by Ross King
More than a century after their deaths, Manet "endures in glory, flooded with light and fame" while Meissonier gathers dust in museum storerooms. Yet for all his self-regard and swollen sense of artistic destiny, Meissonier may well have been resigned to his obscure and dismal place in history. "Life," he once sighed. "How little it really comes to."33 One of the few places that still commemorate him is, suitably enough, Poissy. Here, in what is now an industrial town where automobiles have been manufactured since 1902, Meissonier's well-tended grave, planted in summer with cyclamen, can be found in the cemetery of La Tournelle. The gravestone features a bas-relief bronze portrait and an inscription that proudly announces him as the winner of the Grand Medal of Honor in 1855, 1891 and 1878. A short distance away, a quarter-mile-long stretch of road has been christened the Avenue Meissonier. To its west, in the grounds of the former abbey, thirty acres of wooded slopes and gravel paths have been known since 1952 as the Pare Meissonier. Frémiet's bronze statue of Meissonier may have been knocked from its pedestal and melted down for scrap, but in the park the painter's image endures in the form of the enormous marble statue that Malraux banished from the Louvre. Brought to Poissy in 1980 and placed in the middle of a flower bed, it shows the artist sitting cross-legged in one of his antique armchairs, his left hand holding his palette and his right supporting his head.
Carved in 1895 by Antonin Mercie, this statue is curiously revealing. The base of the pedestal, inscribed "MEISSONIER 1815—1891," features a disconcerting paraphernalia: an empty breastplate, a fallen standard, and a wreath of laurels that seems to have tumbled from the artist's head and landed on the ground. From his armchair, Meissonier himself gazes glumly at a modern world that rushes heedlessly past his stern marble glare. The monument is, more than anything else, an image of acquiescence and defeat, of an artist grimly accepting his unhappy encounter with posterity.
Statue of Ernest Meissonier in Poissy
*Rochefort had returned to France, after an amnesty, in 1880. Six years earlier he had escaped from his captivity on New Caledonia by boarding a boat bound for San Francisco—an episode portrayed by Manet in The Escape of Henri Rochefort (1881). Before returning to Paris he lived for a number of years in London and Geneva.
POLITICAL TIMELINE
1804 (December) Napoléon Bonaparte is crowned Emperor of the French, assuming the dynastic title Napoléon I.
1805 (October) Napoléon is defeated by Britain's Royal Navy at the Battle of Trafalgar.
1806 (October) Napoléon's Grande Armée defeats the Prussians at the Battle of Jena.
1807 (June) The French defeat the Russians at the Battle of Friedland in East Prussia.
1808 (December) Napoléon invades Spain.
1809 (July) Napoléon defeats the Austrians at the Battle of Wagram, near Vienna.
1812 (June) Napoléon begins his invasion of Russia. (September) Napoléon enters Moscow after defeating the Russians at the Battle of Borodino; soon afterward the Grande Armée begins its long retreat.
1813 (October) The French are defeated by Coalition forces at the Battle of Nations near Leipzig.
1814 (April) Napoléon abdicates following the invasion of France by Coalition forces that now consist of the British, the Russians, the Spanish, the Portuguese and the Prussians. He is exiled to Elba and the Bourbon monarchy is restored under Louis XVIII, the younger brother of the guillotined Louis XVI.
1815 (March) Beginning of the Hundred Days as Napoléon, escaping from Elba, returns to France. Louis XVI11 flees to Ghent.
(June) Defeat of Napoléon at Waterloo.
(October) Napoléon exiled to Saint-Helena.
1821 (May) Death of Napoléon on Saint-Helena.
1824 (September) Death of King Louis XVIII. He is succeeded by his brother the Comte d'Artois, who reigns as King Charles X.
1830 (July) The "July Monarchy" is born as Charles X is deposed when artisans and workers take to the barricades in Paris. The Due d'Orleans (descended from a younger brother of Louis XVI) is invited to take the throne as King Louis-Philippe.
1834 (April) Massacre in the Rue Transnonain in Paris as government forces ruthlessly suppress working-class insurrection.
1836 (October) Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoléon, makes an unsuccessful coup attempt against King Louis-Philippe.
1840 (August) Louis-Napoléon stages a second unsuccessful attempt to overthrow Louis-Philippe. Captured at Boulogne-sur-Mer and sentenced to life in prison, he will escape to England in 1846.
1848 (February) Riots and revolution in Paris (partly due to bad harvests) are followed by the abdication of King Louis-Philippe and the proclamation of the Second Republic at the Hôtel de Ville, with the poet Alphonse de Lamartine at its head. (June) Further riots, with barricades in the east and center of Paris. Some 1,500 of the insurgents are killed and 12,000 placed under arrest during what become known as the "June Days."
(December) Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, returning from exile in London, is elected to a four-year term as President of the Second Republic, with a majority of four million votes.
1850 (August) Death in England of the deposed King Louis-Philippe.
1851 (December) Backed by the army, Louis-Napoléon seizes personal control of the government in a coup d'état.
1852 (January) Louis-Napoléon promulgates a new constitution which confirms him in office for a period of ten years and gives him executive powers to command the armed forces, declare war and make laws.
(March) Decree banning gatherings of more than twenty persons.
(December) Exactly one year after his coup d'etat, Louis-Napoléon proclaims himself Emperor of the French, reigning under the dynastic title Napoléon III. The Second Empire is declared.
1854 (March) The Crimean War begins as France and Britain declare war on Russia.
1855 (May-November) Universal Exposition held in Paris.
1856 (March) The Treaty of Paris ends the Crimean War.
1859 (May) France declares war on Austria.
(June) French troops defeat the Austrians at the Battle of Solferino.
(July) France and Austria sign a peace treaty at the Conference of Villafranca.
1861 (April) American Civil War begins.
1862 (April) France declares war on Mexico.
(May) French troops defeated at Puebla.
(August) Confederate forces under Stonewall Jackson defeat the Union Army at the Second Battle of Bull Run.
(September) Otto von Bismarck becomes Minister-President of Prussia.
1863 (May) French troops capture Puebla after a two-month siege; Robert E. Lee's Army of Northern Virginia is victorious at the Battle of Chancellorsville; candidates supporting Napoléon III win 250 of 282 seats in elections for the Legislative Assembly.
(June) French troops enter Mexico City. (July) Confederate forces defeated at the Battle of Gettysburg.
1864 (May) General Ulysses S. Grant begins his summer campaign against the South with the Battle of the Wilderness and the Battle of Spotsylvania.
(June) Union forces suffer heavy casualties at the Battle of Cold Harbor in Virginia; naval battle off Cherbourg between the U.S.S. Kearsarge and the C.S.S. Alabama; Austrian Archduke Maximilian arrives in Mexico City.
(September) The Franco-Italian Convention stipulates the withdrawal of all French troops from Rome, where they have been safeguarding the papacy; the International Working Men's Association is founded in London.
1865 (April) Civil War ends as General Lee surrenders at Appomattox Court House; Abraham Lincoln is assassinated.
(October) The United States demands the withdrawal of French troops from Mexico.
1866 (July) Prussia defeats Austria in the Seven Weeks' War; French troops begin their retreat from Mexico.
(December) Under the terms of the Franco-Italian Convention, all French troops leave Rome except for a garrison of volunteers protecting the pope.
1867 (January) Napoléon III announces a series of liberal reforms.
&nbs
p; (February) The last French troops evacuate Mexico.
(April) Opening of the Universal Exposition in Paris.
(June) The Emperor Maximilian is executed by Mexican republicans led by Benito Juárez.
(September) Giuseppe Garibaldi escapes from custody and marches on the Papal States.
(November) French troops, dispatched into Italy toprotect the pope, defeat Garibaldi at Mentana.
1868 (May) Napoléon III relaxes laws on the censorship of the press; new journals, hostile to his regime, abound.
1869 (June) Elections for the Legislative Assembly result in opponents of Louis-Napoléon claiming more than forty percent of the vote; strikes and violence at La Ricamarie.
1870 (January) Émile Ollivier becomes Minister of Justice in what he christens the "Liberal Empire"; Victor Noir is killed by Prince Pierre Bonaparte.
(May) Napoléon III wins a plebiscite on his reforms by a wide margin.
(July) The Spanish Prime Minister Juan Prim announces that Leopold von Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, a distant relative of Kaiser Wilhelm I of Prussia, will assume the Spanish throne; the Ems Telegram; France declares war on Prussia.
(September) Napoléon III surrenders after defeat at Sedan; the Third Republic is declared; the Italian army enters Rome after French troops are forced to withdraw; the Siege of Paris begins.
1871 (January) Kaiser Wilhelm is crowned Emperor of Germany at Versailles; France surrenders to Prussia.
(February) Following national elections, Adolphe Thiers becomes Chief of State (and later President) of the Third Republic.
(March) Execution in Montmartre of Generals Lecomte and Clement-Thomas; founding of the Paris Commune.
(May) Treaty of Frankfurt officially ends the Franco-Prussian War; defeat of the Communards during "Bloody Week."
(July) Rome becomes capital of a unified Italy.
1872 (July) Death of Mexican President Benito Juárez.
(September) The so-called "Alabama Claims" are settled as a tribunal meeting in Geneva orders Britain to pay $15.5 million to the United States as reparations for the damages inflicted on American shipping by British-built raiders such as the C.S.S. Alabama.
1873 (January) Death of Louis-Napoléon in England.
(May) Adolphe Thiers resigns as President, to be succeeded by Marshal MacMahon, the Due de Magenta.
(September) The last German troops leave French soil.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My thanks to the many people who assisted me with my research and writing. Charlotte Hale, Paintings Conservator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, provided information about the damage done to Friedland by Charles Meissonier's fencing sword. Dr. Ivan Gaskell at Harvard University informed me about the location of Vermeer's The Astronomer in the 1860s. Philip J. Dempsey supplied me with a number of books and arranged for me to view some of the paintings in the collection at Wildenstein & Co. in New York. Michele Lee Amundsen did a superb job of tracking down the illustrations for the book. Assistance with a number of translations was gratefully received from Anne-Marie Rigard. Earlier versions of the manuscript were read and critiqued by Susan Adams, Mark Asquith, Michael Sims, and my agent Christopher Sinclair-Stevenson.
Special thanks must go to George Gibson, my editor in New York, who was a source of unfailing support as well as of numerous stimulating inquiries and wise observations. He and my editor in London, Rebecca Carter, with whom I've also had the good fortune to work on three consecutive books, were instrumental in helping the manuscript find its shape. I can only hope their patient labors have been requited.
I am grateful to a number of scholars and art historians from whose researches I have benefited enormously. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Albert Boime, Marc J. Gotlieb, Robert H. Herbert, Constance Cain Hungerford, Patricia Mainardi, Jacqueline du Pasquier, Agnes du Pasquier-Guignard, Jane Mayo Roos, Paul Hayes Tucker, and Juliet Wilson-Bareau.
Finally, I wish to thank my wife Melanie for her love and support over the course of the past three years.
NOTES
Chapter One: Chez Meissonier
1 For Poissy's population and industry, see the entry in volume 12 (1874) of Pierre Larousse, ed., Grand dictionnaire universel du XIX' siècile, 16 vols. (Paris, 1866—77).
2 Stéphanie Tascher de la Pagerie, quoted in Constance Cain Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier:Master in His Genre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 121.
3 Quoted in John W. Mollett, Meissonier (London, 1882), p. 8.
4 For Meissonier's indefatigable working habits, see Vassílí Verestchagín, "Reminiscences of Meissonier," Contemporary Review 75 (May 1899), p. 664; and Valery C. O. Gréard, Meissonier: His Life and Art, trans. Lady Mary Loyd and Miss Florence Simmonds (London, 1897), p. 85.
5 Henri Delaborde, quoted in Gréard, Meissonier, p. 345.
6 Charles Yriarte, "E. Meissonier: Personal Recollections and Anecdotes," The Nineteenth Century 43 (May 1898), p. 825.
7 Ibid., p. 826.
8 Albert Wolff, La Capitale de Tart (Paris, 1886), p. 182.
9 Quoted in Marc J. Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation: Ernest Meissonier and French Salon Painting (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 9.
10 Quoted in Yriarte, "E. Meissonier," p. 839. An author in his own right, Alexandre Dumas fils (1824-95) was the son of Alexandre Dumas père (1802-70), creator of The Three Musketeers.
11 L'Illustration, February 7, 1891, quoted in Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, p. i.
12 For information on Meissonier's property I am indebted to Agnes du Pasquier-Guignard," La 'Grande Maison' de Poissy: L'Installation a Poissy," in Ernest Meissonier: Retrospective (Lyon: Musée des Beaux-Arts de Lyon, 1993), pp. 64—70. Pasquier-Guignard reports that Meissonier had his Paris apartment at least as late as October 1860; however, it is probable that he maintained the residence during the early 1860s.
13 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 191.
14 Quoted in ibid., p. 133.
15 Flaubert, Correspondance, 1857—1863, ed. Maurice Nadeau (Lausanne: Editions Rencontre, 1965), p. 263. For Flaubert's use in this passage of the term sens historique, as well as his own historical fascination in the context of nineteenth-century historiography, see Gisèle Séginger, Flaubert: Une Poetique de Thistoire (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 2000).
16 Quoted in Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, p. 34.
17 For the status and sales of The Three Musketeers (Les Trois Mousquetaires) in nineteenth-century France, see Anatole France, "M. Thiers as Historian," in On Life and Letters, vol. 1, trans. A. W. Evans et al. (London: Bodley Head, 1911), p. 209.
18 On which matters, see Guy P. Palmade, French Capitalism in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Graeme M. Holmes (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1972).
19 Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O'Brien (London: Penguin, 1969), p. 170. Burke published this work in 1790.
20 La Presse, April 16, 1845.
21 Prosper Haussard, Le Temps, March 20, 1840.
22 La Presse, April 16, 1845.
23 La Presse, August 11, 1857; Revue française, no. 10 (1857). For further examples of the critical carping that caused Meissonier to revise his style, see Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, pp. 112—14; and Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation, pp. 15—16.
24 Gréard, Meissonier, pp. 339—40.
25 Ibid., p. 126.
26 Kenyon Cox, "The Paintings of Meissonier," The Nation, December 24, 1896.
27 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 267—8.
28 Quoted in ibid., p. 18; translation slightly modified.
29 Quoted in Hungerford, Ernest Meissonier, p. 112.
30 The epithet "French Metsu" was first used by Eugène Fromentin (quoted in Gotlieb, The Plight of Emulation, p. 101).
31 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 214.
32 For the story of Meissonier posing as Napoléon on horseback on his rooftop on "a gloomy day in winter," see Mollett, Meissonier, p. 6.
33 Gréard, Meissonier, p. 63
.
34 For the commercial success of Thiers's work, see Anatole France, "M. Thiers as Historian," in On Life and Letters, vol. 1, p. 209.
35 Quoted in Timothy Wilson-Smith, Napoléon and His Artists (London: Constable, 1996), p. 70. Delacroix's nominal father was Charles Delacroix, but the painter has long been rumored to have been the illegitimate son of the great French statesman Talleyrand, i.e., Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord (1754-1838).
36 Philippe Burty, "Meissonier," Croquis d'après nature (Paris, 1892), p. 18.
37 This anecdote—which might just possibly be apocryphal—is recounted by Edmond de Goncourt: see Edmond and Jules de Goncourt, Journal: Me'moires de la vie littéraire, 3 vols., ed. Robert Ricatte (Paris: Robert Laffont, 1989), vol. 2, pp. 892—3. According to the entry in volume 10 (1964) of the Grand Larousse encyclopédique, 10 vols. (Paris: Librairie Larousse, 1960-64), the suspensoir is a medical binding intended to support the scrotum and its contents. It is used in cases of hernia, hydrocele (accumulation of fluid), varicocele (a tumor composed of varicose veins of the spermatic cord), and gonorrhea.