The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  To conserve fuel for inflating balloons, gas supplies to all buildings in Paris had been stopped at the end of November, plunging the cafés and residences into a darkness that could be relieved only by candles. Coal grew scarce as snow fell and the temperatures plummeted to as low as -14 Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) during what became the coldest winter in living memory. Sentries froze to death on the ramparts, hundreds of National Guardsmen suffered frostbite, and ice floes drifted down the Seine. People began burning their doors and furniture, and even their pianos, as firewood. Soon the city was denuded of hundreds of trees, including the chestnuts and plane trees along the Champs-Élysées, as gangs of desperate, frigid citizens appeared in the streets carrying stepladders and wielding axes. Smallpox raged through the city, claiming hundreds of lives.

  Food became ever more scarce. "I shan't even talk about the food," Manet wrote to Suzanne on Christmas, the hundredth day of the siege.35 The bread, made from a barely palatable mixture of rye, rice and straw, was said to taste like a Panama hat. But an enticingly different fare was available for those with both money and venturesome tastes. At a butcher shop in the Boulevard Haussmann the proprietor, a Monsieur Deboos, was selling, according to Edmond de Goncourt, "all sorts of weird remains," including "the skinned trunk of young Pollux, the elephant at the Zoo."36 Castor and Pollux, the two elephants in the Jardin des Plantes, had been cruelly and bunglingly dispatched with a chassepot firing steel-tipped .33-caliber bullets. Elephants had long been the most esteemed and well-loved residents at the Jardin des Plantes. They were fed honey cakes known asplaisirs by visitors to the zoo, and were said to enjoy the singing of patriotic songs. Their keeper, Monsieur Devisme, had protested at the execution (which was watched by several famous big-game hunters and other interested Parisians) and afterward fell sobbing into the snow, hugging the trunk of one of his dead charges. Elephant steak promptly found its way onto the plate of Victor Hugo, who was further satisfying his gastronomic curiosity by tucking into bear and antelope (he complained that horse meat gave him indigestion).37 Wealthy Parisians such as Hugo were able to choose from an extensive menu of zebra, reindeer, yak and kangaroo, all from the Jardin des Plantes, the adjunct of the National Museum of Natural History that had been founded in 1793 to house animals regarded as "national treasures."

  But horses provided the main source of meat for Parisians as the siege continued. Some 65,000 of them were butchered for food, so many that Manet observed there were "hardly any carriages now; all the horses are being eaten."38 Meissonier had to fight to keep his own horses—Lady Coningham and a second horse named Blocus—out of the abbatoir and off the menu. When both animals were requisitioned for food, he appealed to the highest authority, Général Trochu. "I beg that my poor horses, which are useful to me for my military duty, and indispensible for the completion of my unfinished pictures, may not be taken from me," he pleaded, "except in the case of the direst extremity." He added that one of the horses was "particularly dear to me—my mare Coningham. She is an old friend who carried me all day at Solferino."39 For the meantime, both horses were spared.

  After smallpox and starvation came pneumonia. "It's getting tough," Manet admitted to Suzanne three days after Christmas. "Many weak people have succumbed."40 His own health had begun to decline. He had been sleeping in straw while on guard duty along the ramparts, and the ankle-deep mud had given him, in all probability, a case of trench foot, since as early as October he was complaining about his feet and wearing Suzanne's cotton socks for protection. He had taken to keeping himself warm—and creating a kind of bulletproof vest for protection against Prussian bullets—by stuffing hundreds of layers of silk paper down the front of his Guardsman's cloak.41 But he was finding military life both demanding and dangerous. At the end of November he had been present at a fierce battle fought at Champigny, eight miles southeast of the center of Paris. "What a bacchanalia!" he wrote to Suzanne. "The shells went off over our heads from all sides."42 He was, understandably, badly shaken by the sight of so much bloodshed, since the French suffered massive casualties, with one regiment alone losing 400 men.43 He decided to leave the artillery in which he had been serving and find another, preferably safer, position. Fortunately for him, in December he was promoted from enlisted man to the rank of lieutenant and transferred to the Général Staff, which was based at the Élysée Palace. His benefactor—and his new commanding officer—was none other than Lieutenant-Colonel Meissonier.44

  Nothing indicates that Manet and Meissonier knew one another personally, or ever had met, before 1870. According to Manet's friend Théodore Duret, "There had never passed between them the least relation, occupying as they did the two opposite poles of art."45 However, Duret was writing thirty-six years after the fact, and relations may well have passed between them in the 1860s. Manet and Meissonier shared a number of friends, including Delacroix, Daubigny and Philippe Burty. Furthermore, the pair of them may have worked together on the petition presented by Manet to the Comte de Walewski in 1863. But even if they had never met, Meissonier was well aware of both Manet's paintings and his reputation as an artist. Between 1864 and 1870 he served on four different Salon juries to which Manet had offered his work, including the controversial Jury of Assassins in 1866. Though four of his eight paintings had been rejected from those Salons, Manet is unlikely to have held Meissonier responsible for his misfortunes. He saw his persecutors elsewhere, in characters such as Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières, the outspoken jurors Jules Breton and Édouard Dubufe, critics like Gautier and Albert Wolff, and even the censor at the Dépôt Légal who had forbidden the printing of The Execution of Maximilian.

  Still, Manet must have been rankled by the older painter's success, which threw into a dispiritingly sharp relief his own unhappy career. As Duret pointed out, the relationship between the two men in the National Guard was a vastly unequal one: "Military service brought them suddenly together, and put the one, a young and combative artist, under the orders of the other, in his full glory and superior in age and rank." Yet their service together does not seem to have been marked by too great an animosity. Manet, in his letters to Suzanne, made no complaints about his new commanding officer, though in Duret's account Meissonier was guilty of a lordly self-regard (a believable enough complaint) that supposedly left his junior officer feeling "very ruffled." Manet resented how Meissonier treated him "with a kind of polite formality from which, however, any idea of confraternity was banished." No opportunity arose for the two men to talk about "Art with a capital A," since Duret claimed that Meissonier "never showed an awareness that Manet was a painter."46 Meissonier's lofty indifference must have been extremely galling to a man who dominated conversations at the Café Guerbois with his sarcastic wit and luxuriated in his reputation as the leader of the group of younger artists who clustered around him. Manet exacted his revenge, according to Antonin Proust, by showing scorn for the sketches that Meissonier, the obsessive doodler, produced on scraps of paper during meetings at the Élysée Palace—"something that strongly chagrined the painter of The Campaign of France?' Proust claimed, "but amused his shrewder neighbors at the table."47

  Manet soon had more to worry about than Meissonier's haughty disregard: he was painfully ill-equipped for his duties on the Général Staff, which required him to ride a horse. While Meissonier was a superbly adept horseman, Manet had little experience in the saddle, with the result that within days of taking up his new position he was suffering from one more discomfort to go with the cold and the hunger. "For the past two days I've had to stay in my room," he wrote to Suzanne early in January 1871. "Riding horseback has given me piles, and with the abominable cold we are having here, one must look after one's health."48

  Conditions soon became even more disagreeable. For the previous four months, long Prussian trains had been pushing steadily westward from the Rhine, their carriages laden with hundreds of tons of cannon and shot. Included among the Prussian ordnance were Krupp's massive doomsday weapons as well as heavy cannon
s with nine-inch calibers and 300-pound mortars. The weight and mass of these projectiles far surpassed anything ever used in military history, even at the siege of Sebastopol. Finally, on January 5, all of these massive guns had been rolled into position on the heights south of Paris. "We shall soon be at the mercy of those savages," Meissonier bitterly observed.49

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  A Carnival of Blood

  THE BOMBARDMENT OF Paris by the Prussians lasted for almost three weeks. Some 400 shells fell on the city each evening as the Prussians fired their guns after ten o'clock at night in order to starve the besieged Parisians of sleep as well as food. Since the bulk of the artillery was positioned on the heights of Châtillon, five miles south of where the Seine flowed through the center of Paris, virtually all of the mortars fell on the Left Bank. "The Prussian shells have already reached as far as the Rue Soufflot and the Place Saint-Michel," Manet wrote to his wife a week after the bombardment started.1 The Chapel of the Virgin in Saint-Sulpice was struck by a mortar. So were the Gare d'Orleans, with its balloon factory; the Jardin des Plantes, where a collection of orchids was destroyed; and a school in the Rue de Vaugirard, where a single shell killed five young children.

  Residents of the Left Bank hastily fled across the river, clutching a few meager possessions and looking, as Gautier observed, like "a migration of Indians carrying their ancestors rolled in bison skins."2 Gautier himself was in the firing line, having fled from his house in Neuilly to what he thought was the greater safety of the Faubourg Saint-Germain. Both Manet and Meissonier, however, occupied securer quarters on the Right Bank, more than a mile away from where the nearest shells had fallen. Even so, the noise was deafening. "The cannonade was so heavy during the night," Manet wrote to Suzanne, "that I thought the Batignolles was bombarded." Three days later he added, plaintively: "The life I am leading is unbearable."3

  The Prussian guns finally fell silent on January 27, when the Government of National Defense agreed to an armistice. The Siege of Paris had lasted a total of 130 days. "Holding out was no longer possible," Manet wrote to Suzanne. "People were starving to death and there is still great distress here. We are all as thin as rails."4 The armistice was officially signed at the Palace of Versailles on the twenty-eighth, where less than two weeks earlier another ceremony had taken place. The south German states of Bavaria, Baden and Württemberg had agreed to join the German Confederation, which thereafter became known as the Deutsches Reich, or German Empire, a federal state governed by Wilhelm. This unification of Germany was celebrated on January 18 as Wilhelm was proclaimed Emperor, or Kaiser, in a ceremony staged—humiliatingly for the French—in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. "That really marks the end of the greatness of France," despaired Edmond de Goncourt after reading of Wil-helm's coronation in a newspaper.5

  Rue Castiglione during the siege of Paris, 1871

  Manet observed the end of the siege by treating himself to a choice cut of beef—for which he paid seven francs a pound—and cooking a pot-au-feu, the nourishing dish of boiled beef and vegetables ("but naturally with no vegetables," he complained)6 known as le plat qui fait la France ("the dish that made France"). He then began preparations for the 400-mile journey south to the Pyrenees for a reunion with Suzanne, his mother and Léon. His joy at being able to see his family again was tempered by the sad news, received early in February, that Frédéric Bazille, the great friend of Claude Monet, had been killed at the end of November while serving with the Zouaves. Dying a few months short of his thirtieth birthday, Bazille was tragically denied the chance to further explore his brilliant talents.

  Meissonier had a much shorter journey to make, but he too was in mourning as he left Paris. He arrived at the Grande Maison, sometime early in February, suffering from "the bitterest sorrow I have ever felt."7 A young friend and protégé, Henri Regnault, winner of the Prix de Rome in 1866 and of gold medals at the Salons of 1869 and 1870, had been killed in a disastrous sortie by the National Guard at Buzenval, seven miles west of Paris, on January 19. Meissonier, who spoke to the young painter on the night before his death, had seen in Regnault the future of French art. He had personally recovered his body from the muddy battlefield and then a few days later delivered the funeral oration. His words were inspirational: "Let us work again," he had exclaimed. "The time is short. We have no eternity in which to re-create our country."8 But the young man's death left him consumed by a furious hatred for the Prussians. He was therefore displeased in the extreme to discover, upon returning to Poissy, that the Grande Maison had been turned into a barracks for Prussian soldiers. Sixty of them had been living in the house since the start of the siege, with no plans to depart. Meissonier thereby found himself compelled to share his accommodation with the despised enemy.

  Other unpleasant surprises awaited Meissonier's return. Though he had been able to save Blocus and Lady Coningham from the slaughterhouse, one of his horses had been appropriated by the Prussians, who had furthermore taken, and presumably butchered, his cows. Several of his other horses had been requisitioned by the French army; among them was Bachelier, the gray stallion that had appeared in so many of his paintings and sketches. He never saw Bachelier again, and sometime after his return to Poissy he inscribed on one of his 1865 sketches of the animal the words: "My poor Bachelier, taken by the Army of the Loire, 27 January 1871."9

  One of the few consolations for Meissonier as he returned to Poissy was a reunion with Elisa Bezanson, by then thirty years old, still unmarried, and still completely devoted to him. And, for what seems to be the first time, he began a painting that featured her. To escape from the Prussians occupying his house, Meissonier shut himself away in his studio and, in the words of the critic Jules Clarétie, "threw upon the canvas the most striking, the most vivid, the most avenging of allegories."10 Having begun sketches for The Siege of Paris while staying with Francis Petit, he portrayed the tall, robust Elisa as the figure of Paris standing enveloped, in the words of Clarétie, "in a veil of mourning, defending herself against the enemy, with her soldiers and her dying grouped around a tattered flag." Victims of the siege lay sprawled at her feet—soldiers, National Guardsmen, women, children, a horse—while a Prussian eagle, with "wan and haggard Famine" at its side, hovered in the air above them. "I will put all our sufferings, all our heroism, all our hearts—my very soul into it," declared Meissonier, who described the painting as an act of revenge against the conquering Prussians.11

  Passionate he may have been about his new work, but Meissonier approached The Siege of Paris (plate 7A) with his typical painstaking devotion. He made a wax model for the dying horse, while for the figure of Henri Regnault, whom he depicted leaning against the allegorical figure of Paris, he borrowed the greatcoat which the painter had been wearing when he was shot in the head. And likewise for the figure of Brother Anselme, one of the Brothers of the Christian Doctrine whose job was to retrieve bodies from the field of battle, he borrowed the black gown worn by the cleric when he was killed by a Prussian bullet.12

  The Siege of Paris recalls The Last Day of Corinth. Tony Robert-Fleury's triumph from the 1870 Salon. But it also evokes Meissonier's own earlier work, Remembrance of Civil War, the painting (so admired by Delacroix) that had been removed from the 1850 Salon on orders from the government because its "omelette of men" showed the horrors of warfare in such scarifying detail. The Siege of Paris emphasized, even more than Friedland, Meissonier's turn from his lucrative but—in light of recent political events—irrelevant musketeer subjects to a style of painting that would be grander in both physical scale and emotional impact. This was no time, he claimed, "to paint little figures."13 Artistic monumentality was, he believed, the order of the day. "I want to execute this painting large as life!" he said of The Siege of Paris, even going so far as to entertain hopes of executing it as a mural: "Who knows? Perhaps this is the picture that will be in the Panthéon some day."14 But Meissonier still had a very long way to go before he could project his noble vision on such elevated w
alls, since the sketch over which he labored in the months following his return to the Grande Maison measured—in typical Meissonier fashion—less than a foot square.

  Manet was reunited with Suzanne, his mother and Léon on February 12 1871, five months after he had bade them farewell. Oloron-Sainte-Marie, where the family had spent their exile, was an old wool town, famous for manufacturing berets, that perched on a wooded bluff overlooking the junction of two swift-flowing rivers. Suzanne seems to have spent much of her time there arguing with her mother-in-law. The two women had never enjoyed cordial relations, and their enforced exile only led to further mutual aggravation. According to Eugénie Manet, Suzanne had written dozens of letters to Édouard during the siege, documenting "a thousand complaints about me. . . . Her jealousy was always there, against me!"15 Luckily for Manet, none of these missives made it through the Prussian blockade.