The Judgment of Paris (72 page)

15
Flaubert,
Correspondance, 1857—1863,
ed. Maurice Nadeau (Lausanne: Editions Rencontre, 1965), p. 263. For Flaubert's use in this passage of the term
sens historique,
as well as his own historical fascination in the context of nineteenth-century historiography, see Gisèle Séginger,
Flaubert: Une Poetique de Thistoire
(Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2000).

16
Quoted in Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
p. 34.

17
For the status and sales of
The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires)
in nineteenth-century France, see Anatole France, "M. Thiers as Historian," in
On Life and Letters,
vol. 1, trans. A. W. Evans et al. (London: Bodley Head, 1911), p. 209.

18
On which matters, see Guy P. Palmade,
French Capitalism in the Nineteenth Century,
trans. Graeme M. Holmes (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972).

19
Reflections on the Revolution in France,
ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 170. Burke published this work in 1790.

20
La Presse,
April 16, 1845.

21
Prosper Haussard,
Le Temps,
March 20, 1840.

22
La Presse,
April 16, 1845.

23
La Presse,
August 11, 1857;
Revue française,
no. 10 (1857). For further examples of the critical carping that caused Meissonier to revise his style, see Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
pp. 112—14; and Gotlieb,
The Plight of Emulation,
pp. 15—16.

24
Gréard,
Meissonier,
pp. 339—40.

25
Ibid., p. 126.

26
Kenyon Cox, "The Paintings of Meissonier,"
The Nation,
December 24, 1896.

27
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 267—8.

28
Quoted in ibid., p. 18; translation slightly modified.

29
Quoted in Hungerford,
Ernest Meissonier,
p. 112.

30
The epithet "French Metsu" was first used by Eugène Fromentin (quoted in Gotlieb,
The Plight of Emulation,
p. 101).

31
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 214.

32
For the story of Meissonier posing as Napoléon on horseback on his rooftop on "a gloomy day in winter," see Mollett,
Meissonier,
p. 6.

33
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 63.

34
For the commercial success of Thiers's work, see Anatole France, "M. Thiers as Historian," in
On Life and Letters,
vol. 1, p. 209.

35
Quoted in Timothy Wilson-Smith,
Napoléon and His Artists
(London: Constable, 1996), p. 70. Delacroix's nominal father was Charles Delacroix, but the painter has long been rumored to have been the illegitimate son of the great French statesman Talleyrand, i.e., Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838).

36
Philippe Burty, "Meissonier,"
Croquis d'après nature
(Paris, 1892), p. 18.

37
This anecdote—which might just possibly be apocryphal—is recounted by Edmond de Goncourt: see Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
Journal: Me'moires de la vie littéraire,
3 vols., ed. Robert Ricatte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 892—3. According to the entry in volume 10 (1964) of the
Grand Larousse encyclopédique,
10 vols. (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1960-64), the
suspensoir
is a medical binding intended to support the scrotum and its contents. It is used in cases of hernia, hydrocele (accumulation of fluid), varicocele (a tumor composed of varicose veins of the spermatic cord), and gonorrhea.

38
History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoléon,
20 vols. (London, 1845-62), vol. 17, p. 470.

39
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 243.

40
History of the Consulate and the Empire of France under Napoléon,
vol. 17, p. 445.

Chapter Two: Modern Life

1
Quoted in
The Westminster Review,
April 1,1873.

2
Émile Zola,
La Bête Humaine,
trans. Leonard Tancock (London: Penguin, 1977), p. 45.

3
Armand Silvestre,
Au Pays des souvenirs
(Paris, 1892), p. 161.

4
Quoted in Beth Archer Brombert,
Édouard Manet: Rebel in a Frock Coat
(New York: Little, Brown, 1996), p. 42.

5
Quoted in Francoise Cachin,
Manet,
trans. Emily Read (New York: Henry Holt, 1991), p. 18.

6
Eric Darragon,
Manet
(Paris: Fayard, 1989), p. 12.

7
Quoted in Brombert,
Édouard Manet,
p. 15.

8
For the Daumier reference, see ibid., p. 46. Thomas Couture frequently receives bad press from Manet's hagiographers, most notably Antonin Proust. For an absurd distortion of the facts, see the entry on Manet in volume 8 of Andre Michel's
Histoire de l'Art depuis les premiers temps chretiensjusqu'd nosjours
(Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1926). Michel attempts, ludicrously, to make of the young Manet a determined
plein-air
painter who, against the tenets of Couture, eschews the "false shadows" of the studio for the "true light" of the great outdoors (pp. 581-2). For more balanced accounts of Couture and his atelier, see Albert Boime,
Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1980), pp. 441—56; and idem.,
The Academy and French Painting
(London: Phaidon, 1971), pp. 65—78. Boime argues that the reported conflicts between Manet and Couture "reflect the attempts of apologists to create historical cleavage between master and pupil in the interests of establishing the latter's unbridled originality"
{Thomas Couture and the Eclectic Vision,
p. 446).

9
For Manet's journeys to Italy as well as his studies there, see Peter Meller, "Manet in Italy: some newly identified sources for his early sketchbooks,"
Burlington Magazine
(February 2002), pp. 68—84.

10
The father's name was listed on the birth certificate as "Koella" and his occupation as" artiste." The mysterious Koella has never been identified, and speculation about Léon's paternity has settled on Édouard, not unreasonably, perhaps, in view of the fact that he and Suzanne eventually became lovers and set up home together. But speculation has also turned to Auguste Manet, Édouard's father. In 1981 Mina Curtis gave readers of
Apollo
the tantalizing piece of gossip that a "highly distinguished and reliable writer, a relation by marriage of the Manet family, confided in recent years to a close friend that Manet
père
was actually Léon's father." "Letters of Édouard Manet to his Wife during the Siege of Paris: 1870-71,"
Apollo
113 (June 1981), p. 379. This theory has recently been championed by Nancy Locke, who points out that Édouard, later in life, never legitimized Léon, even though the Napoleonic Code made provisions for the legitimation of a child whose parents married after their birth. See
Manet and the Family Romance
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001), pp.47 and 115. Manet's biographer, Brombert, refutes these assertions, claiming that Édouard was in fact the father: see
Édouard Manet,
p. 98. It may be relevant that both Locke's and Brombert's intriguing psychoanalytic readings of Manet's paintings depend, at least in part, on whether he was Léon's half-brother or biological father.

11
L'Artiste,
September 6, 1857.

12
Quoted in Cachin,
Manet,
p. 26.

13
Poems of Baudelaire,
trans. Roy Campbell (New York: Panthéon Books, 1952).

14
Gazette des Beaux-Arts,
July 1, 1861. The critic was Léon Lagrange.

15
Albert de la Fizeliére,
in L'Union des arts,
May 21, 1864.

16
Le Moniteur universe!,
July 3, 1861.

17
Fernand Desnoyers,
Le Salon des Refusés
(Paris, 1863), p. 41.

18
The fact that Auguste Manet received treatment, following his stroke, from Dr. Jacques Maisonneuve, a renowned expert on venereal diseases, suggests that his debilitating medical condition may in fact have been tertiary syphilis, presumably contracted from either a prostitute or a mistress. Locke, for example, speculates that the "cerebral congestion" suffered by Auguste Manet could have been "a euphemism for what we would now call tertiary syphilis": see
Manet and the Family Romance,
p. 48.

19
I have calculated the worth of land based on the fact that in 1863 sixteen acres were sold for 60,000 francs. For this sale, see Brombert,
Édouard Manet,
p. 135.

20
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt,
Manette Salomon
(1867), quoted in Robert L. Herbert,
Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 199. For Herbert's excellent description of the delights of Asnières, see pp. 198-200.

21
Kenneth Clark writes that by the nineteenth century the predominance of the female nude over the male "was absolute":
The Nude: A Study of Ideal Art
(London: John Murray, 1956), p. 343-
22
The term has since entered popular culture, since today the French will describe a woman with a comely shape as
une belle académie.

23
The Journal of Eugène Delacroix,
trans. Walter Pach (New York: Hacker Art Books, 1980), p. 293.

24
Le Concert champêtre,
painted about 1508, was thought in Manet's time to be by Giorgione. It is now believed to have been the work of Titian.

25
Antonin Proust,
Édouard Manet: souvenirs
(Paris: H. Laurens, 1913), p. 43.

26
Ibid.

27
Stendhal was writing about the 1824 Salon in a series of articles in
the Journal de Paris.
A translation can be found in Elizabeth Gilmore Holt, ed.,
From the Classicists to the Impressionists: Art and Architecture in the Nineteenth Century
(New York: Doubleday, 1966), pp. 40-51.

28
Thomas Couture,
Méthode et entretiens d'atelier
(Paris, 1867), pp. 251—2. Though this work was not published until 1867, there is no reason to believe it does not represent Couture's views in the 1850s, when Manet was under his tutelage.

29
Les Chantes modernes
(Paris, 1858), p. 5.

30
The critic was Walter Benjamin in "Das Passagen-Werk," his massive but unfinished study of architecture, politics and capitalism in nineteenth-century Paris, researched from 1927 until his death in 1940. The work has recently been translated by Howard Eiland and Kevin Mclaughlin as
The Arcades Project
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002). For studies of Haussmann's transformation of Paris, see J. M. and Brian Chapman,
The Life and Times of Baron Haussmann: Paris in the Second Empire
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1957); David H. Pinkney,
Napoléon III and the Rebuilding of Paris
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1958); Howard Saalman,
Haussmann: Paris Transformed
(New York: George Braziller, 1971); and David P. Jordan,
Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

31
Baudelaire originally wrote
The Painter of Modern Life,
a study of the artist and illustrator Constantin Guys, at the end of 1859. He published it four years later, in November and December 1863, in three installments in
Le Figaro.
For a modern translation, see
Baudelaire: Selected Writings on Art and Literature,
trans. P.E. Charvet (New York: Viking, J972), pp. 395-422.

Chapter Three: The Lure of Perfection

1
Gréard,
Meissonier,
p. 82.

2
Ibid., p. 254.

3
Ibid. The references to "Penelope's webs" and the palimpsesting are found on p. 83.

4
Ibid., pp. 70-1.

5
Ibid., p. 69. Accounts of Meissonier's studies for
1814: The Campaign of France
may be found in Verestchagín, "Reminiscences of Meissonier," p. 662; Ambrose Vollard,
Recollections of a Picture Dealer,
trans. Violet M. MacDonald (New York: Little, Brown, 1936), pp. 159—61; and Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," pp. 832—4.