The Judgment of Paris (40 page)
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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."
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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 Empress Charlotte. Yet it was not one bound to endear Manet to an administration that already treated him as a reprobate and an outcast.
E
RNEST 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.
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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."
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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."
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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.
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