EPILOGUE

THE CELEBRATIONS OF JULY 14, 1880, HAD AN IMMENSE effect on Édouard’s morale. In December, he met with Henri Rochefort, the radical republican who had set up La Lanterne and La Marseillaise during the final years of the empire and who had endured six months in prison for his role in the Victor Noir affair. Thiers’s troops had captured him while he was attempting to flee Paris during Bloody Week. Victor Hugo had tried to keep Rochefort in France, but he had been sentenced to life in prison and sent to New Caledonia. In 1874, however, he had staged a dramatic escape, after which he’d lived in exile in London and Geneva. The general amnesty now permitted his return.

Rochefort’s first action on arriving back in France, one week after Bastille Day, was to establish a new publication, L’Intransigeant (The Intransigent). He was introduced to Manet by Marcellin Desboutin, a relative of Rochefort who was also an artist in the Impressionist circle. Édouard was excited to meet Rochefort, who was by now, among republicans, a legendary figure. His portrait shows Rochefort in a bow tie, arms crossed (as with Manet’s earlier portrait of Clemenceau), with an upswept shock of smoky gray hair. Rochefort declined Édouard’s offer to give him the portrait. Nevertheless, he agreed to cooperate with Manet on a major painting of Rochefort’s dramatic escape from New Caledonia. The painting would be an automatic entry in the Salon, since Édouard no longer had to submit to the jury. As part of his preparations, he interviewed Rochefort, who told him that the vessel he escaped in was a whaleboat, deep gray, carrying six men but with just two oars. Rochefort had published a fictionalized account earlier that year, so Édouard also relied on his book when he painted two versions of the escape. In the end, however, he sent neither to the Salon, preferring to exhibit his more conventional portrait of Rochefort alongside The Lion Hunter. Both paintings ignited controversy, but Édouard was awarded a second-class medal for the portrait.

In the wake of this interlude, Édouard painted a series of ravishing still lifes and two of his finest paintings, the gorgeously fresh Jeanne (Spring) and the monumental and mysterious A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. He wanted the world to know that, in spite of his ailment, he was still capable of producing masterpieces.

THAT NOVEMBER JULES GRÉVY, who had replaced MacMahon as president, appointed Gambetta as prime minister. This was an astonishing turn of events—just ten years earlier, Gambetta had been widely shunned in the aftermath of the Commune. Gambetta in turn installed Antonin Proust, his and Manet’s longtime friend, as minister of the arts. One of Proust’s first actions was to make Manet a chevalier of the Legion of Honor. To Édouard, who cared about honors (Degas often teased him about it), it was a moving gesture, a powerful vindication after two decades of public scorn. That the honor was bestowed by Gambetta, the man who had escaped Paris in a balloon (just as Rochefort had escaped New Caledonia in a boat), made it all the more satisfying. He could place it on an imaginary shelf in the same part of his brain that celebrated the triumph of the republic and the declaration of the amnesty.

Sadly, Gambetta’s cabinet fell after just sixty-six days. His determination to accrue the power he needed to enact reforms resulted in a bitter power struggle, pitting him against an unlikely coalition of radical republicans, royalists, Bonapartists, and disillusioned moderates. He lost. Later that year, he contracted acute peritonitis—a dangerous infection in the lining of the belly—and died on the final day of 1882, only forty-four years old.

Édouard’s disease, meanwhile, had moved into its next, agonizing stage. Distressed, he consulted a celebrated professor, Pierre Potain, who told him that his problem might be something other than syphilis and wrote a prescription for derivatives of ergot. Siredey, his primary doctor, was alarmed. He warned Manet against taking too much of the medicine—a fungus that can induce nausea and in sufficient quantities bring on gangrene, vision problems, convulsions, and death. Manet was desperate, though. Ignoring Siredey, he took ever-increasing doses, all the while insisting that he was getting better.

CORNéLIE, WHOSE HEALTH had deteriorated steadily since the siege, had died at the end of 1876. Shortly before her death, Yves’s husband, Théodore Gobillard, was discreetly placed in a mental institution. He had been awarded the Legion of Honor after his arm was amputated while fighting for the French in Mexico; now, less than ten years later, he was fired from his job “because of insanity.” Yves was pregnant with their third child when they sent him away.

Two years later, after Edma had her last child—a boy—Berthe herself gave birth to her one and only child, Julie. Berthe, who loved her nieces as if they were her own, was now seized by maternal love. Julie Manet was a serene child. She “has not had the slightest upset since her birth and she is all plump,” reported Yves. “Her mother is very proud of her. The first smile went straight to her heart.”

Julie provided Berthe and Eugène with enormous joy and consolation. She was, according to Berthe, “a Manet to the tips of her fingers . . . she has nothing of me.” This evidently pleased her. Édouard painted a small sketchy oil portrait of Julie as a chubby-cheeked toddler in 1880, and Berthe drew and painted her at every stage, from infancy to young girlhood and from adolescence to young womanhood. According to the art historian Richard Brettell, Julie was likely “the best documented of the Impressionists’ children.” But her birth had been difficult. The umbilical cord had been wrapped three times around her neck when she came out. She was unaffected. (According to Yves, she “went only a few seconds without breathing”.) But the birth took a great toll on Berthe’s health, which was fragile at the best of times. She could not, as a result, participate in the fourth Impressionist exhibition in 1879—the only one of the eight Impressionist exhibitions she missed.

To add to her burdens, Berthe’s friend Marcello died that summer. Primarily a sculptor, Marcello had taken up painting in 1869, and in 1875, less than a year after the first Impressionist exhibition, she had asked Berthe to sit for a portrait. They decided together to make the painting an homage to the eighteenth-century art of Fragonard and Boucher, artists they both loved. Over many sessions, they had sat together in Marcello’s studio, while the sculptor made first a drawing, then a pastel, then a watercolor. She then picked out a large canvas and painted Berthe in a salmon dress and holding a closed fan as she sat sideways on a simple wooden chair, resting one long, bare arm on the seat back.

Now, four years later, Marcello was gone. In her grief, Berthe turned for consolation, as she always had, to her sister Edma. “Don’t accuse me of being neglectful, my dear,” she wrote. “I think of you and your children continually, but my life is becoming complicated, I have little time, and then I have my days of melancholy, my black days, when I am afraid to take up a pen for fear of being dull. The death of the poor dear duchess [Marcello] made me pass through one of these bad phases. Mme Carré told me the other day, laughing at my looks: ‘I think you have lived too long.’ Well, this is true. Inasmuch as I have seen everything that I have loved and known disappear, I have lived too long. The loss of friends can no longer be replaced at my age, and the void is great.”

ALAS, THE VOID would grow greater.

Berthe had registered that her brother-in-law was ill, but she was loath to acknowledge the gravity of his state. Édouard had good periods and bad. But it was clear now that he was approaching the end. The man who had once upbraided Berthe, saying that “he would never risk playing the part of a child’s nurse,” was now in need of around-the-clock nursing. He was in constant, mind-deranging pain. Unfortunately, the medicine prescribed by Potain had begun to have effects that Siredey warned about: nausea, vomiting, and then, in April 1883, a black spot appearing on Manet’s left foot. It spread slowly. Gangrene.

Siredey saw no alternative: on April 20, 1883, Édouard’s left leg was amputated. The operation, which was conducted without anesthetic in his home on the Rue de Saint-Pétersbourg, caused unspeakable pain and mental distress. And it improved nothing, as the gangrene had already spread farther up. After the amputation, Édouard experienced tormenting phantom pains where the leg had been. When Monet visited him and sat on the bed where his friend’s leg would have been, Édouard shouted out in distress. Ten days later he was dead.

“These last days were very painful,” Berthe wrote to Edma. “Poor Édouard suffered atrociously. His agony was horrible. In a word, it was death in one of its most appalling forms that I once again witnessed at very close range. . . . If you add to these almost physical emotions my old bonds of friendship with Édouard, an entire past of youth and work suddenly ending, you will understand that I am crushed.”

The funeral was held in Passy on the third of May—a date that resonated with Goya’s great execution painting of the same name, the inspiration for Manet’s Execution of the Emperor Maximilian. The pallbearers were Proust, Duret, Zola, Monet, Stevens, and Burty. “The expressions of sympathy have been intense and universal,” wrote Berthe. Manet’s “richly endowed nature,” she added, “compelled everyone’s friendship; he also had an intellectual charm, a warmth, something indefinable, so that, on the day of his funeral, all the people who came to attend—and who are usually so indifferent on such occasions—seemed to me like one big family mourning one of their own.

“I shall never forget the days of my friendship and intimacy with him, when I sat for him and the charm of his mind kept me alert during those long hours.”

THREE DAYS AFTER the funeral, Édouard’s former pupil Eva Gonzalès died in childbirth. Her baby, however, survived. Berthe and Eugène, still processing the loss of Édouard, went immediately to visit Gonzalès’s father, who was inconsolable. They were shown Eva’s body, which had been covered in flowers. They were in her hair, in her hands, and on her face, which was waxen but still beautiful. The baby was raised by Eva’s husband, Henri Guérard, who had been Édouard’s engraver, and by Eva’s sister Jeanne, who later married Guérard (just as Berthe had married Eugène). Gustave Manet died in December the following year, 1884, leaving Eugène the sole survivor of the Manet brothers. Their mother, Eugénie, died less than a month later, and by the end of the following year, 1886, Eugène himself had become ill. He never really recovered and died in 1892.

Thus the shadow of death was always passing over Berthe’s otherwise creative and elegant-looking later years. And yet through all the years of Eugène’s illness, the couple maintained a place at the center of a beautiful and influential social circle. They had moved in 1881 to a new home near the Bois de Boulogne on the Rue de Villejust (later renamed Rue Paul Valéry, after the poet and critic who married Yves’s daughter Jeannie Gobillard). Four years later, after the death of Cornélie, they began hosting Thursday night soirées there. Among the regulars were Renoir, Monet, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Degas.

In 1894 Berthe and Julie, now a lovely young woman with auburn hair and large, dark eyes, went to visit Suzanne, widowed and living in Gennevilliers. They sat together at a table and slowly leafed through a portfolio of Manet’s drawings. Berthe had recently purchased Édouard’s Berthe Morisot with a Bouquet of Violets from Durand-Ruel. Repose, too—the portrait Édouard had made of her just before the war—had become available, and she wanted to buy it. She couldn’t afford it. So Jean-Baptiste Faure, the celebrated operatic baritone and art collector whom Manet had several times painted, purchased it instead. Perhaps to compensate Berthe, Renoir painted a portrait of her with Julie and presented it to her as a gift. Suzanne, in any case, was delighted to see Berthe and her beautiful daughter. The drawings they inspected together had special resonances for them all.

Berthe’s own painting continued to develop and strengthen. She worked in watercolors, pastels, and colored pencils as well as oils. She painted a few self-portraits, all frank and direct but haunted with melancholy, some left unfinished. She also painted dreamy, sparkling images of Julie reading, playing the violin, holding a cat, at play in the garden with Eugène, picking cherries, and scratching the chin of a grateful greyhound. Her colors became ever bolder, her drawing more curvingly tensile, and her willingness to leave parts of the canvas bare more arresting and expressive. She was admired and loved by all her Impressionist and post-Impressionist peers.

As time went on, Berthe seemed more and more determined to make her work communicate the transience of love, the brevity of youth, and the hesitations of being itself—all the things life had taught her. She seems to have grasped, perhaps even more viscerally than her Impressionist colleagues, life’s one dependable fact—that everything that is beautiful and all that we love and care about will perish. Sigmund Freud, in his late essay “On Transience,” wrote that when people develop this kind of awareness, they tend to respond either with despondency or rebellion. But there was a third possibility, Freud noted, a response that he believed was not only the most hopeful but also the most rational. It was to recognize that our awareness of the transience of things should increase their value to us, the way scarcity makes us value certain objects more. “Transience value,” he wrote, “is scarcity value in time.” Mourning was inevitable, Freud noted. But “once the mourning is over, it will be found that our high opinion of the riches of civilization has lost nothing from our discovery of their fragility.”

BERTHE MORISOT WAS the late nineteenth century’s great painter-poet of “transience value.” As the critic Paul Mantz wrote in his review of the third Impressionist exhibition in Le Temps, in 1877, “There is but one real Impressionist in this group and that is Mme Berthe Morisot. Her painting has all the frankness of improvisation: it does truly give the idea of an ‘impression’ registered by a sincere eye and rendered again by a hand completely without trickery.”

When the filmmaker Jean Renoir wrote his celebrated memoir of his father, he included a beautiful passage about the effect Berthe had had on the people around her. “In Berthe Morisot’s day,” he wrote, “the Manet circle had been one of the most authentic centers of civilized Parisian life.” Berthe “acted like a special kind of magnet on people, attracting only the genuine.”

The magnet in Berthe’s life was Julie. She was, wrote Berthe, “like a little cat, always in a good mood.” But in 1895, when Julie was sixteen, she fell ill. She recovered, but while caring for her, Berthe contracted pulmonary congestion. Her frail immune system was unable to get the upper hand, and gradually it became clear that she wouldn’t recover. Edma came to be by her side. Berthe’s throat was so painful, she could barely speak. She tried to prevent Julie coming into the room, for fear of frightening her. It was all terrifyingly sudden. She had been laughing just days earlier.

Julie spoke with her mother for the final time at three p.m. Four hours later she went back into the room. But seeing her mother barely able to draw breath was too distressing, and she quickly left.

The night was terrible, but at some point, Berthe found time to write a note. “My dearest little Julie,” it said, “I love you as I die; I shall still love you even when I am dead; I beg of you, do not cry; this parting was inevitable. I hoped to be with you until you married. Work hard, and be good as you have always been; you have never caused me one single sorrow in your little life.”

The note instructed Julie to give paintings to Edma and Julie’s cousins, as well as to Monet and Renoir. A painting she owned by Monet should go to another cousin, she wrote. “Tell Monsieur Degas that if he founds a museum he is to choose a Manet.

“Do not cry,” she finished. “I love you more than I can tell you.”

Berthe Morisot was only fifty-four when she died. Her last spoken word was “Julie.”

RENOIR WAS PAINTING alongside Cézanne when he heard the news. Immediately he closed his paintbox and took the next train back to Paris. Julie later wrote that she had “never forgotten the way [Renoir] arrived in my room . . . and held me close to him; I can still see his white cravat with its little red polka dots.”

Spring turned to summer and Julie, now an orphan, went to Brittany with Renoir and his family. She flourished under the influence of Renoir’s intelligence and compassion. But in October, she had to return to Paris (the city struck her as intolerably gray and drab) and reenter the family home. “I was seized,” she wrote, “by a profound sadness on entering the apartment, which looked so desolate, where every object reminds me of Maman but just stresses the fact that she is no longer here.”

The following spring, Berthe’s fellow Impressionists got together to organize a posthumous Morisot retrospective at Durand-Ruel’s gallery. Julie came to help hang the show, but not before visiting the cemetery in Passy, where Berthe had been buried beside Eugène under a slab bearing both their names. At the head of the tomb (still today) is a tall column inscribed with the names Édouard Manet and Suzanne Leenhoff, and atop the column is a sculpted bust of Édouard, its oxidized surface almost the same rich green that he used for his seascapes and for the railing and window shutters in his very first painting of Berthe, The Balcony.

As if trying to see through her mother’s eyes, Julie observed the “yew trees starkly outlined against the blue sky dotted with wispy clouds,” “the wreaths glittering on the tombs,” and the azalea’s “immaculate whiteness blending with the delicate meadowsweet.”

“There is something reassuring about this place, which seems to whisper to me that Maman is happy,” she wrote in her diary.

Later in the day, Julie went to Durand-Ruel’s gallery, where Monet and Degas were helping to hang the exhibition. More than 160 of Berthe’s paintings were spread out on the gallery floor, and they gave Julie the same feeling of brightness as the azalea. She received a tender kiss from Monet. Renoir soon arrived. Mallarmé had gone to the printer to pick up copies of the catalog, for which he had written an essay.

They had all forsaken their work to be there. Julie’s presence made them all the more conscious of the weight of their responsibility to an artist they revered, a friend they wished to honor.

Returning on Tuesday, Monet, Renoir, and Degas worked throughout the day. And they were there again on Wednesday, when Julie was accompanied by her aunt Edma and cousin Blanche. When they arrived, Degas was hanging drawings. Conversing with Edma, he suddenly asked her if she would like to meet a ballet dancer. Bemused, Edma said yes, whereupon Degas led her to a smaller room. A woman saw them come in and exclaimed, “Well, hello Degas, who’s this lady then? She looks so like the one who died last year!”

Renoir and Monet arrived, and the work continued, with Julie pitching in. It was slow going. Conscious that time was running out, the artists tired and frayed. Degas had been hanging Berthe’s drawings and watercolors on a screen. A debate now ensued as to whether the screen should be placed in the middle of the large gallery or in a separate room toward the back. Degas wanted it installed in the big gallery, as prominently as possible. (He adored Berthe’s drawings.) But Monet and Renoir worried that the screen cut the room in two and would prevent people from getting enough distance from Berthe’s larger paintings. It would interfere, they added, with the general effect of harmony.

Degas snorted. “Only imbeciles see a ‘general effect.’ What on earth is it supposed to mean when one writes in a newspaper that the ‘general impression’ of this year’s Salon is much better than that of last year?”

Alive to the underlying emotion, and no doubt afraid of Degas’s orneriness, Renoir and Monet tried to persuade him to at least consider moving the screen. Placing it in the smaller gallery, offered Mallarmé, would give it “an intimate, quite charming atmosphere. It will just confuse the public to see drawings in the middle of the paintings.”

“What do I care about the public?” shouted Degas. “They see absolutely nothing.” They were mounting this exhibition for themselves, he insisted: “You can’t honestly mean that you want to teach the public to see?”

“I certainly do,” replied Monet, “If we had put this exhibition on just for ourselves, it wouldn’t be worth going to the trouble of hanging all these paintings; we could quite simply look at them on the floor.”

By now it had grown dark outside. The argument spilled over into a debate about whether a couch should replace the screen in the big gallery, so people could sit. Degas fumed. “I would stay on my feet for thirteen hours if I had to,” he screamed.

The gallery staff were laughing now, as Monet got to his feet. The two men shouted at each other about who “adored” Madame Manet (Berthe) more. Mallarmé tried to cool the temperature, while Renoir, “totally exhausted, was sprawled on a chair.”

At last, Degas agreed to have the screen moved, but only if Monet could assure him that he really believed the room would be better without it. Monet said that yes, this was his sincere opinion, and they seemed on the point of reconciliation. But then more arguing erupted, and Degas prepared to storm out. Monet rushed to place his body between Degas and the exit. A moment later, when they shook hands, Julie thought everything was settled. But then Mallarmé made the mistake of mentioning the couch again. This time Degas, apoplectic, really did storm out.

The next morning, with the exhibition due to open that evening, Julie was first to arrive. She had resumed her job of numbering the works when Monet and Renoir came in. “You can bet Degas won’t be coming,” joked Renoir. “‘He’ll be here later in the day up a ladder hammering away and will say, ‘Can’t we cordon off the entrance to prevent people from getting in?’ I know him too well.” Degas did indeed fail to materialize, and they moved the screen to the far room without him.

“At last,” wrote Julie in her diary, “everything was ready and beautifully arranged; the exhibition looks marvelous.”

For page after page in her diary, Julie now described, in succinct but loving prose, almost every work in the show. These paintings and works on paper, as she knew all too well, were the fruit of a decision by an artist of rare talent and rich sensibility to take herself seriously—a decision made amid political strife, violence, and anguish. These same works are now in the world’s great museums and private collections, where they hang alongside paintings by Monet, Renoir, Cézanne, Pissarro, Sisley, Degas, and Manet.