in its box and embraced Camille for the last time. I was being asked to play one more part in her life and I would not let her down.

As the car took me away from Montdevergues, I opened the window and felt the wind on my face and thought of Camille, shut up in that place for sixteen years, all alone. How could anyone bear that and not be broken? I allowed myself to cry for Camille, for the wasted years, for the ruined talent, for my friend. But hadn’t I wasted my own talent? When Camille was making works of genius, I was totting up grocery bills, soothing fractious babies. I should be grateful for what I had: a good husband and four children. But I remembered the sharp tang of lemon cologne, the golden sunlight of a Paris afternoon. And I wept for us all, for Camille, for Georges, for myself.