A wealthy Japanese patron, enamored with Rousseau, offers an atypical and versatile filmmaker the opportunity to freely adapt Jean-Jacques Rousseau's epistolary novel into a film. The filmmaker brings together three young actors in a deserted palace above Clarens and begins shooting. Rousseau's tragedy then reverberates through the contemporary characters.

During the night of September 5th, 1879, Camille Doncieux, wife of the painter Claude Monet, dies from a womb cancer. In the early hours of the following morning, the painter makes a last portrait of the one who used to be his model, before becoming his wife and the mother of his two children.