Chapter IV
La berge de Lavacourt sous la neige
Winter 1879 · the year Camille died
Before Giverny there was Vétheuil, and at Vétheuil there was Camille. She died in the upstairs bedroom on the fifth of September 1879 of uterine cancer, thirty-two years old, leaving Monet with two small sons and no money — Ernest Hoschedé's bankruptcy had taken the household down with it. The winter that followed was the coldest in France in eighty years. The Seine froze. Monet painted from the windows of the rented house at Vétheuil across to the snowbound bank of Lavacourt on the far side. This canvas is one of those paintings. It is grief made into a landscape.
