F   L   O   W   E   R   S       &       S   A   D   N   E   S   S
One night at the bar a close friend told me this story about her grandmother:
"In the years before she died, she was deathly afraid of flies, hated them with a vengeance, especially when they hovered around the flower arrangements she made obsessively. She told us they were meant to be a re-creation of a painting she lost during the war. (She apparently believed that it was a late Manet, which she had been given as a wedding gift, one of the still-lifes of flowers he painted during his final year.) She would leave them on the table until all the petals fell off the flowers.
" 'That's one of the saddest things I ever saw,' I said to her once. Her response was simply to smile and repeat a phrase I had often heard her say before: 'It's a sad and beautiful world.' After she died, I couldn't bear to think of her alone, buried in the cold ground. It gave me the shivers just thinking about it. So I started to make those same flower arrangements, over and over, in her memory. Sometimes I would bring them to leave on her grave, but mostly I left them standing on the table, cursing the flies , like I had seen her do so many times before."
In the winter of 1880 Eduards Manet began to die of a body-wasting disease. In these last months, Manet applied his limited strength to a series of exquisite still-lifes - sixteen small paintings of floral bouquets, most of them gifts from friends. Unverified sources suggest there may seventeen originals in the series. 
 Author:          Gordon, Robert, 1946- Title:              The last flowers of Manet Published:      New York : H.N. Abrams, 1986. Description:    48 p. : col. ill. ; 25 cm.