The Judgment of Paris (35 page)

The most striking absence was Daubigny, who had been the advocate for
refusés
such as Pissarro and Cézanne. His friend Corot, who had served on the past three Salon juries, likewise failed to garner enough votes. Despite the omission of France's two foremost landscapists, another, Théodore Rousseau, was not only elected to the jury but named its president. The fifty-five-year-old's sudden prominence was ironic in view of the fact that his works had once been rejected so frequently from the Salon that he became known as
Le Grand Refusé.
After being excluded from the Salons in 1836, 1838, 1839 and 1840, he had temporarily given up submitting work to the juries.

Ernest Meissonier was naturally elected to the jury. He also began preparing a list of his paintings that he wished to show at the Universal Exposition—more than a dozen of his finest works. He may have had ambivalent feelings about showing his work at the annual Salon, but the International Exhibition of Fine Arts was another matter entirely. Included on his list, therefore, was
Friedland.
With its millions of visitors from all over the world, the Universal Exposition would make the perfect venue for Meissonier to unveil his masterpiece—if only he could complete the work on time. He had been persisting throughout 1866 with his endless studies for the painting, then almost four years in the making. But in the middle of December, just days before he was to submit his list of paintings, catastrophe struck at the Grande Maison.

Meissonier was forever adding to his collection of military paraphernalia. By the end of 1866, two entire rooms of the Grande Maison were filled with sabers, scabbards, bandoliers, shakos and tunics of various colors and materials—a veritable museum of military history. For
Friedland
he was obliged to depict the armor and uniform of Napoléon's cuirassiers. Napoléon had regarded these soldiers as the greatest weapon in the Grande Armée. They had been his shock troops, heavily armored horsemen sent hurtling into battle in a terrifying attempt—usually successful—to break the enemy's line. Known as the
Gros Frères,
or "Big Brothers," troopers in cuirassier regiments were bigger and stronger, and mounted on faster and sturdier warhorses, than those in the other cavalry regiments. Their armor consisted of a cuirass, or breastplate, worn over a dark blue coat, together with a visored steel helmet decorated with a mane of black horsehair. Meissonier avidly put the entire uniform together piece by piece, including the buff-colored trousers and knee-high riding boots.

As work on
Friedland
progressed, Meissonier's "Big Brothers" were almost undone by a weapon considerably less lethal than the thirty-eight-inch saber with which Napoléon had equipped his cuirassiers. Besides the various weapons collected for
Friedland
and other paintings, Meissonier also owned a number of masks and foils. Fencing was, along with yachting and horseback riding, one of his favorite recreations. He had even built onto the Grande Maison a
salle d'armes,
a fencing room where he sparred with his son Charles in between sessions at the easel. Unformnately he was ordered to demolish this extension after his neighbors, Louis and Sarah Courant, protested that it impeded access to their vegetable garden. Unwilling to relinquish the pleasures of his energetic pastime, Meissonier had begun constructing a new
salle d'armes
close to the Nouvelle Maison, the mansion he was having rebuilt for Charles. This extension was not yet finished by 1866, however, and so when Charles and Lucien Gros felt the need to practice their thrusts and parries, early one morning in the middle of December, they took their foils into the summer studio on the ground floor of the Grande Maison. The two young men then began lunging at one another a few feet from where
Friedland
sat on its easel.

"What a day, my pretty little girl," Charles wrote later that day to Jeanne in a blow-by-blow account of the tragic events. "Several more like this one and my hair would quickly turn white."
¹
He and Lucien had taken the precaution of protecting
Friedland,
he explained, by placing an enormous mirror in front of it. However, the fencing had barely started when the mirror tipped over, knocking Meissonier's masterpiece from the easel and tearing the canvas. The damage sustained was a hole some three inches long in the middle, where Meissonier had been painting a charging sorrel horse ridden by a cuirassier.
²
Charles was suitably horrified and despairing. "I wanted to run away, to kill myself," he wrote to Jeanne.

But Charles neither absconded nor fell upon his fencing sword. He climbed the stairs—"I don't know how"—to where his father was obliviously at work in the winter studio. He had good reason to fear the wrath of his father, the "maniac" who, according to Edmond de Goncourt, could be "as brutal as anything." But Meissonier received the news with uncharacteristic equanimity. At first, seeing his son so distraught, he feared some tragic accident had befallen a member of the family. But when Charles threw himself at his father's feet and tearfully confessed all, Meissonier simply raised him to his feet and said, quietly and calmly: "Oh well, it was a beautiful work and 100,000 francs lost. Dear me, it is finished, but do not cry I beg of you."
³

Father and son descended the stairs together to witness the scene of destruction. Meissonier's initial examination concluded that the tear in the canvas was irreparable, but Charles was unwilling to abandon the painting to its tragic fate. He immediately caught the train to Paris, where he consulted with an expert in conservation, "an intelligent man," he reported to Jeanne, "who gave me a remedy that we will employ tomorrow." He then returned to Poissy, still in a state of enormous anxiety. The conservator (most probably one from the staff at the Louvre) had reassured the young man that all was not lost, "but I will be completely calm only tomorrow after the operation is done. I still have many torments and fears. You know me well, my dear little girl, and I am sure that you can imagine everything I suffered when I saw myself—me, his son—destroying my father's most beautiful work."

On the following day, at eleven o'clock in the morning on December 12, the expert from Paris arrived at the Grande Maison and then spent the next three hours repairing the damaged canvas as Charles hovered nervously at his elbow. More was at stake, of course, than the 100,000 francs that Meissonier evidently expected to earn from the painting. As Charles knew only too well, his father had expended almost four years of labor on the work, which he hoped would consolidate his worldwide reputation at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts. "I was very afraid," wrote Charles, in something of an understatement. "Several times we believed it would never be finished." But the operation proved successful ("Victory, thank God"), and by two o'clock in the afternoon
Friedland
was salvaged. The conservator had glued to the back of the canvas a length of the finest French linen, a method allowing him to disguise both the hole in the painting as well as the seams where the original canvas had been fitted together.
⁴
Charles was brazen enough to claim credit for the procedure, writing triumphantly to Jeanne: "It was down to me, you see. I insisted on my method, and I am the one who succeeded."

The apparently imperturbable Meissonier went back to work on the canvas. He had fewer than four months to complete the painting on time to unveil it at the Universal Exposition.

Édouard Manet was also hoping to show samples of his work at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts in the Champ-de-Mars. To that end, he submitted his list of proposed works by the mid-December deadline and then awaited the response. He could not have been especially optimistic, even despite the presence on the jury of Thomas Couture, his old teacher. The shuffling of a few personnel notwithstanding, the painting jury still bore an eerie resemblance to the 1866 Jury of Assassins. Moreover, Manet's list consisted of all his most notorious paintings, including both
Le Déjeuner sur I'herbe
and
Olympia,
along with works rejected from previous Salons, such as
The Absinthe Drinker
and
The Tragic Actor.
He also hoped to exhibit a number of other controversial works, such as
Music in the Tuileries
and
The Dead Christ with Angels,
whose public displays had been greeted with both hostility and hilarity.

Many of the twenty-four jurors no doubt were exasperated by the sight of Manet's list of paintings, and few can have looked forward to the inevitable debates as once again they were forced to ponder their merits. But the problem simply could not be ignored. As a frustrated juror once remarked of Manet's submissions to the Salon: "Every year there is a Manet problem, just as there is an Orient problem or an Alsace-Lorraine problem."
⁵
In any case, the jurors needed to reach their decisions within two weeks. According to the regulations, successful applications would be acknowledged by the first of January, while those artists who heard nothing from the jury by that date could safely assume they had been passed over.

The
Jour de l'An,
New Year's Day, was a social occasion in Paris, with people going from house to house for brief visits, exchanging sweetmeats and small gifts before setting off to browse the wooden stalls in the bazaars that opened for the day along the wide new boulevards on the Right Bank of the Seine. A light snow fell that day in 1867, powdering the trees (as Théophile Gautier observed at his home in Neuilly) "like marquesses in the days of Louis XV."
⁶
For Manet, the celebratory mood, with its high expectations for a year that would see Paris become the center of the world's attention, seemed dismally inappropriate: no word had arrived from the Selection Committee, confirming the exclusion that he must already have been anticipating. He did receive more heartening tidings, however, in the form of a copy of
La Revue du XIX
^e
siècle,
a journal edited by Arséne Houssaye, previously the editor of
La Presise.
The journal's issue for the first of January 1867 included a long article entitled "A New Style in Painting: M. Édouard Manet." Its author was Émile Zola, tenacious champion of the "new movement" in French painting.

The two men had been meeting regularly since Zola's attack on the 1866 jury some nine months earlier, and the article in
La Revue du XIX
^e
siècle
had been preceded by a visit from Zola to the studio in the Rue Guyot. For the occasion Manet had displayed thirty of his finest works. Zola was enraptured. The paintings represented "an enormous totality of analysis and vigor," the pugnacious little writer informed his readers. "You begin to feel, do you not, that there's more to this man than black cats? The entirety of his work is one and complete. It enlarges itself with its sincerity and power. In every canvas, the artist's hand speaks with the same language, which is simple and precise."
⁷
Zola dared to express the hope that in the spring he would find these paintings on show at the International Exhibition of Fine Arts—but by the time the article appeared in print, the jurors had already spurned Manet's efforts.

Manet once again dashed off another letter of thanks: "What a splendid New Year's gift you've made me. I'm delighted by your remarkable article. It comes just at the right moment since I've not been deemed worthy of the benefits enjoyed by so many others." He then outlined to Zola plans he had already hatched to circumvent the Selection Committee by staging his own art exhibition during the Universal Exposition. In the summer of 1866, following his exclusion from the Salon, he had invited the public to his studio to see his rejected works for themselves. In 1867, he told Zola, he was determined to take this approach a step farther: "I've decided to hold a one-man exhibition. I have at least forty-odd pictures I can show, and have already been offered sites in very good locations near the Champ-de-Mars. I'm going to go all out and, with the support of people like you, it should be a success."
⁸

Manet had approached the Prefect of Police, who granted him permission to erect a temporary wooden building on the Right Bank of the Seine, near the Pont de l'Alma. The property on which Manet intended to build was a garden owned by the Marquis de Pomereu-d'Aligre, the forty-nine-year-old scion of a wealthy aristocratic family that had founded, among other enterprises, a spa in Burgundy and a lunatic asylum in Chartres.
*
One of the largest landowners in France, Pomereu-d'Aligre was also an art collector of discriminating tastes. The fact that he owned a number of landscapes by Gustave Courbet may have disposed him favorably toward Manet's unorthodox style of painting.

Manet's projected one-man art show during the Universal Exposition imitated the actions taken by Courbet in 1855 when, feeling himself slighted by Nieuwerkerke, he withdrew his paintings from the Universal Exposition and instead showed forty canvases in a private gallery specially constructed in the Avenue Montaigne, mere yards from where Manet proposed to show his own works. This one-man show had opened under the title of "Realism: Exhibition and Sale of Forty Canvases and Four Drawings by M. Gustave Courbet," with a catalogue put together by Champfleury. The exhibition was no great success, however, since even the presence of many of Courbet's most shocking works failed to garner much attention. Yet Courbet remained unbowed, and in 1867 he was planning a repeat performance. Though four of his works would be on show when the International Exhibition of Fine Arts opened, he decided the time was ripe to inaugurate what he called his own "personal Louvre," a permanent exhibition space in the Avenue Montaigne that would be christened "L'Exposition Courbet" and dedicated exclusively to his works. "I will astonish the entire world," he predicted with his usual modesty.
⁹