The winter of 1877-78 is desperate for…

The winter of 1877-78 is desperate for Monet, as Camille is pregnant and ill and he has no money for food or rent. (His friend Emile Zola will later depict his straits in L'Oeuvre.)

He offers Dr. Gachet a painting in exchange for a loan to pay for the imminent delivery of his second child.

Camille Monet's health continues to deteriorate following the birth of their second son.

Monet, desperate, again seeks help from friends, and Manet again responds.

Driven out of his Argenteuil house by debts, with Manet's financial assistance he rents a house at Vétheuil, also on the Seine and near open country but sixty-five kilometers from Paris.

He now asks Zola for money to cover the cost of moving his furniture to the house that Manet had helped him rent.

Faure, who has collected Monets on speculation, now puts them on auction but they bring depressingly low prices.

Monet's paintings sell for sacrifice prices at the auction of the Hoschedé collection, a sudden forced sale associated with Hoschedé’s declaration of bankruptcy the previous year.

Alice Hoschedé unofficially separates from her impoverished husband, who spends most of his time in Paris, and joins the Monets at Vétheuil with six of her children in the summer.

Using funds from her dowry, she assumes Monet's debts and cares for Camille, together with the two Monet boys.

Monet still has no money for paint or canvas.

“I am no longer a beginner,” he writes a friend on December 30, 1878, “and it is sad to be in such a situation at my age [thirty-eight], always obliged to beg, to solicit buyers.

At this time of the year I feel doubly crushed by my misfortune and 1879 is going to start just as this year ends, quite desolately, especially for my loved ones to whom I cannot give the slightest present.”