The Judgment of Paris (49 page)

The elections for the Legislative Assembly took place on May 24, three weeks into the Salon. Though the candidates supporting the Emperor managed to win 216 of 292 seats, there were causes for concern in the Tuileries. Not only had twenty-five republicans been elected, including Adolphe Thiers, but forty-two percent of the 7.8 million voters had cast their ballots in favor of candidates (ranging from socialists to monarchists) who opposed Louis-Napoléon's regime. Nor did the elections stop the civil unrest in Paris, which featured demonstrations by socialists in the Boulevard Montmartre and violent disturbances in the working-class suburb of Belleville. These riots quickly spread through Paris, night after night, with chants of "Vive Rochefort" (invoking the exiled editor of
La Lanterne)
and choruses of the
Marseillaise
leading to thrown bottles, broken glass and flailing police batons. More than a thousand demonstrators were thrown in jail over the course of a few nights in June. The government became even less popular when, on June 16, troops opened fire on striking coal miners in La Ricamarie, near Saint-Étienne, killing fourteen people, including a seventeen-month-old girl in her mother's arms. Immediately afterward, the silk spinners in Lyon declared a strike. Hotels emptied as foreign tourists hastily left the country, while Rochefort, exiled to Belgium a year earlier, began plotting his return. France appeared to be on the brink of revolution.

Matters became even more troubling for Louis-Napoléon as his health declined. By this point his rheumatism was so excruciating that, according to one of his wife's ladies-in-waiting, he would hold his arm to the flame of a candle before entering a room so that "a change of pain might bring a sort of relief."
³⁷
Even more concerning was a bladder stone, which gave him sharp pains in the groin as well as troubles with urination. Great risks were associated with a lithotripsy, a procedure involving the insertion of a "urethrotome" into the bladder to crush the stone. The hazards were made chillingly clear on August 13 when, drugged with morphine and confined to his bed, Louis-Napoléon was given the distressing news that his most trusted military adviser, Adolphe Niel, the Minister of War, had died following a lithotripsy to remove his own bladder stone.

Two days after the catastrophe of Marshal Niel's death, Paris celebrated the hundredth anniversary of Napoléon's birth. A
Te Deum
was performed in the Invalides and a Mass at Notre-Dame. The Champ-de-Mars was filled with puppet theaters, clowns, acrobats, dwarfs, rope-dancers and men on stilts. Fireworks in the sky above the Trocadéro included 1,200 roman candles and 20,000 rockets. Finally, the word "Napoléon" was spelled in lights above the Arc de Triomphe. As these lights were extinguished a day later, many who watched may have felt the lights of Louis-Napoléon's regime were also fading. That, at any rate, was the conclusion soon reached by many foreign observers in the embassies lining the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. "The Second Empire," wrote Lionel Sackville-West, Charge d'Affaires at the British Embassy, "has gone off the rails. It is no longer being guided. It is hurling itself at an accelerating speed towards the abyss."
³⁸

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

The Wild Boar of the Batignolles

E
ARLY IN SEPTEMBER 1869, as anxiety about his health spread through Paris, followed by rumors of his death, Emperor Napoléon made a queasy appearance in a carriage in the Champs-Élysées. The crowds turning out to see him were almost as large as those that had poured into the streets a day earlier for the opening of Le Bon Marché, the department store, in its grand new premises west of the Jardin du Luxembourg. Within a few weeks the Emperor was well enough to ride in a carriage in the Bois de Boulogne and to attend the theater, though his hair had been dyed brown and his cheeks rouged to hide their pallor. Government bulletins simply reported that he had been suffering from a severe attack of rheumatism: no mention was made of the bladder stone.

Louis-Napoléon next attempted to heal the body politic. At the end of December, a few weeks after the Legislative Assembly convened, he summoned one of its deputies, a forty-four-year-old moderate reformer named Émile Ollivier, and ordered him "to designate the men who can form a homogenous cabinet with you, which will faithfully represent the majority in the Legislative Assembly."
¹
This new cabinet marked the end of Louis-Napoléon's autocratic regime and the beginnings of what Ollivier christened the "Liberal Empire."
²
The transition from despotism to a form of parliamentary democracy was widely hailed in the press. "If this is not the greatest of all revolutions," claimed the
Revue des deux mondes,
"it is at least one of the most interesting, one of the most salutary and opportune."
³
Ollivier's government immediately began preparing legislation to establish trial by jury for press offenses and to abolish both arbitrary arrest and the obligation of workers to carry identity cards. But within days of taking office, Ollivier and his colleagues suddenly found themselves faced with a crisis even more grave than the strikes and riots of the previous summer. The architect of the crisis was the man whose name the republican crowds had been chanting in the streets of Montmartre: Henri Rochefort.

The Marquis Victor-Henri de Rochefort-Luçay had enjoyed a colorful career.
⁴
The son of a ruined aristocrat who had become a vaudevillian, he had begun work as a humble government clerk before moving on to write light comedies for the theater, followed by drama criticism for satirical journals such as
Le Charivari.
Along the way he published several books and accumulated various wives, mistresses and illegitimate children. "He sought pleasure in every form," wrote a fellow journalist, "tracked down all the emotional thrills. He gambled at roulette, at the races, at cards, in the stock market."
⁵
But Rochefort's greatest thrill—and his greatest gamble—was baiting Louis-Napoléon. His wickedly barbed antigovernment polemics got him sacked from
Le Figaro,
but a short while later he had returned to the fray with
La Lanterne.
Forced to decamp to Belgium after the paper's suppression, he returned in the aftermath of the 1869 elections and started a journal called, provocatively,
La Marseillaise,
from which flowed an even more profuse torrent of anti-Bonapartist abuse. And in order to protect himself against the victims of his calumnies, Rochefort hired a twenty-one-year-old playboy and bruiser, Yvan Salmon, a cobbler's son who went by the name Victor Noir.

Rochefort did not find the Emperor's liberal concessions in the least "salutary and opportune." He was skeptical of the Liberal Empire and, in particular, of the motivations of Louis-Napoléon. "Scratch a Bonapartist," he wrote in
La Marseillaise
on January 9, 1870, a week after Ollivier took office, "and find a ferocious beast." For his part, Louis-Napoléon was becoming tolerant of Rochefort, having quashed the one-year jail sentence and 10,000-franc fine imposed upon him after his flight to Belgium in 1868. But another Bonaparte, Prince Pierre, the Emperor's fifty-four-year-old cousin, took umbrage at the comment and immediately challenged Rochefort to a duel. Though dueling was more or less extinct in Britain, where the final combat had taken place in 1851, it was still common in France, where, according to one newspaper, it was "the stock-in-trade of adventurers in journalism, professional orators and parliamentary debaters."
⁶
Indeed, dueling was such an occupational hazard for journalists that some newspaper offices provided special rooms in which their writers and editors could hone their fencing skills.
⁷
These duels often served as publicity stunts, but occasionally they ended in tragedy, as in 1836, when the publisher of
La Presse,
Émile de Girardin, killed a fellow journalist with a bullet to the groin. More recently, in 1862 the editor of
Le Sport
had been slain in a sword-duel with the Due de Gramont-Caderousse. Rochefort himself had nearly become one of these statistics. Three years earlier he had fought a duel against Paul de Cassagnac, a journalist for
Le Pays
who had accused him of slandering Joan of Arc. He survived only because Cassagnac's bullet struck a consecrated medal of the Virgin that had been sewn (supposedly by his mistress) into the lining of his waistband.
⁸

Rochefort remained undaunted by the experience. He eagerly accepted Prince Pierre's challenge, and on January 10 his two seconds, Victor Noir and an aeronaut named Ulric de Fonvielle, presented themselves at Prince Pierre's home in the Paris suburb of Auteuil. Precisely what happened next was the subject of some dispute, but harsh words were exchanged, followed by fisticuffs as Noir struck Prince Pierre in the face with a gloved hand. Prince Pierre, who was never without his pistol, even in bed, promptly discharged a bullet into Noir's chest. Noir staggered down the street and, minutes later, collapsed and died on the floor of a pharmacy
⁹

Prince Pierre, known as the "Wild Boar of Corsica," was an obscure but notorious member of the Bonaparte clan. His turbulent past encompassed a stint in an Italian prison for murdering a policeman, a tour of duty in the Colombian jungle with comrades of Simon Bolivar, and spells of aimless wanderings in London, New York and Greece. More recently, after allegedly killing a gamekeeper in Belgium, he had retired with his working-class mistress to a quieter life in Auteuil, where he lived in the former home of the eighteenth-century philosopher Helvetius. Here his days were spent polishing his numerous weapons and baiting anti-Bonapartists in the letter pages of right-wing newspapers. Louis-Napoléon had never so much as laid eyes on this infamous cousin, who was kept firmly at bay, according to one of Eugénie's ladies-in-waiting, because of his "low tastes and low habits."
¹⁰
Nonetheless, Prince Pierre was a Bonaparte, and the fact that a Bonaparte had slain a republican, an associate of Rochefort, was a call to arms for enemies of the Empire. "I have been so weak as to believe that a Bonaparte could be other than an assassin!" shrieked Rochefort in the pages of
La Marseillaise.
"For eighteen years now France has been held in the bloodied hands of these cutthroats who, not content to shoot down republicans in the streets, draw them into dirty traps in order to slit their throats in private. People of France, have we not had enough?"
¹¹

This seditious cry was followed, a day later, by the spectacle of Noir's funeral. Republicans wished to have the young man interred in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, on the opposite side of Paris from his home in Neuilly-sur-Seine, which would have necessitated a funeral march through the center of Paris. In the end, however, the funeral took place in Neuilly, with a tumulmous procession and phalanxes of soldiers who had been sent into the streets to preserve order. Rochefort was soon afterward jailed for inciting a riot and insulting the Imperial family; but Prince Pierre Bonaparte was likewise under lock and key, awaiting trial on a far more serious charge of murder. His trial was set for March.
*

The rapid ascent of Émile Ollivier seemed to augur well for Édouard Manet. The two men had met by chance in Florence almost twenty years earlier, after which they became traveling companions; and by the 1860s the bespectacled, muttonchopped Ollivier was a regular visitor to the soirées hosted by Eugénie Manet each Thursday evening in the Rue de Saint-Petersbourg. An intelligent and deeply cultured man, Ollivier had married the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and was a staunch champion of the operas of Richard Wagner; in later years he would publish a volume on Michelangelo. Upon coming to power in 1870 he expressed a desire to end "the contempt for taste and intelligence" that had prevailed in the arts for the previous twenty years.
¹²
To that end, on the day he took office, January 2, he deprived the Comte de Nieuwerkerke of many of his powers by creating a Ministry of Fine Arts to be headed by Maurice Richard, a political liberal and personal friend. This new Ministry would take over control of the Salon (and also, curiously enough, of the government's stud farms) from what henceforth was to be known simply as the Ministry of the Imperial Household. Nieuwerkerke would still be in charge of the Imperial museums, but all his other responsibilities had been relinquished, together with his glorious apartments in the Louvre.

With Nieuwerkerke deprived of his influence, the 1870 Salon suddenly assumed an auspicious hue for painters such as Manet. It appeared all the more promising when the new
règlement
stated that the administration would forfeit its right to appoint members to the Selection Committee: all eighteen members of the painting jury would therefore be elected by a constituency of painters who had exhibited at the Salon. Richard furthermore granted to the painting jury, instead of Chennevières, who had been dismissed from his post, the privilege of hanging the paintings in the Salon.

Manet was hoping to submit his portrait of Éva Gonzales to the new Salon. He may have had a cynical motive in offering the portrait, since most critics would surely have thought twice about making flippant and offensive remarks about the daughter of Emmanuel Gonzales, who possessed a good deal of influence and esteem as the president of the Société des Gens de Lettres. Whatever the case, Manet engrossed himself so deeply in the canvas that Marie-Cornelie Morisot, paying a visit to his studio, reported back to her daughter that Manet "has forgotten about you for the time being. Mademoiselle G. has all the virtues, all the charms, she is an accomplished woman."
¹³
At least the Morisot women had the consolation of knowing work on the canvas, which was to depict Gonzales seated before her easel, did not advance to Manet's satisfaction. "She poses every day," Berthe wrote of her rival, "and every evening her head is washed out in soft soap."
¹⁴
By September, Gonzales had sat a total of forty times for Manet, though the portrait was no nearer completion. "The head is again effaced," Berthe wrote to Edma with some satisfaction after seeing Manet at one of the Thursday soirées.
¹⁵