It is the familiarity of the place that is so startling to the first-time visitor. The guidebooks had prepared me for the beauty of Monet's restored home and gardens at Giverny: for the limpid beauty of the water garden with its lush peonies blooming beneath trailing weeping willows and for the flower garden crisscrossed with paths leading through a meadow of trellised roses, irises, dahlias, orchids, delphiniums. What I was not prepared for was the deja vu quality of it all.
After all, here I was, plunked down in a tiny village about an hour's drive from Paris and a world away from my home in Baltimore. So why, I asked myself, do I feel so at home here in Giverny? Why do I feel as though I have been here before?
The answer came a few minutes later as I looked through the lens of my camera. There, framed like a painting, was the vision of lily pads floating under a bright-green Japanese bridge, their passage marked by long slants of sunlight and shade on the shimmering water. Again, I had this strange feeling that I had seen this before.
And, of course, I had.
Claude Monet, the great impressionist artist, had painted precisely that scene over and over again. In fact, the gardens at Giverny had preoccupied Monet for almost the last 40 years of his life. He bought the property in 1883 and died there in 1926.
"I am enraptured," said Monet of his gardens. Enraptured and, perhaps, a bit obsessed too: He devoted the last decade of his life to painting only the water lilies and the pond, capturing it in every season, every kind of light and even every hour of the day.
What resulted from that decade of intense, narrow scrutiny of his water garden was the monumental "Water Lilies" series. These masterworks reside now in museum collections around the world. They also reside, as do so many objects of great beauty in our commercial society, on note paper, glass coasters, pencil boxes and calendars. All of which, incidentally, you can buy in the very large -- and very interesting -- gift shop at Giverny.
But the traveler in search of an experience that thrills both the eye and the spirit need never have seen one of Monet's paintings -- either in a museum or on a pencil box -- to understand that Giverny is a work of art. And a painter's garden in every way.
Monet, an avid amateur botanist, began in 1883 to create the gardens, eventually turning what originally had been an orchard into a work of art. "My most beautiful masterpiece," Monet said, proclaiming his tulips "paintings of color, spots of yellow against a blue sky."
But it is also a painter's garden in an especially intriguing way. While most painters of his era took as their starting point a scene from real life and filtered it through their imagination, Monet's work at Giverny was created in exactly the reverse order: First the artist imagined Giverny's gardens -- designed them in his head -- and then he proceeded to bring them into existence so that he might paint them.
Two great loves
It combined his two great loves: painting and gardening. In what surely must stand as one of the world's great understatements, Monet summed up his life this way: "Besides painting and gardening, I don't know how to do anything."
I arrived at Giverny halfway through a month's stay in Paris. After settling in at the Hotel de l'Universite, a small Left Bank establishment, I spent the first two weeks exploring the city. Street by street. But as wonderful as these excursions were, Giverny was always lurking in the back of my mind. I was waiting, however, for the perfect day -- a day when sun and shadow would play across the water and flowers just as it did in Monet's most striking canvases.
Such a day arrived about midway through my stay. "A perfect day for Giverny!" I thought the instant I saw the slightly overcast sky through my hotel window. Wonderful as the streets of Paris are, I was ready for a day in the country. Particularly Monet country.
Although several firms offer bus tours to Giverny, I wanted the adventure of traveling to Giverny on my own. Also, I wanted to see the area for the first time just as Monet is said to have seen it: from a window of the train that runs past the small town of Vernon and nearby Giverny.
The trains leave frequently from St.-Lazare Station in Paris, and the trip to Vernon -- which runs along the Seine as it winds northwest to Normandy -- offers a pleasant hour's trip through pastoral countryside. It is about three miles from Vernon to Giverny and the visitor can walk, bike or taxi the short distance.
At Giverny, I found to my delight that as beautiful as the gardens is Monet's charming house with its facade of pink crushed brick and painted green doors and shutters. There is also, apart from the house, the studio Monet had constructed in 1915 to accommodate the large paintings he was producing.
Painstakingly restored under the direction of the Claude Monet Foundation, the house, gardens and studio are exactly as they were -- well, almost exactly -- when the great painter lived and worked at Giverny.
Walking through the simple but elegant rooms of Monet's house -- which everywhere conveys his great love of color and light -- I found myself imagining the artist striding through the house, gazing out through the French windows of his bedroom at the thousands of peonies, orchids, daisies, roses, forget-me-nots, irises, poppies, ornamental trees and flowering bushes that stand below like a massed army awaiting their leader's call-to-canvas.
Monet is said to have been fond of entertaining guests in his lush gardens; guests with names like Proust, Renoir, Cezanne, Bonnard and Cassatt. I tried to picture such a group dining al fresco, among the flowers. Or perhaps gathered together in one of the most extraordinary rooms I have ever seen: the glowing, yellow dining room.
Standing in this room I experienced the sensation of being inside a canary diamond: With its pale yellow paneling, bright yellow moldings, painted yellow furniture and light pouring through filmy yellow curtains, light is turned into faceted sparks that bounce around the room.
Next to it is a blue-and-white country kitchen that, although lovingly restored, would not look out of place in any of the current architectural magazines.
There are no original Monets at Giverny but there is an art collection of Japanese woodblock prints that on their own merit are well worth the trip. Along with his contemporaries, Monet was influenced by the Japanese woodblock prints that, after the opening of trade with Japan in 1853, began appearing in Paris art exhibitions. The French painter was drawn to things Japanese and over the years amassed an important collection of 18th- and 19th-century Japanese woodblock prints.
They are displayed throughout the house and constitute a separate reason for visiting Giverny. On the day I visited, I walked through the house with a group of Japanese tourists who studied the ukiyo-e prints with, I thought, slightly homesick eyes. I couldn't help imagining how astonished Monet would be to see in his house the living equivalents of those men and women carved and captured so elegantly in his treasured prints.
The restoration of Giverny was completed and the estate opened to the public in 1980. In addition to the large gift shop which sells all manner of things -- including the expensive but quite beautiful yellow "Giverny" china that graced Monet's table -- there's a cafe nearby and a small shop that sells packets of glorious flower seeds. The idea, the saleswoman explained to me, is "to create Giverny right in your own back yard."
The water garden
After leaving the house and the shops -- and enjoying an icy glass of beer on the grass behind the house -- I wandered back to my starting point: the water garden.
I lingered there in its shaded, winding paths, studying the long slants of sun and shadow that moved across the water's surface. I noticed that where the green Japanese bridge arcing across the pond met its relection in the water, a circle was formed: the real bridge at the top, the watery image at the bottom.
On the bridge, beneath the hanging wisteria, I noticed a young American man standing next to a Japanese woman. I thought of my son, living now in Japan, and of the young Japanese woman he loves. I thought of how much I missed him and for just a moment it was they -- my son and his friend -- who were standing on the bridge looking down, their faces reflected among the watery day lilies below them.
Walking along the water I found myself hearing and seeing things in bold relief: I saw that the shoots on the bamboo trees lining the path were green and tender; I heard a bird on a tiny island in the pond's center sound out the hollow of its nest; I listened to the long grass sigh as the wind passed through it. Standing there, a feeling I could not identify passed through me. All I could locate in this fugitive feeling was the absence of impatience. I glanced at my watch. Time to leave Giverny if I planned to catch the train and be back in Paris for dinner. I looked over at the bridge; the young American and the Japanese girl were gone. How I wish Monet would have seen them there together.
IF YOU GO...
Getting there: By car from Paris: Giverny is about 50 miles northwest of Paris. Take the Autoroute A-13, direction Rouen; exit at Bonnieres or Vernon; then the N-15 into Vernon; cross the Seine and follow signs to the Monet Museum.
By train: Trains depart St.-Lazare Station in Paris several times daily for Vernon, less than an hour away. Fare is approximately $11 each way. At the Vernon train station, you can take a taxi, walk or rent a bike to travel the three-mile distance to Monet's house and gardens. Return trains run until early evening.
Hours and admission: The Monet house and gardens are open April 1 to Oct. 31, daily except Mondays, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. Admission: about $6 for adults; $4 for ages 13-18; $3 for ages 7-12; free for ages 6 and under. There are no official guided tours, but groups are welcome to come with their own guides for tours of the gardens only. The house is open to all, but no tours or photos may be taken inside. The telephone number for the Monet Museum is 32-51-28-21. A gift shop, florist shop, cafeteria and a restaurant are available to visitors.
Other attractions in the area: Near the Monet museum is the stunning American Museum which opened in 1992. Devoted to American painters in France in general, and those who worked at Giverny in particular, the American Museum should not be missed. Visiting hours are approximately the same as those of the Monet museum.
The ancient town of Vernon offers several interesting attractions: the 12th-century Church of Notre Dame, a number of medieval half-timbered houses and poppy-covered countryside that is a delight for hikers. The Vernon tourist office on Rue Carnot near the church distributes maps of hiking trails in the area. Phone number for the tourist office is 32-51-39-60.