The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  Work on this canvas was probably more or less complete by the first week of October in 1863. By dint of both its style and its subject, Olympia almost seemed calculated to raise the same wrathful response asLe Déjeuner sur I'herbe. Still, Manet had other matters to worry about by the time he finished his provocative new painting. At the age of thirty-one, he was about to get married.

  Besides being a photographer, Nadar was also, even more wondrously, an aeronaut. In 1863 he founded the Société generate d'Aerostation et d'Autolocomotion Aerienne, started up a newspaper called L 'Aeronaute, and constructed the world's largest hot-air balloon. The aeronautical possibilities of hydrogen balloons had captured the public imagination. A few months earlier, an unknown thirty-five-year-old named Jules Verne, a former law student, had published his first novel, Five Weeks in a Balloon, in which he imagined the voyage across Africa of three Englishmen in a giant hot-air balloon named the Victoria. The fictional Victoria had been inflated with 90,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, but Nadar's real-life balloon managed to outstrip even Verne's exuberant imagination. Christened Le Ge'ant, it was borne aloft by 200,000 cubic feet of hydrogen, stood 180 feet tall, and used almost twelve miles of silk that two hundred women had required an entire month to sew together. Included in the wicker-work gondola, which was the size of a small cottage, were a photographic laboratory, a refreshment room, a lavatory and, for the amusement of the passengers, a billiard table.

  Studio photograph of Nadar in a balloon

  On October 4, a Sunday, more than 500,000 people—almost a third of the entire population of Paris—crowded onto the Champ de Mars and surrounding streets, and even onto nearby housetops, to witness the maiden voyage of this magnificent vessel. A military band played for two hours as the gondola was towed into place by four white horses and the balloon, which one journalist claimed looked like "an immense unripe orange,"18 was inflated with gas. Twelve passengers besides Nadar then climbed aboard, including the art critic Paul de Saint-Victor. "Lâchez tout.!" shouted "Captain" Nadar at five o'clock in the afternoon, and the gigantic balloon rose skyward, sailing northeast across a silent and awestuck Paris, passing over the Invalides and the Louvre before finally disappearing from view. But unlike the Victoria, which sailed all the way across Africa, Le Giant stayed airborne for only a couple of hours before a technical malfunction in a valve line forced Nadar to make a premature descent into a marsh near Meaux, some twenty-five miles away. By the time he and his dozen passengers were rescued, the enterprising aeronaut was already making plans for a second voyage.

  Two days after Nadar's spectacle, Manet and his mistress Suzanne Leenhoff made their own, less spectacular, departure from Paris. Manet's mother and two brothers had witnessed a marriage contract between him and Suzanne, who was then age thirty-three. According to the terms of the contract, Manet would receive the 10,000-franc advance on his inheritance from the proceeds of selling the fifteen acres of family land in Gennevilliers. This sum would allow him officially to set up home with Suzanne and Léon. The contract stipulated, curiously, that these 10,000 francs would return to Manet's mother should he predecease her with no children of his own.19 This rather mean-spirited provision, no doubt added at the insistence of Eugénie Manet, indicated that Léon, who would suffer under its application, was probably not Manet's flesh and blood. It also indicated how Eugénie—known to her children as "Manetmaman"—nourished a robust dislike for her prospective daughter-in-law, whose misfortune in giving birth out of wedlock she once referred to as a "crime" in need of "punishment."20 Manet's joyful anticipation of his forthcoming marriage must have been tempered by the knowledge that, as long as Eugénie was alive, domestic tranquillity could not be guaranteed.

  Family resentments and rivalries were set aside, temporarily at least, as the Manet family assembled for lunch in the Batignolles on October 6 to celebrate the impending nuptials. Present for the feast was Suzanne's brother Ferdinand—one of Manet's models for Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe—and her younger sister Martina, who had moved to Paris like her siblings, gallicized her name to Marthe, married the painter Jules Vibert, and given birth to two children. The forty-eight-year-old Vibert, a native of Lyon, was a considerably more successful painter than his soon-to-be brother-in-law. A former student of Paul Delaroche, he had entered the École des Beaux-Arts in 1839 and then exhibited regularly at the Salon—usually portraits and landscapes—since 1847.21 Set against Vibert's worthy efforts, Manet's checkered artistic career must have seemed, to the extended Leenhoff family, rather scanty prospects on which to found a marriage.

  When the meal was finished, Manet and Suzanne made their way to the Gare du Nord, from where they were waved off on the seven-hour train ride to Holland. The marriage, a civil ceremony, would be celebrated in Zaltbommel, Suzanne's hometown, on October 28. Manet's experience of Suzanne's family was scarcely more congenial than hers of his. He found her father, the organist and choirmaster Carolus Antonius Leenhoff, then fifty-six, "a typical Dutch bourgeois, sullen, fault-finding, thrifty, and incapable of understanding an artist."22

  If the newly married couple appeared to be dogged by problems with their in-laws, one person at least envied Manet his relationship. The raddled Baudelaire, who had neither met Suzanne nor even known of her existence, was surprised to learn of the wedding. Manet seems to have kept his domestic life a secret, for some reason, from even his closest friends. "Manet came round to tell me the most unexpected news," Baudelaire wrote to a mutual friend on the day Manet departed for Zaltbommel. "He leaves tonight for Holland, from where he will bring back his wife. He makes various excuses, however, since it seems his wife is beautiful, very kind, and a very great artist. So many treasures in a single female, isn't that quite monstrous?"23

  *Charles X had abdicated in favor of his grandson, the Comte de Chambord, but the Chamber of Deputies refused to confirm Chambord, declaring the throne vacant and offering it instead to the more liberal Due d'Orleans, who reigned as Louis-Philippe, King of the French. Louis-Philippe's claim on the throne had been based on the fact that he was the great-great-great-grandson of Philippe I of Orleans (1640—1701), the son of King Louis XIII (r. 1610—43) and younger brother of Louis XIV.

  *Other light sources used by photographers in the middle decades of the nineteenth century included static electricity stored in Leyden jars (a method tried by William Henry Fox Talbot) and a piece of magnesium wire set alight with a candle. Photographers were forced to turn to such unreliable measures because lighting their studios with electricity was too expensive an option.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Deliberations

  THE HANDCARTS AND wheelbarrows laden with offerings for the 1864 Salon began rolling up before the Palais des Champs-Élysées on March 21. Besides having their submissions measured, catalogued and receipted, certain artists were allowed to cast their votes for the Selection Committee. The ballot boxes closed on April 2, the deadline for submitting works of art. Of the twelve seats available on the jury for painting, nine were to be elected by the group of artists who had either received medals at previous Salons or been privileged with induction into the Legion of Honor or the Académie des Beaux-Arts.

  Given this constituency, the results showed a bias in favor of members of the Académie, a total of five of whom were elected. The painter polling the most votes was the seemingly unstoppable Cabanel, followed by Robert-Fleury and Ernest Meissonier. Other members elected included Léon Cogniet and Hip-polyte Flandrin (both of whom had chosen not to serve in 1863), while nonmembers picked by their peers included Gérôme and Camille Corot. The election of the sixty-eight-year-old Corot must have encouraged the landscapists, the group most harshly treated by the 1863 Selection Committee. He was a mentor to both Antoine Chintreuil and another much less well-known participant in the Salon des Refusés, Camille Pissarro.

  The election produced other results that looked favorable for the refusés of 1863. Émile Signol, the man blamed by many for the harshness of the previous painting jury's de
cisions, failed to get himself elected, as did three other well-known conservatives from the Académie: François Picot, François Heim and Auguste Couder. All four were apparently being punished for their deeds of a year earlier. The backlash against the more intransigent académiciens, begun in many of the newspapers, seemed even to have spread into the ranks of this relatively conservative electorate of painters. Meissonier's tally of votes proved, on the other hand, that he was not held responsible for their sins.

  Nieuwerkerke had been careful to reserve for himself the right to appoint a quarter of the Selection Committee. For the painting jury he selected one conservative, Paul de Saint-Victor,* whose narrow-mindedness was offset by the more benevolent Théophile Gautier, as well as by a third appointee, Auguste de Morny. The Due de Morny (his title had been conferred two years earlier) was an inspired choice on the part of Nieuwerkerke—and an acknowledgment of just how determined he was to avoid the debacle of the 1863 Salon.

  After the Emperor, the fifty-three-year-old Morny was the most powerful man in France. He was in fact the illegitimate half-brother of Louis-Napoléon, the product of an affair between Hortense de Beauharnais and one of Napoléon's generals, the Comte de Flahaut. An adept and charismatic politician, he had been one of the architects of Louis-Napoléon's coup d'etat and, since 1854, President of the Legislative Assembly. He was also a great patron of the arts, having amassed a large collection of paintings thanks to the fortune of his former mistress. Eclectic and venturesome in his aesthetic tastes, Morny had been among the first to purchase paintings by the landscapist Théodore Rousseau—whose work until then had regularly been rebuffed by Salon juries—and even Gustave Courbet. He also, naturally, collected Meissonier, six of whose finest works looked down from the walls of his splendid mansion beside the Champs-Élysées. But Morny's tastes for Meissonier's paintings showed his political as well as his aesthetic instincts.

  Morny's appearance on the painting jury was nominally due to the fact that he knew his way around the auction rooms and art galleries of Paris. But he had almost certainly been put forward by Nieuwerkerke because of his brilliant political instincts. A master at blunting opposition to Louis-Napoléon in the Legislative Assembly, he was equally skilled at subtly shaping the careers—political as well as aesthetic—of the artists whom he collected. His purchase in 1852 of Courbet's Young Ladies of the Village Giving Alms to a Cow Girl was a clever attempt to co-opt the radical impulses of Courbet, then at the height of his notoriety.1 The effort proved unsuccessful, but Morny obtained better results with another painter whose uncompromising realism had been seen, in the early 1850s, as a plausible threat to Louis-Napoléon's regime.

  Meissonier may have missed the Revolution of 1830, but he had managed a more active part in the turbulent events of 1848, when the Second Republic was declared after famine and riots forced the abdication of King Louis-Philippe. Meissonier's friend, the poet Lamartine, became Minister of Foreign Affairs and a member of the Executive Committee. At his insistence the thirty-three-year-old Meissonier—whom Lamartine recommended to the voters of Poissy as "a man of heart, an artist of genius, and a devoted patriot"2—ran for a seat in the Constituent Assembly. Though he lost the election, Meissonier served in the National Guard during the June Days, after which he painted his "terrible impression" of political violence, Remembrance of Civil War. His scene of corpses beneath a broken barricade was in many ways a companion piece to Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People, a painting deemed so subversive that for many years it was banned from public view. The authorities recognized that Meissonier's work likewise had the potential to inflame political passions. Sent to the Salon of 1850, it was removed from view before the exhibition closed, though not before a good deal of attention came its way from critics across the political spectrum, most of whom praised Meissonier's "omelette of men" (as one called it) for depicting the horrors of warfare with "the pitiless fidelity of the daguerrotype."3 The man responsible for dozens of easygoing musketeers appeared to have been transformed into a painter whose shocking tableau delivered an uncustomary political and emotional charge.

  Paintings with such sharp political edges had a grim resonance after Louis-Napoléon came to power. After his violent coup d'etat in 1851 saw more than a hundred people shot dead in the streets of Paris, supporters of the new Emperor had reason to fear that Meissonier, a republican sympathizer, might create another such "omelette" with his brushes, conjuring vividly to life the men and women caught in the crossfire of Bonapartist guns. But Morny was careful to forestall any such work by assiduously courting Meissonier's favor, paying visits to his studio and purchasing from him works such as Bravoes, exhibited at the Salon of 1852.4 He also commissioned Meissonier to paint a portrait of his mistress wearing a blue dress and holding a book.5 The tactic succeeded. No more scenes of military gore came forth from Meissonier's easel; work resumed on the bonshommes and musketeers; and by 1859 Meissonier was celebrating in paint the Emperor's victory at Solferino. Such sly coercion on the part of Morny suggests that the members of the Académie would not have heaped up their funeral pyre in so blundering a fashion, as they did in 1863, had he been in their midst.

  Besides appointing the Due de Morny to the painting jury, Nieuwerkerke took further precautions to make certain that the scandals of 1863 would not repeat themselves. The jurors were specifically instructed to take a more tolerant view of the works submitted. Any works not admitted to the Salon would simply be deemed "too weak to participate in the competition for rewards"6 and go on show in another Salon des Refusés. This year, however, the administration of the Salon des Refusés was not to be entrusted to a band of private individuals, such as Chintreuil and his friends; it would be organized instead by Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières themselves.

  One note of discord did manage to creep into Nieuwerkerke's harmonious arrangement when Meissonier—showing that he had not been entirely tamed—abruptly declined to serve on the jury. The reasons for his refusal are not known for certain, but a number of factors may have played their part in his decision. He may simply have balked at the physical and mental labors involved in judging at a time when he was preparing numerous studies for Friedland. "Besides taking up much precious time," he once wrote of his work on the Selection Committee, "it generally results in regret, reproaches, and very great fatigue."7 Nieuwerkerke's dismissive response to the petition presented to the Comte de Walewski a year earlier may still have irked him, while his galling experience on the previous Salon jury and his failure to be awarded a professorship at the École des Beaux-Arts—a position which he coveted—could likewise have made him reluctant.

  Meissonier was not one to forgive and forget a slight. According to a friend at the Institut de France, he enjoyed a well-deserved reputation among friends and enemies alike as "a very savage fellow" whose impulsive temper often "betrayed him into violent outbursts and an offensive show of contempt."8 Another friend, Edmond de Goncourt, likewise noted Meissonier's flammable disposition, calling him a "maniac" who could be "as brutal as anything" if the moment moved him: "One never knows, coming to his house, if the door will be slammed in your face or if you will be crowned with roses."9

  Though he refused jury duty, Meissonier's anger and churlishness were not extreme enough for him to continue his boycott of the Salon. He therefore agreed to send The Campaign of France and The Battle of Solferino to the Salon of 1864. His grand new style, after the delay of a year, would at long last make its debut in public.

  * * *

  After the Selection Committee began its deliberations in April, the Marquis de Chennevières received a letter from an old acquaintance. Charles Baudelaire had reached a low ebb. In February 1864 he had published in Le Figaro a series of melancholy and ill-tempered prose poems entitled The Spleen of Paris, in one of which he declared himself "dissatisfied with everything."10 In April he had departed on a train for Brussels, officially to deliver a series of lectures on Delacroix, Hugo, Gautier and Edgar Allan Poe, but also to find a pu
blisher for his work and, even more pressing, to give the slip to his many creditors in Paris. Ill and penniless apart from money he had borrowed from Édouard Manet, he installed himself in the Hôtel du Grand Miroir, where his sole companion was a live bat. Here he spent his days composing his lectures, drinking Belgian beer (which he blamed for his constant diarrhea) and making frequent excursions to the local pawnshop.

  Yet Baudelaire was not thinking of his own sorry plight when he wrote to Chennevières. He was concerned that his friends Manet and Fantin-Latour should both receive a fair hearing from the painting jury and then advantageous positions for their paintings in the Salon. "You will see what marvelous talent is revealed in these paintings," he informed Chennevières before urging him to "do your best to place them well."11 The entreaties of a figure as notorious as Baudelaire may have seemed unlikely to cut much ice with Chennevières, a staunch conservative; but many years earlier the pair had gone to school together at the Lycée Saint-Louis in Paris, from which, however, Baudelaire had been expelled, though not before distinguishing himself among his fellow pupils for his standoffishness and, as one of them later remembered, "the most brazenly immoral opinions, which went beyond what was tolerable."12 Even so, Baudelaire thought it worthwhile writing to Chennevières (who a year earlier had sent him a copy of his latest volume of short stories) in order to try pulling a few strings for his younger friends.