Patrick Grainville focuses on the singular destiny of a group of painters and writers linked to Étretat, the city whose cliffs inspired so many masterpieces. Claude Monet painted poppies, cathedrals, water lilies, ageless beauties, rare locomotives, and a few steamboats. Born in 1840, he nevertheless knew the age of airplanes and the first industrial carnage, cinema, cubism and the birth of surrealism. For he died on December 5, 1926, in his house in Giverny. Like Chateaubriand a century earlier, the flower-bearded painter thus found himself between two centuries ... Le Figaro.
