King Ross - Mad enchantment: Claude Monet and the painting of the water lilies

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WHERE WAS GEORGES CLEMENCEAU ? The day of the French election had arrivedSunday, April 26, 1914and the newspaper Gil Blas announced in astonishment that the seventy-two-year-old former prime minister had disappeared from Paris. His departure does not fail to cause surprise, reported the paper. Is this vigorous polemicist no longer interested in the political battle?

Gil Blas was always remarkably well informed about the comings and goings of Clemenceau, whose fearsome personality had earned him the nickname the Tiger. Two years earlier the paper had reported how firefighters came to Clemenceaus rescue when his bathroom caught fire as he took a hot soak; another time it informed readers how, despite the fact that he was Frances most notorious anti-Catholic, he had recuperated from an operation at a convalescent home run by nuns. And indeed, on this occasion, the paper quickly managed to track him down, reporting that he had gone to enjoy springtime in the countryside. It is whispered that he wants rest at all costs, and that, little concerned with electoral results, he will sleep late, in rustic silence.

Clemenceaus rustic retreat was fifty miles northwest of Paris, in the Normandy village of Bernouville. Six years earlier, while still prime minister, he had bought a half-timbered hunting lodge whose garden he planted with white poplars and Spanish broom, and whose ponds he stocked with trout and sturgeon. A few weeks after he left office in the summer of 1909, Gil Blas ran an admiring poem describing how, spry as a stripling, he was hard at work in his garden. It was no doubt this love of gardening that, as the election loomed, drew him to Bernouville and that, so he could talk flowers instead of politics, then took him to Giverny to see his friend, the painter Claude Monet.

GIVERNY WAS TWENTY miles from Bernouville, but the chauffeur would have covered the distance quickly: Clemenceau, who loved speed, always urged his drivers to go faster, racing along bone-shaking country roads at speeds in excess of 100 kilometers (62 miles) per hour. Beyond, a line of tall poplars snaked across meadows that in May were stippled by poppies and that in autumn were populated by towering stacks of wheat.

A couple of miles from Vernonnet, a cluster of houses suddenly appeared. Clemenceaus driver would have swung left at the fork, heading toward a small church with a squat, octagonal tower and a black witchs hat of a steeple. Giverny was a village of some 250 inhabitants, with one hundred or so rustic cottages interspersed with more imposing homes set in orchards behind moss-covered walls.