In Camille Claudel's modest Paris, there was no talk of starter-main-dessert but a rhythm dictated by work: the evening soup that warms you for pennies, the lunch gulped down between chisel strokes, the morning café au lait that stands in for a meal when the work presses, the tinned fish kept in the workshop cupboard, and the sweet Sunday treat, a vestige of childhood Sundays in the Tardenois. Bread is the foundation of everything: fresh, you eat it; stale, you resurrect it.

The central gesture of Camille's frugal cooking: nothing is thrown away. The hardened crust becomes a thick soup (panade) or a golden sweetness (pain perdu). An economy of the poor turned into the art of little, like a sculptor who drew wonders from a simple block.