Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  These included continued development of the spectacular park of Buttes-Chaumont in northeastern Paris as well as commencement of Parc Montsouris, a forty-acre landscape park with lake and other water features on the city’s southern edge. Haussmann also received authorization to demolish the current Hôtel-Dieu, the huge hospital to the immediate south of Notre-Dame, and rebuild it (magnificently) in its present location, facing the northern arm of the Seine. In the process, much of the housing in the hospital’s new location would be demolished, further diminishing the resident population of the Ile de la Cité, which was emerging as the center of government administration.

  Water and sanitation continued to occupy Haussmann, who in his fourth and final report to the Paris municipal council in 1865 proposed diversion from the River Vanne to provide the amount of water the city’s residents needed, as well as construction of a new reservoir to the south of the city, the Montsouris reservoir, adjoining the park of the same name.

  It all was expensive. But whatever the cost, Haussmann (and the emperor) were determined that no taxes would be increased to pay for it.

  By this time, accusations of favoritism and corruption were circulating pretty freely about Georges Haussmann, abetted by the circumstances surrounding the 1865 loan. Haussmann had not bothered to get competing bids to float the bond issue but simply handed the whole thing over to Crédit Mobilier and the Pereire brothers, who had offered a low commission rate of 1 percent to handle it. This created a hullabaloo when word got out, and the finance minister, Achille Fould (no friend of the Pereires or of Haussmann) complained that he had not even been consulted. Fould irately predicted that the bond issue would be unsuccessful, but he was wrong: it was a major success with the public, pulling in enough money to cover the huge deficit in Haussmann’s Second System and offering him funds with which to proceed with further projects, under what would be called the Third System.

  The Pereires for their part were beginning to suffer from the numerous shortcuts they had taken, with Haussmann’s tacit or explicit approval, en route to their astonishing financial success. In February 1865, the court case begun several years earlier, involving suspicious circumstances surrounding a merger between the Pereires’ Société Immobilière and the Société des Ports de Marseille, was decided against them. Had the emperor not intervened, they would have had to pay even heavier fines, but as it was, the verdict still took considerable wind out of the brothers’ sails, forcing them to take more than usual precautions to avoid future encounters with the law.

  The joke going around was that the Pereires had been sentenced to six years of forced honesty, but they did not see it as a joke. As for Haussmann, he was about to encounter his own financial difficulties.

  While Haussmann was stirring up one ruckus after another, his younger daughter, Valentine, was doing her best to outdo him. She was beautiful and she was wild, offering plenty of tittle-tattle for gossips, especially after it was evident that she had become the emperor’s favorite. The child she gave birth to in February 1865 was very likely the emperor’s son, and Valentine’s fiancé at the time refused to take responsibility for him. But the fiancé died, and Valentine ended up (wedded) in yet another man’s arms.

  It was all wonderfully spicy but not calculated to burnish the reputation of Valentine’s family, especially not her father, whom many blamed for having placed Valentine directly in the emperor’s notice in the first place.

  Although Louis-Napoleon was continuing to behave much as he always had, chasing one female after another, by 1865 he was suffering from intermittent bouts of pain and a general decline in energy. While some blame this on the years he had spent in prison in the 1840s, following a failed coup attempt, others point to his condition of gallstones, which was first diagnosed in 1865 and attributed in part to his earlier attack of gonorrhea. At the time, the stone was not considered sufficiently serious to operate, and although Louis-Napoleon would suffer several severe attacks during the remaining years of the decade, he continued to behave normally in between. Still, by mid-decade, he had been weakened by the gonorrheal infection, and his general dissipation would have been enough to exhaust most men.

  The carnival of luxury, self-indulgence, and pleasure that characterized the Second Empire was by now engulfing its ruling classes, most especially its charming emperor, a man who no longer saw any great need for action. “I never form distant plans,” he now remarked. “I am governed by the exigencies of the moment.” As one visitor recalled, “At first glance I took him for an opium addict. Not a bit of it; he himself is the drug, and you quickly come under his influence.”2

  Whether through weariness, penitence, or simply a recognition of Eugenie’s inherent strength, Louis-Napoleon now increasingly allowed his wife to assume political power. Eugenie, for her part, was quick to push for and embrace this role, later recalling that from childhood she “had a taste for politics.”3 The question nonetheless remained whether a strong will and a taste for politics were sufficient.

  At the same time, Prussia’s energies were single-mindedly focused on obtaining German unity under Prussian leadership. That autumn, Bismarck met with Louis-Napoleon and Eugenie in Biarritz, with the aim of assuring France’s neutrality in Prussia’s coming war with Austria. Astonishingly, even after hours of long walks and talks, the French emperor exacted no price for his neutrality—a failure of vision and will that Bismarck viewed with contempt. A weak man, Bismarck concluded, “a sphinx without a riddle.” The sphinx’s wife, on the other hand, was (according to Bismarck) “the only man in [the French emperor’s] government.”4

  Strength without a firm grasp on reality, however, was not proving an effective guide for French policy, most especially in Mexico. Eugenie had strongly urged her husband as well as Maximilian into the Mexican scheme, largely based on her response to some well-calculated horror stories as well as her grandiose dreams for the young Austrian couple, and now France was mired in a mess.

  In fairness to the beleaguered principals, the Duke de Morny had also strongly advocated this course, strictly in his own self-interest, and then had died just when his shrewd political judgment would have been of most value. Instead, the principals in this doomed affair slogged on, defending a policy and a military commitment that were at heart indefensible.

  By now France had more than thirty thousand troops in Mexico, propping up an emperor whom the Mexicans clearly did not want. Maximilian, despite his good intentions, was making a complete muddle of things, failing to win over a significant portion of the Mexican people while eradicating the corrupt existing power structure—the very landowners and clergy who were responsible for bringing him there. He wanted to help the people, and his new constitution set out a wide range of reforms, from establishing equality before the law to diminishing child labor, but he pleased no one, even as he offended many with his unapologetic foreignness and strict court protocol, straight from Vienna.

  Although the French commander in Mexico continued to send optimistic reports, it was becoming clear that only the presence of French troops was keeping large parts of the country under Maximilian’s control. Worse yet, now that its Civil War was concluded, the United States had begun to give significant aid to Juárez, who was engaging French troops with ever more frequent and bloody encounters.

  Where and when would it stop? How long could France keep pouring financial and military support into what was emerging as an unwinnable morass?

  Back in Paris, the harsh winter of 1865 prevented most work on the exterior of the new Opéra, but inside, the Grand Foyer and its adjacent salons received an iron superstructure that would support the foyer’s suspended ceiling, while a ring of cast-iron columns reached the sixth level of the auditorium, followed by iron balcony platforms at each level. The substructure of the auditorium would be completed by the year’s end.

  The year was not good to Georges Bizet, whose ambitions continued to focus on opera. His grand opera Ivan IV, commissioned by the Théâtre Lyrique, encou
ntered a variety of ill winds and never was produced. Meanwhile, the Goncourts’ fourth novel, Germinie Lacerteux, published in early 1865, did not do well. Much to the brothers’ dismay, it met with either neglect or disgust. Even their prestigious friend Princess Mathilde, cousin to the emperor, wrote them that the book “made her sick.” Why, she wanted to know, would people like them, upstanding and reputable persons, write books like that?5

  Alone among the reviewers, a young unknown by the name of Emile Zola had written enthusiastically about Germinie Lacerteux. He praised its “indomitable energy, [its] supreme disregard for the judgment of the timid and of fools, . . . [and] an artistic integrity rare in these times.” Zola had not yet broken into the Paris literary scene and was writing for an out-of-town journal, the Salut publique of Lyon, but the Goncourts nonetheless were charmed. He had consoled them, they wrote, for the literary hypocrisy of the moment. Alone, he had understood what they wanted to accomplish.6

  Again in September, Zola praised Germinie Lacerteux, this time in the pages of the Messager de l’Europe. When the Goncourts’ stage play of contemporary life, Henriette Maréchal, appeared at the Comédie-Franҫaise in December, the playwrights still had not met the young critic, but they made sure that he received a complimentary seat to the production’s opening night.

  That evening the Goncourts were uncharacteristically excited (“The Theatre! We had got into the theatre!”) and had every expectation of success. After all, they reasoned, the actors were so good that their performance alone would ensure a triumph. The brothers might well have realized what was coming when some of the actors backstage gave them peculiar smiles and said of the audience, “They aren’t very affectionate tonight.” But the Goncourts were anticipating a hit and were astonished when they began to hear catcalls and hisses. Soon much of the audience was doing its best to bring down the curtain.

  Although the theater’s management afterward insisted that they had seen nothing like it since the legendary uproar caused by Victor Hugo’s Hernani in 1830, this was of little consolation to the brothers, who at length concluded that politics rather than the play’s raw realism lay at the heart of the protest. They had paid tribute to Princess Mathilde in their preface, and they became convinced that the attacks came from writers and students of the Latin Quarter who decided that the play had passed the censors only because of the authors’ friendship with the princess. The police had done little to quell the opening-night riot, possibly—as some conjectured—due to instructions from friends of Empress Eugenie, who was jealous of what amounted to Princess Mathilde’s rival court. But the Goncourts preferred to blame a cabal of “envious, class-conscious Bohemians” and railed (in private) against “that new socialism of the beer-halls and Bohemia directed against all decent writers.”

  The next night went much better, but in the meantime Princess Mathilde had received threatening letters related to the play, saying that “her house would be the first to be burned down and that ‘all her lovers’ would be hanged.” The Goncourts ignored the threat of house burning and instead took exception to the accusation about Mathilde’s supposed lovers: this was absolute slander as far as they were concerned. In the three years that they had been frequenting the princess’s salon, they had seen no one other than the princess’s longtime lover, the Count de Nieuwerkerke, in her presence. This in turn led them to contemplate the “slanderous legends that are invented about the loves of princesses and queens.”7

  The next day, the theater removed Henriette Maréchal from production. But not before Emile Zola had seen and written about it, which he did with gusto. “I have lived an entire life in two hours,” he wrote the Goncourts soon after opening night, “a life of struggle and of passion, . . . which has been for me the image of this modern life that we are hopelessly living.”8 Soon he had the opportunity to praise Henriette Maréchal in print (in a February 1866 issue of L’Evénement).

  But the Goncourts remained disconsolate, and their spirits did not improve after hearing Alexandre Dumas père expound one evening on the current state of the theater. Holding forth at a dinner given by Princess Mathilde, Dumas remarked, “What can you expect, . . . when the only way to make money in the theatre nowadays is with tights that split?” One theater director, as Dumas told it, had made a fortune by telling his dancers to wear split-prone tights. Audiences loved it—until the censors put a stop to it. But the director in question certainly was onto something, according to Dumas. “Something spectacular,” he added, “that’s all you need.”

  This, however, provided little cheer for the Goncourts, who reflected: “Sickness, disease. That is the reproach which is constantly thrown at our books. But what is not sickness in this age of ours?”9

  The year had been a big one for Zola, who not only set up housekeeping with his mistress, Alexandrine Meley, but also established good relations with the Goncourt brothers and began to dabble in journalism as a theater critic. In addition, he began to hold regular Thursday-evening gatherings, attended by Cézanne and Pissarro as well as by other friends.

  In late November, Zola published his first novel, La Confession de Claude, which he described (in his publicity campaign) as “a psychological and physiological study, a tale of blood and tears that has Fall and Redemption as its lofty and pure moral.” In this essentially autobiographical work, based on Zola’s difficult life in the Latin Quarter, the young author explored the disillusionment experienced by a young poet mired in the sordid real world of Left Bank bohemia. He had consciously presented this as a moral tome, to evade the censors, but its subject matter offended many, even while Zola’s inexperience as a writer put off the more discerning critics. “It is weak in certain places,” Zola agreed. “It is the cry of a child who weeps and revolts against himself.”10

  Still, much to Zola’s delight, he was being noticed. This included his employers at Hachette, who soon realized that Zola’s public relations efforts involved publicizing his book on Hachette stationery, causing one critic to refer to it as “Hachette’s little book.” As a result, Zola and Hachette agreed to part company in the new year.

  It was a potentially risky time for the young man, but the fundamental changes in his personality and lifestyle since coming to Hachette—from laziness and negligence to ambition, hard work, and drive—would serve him well in any career, including the one he most desired, as a man of letters. With utmost practicality, he wrote a friend that what he deemed essential henceforth was an adroitness that “is not a matter of lying to oneself, of being dishonest and providing a book for this or that taste. It is a matter, once the book is done, of not waiting for the public to come to you but of forcing it to caress or insult you.” Yes, this might not be dignified, he conceded, but then added, “This is an impatient age.”11

  Much like the Goncourts, Flaubert, and Zola, who aimed at capturing the realities of modern life through their writing, Edouard Manet’s goal was to capture reality with a paintbrush. With this as his aim and his guide, he once again attempted to breach the ramparts of the Salon in 1865, this time with two works—Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers and Olympia. Both were accepted, and both created an uproar—Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers for its unconventional portrayal of Jesus as a vulnerable and very human being and Olympia for its decidedly unromantic depiction of a cool and collected courtesan of Manet’s own times.

  Of the two, it is Olympia that has gone down in history for its break with tradition and for the pandemonium it created at the 1865 Salon. There is nothing respectable about Manet’s courtesan: she is not partially concealed with carefully arranged drapery, nor is her direct gaze shielded from the viewer. She does not reference antiquity, nor is she surrounded by clouds and cherubs or depicted stepping delicately into virginal springs among flowers and butterflies. Instead, she calmly—and with an “I’ve seen everything” gaze—awaits her client, with a black maid behind her bearing flowers and a black cat crouched at her feet. In viewing Manet’s worldly courtesan, startled female members of the ever-
so-proper bourgeoisie would have realized, to their discomfort, that they had just seen the real thing.

  Probably because he was aware of the storm he would set off, Manet had delayed showing Olympia—which he completed in 1863—until 1865. He was right: critics were furious, and the general public was so hostile that, according to Le Figaro, the Salon quickly moved it from its original position to the last room, where it hung so high that it was difficult to see.

  Commenting on the public reaction, Manet told his friend Antonin Proust, “That kind, they need something frothy. I can’t provide that particular article.” But he was not so suavely impervious to the ridicule and abuse as he appeared. In a letter to Baudelaire, he wrote: “I wish I had you here, my dear Baudelaire, insults are beating down on me like hail, I’ve never been through anything like it. . . . All this uproar is upsetting, and obviously someone must be wrong.”12

  In response to the uproar, and perhaps reflecting his own doubts, Manet soon left Paris for Spain, “to go to Maȋtre Velázquez for advice,” as he put it. Soon after his arrival in Madrid, he encountered Théodore Duret, who quickly became a good friend (although Duret did not hesitate to rib Manet about the latter’s objection to Spanish cuisine, which the very Parisian Manet found revolting). Together they visited the Prado, and Manet wrote his friend, the poet and sculptor Zacharie Astruc, that the work of Velázquez alone justified the journey: “He is the greatest artist of all. . . . I discovered in his work the fulfillment of my own ideals in painting, and the sight of those masterpieces gave me enormous hope and courage.”13