That March, Archduke Maximilian and his wife, Charlotte, paid a visit to Louis-Napoleon and Eugenie in Paris, where they were treated as the imperial couple that the French emperor and empress intended that they become. Adding to his legendary persuasiveness, Louis-Napoleon promised to keep a large contingent of French soldiers in Mexico, along with fighters from the French Foreign Legion. For his part, Maximilian saw no problem in pledging to repay, from the bankrupt Mexican treasury, all the debts owed to Britain, France, and Spain, in addition to reimbursing Louis-Napoleon for the considerable sum he had already expended on the French intervention.
Still, Maximilian resisted the call of empire, at least of a Mexican empire, in large part because he did not want to renounce his claims to the imperial Austro-Hungarian throne—a renunciation that his elder brother, Emperor Franz-Joseph, insisted upon should he accept the Mexican post. Louis-Napoleon and Eugenie despaired and told Maximilian, ever the gentleman, that he had committed himself and could not go back on his word. Franz-Joseph, who had his own reasons for seeing Maximilian leave the Old World for the New, also provided considerable pressure, and in April, after an emotional meeting between the two, Maximilian renounced his rights to the Austrian succession and accepted the throne that he had been persuaded to believe the Mexican people had offered him.
Soon after, the still-despondent archduke and his ebullient wife left for Mexico, where Maximilian promptly encountered a sea of difficulties with the French forces, exacerbated by frequent massacres from the guerrillas who surrounded them. In addition, the United States was not keen on these developments south of its border and was not inclined simply to sit by and watch.
In the meantime, in one of Louis-Napoleon’s more positive achievements that year in foreign affairs, that August he sponsored the first Geneva Convention on the treatment of war wounded and the establishment of the Red Cross. The emperor of the French had acquired a distinct repugnance to warfare, based on his memories of the bloody battlefield at Solferino. Unfortunately, this would not be his last experience in battle.
That April, as buds and blossoms throughout Paris heralded the return of hope and spring, Sarah Bernhardt was seriously considering killing herself. She had recently appeared at the Gymnase in a light comedy in which even her mother said she looked ridiculous. Worse yet, she was pregnant, with no husband or lover to support her.
Instead, she impulsively left for Spain, taking a maid with her and leaving letters for her mother and the manager of the Gymnase Theatre asking them to forgive her and to “have pity on a poor crazy girl.”12 She spent a fortnight in Madrid, enjoying herself, until she received a telegram that her mother was very ill. After a hasty return to Paris, she and her mother were reunited and Sarah went to live nearby in her own apartment, taking her younger sister with her.
Nothing is said in her memoirs of the child that was born that December, her son, Maurice (who would not be mentioned in her memoirs until he was a toddler). Nor is anything said of the child’s father. In later years, she would entertain her grandson-in-law and granddaughter with conflicting “true stories” that brimmed over with romance. Common to both, though, was the figure of the Belgian Prince de Ligne and a great love affair.
However romantic their liaison may have been, the prince most certainly did not recognize the child as his son, nor did he offer any support. Instead, according to a close friend of Bernhardt’s, the prince merely informed her that “you must realize that if you sit on a pile of thorns, you can never know which one has pricked you.”13 Not until Bernhardt became
Sarah Bernhardt, c. 1860. Photograph by Nadar. © Bibliothèque de L’Arsenal, Paris, France / Bridgeman Images
famous did he reappear in her life, but, as her biographers point out, she neither forgot nor forgave him.
Bernhardt was twenty years old when Maurice was born, and now, with expensive tastes and no other income, she returned to a series of lovers to support her. It was around this time that she posed for Nadar, draped in dark velvet and in a white cloak; she also posed for him nude behind a fan. These portraits would in time become famous, even as her own fame grew.
Nadar was by now taking portraits of a raft of celebrities, including George Sand (who many at the time considered the greatest living French writer), making multiple copies that he sold at considerable profit to the public. He would do the same with his other celebrities, often, as in the case of Sand, becoming good friends along the way.
Nadar also continued to take photographs underground with only artificial illumination, putting his photographs of the Paris catacombs and the Paris sewers on public display. Haussmann’s man for water, Belgrand, was especially pleased with the results of Nadar’s sewer photographs, which clearly showed that the new system Belgrand was building was a far cry from the fetid and noxious underground through which Victor Hugo depicted Jean Valjean sloshing while carrying the wounded Marius to safety.
It was an especially good year for Belgrand, as water from the river Dhuys officially began to flow into Paris that autumn. Channeled to the new reservoir at Ménilmontant, it was then pumped up to the highest points of Montmartre and Belleville. From there it flowed down to the city by force of gravity, supplementing the haphazard and insufficient water supply for the city’s inhabitants.
Aboveground, that summer Edouard Manet—who had startled his friends and family the year before by marrying his mistress and model, Suzanne Leenhoff14—experienced the unfamiliar thrill of success with his painting of a contemporary event, the sinking of a Confederate ship by a small U.S. gunboat off the coast of Cherbourg. Now a married man but still a man about town (with a remarkably tolerant wife), he now focused on seascapes while on holiday in Boulogne.
Manet by now was living on the Boulevard des Batignolles, bordering the newly annexed district of northwest Paris. There, in addition to frequenting the Café Tortoni on the Boulevard des Italiens, where he regularly lunched, Manet just as regularly gravitated to the Café Guerbois, located on the Avenue de Clichy, just around the corner from his residence. Other artists had also found low-priced studios in the neighborhood and joined Manet at the Guerbois or in his nearby studio, as Fantin-Latour’s 1870 A Studio at Batignolles would commemorate.
Among those who gathered at Manet’s studio for their 1870 group portrait would be Claude Monet, although in 1864 the two had not yet met. But like Manet and most other Parisians who could afford it, Monet (despite his own impecuniousness) regularly got out of town for the holidays—heading that Easter for Fontainebleau and that summer for Honfleur, on the Normandy coast. Gleyre’s academy closed that summer for lack of funds, but Bazille and Renoir stuck it out to the end. Monet did not. “I wonder what you could be doing in Paris in such beautiful weather,” he wrote Bazille from Honfleur in July. “Each day I find something even more beautiful than the day before. It’s enough to drive one crazy, I so want to do it all my head is bursting.”
When summer ended and his stay was up, Monet found that he still could not leave. The landscape was becoming more and more beautiful, he told Bazille, and “I wouldn’t have the heart to leave.” Still on the coast of Normandy in October, he was painting forest scenes as well as boats and a still life of fish in a fisherman’s basket. After that, he told Bazille, he was going to “turn out a few pictures to send wherever possible, given that now, first and foremost (unfortunately), I have to earn some money.”15
This would become a familiar refrain, as Bazille came from a wealthy family and was inclined to help Monet out financially. In late 1864, though, when he and Monet were sharing a large flat with studio on the Left Bank, Monet was still able to help with the rent: Monet’s father had consented to give his son some assistance. It was here that visitors such as Renoir and Sisley congregated, as well as Pissarro, Cézanne, and Fantin-Latour.
Monet, like so many others, would soon gravitate to the Batignolles neighborhood and the Café Guerbois, taking time to pose with other friends for Fantin-Latour’s A Studio at Batignoll
es and Bazille’s Studio in the Rue de La Condamine.
Increasingly drawn to painting outdoors, Edma and Berthe Morisot convinced their parents to spend that summer of 1864 in a picturesque converted windmill along the seaside cliffs of Normandy. There, Berthe took to exploring, carrying her art supplies in a knapsack and finding vantage points among the cliffs, where she feverishly worked to capture the particular time of day and the slant of the sun. Corot in the meantime wrote that Edma and Berthe should persevere, and that “Nature itself is the best of counselors.” Still, according to their brother, Tiburce, Corot found Edma more disciplined than Berthe, who “took liberties of which he disapproved.”
Nonetheless, back in Paris, the sisters continued to paint, successfully submitting two paintings each to the 1864 Salon, where their work was graciously but indifferently received. Undaunted, they continued to paint in a garden studio their father built for them behind the house where the family moved in 1864, on Rue Franklin, after he was appointed chief councilor of the Cour des Comptes (the Court of Audits, which audited most public institutions).
There, the Morisots continued to entertain regularly with Tuesday dinners, inviting “no tiresome or boring people.” Included as regular guests were the Ferry brothers, Charles and Jules, both of whom took a polite interest in Berthe and Edma, who in turn showed just as polite a disinterest in the pair. This was not surprising, Tiburce noted, “as these two strapping and somewhat burly fellows were completely lacking in elegance, in a period that carried social refinement to an extreme.”
But Charles and Jules Ferry were undoubtedly intelligent and scintillating guests, who seemed to keep their ears open. As Tiburce noted, “It was from my father’s candid talk . . . that Jules Ferry, not too discreetly, took material for his future pamphlet, Les Comptes Fantastiques d’Haussmann” (The Fantastic Accounts of Haussmann), which would help to destroy Haussmann’s career even as it aided his own.16
Money, or lack of it, was increasingly becoming a problem for Georges Haussmann, most especially for the newly emerging Bois de Vincennes. Years later, writing his memoirs, Haussmann would complain about the cost of creating the Bois de Vincennes: “Exceeding all forecasts,” he wrote, it “made a large breech in the city’s finances.”17
He had never been enthusiastic about this park, which he sourly pointed out was to be for the working classes of Paris’s newly created eleventh and twelfth arrondissements, especially the workers of the fractious Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Louis-Napoleon, however, was a keen backer of the project, viewing this enormous green space on the eastern edge of Paris as part of his efforts to better the lives of Parisian workers, who largely inhabited the eastern portions of the city. He also had an interest in cajoling them, given their increasing discontent with imperial rule. After all, the rich were getting richer under Napoleon III, but the poor certainly were not benefiting from all the new wealth. Louis-Napoleon thought that a lovely park, where the workers and their families could stroll (during their admittedly limited leisure hours), would be of benefit both to them and to him.
The Bois de Vincennes had been a pleasure ground for royalty since the twelfth century, when Louis VII built a hunting lodge there. The forest’s importance grew over the years, especially in the fourteenth century, when Jean II and Charles V erected the huge and heavily fortified Château de Vincennes, with its village of support buildings, a moated curtain wall, and a bullying keep or donjon that was the highest in France.
The castle was the product of the Hundred Years’ War with England, but right through the nineteenth century it would serve as a fortress and prison, whose “guests” included such notables as Henri de Navarre (the future Henri IV), Denis Diderot, and the Marquis de Sade. By 1860, soon after Paris absorbed its surrounding suburbs, the emperor prompted the Legislature to cede the Bois de Vincennes to Paris on the condition that the city promptly convert it into a public area for walks—while keeping the castle and its surrounding military installations, including the camp and grounds used for army maneuvers. As with the Bois de Boulogne on the western edge of Paris, the more than two thousand acres of the Bois de Vincennes came with strict architectural stipulations as well as permission granted the city to sell almost three hundred of these acres to private purchasers.
But creating the elaborate system of artificial lakes as well as the extensive lawns and specimen trees that the landscaped areas required, in addition to grottoes, cascades, cafés, restaurants, and a racecourse—all of this cost money, and the money disappeared even more quickly in creating this Bois than in its twin across town. The Bois de Boulogne may have been bedeviled by an improperly set-out watercourse, but the Bois de Vincennes suffered most surprisingly from sandy soil, which made everything undertaken there far more difficult. By the time it was finished, in 1864, the Bois de Vincennes (according to Haussmann) cost five times more than the Bois de Boulogne; worse yet, its acres put up for public sale unsurprisingly brought in far less than the lands adjoining the far wealthier sections across town.
Haussmann could only grumble, even while, in the northern reaches of Paris, another expensive park, Buttes-Chaumont—in this case one he championed—continued to rise out of the detritus of a former garbage dump and quarry.
October 1864 brought unexpected success to Emile Zola with his first publication—a volume of short stories that he titled Les Contes à Ninon (Stories for Ninon). The publisher (Hetzel and Lacroix) agreed to publish 1,500 copies, giving Zola a substantial royalty of twenty-five centimes per copy (far more than Hachette would have offered), while Zola agreed to publicize his work. Already showing a decided flair for publicity, Zola energetically promoted his literary baby, using contacts he had made at Hachette and pushing magazine and newspaper editors to publish excerpts, insert blurbs, and review the book—preferably using review copy he had written on his own behalf. He was not shy about himself or his work, and he was relentless in pushing open doors and keeping them open.
As he knew, or at least suspected, the journalists he pursued were more inclined to use a piece already written than one that had to be composed from scratch, and of the many pieces that Les Contes elicited, most of them used Zola’s own words to praise him. Still, despite the favorable reception, the book did not sell as well as Zola had hoped.
Yet despite this disappointment, Zola soldiered on. There was no stopping him now, and he already was halfway through writing his first novel, La Confession de Claude, by the time Les Contes appeared.
The Goncourt brothers were similarly determined in their pursuit of literary success, which they anticipated would arrive with their next book, Germinie Lacerteux, largely based on the life of their maid, Rose Malingre, whose hidden double life had led to her destruction. It was not a pretty subject, nor had the Goncourts intended it to be, and in researching its background they traveled to the farthest reaches of the city, near the fortifications, where they witnessed incredible violence in the midst of “wretched huts, the hovels of rag-pickers and gypsies.”18
The Goncourts positioned themselves as leaders in the new literary Realism, with little regard for the full-blown Romanticism of a Victor Hugo. Hugo in turn was little impressed by the rising tide of Realism, led (despite his protests to the contrary) by Flaubert19 as well as by the Goncourts—a trio already joined (in his own imagination) by Emile Zola.
Hugo had no regrets about what he wrote, how much he wrote, or how he wrote it. In a note in 1864, he simply expressed the wish that he hadn’t started sooner. “What a shame I wasn’t exiled earlier!” he wrote. “I would have done many things for which I now feel I shall not have time.”20
Parc des Buttes-Chaumont. © J. McAuliffe
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Death and Taxes
(1865)
That March brought the unexpected death of the Duke de Morny, Napoleon III’s half-brother and the most influential as well as arguably the most able of all of the emperor’s advisers. Although trailing a lengthy history of astute but shadowy busine
ss deals, along with a reputation as a womanizer and gambler, Morny had served his half-brother well, not only as president of the Legislature but especially as the emperor’s personal adviser. Reporting the news to a colleague in London, Lord Cowley, Britain’s ambassador to France, had this assessment of Morny: “He had it in him, if he had been honest, to have become a very great man.”1
In the capacity of trusted adviser, the ever-realistic Morny had urged Louis-Napoleon to liberalize his regime, but now there was no one to take this position. From now on, the most influential man among the emperor’s inner circle would be the austere and authoritarian Eugène Rouher, the emperor’s minister of state, who would serve as a rock-hard opponent of liberalization—as well as an unrelenting foe of the increasingly difficult Georges Haussmann.
While Haussmann unquestionably was unpopular, stirring up animosity with his self-importance as well as with his bullying insistence on getting his way, it was the question of money—the money for the prefect’s ever-more expensive and expansive city development—where the flash points between Haussmann and his enemies were growing.
Large-scale loans, in the form of bonds, were a necessity for Haussmann’s grands travaux, since neither he nor the emperor wanted to increase taxes. Such loans needed the Legislature’s approval, which was easily won during the Second Empire’s early years. But the Legislature stalled over the loan of 1858, holding it up until 1860. Now in 1865, a third loan was required, in large part to pay for the enormous cost overruns of Haussmann’s Second System. Haussmann did not present this loan for what it was but instead posed it as a necessity to pay for the costs incurred since 1860 for incorporating the many villages and communes around the outskirts of Paris. The Legislature gave its approval but only reluctantly, auguring dangers for Haussmann’s future plans for Paris.
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