The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Rochefort remained undaunted by the experience. He eagerly accepted Prince Pierre's challenge, and on January 10 his two seconds, Victor Noir and an aeronaut named Ulric de Fonvielle, presented themselves at Prince Pierre's home in the Paris suburb of Auteuil. Precisely what happened next was the subject of some dispute, but harsh words were exchanged, followed by fisticuffs as Noir struck Prince Pierre in the face with a gloved hand. Prince Pierre, who was never without his pistol, even in bed, promptly discharged a bullet into Noir's chest. Noir staggered down the street and, minutes later, collapsed and died on the floor of a pharmacy9

  Prince Pierre, known as the "Wild Boar of Corsica," was an obscure but notorious member of the Bonaparte clan. His turbulent past encompassed a stint in an Italian prison for murdering a policeman, a tour of duty in the Colombian jungle with comrades of Simon Bolivar, and spells of aimless wanderings in London, New York and Greece. More recently, after allegedly killing a gamekeeper in Belgium, he had retired with his working-class mistress to a quieter life in Auteuil, where he lived in the former home of the eighteenth-century philosopher Helvetius. Here his days were spent polishing his numerous weapons and baiting anti-Bonapartists in the letter pages of right-wing newspapers. Louis-Napoléon had never so much as laid eyes on this infamous cousin, who was kept firmly at bay, according to one of Eugénie's ladies-in-waiting, because of his "low tastes and low habits."10 Nonetheless, Prince Pierre was a Bonaparte, and the fact that a Bonaparte had slain a republican, an associate of Rochefort, was a call to arms for enemies of the Empire. "I have been so weak as to believe that a Bonaparte could be other than an assassin!" shrieked Rochefort in the pages of La Marseillaise. "For eighteen years now France has been held in the bloodied hands of these cutthroats who, not content to shoot down republicans in the streets, draw them into dirty traps in order to slit their throats in private. People of France, have we not had enough?"11

  This seditious cry was followed, a day later, by the spectacle of Noir's funeral. Republicans wished to have the young man interred in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, on the opposite side of Paris from his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which would have necessitated a funeral march through the center of Paris. In the end, however, the funeral took place in Neuilly, with a tumulmous procession and phalanxes of soldiers who had been sent into the streets to preserve order. Rochefort was soon afterward jailed for inciting a riot and insulting the Imperial family; but Prince Pierre Bonaparte was likewise under lock and key, awaiting trial on a far more serious charge of murder. His trial was set for March.*

  The rapid ascent of Émile Ollivier seemed to augur well for Édouard Manet. The two men had met by chance in Florence almost twenty years earlier, after which they became traveling companions; and by the 1860s the bespectacled, muttonchopped Ollivier was a regular visitor to the soirées hosted by Eugénie Manet each Thursday evening in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg. An intelligent and deeply cultured man, Ollivier had married the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and was a staunch champion of the operas of Richard Wagner; in later years he would publish a volume on Michelangelo. Upon coming to power in 1870 he expressed a desire to end "the contempt for taste and intelligence" that had prevailed in the arts for the previous twenty years.12 To that end, on the day he took office, January 2, he deprived the Comte de Nieuwerkerke of many of his powers by creating a Ministry of Fine Arts to be headed by Maurice Richard, a political liberal and personal friend. This new Ministry would take over control of the Salon (and also, curiously enough, of the government's stud farms) from what henceforth was to be known simply as the Ministry of the Imperial Household. Nieuwerkerke would still be in charge of the Imperial museums, but all his other responsibilities had been relinquished, together with his glorious apartments in the Louvre.

  With Nieuwerkerke deprived of his influence, the 1870 Salon suddenly assumed an auspicious hue for painters such as Manet. It appeared all the more promising when the new règlement stated that the administration would forfeit its right to appoint members to the Selection Committee: all eighteen members of the painting jury would therefore be elected by a constituency of painters who had exhibited at the Salon. Richard furthermore granted to the painting jury, instead of Chennevières, who had been dismissed from his post, the privilege of hanging the paintings in the Salon.

  Manet was hoping to submit his portrait of Éva Gonzales to the new Salon. He may have had a cynical motive in offering the portrait, since most critics would surely have thought twice about making flippant and offensive remarks about the daughter of Emmanuel Gonzales, who possessed a good deal of influence and esteem as the president of the Société des Gens de Lettres. Whatever the case, Manet engrossed himself so deeply in the canvas that Marie-Cornelie Morisot, paying a visit to his studio, reported back to her daughter that Manet "has forgotten about you for the time being. Mademoiselle G. has all the virtues, all the charms, she is an accomplished woman."13 At least the Morisot women had the consolation of knowing work on the canvas, which was to depict Gonzales seated before her easel, did not advance to Manet's satisfaction. "She poses every day," Berthe wrote of her rival, "and every evening her head is washed out in soft soap."14 By September, Gonzales had sat a total of forty times for Manet, though the portrait was no nearer completion. "The head is again effaced," Berthe wrote to Edma with some satisfaction after seeing Manet at one of the Thursday soirées.15

  Morisot had further consolation by this point, since Manet asked her to pose for her own portrait, an arduous task to which she readily agreed despite the unflattering comments about her appearance in The Balcony. Entitled The Repose, the new canvas showed her idling on an upholstered sofa, enfolded in acres of white muslin and extending a slippered foot. Her languid demeanor conveys something of her mood at a time when she was depressed, uncertain and unable to paint. "I am overcome by an insurmountable laziness," she confessed to her older sister Yves. "I feel sad . . . I feel alone, disillusioned and old into the bargain."16 Manet, who constantly found fault with Morisot's work, seems to have done little to buoy her self-confidence. "Manet has been lecturing me and sets up that eternal Mademoiselle Gonzales as an example to me," she wrote bitterly to Edma. "She has poise, perseverance and makes a proper job of things, whereas I am not capable of anything."17 Adding to Morisot's crisis was the fact that Marie-Cornelie was determinedly seeking a husband for her daughter, whose twenty-eighth birthday had passed in January with no prospect of marriage in sight. Various unsuitable young men had since been presented to her, the most recent of whom, a "Monsieur D.," she found "completely ludicrous."18 Morisot had reservations about marriage in any case after witnessing the fate of Edma, who had put away her brushes following her marriage in February and abandoned all aspirations for a career in art.

  Work on The Repose came easily to Manet as, in a kind of reprise of The Balcony, he gave Morisot the same fan, the same abundant dress, and the same vacuous expression. The canvas was completed before the portrait of Gonzales, but Manet was determined to exhibit this latter portrait at the Salon. He was within reach of finishing it on time for delivery to the Palais des Champs-Élysées when, like the Wild Boar of Corsica, he got himself involved in a duel.

  The cause of the duel was an unflattering review of a pair of canvases that Manet exhibited in February at the Cercle de l'Union Artistique in the Place Vendôme. This venue, often known as Mirlitons, had been founded a decade earlier by a painter named Ludovic-Napoléon Lepic, a friend of both Edgar Degas and the Morisot family. Lepic had envisaged a private club in which painters and collectors could come together in elegant rooms to view works of art or listen to musical performances, and to this end Mirlitons mounted an unjuried art exhibition each February, a "petit Salon" staged in an intimate setting that was restricted to an elite audience. In 1870 Manet elected to show two paintings in these gentlemanly quarters: the Velázquez-inspired canvas painted after his trip to Madrid called Philosopher (A Beggar with Oysters) and a watercolor study for The Dead Christ with the Angels. Though
accustomed to negative reviews, he became enraged after reading in the pages of the Paris-Journal a notice by a friend named Edmond Duranty. "Monsieur Manet has exhibited a philosopher trampling over oyster shells and a watercolor of Christ supported by angels," wrote Duranty. "Mirlitons really ought to try harder. Among the exhibitors there is more of a feeling of a boring duty to be performed than of a little artistic context to entertain the public."19

  Manet had read far more disobliging comments, but such casual insolence, from a friend no less, seems to have been too much. Encountering Duranty a day or two later in the Café Guerbois, Manet struck him in the face and loudly demanded satisfaction. Seconds were quickly assembled, with Émile Zola agreeing to represent Manet. The duel was set for four days later, at eleven o'clock in the morning on February 23, in the wild privacy of the Forest of Saint-Germain.

  The thirty-six-year-old Duranty had existed for some time on the fringes of the worlds of art and journalism. Blue-eyed and balding, he was the illegitimate son of a former mistress of the novelist Prosper Mérimée. In 1856, under the spell of Courbet, he had edited a short-lived journal, Le Réalisme, in which he proposed that the Louvre should be burned to the ground. He wrote criticism for Le Figaro and La Gazette des Beaux-Arts, while his novel, The Misfortunes of Henriette Gérard, had appeared in 1861. He had also turned his hand to such enterprises as a puppet theater in the Jardin des Tuileries. He was described by a fellow critic, Armand Silvestre, as a "likeable, distinguished person, with a touch of bitterness . . . One sensed a lot of disillusionment behind his quiet little jokes."20 Gentle and soft-spoken, his characteristic gesture, according to Silvestre, was his sad smile, while his physical exertions were limited to the billiard table. Manet could scarcely have found himself with a less intimidating opponent.

  Given the French passion for dueling, together with the vitriolic tone of so much French art criticism, it is a wonder that more painters had not marched their persecutors into the woods in hopes of finding satisfaction. But in this, as in so many other things, Manet seems to have been in the avant-garde. With admirable sangfroid, he went out on the eve of the duel to buy a new pair of boots—"a pair of really broad, roomy shoes in which I would feel quite comfortable"—and casually informed Suzanne, on the morning of the duel, that he was off for a spot of plein-air sketching.21 The Wild Boar of the Batignolles then made his way to the Forest of Saint-Germain.

  Unlike the swashbuckling Ernest Meissonier, with his rapiers and his salle d'armes, neither Manet nor Duranty had any experience with a fencing sword. Unsure, therefore, of quite how to proceed, they flung themselves at one other with "such violence" (as the police report later observed) that they bent their swords.22 The clumsy altercation left Duranty slightly wounded in the chest, at which point the horrified seconds stepped in to stop the fight. Honor apparently having been served, the parties were reconciled with a shaking of hands. In a bizarre gesture, Manet then attempted to give his erstwhile opponent, as a token of his consideration, his new pair of boots, "but he refused," Manet later recalled, "because his feet were larger than mine."23

  The preposterous stunt thus complete, the combatants repaired to their homes with stories of their derring-do: Manet informed Suzanne that he had "run his sword through the wag's shoulder," while Duranty boasted in a letter that "I would have killed him if my sword had been straight."24 However, Manet later confessed to Antonin Proust that he and Duranty "have wondered ever since how we could have been silly enough to want to run each other through."25 For her part, Madame Eugénie Manet, when she learned of the fight, blamed the incident on the evil influence of the Café Guerbois. At one of her soirées, a short time later, she begged Fantin-Latour to help keep her son away from the establishment, "which is so dangerous for someone of his lively, spontaneous temperament."26

  * * *

  Soon after his duel, Manet involved himself in the election campaign for the 1870 painting jury. He had agreed to join a slate of eighteen candidates put forward by Julien de La Rochenoire, a forty-five-year-old painter who specialized in portraits of animals, and who was proposing to reform the Salon by handing over complete control to a committee composed entirely of the artists themselves. He also advocated doing away with all medals and prizes.27 Naming himself president of what he called the Comité d'initiative, La Rochenoire chaired a number of meetings, composed a manifesto, and recruited painters to campaign with him for seats on the jury. In addition to Manet, an impressive group came forward, including Corot, Daubigny, Chintreuil and Millet.

  Manet had not become so actively involved in the politics of the Salon since 1863, and he took to the task with relish. "I will take care of the newspapers," he wrote to La Rochenoire, "where I have friends."28 He meant, of course, Émile Zola, whom he importuned to state their case in various antigovernment journals. He also advised La Rochenoire that they needed to "strike a big blow" by sending to the studio of every artist, on the eve of the elections, the following notice, to which the names of the eighteen candidates would be affixed: "Every artist who fears being rejected should vote for the following men, who support the right of all artists to exhibit their work, and to do so under the most favorable conditions."29

  When the elections for the 1870 jury were held on March 24, the most liberal selection process in the history of the Second Empire produced some surprising results. La Rochenoire's "Committee of Initiative" did manage to place a number of its candidates on the jury, including Daubigny, Corot and Millet. But neither La Rochenoire nor Manet managed to get himself elected. Manet may have held influence and esteem among his friends at the Café Guerbois, but the majority of French artists evidently did not trust him to represent their interests. Even some of the other members of La Rochenoire's slate had reservations, with Corot striking Manet's name from his ballot.30 In comparison to 1868 and 1869, the ballots actually showed a slight swing to the conservatives. Emblematic of this trend was the election of one of the most well-known conservatives of all, Chennevières himself, who had sufficiently overcome his horror of democracy to toss his hat into the ring. He later claimed that in 1870, in stark contrast to La Rochenoire, he had hoped to turn the jury into "an aristocratic corporation, based on the elite and on recognized merit, on the election of the best by the best."31 As the 1870 jury convened, it was therefore far from certain that the new liberalism of Louis-Napoléon would find its way into the Palais des Champs-Élysées.

  *Victor Noir did not stay for long in the cemetery at Neuilly. A few years later his remains were moved to Père-Lachaise, where in 1891 the sculptor Jules Dalou unveiled a bronze statue over his grave. It portrays Noir lying recumbent in a frock coat, a top hat at his feet and (in keeping with his reputation as a lady's man) his crotch bulging conspicuously. He has since become a fertility symbol, and female visitors to Père-Lachaise leave flowers on his grave and rub his protuberance for good luck in starting a family.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  Vaulting Ambitions

  ANOTHER FAMILIAR NAME graced the list of the 1870 painting jury. Despite not having participated in the politicking and maneuvering in the weeks immediately preceding the elections, Ernest Meissonier managed to place fourteenth in the voting. He had been absent for most of the election campaign since he left Paris at the beginning of March, with plans to be back in time for the jury sessions. Once again he traveled south, spending a few days painting landscapes in Antibes, but his primary destination was Italy. In a whirlwind trip of only two or three weeks, he made visits to Florence, Siena, Genoa and Parma.

  Italy had been a place of artistic pilgrimage for Meissonier no less than for so many other artists. He had threatened to run away to Naples when his father at first refused to support his artistic career, and in one of his first excursions he set off, as an aspiring young painter in 1835, to visit the land of Michelangelo and Raphael—though on that occasion an outbreak of typhus meant he got no farther than Grenoble. He had since visited Italy a number of times, most recently in 1860 when, after
making his sketches for The Battle of Solferino, he had gone on to Venice and Milan; in the latter, in the Biblioteca Ambrosiana, he had become "drunk with pure beauty" at the sight of Raphael's cartoon for his fresco The School of Athens.1Meissonier's return to Italy in 1870 no doubt had much to do with fresco painting—and with his long-standing desire to elevate his reputation among his fellow académiciens, with whom he had pledged to keep faith by producing "works perhaps more worthy" of their attention.

  Meissonier was known as the "king of easel painters,"2 but he knew that all artists pretending to greatness in nineteenth-century France had worked on murals. Ingres had executed The Apotheosis of Homer on a ceiling in the Louvre and The Apotheosis of Napoléon in the Hôtel de Ville. The handiwork of Delacroix covered various walls and cupolas in the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais Bourbon, the Louvre, and churches such as Saint-Sulpice. However, aside from his bits of graffiti—his doodlings in the corridors of the Grande Maison or on the whitewashed walls of Poissy—Meissonier had never attempted a mural. Indeed, his troubles securing a chair in the Institut de France had owed much to the fact that, unlike most of the other members, he had no mural to his name, no grand public commission that looked down from the vault of some impressive public building.

  A man who labored for many years on paintings only a few feet square would surely have been an eccentric choice to decorate a huge surface such as the entire underside of a dome or the wall of a church. Still, Meissonier believed that only a major mural project of this sort could make unassailable his position at the head of French art. Minuscule paintings of musketeers had made Meissonier hugely popular with the public, the collectors and most of the critics, but they had done little for his reputation at the Académie, where Raphael still reigned supreme, and where "real painting" (as Géricault had called it) meant adorning the walls of public buildings with grand religious and historical subjects, not manufacturing for private consumption tiny easel paintings of cavorting cavaliers.