The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Despite his brush with cholera, Manet dashed off three bullfight scenes in the autumn of 1865: one entitled The Saluting Torero, showing a matador in his suit of lights, and two others known as The Bullfight and The Bull Ring in Madrid, both panoramic action shots featuring the sanguinary scenes he had promised Astruc in his letter from Spain—horses being gored by angry bulls. He also began work on portraits of two "beggar-philosophers," a pair of six-foot, two-inch canvases, each depicting a shoddily dressed old man wrapped in a cloak: A Philosopher (Beggar in a Cloak) and A Philosopher (Beggar with Oysters). These works had been inspired by two full-length portraits by Velázquez he had seen in the Prado, Aesop and Menippus, which pictured the eponymous philosophers looking aged and bedraggled. Beggar in a Cloak was a particularly arresting piece. Using the same stark lighting and cursory brushwork as Velázquez, he portrayed an old man with an expressive face stepping forward either to deliver an oracular pronouncement or make a request for money.

  Altogether Manet painted more than a dozen canvases between his return to Paris and the March 20 deadline for the Salon six months later. One of them was The Tragic Actor, a full-length portrait of an actor and painter named Philibert Rouvière; a second was The Fifer, a slightly smaller full-length portrait of a child dressed in a military uniform. Both had been inspired by the eerily luminous atmosphere of Velázquez's works in the Prado; and it was with these two works—the fruits of his Spanish journey—that Manet would attempt to redeem his reputation at the Salon of 1866.

  Menippus (Diego Velázquez)

  Beggar in a Cloak (Édouard Manet)

  *Renamed the Avenue de Clichy in 1868.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Jury of Assassins

  IF THE GROUNDS of the old abbey of Saint-Louis had once been a place of serenity, disturbed only by the tolling of bells and the whispering of nuns in the cloisters, the nineteenth century had brought a number of changes. By the 1860s the abbey enclosure was home to not only Ernest Meissonier and his family but also several other families—the Courants, the Gros and the Bezansons—who had likewise taken up residence in the grounds. Relations among them were for the most part congenial, no small outcome considering that the Protestant Courants and Gros were somewhat taken aback by the grandeur of Meissonier's style of living. Louis and Sarah Courant, furthermore, had taken successful legal action against Meissonier when one of his numerous additions to the Grande Maison infringed on their vegetable garden, while Adolphe Bezanson, a lawyer, had been Meissonier's political opponent in the elections of 1848, defeating him for a seat in the Constituent Assembly.

  Neighborly harmony seems to have been preserved due to the happy coincidence that each of the four families had children (or grandchildren in the case of the Courants) of roughly the same age. Meissonier's children Charles and Therese became friends with Lucien and Jeanne Gros, Alfred and Elisa Bezanson, and (whenever they visited from Le Havre) Maurice, Claire and Jenny Courant. Together they swam in the river, unfurled the sails of Meissonier's yachts, or knocked croquet balls across the expansive lawns of the Grande Maison. They also went horseback riding together, accompanying Meissonier on his gallops through the countryside. And Charles and Lucien had another pursuit in common, training together under the eagle eye of Le Patron1

  Charles Meissonier was hoping to build on the modest success of The Studio a year earlier with another contribution to the Salon, and so in the middle of March 1866 he sent to the Palais des Champs-Élysées a domestic interior entitled While Taking Tea. Recently, however, Charles had become distracted from his studies. He had taken to painting plein-air landscapes in the orchard of the Grande Maison—sometimes, comically, late into the night—in hopes of catching a glimpse of his neighbor Jeanne Gros, the nineteen-year-old sister of Lucien, as she walked along a path skirting the property of the Grande Maison.2 Having fallen in love with Jeanne two or three years earlier, he arranged his days around the possibility of seeing her. After he discovered that he could see the window of her bedroom in the Gros house from the terrace of his own bedroom, the opportunity of gazing at her from afar made him a reluctant participant in his father's early-morning jaunts through the countryside. "My father wanted to make me ride a horse this morning," he lamented in his diary in the spring of 1866. "He was unaware that this morning I wished to remain at the house in order to see Jeanne for a few minutes. One day without seeing her is so long, so tedious and so heavy to bear."3

  On some mornings when Charles did accompany his father on long excursions, a frosty atmosphere prevailed. The reason was not Jeanne Gros, however, but another neighbor who often came along for the ride, twenty-six-year-old Elisa Bezanson, the daughter of Meissonier's old political opponent. One morning in 1866 Meissonier led his party of riders five miles into the Forest of Saint-Germain. "The weather was cold," Charles recorded in his diary. "Mademoiselle Elisa was with us. I was exquisitely courteous, but very cold. Seventeen words exchanged, I counted them by chance."4

  By 1866 Elisa seems to have been the elder Meissonier's lover, in spirit, at least, if not yet in the flesh. Edmond de Goncourt later claimed that "La Bezanson" (as he called her) was indeed the painter's mistress.5 Still, it seems unlikely that even a man as arrogant and self-centered as Meissonier would have paraded his mistress before his wife and children in quite so brazen a fashion. At this early stage of their relationship—and a relationship would certainly develop between them—the unmarried Elisa may simply have been in awe of the wealthy and famous Meissonier, who was as flattered by her attentions as he was no doubt vexed by the physical dolors that kept his wife confined for long periods to her bedroom.

  Though they had been married for almost thirty years, Meissonier only rarely painted his wife. On one of the few occasions, Portrait of Mme Meissonier and her Daughter, done in 1855, he depicted Emma with bobbin and thread in hand, working at a piece of lace. The two Meissonier women are shown tranquilly following their sedentary pursuits, Emma in a chair and Therese, then fifteen, at the table with a book. Emma has long fingers and an even longer face, with refined features set in a dull and expressionless gaze. The picture of Victorian domestic respectability, she sits beneath the Mount Parnassus tapestry that features in works such as The Etcher. But if in The Etcher the figure of Apollo with his garland of laurels seems to foretell artistic triumphs awaiting Charles, in Portrait of Mme Meissonier and her Daughter the presence of the god above a woman sedately doing her needlework seems more than a little incongruous—perhaps even a bit ironic.

  Whatever the state of his relationship with Elisa Bezanson, in 1866 Meissonier had reached a juncture in his artistic career as well as in his personal affairs. Though not deliberately boycotting the Salon as in 1863, he had decided not to show any work in the Palais des Champs-Élysées. Friedland was still unfinished after three years of work, and despite occasional rumors that Meissonier was about to put the work on show or sell it to a wealthy collector for an exorbitant sum—breathless reports had mentioned an American senator—the painting failed to emerge from his studio. He continued to craft his masterpiece with an intensifying series of studies, making endless sketches of lunging horses and flying hooves. The painting itself was reworked relentlessly. "Love of truth often impels me to begin something over again, after finishing it completely," he once said with reference to his work on Friedland6

  Meissonier's obsessive labors over Friedland were not the only reason he was showing nothing at the Salon of 1866. He had completed a number of small works over the previous year, including one called The Venetian Nobleman, for which he himself had posed in a red velvet gown. But none of these works was sent to the Palais des Champs-Élysées. As a successful artist with numerous patrons, Meissonier did not need to advertise his wares at the Salon; however, his reasons for not showing work in Room M had more to do with his wish to elevate his art to more sublime heights. His ideal audience was no longer the gawping rabble who elbowed their way into the Salon or even the bankers and industrialists with their ch
eckbooks at the ready. Rather, he was appealing to the generations to follow, who would recognize him, he hoped, as the foremost painter of his epoch. He would therefore exhibit at the Salon works such as Friedland and The Campaign of France or he would exhibit nothing at all.

  The double act that controlled the Salon, Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières, forever experimented with their rules and regulations. In 1866 they made a major change, doubling the size of the jury for painting from twelve to twenty-four members, an enlargement that Chennevières explained would do away with "accusations of camaraderie and favoritism" that had arisen after the Salon of 1865.7 An expanded jury would cater to a wider range of tastes while ensuring that individual jurors would possess less influence than previously. But Chennevières and Nieuwerkerke were careful to ensure that this enlarged jury remained (to quote Castagnary) an "intolerant and jealous aristocracy" by stipulating that the only painters eligible to vote were, as usual, those with membership in the Institut de France and the Legion of Honor, together with winners of medals at previous Salons. Meanwhile they retained the privilege of appointing a quarter of the painting jury themselves.

  Few surprises presented themselves when the ballot boxes were opened and the votes counted on March 21. The entire membership of the 1865 Selection Committee was reelected, while new faces included Meissonier's landscapist friend Daubigny and a thirty-eight-year-old named Jules Breton, who had been enjoying popularity and acclaim with his paintings of peasants toiling in the fields. Alongside them were two history painters and muralists, Paul Baudry and Félix Barrias. The thirty-seven-year-old Baudry had won the Prix de Rome fifteen years earlier and had enjoyed immediate success after his return to Paris, titillating Salon-goers with what was to become his hallmark, female nudes in attitudes of voluptuous languor. In 1864 he had been awarded the most prestigious mural commission in France when he was selected to paint thirty-three scenes for the foyer of the new opera house that the architect Charles Gamier was building between the Boulevard Haussmann and the Boulevard des Capucines. Barrias had likewise won the Prix de Rome and then proceeded to paint ambrosial scenes from classical history onto the walls and ceilings of various public buildings. In 1866 he too was decorating Garnier's opera house, executing a scene called The Glorification of Harmony for the grand foyer.

  In addition to the eighteen painters elected by their peers, Nieuwerkerke appointed six further jurors in order to bring the total number on the painting jury to twenty-four. They included, as usual, the critics Gautier and Saint-Victor, as well as the ornately named Jacques-Auguste-Gaston Louvrier de Lajolais. A former student of Gleyre, Louvrier de Lajolais was an interesting addition, since he had shown work at the Salon des Refusés in 1863 after the jury had rejected his work. A former refuse' had therefore made it onto the painting jury.

  Deliberations began at the end of March, and within a few days, in a repeat of 1863, word leaked out of the Palais des Champs-Élysées of mass rejections. One newspaper reported that Édouard Manet's two paintings had been refused, though it undermined its scoop by naming the works as Imprudence and Father's Opinion—titles that sounded quite unlike anything Manet was inclined to paint.8 When they were finally announced in the middle of April, the jury's decisions did not prove as unforgiving as three years earlier, with more than 3,000 works approved for the exhibition. But the rumor about Manet's rejection proved true as both of his works were rejected, a surprising turn of events since neither The Tragic Actor nor The Fifer seemed likely to foment controversy. Manet was apparently being punished for his work of a year earlier.

  The sensation created by the rejection of the scandalous author of Olympia was rapidly overshadowed by an even more dramatic event: the suicide of another refusé, a forty-year-old painter from Strasbourg named Jules Holtzapffel. A former student of Léon Cogniet, Holtzapffel had shown work at every Salon for the previous ten years, even getting work into the Salon of 1863. Faced with rejection in 1866, he composed a despairing suicide note—"The members of the jury have rejected me, therefore I have no talent . . . I must die"—and shot himself in the head in his modest studio near the Gare du Nord.9

  Holtzapffel's violent death, as well as the publication of his suicide note, created a backlash against the supposedly heartless jurors. Groups of artists poured along the boulevards chanting "Assassins! Assassins!" while articles appeared in the newspapers denouncing what became known as "the Jury of Assassins."10 Some of the most forceful protests came from a notorious old buffoon, the Marquis de Boissy. Furious that a portrait of himself done by Giuseppe Fagnani had failed to impress the jury, Boissy rose to his feet in the Senate and demanded the return of the Salon des Refusés. He also published a letter in a newspaper, L'Événement, expressing his plan to exhibit the rejected portrait together with—if Holtzapffel's family proved willing—paintings by the dead artist."11

  L'Événement ("The Event") had been launched the previous November by Hippolyte de Villemessant, owner of Le Figaro. Like Le Figaro, it dealt in scandal, intrigue, gossip, indiscretion and—if space permitted—the arts. In April 1866 it became a forum for debates over the Jury of Assassins, with Nieuwerkerke stooping to reply in its columns to the letter of Boissy and the charges of those who believed the painting jury guilty of bias, incompetence and even murder. The members were, Nieuwerkerke assured the paper's readership, "men of talent of whom France has the right to be proud and whom competent people of Europe know how to appreciate."12

  Soon after Nieuwerkerke made this stout defense, the pages of L'Événement began running a remarkable series of broadsides against these "men of talent" composed by an energetic and articulate twenty-six-year-old force of nature named Émile Zola. Manet and the other refusés of 1866 could not have found a more capable or determined advocate, nor the jurors a fiercer opponent.

  * * *

  "One had to be blind not to sense the vigor of this man just by looking at him," the poet Armand Silvestre once wrote of Émile Zola.13 Raised in Aix-en-Provence, Zola was the son of a brilliant Venetian civil engineer who had built a dam across the Infernets gorge in Provence and irrigated the drought-stricken countryside with a canal—christened the Canal Zola—that delivered water to the fountains of Aix. After catching a chill on the job, Francesco Zolla (as his surname was spelled) died of pleurisy in 1847, leaving seven-year-old Émile and his mother in dire financial straits. Eventually, in 1858, the pair moved to Paris, where Zola, having twice failed his baccalauréat, tried to make his mark as a poet. There followed a torrent of long alexandrine verses, including one in honor of his father entitled "Le Canal Zola" and another, "To the Empress Eugénie," celebrating in booming couplets the military exploits of Napoléon III. Unsuccessful in these pursuits, he was forced to pawn his clothing until he had nothing to wear but a bedsheet.

  Zola was not a man to buckle under rejection or hardship. In 1862 he found work in a prestigious publishing company, the Librairie Hachette, first packing books into boxes and then, when his talent for publicity was spotted, in the advertising department (where he pioneered the use of sandwich boards). He also began publishing articles on art and politics in various newspapers. A collection of short stories appeared in October 1864, followed a year later by his first novel, The Confession of Claude, which proved something of a succès de scandale thanks to raunchy bedroom scenes that attracted a series of lurid headlines ("Grave Threat to Public Morality," "Pornographic Trash," "Sex Clinic for French Citizens") and eventually the attentions of Jules Baroche, the Minister of Justice. Baroche had Zola's rooms searched and the novel examined to see if it constituted "an outrage to public and religious morals," the offense with which both Flaubert and Baudelaire had been charged in 1857. Zola was found not guilty, though the report to Baroche concluded that the novel "inspires reservations from the point of view of good taste.14 Zola could not have been more pleased with his sudden notoriety. "Today I am ranked among those writers whose works cause trepidation," he boasted in a letter to a friend.15 He promptly left his job
with Hachette and landed a position on the scandalmongering L 'Événement.