Warming his hands on a mug of coffee, he stares out the window of the studio at the forest. It was here in Montfort that his mother painted for years, almost until her death. Afterwards the place lay abandoned, left to squatters and thieves. Camille hardly gave it a thought and yet, for some obscure reason, he never sold it.Then, some time after Irène’s death, he decided not to keep anything of his mother’s, not a single canvas, a vestige of an old grudge between them: it is because of her smoking that he is only four foot eleven.Some of the paintings now hang in foreign museums. Camille had promised himself he would donate all the proceeds of the sale but, of course, he did nothing with the money. Not until some years after Irène’s death, when he finally rejoined the world and decided to rebuild and refurbish the little studio on the edge of the forest of Clamart, which had once been the gatekeeper’s lodge to a country house that has long since vanished. Back then, the place was more isolated than it is now, when the nearest house is only three hundred metres away.
