CHAPTER 11

The Siege Ends

BY THE TIME THE GERMAN EMPIRE WAS DECLARED AT Versailles on January 18, Moltke and Bismarck were openly at loggerheads, and the king—now to be referred to as the Kaiser—was forced to act as referee. His intervention humiliated Moltke at exactly the moment when the government in Paris was preparing a third and final grand sortie. The exercise took place on January 18 and 19—and was all but designed for failure. The Red Clubs in Belleville and Montmartre had been demanding the chance to mount a full-throttle attack for so long that Trochu finally let it proceed, almost to prove a point, hoping thereby to pave the way for an acceptable peace.

At dawn on January 19, ninety thousand men were to pour out of Mont-Valérien in the direction of Versailles. This happened to be exactly where the German lines were strongest, their positions reinforced by a maze of trenches, redoubts, and other obstructions that led through a forest back to Versailles. About half the French attackers were from the National Guard, and many thousands of them had never seen a day’s fighting. They were to advance in three lines spread across four miles toward German forces at Bougival, to the west, and toward Saint-Cloud, to the south. This was the same territory that had seen so much mayhem back in October at the Battle of Buzenval, where Degas’s friend the sculptor Cuvelier had been killed.

That tragedy was to replay itself. Henri Regnault, the young Orientalist painter and Prix de Rome winner whose Salomé had made him the star of the 1870 Salon, had returned to Paris from Rome shortly ahead of the German advance. Holders of the Prix de Rome were automatically excused from military service, but Regnault, against the exasperated warnings of his father Victor, was determined to enlist. He was desperate—like many of his fellow National Guardsmen—to join the battle. In October he had proposed to Geneviève Breton, who had agreed to marry him. He saw out the year 1870 manning the fortifications at Colombes and Asnières on the Seine.

Just days before the call to battle, Regnault had been offered an officer’s commission, but he refused it. “You have made me a good soldier,” he explained; “don’t make me a mediocre officer.” He received his marching orders on January 17. That night, as Marc Gotlieb writes in his book about Regnault, his fiancée presented him with some bread, a packet of letters, and a silver charm. The next morning his regiment, the Sixty-Ninth Battalion, mustered on the Boulevard Malesherbes, where they were assigned their packs. From there they walked to the Champs-Élysées, where they converged with ninety thousand other troops, and all marched on to Pont de Neuilly.

They sang; they were cheered by children and elderly men; and as the sun set, their wives, mothers, and girlfriends strode alongside them, arm in arm, in some cases carrying their rifles. Having crossed the Seine, most of the troops hunkered down in a field and went to sleep in the open air. But rain poured all night, and Regnault and his fellow artist Georges Clairin managed to find refuge in a wine shop. To stay warm, Regnault squeezed his legs into the sleeves of a fur coat. Awakened after midnight, he marched with his battalion up the steep slope to Mont-Valérien, where they waited in the bone-chilling cold at the base of the fortifications until dawn, vulnerable to German shelling but concealed by fog and rain.

At dawn they were still there, dangerously exposed as the sun rose and the fog cleared. They were waiting for a column led by Ducrot, but it was still more than an hour away, delayed by obstacles that the French themselves had put in place and forgotten to dismantle. Eventually, on the orders of the commandant at Mont-Valérien, three guns were fired—the signal to start the attack. Regnault’s Sixty-Ninth was made to wait at the fort for an uncomfortably long time, but finally, as the German guns boomed away, it was allowed to advance. On either side of Regnault and Clairin, their fellow soldiers were picked off by sniper fire and “collapsed and fell like drunks,” according to Clairin. Nonetheless, the two men reached the ridge, where Regnault jettisoned his pack and scrambled up the steep slope toward a château.

At the same time, the left column swept up the hills of Montretout and Saint-Cloud, outflanking the first lines of the German defense. The soldiers forced the Germans to retreat but were soon bogged down. The heavy guns they had wanted to drag up behind the advancing troops were delayed. Then they were thwarted by the slippery slopes.

Meanwhile Regnault had made it to the château, where he ran into another friend, Emmanuel de Plaza. Briefly breaking ranks, the two men hugged and kissed each other’s cheeks, bringing tears to Regnault’s eyes. Seconds later he rejoined his company as they surged into the forest beyond the château.

Behind the château was a huge wall that curved across the park. Here the Germans positioned themselves, able to fire on the advancing troops with impunity. The French needed explosives to breach the wall, but their supplies of dynamite had frozen overnight, rendering them useless. By late afternoon, the hopelessness of their position had become plain. “Only the wall, always the wall,” wrote Clairin, “that neither with our bayonets or our own nails could we tear down.” Long-simmering tensions between the professional soldiers and the raw recruits boiled over into angry accusations and insults. Some tried to desert but were shot, and in the chaos friendly fire compounded the damage.

Watching wistfully from Fort Mont-Valérien, Trochu finally gave the order to retreat at five p.m. The withdrawal degenerated into panic, then outright mayhem when retreating troops, tripping over dead bodies in the failing light, ran up against the ammunition trains, supply wagons, and ambulances that had been brought up from behind in expectation of an advance. It was difficult to maneuver in the darkness and the cold. Mud caused wheels to get bogged. It took all night for many soldiers to get back to Mont-Valérien and from there into the cold and starving city. They left behind a shambles of abandoned weapons and dead or wounded warriors. In all, about 1,500 were killed and 3,500 wounded—many times the number of German casualties.

After the order to retreat, Regnault made it back through the forest to the château, where he briefly took cover. “So many bullets had been flying around us for hours and hours that we no longer paid them much attention,” claimed Clairin. Feeling in his pockets, Regnault realized he still had some cartridges left. He wanted to use them, but Clairin warned him not to. “It’s over,” he said. But Regnault ignored him and took off. Clairin never saw him alive again. No one knows how Regnault died—whether it was by a German bullet or by friendly fire (which, according to Trochu’s own estimates, may have accounted for five hundred French deaths that day). But diarists all over the city made note of it, and the story of Regnault’s last day quickly took on an aura of legend.

When news of this last, most demoralizing defeat reached Paris, people were stunned. Carts piled high with the dead were driven back into the city along the same routes that the troops had marched out on. Bodies washed up on the banks of the Seine. An armistice was declared on January 20 to allow the battlefield to be cleared. But many dead and wounded remained with the Germans, who had simply retaken their earlier positions after the French retreat.

Every Parisian knew it was the end.

MANET’S NEXT LETTER to Suzanne acknowledged what now appeared inevitable. Daily bread rations had been cut down to three hundred grams. (These discouraging morsels scarcely deserved the name “bread.” He said Marie would keep a sample to prove it.) He had recovered from his flu and would be back on duty the next day. Urging Suzanne to stock up on provisions for when they returned to Paris, he noted that many people were in genuine danger of dying from starvation. He told her to gather together preserves and any other food she could get her hands on. Everything in Paris was bound to remain outlandishly expensive.

Cornélie, meanwhile, was positively beaming, even as the battlefield was being cleared of corpses. “We are very happy today my dear, Edma,” she wrote. “At last we have news!” The household on the Rue Franklin had received a long letter, via the pigeon post, reassuring them that Edma, Yves, and their several infants were all in good health; that Edma’s husband Adolphe, the naval officer, was at sea; and that Berthe’s brother Tiburce had escaped from captivity in Mainz by hiding in the hold of a ship carrying coal to Hamburg. He was back in the French Army, now a lieutenant.

“That is an unexpected joy,” Cornélie wrote to Edma. “Your father wept upon hearing that all of you are well; he has been less concerned about his son than about you.”

THE FRENCH ARMY of the Loire, meanwhile, had been defeated in battle near Le Mans. For Trochu, it meant the end. His colleagues persuaded him to resign and replaced him with General Joseph Vinoy, a stout man in his late sixties. The radicals seized on Trochu’s resignation, and the following day, January 22, a group marched on Mazas Prison demanding the release of Gustave Flourens and other leaders of the chaotic insurrection back in October. The prisoners were freed. The next day, not unexpectedly, Flourens marched on the Hôtel de Ville. A gunfight ensued; five people were killed and eighteen wounded. “Civil war was a few yards away, famine a few hours,” remembered Favre. The government shut down two of the radicals’ newspapers, Le Reveil and Le Combat, and at the same time, accelerated talks with Bismarck.

On January 23, Jules Favre traveled with an escort to the German military headquarters at Versailles. By now, the besieged city had a full-scale smallpox epidemic on its hands. Typhus and typhoid were also endemic, but the two biggest causes of death were bronchitis and pneumonia. The unusually cold winter and chronic hunger had left even better-off families like the Manets and Morisots acutely vulnerable. At Versailles, Favre had little leverage. Despite their differences, Moltke and Bismarck were united in wanting to impose the harshest terms possible. The parties eventually agreed to an armistice that was something short of a complete surrender. Bismarck was aware of the instability within Paris and the threat it posed to any agreement, so the terms required the French, as quickly as possible, to settle on a legitimate national government. Only then could she meaningfully negotiate the actual terms of the peace.

The armistice provoked disgust and despair among many of Paris’s suffering residents. They needed relief. They had put so much into the war effort, both physically and psychologically; so many had lost their lives or seen their livelihoods destroyed; yet they had never had the satisfaction of fighting an “honorable” war. Rather, they had spent a long, brutal winter trapped in a city that grew dimmer and dingier by the day, receiving no reward for their sacrifices. And now the whole harrowing experience was ending in humiliation.

Humiliation—and yet relief. Édouard longed to see his family again. “It’s all over,” he wrote to Suzanne. He told her that any hope of holding out for longer had died. People were literally starving to death, and the distress and anxiety had not yet ended. “We are all as thin as rakes,” he wrote, adding that for several days he himself had suffered from diet-related exhaustion and illness. No one who hadn’t been through the siege could know what it had truly been like, he wrote. He promised to leave Paris and reunite with them as soon as he could, but for now he had to wait as higher authorities met to determine the city’s future.

Berthe, too, had to wait before reuniting with Edma and Yves and their families and with her brother Tiburce. By February 4, food and other supplies were coming back into the city, but the distribution was fitful and insufficient. “We have been living on biscuits for about twelve days,” wrote Cornélie to Edma and Yves, “for the bread is impossible and makes us all sick.” Berthe had “hollows in her cheeks, [and] this morning she is in bed with stomach cramps.” Her mother was desperate for the whole horrific chapter to be over: “We have a great wish to escape from this confinement, and I have a great need to hold you in my arms.”

OVER THE NEXT FEW DAYS, enormous quantities of food poured into Paris, much of it the result of relief efforts organized out of Britain and the United States. But there was still only one way out of the city, across the Seine at Neuilly, just north of the Bois de Boulogne. All the other roadways were impassable, having been bombed or shelled. People lined up for hours at locations that had been converted into warehouses for provisions sent from Britain. At Bon Marché alone, seven hundred packages of rations were handed out every hour. Thousands of forlorn and emaciated faces waited to receive them.

By February 6, Gambetta had resigned, battered by defeats. Two days later, as per the armistice agreement, elections were held for a new National Assembly, a body that could legitimately represent all of France, not just Paris, and could therefore negotiate peace. The prospect of elections filled most Parisians with dread. They had hoped for so much and endured such prolonged misery, only for their dreams of a vibrant and victorious republic to dissolve. Many believed that Trochu and Favre were guilty of treachery. They had been so eager to avoid the reforms wanted by the left that they had been willing to cave into the enemy and hand control of Paris back to reactionary forces.

Gambetta’s old rival Adolphe Thiers was the clear favorite to win control of the government. Experienced, steeped in realism, and committed to order, he had been vindicated by his original vocal opposition to the war; he would now lead France through the painful weeks to come. “All eyes are turned toward you,” an old rival, Montalivet, said to him ahead of the election. “There is not one sensible man who does not see with confidence the government of the country in your hands, in whatever form it may be.” Predictions of a reactionary turn proved correct. Paris and several of the other big cities returned left-wing republican delegates (among them Gambetta and Victor Hugo). But across the country, out of 768 seats, more than 400 were won by candidates who favored a restoration of the monarchy, be it Bourbon or Orléanist.

The newly elected National Assembly met for the first time on February 13 in Bordeaux. Its members wanted to rid France of the German presence at the earliest opportunity and were determined not to let Parisian “histrionics” get in the way of restoring stability. Hugo promptly resigned, convinced that he and his fellow Parisian delegates were being deliberately sidelined. The delegates from Alsace, who saw the writing on the wall, did likewise. Gambetta, who was simply exhausted, went into self-exile in San Sebastián, where he walked daily along the beach, writing letters to Antonin Proust (Manet’s future biographer). On February 17, Thiers was returned as chef de l’executif, a post that combined head of government and head of state. The last time he had been prime minister was under Louis-Philippe.

BY FEBRUARY 9, nutritious food had arrived at the Morisot residence on the Rue Franklin, and Berthe’s health was slowly improving. She had been demoralized as well as sick, she admitted in a letter to Edma. Her mother had also grown very thin. It would be good for them all to see a fresh face or two. “The thought of spending a couple of weeks away from Paris, and with you, revives us. . . . It seems to me that we have so much to tell one another, so much to grieve about together.”

Berthe wanted Edma to understand the enduring lesson that she had taken from the war. It was neither pretty nor uplifting. “I have come out of this siege absolutely disgusted with my fellow man, even with my best friends,” she wrote. “Selfishness, indifference, prejudice—that is what one finds in nearly everyone.”

Édouard, meanwhile, had only just learned of Bazille’s death at Beaune-la-Rolande. He was crushed. Less than a year had passed since he had stood at Bazille’s easel adding flourishes to the young man’s painting of the Rue de la Condamine studio. The pity of his death was beyond words.

Édouard left Paris on February 12. Two days later he was reunited with Suzanne, his son Léon, and his mother, Eugénie-Désirée. He took them to Bordeaux, where the newly elected National Assembly was meeting and where Édouard found Zola. The writer was struck by his old acquaintance’s demeanor. Events in Paris had shaken him, there was no question.

The end of the war prompted a wistful, retrospective mood and an accompanying tenderness, even softness. The Morisots thought it best to stay in Passy—at least for now—and so the correspondence among the women in the family continued. “When I left you,” wrote Edma to Berthe, “neither of us anticipated such a long separation. I remember you packing my trunk and saying to me each time I handed you something: ‘So you intend to spend the winter there.’ ” The implication—that Berthe had sensed that Edma was abandoning her—had taken on a terrible weight in hindsight. Edma was acknowledging this, though with a delicacy that required no response. Instead, she switched to politics. The Morisots were not entirely of one mind, but they shared a wariness of extreme positions and a suspicion of tribalism. Cornélie had Orléanist sympathies, like Thiers, but she and Edma also felt for Manet’s friend Gambetta, whose resignation and self-exile had made him a scapegoat. “We feel just as indignant as Mother does when Gambetta is unjustly attacked,” wrote Edma. “It was he who did most for the defense, and it is he who is most thoroughly denounced today . . . and held responsible for our defeat.”

Meanwhile there was talk in the newspapers of the German Army entering Paris. “Perhaps,” wrote Edma, “you are now witnessing that sad spectacle. Nothing is to be spared us.”

THIERS HAD BEEN NEGOTIATING with the Germans. An announcement of the dreaded peace terms was imminent. The rumor was that Thiers would use the occasion to try to disarm the National Guard. So on February 24 angry crowds—including many Guardsmen—occupied the Place de la Bastille. They flew a red flag from the July Column, which commemorated the trois glorieuses—the three days in 1830 that had brought about the fall of King Charles X and the beginning of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy. The radical left now claimed the column as an antiauthoritarian symbol. Two days later the peace terms were announced. They were as punitive as feared. France would give up two of its most cherished and productive provinces, Alsace and Lorraine, including the bastion cities of Strasbourg and Metz. The French government would have to pay 5 billion francs in reparations by September 1875. And although Thiers had managed to save the vital town of Belfort, near the border south of Strasbourg, Paris would have to pay in the coin of humiliation: the German Army would be permitted to make a triumphal march into Paris.

It all seemed drastic beyond imagining. “The peace terms seem to me so ponderous, so crushing,” wrote Goncourt, “that I am terrified the war will only break out again, before we are ready for it.” Berthe was similarly dismayed. The terms, she wrote, “are so severe that one cannot bear to think about them.”

In the eyes of the leftists in Paris, the treaty amounted to nothing less than treason. The Government of National Defense had never really wanted to battle the Prussians, they said; now, wary of radicals, the National Assembly was in a hurry to cave into their demands. The reason in both cases, they believed, was class-based self-interest. Those with money would sacrifice anything to prevent Paris’s radicals from taking power and redistributing their wealth. A cartoon by Gaillard fils captured the sentiment: it depicted a corpulent Thiers—designated “king of the capitulators”—standing atop a platform groaning with game, conserves, and bottles of sherry. Arms benevolently outstretched, he smiles as legislators prostrate themselves before his edible throne.

The narrative of betrayal had spread like forking roots beneath the crumbly topsoil of the new republic. It now burst into the open. Furious crowds poured into the streets, their outrage matched by bitterness. An estimated 300,000 Parisians marched past the July Column in a second protest that lasted all day. The city’s suffering had been in vain, and now the whole sorry saga would be capped by Germans marching into Paris. Bile gushed in the protesters’ mouths. It was intolerable, disgusting—and at some deeper level, inexplicable. Some in the crowd were almost crazed with indignation. When a speech was interrupted by cries of “Spy! Spy!” the crowd hauled forward a man called Vincenzoni and accused him of taking down the names of National Guardsmen. The baying crowd kicked and beat him and—in a scene worthy of Goya’s Disasters of War—dragged him to the banks of the Seine, where they tied his hands and feet and threw him into the river. He had begged to be allowed to shoot himself but was refused. Over the course of two hours, whenever his head bobbed to the surface, they pushed it back under until he drowned.

POWER APPEARED TO BE sliding inexorably from Thiers’s hands. A crowd invaded the prison of Sainte-Pélagie and released political prisoners, among them Paul-Antoine Brunel, a lieutenant who, just days before the capitulation, had been arrested by General Vinoy, accused of ordering National Guardsmen under his control to seize ammunition. Now, in a coordinated effort that inaugurated a whole new phase of Paris’s troubles, National Guardsmen from more than 200 of the 275 battalions seized hundreds of cannons from army depots and artillery parks around the city and transported 227 of them up the hill to Montmartre. In taking this fateful action, the Guardsmen were acting on instructions from their own Central Committee, an authority newly established to rival General Louis d’Aurelle de Paladines, the reactionary whom Thiers had recently—and provocatively—appointed chief of the National Guard. The Guardsmen felt possessive of the cannons since most of them had been paid for during the siege by public subscription. They were determined to prevent them falling into enemy hands—a distinct possibility, it suddenly seemed, now that the Germans were being allowed to enter Paris.

The Central Committee then went a step further. Refusing to accept the capitulation to the Germans, it established, by fiat, a Republican Federation outside the control of the national government. Its justification was that the government had betrayed Paris and failed to defend her and thus had forfeited its right to govern. From now on it would be up to Parisians to govern themselves.

DIVISIONS WERE DEEPENING not only at the governmental level but inside the Morisot home on the Rue Franklin. The prospect of Germans parading through Paris sent alarm bells through their neighborhood, since Passy was on the route from Versailles to Paris. People came out on the streets to protest the treaty. “Our Passy, usually so quiet, was animated,” wrote Berthe. “The Place de la Mairie and the main street were filled with noisy crowds.” No one knew when the Germans would come—only that they would—and the uncertainty drove everyone to distraction.

The siege was over, but the Morisots were once again going to bed thinking about occupation, civic breakdown, and the possibilities of violence and death. “Each day brings us a new sorrow, a new humiliation,” wrote Berthe in dismay. “The French people are so frivolous that they will promptly forget these sad events, but I am brokenhearted.” Describing the local uproar in a letter to Edma, Cornélie also gave a vivid account of the lynching of Vincenzoni, an act she described as “odious and revolting in the last degree.

They drowned an officer of the peace or policeman, after subjecting him to two hours of torture, and not a soul among the millions who were there did anything to save the unfortunate man, who only begged for the mercy of having his brains blown out. What infamy! What a nation! When I hear accounts of such misdeeds, I begin to hate the Prussians less. No doubt we shall have to billet some of them. God knows what senile or childish idea has got hold of [your] father; he says he will have his door broken in rather than open it, and that if they use force, he will sacrifice his life rather than yield.

Cornélie dismissed her husband’s furious vow of self-sacrifice as melodramatic, but she was conscious of her audience (a concerned daughter) and may in reality have been just as worried, just as enraged. Certainly the presence of Berthe, their attractive, unmarried daughter, in a house that might soon be occupied by German soldiers in a mood to exact revenge or to “reward” themselves after a long winter siege can only have enhanced their fears. There was no telling what might happen.

Writing to Edma, Berthe seemed unusually upbeat and chatty, offering a rare glimpse into her political views by expressing sympathy for the leftists. “But if by chance I timidly advance that opinion,” she noted, “Father throws his arms in the air and treats me as a madwoman.” “Do you know,” she continued, “that all our acquaintances have come out of the war without a scratch, except for that poor Bazille, who was killed at Orléans, I think. The brilliant painter Regnault was killed at Buzenval. The others,” she went on, in a wry vein, “made a great fuss about nothing. Manet spent his time during the siege changing his uniform. His brother writes us today that in Bordeaux he recounted a number of imaginary exploits.” Degas, she noted, “is always the same, a little mad, but his wit is delightful.”

Berthe had not yet finished writing her letter when she learned of the “great commotion” in Paris the previous day. The word was that the National Guardsmen at Belleville had declared their intention to fire at the Germans when they entered the city for their victory procession. “I think,” she signed off, “we are at the beginning of an emotional period.”

AT EIGHT A.M. ON MARCH 1, a young lieutenant and six troopers of the Fourteenth Prussian Hussars leaped over chains and other impediments that resentful Parisians had placed in their way and continued under the Arc de Triomphe. Behind them marched thirty thousand German veterans of the siege. Wilhelm, now emperor of Germany, had wanted his triumphal march to match the splendor of the parade held after the first Napoleon’s defeat in 1814. It would be a lesson to France, the aggressor, that all the world could witness, and so he planned to lead his troops in a large-scale, three-day victory parade. Parisians were given to understand that it might take even longer—that the Germans could occupy the city for as long as it took to ratify the treaty.

At every public meeting, accusations of treachery were leveled against Thiers who, it was claimed, “hadn’t wanted to spare the great, heroic city this final shame.” Openly insurrectionary talk became more widespread as, for two days, the Germans occupied the Champs-Élysées district. Some locals came out to watch or jeer at them. But for the most part, wrote Zola, Paris “didn’t stir, lugubrious, its streets deserted, houses shuttered, the entire city dead, veiled in the immense crape of its mourning.” Some German soldiers were permitted to walk through the galleries of the Louvre—a low point for the museum’s staff, who had been working throughout the siege under the direction of Courbet.

Cognizant of the volatility inside Paris, the National Assembly in faraway Bordeaux rushed to ratify the treaty. The vote was 546 to 107. The ratified documents were rushed to Favre in Paris, who hurried them on to Bismarck. Although Bismarck had wanted the victory parade to last longer, under the terms of the treaty his troops now had to withdraw. Having won far more than he expected (an “incredible result,” Emperor Wilhelm had said of the treaty), he ordered his troops to withdraw to the Bois de Boulogne, where they were again inspected by the emperor at Longchamp, where Manet and Degas used to fraternize with the horse-racing crowd. Wilhelm understood the precariousness of the wider situation, but he still complained that his troops were “as good as being chased out of Paris.”

THROUGHOUT THIS COMBUSTIBLE post-siege period, the artists in Manet’s circle—the future Impressionists—were scattered. Monet remained in London. Renoir, recuperating from illness, found himself stationed nearer the Spanish border, riding horses and teaching a young girl to paint. Sisley settled at Louveciennes, near Pissarro’s home, which had recently been occupied by Prussians. And Degas went to stay with his friends the Valpinçons at Ménil-Hubert in Normandy.

After meeting up with Zola in Bordeaux, Édouard, along with Suzanne and Léon, left for Arcachon, a seaside town west of Bordeaux. They stayed for a month. Édouard resumed painting, but only tentatively. He had been on the road for several weeks and was still recovering both his health and his bearings. The one painting he spent time on was a picture of Suzanne and Léon sitting at a round table in the rather desolate interior of the seaside home they rented at Arcachon. It could have been a celebratory painting—an avowal of love for the wife and son from whom he had been so cruelly separated for so many dark months. But as always with Manet, the picture is more muted and difficult to read than that. Suzanne is shown from behind and at an angle, in lost profile (a way to avoid depicting her face, which always seemed to present difficulties). She appears to be taking in the view through the window out to the Atlantic. Léon, who had just turned nineteen, perches sideways on his chair. Looking up from the book on his lap, he smokes a cigarette. He looks suddenly very grown up—no longer the innocent blond, the pliable model from Manet’s earlier paintings. He had escaped conscription by a whisker.

The window to the turquoise sea suggests a beneficence—a kind of emotional exhalation after the fear and claustrophobia of the siege. But there’s also something guarded about the picture. You can feel the little family still getting used to one another’s company, struggling—at different rates, perhaps—to fuse their separate experiences over the previous five months, as if painter, wife, and son were each trying to reassemble the pieces to a scrambled puzzle. While he was alive, Manet never exhibited Interior at Arcachon. It likely felt too raw.

THE MORISOTS LINGERED in Paris, just as they had after Sedan. But with each passing day their decision—or indecision—began to look more foolhardy. Order was breaking down. The German victory parade had crystallized disappointment into righteous anger. Demonstrations continued almost every day at the Place de la Bastille.

Back in September, most Parisians had been happy to see the ouster of Napoleon III and the declaration of a republic. Now the moderate republicans who had assumed power appeared to have been thoroughly discredited. Voters across the country had elected a reactionary government. Mostly Catholic and to a large extent royalist, they wanted peace and a return to order, which meant muzzling the godless agitators in Paris. Thiers was a known Orléanist, but he was savvy. He had said as far back as 1850 that “the Republic is the regime that divides us the least.” Seeing the turbulence in Paris, he now warned representatives of both the Orléanist and Bourbon families to stay away from the city. This was not enough for many Parisians, who remained suspicious. They feared that in time—and likely under Thiers’s devious guidance—France would revert to a monarchy. Increasingly, they felt their concerns diverging from those of the rest of the country. They had bled and suffered, then lost elections they saw as rigged. Now all they had stood and fought for was in danger of being reversed.

Along with the National Guard, tens of thousands of French soldiers were still in Paris, awaiting orders. Their presence was stretching the city’s still-fragile resources. One observer saw “soldiers wandering about . . . their uniforms sullied, disheveled, without weapons, some of them stopping passers-by asking for some money.” Their loyalty to Thiers’s new national government could not be guaranteed. They were only one provocation away from rebellion.

CORNÉLIE HAD ONLY JUST heard about the National Guard’s seizure of the cannons when, with the Germans still withdrawing from Paris, she wrote an extraordinary letter to Yves. Her take on the seizure was trenchant: “Paris is far from peaceful.” She was convinced that the National Guard fully intended to use the cannons if they thought it necessary. She praised Thiers, who all along had been “the spokesman for all people of common sense.” Since there had been no way for France to win the war, it would have been better to negotiate—as Thiers had tried to do at the outset—and “to be swallowed whole” rather than to allow France to be fractured while clinging to absurd illusions. The radical left, she opined, “would not have acted any better or differently from the others, fighting against impossible odds as we were. But now it will be easy for them to pose as heroes, to manipulate the passions they have aroused, and to incite the populace to bold deeds by flattering words to further their personal ambitions.” Her fear was that they would “take advantage of the state of things to plunge us into chaos.”

Parisians who favored continued resistance against the German Army, she went on, ignored the fact that people in the provinces were tired of fighting a war they had already lost. Having lived through so many failed breakouts during the siege, she was sick of belligerent talk that never led to successful actions. “All those fire eaters . . . who clamor so loudly for a war to the death took to their heels during our sorties. Nothing is more shameful than the conduct of the men of Belleville and Ménilmontant, who have the courage only to fight their own countrymen, hoping thus to find an opportunity for plunder and for gratifying all their passions.”

Cornélie’s commentary was not just scathing, it was in some ways prescient. She welcomed reports that Edma was planning to visit them in Paris. She expected the journey from Mirande to be “long and difficult,” and she prayed that Edma would not arrive while the Germans remained in the city. In fact, Edma had already departed, and after arriving in Passy, she spent several days in her old home, tending to Berthe, going for walks, and sharing stories of all they had separately endured. She then traveled to Cherbourg to be reunited with her husband. On the day she departed, the two sisters went for a long walk along the boulevard. This time the pain of yet another departure felt almost unbearable. (In a subsequent letter, Berthe made a poignant reference to “that sad walk . . . that upset us so greatly.”)

Around the same time, Berthe’s brother, Tiburce, returned to Passy. He was in good health—a great relief. Dark clouds, however, were gathering, and Tiburce was about to be drawn into the heart of a new conflagration. Since he was still in the army, his family could do little to keep him out of harm’s way. They could try only to protect themselves. So around March 6, they finally decided to leave Passy for the relative safety of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, just beyond the city’s western reaches.

In leaving Paris, the Morisots were by no means alone. The city’s more affluent residents were departing in droves. Many descended on Versailles, where the National Assembly, temporarily in Bordeaux, was preparing to establish itself rather than in the capital, where Thiers admitted he couldn’t ensure its safety. But Versailles, with its rich royalist history, only stoked the fires of resentment in Paris. All of a sudden, the town was overflowing with bourgeois refugees, many of them unable to find suitable lodgings. Over the next few weeks, the population jumped from 40,000 to 250,000. Puvis de Chavannes, who was utterly opposed to the radicals, was among the transplants. Not knowing that the Morisots had already decided to leave Passy, he wrote to Berthe expressing concern for her well-being. He was delighted, he wrote, to have left behind “my awful quarter [in Paris], where informing against one’s neighbor was becoming a daily occurrence and where one may at any moment be forced to join the rabble under penalty of being shot by the first escaped convict who wants the fun of doing it.” In Versailles, he concluded dreamily, he felt reassured and “bathed in a feeling of grandeur . . . since it recalls a beautiful and noble France.”