The Judgment of Paris (55 page)

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.
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One hungry Parisian pronounced cats "a very dainty dish" when broiled with pistachio nuts, olives, gherkins and pimentos.
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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."
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Another diner pronounced it "excellent—something between frog and rabbit."
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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.
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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.
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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."
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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 materials 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.
³³
He 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.

To conserve fuel for inflating balloons, gas supplies to all buildings in Paris had been stopped at the end of November, plunging the cafés and residences into a darkness that could be relieved only by candles. Coal grew scarce as snow fell and the temperatures plummeted to as low as -14 Celsius (7 degrees Fahrenheit) during what became the coldest winter in living memory. Sentries froze to death on the ramparts, hundreds of National Guardsmen suffered frostbite, and ice floes drifted down the Seine. People began burning their doors and furniture, and even their pianos, as firewood. Soon the city was denuded of hundreds of trees, including the chestnuts and plane trees along the Champs-Élysées, as gangs of desperate, frigid citizens appeared in the streets carrying stepladders and wielding axes. Smallpox raged through the city, claiming hundreds of lives.

Food became ever more scarce. "I shan't even talk about the food," Manet wrote to Suzanne on Christmas, the hundredth day of the siege.
³⁵
The bread, made from a barely palatable mixture of rye, rice and straw, was said to taste like a Panama hat. But an enticingly different fare was available for those with both money and venturesome tastes. At a butcher shop in the Boulevard Haussmann the proprietor, a Monsieur Deboos, was selling, according to Edmond de Goncourt, "all sorts of weird remains," including "the skinned trunk of young Pollux, the elephant at the Zoo."
³⁶
Castor and Pollux, the two elephants in the Jardin des Plantes, had been cruelly and bunglingly dispatched with a
chassepot
firing steel-tipped .33-caliber bullets. Elephants had long been the most esteemed and well-loved residents at the Jardin des Plantes. They were fed honey cakes known as
plaisirs
by visitors to the zoo, and were said to enjoy the singing of patriotic songs. Their keeper, Monsieur Devisme, had protested at the execution (which was watched by several famous big-game hunters and other interested Parisians) and afterward fell sobbing into the snow, hugging the trunk of one of his dead charges. Elephant steak promptly found its way onto the plate of Victor Hugo, who was further satisfying his gastronomic curiosity by tucking into bear and antelope (he complained that horse meat gave him indigestion).
³⁷
Wealthy Parisians such as Hugo were able to choose from an extensive menu of zebra, reindeer, yak and kangaroo, all from the Jardin des Plantes, the adjunct of the National Museum of Natural History that had been founded in 1793 to house animals regarded as "national treasures."

But horses provided the main source of meat for Parisians as the siege continued. Some 65,000 of them were butchered for food, so many that Manet observed there were "hardly any carriages now; all the horses are being eaten."
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Meissonier had to fight to keep his own horses—Lady Coningham and a second horse named Blocus—out of the abbatoir and off the menu. When both animals were requisitioned for food, he appealed to the highest authority, Général Trochu. "I beg that my poor horses, which are useful to me for my military duty, and indispensible for the completion of my unfinished pictures, may not be taken from me," he pleaded, "except in the case of the direst extremity." He added that one of the horses was "particularly dear to me—my mare Coningham. She is an old friend who carried me all day at Solferino."
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For the meantime, both horses were spared.

After smallpox and starvation came pneumonia. "It's getting tough," Manet admitted to Suzanne three days after Christmas. "Many weak people have succumbed."
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His own health had begun to decline. He had been sleeping in straw while on guard duty along the ramparts, and the ankle-deep mud had given him, in all probability, a case of trench foot, since as early as October he was complaining about his feet and wearing Suzanne's cotton socks for protection. He had taken to keeping himself warm—and creating a kind of bulletproof vest for protection against Prussian bullets—by stuffing hundreds of layers of silk paper down the front of his Guardsman's cloak.
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But he was finding military life both demanding and dangerous. At the end of November he had been present at a fierce battle fought at Champigny, eight miles southeast of the center of Paris. "What a bacchanalia!" he wrote to Suzanne. "The shells went off over our heads from all sides."
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He was, understandably, badly shaken by the sight of so much bloodshed, since the French suffered massive casualties, with one regiment alone losing 400 men.
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He decided to leave the artillery in which he had been serving and find another, preferably safer, position. Fortunately for him, in December he was promoted from enlisted man to the rank of lieutenant and transferred to the Général Staff, which was based at the Élysée Palace. His benefactor—and his new commanding officer—was none other than Lieutenant-Colonel Meissonier.
⁴⁴

Nothing indicates that Manet and Meissonier knew one another personally, or ever had met, before 1870. According to Manet's friend Théodore Duret, "There had never passed between them the least relation, occupying as they did the two opposite poles of art."
⁴⁵
However, Duret was writing thirty-six years after the fact, and relations may well have passed between them in the 1860s. Manet and Meissonier shared a number of friends, including Delacroix, Daubigny and Philippe Burty. Furthermore, the pair of them may have worked together on the petition presented by Manet to the Comte de Walewski in 1863. But even if they had never met, Meissonier was well aware of both Manet's paintings and his reputation as an artist. Between 1864 and 1870 he served on four different Salon juries to which Manet had offered his work, including the controversial Jury of Assassins in 1866. Though four of his eight paintings had been rejected from those Salons, Manet is unlikely to have held Meissonier responsible for his misfortunes. He saw his persecutors elsewhere, in characters such as Nieuwerkerke and Chennevières, the outspoken jurors Jules Breton and Édouard Dubufe, critics like Gautier and Albert Wolff, and even the censor at the Dépôt Légal who had forbidden the printing of
The Execution of Maximilian.

Still, Manet must have been rankled by the older painter's success, which threw into a dispiritingly sharp relief his own unhappy career. As Duret pointed out, the relationship between the two men in the National Guard was a vastly unequal one: "Military service brought them suddenly together, and put the one, a young and combative artist, under the orders of the other, in his full glory and superior in age and rank." Yet their service together does not seem to have been marked by too great an animosity. Manet, in his letters to Suzanne, made no complaints about his new commanding officer, though in Duret's account Meissonier was guilty of a lordly self-regard (a believable enough complaint) that supposedly left his junior officer feeling "very ruffled." Manet resented how Meissonier treated him "with a kind of polite formality from which, however, any idea of confraternity was banished." No opportunity arose for the two men to talk about "Art with a capital A," since Duret claimed that Meissonier "never showed an awareness that Manet was a painter."
⁴⁶
Meissonier's lofty indifference must have been extremely galling to a man who dominated conversations at the Café Guerbois with his sarcastic wit and luxuriated in his reputation as the leader of the group of younger artists who clustered around him. Manet exacted his revenge, according to Antonin Proust, by showing scorn for the sketches that Meissonier, the obsessive doodler, produced on scraps of paper during meetings at the Élysée Palace—"something that strongly chagrined the painter of
The Campaign of France?'
Proust claimed, "but amused his shrewder neighbors at the table."
⁴⁷

Manet soon had more to worry about than Meissonier's haughty disregard: he was painfully ill-equipped for his duties on the Général Staff, which required him to ride a horse. While Meissonier was a superbly adept horseman, Manet had little experience in the saddle, with the result that within days of taking up his new position he was suffering from one more discomfort to go with the cold and the hunger. "For the past two days I've had to stay in my room," he wrote to Suzanne early in January 1871. "Riding horseback has given me piles, and with the abominable cold we are having here, one must look after one's health."
⁴⁸

Conditions soon became even more disagreeable. For the previous four months, long Prussian trains had been pushing steadily westward from the Rhine, their carriages laden with hundreds of tons of cannon and shot. Included among the Prussian ordnance were Krupp's massive doomsday weapons as well as heavy cannons with nine-inch calibers and 300-pound mortars. The weight and mass of these projectiles far surpassed anything ever used in military history, even at the siege of Sebastopol. Finally, on January 5, all of these massive guns had been rolled into position on the heights south of Paris. "We shall soon be at the mercy of those savages," Meissonier bitterly observed.
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CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO