Christine and Sickert were married at the Paddington Registry Office, and began spending much of their time in Dieppe and ten miles away, in Envermeu, where they rented a house. When World War I broke out in 1914, they returned to London. Artistically, these were productive years for Sickert. He wrote numerous articles. His paintings reflect tension between couples that is enigmatic and powerful and made him famous.
During the early years of his marriage to Christine, he produced his masterpiece Ennui, he painted battle scenes, then returned to the music halls, going to the New Bedford “every bloody night.” There were also those other works that show his sexually violent side. In Jack Ashore, a clothed man approaches a nude on a bed. In The Prevaricator, a clothed man leans over the foot of a wooden bedstead that is similar to Mary Kelly’s and a rare departure from Sickert’s typical iron bedstead. A form is in the bed, but we can’t make it out clearly.
Christine’s health continued to cause inconveniences for Sickert, and he wrote manipulative letters to his helpful lady friends. He claimed he was so pleased that he was “contributing to make one creature happier than she would otherwise have been.” If only he could make more money, he adds, because he needed two servants to take care of his sick wife. “I can’t leave my work & I can’t afford to take her away to the country.” He wished Nan Hudson would let Christine come and stay with her for a while.
After the war, the Sickerts moved to France, and in 1919 he took a fancy to a disused gendarmerie, or police station, on Rue de Douvrend in Envermeu. Christine paid 31,000 francs for the run-down barracks with its upstairs bedroom that had formerly been jail cells all on one side. Her new husband’s responsibility was to fix up Maison Mouton, as it is still called, and get it ready for her while she stayed in London to settle certain matters and ship their furniture across the Channel. Intermittently, she collapsed in bed when her neuritis flared up, at one point so ill she was kept awake “for 45 nights… with drugs and infections, and even when the acute pain is gone, one can hardly move.”
It appears Sickert could hardly move, either, at least not in a way that was remotely helpful to his frail wife. In the summer of 1920, Christine wrote to her family that Maison Mouton was “uninhabitable.” A photograph of Sickert he sent to Christine showed he had not cleaned his shoes since she saw him last, almost four months earlier. “I am afraid he has spent all the money I had reserved for the kitchen floor and sink.” He told her he had bought “a loggia overlooking the river and a 15th century life-size carved and painted Christ,” which was to “preside over our fortunes.”
By the end of the summer of 1920, Christine had not seen Sickert in so long that she wrote in what may have been her last letter to him, “Mon Petit – I suppose it is the last time I shall write letters at the window looking into Camden Road. It will be wonderful to see you again, but very strange.” Soon after, Christine arrived with the furniture to move into her new home in Envermeu and discovered there was no lighting and no running water – only tubs to gather rain. Inside the well was a dead cat that one of Christine’s sisters said “had been drowned.” Lame and weak, Christine had to walk to the back of the garden and along a flint path and down steep stairs to get to the “earth closets.” Her family would indignantly remark after her death that it was “no wonder poor Christine gave up the ghost.”
Christine had not been well during the summer, but then she improved somewhat, only to take a dramatic turn for the worse at Envermeu in the fall. On October 12th Sickert telegraphed her sister Andrina Schweder that Christine was dying painlessly, and that she was sleeping a lot. Her spinal fluid had tested positive for “Koch’s tubercle bacillus.” Sickert promised to wire again “when death takes place,” and said Christine would be cremated in Rouen and buried in the small churchyard in Envermeu.