Download Claude & Camille: A Novel of Monet AudioBook Free
Sometimes he dreamt he held her; that he'd turn in bed and she would be there. But she was ended up and he was old. Almost seventy. Only cool paint met his hands. “Ma très chère . . .” Darkness started to fall season, dimming the paintings. He noticed the crumpled notice in his pocket. “I loved you so,” he said. “I never would have had it turn out as it have. You were with all of us when we started, you offered us courage. These backyards at Giverny are for you but I’m old and you’re permanently young and will never see them. . . .”
In the mid-nineteenth century, a man named Claude Monet decided that he'd rather endure a difficult life painting landscapes than dominate his dad’s nautical products business in a French seaside town. Against his dad’s will, and with only a aspiration and an insatiable urge to create a new design of fine art that repudiated the Classical Realism of the time, he tripped for Paris.
But once there he is confronted with hurdles: an art world that refused to validate his style, extreme poverty, and a battle that led him from his home and friends. But there were bright spots as well: his deep, long lasting friendships with men named Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Manet – a group that jointly would become known as the Impressionists, and this supported each other through the difficult years. But even more illuminating was his lifelong love, Camille Doncieux, a lovely, upper-class Parisian girl who threw away her privileged life to be by the medial side of the defiant painter and accept the exciting Bohemian life of their own time.
His muse, his closest friend, his passionate fan, and the mother to his two children, Camille remained with Monet—and assumed in his work—even as they resided in wretched rooms, were sometimes kicked out of these, and often suffered the indignities of destitution. She comforted him during his frequent emotional torments, even when he'd leave her for long periods to set off on his own to color in the countryside.
But Camille experienced her own demons – secrets that Monet could never penetrate, including the one that when eventually discovered would pain him so deeply that he'd never fully get over its impact. For though Camille never once discontinued loving the painter with her complete being, she had not been immune to the loneliness that often came with being his partner.
A vividly-rendered family portrait of both surge of Impressionism and of the artist at the center of the activity, Claude and Camille is most importantly a love account of the highest romantic order.
