Claude & Camille: A Novel Of Monet - Plot & Excerpts
They left in haste and for one week lived on a damp, cold houseboat in the Seine. He liked to watch Camille looking over the river at sunset. He was twenty-seven and she just twenty.He had made a tentative rapprochement with her family during a stiff Sunday dinner in their rooms on the Île Saint-Louis. He had sat back in what Auguste called his lordly way, lace cuffs showing, and exclaimed, “I am heir to a prosperous Le Havre business.”“But do you intend to take it over from your father?” Madame asked as they sat down to dine later and the maid served them.“Not exactly, no.”“Le Havre is after all too provincial for Minou.”“It is, of course! But I don’t have to think of that. I’m on the cusp of doing very well here, madame! My prospects are great. Just this month, several new patrons have expressed interest in commissioning my work.”For some moments Claude felt he had convinced Camille’s parents of his future. Later, thinking over her father’s mumbled assent and her mother’s cold look, he realized they had temporarily given up in weariness and were merely biding their time until their errant daughter would come back to them with some of her good name intact and marry the sort of man who would not take her to live on a houseboat.
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