23.Dominique Claudius-Petit, ‘Histoire de la maison Rostand’, (unpublished article, 2014), p. 3.
24.Félicien Champsaur, Paris, le massacre (Paris, 1885), p. 268.
25.Gabrielle Houbre, Le Livre des courtisanes: Archives secrètes de la police des moeurs, 1861–1876 (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), p. 252.
26.Jean-François Barielle and others. Champs-Elysées, Faubourg St Honoré, Plaine Monceau (Paris: Henri Veyrier, 1982), pp. 283–6.
27.Jacques Hillairet, Dictionnaire historique des rues de Paris, 2 vols (Paris: Les Éditions de minuit, 1957–1961), vol. II, pp. 92–3.
28.L. de V., ‘Hôtel privé, boulevard Malesherbes à Paris, par M. J. Février, architecte’, Le Moniteur des architectes, (1877), pp. 35–6.
29.A description of the property can be found in L. de V., ‘Hôtel privé, boulevard Malesherbes à Paris, par M. J. Février, architecte’, Le Moniteur des architectes, (1877), pp. 35–6; On the property’s contents and impact, see Fernand Xau, ‘Valtesse de la Bigne’, Gil Blas, 13 June 1883, p. 2.
30.L. de V., ‘Hôtel privé, boulevard Malesherbes à Paris, par M. J. Février, architecte’, Le Moniteur des architectes, (1877), pp. 35–6.
31.H.A. de Conty, Paris en poche – Guide pratique Conty, 6th edn (Paris, 1875), p. 295.
32.Fernand Xau, ‘Valtesse de la Bigne’, Gil Blas, 13 June 1883, p. 2.
33.Maître X, Le Gaulois, 1 March 1882, p. 3.
34.I am indebted to Audrey Gay-Mazuel and the staff at the Musée des Arts décoratifs in Paris for allowing me access to the archives on Valtesse’s bed and assisting me in my research. On Valtesse’s bed, see Roberto Polo, ‘Édouard Lièvre, un créateur des arts décoratifs au XIXe’, L’Estampille – L’Objet d’art, 394 (September 2004), pp. 102–113; Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, ‘Le lit d’une lionne: Valtesse de la Bigne’, in Rêves d’Alcôves: la chambre au cours des siècles, exhib. cat. (Paris: Musée des Arts décoratifs, 1995), pp. 211–13; Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, ‘La création de la chambre conjugale’, in Rêves d’Alcôves: la chambre au cours des siècles, exhib. cat. (Paris: Musée des Arts décoratifs, 1995), pp. 104–127; Catalogue de tableaux modernes, pastels, aquarelles, dessins etc. de Mme Valtesse de la Bigne (Paris: Imprimerie de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, June 1902), p. 106; Jean-Jacques Lévèque, ‘Trois intérieurs du début de la IIIe République’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, (March 1976), pp. 92–4; Béatrice Lauwick and Odile Nouvel-Kammerer, ‘Le Lit de Valtesse de La Bigne’, Histoire de l’art, 32 (December 1995), 71–7.
35.Catalogue de tableaux modernes, pastels, aquarelles, dessins etc. de Mme Valtesse de la Bigne (Paris: Imprimerie de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, June 1902), pp. II–III.
36.Liane de Pougy, My Blue Notebooks, trans. by Diane Athill (New York: Tarcher Putnam, 2002), p. 108.
CHAPTER 8
1.Émile Zola, cited in John Rewald, The History of Impressionism, 4th edn (New York: Museum of Modern Art and London: Secker & Warburg, 1973), p. 198.
2.Edmond Duranty, cited in Rewald, pp. 197–8.
3.T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life: Paris in the Art of Manet and His Contemporaries (New York: Knopf, 1984 and London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), p. 92.
4.Jules Claretie, cited in T.J. Clark, The Painting of Modern Life, p. 86.
5.Conversation recorded in Auriant, Les Lionnes du Second Empire (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), pp. 187–8.
Leah Rosenblatt Lehmbeck, ‘Édouard Manet’s Portraits of Women’ (doctoral thesis, Institute of Fine Arts, New York, May 2007).
6.Tamar Garb, ‘Gender and Representation’ in Francis Frascina and others, Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 219–89 (p. 231).
7.Edmond de Goncourt, cited in Garb, ‘Gender and Representation’, p. 231.
8.Garb, ‘Gender and Representation’, p. 235.
9.Alain Pougetoux, ‘Josephine as Patron and Her Collection of Paintings’ in Carol Solomon Kiefer, The Empress Josephine: Art and Royal Identity (Mead Art Museum: Amherst, Massachusetts, 2005), pp. 93–5.
10.Edmond Bazire, Manet (Paris, 1884), p. 30.
11.Rewald, p. 197
12.Rewald, p. 197.
13.Christiane Lefebvre, Alfred Stevens – 1823–1906 (Paris: Brame & Lorenceau, 2006), pp. 126–33; Max Sulzberger, Une Visite chez Alfred Stevens (Brussels, 1876), pp. 3–11.
14.Comte Robert de Montesquiou-Fezensac, cited in Lefebvre, p. 131.
15.Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot (California: University of California Press, 1995), p. 23.
16.Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris (Paris: Charpentier, 1911), p. 240.
17.Peter Mitchell, Jean Baptiste Antoine Guillemet, 1841–1918 (London: John Mitchell & Son, 1981).
18.Jean-Marcel Humbert, Édouard Detaille: L’héroisme d’un siècle (Paris: Éditions Copernic, 1979), p. 20.
19.Goncourt journals, May 1887, cited in Yolaine de la Bigne, Valtesse de la Bigne ou Le pouvoir de la volupté (Paris: Perrin, 1999), p. 174.
20.The female figure in another of the artist’s paintings of civilian subjects, Two Elegant Figures on Horseback (1873), bears a striking resemblance to Valtesse, suggesting that the couple were already intimate by this date.
21.Henri Gervex 1852–1929, exhib. cat. (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1992). I am indebted to Jean-Christophe Pralong-Gourvennec for his detailed knowledge of Gervex’s personal life.
22.Gil Blas, 2 December 1894, p. 1.
23.http://www.osenat.fr/html/fiche.jsp?id=3408505&np=14&lng=fr&npp=20&ordre=1&aff=1&r (accessed 9 June 2014).
24.World Ceramics: An illustrated history from earliest times, ed. by Robert J. Charleston (New York: Crescent Books, 1990). I am indebted to the expert knowledge of ceramicist Elaine Hewitt for the information on the history of porcelain.
25.She was also sometimes referred to as ‘l’Union des peintres’.
26.André de Fouquières, Mon Paris et ses Parisiens, 5 vols (Paris: Éditions Pierre Horay, 1953–1955), vol. ii, (1954), p. 124.
CHAPTER 9
1.Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris (Paris, 1911), p. 234.
2.Félicien Champsaur, Paris, le massacre (Paris, 1885), p. 269.
3.Claretie, p. 234.
4.Yves Olivier-Martin, Histoire du roman populaire en France (Paris: Albin Michel, 1980), p. 128.
5.Tamar Garb, ‘Gender and Representation’, in Francis Frascina and others, Modernity and Modernism: French Painting in the Nineteenth Century (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1993), pp. 219–90 (p. 280).
6.Tamar Garb, ‘Gender and Representation’, in Frascina and others, p. 231.
7.Women’s Voices through two thousand years of letters, ed. by Olga Kenyon (London: Constable, 1997), p. 157.
8.Ego, pp. 84–5.
9.Céleste Mogador, Memoirs of a Courtesan in 19th-Century Paris, trans. by Monique Fleury Nagem (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2001), p. 106.
10.Mogador, p. 108.
11.Liane de Pougy, My Blue Notebooks, trans. by Diane Athill (New York: Tarcher Putnam, 2002), p. 44.
12.Gabrielle Houbre, Le Livre des Courtisanes: Archives secrètes de la police des moeurs (Paris: Tallandier, 2006), pp. 230–2.
13.Octave Mirbeau – Correspondance générale, ed. by Pierre Michel and Jean-François Nivet, 3 vols (Lausanne: ge d’homme, 2002–2009), vol. i (2002), p. 186–7.
14.Octave Mirbeau – Correspondance générale, vol. i, p. 186.
15.Ibid.
16.Event recounted in Claretie, p. 237.
17.Theodore Zeldin, France 1848–1945: Taste and Corruption (Oxford, New York, Toronto and Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1980), pp. 144–225.
18.Auriant, Les Lionnes du Second Empire (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), p. 214.
19.Félicien Champsaur, Les Parisiennes (Paris, 1877), p. 62.
20.Félicien Champsaur, Les Parisiennes (Paris, 1877), p. 64.
21.The Académie was limited to strictly 40 seats.
22.Arsène Houssaye, ‘Les Parisie
nnes d’Amour – Valtesse’, Panurge, 22 October 1882.
23.Dr Besançon, Le Visage de la femme (Paris: Éditions Terres Latines, 1940) cited in Yolaine de la Bigne, Valtesse de la Bigne ou Le pouvoir de la volupté (Paris: Perrin, 1999), p. 132.
24.Auriant, Les Lionnes du Second Empire, p. 213.
25.Liane de Pougy, My Blue Notebooks, trans. by Diane Athill (New York: Tarcher Putnam, 2002), p. 44.
26.André de Fouquières, Mon Paris et ses Parisiens, 5 vols (Paris: Éditions Pierre Horay, 1953-1955), vol. II, (1954), p. 126.
27.Ego, Isola (Paris, 1876).
28.Ego, pp. 10–11.
29.Ego, pp. 2–3.
30.Ego, p. 61.
31.Ego, p. 13.
32.Ego, p. 59.
33.Ego, p. 61.
34.Le Figaro, 12 February 1876, p. 3.
35.Le Figaro, 13 February 1876, p. 3.
36.Claretie, p. 234.
37.Albert Wolff, Le Figaro, 20 March 1876, p. 1.
38.Mardoche and Desgenais, Les Parisiennes (Paris, 1882), p. 362.
39.Albert Wolff, Le Figaro, 20 March 1876, p. 1.
40.Ibid.
41.Ego, p. 144.
42.Mardoche and Desgenais, p. 360.
CHAPTER 10
1.Le Gaulois, 24 March 1878, p. 1.
2.Paris–Plaisir, 14 April 1878, p. 7.
3.Manuscrits nouv. acq. fr., 24520, f. 184, cited in O.R. Morgan, ‘Zola et Valtesse de la Bigne’, Les Cahiers Naturalistes, 39 (1970), 70–1.
4.Of Offenbach’s operetta La Belle Hélène, Zola wrote: ‘[it] amounts to nothing more than a grimace of convulsive gaiety, a display of gutter wit and gestures.’ Frederick Brown, Zola: A Life (London: Papermac, 1997), p. 117.
5.O.R. Morgan, ‘Zola et Valtesse de la Bigne’, Les Cahiers Naturalistes, 39 (1970), pp. 70–1.
6.Émile Zola, L’Événement, 29 March 1866, cited in Henri Mitterand, preface to Émile Zola, Nana (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), pp. 9–17 (p. 11).
7.Paul Alexis, cited in Graham King, Garden of Zola: Émile Zola and His Novels for English Readers (London: Barry and Jenkins Ltd, 1978), p. 125.
8.Adrien Marx, Les Petits mémoires de Paris (Paris, 1888), pp. 163–5.
9.Émile Zola, Correspondence, ed. by B.H. Bakker and Colette Becker, 10 vols (Montréal: Les Presses de l’Université de Montréal, Paris: Édition du Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, 1978–1995), vol. iii, p. 174.
10.Adrien Marx, ‘La Plaine Monceau’, Le Figaro, 21 June 1880, p. 1.
11.Albert Wolff, La Haute-Noce (Paris, 1885), p. 52.
12.Anecdote recounted in Yolaine de la Bigne, Valtesse de la Bigne ou Le pouvoir de la volupté (Paris: Perrin, 1999), p. 114.
13.Some people insisted that it was Guillemet and not Hennique who made the introduction, though the correspondence between Hennique and Zola suggests otherwise. Edmond Lepelletier, Émile Zola: sa vie, son oeuvre (Paris: Mercure de France, 1908), p. 250.
14.Ernest Alfred Vizetelly, With Zola in England: A Story of Exile (Middlesex: The Echo Library, 2007), p. 177.
15.King, p. 272.
16.Jules Bertaut, Paris 1870–1935, trans. by R. Millar, ed. by John Bell (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1936), pp. 69–70.
17.Émile Zola, Nana, trans. by Douglas Parmée (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. 294; Zola, Nana, p. 275–6.
18.Zola, Nana, p. 294.
19.Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana (Brussels: Mercure de France, 1942), p. 44.
20.Liane de Pougy, My Blue Notebooks, trans. by Diane Athill (New York: Tarcher Putnam, 2002), p. 44.
21.Félicien Champsaur, Paris, le massacre (Paris, 1885), p. 271.
22.Pougy, p. 44.
23.Ego, Isola (Paris, 1876), pp. 28, 47.
24.Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana, p. 45.
25.Champsaur, p. 269.
26.Alexis, cited in Auriant, ‘Quelques sources ignorées de “Nana”’, Mercure de France, 252 (1934), 180–8 (p. 183).
27.Zola, Nana, p. 274.
28.Zola, Nana, p. 274.
29.Zola, Nana, p. 275.
30.Zola, Nana, p. 374.
31.When the bed lately underwent restoration, the dates ‘1880’ and ‘1881’ and the name of the fitter were found written in pencil on the bedhead under Valtesse’s circular crest. It was assumed that the bed was not yet in place when Zola visited Valtesse’s home in 1878. If the dates are accurate, and judging by Zola’s description of Nana’s excitement at the plans and the work that went into preparing it, it is possible that even if the bed were not in place, Valtesse proudly showed the plans to Zola after dinner; Zola, Nana, p. 375.
32.Champsaur, p. 267.
33.Liane de Pougy acknowledges that her friend’s bed was widely understood ‘to be the model Zola used when describing his Nana’s luxury’. Pougy, My Blue Notebooks, p. 108.
34.Zola, Nana, p. 369.
35.Céard in a letter to Zola on 15 October 1879, cited in Brown, p. 431.
36.Le Gaulois, 14 October 1879, p. 4.
37.Parmée quotes Henry James’s review. Émile Zola, Nana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xx.
38.Brown, p. 434.
39.Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana, p. 99.
40.Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana, p. 121.
41.Le Gaulois, 14 October 1879, p. 1.
42.Auriant even cites an article in which Valtesse’s pseudonym was used: ‘Ego nominor Nana’. Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana, p. 114.
43.Émile Zola, L’Assommoir (Paris: Fasquelle, 1977), p. 360.
44.Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris (Paris, 1911), p. 234.
45.Ego, Isola (Paris, 1876), p. 166.
46.Auriant, Les Lionnes du Second Empire (Paris: Gallimard, 1935), p. 172.
47.Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana, p. 76.
48.Émile Zola, ‘Revue dramatique et littéraire’, Le Voltaire, 28 October 1879, p. 1.
49.Zola, Nana, p. 275.
50.See Yolaine de la Bigne, Valtesse de la Bigne ou Le pouvoir de la volupté (Paris: Perrin, 1999), p. 121.
51.Georges Ohnet, cited in Auriant, La Véritable histoire de Nana, p. 121.
52.Auriant, Les Lionnes du Second Empire, p. 198.
53.‘France’, The Morning Post, 1 October 1880.
54.Auriant, Les Lionnes du Second Empire, p. 198.
CHAPTER 11
1.Detaille’s diary, held at the Bibliothèque de l’Institut, Paris, extracts held by the Musée des arts décoratifs, Paris, MS 5506, February 1880.
2.Detaille’s diary, MS 5506, March 1880.
3.Both women were present at Offenbach’s funeral. ‘Obsèques d’Offenbach’, Le Gaulois, 8 October 1880, p. 2.
4.Detaille’s diary, MS 5506, 17 July 1880.
5.Detaille’s diary cited in François Robichon, Édouard Detaille: Un siècle de gloire militaire (Paris: Bernard Giovanangeli, 2007), p. 65.
6.Robichon, p. 65.
7.Jean-Marcel Humbert, Édouard Detaille: L’héroisme d’un siècle (Paris: Éditions Copernic, 1979), p. 7.
8.Jules Claretie, L’Art et les artistes français contemporains (Paris, 1876), p. 65.
9.Alain Corbin, ‘The Secret of the Individual’ in A History of Private Life, ed. by Philippe Ariès and George Duby, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987–1991), vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. by Michelle Perrot (1990), pp. 457–547 (p. 460).
10.André Jouve, Le Courrier de Lyon, 17 January 1844, cited in Etienne Grafe, Portraitistes Lyonnais 1800–1914 (Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts, 1986), p. 25.
11.On this, see Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in 19th-Century France (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 1–13.
12.Richard Brilliant, Portraiture (London: Reaktion Books Ltd, 1991), p. 90.
13.Jean-Jacques Lévèque, ‘Trois intérieurs du début de la IIIe République’, Gazette des Beaux-Arts, (March 1976), 92–4.
14.E.
R., ‘Le Salon de 1879, La Presse, 27 May 1879, p. 2.
15.Catalogue de tableaux modernes, pastels, aquarelles, dessins etc. de Mme Valtesse de la Bigne (Paris: Imprimerie de la Gazette des Beaux-Arts, June 1902), p. III.
16.I am indebted to the Musée d’Orsay for allowing me access to their archives when researching this painting.
17.Henri Gervex 1852–1929, exhib. cat. (Paris: Paris-Musées, 1992), p. 107.
18.E.R., ‘Le Salon de 1879’, La Presse, 27 May 1879, p. 2.
19.E.R., ‘Le Salon de 1879’, La Presse, 27 May 1879, p. 2.
20.Jane Kinsman, ‘Henri Gervex – Madame Valtesse de la Bigne’ in Sylvie Patry and others, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne & Beyond – Post-Impressionism from the Musee d’Orsay, exhib. cat. (London: Prestel, 2011).
21.Jules Claretie, La Vie à Paris (Paris, 1883), pp. 206–8.
22.Leah Lehmbeck, ‘“L’Esprit de l’atelier”: Manet’s Late Portraits of Women, 1878–1883’ in Maryanne Stevens and others, Manet: Portraying Life (Toledo: Toledo Museum of Art; London: Royal Academy of Arts; New York: Distributed in the United States and Canada by Harry N. Abrams, Inc., 2012), p. 50.
23.Lehmbeck, p. 54.
24.It is generally agreed that the portrait was Manet’s idea and that he approached Valtesse. Charles Sterling and Margaretta M. Salinger, French Paintings: A Catalogue of the Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 19th and 20th Centuries (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1967), vol. III, p. 51.
25.A. Tabarant, Manet, histoire catalographique (Paris: F. Aubier, 1931), pp. 462–3.
26.Lehmbeck, p. 55.
27.Tabarant, p. 463.
28.The Concise Oxford Dictionary of French Literature, ed. by Joyce M.H. Reid (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 108.
29.Yolaine de la Bigne, Valtesse de la Bigne ou Le pouvoir de la volupté (Paris: Perrin, 1999), p. 172.
30.Tabarant, p. 463.
31.I am indebted to the Mairie of the 19th arrondissement in Paris for assisting in my research of this painting; Philip Ward-Jackson, ‘A sculptor-mayor and his family: Le Mariage civil by Henri Gervex’, Sculpture Journal, 14 (2005), pp. 41–50 (p. 43).
32.Lynn Hunt, ‘The Unstable Boundaries of the French Revolution’ in A History of Private Life, ed. by Philippe Ariès and George Duby, trans. by Arthur Goldhammer, 5 vols (Cambridge, MA and London: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987–1991), vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, ed. by Michelle Perrot (1990), pp. 13–45 (p. 29); Martin-Fugier, ‘Bourgeois Rituals ‘, in A History of Private Life, vol. 4, ed. by Michelle Perrot, p. 316.
The Mistress of Paris Page 33