The Invention of Paris (65 page)

Théophile Gautier, despite being the dedicatee of
Les Fleurs du mal
, was among the most virulent critics: ‘
Olympia
cannot be explained from any point of view, even by taking her for what she is, a sickly model stretched out on a sheet. The tone of the chairs is dirty, the representation appalling. Shadows are indicated by stripes of polish of varying width. And what can we say of the Negress holding a bouquet wrapped in paper, or the black cat that has left the imprint of its dirty paws on the bed?' Gautier was close to the Goncourts, who were beginning their
Manette Salomon
– a novel of the devastating influence of a Jewish model on the painter Coriolis – at the very time of the scandal over
Olympia
. Coriolis's
The Turkish Bath
inspired by Boucher, the Black servant, the ‘nudity that had suddenly cast into the studio the radiance of a masterpiece': all this is undoubtedly an indirect criticism of Manet's
Olympia
, which the Goncourts held as a provocation that, like Baudelaire, heralded disaster for the arts.
¹⁶

After the events of 1870–71 – the siege of Paris, when he served with Degas in the artillery of the National Guard, then the Commune – Manet felt he could no longer paint as he had before. The massacres of Bloody Week shocked him so much that he even thought of stopping painting altogether. This is not a matter of Manet's political opinions, which are generally commented on with vague allusions to ‘republican sympathies', referring for example to
The Rue Mosnier Decked with Flags
. It would be clearly absurd to see Manet as any kind of revolutionary. But three points are worth noting: Firstly, that it was not politically neutral to paint
The Execution of Maximilien
in 1868, when this event was less than a year old and the shameful end of the Mexican expedition had shaken the Empire. The engraving that Manet made for the reproduction of this picture was banned by the censors.

Secondly, during the 1860s Manet had his studio on Rue Guyot (now Médéric), on the edge of the wretched quarter of Petite-Pologne which Haussmann had already started demolishing to drive through Boulevard Malesherbes.
¹⁷
It was in these parts that Manet hobnobbed with the gypsy Jean Lagrène, who lived in a temporary encampment harassed by the police, earning his living by playing the barrel-organ, and whom Manet took as
his model for
The Old Musician
. Behind him, seated on the bank, is the ragpicker Collarder – a Baudelairean character par excellence – whom he also used as a model for
The Absinthe Drinker
, rejected by the Salon of 1859: ‘Manet has chosen only themes congenial to him – not simply because they were at hand or because they furnished a particular colouring or light, but rather because they were his world in an overt or symbolic sense and related intimately to his personal outlook.'
¹⁸

Manet's interest in those on the margins of society, the bohème of the street, is related by Antonin Proust (for whom, ‘in Manet, the eye played so great a role that Paris had never known a flâneur the like of him, or one who put his flânerie to better use') in his
Souvenirs
: ‘One day we walked together up to what has since become Boulevard Malesherbes, amid demolition interspersed with the gaping openings of land already cleared . . . A woman came out of a sordid bar, holding up her dress and with a guitar in her hand. He went straight up to her and asked her to come and pose for him. She burst out laughing. “I will paint her,” he said, “and if she doesn't come, I've got Victorine.”'
¹⁹

Thirdly, during the Commune, Manet left Paris to give his family the protection of the provinces. But his name still figured on the list of the Commission des Artistes, officially drawn up in his absence, which shows that he was considered as favourable to the movement. He was on the best of terms with Courbet, who chaired the Commission and whose name recurs on several occasions in connection with the insults that surrounded
Olympia
. Manet made two lithographs of Bloody Week, both dated 1871:
The Barricade
, in which, at the centre of a Paris crossroads that is hastily sketched, a squad of Versaillais soldiers – the same grouping and even the same attitudes as in
The Execution of Maximilien
– shoot at point-blank range an insurgent whose horrified face alone stands out in the smoke above the pavement; and
The Civil War
, in dark flat tints and thick lines, with the corpses of two insurgents at the foot of a dismantled barricade, a civilian and a National Guard of whom you see only the leg of his striped trousers.

When he went back to work, Manet's painting completely changed, and his new style was heralded by a manifesto-painting. For the first time, an
image of Paris was exhibited at the Salon: known either as
The Railway
or
La Gare Saint-Lazare
, which is of little importance, since neither one or the other is visible.
²⁰
This work triggered a new outcry. A drawing by Cham, for the cover of the special issue of
Le Charivari
devoted to the Salon of 1874, was titled
The Seal Lady
, and beneath it: ‘These unhappy creatures tried to escape being painted, but with great foresight he put up a fence that cut off any retreat.' And another: ‘Two madwomen, afflicted by incurable
Monomanétie
, watch carriages pass outside the bars of their cell.' Burty and Duret, generally supporters of Manet, were both disconcerted. Zola could only find praise for ‘the charming palette', repeating with scant conviction that Manet was ‘one of the rare original artists that our school can boast'.
²¹

Nothing at all like this picture had previously been seen. It is set in the Europe quarter, where Manet had just moved (his new studio was at 4 Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg).
²²
But it was not just the novelty of the setting and subject – the train, as symbolic of modern life as the Place de l'Europe was of modern Paris – that made this painting a scandal. Its very technique creates a feeling of strangeness, transgressing the rules, and this is because the influence of photography makes itself felt. Not that Manet worked on or after a photograph – as his neighbour, the engineer Caillebotte, indeed did: the images on which he based the impeccable perspectives of
Rainy Weather in Paris, at the Crossroads of the Rue de Turin and the Rue de Moscou
, and
Le Pont de l'Europe
.
²³
The foreground of
La Gare Saint-Lazare
is both very close and very clear: Victorine Meurent, shown full face, wears around
her neck the velvet ribbon that was
Olympia
's only clothing, while little Suzanne is seen almost from behind, looking away towards the tracks. But beyond the railing, the background is not clear, as in a photograph with a weak depth of field. This is not just an effect of the smoke that is rising above the unseen railway: Manet has deliberately chosen to place a very shallow foreground against a vague background, a procedure contrary to all the rules that had governed open-air perspective since at least the time of Leonardo, but one that was quite current in photography. In other views of Paris made a short time earlier by painters close to Manet – Monet's paintings from the second floor of the Louvre in 1867,
Saint-Germainl'Auxerrois
,
The Jardin de l'Infante
,
The Quai du Louvre
; or again Caillebotte's
Bare-Headed Man Seen from Behind at a Window
, painted from his apartment on Rue de Miromesnil, or Renoir's
The Pont-Neuf
– despite the ‘impressionist' feeling of the brushwork, the distances are as clear as in Van Eyck. On top of this,
La Gare Saint-Lazare
is painted in almost a single colour: blue with white highlights for Victorine's dress; white with a large blue bow and blue embroidery for little Suzanne's; the blue-black railing; and bluish white for the cloud of smoke that is not just a sign of absence, but almost a third character in the painting. And as for Victorine herself, raising her eyes from the book in which she was absorbed – her fingers placed between its pages like bookmarks, suggesting that she is comparing passages or consulting notes – her character expressing nothing more than a vague surprise is archetypically photographic in the way it renders the sudden and accidental. It is a snapshot, there is no story attached (Duret was quite vexed: ‘In fact, there is no subject at all'), no psychology either in the sense of the portraits of Rembrandt or even Goya. If Manet chose Victorine Meurent so many times as his model, from
The Street Singer
through to
La Gare Saint-Lazare
, it was because she had this unfathomable look, which, without expressing anything legible, creates an expectation, a disturbance. This look – dark, frontal and mysterious – which Victorine already had turning her head towards the viewer with an adorable shyness in
Mlle V in the . . . Costume of an Espada
, is what Manet gave to the many unforgettable women of his Paris, to Berthe Morisot in
The Balcony
, to Henriette Hauser in
Nana
, right through to the last, the blonde Suzon in
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
. And when the gaze of his models was clear and oblique – the elegant bourgeoise of
In the Conservatory
or the poor girl alone in
La Prune
– only then does something like a trace of melancholy slip in.

Manet did indeed manage to wrong-foot his critics. By being handsome and warmhearted, rejecting the customary pictorial signs of emotion, not ‘composing' his pictures in the usual sense of the term – while in Monet's
Gare Saint-Lazare
series, no matter how innovatory he was, each canvas is
as structured as a landscape by Poussin – he was taken for an unfinished artist, a painter without ideas or culture, with the critics particularly maintaining that he had so well internalized the inheritance of Hals, Goya and Velasquez that he could no longer be distinguished. Even Zola reached the point of failing to understand anything. But for Mallarmé, who stopped off at his studio every evening on his way back from the Lycée Fontane (now Condorcet, on Rue du Havre in front of the Gare Saint-Lazare), Manet was ‘the painter to whom no other can be compared',
²⁴
and he describes him ‘in his studio, a fury raging on the empty canvas, as if he had never painted before'.
²⁵
Mallarmé was, it is true, better placed than Zola to understand Manet in his later years, the Manet who has his place in the lineage of enigmatic painters, ‘difficult' as they are called, whose paintings can certainly be dated, described, X-rayed, followed from one collection to another, but whose intentions remain veiled, and with whom obscurity is in some sense a part of his meaning. Who can be sure of having really understood Urbino's
Flagellation
, even after Carlo Ginzburg has identified the three characters placed in the foreground by Piero della Francesca, in a confabulation that will remain forever mysterious?

In official historiography, the 1870s are presented as the time when modern parliamentary democracy was established in France, when secular education was developed, and a country shaken by defeat and civil war was rebuilt both materially and morally. The pretence is made of forgetting that this was a period of reaction such as always follows the defeat of revolution. The very nature of the regime was not settled until 1875, when the majority in parliament voted for a republic almost by a stroke of luck. It was in these years that Monet painted
Flags on the Rue Montorgueil on the 14
^th
July
, and Manet
The Rue Mosnier Decked With Flags
, the tricolour flag reappearing after it had been almost absent from painting since Delacroix's
Liberty
, and at a time when it had a very particular meaning, opposed to the white flag of the Comte de Chambord whom his supporters sought to enthrone as Henri V. Tens of thousands of Communards were still exiled, imprisoned, deported or transported.
²⁶

These years saw both the appearance of the expression ‘moral order', and a phenomenon that can be taken as the revelation of its hidden face. It was the start of a brief period – thirty or forty years at the most – when Paris became what it had never been before, the principal subject of modern painting. Not by its famous sites, its old stones, the play of sunshine on its monuments, the elegant ladies of the Bois de Boulogne; what Degas and Manet chose instead – for initially it was more or less them alone – was rather the world of pleasure, of nighttime entertainment in which all strata of the city mingled, a world whose life continued without even the most vigilant police force managing to check it. A kind of dialogue, if certainly a silent one, now developed between these two painters: they observed one another with a greater interest than had Monet and Renoir at La Grenouillère, if without a common purpose and without working together.

They did however have a great deal in common. Both of them – and this is the essential thing – were true Parisians, the only ones among the major painters of the day. Degas, who was born on Rue Saint-Georges and died on Boulevard de Clichy, never moved far from Pigalle, just as Manet always remained between the Batignolles, the Quartier de l'Europe and the Place Clichy. But when Manet exhibited
A Bar at the Folies-Bergère
at the Salon of 1882, Degas wrote to Henri Rouart: ‘Manet, stupid and refined, a playing card without strength, Spanish trompe l'oeil – a painter . . . in the end, you'll see.' The connections between them were Berthe Morisot, a follower of both Degas and Manet, and Mallarmé, one of the few writers who impressed Degas, himself an amateur poet. The two painters each expressed a different aspect of Mallarmé's character: in Manet's portrait – his hand holding a cigar, its smoke against the white paper, his look again unfathomable, focused, lost in the distance – it is his genius; in Degas's photograph – where Mallarmé is standing in profile, smiling lightly as he turns towards a seated Renoir – his particular goodness.