There were good days and there were bad days, but the emperor’s bad days were increasingly outnumbering his good ones. In 1866, he had firmly rejected Eugenie’s urging to abdicate in favor of their young son, with her as regent. Now the idea of abdication was proving more attractive. Years later, Eugenie maintained that Louis-Napoleon had resolved, presumably around this time, to abdicate in 1874, when his son would be eighteen and of age to assume the imperial crown in his own right. According to her, the emperor had even planned where he and she would live in retirement—Pau in the winter and Biarritz in the summer. She made no mention that in these plans, her husband not only was making every effort to continue the empire and his line, but also was planning for his son’s rule without Eugenie as regent.
Louis-Napoleon’s physical deterioration was now manifesting itself in what most never would have predicted, a declining interest in women. His last mistress, the beautiful Countess Louise de Mercy-Argenteau, prettily conceded that she was the emperor’s last love but firmly stated that she had never been his mistress. It had not been for unwillingness on her part.
The emperor was unhappy—about his aging and physical decline, but especially about his unpopularity, particularly in the towns. That May, in an attempt to mollify the growing republican opposition, he lifted certain restrictions on the press, and in June he abolished some of the restrictions on meetings, although only on those that were neither political nor religious in nature, making these concessions virtually meaningless. Although these reforms may have been intended as steps toward what Louis-Napoleon perceived as a “Liberal Empire,” liberals were not moved to applaud.
Perhaps most ominously, the emperor’s attempts to reform and strengthen the army now met with resistance and failure. Although French troops had won the battles of Magenta and Solferino back in 1859, they had done so only because their Austrian opponents had been even less prepared for war. During the following years, it would have been difficult to ignore the rising threat of a highly militarized Prussia, under the leadership of the rightly named “Iron Chancellor,” Otto von Bismarck. France’s current military system, established years earlier, required a seven-year military service; yet thanks to the common practice of buyouts (from which Claude Monet, among many others, had benefited), only a portion of the eligible conscripts ever showed up. This resulted in a lackluster army of some 400,000 indifferently trained men, most or all of whom were too poor to buy their way out. France had no trained reserves whatever.
Uncomfortably aware of the discrepancy between France’s and Prussia’s armed forces, Louis-Napoleon in 1867 instructed the minister of war, Marshal Niel, to come up with a solution. In response, Marshal Niel submitted a complicated bill that in essence provided for the call-up of all eligible conscripts and the creation of a mobile National Guard to defend the towns and France’s borders—in addition to enforcing law and order at home. The resulting uproar united peasants, urban workers, and bourgeoisie alike. Conscription had always been unpopular, and in its newest incarnation, it aroused a tidal wave of opposition in the press as well as in the Legislature. When a less-offensive version became law in early 1868, its only innovation was a mobile National Guard, which in fact never saw light of day.
Nothing had been accomplished in readying France for what some already anticipated would be war with Europe’s newest power, Bismarck’s Prussia.
On February 24, the twentieth anniversary of the 1848 Revolution’s outbreak, the Goncourts reminisced over the explosion of popular sentiment they had witnessed on that day, including decapitated sculptures in the Tuileries gardens and a statue of Spartacus newly sporting a red bonnet. They had watched their local ironmonger hammer out the words “to the King”(following “Ironmonger”) from the sign that hung over his shop. Now, they mused, the ironmonger’s sign read “to the Emperor” instead of “to the King.”
Had so little changed? Certainly the poverty had not. In May, the brothers visited a former mistress of Jules, who now served as a midwife in some of the poorer sections of Paris, areas that Haussmann had not yet eliminated. On this particular day, she was delivering a baby in a shack located at the far end of Boulevard de Magenta, a hut crunched in among a bevy of others that were leased to the poorest of Paris’s poor. The planks forming the walls were coming apart, the floor was full of holes, and rats inundated the place, including the bed of the woman in labor, who was dead drunk, and her husband, likewise inebriated. Four children slept in a bed so small that they could not even stretch out, while two more children slept in a crate.
And who was the landlord of this “wretched shanty of civilization”? None other than the Baron James de Rothschild.2
Jules Ferry’s s Comptes fantastiques d’Haussmann, attacking Haussmann and Haussmann’s finances, continued to hammer at the prefect through May, focusing in particular on Haussmann’s Third System. According to Ferry, the First System, now paid for, had the merit of opening up the center of Paris and creating more than five miles of new roads. The Second System had successfully linked the center of Paris to the outer portions of the city. But the Third System was a different matter and came under Ferry’s fire for being “purely and simply M. Haussmann’s personal system,” an expression of ego comprising nothing more than “massive demolition” and equally massive development at an unjustifiable cost. This in turn was paid for through the mechanism of a financial vehicle—credit certificates—that Ferry blasted as completely illegal.3
No less withering was Ferry’s attack on the social consequences of Haussmann’s grands travaux. Although Ferry granted the importance of the First and Second Systems in opening up and connecting Paris, he weighed social costs against economic benefit and found that those who benefited most from the emperor’s attempt to create wealth for all were the few who profited directly from the deals, often shady, behind the grand works. Those who suffered the most under the Second Empire, Ferry argued, were the workers, who remained mired in poverty and had been pushed en masse from their homes in the center of Paris to no-less-dilapidated quarters on the city’s outskirts.
Others took up the same cry, and soon the National Audit Office stepped in, determining that the credit certificates were nothing more than disguised loans and that Haussmann’s contract agreements with the Caisse des Travaux had been improper.
By year’s end, Haussmann troubles were burgeoning, and they in turn threatened to spread their stain to Napoleon III himself and his empire.
It was in the thick of this that the Goncourts decided to leave the city and buy a house in the country, specifically in Auteuil—which in fact was within the farthest reaches of the city limits, as newly defined by the 1860 eradication of the Farmers-General wall.4
The brothers were at first delighted. “The sun was shining through the trees in the garden,” they noted appreciatively, “and the lawn and the leaves were glittering under the rain of a garden hose.” They made their purchase with beating hearts and went off, “intoxicated with happiness.” The following month they moved in, still “not quite sure that this is not a dream.”5
And then reality struck. The very next day they wrote that “unfortunately for us, who came here to escape from the noise of Paris,” they now had other noises to contend with: “the noise of a horse in the house on the right, the noise of children in the house on the left,” and perhaps worst of all, the noise of the Petite Ceinture—the little train that encircled the outskirts of Paris, whose “buckle” had finally closed the previous year with the completion of the last section from Gobelins to Auteuil. This was the portion that now ran across the street from the Goncourts’ new house, its trains “rumbling and whistling and disturbing our insomnia.”6
The Goncourts had traded the noise of Paris for the noise of the suburbs.
Despite their discomforts, the Goncourts did not hesitate to entertain literary friends in their new abode. That December they finally met up with Zola, “our admirer and pupil,” who came to lunch. Zola, now twenty-eight, talked at
length about how hard a life he had and how much he needed to find a publisher who would subsidize him and his mother sufficiently to free him up from those “foul ignoble articles I have to write these days.” What he wanted was the financial freedom to write the massive novel he had in mind, one that he told the Goncourts would be the story of a family, in ten volumes. This would in fact emerge as Zola’s masterwork, the Second Empire epic of two related families, the Rougons and the Macquarts, extending to twenty volumes.
But Zola did not yet know of the fame and success that awaited him, which (to their discomfort) would considerably outshine that of the Goncourts.
Edmond and Jules de Goncourt. Photograph by Nadar. © G. Dagli Orti / De Agostini Picture Library / Bridgeman Images
Now, during that December luncheon, he complained of his many enemies and of the difficulty he had in making a name for himself. The Goncourts, who had highly praised Thérèse Raquin, were interested to find their young author “waxy and anemic” and yet “a strapping young fellow,” one who was “at once sturdy and puny.” In all, they were struck by his divided nature—“an incomprehensible deep, complex character,” as they put it. They added that they also found him “unhappy, worried, evasive, and disquieting.”
Zola, for his part, expressed homage to his hosts: “We . . . the younger generation: we know that you are our masters, you and Flaubert.”7 But it would not be long before Zola would make his own way into the literary pantheon.
Earlier that year, Edouard Manet painted Emile Zola, probably as an expression of thanks to the young writer who had championed him. The sittings, which may have begun the previous November, continued into the new year, during which Zola recorded such gems from the artist as the following: “I can’t do anything without the model. I don’t know how to invent. . . . If I amount to anything today, I put it down to precise interpretation and faithful analysis.”8
Among the books that Manet arranged on the desk before his sitter was Zola’s brochure on Manet, whose title, Manet, became the artist’s signature. Zola claimed to be delighted with the portrait, but later, a keen observer noted that it was not given a place of honor but hung in an inconspicuous spot in Zola’s large Médan home. Possibly this was due to Zola’s corpulence in later years, which was of sufficient embarrassment to him that he tried drastic measures to lose weight. The portrait was, indeed, of a man sufficiently thinner as to be virtually unrecognizable as Zola’s younger self.
But for the moment, Zola remained thin and the 1868 Salon accepted Manet’s Zola portrait, while Manet’s congratulations on Zola’s literary output became considerably warmer. “I’m in the middle of Madeleine Férat,” he wrote Zola in late 1868, soon after publication of this story of obsession and destruction, “and don’t want to wait till I’ve finished to congratulate you.” But it was Zola’s preface to the second edition of Thérèse Raquin that elicited Manet’s unequivocal approval. “Bravo, my dear Zola,” he wrote. “It’s a splendid preface . . . and you are standing up not only for a group of writers but for a whole group of artists as well.”9
It was during 1868 that Edouard Manet met Berthe Morisot. According to Morisot’s grandson, Denis Rouart, Morisot admired Manet’s work “for its freedom and sincerity” and had “long wished to meet him.”10 Their mutual friend Henri Fantin-Latour made the introduction, and soon Manet asked Morisot to pose, along with two other friends, for Le Balcon (The Balcony).
Edouard Manet and his two brothers, Eugène and Gustave, came from the sort of social milieu that would recommend them to the family of a sheltered young woman of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie such as Berthe Morisot. Both of the fathers were eminent in their respective fields, and upon his death in 1862, Monsieur Manet left his three sons with sufficient incomes for their financial independence. The Morisots and the Manets now began to socialize regularly, providing the Morisots with a new group of acquaintances, including musicians, art critics, and writers. It was there that Berthe Morisot first met Pierre Puvis de Chavannes and Edgar Degas as well as the Manet brothers.
Still, despite their position and connections, there was an element of danger to the Manet brothers, especially Edouard, that Madame Morisot found worrisome, even if her daughters did not. Elegant and sophisticated, Edouard was a ladies’ man as well as a painter of provocative pictures. Not only was he a womanizer; he was a married man. To make matters worse, his marriage was hardly a conventional one, even though—shielded by the Manet family—Suzanne escaped the social ostracism one might expect.
And then there was the matter of the Manet brothers’ politics. Madame Morisot and her husband were staunchly conservative, although constitutional monarchists rather than Bonapartists, but the Manet brothers were just as firmly anti-Bonapartist and anticlerical. Gustave was an outspoken republican, and Edouard, an admirer of Léon Gambetta, had also become involved in republican politics. Still, their mother’s relative conservatism reassured the Morisot elders, who worried considerably about influences on their two still-unmarried daughters.11
Edouard Manet, as well as many others, had noticed the beautiful and talented Morisot sisters. Writing to Henri Fantin-Latour that August, he commented that he agreed with him that “the young Morisot girls are charming.” He then added playfully, “It’s a pity they’re not men; but being women, they could still do something in the cause of painting by each marrying an academician and bringing discord into the camp of those old dodders.” That, he conceded “would be asking for considerable self-sacrifice.” In the meantime, he concluded, “give them my respects.”12
That summer, Manet spent two months in Boulogne, with a brief excursion to London, where he failed to meet up with Whistler but was “enchanted by London, by the welcome I got from everyone I visited.” He was disappointed that Degas and Fantin-Latour had failed to come with him and added that, given the obstacles he had encountered in Paris, he was considering exhibiting in London the following year. But most of all, he thought that “if we resolved to stick together and above all not to get discouraged, we would be able to react against all this mediocrity which is only held together by consensus.”13
This group of renegades had already begun to form, with Edouard Manet at its center. It included Claude Monet as well as Emile Zola, who had published another laudatory article about Monet that spring, prompted by the Salon’s refusal of yet another Monet painting (The Jetty at Le Havre). Zola focused on it and Monet’s Women in the Garden, which the Salon had refused the year before. Probably on Zola’s recommendation, Monet took Camille Doncieux and their son to Bettencourt that spring, where Zola had already established himself for the warm months with his mistress, Alexandrine.
Since the beginning of the year, Monet had survived largely by leaning on Bazille for funds. January, by his own account, saw him, Camille, and the baby freezing and without a fire in Paris. Friends once again came to the rescue, and he then returned (without his mistress and child) to his family for two months, ignoring the winter cold to paint out-of-doors. As a columnist from Le Havre observed (on a day cold enough “to crack the pebbles”): “We saw a foot warmer, then an easel, then a man huddled in three overcoats, wearing gloves, and with his face half-frozen.” This was Monet, working in the open air to study the effects of snow.14
By spring, Monet had moved, with Camille and their child, to an inn on the outskirts of Bettencourt, in Normandy. There, he painted avidly until the innkeeper threw him out (“without a shirt on my back”) for non-payment. He immediately turned to Bazille, telling him that “I must have been born under an unlucky star” and asking Bazille “to come speedily to my rescue if you can.” Monet’s family had refused to do anything more for him, and he even alluded to a suicide attempt (“I was so upset yesterday that I was stupid enough to hurl myself into the water”).15
Besides Bazille, Monet had another possible source of funding—a well-to-do art lover in Le Havre by the name of Louis-Joachim Gaudibert, who in late summer commissioned Monet to paint his wife (Madame Gaud
ibert). This portrait, now recognized as a masterpiece, was at the time praised only by its sponsor, and Monet’s other works that autumn were dismissed by the jury for a Le Havre exposition—although much to Monet’s satisfaction and relief, Gaudibert bought the paintings he had exhibited there.
October brought the news that the director of L’Artiste had purchased Camille and intended to donate it to the Palais du Luxembourg, which (unlike the Louvre) was the official state repository for contemporary paintings. In the end, Camille was sold at auction, but not before a Le Havre critic derided the painting and its subject, whom he smeared as a harlot. By this time even Gaudibert was unwilling to receive Camille Doncieux, and Monet’s family remained adamant on the matter. Writing to Bazille in late October, Monet (by now ensconced, without Camille, in the Gaudibert château) was enjoying the château’s hospitality but railed against the series of “disappointments, insults, hopes, renewed disappointments” he had undergone. At length he exploded to Bazille: “Painting is no good, and I have definitely given up all hopes of glory.”16
Still, Gaudibert’s continued patronage, and in particular Gaudibert’s purchase of Monet’s exhibition paintings, now allowed the painter to rejoin his mistress and son for a few weeks in nearby Etretat. “I’m very happy, very delighted,” he wrote Bazille in December. “I spend my time out-of-doors on the shingle when the weather’s stormy . . . ; otherwise I go into the country which is so lovely here.” Thanks to Gaudibert, Monet could for a time live this peaceful existence, surrounded by his “dear little family.”17
Unfortunately, this little bit of heaven did not last.
Gustave Eiffel, on the other hand, was doing well. That year, he signed deeds of partnership with a young and well-to-do German engineer, Théophile Seyrig, to form G. Eiffel et Compagnie with a capital of 200,000 francs—Seyrig having contributed more than half of the capitalization. It represented a giant step for Eiffel, even though his firm’s business would for many years consist largely of unremarkable commissions, largely railway bridges, many of which were scattered throughout France’s colonies.
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