Mad Enchantment: Claude Monet And The Painting Of The Water Lilies - Plot & Excerpts
The vehicles then wound their way through the country lanes to where Monet was hosting at his house what was, in effect, a road trip for the Académie Goncourt. “I’m counting on you,” he had written to Gustave Geffroy three days earlier, “to remind Descaves, Rosny, in fact everyone.”1Not all ten members could make the expedition, but at least five of Les Dix clambered into the automobiles to be conducted the fifteen miles to Giverny. Besides Geffroy and Mirbeau, the group included Lucien Descaves, Léon Hennique, and J.-H. Rosny the Elder. Also present was Mirbeau’s wife Alice, a former actress and a novelist in her own right. It was to this cast of distinguished writers and friends that Monet was about to offer an early viewing of his Grande Décoration.This audience was an appropriate one. Les Dix were a band of literary rebels committed to shaking up French literature and society in much the same way that, years earlier, the Impressionists had challenged France’s conservative artistic tastes and institutions.
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