Paris, City of Dreams

by Mary McAuliffe

  Suddenly the entire balance of power in Europe had changed. A little late to the party, Louis-Napoleon now attempted to win some territorial concessions on the Rhine’s left bank from Prussia, but Bismarck was contemptuous. Others were contemptuous as well. Adolphe Thiers, by now a leading deputy of the opposition in the Legislature, remarked that “it is France who has been beaten at Sadowa.”1

  For her part, Empress Eugenie was devastated. Two days after Sadowa, at a hastily summoned meeting of the Council of Ministers, she listened as Foreign Secretary Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys recommended that France send troops to the Rhine in response to Prussia’s muscular progress. When the interior minister disputed this, arguing that France would have no difficulty in obtaining territorial compensations through friendly negotiations with Prussia, Eugenie burst out: “When the Prussian armies are no longer tied up in Bohemia and can turn back against ourselves, Bismarck will simply laugh at our claims!” She even told the emperor, “Prussia did not scruple to throw a barrier in front of you after [your victory at] Solferino. Why should you worry over doing the same to her after Sadowa?”

  Many years later, Eugenie told an interviewer: “The summer of 1866, after Sadowa, is the critical date, the date of doom for the Empire; it was during those months of July and August that our destiny was fixed!” Whether or not Bismarck would have pulled back if Louis-Napoleon had strongly opposed him after Sadowa, Eugenie and some of her husband’s ministers firmly felt that this course was the only possible one. “At that moment,” she said years afterward, “I felt the fate of France and the future of our destiny were at stake.”2

  But Louis-Napoleon—depressed and ill—refused to take action, any action at all, and now Eugenie thought seriously that her husband should abdicate in favor of their nine-year-old son, with her as regent.

  It was at this unfortunate moment that Empress Charlotte arrived from Mexico.

  Trying to protect her husband from this encounter, Eugenie at first met alone with Charlotte, assuring her that Louis-Napoleon was too ill to receive her. But Charlotte was distraught and not to be put off. Louis-Napoleon, accompanied by Eugenie, then received her—an excruciating encounter, during which he had to inform Charlotte that “Mexico is an abyss into which France is sliding. I must stop it.” And he begged her to convince Maximilian to leave Mexico while he still could.

  Charlotte, now sobbing, replied that he was condemning her and Maximilian to death. No, no, Louis-Napoleon insisted: they were both young, and there would be a new life for them back in Europe. At this, Charlotte retorted that her husband would not run away. As Louis-Napoleon continued his attempts to placate her, she suddenly screamed, “Blood and tears! . . . Both will flow again, and because of you! Rivers of Blood! And on your head!” And then she collapsed. When Eugenie tried to give her water, Charlotte seized the glass and threw the water at her, screaming, “Assassins! Leave me alone! I won’t swallow your poisoned drink!”

  She had gone mad.3

  Despite the turbulence in affairs at home and abroad, and despite a new outbreak of cholera that struck Paris in the wake of the Austro-Prussian war, Haussmann’s renewal of the city marched on.

  In 1866, Boulevard de Magenta was finally completed as far as the outer boulevards, and a northward extension (later renamed Boulevard Barbès) was under way. The new Hôtel-Dieu hospital was now rising on the northern side of the Ile de la Cité, while construction continued on the Opéra throughout the winter, which turned out to be a mild one. Supplementary water from the River Vanne became closer to reality for Parisians, while at Belgrand’s request, Haussmann purchased windmills on the River Marne and then set up two hydraulic machines to pump water from the Marne into the Canal de l’Ourcq.

  All of this of course was expensive, but funds from the legislatively approved bond issue continued to support the grands travaux, while the municipal council approved Haussmann’s portion of the city budget, as in the past. Unlike requests for state funding from the Legislature, which Louis-Napoleon had initiated for financing Paris’s grands travaux, Haussmann did not have to justify his requests to the municipal council as work that would benefit the entire nation. In previous years, the municipal council had approved his portion of the budget with little ado. In 1866, it continued its approval; yet for the first time, a hint of trouble surfaced.

  Somewhere in the depths of the national audit office, questions had arisen over alleged financial irregularities within the Haussmann administration. The city’s treasury department was under the National Audit Office’s control, and Haussmann viewed it balefully, as a “body that has forever been closed to progressive ideas,” whose only purpose was “to tick off figures, to check additions down to the last centime,” and to nitpick.4

  Trouble had not yet materialized, but it was not far off.

  It was now that Edouard Manet and his wife, Suzanne, moved in with Manet’s widowed mother on Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, near the Gare Saint-Lazare and the new Opéra quarter. Léon, Suzanne’s illegitimate son, joined them—presented as always to the rest of the world as Suzanne’s younger brother. Madame Manet and Suzanne enjoyed one another, and whether Léon was the son of Edouard’s father or of Edouard himself—or of some other man previously in Suzanne’s life—Edouard’s mother did not seem overly concerned and was especially fond of the boy.

  It was a busy and bustling household, where Edouard’s mother surrounded herself with family and friends. Madame Manet was not inclined to solitude, and she often featured her daughter-in-law—an accomplished pianist—in musical evenings. Among those that Madame Manet invited to her twice-weekly soirées were a vibrant group of politicians, artists, writers, musicians, and composers, as well as personal family friends. This, plus the fortune that underpinned the entire family, made for a secure and pleasant home for Manet, who would never suffer, as did so many other painters, from poverty.

  Even Manet’s marriage seems to have been a happy one, whatever his man-about-town proclivities. Perhaps surprisingly, he and Suzanne longed for children of their own, as he indicated in writing to Zacharie Astruc. After congratulating Astruc “for the arrival of your heir,” he added, “We would love the same thing to happen to us.”5

  And yet, despite his comforts and his security, Edouard Manet was frustrated and unhappy. That year, the Salon rejected both of his submissions (The Tragic Actor and The Fifer), which he had painted under the inspiration of his recent trip to Spain and, in particular, of Velázquez.

  It was now that a friend introduced Manet to Emile Zola, who had begun to write art criticism for the weekly L’Evénement. Zola may have misunderstood Manet’s work and modern painting in general; he may also have had his own career interests more in mind than Manet’s when he took up Manet’s cause. Still, Zola was the only one to come publicly to Manet’s defense, and he did so with characteristic verve. Zola’s subsequent article on Manet appeared in early May, as part of a series he called Mon Salon. “You know what effect Monsieur Manet’s canvases produce at the Salon,” he wrote. “Quite simply they burst open the wall. All around them stretch the sweets of the fashionable artistic confectioners, sugar-candy trees and pastry houses, gingerbread gentlemen, and ladies made of vanilla cream.”6

  “Monsieur Manet has a no-nonsense temperament which cuts clean,” Zola continued. “He captures his figures alive.” He especially liked Manet’s rejected painting, The Fifer, whose exactness and simplicity made a strong impression on him. “He delineates his figures sharply . . . , rendering objects in all their vigor.” Moreover, “his entire being compels him to see in patches, in simple elements charged with energy.”7

  Zola eviscerated the Salon as vigorously as he defended Monet, exposing the bargaining and the bribery involved in the selection process and scathingly depicting the artwork that was accepted. And what kind of works were accepted? he rhetorically asked. A dull lot, he answered, dreary and mediocre. While at the same time painters such as Manet, painters who were “strong, solid,” and “the most living
,” were being rejected. It was scandalous!

  Manet was delighted. Immediately after the article appeared, he wrote Zola: “I don’t know where to find you to shake your hand and tell you how proud and happy I am to be championed by a man of your talent, what a splendid article , . . . a thousand thanks.” He suggested meeting at the Café de Bade, where he regularly could be found from 4:30 to 7 p.m., “if that should suit you.”8

  The Café de Bade, or possibly the Café Guerbois, evidently suited, for the two now became friends. Manet, much to his gratification, had a champion, while Zola was on his way as a literary star of the avant-garde.

  Claude Monet, unlike Edouard Manet, did have two paintings accepted for the 1866 Salon. Since he was unable to complete his Luncheon on the Grass in time for the that year’s Salon, he submitted Le Pavé de Chailly, which he had done the previous year, and a new painting—his remarkable full-length study Camille, or The Woman with a Green Dress.

  Monet had by now moved to the Right Bank, where he began to paint this life-size female figure, posed indoors and clothed in a voluminous (and rented) green satin dress. His model was Camille-Léonie Doncieux, a nineteen-year-old Parisian, born in Lyon, who had recently become his mistress. Up against a tight deadline, Monet managed to finish the painting in time to get it to the Salon jury by the March 20 cutoff date (although probably not painted in the four days that legend has it).

  Once on display, Monet’s striking portrait attracted attention, much of it negative. One critic complained that “a dress is no more a painting than a sentence written correctly is a book” and demanded, “What does this outfit mean to me if I cannot understand the body beneath, . . . if the head is not a head, and the hand no more than a paw?” And, as the year before, viewers and critics alike confused Monet with Manet—not only because of the similarities in name but also because of the unconventional nature of the two painters’ work. The caricaturist André Gill (of subsequent Lapin Agile fame) featured Camille with the caption: “Monet or Manet?—Monet. But it is to Manet that we owe this Monet; bravo! Monet; thank you! Manet.”9

  But Emile Zola did not confuse the two, while applauding both. Continuing his passionate support of Manet, he gave stellar marks to Monet as well. “Now there’s a temperament,” he wrote in L’Evénement. “There’s a man among eunuchs!” Zola stood before Monet’s Woman with a Green Dress and marveled at the contrast between it and the canvases displayed around it. “Here we have something more than a realist,” he proclaimed. “We have a strong, subtle interpreter who has not gone wooden with his concern for detail.”10

  Not surprisingly, L’Evénement’s readers were not all of a same mind, and angry letters flooded the editor, while some of its readers, evidently provoked beyond endurance, tore up the issue in front of the newspaper’s office and stamped on the fragments. One irate soul even challenged Zola to a duel. L’Evénement thrived on scandal, but the flood of subscription cancellations convinced the editor that Zola could not go on in this vein. After just a few weeks of glory, Zola’s art criticism in L’Evénement came to a halt. But he would soon publish his offending articles in pamphlet form as Mon Salon, which would have a life of its own.

  Zola did meet Monet, while Monet and Manet did at last become friends, thanks to the intercession of Zacharie Astruc, who made it clear to Manet that the confusion between the two was not of Monet’s making.

  Monet in the meanwhile was encountering unexpected financial difficulties: his aunt had finally decided to put an end to the allowance she had regularly sent him. “I’m utterly shaken,” he wrote the painter Amand Gautier, asking him to “placate my aunt for a little while longer” and adding that “I don’t know quite how I could manage otherwise.” Gautier, a friend of Monet’s aunt, did indeed do exactly as Monet requested, writing the aunt and focusing on what he termed Monet’s “Salon success.” In addition, as an overjoyed Monet wrote Gautier, “no less than three people sent [the aunt] the Evénement [Zola’s article] which you also sent,” which delighted her—“She is congratulated at every turn.” An ecstatic Monet thanked Gautier “from the bottom of my heart.”11

  Adding to his happiness, Monet sold several paintings based on his Salon showing, for a total of eight hundred francs. Still, Camille did not find a buyer, and his aunt had made it clear that, although renewing his allowance, she was not about to pay off his debts. Eight hundred francs represented a victory, but it would not go very far—especially now that Monet had another mouth to feed.

  Among the young painters striving in new directions, Berthe Morisot continued to experience modest success at the Salon, once again having two paintings accepted in 1866. Camille Pissarro also had a landscape accepted at the 1866 Salon, as he had in every Salon but one since 1859. Edgar Degas, who showed for the first time at the 1865 Salon with an acceptable historic scene (War Scene from the Middle Ages), appeared at the 1866 Salon in a more audacious light, depicting a fallen jockey with galloping horses, all contoured in daringly sweeping outlines. Despite its calculated challenge to the tradition-bound, his entry was accepted but went unnoticed.

  Pierre-Auguste Renoir, a fellow-student with Monet at the Gleyre academy, who had succeeded with his first try at the 1864 Salon, subsequently—after painting en plein air in the company of Monet, Bazille, and Sisley—became disillusioned with the acceptable style of Academic painting and destroyed his successful 1864 entry (called La Esmeralda). He scored with two submissions to the 1865 Salon (a portrait of Sisley’s father and a landscape), but his 1866 submission, a landscape with two figures, was rejected. Enquiring hesitantly on its fate, in the guise of “a friend of Renoir,” he was told (by one of the few jurors inclined to favor the “new” artists) that the painting had been solidly rejected. Still, the juror went on, “Tell your friend not to become discouraged, that there are great qualities in his picture. He should make a petition and request an exhibition of Refusés.”

  There had not been a sequel to the 1863 Salon des Refusés, and it is not known whether Renoir (or for that matter the disappointed Manet or Bazille) followed this advice; but Paul Cézanne most certainly did. Cézanne’s submissions to the 1864 and 1865 Salons had been rejected, and his 1866 submission, the portrait of a friend, Anthony Valabrègue, struck one juror as having been “not only painted with a knife but even with a pistol.” Expecting rejection and geared for a fight, Cézanne wrote the superintendent of fine arts, the well-connected Count de Nieuwerkerke (Princess Mathilde’s longtime lover), of his disappointment. Not receiving an answer, he wrote again, not merely to request but to demand the chance to show his pictures to the public, despite their rejection by an “unfair judgment.” He was not alone in this request, he told Nieuwerkerke, citing the many painters “in my position” who would all, if asked, “disown the jury.” Yet even if he were alone, he demanded that the Salon des Refusés be reestablished.

  Zola seems to have helped his boyhood friend Cézanne with this letter, which came at the same time that he began his weekly attacks on the Salon in L’Evénement, in which he may have received essential coaching from Cézanne. After all, Zola had long before admitted that he knew next to nothing about art. But this was a cause that he could commit to with a passion, and expertise—if not his own—was certainly available to him.

  “What he asks is impossible,” reads a marginal note that an official wrote on Cézanne’s second letter. “We have come to realize how inconsistent with the dignity of art the exhibition of the Refusés was, and it will not be repeated.”12 The Salon des Refusés was not repeated, and the superintendent of fine arts does not appear to have answered either of Cézanne’s letters.

  But Cézanne may well have contributed essentials to the broadside that Zola launched against the Salon and in defense of Manet and Monet. Cézanne, however, was not among those whom Zola chose to praise, and in a later novel, L’Oeuvre, he would make it clear that he viewed his boyhood friend as an “incomplete genius.” Still, if Zola owed Cézanne for assistance on his L’Evénem
ent articles, he made a gesture toward repayment when he gathered together these articles into the pamphlet Mon Salon, which he dedicated to Cézanne.

  Monet in the meantime had moved to a small village to the west of Paris, where he once again took up the challenge of creating a large painting of figures in a landscape. This time, the figures were all of women, who were clothed in the floating summer dresses of the time, and the physical challenges alone of creating such a huge painting were daunting: simply to reach every part of the canvas with his paintbrush, Monet found it necessary to dig a trench in his garden and set up a pulley system to raise and lower the canvas into and out of the trench. Despite such obstacles, and the recurring problem of debts, Monet completed Women in the Garden later in the year in Honfleur and submitted it to the 1867 Salon. But not before more problems, and bills, arose.

  Gustave Flaubert, in the meanwhile, had been made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, probably at the urging of his friend Princess Mathilde. The honor may have pleased him, but he was not pleased that Pierre Alexis Ponson du Terrail, a popular writer whose work he despised, was decorated at the same time. Maxime Du Camp undertook to console Flaubert by telling him that in all probability Ponson du Terrail “was quite as much scandalized at being decorated in company with Gustave Flaubert”—a truth that Flaubert readily acknowledged.13

  In another part of town, the master photographer Nadar—now at the top of his profession—was bored. Photography no longer inspired him, and he preferred the company of hot-air balloons or anything that flew. He could envision the possibilities for aerial military photography and land surveys, and he was determined to be the first to take photographs from the sky. But photographing celebrities had lost its charm.