The Judgment of Paris

by Ross King

  The political jollities did not last long, since Parisians began preparing to defend themselves against the invaders, who were scything their way across eastern France, bent on reaching Paris. Bridges over the Seine were blown up and houses demolished in what became a military zone near the Point du Jour, southwest of the Champ-de-Mars. The hateaux-mouches that had carried visitors along the Seine during the Universal Exposition were fitted with guns to form a flotilla on the river. Charles Garnier's half-finished opera house was turned into an infirmary for the wounded; its rooftop became a semaphore station, beaming messages by means of electric searchlights to other stations atop the Arc de Triomphe, the Panthéon and, in Montmartre, the Moulin de la Galette. All of the theaters were closed by order of the Prefect of Police. Barracks tents appeared in the Jardin des Tuileries, and soldiers could be seen bathing in the fountains in the Place de la Concorde. Peddlers walked among them, selling papers and pencils with which to write wills. In Montmartre, mass graves were excavated to make room for the dead.

  Meissonier was determined to take his own part in resisting the invasion. "Chance, necessity rather, has made me a soldier," he wrote proudly as he donned a uniform of the popular militia, the National Guard.5 After sending his wife and daughter to Le Havre and a store of his paintings to England, he received an audience with Général Louis-Jules Trochu, the Military Governor of Paris and head of the provisional Government of National Defense. Meissonier possessed some experience marching in uniform and shouldering a rifle, having served as a captain in the National Guard in 1848. He therefore hoped to lead a battalion at Poissy. "Give me the National Guard and I will be responsible for the whole place," he boldly informed Trochu.6 Soon, however, he thought better of this assignment, since Poissy, having neither guns nor fortifications, would make easy pickings for the Prussians, who he worried "might wish perhaps to treat me courteously"—an abhorrent possibility—when they overran the town. He therefore got himself reassigned to Paris, where he moved into the house of his picture-dealer, Francis Petit, on the Right Bank, near the church of Notre-Dame-de-Lorette. He was given the exalted rank of lieutenant-colonel in the National Guard and the task of inspecting the ring of walls and fortresses protecting Paris.

  Meissonier was far from the only artist to down brushes and take up a weapon as the Prussians approached. Maurice Courant and Lucien Gros both had been taken prisoner, but Meissonier's other young pupil, Édouard De-taille, joined the Eighth Battalion. Other artists in National Guard uniform were numerous: Edgar Degas, Paul Baudry, Charles Gamier, William Bour-guereau, the engraver Félix Bracquemond, the sculptor Jean-Alexandre-Joseph Falguière, a promising young painter named Henri Regnault, along with scores of others. Some units were composed almost entirely of artists, such as the Seventh Company of the Nineteenth Battalion, which included nine painters, seven sculptors and a couple of engravers.7 Many Parisians were pleasantly surprised by the patriotic duty of these men, who were more generally associated in the popular imagination with laziness, hedonism and trouble-making. "All of the artists conduct themselves admirably," wrote one observer, "with a simplicity and good humor, with a devotion that elicits the tenderness of the people of Paris."8 A military pride seized even Gustave Courbet, a lifelong pacifist who had once cleverly avoided his military service by downing a bottle of cognac and smoking twenty pipes on the eve of his army medical, for which he turned up, to the alarm of the doctor, reeking of booze and tobacco. Though not a member of the National Guard, he stitched a red stripe onto his trousers to give himself a martial bearing. "When I have my chassepot," he wrote jovially to a friend, "watch out."9

  Édouard Manet also joined the National Guard, sending his family to stay with friends in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, a hilltop town in the Pyrenees. Like Meissonier, he attempted to safeguard his paintings, taking a dozen of what he considered his most important canvases—including Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe and Olympia—to Théodore Duret's home near the church of the Madeleine, where they were placed in the cellar. His other paintings he deposited in the cellar of the family home in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg, where he remained with his brothers Gustave and Eugène, both of whom had joined the Garde Mobile, a force of untrained conscripts attached to the regular army. "I am glad I made you leave. Paris is bleak," he wrote to Suzanne on September 10, reporting that the theaters had closed. "I find the house very sad. I hope this won't last a long time."10 Two days later he went with Eugène to Passy to visit the Morisots, who had soldiers from the National Guard billeted in their house. Manet tried to persuade Berthe to leave the capital, graphically describing the horrors that lay in store. "You will be in a fine way," he informed her, "when you are wounded in the legs or disfigured."11 Berthe was undaunted by this grim scenario, but Manet's visit "has had a bad effect on your father," Madame Morisot wrote to Edma. "The tales that the Manet brothers tell us are almost enough to discourage the most stout-hearted."12

  If Berthe Morisot was determined, like Manet, to remain in Paris, other members of the École des Batignolles took the opportunity of removing themselves to safer environs. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War had found Claude Monet on his honeymoon at the Hôtel Tivoli in Trouville. He and Camille had been married at the end of June in a civil ceremony in the Batignolles, with Courbet as a witness. The newlyweds remained in Trouville and the surrounding area for the month of August, with Monet painting on the beaches and making an occasional excursion to Le Havre in a bid to extract money from his father. After the fall of Sedan, he hastily left Trouville on a boat bound for England without (naturally) paying his bill at the Hôtel Tivoli. He also left without Camille and Jean. By a strange coincidence, he was followed across the Channel from Trouville, one day later, by Empress Eugénie. She had fled the Tuileries and, in the company of her American dentist, Dr. Thomas Evans, traveled incognito to Trouville, where she arrived on the sixth. She then crossed to England after throwing herself on the mercy of a stranger, Sir John Burgoyne, whose yacht was moored in the harbor. After a rough passage, she began her exile at Chislehurst, a dozen miles outside London in the Kent countryside. As for Monet, he made his way to London, to a flat in Bath Place, Kensington. He would eventually be reunited with two other refugees, Daubigny and Pissarro, and then with his wife and son.

  Another newly wed who took the precaution of keeping out of harm's way was Émile Zola. At the end of May, with Cézanne as a witness, he too had married his mistress in a civil ceremony in the Batignolles. The outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War two months later was most inopportune for Zola, interrupting as it did the newspaper serialization of La Fortune des Rougon, the first novel in his ambitious project of mapping out in a series of novels what he called the "natural and social history of a family under the Second Empire." Zola had celebrated the Emperor's expedition to Italy in 1859 in clunky, jingoistic verse: "Go! Our Emperor leaves us for glory! / As, in former days, soldiers, our anthem of victory."13 But by 1870 he was much less supportive. He spent the war attacking the Emperor and the French army in the radical journal La Cloche, an act for which he would have been prosecuted had not the Second Empire collapsed at Sedan. He then made plans to escape Paris. "My wife is so frightened that I must take her away," he wrote to Edmond de Goncourt in early September.14 He duly departed for Marseilles with his mother and his new wife. He was followed south, soon afterward, by Cézanne, who went to L'Estaque with his mistress Hortense Fiquet.

  Zola and Cézanne, along with thousands of others, had escaped the capital with only days to spare. Little more than a fortnight after the Third Republic was declared, on September 19, the siege of Paris began. The city was encircled by 200,000 Prussian troops who, after a few skirmishes in the suburbs, hunkered down to wait for their siege artillery to arrive. The Prussian commanders had decided on a siege rather than an invasion, reckoning they could starve the Parisians into submission within six weeks. Bismarck had insolently predicted that "eight days without café au lait" would be enough to break the will of the pleasure-loving Pari
sians.15

  The Government of National Defense had made preparations for feeding its besieged citizens. The iron pavilions of Les Halles, newly built, were filled with sacks of wheat and flour, while the Gare du Nord was turned into a flour mill. Livestock had been brought into the city to graze in the squares, and shepherds could be seen tending their flocks in the Bois de Boulogne, which had also become a pasture for 25,000 oxen. But food and other luxuries quickly began running short as the city was severed from the outside world. "We now can no longer get café au lait," Manet wrote to Suzanne on the last day of September, adding that people began queueing at the butcher shops—which were open only three days a week—at four o'clock in the morning.16 "Horse meat is sneaking slyly into the diet of the people of Paris," noted Edmond de Goncourt one day later.17 After a few more weeks, Manet was reporting to Suzanne that even mules were regarded as "royal fare."18

  Manet's letters were sent to Suzanne by means of the "Balloon Post," a service started, on the advice of the intrepid Nadar, in the first week of the siege. With Paris encircled by the Prussians, with its roads and rails blockaded and its telegraph lines cut, the only way to communicate with the outside world was through the air. On the second day of the siege, Nadar had ascended above the Prussian line of investment in a hot-air balloon, not to deliver post but to shower the enemy soldiers with leaflets castigating them for attacking Paris, the pinnacle of civilization. Unable to steer his balloon back to Paris, he touched down in the countryside beyond, from where it was impossible to get back into the city. For Nadar at least, the siege was over. The next balloon left Paris two days later, floating over the heads of the Prussian soldiers with 275 pounds' worth of dispatches in its gondola. This vessel, the Neptune, landed safely at Evreux, seventy-five miles to the west, after a three-hour flight, effectively breaking the blockade. Four more balloons left in quick succession, and soon the Gare d'Orleans and several other venues, including a former dance hall in Montparnasse, were turned into factories for making more of them.

  One of these new vessels, the Armand Barbes, named for a republican and revolutionary who had died the previous June, was used to transport Léon Gambetta out of Paris so he could organize resistance in the provinces. Wearing a sealskin cap and fur-lined boots, and looking distinctly queasy as he climbed into the gondola, Gambetta was launched in the first week of October from a spot in Montparnasse as the assembled crowd shouted "Vive la République!" He was carrying—as if more hot air were needed—several letters from Victor Hugo, one addressed "To the Germans!" and another "To Frenchmen!"19

  Since balloons could not be flown back into Paris due to their erratic and uncontrollable flight patterns, the only means of getting information into the capital from the outside world was the carrier pigeon. Pigeons had been used to convey messages since antiquity, and a pigeon post between Germany and Belgium had been operated as late as 1850 by Paul Julius Reuter, the founder, in 1865, of the Reuter's Telegraph Company. Reuter's fleet of forty-five carrier pigeons had actually proved themselves swifter than the railway in carrying stock prices between Brussels and Aachen. The carrier pigeons used in the Siege of Paris were able to carry much more information thanks to a new process of microphotography invented by René Dagron. In 1859 Dagron had received a patent for microfilm, and over the next decade he produced such novelties as photographs shrunk to fit inside jewels, signet rings and other trinkets. He also developed, like so many other photographers, a profitable sideline in pornography, producing on microfilm works with titles such as The Surprised Bathers and The Joyful Orgy. Illegible to the naked eye—and therefore difficult for the police to apprehend—his shrunken images of gaily disporting lovelies could be enjoyed with the assistance of a special magnifying viewer.20

  During the siege, Dagron turned his talents to more patriotic endeavors. He and his equipment were flown out of Paris on a pair of balloons, one of them christened, fittingly, the Daguerre. Despite an ill wind, a crash and one of the balloons falling into the clutches of the Prussians, Dagron eventually made his way to Tours, where Gambetta and the machinery of government were based. He set to work photographing government dispatches, shrinking them to a minute size, printing them on lightweight collodion membranes, then rolling them up and fitting as many as 40,000 of them into a canister strapped to the legs of a single carrier pigeon. The pigeons were then released, encountering on their return to Paris, besides all the usual perils, falcons specially trained by the Prussians.21

  As well as the official dispatches sent to Général Trochu and the other military authorities in Paris, the pigeons also carried personal communications, short messages from anxious relatives to their loved ones inside Paris. Manet finally received one of these from Suzanne in the middle of November. "You can imagine my emotion on opening it," he wrote back to her via the Balloon Post. "It is the first time in two months that I have had any sign of life from you. It will restore a little of my courage, and plenty is needed here."22 Little wonder that the pigeon quickly became for besieged Parisians a symbol of freedom and hope. A play called The Pigeon of the Republic was performed on the stage, and a former student of Couture, Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, painted in his studio in the Place Pigalle a work entitled Le Pigeon voyageur, showing a heroic little bird dodging a vicious-looking Prussian hawk and arriving safely in the arms of its keeper. There were even arguments made in favor of putting the pigeon on the coat of arms of Paris. But perhaps the most sincere tribute was the fact that, even as winter drew nigh and starving Parisians began to experiment with ever more exotic cuisine, the pigeon remained safe from their cooking pots.

  By November the situation in Paris had become grim. "They are starting to die of hunger here," Manet wrote to Suzanne in the middle of the month, informing her three days later that "there are now cat, dog and rat butchers in Paris. We no longer eat anything but horse meat, when we can get it."23 A much-loved cat mysteriously disappeared from the apartment of one of Manet's neighbors. "Naturally it was for food," he observed.24 One hungry Parisian pronounced cats "a very dainty dish" when broiled with pistachio nuts, olives, gherkins and pimentos.25 Rats such as those purchased from the "rat market" in front of the Hôtel de Ville also had their advocates. "This morning I regaled myself with a rat pâti," Gautier wrote to a friend in Switzerland, "which wasn't bad at all."26 Another diner pronounced it "excellent—something between frog and rabbit."27

  The capacity of Parisians to stomach dainties such as rat was possibly assisted by an adventurous national gastronomy that already encompassed snails, frogs, calves' udders, pigs' lungs and the testicles of roosters. Horse meat was already popular with the French, since 2,421 horses—the equivalent of more than a million pounds of meat—had been butchered for food in 1868.28 Even rats were not unknown to the dinner tables of the French, with people in Bordeaux regarding them as something of a delicacy, cutting them in half and then grilling them with herbs and spices.29 In any case, few people could afford to disdain a rat pâti as the siege continued and supplies became ever scarcer.

  Neither the privations of the besieged metropolis nor his military duties stopped Manet from working. He wrote to Éva Gonzales, who had fled to Dieppe, that his paintbox and portable easel were "stuffed into my military kitbag, so there's no excuse for wasting my time."30 One of the pictures he executed, an etching done in bister on ivory laid paper, showed a queue at a butcher shop—a line of people standing under umbrellas in the rain. He also made rough pencil-and-watercolor sketches of his kepi-wearing and rifle-bearing comrades in the National Guard. Circumstances had turned Manet (who had given up his studio in the Rue Guyot) into a plein-air painter. Such vignettes, he told Suzanne, were "souvenirs that will one day have value."31 His most remarkable work was an oil sketch, no doubt painted outdoors, called Effect of Snow at Petit-Montrouge, a hasty impression of a church on the southern edge of Paris whose tower had served as a lookout post.32

  Manet's fellow Guardsman, Lieutenant-Colonel Meissonier, likewise kept his sketching materi
als in his knapsack. Prussian guns were not enough to keep a compulsive worker like Meissonier from his brushes and paints. He had brought to Francis Petit's house the materials he needed to complete Friedland, including the canvas itself, which he believed was only six months from completion. But after Sedan he found himself unable to touch the work on which he had spent much of the previous seven years. In September he had therefore set Friedland aside in favor of beginning—in his spare moments away from military duties—a work of quite a different sort, an allegorical scene to be called The Siege of Paris.33He began sketches for the painting on (apparently for want of other material) Petit's headed notepaper; his first doodles showed a female figure standing tall and defiant in the midst of the dead and dying. Taking his paintbox and brushes to the ramparts, he painted watercolors called A Battery of Artillery and A Cannon in an Embrasure on a Rampart. He also made a watercolor sketch of his own head after coming home from an outpost, after a frigid shift in December, and seeing in the mirror the "tragic expression" on his face.34 If circumstances had turned Manet into a plein-air painter, Meissonier had become, through the same exigencies, a painter of modern life.