Camille was eighteen when she met him and only thirty-two when she died; she left her good home to live with him and her parents disowned her. She was charming and a clever amateur actress and I think that their good friend, the struggling painter Renoir, had a particular tenderness for her for he painted her often and she almost always smiled for him with a special sweetness.(Who could not like Renoir?) Claude adored her and was devastated when she died. Here he painted her with a dog. What did he say to her as he painted? "Stay still just twenty minutes more, then we'll go out someplace cheap for dinner and wine and then, dearest, when we come home...." We try to hear the murmurs of the young lovers in a hidden room in Paris in 1866.
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