Natalya Alexandrovna Herzen spent the last years of her life in Nice. During that period, she and her husband were facing marriage problems. She was torn between her husband, Alexander Herzen, and her lover, the German poet Georg Herwegh. Natalya Herzen wrote to her husband, explaining her feelings for the poet,

Herzen and Herweg exchanged insulting letters and were on the brink of a duel. However, after the writer’s son died tragically in a shipwreck, the marital problems faded into the background.

Natalya Herzen never recovered after this tragedy. Her health began to deteriorate quickly. On April 30, she gave birth prematurely to another son, Vladimir. Both the newborn and his mother died several days later, on May 2.

In the displayed painting, the artist Ippolito Caffi depicted the nighttime funeral of Natalya Herzen. She and her newborn child were buried in the same casket at the Mount Château cemetery. The funeral procession walked up the mountain with torches. Alexander Herzen wrote,

It was no coincidence that Alexander Herzen turned to Ippolito Caffi. The artist was a follower of the revolutionary leader Giuseppe Garibaldi. Eventually, he even died on board Garibaldi’s ship. Almost two decades later, Alexander Herzen was reburied here, on Mount Château, and a full-length monument of the writer with his arms folded on his chest was erected over the family grave.