The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  * * *

  Another work painted in the autumn of 1867 also showed Manet's intense preoccupation with mortality. Léon Koella was working at this time as an errand boy for a banker named Auguste de Gas whose son Edgar, a painter, Manet had met in the Louvre in 1862. Edgar de Gas (he was not yet spelling his surname "Degas") had since become a regular if slightly incongruous presence in the Artists' Corner at the Café Guerbois. With an exotic genealogy that included a Neapolitan grandmother and a Creole mother from New Orleans, he had enjoyed a privileged upbringing in the wealthy First Arrondissement. But unlike that other son of a banker, the loutish Paul Cézanne, Degas, with his brittle wit and aloof, haughty manner, looked and acted the part of a plutocrat's offspring. Throughout his life, it was said, he used the informal tutoiement—the linguistic marker of intimacy and equality—with only three people. His charmed upbringing, however, together with his sharp tongue and love of the Old Masters in the Louvre, had quickly made him a natural friend and ally of Manet.

  Degas was two years younger than Manet. Like many young Parisians predestined for greatness, he had studied at the Lycée Louis-le-Grand, the prestigious school in the Latin Quarter whose former pupils included Moliere, Voltaire and Hugo. Most unusually for an aspiring artist, he had proved himself a superb student, reading voraciously and excelling at the classics in particular. He briefly studied law at the Sorbonne before moving on to the École des Beaux-Arts to train with a former pupil of Ingres—his artistic hero—named Louis Lamothe. His education had then continued in Italy, where the Neapolitan branch of his family owned a palazzo, and where he spent three years studying Renaissance paintings. He exhibited at the Salon for the first time at the age of thirty-one, in 1865, though his War Scene in the Middle Ages—which made allusions to the plight of women in the American Civil War—attracted no attention whatsoever. Due largely to Manet's influence he soon switched from historical scenes to subjects from modern-day Paris, such as racehorses, ballerinas and washerwomen. Degas also painted portraits, including one of Manet and Suzanne, done in the summer of 1866. This picture was the cause of a serious but temporary fracture in their friendship. Posed at the apartment in the Boulevard des Batignolles, Portrait of Monsieur and Madame Édouard Manet appeared to show a crestfallen Manet lounging in a fit of boredom as his wife played the piano: Degas depicted him sprawled apathetically on a white sofa, one knee drawn awkwardly upward, his hand thrust into his beard and his eyes raised vacantly upward. If this likeness was unflattering, the one of Suzanne must have been far worse, since Manet took such exception to Degas' depiction of his wife that he took a knife to the canvas and expurgated her face and hands. Degas was enraged by this act of vandalism, and for several months the two men had refused to speak. The rift was soon healed, however: Degas claimed that "one cannot stay vexed with Manet for very long."9 And shortly after their reconciliation, Degas seems to have found Manet's fifteen-year-old godson employment at the Banque de Gas.

  Léon Koella was not living in the apartment in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg that Manet and Suzanne were sharing with his mother. More modest lodgings had been found for him in a ground-floor flat in the building next door. Manet paid frequent visits to the boy, and most evenings the pair of them competed at games of backgammon and bezique. Léon had posed for his godfather on a number of occasions, most recently as the young dandy in View of the Universal Exposition of 1867. He was, in fact, Manet's favorite model, ultimately posing for him more times even than Victorine Meurent, which suggests that Manet, who always feared being let down by his models, found the boy a compliant sitter. Therefore, when a new idea for a painting came to him in the weeks following Baudelaire's death, he naturally turned to Léon; and in between running his errands at the Banque de Gas, the boy therefore found himself in the studio in the Rue Guyot, blowing soap bubbles.

  Soap bubbles had long been a source of fascination to scientists and artists alike. Even as Manet was painting his canvas, a Belgian physicist named Joseph-Antoine-Ferdinand Plateau was dipping wire frameworks into tubs of soapy water in an attempt to describe the geometrical properties of bubbles, including the precise angles at which they clustered together.10 Manet's interest in soap bubbles, like that of most artists, was rather different. The soap bubble had been used for several centuries in what was known as a vanitas, a painting whose purpose was to remind viewers (through symbols such as skulls, timepieces and snuffed-out candles and lanterns) of the vanity and brevity of earthly life. With its intimations of the evanescence of life and inevitability of death, Manet's Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles faithfully followed this genre. Nevertheless, if Manet was brooding on death and extinction, he also perhaps kept a shrewd eye on his artistic career. Executed with a careful brushwork, Boy Blowing Soap Bubbles was a beautiful and inoffensive painting of the sort beloved by Salon juries and art collectors alike.

  By some point in the autumn of 1867 Manet resumed work on The Execution of Maximilian. In keeping with the stringent researches carried out by history painters such as Meissonier, he arranged for a number of French infantrymen, Chasseurs à Pied from a nearby barracks—"foot soldiers" whom the Emperor had often called upon to put down various riots and insurrections—to come to his studio and pose with their muskets aloft.11 This dedication resulted, however, in the anachronism of the Juaristas wielding French infantry muskets rather than the Springfield rifle muskets with which they had actually shot Maximilian. Manet also made the uniforms of the soldiers in his painting similar to those of the Chasseurs a Pied posing in his studio, though he gave them swords and made a few minor alterations, such as removing the epaulettes and adding white spats.12

  These errors were not due simply to Manet's slipshod efforts at historical accuracy. By the time he recommenced work on his second version of the scene, information about the execution was suddenly exceedingly difficult to come by. In September the photographs described in the article in Le Figaro had been interdicted. Soon afterward, a dealer of photographic prints named Alphonse Liébert was sentenced to two months in prison and slapped with a 200-franc fine for possessing copies of them with an intent to distribute.13 Such censorship, so typical of the Second Empire's approach to the press, did not merely hinder Manet's researches; it also threatened to make his gigantic canvas illegal. Though he must have realized that his Execution of Maximilian could likewise be proscribed in order to spare Louis-Napoléon the embarrassment of witnessing how his foreign policy had concluded in a hail of bullets, Manet nonetheless carried on with the work. He may well have wished to use the painting to provoke Louis-Napoléon, a man for whom he and his friends, republicans to a man, had little love or respect. He had no doubt rehashed the Mexican episode at length during his stay in Trouville with Antonin Proust, who regularly assaulted the Imperial government in the pages of La Semaine, a journal so inflammatory that it was printed in Belgium in order to circumvent the censorship laws in France.

  Lithograph of The Execution of Maximilian (Édouard Manet)

  The soldiers from the Chasseurs a Pied who posed for Manet in the Rue Guyot might have had reason, once the painting was finished, to feel betrayed by The Execution of Maximilian. Manet seems deliberately to have changed the color of the Juaristas' uniform from gray (as described in Le Figaro) to blue, thus making it more closely resemble the French uniform. The implication was that French troops, by retreating from Mexico, had been responsible for the death of Maximilian.14

  That Manet held Louis-Napoléon to blame for the death of Maximilian appears to be suggested by the soldier on the right of the canvas who prepares, with menacing sangfroid, to deliver the coup de grace. Manet had his facts right, since a Mexican soldier was indeed required to step in to finish off the Emperor as he lay bleeding on the ground after the first round of .58-caliber bullets failed to kill him. However, Manet gave this executioner a goatee beard that made him look uncannily like Louis-Napoléon. The clever and none-too-subtle touch illustrated what many people believed, not least the tragically distraught Empr
ess Charlotte. Yet it was not one bound to endear Manet to an administration that already treated him as a reprobate and an outcast.

  *Baudelaire was eventually given a more fitting memorial in the cemetery of Montparnasse: a rather gruesome monument consisting of a flamboyantly forelocked bust contemplating a mummy-like figure that lies beneath a pedestal draped in the skeleton of a giant bat. Sculpted by José de Charmoy, it was unveiled in 1902, thirty-five years after Baudelaire's death.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  Maneuvers

  ERNEST MEISSONIER SOMETIMES rode all the way through the Forest of Saint-Germain, along the Route de la Reine, to emerge on the south side, in the ancient town of Saint-Germain-en-Laye. Only a few miles west of Paris, Saint-Germain-en-Laye was home to a cavalry garrison, the 10th Regiment Cuirassiers, whose commander, Colonel Dupressoir, was a friend of Meissonier. A portly man who loyally trimmed his beard and waxed his mustache in the style of Louis-Napoléon, the fifty-one-year-old Dupressoir was an experienced cavalry officer who had served in both the Dragoons and Cara-biniers. During several of Meissonier's visits to Saint-Germain-en-Laye, Dupressoir obligingly put a company of his Gros Frères through their paces as the painter watched attentively from his saddle. Édouard Manet was therefore not the only painter for whom troops of soldiers were taking time away from their training to strike dramatic poses. More than four years after starting his work, Meissonier was still doing his best to capture the "flash of swords" at the Battle of Friedland.1

  Unlike Manet, Meissonier had no subversive intentions with his painting. On the contrary, he wished to glorify Napoléon Bonaparte, the cuirassiers who had fought for him at Friedland, and by implication the fighting spirit of the French military across the decades. This lofty aim, together with Meissonier's reputation as France's greatest painter, made Colonel Dupressoir and his men only too happy to assist him in whatever way they could. Meissonier had already been studying charging horses with the help of his son Charles on their early-morning jaunts through the Forest of Saint-Germain. The pair would take their horses along the wide bridle path leading from Poissy to Maisons-Laffitte, five miles to the east. "When we thought we had got far enough away and were alone," Charles later recalled, "my father would say to me, 'Make your horse gallop.' Then, putting his own horse at the same pace, and keeping on the opposite side of the road, he would study each movement." Meissonier was attempting to capture, according to Charles, "the rhythm and successive modifications of the horse's action."2

  These experiments in equine locomotion were continued on the parade ground at Saint-Germain-en-Laye. According to Charles, a witness to these grand reenactments, the cuirassiers were delighted to demonstrate "all the massed movements that might furnish him with as close an image as possible of war, with its furious bursts, its hand-to-hand encounters, its charges, its mêlées."3 Meissonier may have earned their respect with his own adept horsemanship, since he rode his own steed alongside the charging cuirassiers, "gazing as if hypnotized," according to Charles Yriarte, and then frantically noting down everything he witnessed.4

  Study of horses in motion (Ernest Meissonier)

  Besides demonstrating their attack formations and the secrets of hand-to-hand combat, the cuirassiers had another task to perform for Meissonier: he requested that they and their horses trample a field of wheat. Just as The Campaign of France had required him to rake across the grounds of the Grande Maison vast quantities of flour to double as snow, his work on Friedland demanded a battered crop of ripening wheat—the landscape on which the incident depicted had taken place. Yriarte claims Meissonier purchased an entire field over which he hired horsemen from a cavalry company to tromp.5 Another of Meissonier's friends, Albert Wolff, likewise a writer for Le Figaro, maintained that the painter actually planted the crop in his park at Poissy, then hired the horsemen to flatten it once June, the month of the battle, had arrived.6 Whatever the exact circumstances, Meissonier had assembled his easel in the middle of the field and made plein-air sketches of the ears of wheat scattered across the ground.

  These studies seem to have been completed in 1867 or the first half of 1868. Meissonier included one of them in a portrait he began early in 1868, that of Gaston Delahante, owner of The Campaign of France. The banker posed for the portrait not at his own mansion but, in what amounted to a kind of advertisement for Meissonier's taste in interior decoration, in one of Meissonier's antique Louis XIII chairs, with a carved trunk beside him and a tapestry on the wall behind. Also in the background was an easel with a sketch of Friedland clearly visible, while a piece of paper lying casually on the floor proclaimed: "Gaston Delahante. E. Meissonier, 1868." The cost to Delahante was 25,000 francs, one of the highest prices ever paid by a sitter for his portrait.7

  Delahante naturally could not fail to notice how Meissonier's latest masterpiece was proceeding. But when he expressed an interest in acquiring Friedland he learned how the painting was already spoken for. The buyer was not Henry Probasco, who had returned to Cincinnati with tens of thousands of dollars' worth of books and other treasures but without, however, getting his hands on Friedland. His offer of 150,000 francs had been topped by a bid from Lord Hertford that seems to have been in excess of a stratospheric 200,000 francs.8 At this price, Friedland cost more than double the amount ever paid for a painting by a living artist. To put this sum into perspective, twenty years earlier, Alexandre Dumas père had spent 200,000 francs constructing his Château de Monte Cristo, a lavish Renaissance-style castle featuring a moated studio, statues by James Pradier, and a Moorish salon carved by a team of craftsmen specially imported from Tunisia; while Le Moniteur once reported that 200,000 francs could support a brigade of soldiers—some 2,000 men—for as long as six months.9 The price tag of 200,000 francs was therefore an extravagance even for the man who owned Bagatelle, the beautiful Château built for Marie-Antoinette in the Bois de Boulogne.

  The Universal Exposition of 1867 and the months following its closure at the end of October comprised for Meissonier a kind of annus mirabilis in what had already been a miraculously successful career. If he entertained any worries about his finances (and his passion for aggrandizing his property at Poissy certainly gave him a few anxious moments over the years), then the 200,000 francs would happily lay these to rest. And if he retained any worries about his critical reputation, he could rejoice in the assurances of the many critics who claimed he possessed, in the words of Charles Blanc, "no equal . . . either in France or anywhere else."10 His career had reached a magnificent peak by the time he celebrated his fifty-third birthday in February. He also relished other domestic delights, since he would mark his thirtieth wedding anniversary later in the year, a few weeks before his son Charles—who had succeeded in winning the hand of Jeanne Gros—was due to marry. Charles himself seemed poised to become a great success as a painter, a worthy heir to his father. Not only had While Taking Tea been awarded a medal at the 1866 Salon, but Charles was celebrated by the reviewer for the Revue du XIXe Siècle as an artist whose talent "seizes you with its lively charm, which harbors sharp and rigorous drawing, and which bursts with the right color—youthful, stimulating, harmonious, virile and truthful."11 Buoyed by so many accomplishments, Meissonier was unprepared for the rebuke he was about to receive as the Salon of 1868 approached.

  The règlement for the 1868 Salon was published in Le Moniteur universel a little more than a week after the Universal Exposition closed at the end of October. The numerous protests over the previous two Salons—the chanting in the streets, the petitions, the violent threats—had convinced Nieuwerkerke that he could no longer avoid making alterations to how the jury was chosen. Four years earlier, the furores of 1863 had persuaded him to allow certain artists to elect three quarters of the jurors, effectively marginalizing the most reactionary painters. But the artists casting their ballots had constituted an elite group who had either won medals at the Salon or been decorated with the Legion of Honor. The controversies surrounding the Salons of 1866 and 1867 i
ndicated that a noisy rump of artists had yet to be appeased by what they regarded as half-measures and token gestures.

  The time had therefore come for Nieuwerkerke to surrender to the democrats: his new règlement announced that two thirds of the jury for the 1868 Salon would be elected by artists who had ever exhibited as much as a single work at the Salon, regardless of whether or not the work had been awarded a medal of any description. Hundreds of artists were thereby enfranchised. Perennially unsuccessful painters such as Paul Cézanne would still be excluded from the ballot box; but Manet, Fantin-Latour, Whistler, Monet, Renoir, Pissarro and Degas were suddenly eligible to vote for the first time. Cabanel, for one, was displeased with this new democracy: "It's just like in politics," he lamented, "it makes a fine mess of things."12

  The deadline for submitting work to the 1868 Salon was March 20, with ballot papers due to be counted two days later. The first weeks of March therefore witnessed, besides the usual scenes in which hopeful masterpieces trundled down the boulevards on the tops of pushcarts, much frantic politicking on the part of the artists as the more savvy and ambitious among them recognized that in order to get themselves elected they needed to campaign as vigorously as any politician. Meetings were therefore convened, committees appointed, parties formed, manifestos composed, and slates of candidates thrust forward. Not surprisingly, Gustave Courbet, a veteran of so many previous battles, proved himself the most energetic politician; he wasted no time putting together a group called "The Committee of Non-Exempt Artists." Consisting of twelve candidates, his impressive roster encompassed two former jurors, Daubigny and Charles Gleyre, and a number of other successful and well-known painters.*