The Judgment of Paris (63 page)

Manet's inspiration for this portrait was almost certainly a visit he and Suzanne had made to Holland the previous June, immediately before he took possession of his new studio. It was Manet's first visit to Holland since his marriage in 1863; and while he may have had little desire to visit his in-laws, his enthusiasm for Dutch museums made the journey worthwhile. Accompanied by his brother-in-law Ferdinand Leenhoff, he had made a visit to the Frans Hals Museum in Haarlem, a town of canals and gabled houses that was famous for growing flower bulbs and brewing beer. Opened ten years earlier in a former home for indigents where the painter had died in 1666, the museum held more than a dozen of Hals's portraits of worthy Haarlem burghers dressed in millstone collars and dark suits. Yet besides these respectable Dutch merchants, Hals had also painted more lighthearted portraits of bosomy wenches and cheery, round-faced cavaliers. One of the best of these,
The Merry Drinker,
was in the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, which Manet likewise visited. Painted in the 1620s, the work showed a rosy-cheeked gentleman in a ruff collar and wide-brimmed hat gesticulating amiably with his right hand and raising a glass of Haarlem's finest with his left.
²

This convivial
bonhomme
seems to have put Manet in mind of his friend Bellot, and within a few weeks of returning to Paris he began work on a Hals-like painting called
Le Bon Bock
("The Good Pint," plate 8A). The honor of posing for Manet was, as ever, greater than the pleasure, and Bellot was obliged to visit the studio on at least eighty occasions. In keeping with the lordly style of his new studio, Manet instructed the concierge to admit Bellot—humiliatingly for the engraver—through the tradesmen's entrance.
³
At least the pose was by no means a demanding one. Bellot was merely required to don an otter-skin cap and sit at a table holding a glass of beer while puffing happily on his long-stemmed pipe. His twinkly-eyed contentment is wonderfully captured—a rare example of Manet depicting animation and emotion in a subject. Manet himself was evidently pleased with the work, which he decided to send to the 1873 Salon.

Manet was also working on several other paintings in between his relentless sessions with Bellot. One of them, quite different in flavor from
Le Bon Bock,
was entitled
The Railway
(plate 7B)—a portrait of a mother and child that included in the background the tracks and platforms of the Gare Saint-Lazare as seen from the back garden of a house in the Rue de Rome. The garden, which belonged to an artist friend named Hirsch, looked east across the tracks toward Manet's new studio, one of whose balustraded windows makes a sly cameo in the top left-hand corner of the painting.
⁴
The work satisfied Couture's old demands for paintings of
la vie moderne,
since it featured huge clouds of locomotive steam rising above the railway cutting and the Pont de l'Europe, a star-shaped bridge with iron latticework that had been completed only in 1868. Manet seated the fashionably attired young mother on a concrete ledge, holding in her lap a clasped fan, an open book and a sleeping puppy; the child stands beside her, back turned as she clutches the iron railing at the foot of Hirsch's garden and looks down into the vaporous void of the railway station.

The little girl was posed by his friend's daughter, and the young woman—surprisingly, perhaps, for such an image of bourgeois motherhood—by none other than Victorine Meurent. Victorine had only recently returned to Paris after six or seven years in America, to which she had emigrated to pursue a love affair. She may have been surprised at the pose she was ordered to adopt in Hirsch's garden, since this most notorious
femme fatale
of the 1860s Salons suddenly found herself playing a maternal role. Even so, the painting would have been unsettling for anyone expecting an intelligible narrative or an unambiguous moral imperative. Victorine's nonchalant expression; the child turning her back; the prison-like bars of the railing; the smoking chasm of the railway tracks; the inexplicable bunch of grapes in the right foreground—as so often whenever Manet and Victorine came together, numerous enigmatic touches seemed deliberately to frustrate any clear reading of the work.
⁵

Louis-Napoléon's exile in England had been a reasonably pleasant one. Camden Place, his rented mansion in Chislehurst, was staffed by fifty servants and host to numerous visitors. Both the Prince of Wales and Queen Victoria had come to pay their respects. The former then invited Louis-Napoléon to his club in London, the latter by private train to Windsor Castle. The deposed Emperor gratefully accepted both offers. He also made excursions to the Brighton Aquarium, and in the summer of 1871 he had holidayed on the Isle of Wight, where he went yachting with a party that included a young American, Jennie Jerome, who three years later would become the mother of Sir Winston Churchill. He even began working on a new invention, a cylindrical stove that would provide, he hoped, a cheap source of central heating for the poor.

In addition to these recreations, Louis-Napoléon had been—despite his protestations to the contrary—plotting his return to France. In a repeat of his exploits of three decades earlier, he planned to cross into France from Switzerland; he would then mobilize loyal elements in the army and march triumphantly on Versailles to overthrow Adolphe Thiers. His scheme was compromised, however, by the fact that he was too debilitated to ride a horse. Jennie Jerome had found him "old, ill and sad,"
⁶
and indeed he was still suffering from both rheumatism and his bladder stone. Throughout the autumn of 1872 the pain from the stone became so excruciating that his physician, Sir Henry Thompson, decided to risk an operation. A thorough examination was conducted on Christmas Eve, followed by a crushing operation soon afterward. Over the next week, two further operations were performed to break up the remains of what turned out to be the largest bladder stone Sir Henry had ever seen. A fourth procedure was scheduled, but Louis-Napoléon's condition had begun rapidly to deteriorate. He died on the morning of January 9, 1873, three months short of his sixty-fifth birthday.

The Emperor's body lay in state—ironically for a man who had little appreciation for art—in the picture gallery on the ground floor in Camden Place, with the funeral taking place at Saint Mary's Catholic Church in Chislehurst. The tiny building had seating for fewer than 200 people, but some 30,000 more gathered in the grounds outside, the majority of them French. Hundreds of
immortelles
were sold, and mourners clipped sprigs from the yew and holly trees for souvenirs. There was "weeping and sobbing from men as well as women," reported
The Illustrated London News,
which declared: "The late Emperor was a great man, and a great ruler of men."
⁷
In France, the newspapers expressed far less sympathetic opinions. Though Bonapartist organs such as
L 'Ordre
announced the death on front pages bordered in black, the left-wing journals were jubilant.
"Requiescat in pace
in the oblivion of history," sneered one, while another suggested that 200,000 Frenchmen would be alive and five billion francs saved if only Louis-Napoléon had died a few years earlier. Meanwhile the official government newspaper,
Le Journal officiel,
did not bother to report the death until two days later, and then it deemed the Emperor worthy of only a single line: "Napoléon III died on January 9 at Chislehurst."
⁸

Determined that her husband should not rest in the oblivion of history, Eugénie immediately began constructing a memorial for Louis-Napoléon. No sooner was he interred in the sacristy of Saint Mary's than she commissioned a neo-Gothic chapel to enshrine his tomb, the granite for which had been donated by Queen Victoria. The small chapel attached to Saint Mary's would be completed early in 1874, in time for a Requiem Mass on the first anniversary of his death. Above its door was a stained-glass window that featured, among other scenes, a portrait of Saint John the Evangelist holding a poisoned chalice. The image was an apt one for a man whose long reign had been brimful of both splendor and tragedy
*

A few days after the newspapers announced Louis-Napoléon's death, Charles Blanc published the regulations for the 1873 Salon. He demanded such stringent qualifications from voters that only 149 painters were eligible to receive a ballot, compared with more than a thousand in 1870. As a result, the jurors for the 1873 Salon turned out to be virtually identical to those elected the previous year. However, one member of the 1872 jury was conspicuously absent in 1873: the voters emphatically rejected Ernest Meissonier, denying him a place on the jury as chastisement for his persecution of Gustave Courbet. The exclusion of Meissonier itself then caused a rumpus, since several jurors, including Baudry and Breton, promptly resigned in a show of support—though the rest of the artistic community seems to have endorsed the punishment of the belligerent and overbearing Meissonier.

Meissonier was not especially troubled by his reproof from the voters because in 1873 he was involved in what he regarded as a grander mission. Almost six years had passed since Napoléon III had opened the Universal Exposition in 1867. A number of large industrial exhibitions had been held since then, though nothing on the same scale as the Emperor's spectacular display in Paris. In 1870, however, the Lower Austrian Trade Association had proposed the staging of what became known as a
Weltausstellung,
or World Exhibition—a showcase, explained the organizers, "that would embrace every field on which human intellect has been at work."
⁹
A huge exhibition hall named the Rotunda, complete with a 440-foot-wide dome, began rising over Prater Park in Vienna, while nearby a 2,000-foot-long Machinery Hall started taking shape. To the east of the Rotunda, beside the Danube, was the Fine Arts Gallery, a 600-foot-long brick-and-stucco construction in which the most recent masterpieces of world art were due to be shown when the Emperor Franz Josef opened the exhibition on May 1, 1873. It was in this building, on the largest stage the world could provide, that Meissonier planned to unveil
Friedland.

Meissonier may have
been persona non grata
among many of his fellow artists in France, but abroad his name still carried enough weight and prestige that Charles Blanc chose him to head the International Jury for the Fine Arts, in which capacity he would oversee the display of French paintings in Vienna. Meissonier naturally took to this task with relish, seeing a chance to demonstrate to the world—and in a German-speaking nation—that the genius of France was still alive and well. The critic Edmond About summed up the aspirations of many Frenchmen when he wrote that "a French masterpiece, exploding amid the mediocrity of arts in Europe, would do us as much honor as a victory on the battlefield."
¹⁰
To that end, Meissonier planned to send to Vienna masterworks of French painting from the Louvre, the Luxembourg and other French museums. Besides the mighty
Friedland,
Meissonier also planned to dispatch some nine or ten others of his works.

This artistic expedition soon encountered problems when Adolphe Thiers, citing possible damage en route to Vienna, refused to allow any paintings to be removed from the walls of French museums. Meissonier was furious at his friend's casual attitude to the exhibition, which recalled the ineptness and complacency with which the French generals had prosecuted the war against the Prussians. He sent a telegram to Thiers requesting an audience. "We had a long conversation," Meissonier later reported. "I told him over and over again that he was sending us out to battle with only half our arms, the best of which he was keeping back in the arsenal."
¹¹
Thiers eventually relented. The French would go into battle fully equipped with masterpieces.

So long as Meissonier was in charge, one artist would have nothing to do with the French expeditionary force. Over the past two decades, Gustave Courbet's work had been shown in London, Brussels, Amsterdam, Antwerp and Ghent, and even as far afield as New York and Boston. Courbet was especially popular among his Teutonic neighbors. He had spent several happy months in Frankfurt at the end of 1858, doing a lucrative trade in portraits; and in 1869 he had spent a few weeks painting and socializing in Munich, where King Ludwig II of Bavaria made him a Knight of the Order of Saint Michael. He was therefore a natural choice to represent France in Vienna, but Meissonier would have none of it. Not only was he impenitent about having excluded Courbet from the 1872 Salon; in 1873 he began pressing to have him banned from the World Exhibition as well. Vainglorious and self-centered as always, he seems not to have appreciated just how swiftly he was becoming more unpopular than the man he was persecuting.

The jury for the 1873 Salon followed a predictable pattern, rejecting more than half of the five thousand submissions. This harsh treatment was followed in turn by the usual response from the rejected artists, who began agitating for a Salon des Refusés. For once, Charles Blanc acceded to their wishes, making provisions for what was named an Exposition Artistique des Oeuvres Refusées. The works of hundreds of rejected artists would therefore go on show on the tenth anniversary of the infamous Salon des Refusés of 1863.

Courbet had submitted nothing to the 1873 Salon because he feared, with good reason, that the authorities might seize his canvases from the Palais des Champs-Élysées. At his 1871 trial in Versailles he had stated, much to his subsequent regret, that he would pay for the rebuilding of the Vendôme Column, and by 1873 the government was ready to hold him to his word. In January his friend Castagnary warned him to get as many of his canvases as possible out of France lest they fall into the hands of the authorities.
¹²
Though Courbet claimed his notoriety guaranteed even higher prices for his work, by this time much of his bravado had been replaced by worry and grief. "I am in a state of inexpressible anxiety," he wrote to his sister Lydie.
¹³
His fourteen-year-old son by a former mistress had died in the summer of 1872; and he himself was once again in poor health, with rheumatism and an enlarged liver—though this latter ailment did not prevent him from buying a forty-gallon cask of Beaune wine with which to celebrate a particularly lucrative sale.