by Ross King
Meissonier's researches into the articulation of a horse's leg as it cantered or galloped were nineteenth-century equivalents of Leonardo da Vinci's sketches of bats and birds or Michelangelo's dissections of the human body. In each case, scientific observation was pressed into the service of art, and art into the service of science, with Michelangelo, for instance, in his quest to depict physical perfection, mapping the anatomical structure of the human body more accurately and explicitly than anyone before him.20 Meissonier was no less committed to his own task. He became the first painter in history, according to one of his friends, to bring a "scientific knowledge of anatomy" to bear on the artistic treatment of the horse.21
The 1869 Salon took place, like the one in 1863, against the background of elections for the Legislative Assembly. The political climate in France had altered dramatically in the intervening six years. Not only had the Emperor's reputation been damaged by his ill-judged foreign policy initiative in Mexico, but the economy had begun to contract after years of growth. The silk industry was suffering from an epidemic of pébrine, the wine industry from phylloxera, and the banking industry from a greve du milliard, the "strike of the billions" whereby nervous financiers ceased to invest their wealth, causing the collapse of banks such as the Crédit Mobilier, the value of whose shares had tumbled, in 1867, from 1,982 francs to 140.22 Even worse for the Emperor was the fact that the relaxation of the press laws in 1868 meant the republican opposition—always a powerful force in Paris—had at last been unmuzzled. La Lanterne, an inflammatory antigovernment journal edited by Henri Rochefort, had become so provocative (and so successful) that the government took action after only a few issues and—liberal laws notwithstanding—closed it down. But dozens of other journalists also began whipping themselves into a vituperating frenzy. The result, in Paris at least, was that almost every night for weeks on end witnessed packed electoral meetings, followed by demonstrations, riots and the forceable scattering of the angry protesters with batons and cavalry charges.23
French artists, however, were more sedate in 1869, thanks largely to the fact that a wide majority had work accepted for the Salon. Many of the painters from the Salon of Newcomers returned in 1869. Camille Pissarro had two views of Pontoise accepted; Renoir a portrait of his mistress Lise Tréhot; and Degas that of a former ballerina, Josephine Gaujelin. But Degas also had one of his canvases rejected; Berthe Morisot submitted nothing; while Cézanne and Alfred Sisley each had both of their works turned down.
The 1869 Salon had another notable absentee. Claude Monet had reached a low ebb following Nieuwerkerke's insistent rejection of one of his two paintings in 1868. He had moved that summer to Bonniéres-sur-Seine, twenty-five miles north of Paris, where an unpaid bill resulted in his eviction from an inn and a halfhearted suicide attempt as he threw himself into the river. "Fortunately no harm was done," he wrote a day later to Bazille.24 His fortunes then briefly waxed after he managed to show some of his canvases at an exhibition of maritime art in Le Havre and sell his portrait of Camille, shown at the 1866 Salon, to Arséne Houssaye, editor of L 'Artiste, for 800 francs. However, the authorities in Le Havre seized four of his paintings from the walls of the exhibition and auctioned them to pay his numerous creditors. These canvases were knocked down to a buyer for 80 francs each—an astonishing bargain considering that a new, unpainted canvas cost a little less than half that.
Monet had moved in the autumn to a rented house in Étretat, on the Normandy coast not far from Le Havre. There, buoyed by a visit from Gustave Courbet, his spirits quickly improved. "I'm very happy, very delighted," he wrote to Bazille. "I'm surrounded here by all that I love."25 Despite being refused credit at the paint shop (his reputation had obviously preceded him) he managed a winter scene, The Magpie, which he painted out of doors on a day so cold that he was forced to bundle himself into three overcoats, light a brazier beside his easel, and wield his paintbrushes in gloved hands. A few months later, having moved back to Paris, he submitted The Magpie to the Palais des Champs-Élysées along with Fishing Boats at Sea, another product of his Étretat sojourn. This time both paintings were rejected. Monet was furious. "That fatal rejection has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth," he fumed in a letter. The dealers had all turned their backs on him, he noted bitterly, notwithstanding his extremely modest prices.26
Édouard Manet enjoyed more favor from the 1869 jury. Both The Balcony and The Luncheon were accepted, but he was anxious about their possible reception following so many discouraging experiences. On the first day of the Salon, Berthe Morisot discovered him loitering nervously in Room M, "with his hat on in bright sunlight, looking dazed."27 Morisot, who had come to the Palais des Champs-Élysées with her mother, was not showing work in 1869. Though 130 women were exhibiting at this Salon, Morisot had been unable to join them since she was suffering from an eye infection that prevented her from completing her work on time. This infection made it difficult for her to see the paintings on the wall, but Manet begged her to gauge their effect, "as he did not dare move a step. I have never seen such an expressive face as his," she later wrote to her sister Edma. "He was laughing, then had a worried look, assuring everybody that his picture was very bad, and adding in the same breath that it would be a great success."28
Morisot made her way to where The Balcony was suspended on the wall. "It seems that the epithet femme fatale has been circulating among the curious," she reported to Edma about her own appearance in the work.29 Manet, "in high spirits," then gallantly escorted her through the other rooms in the Palais des Champs-Élysées. The party soon became separated in the press of the crowd, at which point Morisot became sensible that it was not proper for a woman such as herself "to walk around all alone. When I found Manet again, I reproached him for his behavior. He answered that I could count on all his devotion, but nevertheless he would never risk playing the part of a child's nurse."30
With her sessions for The Balcony complete, Morisot's relations with the man she quickly came to regard as a mentor had become slightly fraught. "I think he has a decidedly charming temperament," she wrote to her sister following this particular encounter, "I like it very much."31 But in many ways the gentle, insecure Morisot was ill-equipped to deal with a character such as Manet. Though he may have looked the part of the gentleman, with his lemon-yellow gloves and ubiquitous cane, Manet could sometimes be guilty of unpleasantly boorish behavior. He dominated the Café Guerbois and his various other haunts with a kind of tyrannical wit. He was "naturally sarcastic in his conversation and frequently cruel," wrote one friend. "He had an inclination for punches, cutting and slashing with a single blow. . . . He was the strangest sight in the world, his elbows on the table, throwing about his jeers with a voice dominated by the accent of Montmartre, close to that of Belleville."32 Clever insults delivered in an affected working-class accent may have gone down well in male company, but Morisot, more accustomed to tutelage from the genial, pipe-smoking "Papa" Corot, found them extremely hurtful. Manet, she once admitted to Edma, "has said many unpleasant things to me."33 By the time of the 1869 Salon, moreover, the uneasiness between Manet and Morisot was exacerbated by the presence of another young female painter, a twenty-year-old named Éva Gonzales who had become Manet's first and only student after entering his studio in February. The daughter of a Spanish-born novelist, Éva possessed beauty, elegance, breeding, intelligence—and even some talent as a painter. She swiftly became Morisot's rival for Manet's affections and attentions.
As it transpired, Manet had good reason to be nervous about the reception of his paintings. The attacks on the painter each spring in the French newspapers were becoming a regular event, an annual ritual like the Poisson d'Avril or the Grand Prix de Paris. The 1869 Salon brought yet another volley of abuse. Though Théophile Gautier wrote that the two works "are relatively sensible and will create no scandal," other reviewers found plenty of reasons to inveigh against them. A writer in the Gaiette de France rather cruelly picked out the figure of Léon in The L
uncheon: "The painter of Olympia and her cat seems to have laboriously plumbed the depths of human ugliness to extract the distressing figure which he shows us in the foreground of his Luncheon." Most severe of all was a thirty-four-year-old German playwright and journalist named Albert Wolff, recently appointed chief art critic of Le Figaro. "Manet thinks he is producing paintings, but in fact he does nothing but sketches," wrote Wolff, voicing the familiar complaint against painters of the Generation of 1863. "He lacks imagination," Wolff added. "He will never accomplish anything else, you can count on it." Even Castagnary, one of the country's more progressive reviewers, found both paintings "meager" and "sterile." His review inLe Siècle, a left-leaning paper with 40,000 readers, went so far as to suggest that Manet required more training in order to improve his technique.34
Having endured the humiliation of this latest batch of lacerating reviews, Manet lapsed into the usual depression. "Poor Manet, he is sad," Berthe Morisot wrote to her sister. "His exhibition, as usual, does not appeal to the public, which is for him always a source of wonder."35 Such failure caused Manet embarrassment as well as wonder. Morisot's mother noted how he met in the street "people who avoid him in order not to have to talk about his painting, and as a result he no longer has the courage to ask anyone to pose for him."36 Still, Manet did summon the courage to ask to ask one person. Before the summer was out, he had begun, much to the annoyance of both Morisot and her mother, a portrait of Éva Gonzales.
The elections for the Legislative Assembly took place on May 24, three weeks into the Salon. Though the candidates supporting the Emperor managed to win 216 of 292 seats, there were causes for concern in the Tuileries. Not only had twenty-five republicans been elected, including Adolphe Thiers, but forty-two percent of the 7.8 million voters had cast their ballots in favor of candidates (ranging from socialists to monarchists) who opposed Louis-Napoléon's regime. Nor did the elections stop the civil unrest in Paris, which featured demonstrations by socialists in the Boulevard Montmartre and violent disturbances in the working-class suburb of Belleville. These riots quickly spread through Paris, night after night, with chants of "Vive Rochefort" (invoking the exiled editor of La Lanterne) and choruses of the Marseillaise leading to thrown bottles, broken glass and flailing police batons. More than a thousand demonstrators were thrown in jail over the course of a few nights in June. The government became even less popular when, on June 16, troops opened fire on striking coal miners in La Ricamarie, near Saint-Étienne, killing fourteen people, including a seventeen-month-old girl in her mother's arms. Immediately afterward, the silk spinners in Lyon declared a strike. Hotels emptied as foreign tourists hastily left the country, while Rochefort, exiled to Belgium a year earlier, began plotting his return. France appeared to be on the brink of revolution.
Matters became even more troubling for Louis-Napoléon as his health declined. By this point his rheumatism was so excruciating that, according to one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting, he would hold his arm to the flame of a candle before entering a room so that "a change of pain might bring a sort of relief."37 Even more concerning was a bladder stone, which gave him sharp pains in the groin as well as troubles with urination. Great risks were associated with a lithotripsy, a procedure involving the insertion of a "urethrotome" into the bladder to crush the stone. The hazards were made chillingly clear on August 13 when, drugged with morphine and confined to his bed, Louis-Napoléon was given the distressing news that his most trusted military adviser, Adolphe Niel, the Minister of War, had died following a lithotripsy to remove his own bladder stone.
Two days after the catastrophe of Marshal Niel's death, Paris celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Napoléon's birth. A Te Deum was performed in the Invalides and a Mass at Notre-Dame. The Champ-de-Mars was filled with puppet theaters, clowns, acrobats, dwarfs, rope-dancers and men on stilts. Fireworks in the sky above the Trocadéro included 1,200 roman candles and 20,000 rockets. Finally, the word "Napoléon" was spelled in lights above the Arc de Triomphe. As these lights were extinguished a day later, many who watched may have felt the lights of Louis-Napoléon's regime were also fading. That, at any rate, was the conclusion soon reached by many foreign observers in the embassies lining the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. "The Second Empire," wrote Lionel Sackville-West, Charge d'Affaires at the British Embassy, "has gone off the rails. It is no longer being guided. It is hurling itself at an accelerating speed towards the abyss."38
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The Wild Boar of the Batignolles
EARLY IN SEPTEMBER 1869, as anxiety about his health spread through Paris, followed by rumors of his death, Emperor Napoléon made a queasy appearance in a carriage in the Champs-Élysées. The crowds turning out to see him were almost as large as those that had poured into the streets a day earlier for the opening of Le Bon Marché, the department store, in its grand new premises west of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Within a few weeks the Emperor was well enough to ride in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne and to attend the theater, though his hair had been dyed brown and his cheeks rouged to hide their pallor. Government bulletins simply reported that he had been suffering from a severe attack of rheumatism: no mention was made of the bladder stone.
Louis-Napoléon next attempted to heal the body politic. At the end of December, a few weeks after the Legislative Assembly convened, he summoned one of its deputies, a forty-four-year-old moderate reformer named Émile Ollivier, and ordered him "to designate the men who can form a homogenous cabinet with you, which will faithfully represent the majority in the Legislative Assembly."1 This new cabinet marked the end of Louis-Napoléon's autocratic regime and the beginnings of what Ollivier christened the "Liberal Empire."2 The transition from despotism to a form of parliamentary democracy was widely hailed in the press. "If this is not the greatest of all revolutions," claimed the Revue des deux mondes, "it is at least one of the most interesting, one of the most salutary and opportune."3 Ollivier's government immediately began preparing legislation to establish trial by jury for press offenses and to abolish both arbitrary arrest and the obligation of workers to carry identity cards. But within days of taking office, Ollivier and his colleagues suddenly found themselves faced with a crisis even more grave than the strikes and riots of the previous summer. The architect of the crisis was the man whose name the republican crowds had been chanting in the streets of Montmartre: Henri Rochefort.
The Marquis Victor-Henri de Rochefort-Luçay had enjoyed a colorful career.4 The son of a ruined aristocrat who had become a vaudevillian, he had begun work as a humble government clerk before moving on to write light comedies for the theater, followed by drama criticism for satirical journals such as Le Charivari. Along the way he published several books and accumulated various wives, mistresses and illegitimate children. "He sought pleasure in every form," wrote a fellow journalist, "tracked down all the emotional thrills. He gambled at roulette, at the races, at cards, in the stock market."5 But Rochefort's greatest thrill—and his greatest gamble—was baiting Louis-Napoléon. His wickedly barbed antigovernment polemics got him sacked from Le Figaro, but a short while later he had returned to the fray with La Lanterne. Forced to decamp to Belgium after the paper's suppression, he returned in the aftermath of the 1869 elections and started a journal called, provocatively, La Marseillaise, from which flowed an even more profuse torrent of anti-Bonapartist abuse. And in order to protect himself against the victims of his calumnies, Rochefort hired a twenty-one-year-old playboy and bruiser, Yvan Salmon, a cobbler's son who went by the name Victor Noir.
Rochefort did not find the Emperor's liberal concessions in the least "salutary and opportune." He was skeptical of the Liberal Empire and, in particular, of the motivations of Louis-Napoléon. "Scratch a Bonapartist," he wrote in La Marseillaise on January 9, 1870, a week after Ollivier took office, "and find a ferocious beast." For his part, Louis-Napoléon was becoming tolerant of Rochefort, having quashed the one-year jail sentence and 10,000-franc fine imposed upon him after his flight to
Belgium in 1868. But another Bonaparte, Prince Pierre, the Emperor's fifty-four-year-old cousin, took umbrage at the comment and immediately challenged Rochefort to a duel. Though dueling was more or less extinct in Britain, where the final combat had taken place in 1851, it was still common in France, where, according to one newspaper, it was "the stock-in-trade of adventurers in journalism, professional orators and parliamentary debaters."6 Indeed, dueling was such an occupational hazard for journalists that some newspaper offices provided special rooms in which their writers and editors could hone their fencing skills.7 These duels often served as publicity stunts, but occasionally they ended in tragedy, as in 1836, when the publisher of La Presse, Émile de Girardin, killed a fellow journalist with a bullet to the groin. More recently, in 1862 the editor of Le Sport had been slain in a sword-duel with the Due de Gramont-Caderousse. Rochefort himself had nearly become one of these statistics. Three years earlier he had fought a duel against Paul de Cassagnac, a journalist for Le Pays who had accused him of slandering Joan of Arc. He survived only because Cassagnac's bullet struck a consecrated medal of the Virgin that had been sewn (supposedly by his mistress) into the lining of his waistband.8