The Salon accepted both The Luncheon in the Studio and The Balcony, but Manet’s doubts continued. The Salon opened in early May, and Berthe Morisot immediately wrote her sister, “I don’t have to tell you that one of the first things I did was to go to Room M. There I found Manet, . . . looking dazed. He begged me to go and see his painting, as he did not dare move a step.” He alternated between laughter and worry, “assuring everybody that his picture was very bad, and adding in the same breath that it would be a great success.”
And what did Morisot think of how Manet painted her in The Balcony? Well, she thought that he had made her “more strange than ugly” but admitted that “the epithet of femme fatale has been circulating among the curious.” As for her opinion of Manet’s painting in general, Morisot found that his works produced “the impression of a wild or even a somewhat unripe fruit,” although she did not “in the least dislike them.” Still, she preferred Manet’s portrait of Zola.
As for Manet himself, she thought “he has a decidedly charming temperament, I like it very much.”8
Both Berthe and Edma Morisot seem to have enjoyed Edouard Manet’s company, as well as that of his artist friends. In March, Edma told Berthe somewhat flippantly that “it is disheartening that one cannot depend on artists. My infatuation for Manet is over.” Still, she admitted that she was curious to know what Monsieur Degas thought of her and added, “When I think of any of these artists, I tell myself that a quarter hour of their conversation is worth as much as many sterling qualities.”9
Only a few weeks earlier, Edma Morisot had wed, breaking up the close working and personal relationship between the two sisters and effectively removing Edma from the Paris art scene. Edma’s husband was Adolphe Pontillon, a naval officer who brought her to live far from Paris, in Brittany. From there, she wrote frequent letters to her sister, assuring her of her husband’s goodness and kindness and hoping that he was “not aware of the void that I feel without you.” But despite her kind husband and her efforts to acclimate to far-off Brittany, Edma was bored and missed Berthe, her family, and Paris. Berthe in turn wrote that “if we go on in this way, my dear Edma, we shall no longer be good for anything. You cry on receiving my letters, and I did just the same thing this morning.”
“Come now,” Berthe Morisot went on, “the lot you have chosen is not the worst one. You have a serious attachment, and a man’s heart utterly devoted to you. . . . Remember that it is sad to be alone; . . . a woman has an immense need of affection.”10
Yet even as aware as she was of her own need for affection, and aware as well that she was approaching the age of thirty, when she would be consigned to the dreaded category of “old maid,” Berthe Morisot continued to hold marriage at arm’s length—enduring chaperones for every outing and remaining resignedly in her parents’ home. Driven by an increasingly clear and radical vision of what to paint and how, she was appalled by her sister’s inability to paint after she wed. Men unquestionably found Morisot’s dark beauty attractive, but with the single exception of the forty-five-year-old painter Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, whom she found stuffy, her talent and intelligence kept most suitors at bay.
And then there was Edouard Manet. Manet seemed fascinated by Berthe Morisot, and his Le Balcon was only the first of his many paintings of her. More recent generations have speculated about an affair between the two, but even the rule-breaking Edouard Manet would not have dared to break the iron-clad constraints governing his class in society: men could, with reasonable discretion, do as they pleased, but affairs simply were not acceptable for an unmarried woman of Paris’s haute bourgeoisie. Presiding over her still-unwed chick, Madame Morisot continued to chaperone her daughter to and through all her social contacts, including sittings for Manet, and Berthe Morisot quietly put up with it.
Despite the drawbacks of continued maidenhood, Morisot found the prospect of marriage unsettling. That May, she regaled her sister with an account of a suitor: “I have missed my chance, dear Edma,” she wrote, “and you may congratulate me on having got rid so quickly of all my agitations.” Fortunately, she added, the suitor in question “turned out to be completely ludicrous.” Surprised but not disappointed, Morisot now felt “free of all anxiety,” and she quickly renewed her interest in visiting her sister in Brittany as well as in what she might paint while there.
“Men incline to believe that they fill all of one’s life,” she had written Edma in April. “But as for me, I think that no matter how much affection a woman has for her husband, it is not easy for her to break with a life of work.” Edma concurred: “The longer I’m married,” she told Berthe, “the more convinced I am that you wouldn’t be satisfied with this arrangement on the same conditions. Do your utmost with your charm and your skill to find something that suits you.”11
As it turned out, Berthe Morisot would do exactly that.12 In the meantime, although Madame Morisot longed to see her third daughter wed, she did not seem inclined to marry her off to just anyone. Tellingly, on one notable occasion (perhaps the very one that Berthe described to Edma), Madame Morisot told Berthe to go upstairs to dress for a suitor’s expected visit. When Berthe was slow in returning, Madame Morisot suddenly appeared before her. “How long,” she demanded, “are you going to leave me face to face with that idiot?”13
By this time, Georges Bizet was far more enthused about marriage than he had ever expected. Geneviève Halévy, the daughter of his composition teacher, had turned the world around for him. “No more evenings out!” he had written a friend in 1867. “No more dissipation! No more mistresses! That’s all over! . . . I’ve met an adorable girl and I adore her! In two years time she’ll be my wife!”14 Her well-to-do family had serious doubts about her marrying a not very successful composer, with a lifestyle that bordered on the bohemian. Bizet in turn could have had doubts about the mental instability that ran through the mother’s side of Geneviève’s family. But oblivious to shadows, a thoroughly besotted Bizet promised to reform, and in May 1869, he and Halévy announced their engagement. They were married shortly thereafter, with the bride bringing a happily substantial dowry to enhance their marriage.
That winter of 1868–1869, Claude Monet painted the effects of sunlight on snow in The Magpie, which he submitted—along with a seascape—to that year’s Salon. Both were rejected, adding to his increasing misery.15
Monet’s family, most especially his aunt, had re6fused to subsidize him further, especially in light of his open liaison with Camille Doncieux, while Monsieur Gaudibert had already done as much as he could or was willing to do. And so at winter’s end, Monet returned to Paris, where once again Bazille took him in. Camille’s family at last agreed to help their daughter (as Bazille put it, “They’re not overjoyed, but they don’t want their daughter to starve”). But the Salon’s untimely rejection only added to Monet’s woes. As he put it, in a begging letter to Arsène Houssaye (director of L’Artiste and inspector-general of fine arts, who had purchased Camille): “That fatal rejection [from the Salon] has virtually taken the bread out of my mouth.” He added, “I am in quite a desperate state,” and hoped that Houssaye would be willing to purchase “a few of the canvases I was able to save from the bailiffs.”16
Unfortunately Houssaye does not seem to have received the letter, and at length Monet moved with his mistress and baby Jean to a small cottage to the west of Paris, near Bougival and Chatou. Even here his resources were inadequate, and food and fuel were running out. Renoir, who was living with his parents in nearby Voisins, on the outskirts of Louveciennes, often came to walk along the Seine with Monet, bringing bread with him. “Some days they don’t get to eat,” he wrote Bazille.17
Yet throughout these difficult days, Monet continued to paint. “I have a dream,” he wrote Bazille late that September, envisioning the magic glow of light on water that enveloped the Grenouillère, that famed floating café on the banks of the Seine in nearby Croissy-sur-Seine.18 Renoir shared this dream, and that summer the two artists painted this scene
together—a view of the Grenouillère’s tiny island, known as the Flowerpot or the Camembert, surrounded by light-infused and gently rippling water, which the boats and swimmers set in motion. Monet sensed that he was on the brink of an artistic breakthrough—a breakthrough that would be reinforced the following winter after Renoir returned to Paris, when Monet painted snow-covered landscapes with Pissarro in nearby Louveciennes.
But life still was hard. Monet returned occasionally to Paris that autumn, to contact potential buyers or to meet with friends at the Café Guerbois. It was during one or more of these visits that he posed with Renoir, Bazille, Zola and others grouped around Edouard Manet at his easel for Fantin-Latour’s A Studio at Les Batignolles. Soon after, Bazille painted the same group of friends in The Studio on the Rue de la Condamine.
It was all quite convivial-looking. But Monet’s mistress and their child remained back in the small cottage outside of Paris, and a long, cold winter lay ahead.
It was a dismal winter for the Goncourt brothers as well. Not only had their latest book, Madame Gervaisais, attracted little attention—“not a single letter, not a single word, not the slightest comment from anybody”—but the health of the younger brother, Jules, was rapidly declining. Edmond put in his claim for sympathy (“both of us are ailing, casting inquiring glances at each other and measuring each other’s sufferings”),19 but it was Jules whose condition was clearly becoming the more serious.
That autumn, as it became evident that Jules was suffering from syphilis, the Goncourts’ good friend Princess Mathilde offered the lodge at her château, Catinat, as a quiet place where the brothers could escape from the noise of their Auteuil house. Unfortunately, even there a volley of noise pursued them: the local church had begun to try out the bells that the princess had given them, ringing them incessantly.
“The agony of being ill and unable to be ill at home, of having to drag one’s pain and weakness from one place to another,” was clearly more than either of them could bear.20
Following his December 1868 luncheon with the Goncourts, Zola had continued to cultivate the brothers, promising some much-needed publicity for Madame Gervaisais. Keeping himself resolutely in the swim of everything important to his career, he also introduced himself to Flaubert,21 maintained numerous engagements with his Café Guerbois friends, and continued to publish a barrage of articles. Most importantly, he submitted the first master plan of his Rougon-Macquart series to the Brussels publisher, Lacroix. It was an exhausting life, but Zola rose to the occasion, summoning up the energy for which he would become legendary.
Meanwhile, Alexandre Dumas père, who also was renowned for his astonishing energy, was now reaching the end of his extraordinary life. Dumas was a fighter, but with his strength and health abandoning him, he took his doctor’s advice and retreated that summer to the seashore. There, even in decline,Dumas found the strength to put yet one more of his many talents into play, writing a cookbook—his wide-ranging and delightful Dictionnaire de cuisine. Dumas had been as enthusiastic a cook as he had been an eater, and his extensive travels fed his culinary experience, from North African bazaars to sturgeon fishing on the Caspian Sea. He could not resist telling stories, whether about chocolate or turkey, while his advice (see for example his entry on keeping eggs fresh) gives an insight into a very different pre-refrigeration era.22
Returning to Paris, Dumas noted that the Opéra had just completed its faҫade and wrote Charles Garnier to compliment him on it. “It is perfect,” he told Garnier. “Let people talk, if they must.” But then he added that “only one thing slightly bothers the eye, and unhappily it is the only thing that you could not modify.” This of course was the “N” and the “E” on the faҫade. This tribute to emperor and empire, he observed, “will be modified . . . by time.”23
The Opéra’s faҫade was indeed drawing considerable attention, including some observations from young Auguste Rodin. A thrice-rejected candidate for the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, largely because his emerging naturalism was completely out of step with acceptable tradition, Rodin was now employed in the building trades, where he provided ornamentation for edifices such as La Païva’s mansion on the Champs-Elysées. He was among the crowd that day who eagerly awaited the unveiling of the four large sculptural groups flanking the Opéra’s entrance. Of the four, the single group that drew his attention was La Danse, by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, which Rodin considered to be a masterpiece. Others, however, were not of the same mind, objecting to what they viewed as the work’s unabashedly naked figures. “What rage, what shrieks, what real or false indignation!” came from those who embraced the “cold mortality” of the “formulas of the academies,” Rodin noted contemptuously. Much to Rodin’s disdain, these critics considered Carpeaux to be a bad sculptor, and Rodin noted that the head of one atelier even dismissed a student who was overly enthusiastic about Carpeaux.24
But Dumas did not involve himself in such disputes, especially not when he had so little time left. Restricted to his apartment and his bed, he dreamed of new novels and reread his own works. His judgment on The Three Musketeers? “It is good,” he told his son, Dumas fils. What about The Count of Monte-Cristo? He thought a bit. “It is not as good as Les Mousquetaires,” he observed.25
In another part of town, life for Sarah Bernhardt was just beginning. A trouser role as an ardent minstrel boy in Le Passant, an otherwise forgettable tear-jerker, had brought sudden stardom to her and to the young playwright and poet, Franҫois Coppée. “I had become the adored queen of the students,”she recalled in her memoirs, “and I used to receive little bouquets of violets, sonnets, and long, long poems.” Showers of flowers greeted her on arriving at the theater, and the emperor even requested a performance at the Tuileries.
Much to Bernhardt’s professed embarrassment, the emperor caught her unawares ahead of time in a small drawing-room, practicing her three required curtsies. As Bernhardt described him, Napoleon was amused and charming, as only he could be. “I liked him much better like this,” she later wrote, “than in his portraits. He had such fine eyes, which he half closed while looking through his long lashes.” As for his smile, it was “sad and rather mocking,” while his voice was “faint, but seductive.” Louis-Napoleon seems to have been in full seduction mode.
As for the empress, Bernhardt thought her very beautiful—more beautiful than her portrait. But her voice most unfortunately was rough and hard, giving Bernhardt a shock. “From that moment,” she recalled, “I felt ill at ease with her, in spite of her graciousness and her kindness.”
The Prince Imperial, age thirteen, was a different matter. “He was delicious,” Bernhardt wrote, “with his magnificent eyes with heavy lids like those of his mother, and with his father’s long eyelashes.” Even better, he was witty—according to Bernhardt, much like his father, “who had the most refined, subtle, and at the same time the most generous wit.”
After setting up for rehearsal, Bernhardt and two others were invited to view the palace. “Nothing could have been uglier than the private rooms,” Bernhardt recalled, “with the exception of the Emperor’s study and the staircases.” Unfortunately, the palace “bored me terribly.”26
Bernhardt’s own apartment, on Rue Auber—alongside the rising Paris Opéra—was far more to her taste, furnished with a variety of luxurious items as well as with a number of antiques. By her own account, she had spent a fortune on furnishings and curiosities, including a tortoise whose back was covered with gold and set with topazes. But one evening, fire broke out, probably due to a misplaced lighted candle. Whatever the cause, the fire destroyed everything (including the tortoise) and ruined Bernhardt; for in addition to her personal loss, she was held responsible for damage to other apartments in the building. Worst of all, she was not insured, having put off signing the insurance papers.
Homeless and penniless, she was forced to go back to living with her mother. This in itself was humiliating, but in addition, she felt that she “could not live without comfort and luxury.
”27 Fortunately her plight caught the attention of sympathizers, who arranged a gala benefit for her at the Odéon. The proceeds were impressive, and Bernhardt was able to relocate comfortably on the Rue de Rome, where she would remain for several years.
Bernhardt’s taste in men as well as in furnishings ran to the luxurious. Her frequent escort and lover at this time was Charles Haas, whom she described as “a most charming man, who was very intelligent and distinguished.”28
This was an understatement. Haas, a sophisticated and renowned man about town and one of the few Jewish members of the Jockey Club, would in time serve as a model for Proust’s Charles Swann, in In Search of Lost Time—much as Bernhardt would serve as an inspiration for Proust’s actress Berma. Proust was not yet born when their affair took place, but it must have rattled the rafters at the time, as Bernhardt enticed Haas with numerous raunchy summonses, including a sketch of a four-poster bed beneath which she dashed off the words, “Come! Come!! Come!!!” She flattered and cajoled him with missives such as “I have a thousand lovers but only one who is the real thing.” And she beseeched him with “Come, and give me your lips.”29
Haas came for a time, but Bernhardt may have amounted to little more than a pleasant diversion for this man who had scores of beautiful women vying for him. She did not remain with him for long. Their affair soon ended, with Haas providing Bernhardt with a substantial and gentlemanly “loan.”
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