Sarah Bernhardt was also bored. She had been on her own for two years now and longed to get back into the theater. Pulling strings, she managed to wangle an interview with the Théâtre de l’Odéon but on the condition that she behave herself. This meant controlling her temper and her indiscreet lifestyle. Hiding her annoyance, she outdid herself with charm but nonetheless managed to receive only a humiliating one-month contract. Still, the Odéon was France’s second national theater, and it was a start. The director, who had encountered Bernhardt before, did not like anything about her, but the associate director was more amenable. And so she signed—fully intending to be a success.
Charles Baudelaire had by now come to despair of success. Still in Brussels, after his agent had led him to believe that a publisher was about to offer a contract, he learned to his disbelief that, after many months, the agent had not even approached the publisher in question. When a friend inquired on his behalf, the publisher promptly closed the door on all possibility of publication, ending all of Baudelaire’s hopes.
His drinking increased, as did his use of opium, and in 1866—while still in Belgium—he suffered a massive stroke, followed by partial paralysis. Those concerned about him, including the Hugos, placed him in a nursing home in Brussels, and then in July 1866, friends brought him by private compartment in a train to Paris. There he entered a clinic, where for a brief time he entertained visitors and even attended dinners that Nadar arranged in his honor.
But soon, as death approached, Baudelaire withdrew from almost all contact with the outside world.
In the course of one of Haussmann’s demolition projects, the city of Paris had condemned the school building that Louise Michel owned, with a colleague, on Rue du Château-d’Eau. Michel hoped that they would receive an indemnity for the building, but the reimbursement never materialized. She then bought a day school in Montmartre with money that her mother managed to scrape together. Michel and another teacher lived in the day school, and gradually, the number of her pupils increased. “For schoolmistresses,” she recalled, “we were nearly comfortable,” and “joy filled my heart.”
Adding to her joy, Michel now began to attend classes at a Left Bank center on Rue Hautefeuille (6th) directed by two reform-minded republicans, Jules Favre and Eugène Pelletan. There, she and other schoolteachers continued their education with “free courses in elementary teaching, professional courses, readings to mothers of families, and a night course for young people who had to work.” Those women who were young teachers or were preparing themselves to become teachers “were eager for this learning,” Michel noted, as they had “only what they had been able to snatch here and there.” Describing this vital atmosphere, Michel added, “A frenzy for knowledge possessed us.”
At the Rue Hautefeuille center, there were lectures ranging from physics and chemistry to law. Teachers tried out new methods of instruction, and Michel taught many poor children there: “Young as they were,” she later wrote, “they had to work all day, and if it hadn’t been for the center on the rue Hautefeuille [where instruction continued up to ten o’clock at night], they would never have been in a class.”
It was as she returned home late at night that Michel saw a Paris that most, except the destitute, did not see. “I have seen criminals and whores,” she challenged her readers, “And spoken with them. Now I inquire / If you believe them made as now they are / To drag their rags in blood and mire, / Preordained, an evil race?” And she added, in pungent prose: “No one comes into the world with a knife in his hand to stab others, or with a card in her hand to sell herself.”
Louise Michel had seen the darkness and wanted to shine a light on it, through teaching and education. “At the rue Hautefeuille in the long night of the Empire we had glimpses of a better world,” she wrote. “It provided an untainted refuge in the middle of imperial Paris.”14
Arrival of the Emperor and Empress at the Grand Entrance opening the 1867 Paris Exhibition (engraving for The Illustrated London News, 13 April 1867). Private collection. © Look and Learn / Illustrated Papers Collection / Bridgeman Images
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
A Setting Sun
(1867)
The year started badly, with Napoleon III receiving yet another brush-off from Bismarck. The French emperor had not learned from his unsuccessful attempt the year before to extricate a compensation along the Rhine in return for France’s neutrality in Prussia’s war with Austria. Now, in the new year, Louis-Napoleon received as little joy when he made his follow-up bid to Prussia, asking for French hegemony over Luxembourg. After a fairly major kerfuffle, in which Bismarck threatened war and Britain intervened, Louis-Napoleon backed off, his reputation none the better for the encounter. Those in the know began to remark quietly that a Franco-Prussian war was looking ever more likely.
Added to this, French Catholics were becoming alarmed over affairs in Rome where, the previous December, the emperor had withdrawn protective French troops after the Italian government agreed not to attack the pope. What, the devout wondered, would prevent the newly exposed Holy City from coming under attack from Garibaldi and his army of Italian nationalists?
As it turned out, the faithful were right to be worried: by autumn, Garibaldi was once again threatening the remnants of the Papal States. Reluctantly, Louis-Napoleon—concerned about undermining French-Italian friendship—sent French troops back to Rome. There, the French intervened in a firefight between papal forces and Garibaldi’s men, inflicting heavy losses on Garibaldi’s troops. Italian-French friendship, already frayed, now ended.
Two new, and hostile, powers now bordered France: Prussia and Italy. But this did not faze French conservatives, who applauded the emperor’s minister of state, Eugène Rouher, when he proclaimed: “Never shall Italy lay hold of Rome. Never shall France support such violence to its honor, to the Catholic Church.”
Louis-Napoleon is said to have congratulated Rouher for his speech, but then added: “In politics, you must not say never.”1
And then there was the ongoing debacle in Mexico. Napoleon ordered the last French troops home that March, leaving behind some seven thousand dead Frenchmen on foreign soil and a naive young emperor whose situation was perilous. Soon, Maximilian and his remaining defenders were surrounded and besieged, and the would-be emperor of Mexico was forced to surrender.
On June 19, Maximilian was executed by firing squad. To the end, he was the very personification of nobility, voicing clearly before the shots rang out that his only wish was that his blood would “bring peace and happiness to my unhappy adopted fatherland.”
The news of his death reached Paris on July 1, just as Louis-Napoleon was about to preside over a splendid ceremony at that year’s glittering Universal Exposition. Pomp and circumstance reigned on the one hand but could not hide a bloody debacle, whose stain had made its mark. In the words of Philip Guedalla, an early historian of the empire, “The sky was still bright; but there was a strange chill upon the Empire. The clear dawn of 1852 seemed half a century away, and quite suddenly the Emperor had become an old man.”2
That January, the Goncourts had noted the ongoing decline of civilization by remarking that there were no longer any chairs in the bookshops along the Seine’s embankments. France, in their words, had been “the last bookseller who provided chairs where you could sit down and chat.” But modern trade, as they put it, had been “all-devouring.”
Despite their fears for the future of everything civilized, especially at the hands of Americans, whom the Goncourts feared were “destined to be the future conquerors of the world, . . . the Barbarians of civilization,” the brothers were pleased when the elder, Edmond, received his admission to the Legion of Honor that September. Although his joy was incomplete, due to the absence of a similar recognition for Jules, Edmond nonetheless felt great pride in receiving the decoration, “which has that rare distinction of not having been asked for or solicited by so much as a single word or allusion, but obtained by a friend who thought of it
by herself”—that is, Princess Mathilde.3
That year Georges Bizet once again suffered disappointment with yet another commissioned opera, La Jolie Fille de Perth (The Fair Maid of Perth), which was squeezed out of the prime summer exposition spot by Charles Gounod’s Roméo et Juliette before at last making it to the stage late in the year, where it played for only eighteen performances. But that January, Sarah Bernhardt made her official debut at the Théâtre de l’Odéon. The part did not suit her, but soon after, she had a “veritable small triumph” (as she put it) in Racine’s Athalie.
The Odéon was a Left Bank center for artists, intellectuals, and Sorbonne students, where anti-imperialism flourished and Victor Hugo and George Sand reigned supreme. It was therefore a notable break for Bernhardt when George Sand noticed her and awarded her with a small part in Sand’s Le Marquis de Villemer, which Sand had dramatized from her novel with the help of Dumas fils.
Bernhardt loved her time at the Odéon. “Oh, that Odéon Theater!” she later enthused. “It is the theater I have loved most. . . . We thought of nothing but putting on plays, and we rehearsed morning, afternoon, and at all hours, and I liked that very much.” Even her Spartan surroundings could not dampen her enthusiasm. “I always ran up the cold, cracked steps of the theater with veritable joy,” she wrote, “and rushed up to my dressing-room.” But it was the stage that delighted her the most—“to be once more in that infinite darkness with only a poor light.” For her, there was “nothing more brilliant than that darkness.”
As for George Sand, Bernhardt recalled her as “a sweet, charming creature, . . . [who] did not talk much, but smoked all the time.” Bernhardt seems to have performed creditably in Sand’s Marquis de Villemer, but it was in playing the role of Anna Danby in Alexandre Dumas’s Kean in early 1868 that she elicited a review that first remarked on her voice, “her rich voice—that astonishing voice of hers.” As a friend would later tell Bernhardt, “You are an original without trying to be so, “ adding that “you have a natural harp in your throat.”
Bernhardt was already striking some as extraordinary, “a creature apart”—which of course, as that friend pointed out, “is a crime of high treason against all that is commonplace.”4
Early in January 1867, Zola published a long article in Manet’s defense in La Revue du XIX siècle. Manet was delighted. “What a splendid New Year’s gift you’ve made me,” he wrote Zola. ‘It comes just at the right moment.” Once again, Manet had been treated shabbily by the Salon judges, and he now decided to hold a one-man exhibition at the upcoming Universal Exposition. “I have at least forty-odd pictures I can show,” he added, and had been offered “sites in very good locations near the Champ de Mars.” He promised Zola that he was “going to go all out.”5
Yet even with boundless enthusiasm and support of friends like Zola it was a risky venture, as Gustave Courbet had discovered at the 1855 exposition. Sales and attendance for Courbet’s one-man exhibition had been disappointing, and the members of the public who did show up had scoffed. Still, Courbet had emerged from the affair as a hero of the new school of Realist art and rapidly became a celebrity. Once again, at the upcoming 1867 exposition, Courbet planned a one-man exhibition, and this time, Manet planned to venture his reputation and a considerable fortune by joining him.
It was odd, Camille Pissarro later commented to his son Lucien, how Manet, “great painter that he was, had a petty side, he was crazy to be recognized by the constituted authorities.” Despite his talent, despite the security that his life offered, “he believed in success, he longed for honors.” In particular, Manet longed for recognition from the Salon, which in spite of his disappointments, he continued to regard as “the real field of battle.”6
But given his treatment by the 1867 Salon judges, Manet decided on the radical step of a one-man show, held in a temporary pavilion of his own construction on the Place de l’Alma at Avenue Montaigne, diagonal from Courbet’s own pavilion. This was no inexpensive venture: Manet had to ask his mother to advance him the funds to build the wooden pavilion and meet the exhibition’s other expenses. Prepared to put the entirety of his work before the public, he exhibited fifty-three paintings, including The Absinthe Drinker, Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, and Olympia. And he published a catalogue in which he (and probably some of his writer friends) set forth his aims as an artist, in which he presented himself as reasonable rather than radical. “M. Manet,” it stated, “presumes neither to overthrow earlier painting nor to make it new. He has merely tried to be himself and not someone else.”7
Unfortunately, as Courbet had already discovered, one-man exhibitions were not a good way to attract the attention of critics or the general public. Manet received praise from only one critic (Jules Claretie, in L’Indépendance belge), and members of the general public just as generally stayed away.
It was a disastrous experience for Manet, financially and in every other way—underscoring once again the difficulties in trying to win public recognition and success without the imprimatur of the Salon.
In late May, Claude Monet wrote Frédéric Bazille that “Manet’s opening is in two days and he is in a frightful state.” Courbet’s opening was also due shortly, “but that’s quite another story. Can you imagine, he’s inviting every artist in Paris to the opening: he’s sending three thousand invitations, and on top of that, every artist also gets a copy of his catalogue. Rest assured he’s doing well.”8
Monet himself was now in dire financial straits. By winter’s end, he had come to live with Bazille, where he joined an equally broke Renoir. His prospects, and that of so many of his friends, looked bleak: that year’s Salon jury had accepted none of the paintings Monet submitted and also rejected the paintings of Renoir, Bazille, Sisley, Pissarro, and Cézanne. Although Monet and others petitioned for a new Salon des Refusés, they had no luck. Even their attempt to organize an exhibit on private premises failed, leaving them to eke out the rest of the winter and spring as best they could. Only Bazille’s last-minute intervention, by purchasing Women in the Garden at a remarkably high price (payable in fifty-franc monthly installments), brightened Monet’s prospects, at least for the moment.
But still, Monet remained chronically out-of-pocket and out-of-sorts. He spent the spring painting views of Paris with Renoir and only occasionally looked in on his mistress, Camille Doncieux, who by now was pregnant and living separately from him. On contacting Monet’s father on his friend’s behalf, Bazille received the firm admonition that if young Monet wanted to succeed, “he must renounce his extravagant ideas and his past conduct.”9 As for Camille Doncieux, Monet’s father was firm: Monet would have to leave her.
Monet did not completely abandon his mistress but nonetheless kept his distance, moving her to a room in a Batignolles apartment near that of her parents (who did not seem to have taken any interest in their disgraced daughter). He also arranged for the anticipated July delivery and planned to be present when it took place. But his interest seems to have been elsewhere, either with Manet’s one-man show or with his own ever-pressing financial needs. Bazille had by now left for his parents’ home in Montpellier, and Monet continued to press his friend for money. “I saw Camille yesterday,” he wrote Bazille in late May. “I don’t know what to do; she is ill, bedridden and penniless, or almost.” Since he continued his plans to leave Paris shortly, to stay with his family in Normandy, “I have to remind you of your promise to send me fifty francs at least, for the first of the month”—the arrangement that Bazille had made in purchasing Women in the Garden.
After staying with his family for two weeks, Monet reported to Bazille that all was going well there: “Everyone is good to me and every brushstroke I do is admired.” He was working hard and had twenty or so canvases “well under way.” But then he switched to an appeal, to help “poor Camille,” who “is so kind, a really good lass.” His parents had warned that although he could stay with them as long as he liked, he would have to earn any money he needed. And as the baby was
due in late July, he was writing Bazille “to ask you to send whatever you can, the more the better.”10
Monet heard nothing from Bazille and continued to send him pleading and accusatory letters, although he juxtaposed pleas on Camille Doncieux’s behalf with expressions of his own personal satisfaction: “All goes well here,” he told Bazille, “work, family.” Other than the imminent baby, “I could not be happier.”11
The baby finally arrived on August 8, a boy whom Claude Monet recognized and registered as his legitimate son, Jean-Armand-Claude Monet. Zacharie Astruc stood by Monet and perjured himself by signing the official document, which in addition to stating the legitimacy of the child falsely gave the birth date as August 11, the father not having been present for the actual birth (Wildenstein says that Monet had not wished to “annoy his family” by being present at the child’s birth).12 Monet then promptly returned to his parents’ home in Normandy, where he continued to press Bazille for money. “I really don’t know what to say to you,” he fired off on August 12; “you’ve shown such pig-headedness in not replying.” Camille, he told Bazille, “has given birth to a big and beautiful boy, . . . and it pains me to think of his mother having nothing to eat.” Monet continued with his grievances, telling Bazille that he had been forced “to borrow and received snubs from people I don’t know, and I’m really angry with you.” Neither he nor his mistress had “a penny of our own,” and the entire situation was dismal. “It’s all your fault,” he admonished Bazille, “so hurry up and make amends and send me the money right away.”13
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