CHAPTER 1

The Balcony

TYPICALLY (IT WAS MANET’S PERENNIAL PROBLEM), PARTS of The Balcony don’t work. Yet what does work is so fresh, so brisk, so almost sly, that the effect is disarming—like a mild insult that, received in the right spirit, could almost be read as a flirtation. You look at the picture, and you’re not quite certain of whether Manet even wants you to believe in it. Most of it is more or less black and white: two voluminous white dresses and a man’s black jacket blended with a pitchy interior. So it’s surprising that the arresting thing about The Balcony—the thing everyone remembers—is the intense, almost sparkling effect of green. Manet used subtly different shades of it for the open window shutters, the bars of the balcony balustrade, the leaves of a plant, a neck ribbon, and a folded-up umbrella. Where the green is cool, its minty freshness is accentuated by touches of blue and purple (the man’s tie, the purple hydrangeas). Where it is warmer, its gilded glow is brought out by pale or tawny yellows (the woman’s yellow gloves).

The painting shows three adult figures on a balcony, with a fourth, younger person behind, barely visible in the interior gloom. It’s a very odd tableau. We see the two prominent standing figures, both stiff and lifeless, on a level, as if we were across the street on a balcony at the same height. The hands of the man, one of them holding a cigarette, are frozen in a gesture of surprise or hesitation, his gaze directed out over the head of the woman who stands to his left. With her gloves and umbrella, she looks directly at us. But her expression, like his, is emphatically blank. The modeling of both their faces is minimal—just dark notations (eyes, nostrils, lips) against a light ground, with almost no transitions.

The third figure, by contrast, is unforgettably vivid. With dark eyes and eyebrows and glossy black hair falling in loose ringlets to her shoulders, she has a kind of absolute presence. Her face is charged with a luster that makes everything around her shimmer, fade, and fall away, as if aware of its own insubstantiality, its insignificance. Something off to her right has caught her attention. And while it barely occurs to us to wonder what the man behind her is looking at, in her case it seems vital that we find out.

The woman is the painter Berthe Morisot.

BERTHE LIKED TO LEAN AGAINST the iron balustrade of the terrace behind her parents’ home in Passy, from where she could look out over Paris. The railing, guarding against a steep drop over large boulders, was supported by a square pilaster, on top of which stood a neoclassical stone vase. (Berthe later made several paintings of the terrace and its panoramic view.) Even in broad daylight on a clear day, the city appeared to her as a loose patchwork of grays rather than a grid of sharp lines. It was grand and vast. But like Manet’s paintings, there remained something blurred and precarious about it, something unfinished—and not just physically.

The Morisots were well-off and had impressive connections, but in the tumultuous political environment of nineteenth-century France, no social status was entirely secure. The city itself had been subject to unremitting change since 1853, when Baron Georges-Eugène Haussmann had been appointed by Napoleon III to head a major redevelopment campaign. Haussmann’s dramatic restructuring of the city had transformed it into an enormous building site. The booming and clattering sounds of demolition and construction carried up to the Morisot home, in a hamlet just off the Rue Benjamin Franklin. The family of Berthe’s mother, Cornélie, had owned a number of homes in Passy, and on the Rue Franklin specifically, since 1832. Berthe’s parents had settled in what was then still just a village on the capital’s outskirts in 1852. They had moved to the house at 16 Rue Franklin from number 12, just across a side street, in 1864, when Tiburce Morisot, Berthe’s father, was named chief counselor at the state accounting office. By then, aided by new railways, Passy had grown into an affluent suburb, a place where, as one historian put it, men might “set up the home of the family in the good air and in the semi-country, while keeping their offices in the central part of the city.” Along with fifteen other outer suburbs, Passy had been officially incorporated into the city in 1860, but it still felt like part of the countryside, with Versailles to the southwest and the Bois de Boulogne to the west. Some breezes, depending on the wind’s direction, carried city stench and construction dust, others the soothing scents of farmland and forest.

Large and square and painted white, the Morisot home commanded a view out over the city from the Chaillot foothills. One of Haussmann’s more labor-intensive projects had been to flatten the adjacent part of the hill to create the Place du Roi-de-Rome, now the Place du Trocadéro. This massive job wasn’t completed until 1869, by which time Paris was a city of 1.5 million—double what it had been at the end of the first Napoleon’s reign in 1815. It was the wealthiest, the most glamorous city in Europe. It had been known as the “City of Light” since the eighteenth century because of its prominent role in fostering the Enlightenment.

But the moniker had taken on new meaning in the 1840s and ’50s when the boulevards were lit up at night and the city flourished, as Charles Baudelaire wrote, “in the light of the gas lamps, illuminated . . . and as if drunk on it.” Gaslight allowed for the emergence of a truly nocturnal city. At sunset, twenty thousand lampposts ignited automatically, fed from fuel lines connected to subterranean gas mains. Scores of lamplighters lit another three thousand streetlights manually. These new lights could illuminate a far larger area than before—a boon to safety that also transformed Parisians’ sense of their city’s potential, enhancing the culture of spectacle for which it was already famous, and leaving giddy visitors with an impression of ineffable modernity. The capital, wrote Joachim Schloer, became “like an island of light against the surrounding darkness.”

The year after the coup d’état that established him as emperor, Napoleon III had overseen the transformation of the Bois de Boulogne into an English-style park with lakes, waterfalls, mounds, and at its northern end, a zoo. He had next worked with Haussmann on an ambitious overhaul of the old medieval city. The changes were drastic. “In every quarter,” as a contemporary guidebook for travelers put it, “at every level, Paris rises astonishingly anew.”

Throughout the years of demolition and construction, Haussmann met with the emperor almost daily. On these two men’s instructions, twenty thousand buildings were demolished and thirty thousand new ones built. Haussmann had convinced Napoleon III that Paris needed to be a center of intellectual and artistic activity, so new theaters were prioritized over factories, which were moved to the edges of the city. Paris, with its operettas, puppet shows, and café concerts became Europe’s capital of entertainment and pleasure.

A modernized market with eight new pavilions emerged at Les Halles, the so-called belly of Paris. To address what issued from the other end of the digestive process, Haussmann installed a new sewage system so impressively modern that it became a tourist attraction. Two new systems of water distribution were also introduced. One, for drinking water, relied on a new aqueduct bringing water from the Vanne River to an enormous reservoir, from which hundreds of miles of new pipes distributed water throughout the city. Another system, for washing the streets and watering the parks and gardens, brought water from the Seine and the Ourse.

Haussmann’s long, sweeping boulevards—more than forty miles of them—were an attempt to straighten out the city’s kinks, modernize its infrastructure, and scrub away its more anarchic elements. Lined with uniform buildings of cream-colored stone and new foot pavements, these long, straight streets yielded a stately sense of decorum as well as thrillingly long perspectives.

And yet the “anarchic element”—by which was meant the real lives of real people at the lower end of the economic spectrum—was not so easily swept away. For all its glamour in the eyes of foreigners, and despite almost two decades of stable rule, Paris remained riven by class tensions. Politically, it was more unstable than even its residents quite realized. Haussmann’s project was a massive stimulant to the economy, and many workers benefited. But it also severely disrupted livelihoods, neighborhood bonds, and old routines, and many people, displaced and aggrieved, passionately wanted their city back. The Latin Quarter was vibrant with the angry static of students leading precarious, improvised lives. The working poor were displaced to Belleville and Montmartre, where antigovernment, anticlerical, and antibourgeois sentiments, aired in cafés and meeting houses, were given more voice each year.

Those who hated the emperor, be they workers, political dissidents, or stifled artists, despised the heavy-handedness of the imperial aesthetic. It was in evidence everywhere—in the art favored by the Salon jury, in public statues and buildings, and in the massive, heavily ornamented form of Charles Garnier’s as yet unfinished Opéra, the facade of which had been launched, to great fanfare, at the 1867 Exposition Universelle. Begun in 1862 and described by the writer Louis Veuillot as “a monstrous fetus, conceived in nights of orgies,” the Opéra Garnier was the flagship monument of the Second Empire. But for republicans, it was the hideous centerpiece and despised symbol of what they saw as Napoleon III’s corrupt and gaudy empire.

STANDING ON THE TERRACE, Berthe could see the gleaming gold dome of Les Invalides and, farther in the distance, the recently restored Notre-Dame. Turning to the left, looking past the spire of the Church of Saint-Augustin (inaugurated just the previous year), she could make out the Batignolles district at the foot of the Butte Montmartre, about an hour’s walk away. Somewhere over there, she knew, Édouard Manet and his companions and acolytes congregated on Friday nights at the Café Guerbois, a smoky, billiards-and-beer-style venue that had become a gathering place and nerve center for Manet and his brilliant circle. Berthe envied those nights at the Guerbois, the young painters and writers, most of them republicans, spending time with Manet, the bold, uncensored talk of painting and politics.

Manet was intoxicating company. His friend, the journalist Théodore Duret, described him as “overflowing with vivacity, . . . with a gaiety, an enthusiasm, a hope, a desire to throw light on what was new, which made him very attractive.” And with his dirty-blond beard, high forehead, and swept-back hair, he was marvelous to look at. Although he dressed stylishly, he liked to disport himself casually, and he spoke with deliberate coarseness, as if shrugging off (with conscious irony) the expectations of his upper bourgeois class. Other traits, too, seemed contradictory. He was ferociously independent and at the same time disarmingly insecure; he was urbane and ironic yet earnest and sincere. Beneath his outwardly confident veneer, he was also vulnerable. His social manner could be maddening: many things seemed simply to glance off him, as if nothing could touch him. But it was entirely possible that this was a decoy and that beneath Manet’s alluringly complex surface lurked doubt, shame, and passion.

Modeling himself in no small part on the ideas of his close friend, Charles Baudelaire, Édouard thought of himself as a flâneur—a wryly detached observer of the city’s constantly changing countenance, a diviner of its hidden relations. On his wanderings, he would pop into the swank Café Tortoni on the Boulevard des Italiens, famous for its velvety ice creams, or Café de Suède, a meeting place for radicals, journalists, artists, and writers. He lived on the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, near the recently expanded train station, the Gare Saint-Lazare, with his Dutch wife Suzanne and their son Léon. It was a comfortable residence that they shared with Manet’s widowed mother, Eugénie-Désirée. The daughter of a French consul in Sweden, Eugénie-Désirée was also the goddaughter of Charles Bernadotte, Napoleon’s general, marshal, and ambassador, who was offered, then took, the Swedish crown, thereby founding the house of Bernadotte. Her husband Auguste, a high-ranking judge, had died in 1862 after a cruel period of muteness and physical paralysis brought on by advancing syphilis—the same disease that would later torment his son. Since Auguste’s death, Eugénie had gradually adapted to her new role as widow. Édouard’s affection for her was more than just filial, as Léon would later write—it was a “real obsession.” She liked to host Thursday-evening musical soirées, which Berthe and various members of the Morisot family had lately been invited to attend.

Manet’s friend Edgar Degas was another regular at these weekly soirées. The two men, mutual admirers, had lately been growing closer. They had much in common. Degas, too, was from a well-off family, although his mother, who came from a prominent Creole family in Louisiana, had died when he was thirteen, and he grew up in a household and immediate milieu of men. Degas had been educated at the best school in Paris, but he was a gifted draftsman and had chosen, with his father’s initially reluctant support, to take up art. He had a morose, ironic intelligence, little time for small talk, and a hatred of cant.

The previous winter, 1868, he had taken his easel and paints to the Manets’ Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg apartment, where Édouard and his wife had posed for a double portrait by Degas. Portraiture, at this time, was becoming ever more central to Degas’s art, but he wasn’t interested in portraiture that advertised status and family connections. Rather, he was trying to make modern, psychologically acute portraits that coolly appraised people’s characters. Degas’s marriage portrait of the Manets showed Édouard lounging on the sofa, bored, frustrated, or lost in reverie (it’s hard to tell which), and Suzanne sitting at the piano. Something about the painting bothered Édouard. Perhaps he saw it as a less-than-flattering portrayal of his wife or perhaps (and more distressingly) as a slightly too-revealing commentary on what Degas perceived as the disaffected or alienated state of his marriage. Édouard accepted the painting as a gift. But back in his studio, anger unaccountably flared, and he took a knife and sliced away half of Suzanne’s face and body. Degas, when he discovered what his friend had done, was astonished and retrieved the picture. The incident had a chilling effect on their friendship, and for a while they didn’t speak. Berthe, like everyone else, could only guess at why Édouard had done it. But she half-worried that her recent entry into their circle might have had something to do with it. Both men had been lightly flirting with her. She was stimulated by a bit of tumult and gossip, but she recoiled from open conflict.

Degas could certainly be prickly. He had an aloof, impregnable quality that she found at once admirable and off-putting. Édouard, no paragon himself, could be by turns frustratingly breezy and a little too bold. But both men had depth, talent, and palpable self-belief. And each, in his very different way, possessed a species of intelligence that she had never previously encountered. She knew instinctively that, as a painter, she had much to learn from them. She may also have sensed (as they both intuited) that she had things to teach them.

Now, thankfully, in the spring of 1869, the rift seemed to be healing. Cornélie Morisot, who had seen them together, reported that they seemed to have “patched things up.” (Degas would later make light of the affair: “How could you expect anyone to stay on bad terms with Manet?” he said.) A delightful circle had lately formed. To complement Eugénie Manet’s weekly entertainments, Degas’s widowed father also hosted musical soirées where various musicians—some of them illustrious, like the singer and guitar player Lorenzo Pagans—performed in the intimacy of his spare but elegant apartment. Berthe’s mother, meanwhile, had established reciprocal evenings at the Morisot home, to which both the Manet and Degas families had standing invitations.

Berthe envied her new friends’ freedom to roam the city. She was by no means under lock and key, but as an unmarried woman from the upper bourgeoisie, she couldn’t be seen in the kinds of places they frequented without compromising herself. So she spent many nights at home. She liked to emerge onto the balcony in the evenings as the sun set behind her. The softer light was easier on her eyes, which had lately been giving her trouble. The nature of the malady was unknown, but it had reduced her to staying indoors, with poultices over her closed lids during daylight hours.

“Here I am, trapped because of my eyes,” she wrote to her sister Edma in Brittany. “I was not expecting this and my patience is very limited.”

OUTSIDE, THE LILACS were blooming and the chestnut trees were about to burst forth, so the trouble may have been connected to spring allergies. But could it also have been related to the tears she had shed over Edma? Her sister’s departure was still fresh, and Berthe was grieving. Grief, perhaps, is too strong a word. It wasn’t as if Edma had died. She had simply married. The groom, in Edma’s case, was a naval ship’s lieutenant, Adolphe Pontillon. He happened to be an old acquaintance of Édouard. The two had befriended each other when Édouard, as a young man trying to gain admission to the naval academy, had crossed the Atlantic on a training vessel bound for Rio de Janeiro. That was twenty years ago. Manet had since become a notorious painter, while Pontillon was still in the navy. His wedding to Edma took place at the town hall in Passy on March 9, 1869.

According to Berthe’s biographer Anne Higonnet, one of the witnesses was the statesman Adolphe Thiers, a friend of Edma’s and Berthe’s parents (since his name is not on the marriage certificate, he may have been just a guest). Three decades earlier, as minister of the interior serving under King Louis-Philippe, Thiers had taken on a silk weavers’ (canuts) revolt in Lyon, the second in three years. Workers had erected barricades across the city, storming army barracks and an arsenal and turning parts of the city into fortified enclaves. Thiers, a patient man, made a calculated decision to withdraw his troops and station them around Lyon. He ordered artillery to shell the city, then sent his soldiers back in with instructions to methodically retake the areas controlled by insurgents using cannons, explosives, bullets, and bayonets—whatever it took. The tactics worked. The revolt was suppressed. But hundreds of Lyonnais were killed in several massacres—people referred to those few days as “Bloody Week”—and the uprising captured the imagination of some of France’s greatest writers, including Honoré de Balzac, Victor Hugo, and George Sand. (Sand not only attended the 1835 trial of the rebels but had an affair with the trial advocate, Michel de Bourges.) The Canut revolts, as they became known, would inspire a cast of far-left political thinkers, among them Louis Blanqui, Karl Marx, and Friedrich Engels.

After exchanging vows, Edma and Adolphe Pontillon moved to the harbor town of Lorient, where Pontillon was stationed. Berthe, twenty-eight and still single, missed her sister desperately. It was the first time in their lives that they had been separated. Her mother noticed that Berthe, as she pined for Edma, was eating less and had fallen into helpless lassitude. The Salon, where Manet’s The Balcony would be revealed to the public, would be opening in a few short weeks. Berthe hoped to be there. But the thought of attending without Edma by her side was too awful to contemplate. Every time she tried to visualize the day, wavelets of nerves convulsed and soured her stomach.

The Salon was an exhibition held each summer in the vast halls of the Palais de l’Industrie, situated between the Seine and the Champs-Élysées. A vast and spectacular showcase of contemporary art that an appointed jury deemed worthy of display, it drew crowds of hundreds of thousands as well as fervent press interest. If your work was accepted and you were lucky with its placement, you stood to gain a great deal. There were reviews and illustrations in every Paris daily newspaper and in the weeklies, too. Certain pictures sustained society gossip for months.

The Salon was not supposed to be a commercial exhibition, but the publicity it generated provided the best opportunity for painters to find clients. Succeeding there was almost the only practical way for a young artist to forge a viable career, so every year painters and sculptors carefully planned their submissions. If you had been awarded a distinction at two or more previous Salons, or if you were already a member of the government-sponsored Académie des Beaux-Arts (men only), you could exhibit whatever you chose without submitting it to the jury. Otherwise, you had to submit, and hope.

A portion of the jury, varying in size from year to year, was selected by the state. The remainder of the places on the jury were elected—by a circle of artists who had previously won honors. For all these reasons, the jury skewed conservative, and painters who wanted to stir things up—to paint modern subjects instead of old myths and Bible stories, for instance, or to complicate the established hierarchies of genre, or simply to paint in fresh, unconventional styles—were repeatedly denied and frustrated.

Stimulated by what they read and heard, many people who attended the Salon went looking for things to mock or jeer. And for the better part of a decade, as Berthe was aware, they had rarely had to look further than the latest concoction by Manet.

BERTHE HAD FIRST MET Édouard in 1868, in the galleries at the Louvre—one of the few public places where painters of both sexes could freely mingle as peers. Berthe was there with her painter friend, Rosalie Riesener, in the great gallery devoted to Rubens’s Marie de’ Medici cycle. She was copying Rubens’s Exchange of the Two Princesses, focusing all her attention on the figure of the naiad in the foreground, when she heard voices and footfalls approaching. She turned to see a familiar face. It was Henri Fantin-Latour, a painter in his late thirties known for his refined and harmonious flower paintings. Berthe had first met Fantin in the Louvre almost a decade earlier. More recently, he had finished a full-length portrait of his close friend, Édouard. Before Edma’s engagement to Pontillon, Berthe had heard a rumor that Fantin was smitten by her sister. He wasn’t the only one.

Fantin now introduced Berthe to Édouard. He had already heard about the Morisot sisters and had even seen their landscapes, both at the annual Salon and at the gallery of Alfred Cadart. They were fresh and sensitive, with shades of Camille Corot, the elder statesman of French landscape painting. Berthe had obviously seen Édouard’s paintings, too (his notoriety would have made them hard to avoid), but she wasn’t particularly interested in secondhand opinions of them. In a letter to Edma, she described the effect that Édouard’s work had on her: they “produce the impression,” she wrote, “of a wild or even a somewhat unripe fruit. I do not in the least dislike them.”

Having been introduced, Berthe and Édouard got to talking. Their January birthdays were one week apart, but he was nine years her senior. We don’t know what they spoke about. The journalist Paul Alexis would later describe Manet as “one of the five or six men of our present-day Parisian society who still knows how to talk to a woman.” (“The rest of us,” he added, “are too bitter, too distracted, too deep in our obsessions: our forced gallantries make us resemble bears dancing the polka.”) Berthe, for her part, conversed easily. She combined a forthright intelligence with something disarmingly vulnerable. She moved with the physical confidence of a painter, accustomed to wielding brushes and palettes and to wearing paint-splattered smocks. She noticed Édouard’s blondish beard, his high forehead with its swept-back hair, and his generous, laughing eyes. Perhaps one of them commented on the Rubens in front of them, or on Rubens’s huge influence on Édouard’s hero Delacroix (a close friend of Rosalie’s father), or on the nearby Madonna of the Rabbit, a lovely painting by Titian that both Rubens, in the seventeenth century, and Édouard, when he was still a student, had copied. Or perhaps Berthe and Édouard spoke about things entirely unrelated to art. Regardless, the space between them seemed unaccountably charged, and for several minutes, it was as if Fantin-Latour and Riesener did not exist.

LOOKING BACK MANY YEARS LATER, Berthe reflected on her state of mind in the 1860s, prior to this first meeting with Édouard. “I’d like to know what I was thinking when I was 20,” she wrote. “I think I was very silly, and yet I identified very much with Shakespeare’s women; in any case, I had a wild desire to taste life, which is always attractive.” It’s clear, from the way Édouard later painted her, that he perceived in her precisely this desire to “taste” life. Her vitality amplified her attractiveness. Picking up on her intriguing nervous energy, Édouard saw all kinds of potential in it. “I agree with you,” he wrote, in a mischievous mood, to a mutual friend soon after meeting her. “The Morisot sisters are charming. It’s too bad they’re not men. Nonetheless, they might, as women, serve the cause of painting by each marrying an academician and sowing strife in the camp of those old fellows.” Edma was impressive, but it was Berthe to whom Édouard was really drawn. With her dark eyes—Spanish, he liked to think—and fine features, she could, he thought, have come straight out of a painting by Goya. And as soon as this idle notion crossed the scrim of his painter’s mind, he decided to make it true, more or less: He asked her to pose for a painting that would be an homage to Goya.

The story goes—and it may be true—that Manet wanted to paint The Balcony after glimpsing people gathered on a balcony during his family’s summer vacation at Boulogne in 1868. But he was undoubtedly also thinking of Goya’s Majas on a Balcony, which shows two attractive young women seeming to confer as they look out at the viewer. Both women, in the Goya, are courtesans. Two threatening men lurk in the shadows behind them, dressed in capes and cocked hats.

Goya had been dead for forty years, but he was all the rage in Paris in the late 1860s. By this time, Édouard was entering the final stages of a decade-long infatuation with all things Spanish. He was particularly besotted by the Spanish painters Diego Velázquez and Goya. Writers and artists of the generation before Édouard—figures like Victor Hugo and Théophile Gautier, Delacroix and Courbet—had all helped inspire his Spanish obsession. Gautier, in his widely read accounts of traveling in Spain, had romanticized Spanish poverty, marveling at how “the least beggar is draped in his coat like a Roman emperor in his purple.” Édouard loved this idea. He had read both Gautier’s travel writing and his art criticism, in which the older man of letters had ardently championed Goya. Gautier’s descriptions of bullfights dovetailed in Édouard’s imagination with Goya’s paintings and etchings of the same subject; they would inspire many future paintings, including Manet’s Incident at a Bullfight and Mademoiselle V . . . in the Costume of an Espada. Also inspired by Goya’s portrayals, the writer Alfred de Musset, in a youthful account of his own travels in Spain, played up the special allure of Spanish women. When de Musset’s lover, George Sand, had sat for a portrait by Delacroix, the artist first showed her a copy of Goya’s Los Caprichos, whereupon she, too, immediately fell under the Spanish artist’s spell. And when Sand and de Musset parted for the final time, Sand fantasized about being transformed into one of Goya’s women in order to win him back.

Delacroix and other Romantic painters were not only responding to Goya’s technique. They were roused, too, by the political dimension in his work, and they wanted to apply Goya’s explicit, often sardonic condemnation of injustice and folly to French society. They were especially affected by the idea of Goya as an active participant in the worlds he depicted: he was not just an aloof observer.

So if Édouard was susceptible to what he saw as Berthe’s “Spanish look,” it was mixed up with all this. Majas on a Balcony had gone on display in 1838 when a Spanish gallery opened at the Louvre. Baron Isidore Taylor, a philanthropist, artist, dramatist, soldier, traveler, and pioneer of Romanticism who had come to France with his English father and Belgian mother during the Revolution, created the gallery at the behest of France’s hispanophile king Louis-Philippe, and he had acquired the painting directly from Goya’s son. He also acquired Old Women (Time), the arresting work that Goya painted as a pendant to Majas on a Balcony, transforming the pretty young majas in the first picture into the haggard and conniving old women they were destined (in Goya’s scathingly satirical imagination) to become. Artists flocked to see the works that Taylor had brought back from Spain. They remained on view until January 1849, after Louis-Philippe was dethroned. Édouard’s friend, the poet Baudelaire, lamented the loss. “The Spanish museum,” he had written in 1846, “had the effect of increasing the volume of general ideas that you had to have about art.” Not only that, but it had, he claimed, a pacific effect: “A museum of foreign art is an international place of fellowship, where two peoples, observing and studying each other in a more relaxed fashion, come to know each other and fraternize without arguing.”

Goya might have smiled wryly at this notion. A witness to looting, rape, starvation, and pitiless cycles of violence, he knew more than most about “international friendship.”

One of the things France’s progressive artists liked about Spanish art was its refusal to idealize. Unlike the artists of the Italian Renaissance, the great Spanish artists were not in thrall to standards of beauty and decorum dictated by Greece and Rome. “No other nation has borrowed less from antiquity,” as the art critic Charles Blanc put it. Édouard responded powerfully to this willingness to see what other art traditions shied away from. Old Women (Time), for instance, was as far from the French classical ideal as it was possible to get. Édouard also liked the way not only Goya but especially Ribera and Velázquez projected dignity onto individuals from all classes. It fed into his instinctive egalitarianism, his feeling for justice, his republicanism.

THROUGHOUT THE 1860S, Édouard painted one arresting canvas after another, all in a distinctive style that was brisk and unfussy, sensuous, witty, and self-aware. He dispensed with a lot of what his contemporaries had assumed to be necessary to great art—not just high-minded subject matter and clear narratives (Édouard’s subjects were more often nonchalantly ironic, if not downright bizarre) but also subtle tonal transitions, richly conceived space, and licked-smooth surfaces, with all evidence of the brush concealed. Édouard’s works, by contrast, were flat, like posters, and brushy—you could see the paint textures, which had a brisk, sensuous gleam. He loved to place bright, light-reflecting surfaces right up against black shadows with no gradations in between. To his young admirers, his style looked dashing and modern. His art was probing, poetic, allergic to cliché, and open to experiment. But most others noticed everything that was missing: the patient buildup from dark to light, the anodyne displays of technical skill, the kitschy sentiments. And it incensed them. Critics thought his paintings looked crude, slapdash, and vulgar. They read his efforts, moreover, as callow provocations, as insults. He was assailed with abuse.

All this was hard, not only on Édouard but also on his family and on those who treasured his friendship. And there were many. Édouard was congenial, he was charming. He seemed to know instinctively how to insinuate himself into the most volatile, susceptible parts of people. But to the extent that he realized he had this knack, he never exploited it. Instead, he bolstered his friends’ confidence. His manner could be breezy and debonair, but he was stubbornly committed to his course. His confidence was contagious. And yet he never seems to have felt himself on solid ground. The up-and-down lurches of his artistic career made him flighty and self-doubting. He craved applause. More often, however, he aroused jeers.

Édouard’s first submission to the Salon, in 1859, The Absinthe Drinker, had revealed the impact of the Spanish painters on him. It was a self-consciously modern take on Velázquez and on what Gautier had called “the wretches in the teeming ranks of the underclass.” The Salon rejected it. Two years later, in his next attempt to win over the jury, he made the Spanish connection more explicit. The Spanish Singer—a young guitar-wielding man with conspicuously battered shoes—combined Realism with Romantic appeal. That was enough to earn high-spirited praise from the influential Gautier: “Caramba!” wrote the critic in his review of the Salon. Velázquez, he opined, would have saluted Édouard’s guitar-wielding songster with a friendly wink, “and Goya would ask him for a light for his papelito,” his hand-rolled cigarette. This was precisely the lineage in which Édouard craved to be included. The painting was given an honorable mention and moved down to a more prominent place on the Salon wall.

The surprise success of The Spanish Singer made Édouard suddenly magnetic to a coterie of young artists looking for alternatives to the stultifying conventions promoted by the Salon. They began to watch his every move. “Manet has his admirers, quite fanatic ones,” observed Gautier. “Already some satellites are circling around this new star and describing orbits of which he is the center.” Further tributes by Édouard to both Velázquez and Goya soon followed. When a troupe of Spanish dancers came to Paris in the second half of 1862, Édouard—a lover, like Baudelaire, of crowds and crowd scenes—somehow convinced them all to pose for him. He painted a portrait of the troupe’s star, Lola de Valence, in costume. Both pictures were open homages to Velázquez. To Édouard, the Spanish court painter’s brushwork, so fresh and vital, was the perfect antidote to the labored finish and sooty chiaroscuro of other old masters. “Now that’s good clean work,” he said when he saw Gathering of Gentlemen (a painting then believed to be by Velázquez). “It puts you off the brown sauce school,” he added.

Édouard had not even been to Spain at this point, let alone seen a bullfight. (They were banned in France under Napoleon III.) But the Spanish vogue had by now so soaked into French culture that as he embarked on his broader project—to sweep away the “brown sauce school”—he could take for granted a certain familiarity with Goya and Velázquez. He owned a copy of Goya’s Disasters of War etchings and had begun to look closely at Goya’s Tauromaquia, his series of etchings of bullfights. Between 1862 and 1864, he made a series of indelible works portraying bullfighters and bullfights, all informed by an improvised, playful quality that knowingly blurred reality and make-believe. Neither the critics nor the public knew quite what to make of them. Perhaps the most bizarre of his efforts was Mademoiselle V . . . in the Costume of an Espada (1862)—a depiction of his new favorite model, Victorine Meurent, dressed in a bullfighter’s costume and posing in front of a bullfighting scene straight out of Goya. Was it a sly allusion, also, to Napoleon III’s wife, Empress Eugénie? In many ways the power behind the imperial throne, Eugénie was herself a Spanish aristocrat and an aficionado of bullfighting. Celebrated for her extravagant costumes, she occasionally liked to appear at events in masculine outfits.

Throughout the 1860s, Meurent had been Édouard’s most important model. Nicknamed “Le Crevette” (the Shrimp) because of her red hair and small stature, she had begun modeling at the age of sixteen in the studio of his teacher Thomas Couture. (She may also have studied painting in a separate studio reserved by Couture for women.) By the time Meurent arrived at the studio, Édouard had left. He most likely met her through the painter Alfred Stevens, and as soon as he did, he asked her to model for him. Meurent first posed for The Street Singer, and she went on to pose for some of his greatest, most notorious canvases. To the 1863 Salon, Édouard submitted Mademoiselle V . . . in the Costume of an Espada, The Luncheon on the Grass, and a painting of Édouard’s brother, in which Gustave wore the same Spanish bullfighter’s costume worn by Meurent in Mademoiselle V.

This nonchalant attitude toward roles and identity was typical of the way Édouard worked in those years. He was like the director of an amateur theater troupe made up of friends, family, and anyone he could rope in. They wore their assigned costumes with varying degrees of conviction, addressing an audience that was assumed to be in on the game. But wrongly, it turned out—all three paintings were rejected. The jury was unusually brutal that year, knocking back fully two-thirds of the submissions. The upshot was an uproar in the artistic community. So to placate the aggrieved artists, Napoleon III sanctioned an exhibition of all the rejected paintings—the so-called Salon des Refusés. Thousands came to see this now legendary display of the “rejected” on the first day alone. But the public came less in sympathy, it seems, than in a spirit of schadenfreude, and they directed much of their mirth at Manet. His three paintings certainly stood out: they were as vivid and bold in style as they were bewildering in subject matter. But audiences were also following the lead of Napoleon III who, on his official visit to the exhibition, paused in front of The Luncheon on the Grass, which depicted Meurent seated freshly naked (her clothes make a pile in the picture’s lower left corner) at a bizarre picnic in the company of two fully clothed men (possibly art students with mischief in mind). The emperor made a gesture of moral revulsion and moved silently on.

OLYMPIA, MANET’S MOST FAMOUS painting, was exhibited at the Salon of 1865, although he had begun painting it in 1863—the same year as The Luncheon on the Grass. It was another portrayal of Meurent, this time playing the role of a courtesan. The effect was almost shockingly immediate, but at the same time it was lightly ironized, as if Édouard had painted a nude, then placed it in quotation marks. Meurent wears a black neck ribbon, earrings, and a bracelet. A flouncy pink flower is tucked behind her ear. A satin slipper dangles suggestively from the end of one foot; the other has fallen off. Meurent’s starkly undifferentiated skin is pale and unblemished, as in a photograph taken in strong light, the contours of her figure darkly outlined against the light background. A black cat comically arches its back at her feet, and a Black maid, modeled by Laure—family name unknown—who lived in the Batignolles district ten minutes from Manet, presents her with a bouquet of parti-colored flowers. These—in the fiction Édouard knowingly constructed—are meant to be read as a gift from a client.

Olympia’s art-historical source was Venus of Urbino, Titian’s painting of a Renaissance courtesan posing as the goddess of love. But in literature, its source was “The Jewels,” a poem by Baudelaire. A few years earlier “The Jewels” had been one of six poems snipped by government censors from Baudelaire’s The Flowers of Evil for being, in essence, too sexy. (“The darling one was naked,” the poet had written, “and, knowing my wish / had kept only the regalia of her jewelry.”) Large-scale female nudes were commonplace in nineteenth-century French art. But Olympia was painted in a way that resembled nothing previously exhibited at the Salon. You could look at it and concoct a cute little story about a glamorous courtesan if you wanted. But Manet made sure that you would also see Victorine Meurent and Laure, two identifiable, contemporary women knowingly playing parts. By drawing attention to the fiction’s flimsiness, he exposed the mechanisms of belief as contingent, and this had the effect of making his models, as co-conspirators in the game of creation, more solidly real.

No nineteenth-century painting had a more explosive effect. To people who thought they recognized good painting, Olympia looked unfinished or, as Morisot had written, “unripe.” Yet its impact was unignorable—and sharply erotic, in ways that got mixed up in more prurient minds with filth and death. One critic, Jean Ravenel, described Olympia as “fatigued” and “corrupted.” Meurent’s expression, he wrote, had “the sourness of someone prematurely aged.” Four critics directly compared the picture to an image of a cadaver in the morgue.

This strange association may have been connected to the fact that a gleaming new morgue had opened in Paris the previous year. Situated on the Quai Napoléon on the Île de la Cité, it was bigger and had better sanitation than the old morgue, which had been a magnet for rats. The new morgue was part of Napoleon III’s attempt to make Paris cleaner and more efficient. It featured a Salle du Public—an exhibition room where cadavers were laid out, behind a glass partition, on two rows of black marble tables, naked but for a piece of leather covering their loins. Here visitors could come to identify them. The tables were inclined toward the viewer and cooled by running water. An average of two bodies came in each day, most of them men, many hideously disfigured. About a third were suicides by drowning, their bloated bodies scooped from the Seine. Others had shot or hanged themselves. Some were murder victims, but a good number had simply expired on the street from hunger, untreated illness, or exposure. The bodies would stay on display for three days unless they were claimed. Most never were. But the Salle du Public had turned the morgue into a macabre tourist site. “A perpetual stream of men, women, and children is running in and out of this horrible exhibition,” wrote the author of a contemporary travelers’ guide, “and there they stand gazing at the hideous objects before them, usually with great indifference.”

People streamed in and out of 1865 Salon, hoping, it seemed, to have their sensibilities offended. Their desires were fulfilled when they saw Olympia. Édouard usually loved attention; the positive reaction to his Street Singer, four years earlier, had been a massive boost, and he’d fully expected that, as his ambition grew, more praise would shower upon him, vindicating his decision to become an artist against his parents’ wishes. He had wanted his art to sparkle with freshness, as if he had opened the window of a stale-smelling bedroom onto a bright autumn morning. He hoped that his paintings would set him apart as an authentic original—a new Delacroix, a Courbet, someone genuinely transformative. He liked being provocative—Courbet had set a stimulating example in that way—and he didn’t mind some controversy.

But Olympia’s reception at the Salon was like an anxiety dream unfolding in slow motion, and he was quite unprepared for it. The volume, the intensity, and the sheer ill will had something lurid about it, and it almost overwhelmed him. In the public imagination, Manet’s name came to be surrounded by the sour, dead odor of a cheap spectacle, a murder plot that everyone knew by heart.

To get away from the Olympia scandal, Édouard made his first trip to Spain. Departing Paris by train at the end of August 1865, he went via Bordeaux and Bayonne. After crossing the border at Irún and traveling through Burgos (where he saw an El Greco in the famous cathedral) and Valladolid, he arrived in Madrid. The journey took more than thirty-six hours. He made his first visit to the Prado on September 1, 1865, and all but fell to his knees. His infatuation with Velázquez, in particular, reached a new peak of intensity during this trip. He described the court painter’s full-length portrait of the jester Pablo de Valladolid as “possibly the most extraordinary piece of painting that has ever been done. . . . The background disappears, there’s nothing but air around the fellow, who is all in black and appears alive.” In the same letter, he raved not only about Las Meninas, Velázquez’s masterpiece, but also about his two paintings of philosophers and his several portraits of court dwarfs—“one in particular seen sitting full face with his hands on his hips, a choice picture for a true connoisseur.” And then there was Goya. What Édouard had seen of his work on his first day in Madrid didn’t greatly impress him. But over the next few days he saw other Goyas, including his portrait of the “Duchess of Alba dressed as a maja”—“a stunning invention,” as he wrote to his friend Zacharie Astruc—and love bloomed.

Still, traveling in Spain at the end of summer was exhausting. The heat was oppressive, and the food, he complained, didn’t agree with him. So after drinking his fill in the museums, he returned to Paris earlier than planned, refreshed and ready to paint on. He had discovered “the fulfillment of my own ideals in painting,” he wrote to Astruc, “and the sight of those masterpieces gave me enormous hope and courage.”

Two years later, shortly after the publication of a monograph on Goya, a painted copy of the Spaniard’s Majas on a Balcony appeared at an auction in Paris. So Goya’s portrayals of courtesans on a balcony were certainly sluicing around in Édouard’s mind as he looked for a new composition to submit to the Salon. When he encountered Berthe—with her dark eyes and, to his highly suggestible mind, her strikingly “Spanish” look—he knew he had to embark on the painting that would become The Balcony.

WE DON’T KNOW IF Berthe agreed to Édouard’s proposal to sit for him right away. They had only just met, and the invitation likely presented her with a dilemma. She was no bohemian artist’s model, after all; she was an unmarried woman in her late twenties, from an extremely well-connected family. Moreover, she wanted to be taken seriously as a painter, not as a passive model and (inevitably) a subject of gossip. For a woman in her position, to model for any artist—let alone an artist as notorious as Manet—was to run a grave risk. At stake was something more serious than gossip: it was reputation. If she made a poor decision, Berthe might not only embarrass her family but compromise her chance to marry.

The stakes were made higher by evolving social realities that were unique to Second Empire Paris. Under Napoleon III, the city had become a magnet for pleasure-seekers. Stark economic inequalities and high demand had led tens of thousands of Parisian women into various forms of prostitution. The government made attempts to regulate the sex industry, hoping to limit the spread of venereal disease (especially syphilis), but their efforts had largely backfired. Haussmann’s remodeling of the city forced streetwalkers and brothels to move from the Palais-Royal area to the new center, around the unfinished Opéra Garnier.

On the unfinished building’s facade, a sculpture by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, commissioned by Garnier, was unveiled. It depicted an upright male figure with angel’s wings surrounded by a tight ring of lurching naked bacchantes. Critics attacked it as vulgar, even disgraceful. The dancers’ grinning, mobile expressions and ungainly body postures were compared to a ring of delirious dancers from the Opéra’s ballet corps, stripped of their costumes. At the end of August 1869, after an evening flare-up of rioting in working-class Montmartre, someone threw black ink over the sculpture, which set off a sustained uproar in the press. Artists and a few critics protested the vandalism, but others continued to decry the sculpture’s indecency. Against a backdrop of rumbling class tensions, exacerbated by the late summer heat, the sculpture was interpreted as a representation of women, likely from Montmartre, dancing the “can-can,” in those days a freer, wilder, and openly lubricious set of improvised movements in which women flashed glimpses of their genitals by raising their skirts and petticoats while kicking up their legs. So the dance was associated not only with prostitution and “wanton women” but with a still more threatening form of energy: the potential anarchy and violence of the working class.

Just as unremitting social turbulence had scrambled old assumptions about class in Paris, creating subtle forms of panic, the explosion in sex work stirred up social perils for all women, not just sex workers. Registering as a sex worker in Paris involved submitting to regular medical inspections and following strictly mandated guidelines. The requirements were so onerous and humiliating that most opted out. So the system broke down, and freelance mercenary sex—much of it targeted at tourists—exploded. Women who worked in low-paying jobs as souvenir and flower sellers, department store assistants, waitresses, tobacconists, ballet dancers, and artists’ models (like Meurent) were presumed to be also available for sex, and there were so many subtle varieties of pay-for-sex relations that it became confusing. Unmarried bourgeois women were severely constrained, because of a class imperative, to hold the line against this rising tide of social and sexual ambiguity. A bourgeois woman could not risk being mistaken for a freelance prostitute, so it was essential that she not allow herself to arouse suspicion. Impediments arose everywhere. It was hard for women to work, to speak freely, to dress comfortably, to socialize unguardedly, or even simply to be seen enjoying themselves in public. On the scale of permissible activities, accepting an invitation to pose for any artist, let alone one with a reputation like Manet’s, was somewhere near the bottom.

This code of decorum should have caused Berthe to decline Édouard’s invitation. But there were two loopholes. The first was Berthe’s status as a dedicated painter who had already shown at the Salon. This gave her a legitimate pretext to accept. Artists were always painting fellow artists. The second was that her family and Édouard’s had much in common and enjoyed similar social standing. The proviso, of course, was that, were Berthe to pose for Édouard, she must be suitably attired and always chaperoned. When the sittings for The Balcony began, it was Berthe’s mother who performed this role.

The sessions were held in Édouard’s studio on the Rue Guyot, up the Avenue de Wagram from the Arc de Triomphe, in the Batignolles district. They had been thrilling at first. Édouard was great company. Just being around him, you felt connected to something bigger, riskier. When he got on a roll, he was hilarious. But he was also wayward and needy. He could be calm and amiable one moment, then suddenly ardent the next. The painting itself took months rather than weeks to complete. The longer Édouard worked on it, the more insecure he seemed to grow.

Berthe was fascinated by the fact that he made no preparatory drawings. Instead, he painted directly onto the canvas. Was this the source of his problems? she wondered. Because there were problems! In agonies of indecision, Édouard changed his conception of the picture several times. The woman standing beside Berthe in the painting was the twenty-two-year-old violinist Fanny Claus, the best friend of Édouard’s wife Suzanne. They often played music together. Édouard had originally thought to make a portrait of her alone; but then he met Berthe. And as the idea for a painting based on the Goya took hold (Berthe rests her forearm on the railing in exactly the manner of one of the majas in the Goya), he decided to paint in the two male figures, too.

The painter Antoine Guillemet, who had studied under some of the same teachers as Berthe and Edma, stands immediately behind the two women, looking stunned and slightly idiotic. Édouard had made him pose for fifteen sessions and still couldn’t get him right. Behind him, lost almost in shadow, stands young Léon, Édouard’s son by Suzanne. The figure of Claus, thought Guillemet, was “atrocious.” But both models were so sick of posing on their feet that in Édouard’s presence, they declared the picture perfect. “There’s nothing more to be done,” they insisted. Eventually, Édouard acquiesced. The Balcony was deemed complete. It would soon be revealed at the Salon.