Chapter One

Ashes

(1871)

What blood and ashes! What women in mourning! What ruins!”1

Sarah Bernhardt, like so many of her fellow Parisians, had left Paris during the height of the siege, and now that the “abominable and shameful peace” was signed and the “wretched Commune” crushed, she ventured back. But the Paris she found was not what she expected. Everywhere, she wrote in her memoirs, one could smell the “bitter odor of smoke.”2 Even in her own home, everything she touched left an unpleasant residue on her fingers.

Emile Zola, who had holed up in his small house on Rue La Condamine (17th), in the heart of the fighting between government and Communards, had an entirely different reaction. For two months he had tried to keep up his writing as cannon boomed night and day and as shells hissed over his head, but at last—warned that he was about to be seized and possibly shot by the Communards—he fled Paris. At the time, it seemed the end of the world. But he quickly forgot this once the Commune was over. Writing in July to his boyhood friend, Paul Cézanne, he told him that now that he was back in his home in Paris, it all seemed as if it had been a bad dream. When he saw that “my house is the same, my garden has not budged, not a piece of furniture, not a plant has suffered,” he concluded that it almost seemed as if it all had been a “nasty farce invented to frighten children.”3

Yet if Zola’s little world remained blessedly untouched, the larger world around him had suffered enormous damage. Not only had the Tuileries Palace and a swath of historic public buildings gone up in flames, from the Palais de Justice to the Hôtel de Ville, but countless private houses and businesses had been damaged or reduced to rubble. Many of these, like Thiers’ mansion, had been the target of angry mobs, while countless others were the random victims of Communard fire-bombers. But many more, primarily in the western sectors of Paris, had suffered from the lengthy cannon bombardment by government troops prior to their forced entry into the Commune-controlled city. Ironically, this western sector was the part of Paris most likely to contain government supporters, but western Paris took its hit not only from the mob its residents feared, but also from the government troops that these Parisians regarded as their saviors.

Pummeled in turn by the Prussians, by French government forces, and by the Commune, Paris in late spring of 1871 was a shambles. Not even the trees along its avenues and quays remained standing, having been used for fuel during the siege’s long winter months.4 All suffered, but not equally, for the greatest damage was borne by the poor, whose despair and anger had fueled the Commune. The death toll from Bloody Week was enormous by any standards, and for years there was a noticeable dearth of men of a certain age in the working-class areas of Montmartre and Belleville.

L’Hôtel de Ville après l’incendie de la Commune (Frans Moormans, 1831–1893). Oil on canvas. Paris, Musée Carnavalet. © Musée Carnavalet / Roger-Viollet / The Image Works.

Georges Clemenceau was acutely aware of this when he returned to Paris in the summer of 1871. Although his career in politics would eventually take him to the pinnacle of power, he began life as a doctor, with a deep abhorrence of all forms of political and social injustice. Born and raised in the remote reaches of the Vendée, near Nantes, Clemenceau had followed in his well-born father’s footsteps, both in his medical studies and in his ardent republicanism. Paris made its imprint on him at an impressionable age, as a young medical student—one who enthusiastically participated in left-wing protests against Napoleon III’s repressive empire. America made a deep impression on him as well, where he traveled widely, served as a foreign correspondent for a Paris newspaper, and (strapped for cash) taught at a girls’ finishing school. After that, life as a country doctor in the Vendée must have seemed extraordinarily dull—especially once it became evident that Napoleon III’s war on Prussia was turning into a disaster for the French. As the Second Empire tottered, Paris beckoned ever more strongly, and at last Clemenceau left his young American wife and child in the Vendée and headed for the City of Light. Here he settled in Montmartre and promptly dived into the turbulent politics of the time.

French military defeat and the end of the Second Empire soon vaulted him into public life as mayor of the eighteenth arrondissement (essentially, the mayor of Montmartre), where his left-wing politics and devotion to his constituents won him widespread support during the long difficult months of Prussia’s siege of Paris. Elected to the National Assembly, he voted against Prussia’s terms for peace but was outvoted by a conservative majority, which formed a new government. Soon after, during the opening days of the bloody Commune uprising of 1871, Clemenceau’s attempts to broker a peaceful resolution between government and workers came to naught, ironically earning him the enmity of both sides.

Significantly, he did not join the Commune. Although sympathetic with its poverty-stricken followers and their hostility to the newly formed government, he firmly believed that such a government could only be legitimately opposed—and modified—through peaceful means, not through violence. At last, just before the height of the bloodshed, he returned to the Vendée and his family, a decision that may have saved his life.

But Paris still beckoned, and he returned after the Commune’s bloody demise, opening a dispensary in the heights of Montmartre, at 23 Rue des Trois-Frères (the small building in which it was housed is still there). Here, for two days a week, Clemenceau cared for the poor of Montmartre, free of charge. And here, driven by the appalling conditions he saw around him, he reentered politics.

He had seen too many women like Gervaise Lantier, the tragic heroine of Zola’s still-to-be-written great novel, L’assommoir (Zola had just begun the serial publication of the first of his twenty-volume series on the Rougon-Macquart family, including L’assommoir, which would be published in 1877). Indeed, Clemenceau and Zola did not yet know one another, although their paths had briefly crossed several years earlier, when both had written for the same left-wing student newspaper in Paris. Now they lived only a few blocks from one another, but while Clemenceau was avidly pursuing his path in politics, Zola was torn between the life of tranquility and the life of action. Both were ardent republicans of a left-wing but nonextremist cast, yet it would be many years before their paths would memorably cross, with Zola at last taking the path of action. In the meantime, Zola wrote with driving power and a journalist’s eye for detail about the heredity-driven lives of his fictional family, including Gervaise Lantier, who found herself mired in poverty on the slopes of Montmartre.

Zola certainly was not sentimental. In his preface to L’assommoir, Zola wrote that this was “the first novel about the common people which does not tell lies but has the authentic smell of the people.” From this, he added, “it must not be concluded that the masses as a whole are bad, for my characters are not bad, but only ignorant and spoilt by the environment of grinding toil and poverty in which they live.”5

By contrast, Zola’s childhood hero, Victor Hugo—whose blockbuster novels Notre-Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre-Dame) and Les misérables seethed with righteous indignation over the plight of the common people—served up large quantities of heart-wrenching sentiment. But while Zola (along with Flaubert and other leading intellectuals of the time) now regarded Hugo as a man of the past—a giant, perhaps, but an outmoded one—the common people regarded Hugo in an almost messianic light. Returning to Paris the day after the empire’s fall, Hugo was greeted by a huge crowd at the Gare du Nord. Never one to shy from an audience, he pushed his way through the mob and into a café, where he spoke from a balcony: “Citizens,” he told them, “I have come to do my duty.” He had come, he added, “to defend Paris, to protect Paris”—a sacred trust, given Paris’s position as the “center of humanity.”6 After that, he climbed aboard an open carriage, from where he spoke again to the fervent crowd before making his way to the house of a friend, near Place Pigalle. There the young Montmartre mayor, Georges Clemenceau, warmly welcomed him. Altogether, it must have been a most gratifying occasion for the old man, who had left Paris almost twenty years before in what had amounted to a self-imposed exile.7

Hugo arrived just as the siege set in, and on October 22, he reported in his diary, “We are eating horse in every form.” A month later, he noted: “People are making rat pâté,” adding (with a bit of ghoulish delight), “It is said to be quite good.”8 Several days later, he was one of the lucky ones still to have meat, only this time it was antelope, bear, and stag, in that order—courtesy of the zoo in the Jardin des Plantes. (During these same desperate days and weeks, young César Ritz, who was working at the elegant—but similarly food-deprived—Restaurant Voisin, served up épagneul, or spaniel, and a dish of elephant trunk with sauce chasseur.)

Deprivation was not the only difference in the Paris that greeted the returning Hugo. Paris’s physical appearance had undergone an enormous transformation, and much of the city he had known so well no longer existed. Baron Haussmann, Napoleon III’s prefect of the Seine, had cut a swath through some of the oldest and most poverty-ridden quarters of Paris, in the process eradicating whole sections of the city that had provided the setting—indeed, had served as a major character—in Notre-Dame de Paris and Les misérables. Haussmann had destroyed history, but he had not been able to destroy memory. Les misérables—which Hugo had written in large part while on the Isle of Guernsey—summoned up the Paris that he had known so well before his departure in 1851.

But when Hugo returned to Paris in triumph in 1870, he found a city he no longer recognized, set out along broad boulevards that served a distinctly military as well as aesthetic purpose. The churches still existed—Saint-Merri, Saint-Médard, Saint-Jacques du Haut Pas, and of course Hugo’s beloved Notre-Dame, which he had almost single-handedly saved from irreversible decay and ruin. But so much else did not.

Not surprisingly, such changes dismayed Hugo, an ardent lover of the Gothic—one who proclaimed that Paris had reached architectural perfection in the fifteenth century, only to come downhill ever since. Touring the city on the Petite Ceinture, the circular railway that since 1852 had run along the inner wall of the Thiers fortification, he commented with considerable irony, “Fascinating. Paris demolishing itself in order to defend itself—a magnificent sight.”9

* * *

Paris had of course undergone considerable demolition and change throughout the centuries, although nothing quite as far-reaching as what Haussmann and the Second Empire undertook. Philippe-Auguste’s twelfth-century wall—a hulking physical presence for several centuries—had long since been bypassed by an expanding population and fallen into ruin. The wider-circling fourteenth-century wall that sheltered Notre-Dame de Paris’s thieves and gypsies had been destroyed by none other than Louis XIV, who loftily pronounced the irrelevance of such a fortification in light of his proven prowess as a military commander. Louis then had this wall replaced with today’s Grands Boulevards, a demolition scheme that seems to have pleased everyone.

The eighteenth century brought an even wider-circling tax wall, which its proponents mistakenly thought would charm Parisians with its sublime architecture, especially its neoclassical tollhouses, which were designed by one of the foremost architects of the day. Instead, these tollgates were among the first targets of the irate Paris populace during the opening days of the 1789 revolution.10 Still, the wall itself remained in place for decades longer, as two emperors and a sequence of returning monarchs agreed that the customs it collected were unquestionably useful. Only in 1860 did it come down, thanks to Baron Haussmann, who perceived that the Thiers fortifications (which encompassed Paris in an even larger circle) could serve the same purpose, and to much better effect.

A fortification rather than a mere tax wall, the massive Thiers structure—built in the 1840s and named after the same Adolphe Thiers who in 1871 was once again head of government—turned out to be especially useful as a tax barrier. Of course its original purpose was defensive, with an eye toward the northeast and a reunited Germany. That it failed miserably during the Franco-Prussian War—and just as miserably during the Commune uprising—did not persuade the government of the Third Republic to tear it down. Not until after World War I did it finally disappear, ultimately to be replaced by Paris’s unloved ring road, the Périphérique.

In the meantime, the removal of the older tax wall in 1860 meant a new look for Paris. Villages such as Montmartre, Belleville, and Grenelle now were incorporated into Paris proper, with the city’s original twelve arrondissements, or administrative units, expanded into twenty, completing the number of arrondissments and establishing Paris’s administrative limits as they exist today.11 This meant that the barrier that once divided the city from such outlying areas as the Butte of Montmartre had now disappeared, its path marked only by a series of boulevards, such as the Boulevard de Clichy, that once ran alongside it. Soon Parisians in search of a good time flocked northward to the cabarets that began to open in Montmartre.

Unlike these well-to-do pleasure seekers, the residents of those regions once beyond the wall, much like Zola’s Gervaise Lantier, found it almost impossible to leave their particular hellholes once industrialization and its accompanying poverty set in. Those who did manage to cross the great divide, leaving their poverty and former addresses behind, typically did so in much the same fashion as Gervaise’s daughter, Nana—as common street prostitutes or, if especially ruthless and fortunate, as high-society courtesans, living in the shadows of upright society. It seems hardly surprising that Nana and others like her treated the world with as much contempt as the world had treated them.

* * *

“What terrible events, and how shall we come out of this?” wrote Edouard Manet to his young artist friend, Berthe Morisot. “Each one lays the blame on his neighbour, but to tell the truth all of us are responsible for what has happened.”12

Morisot’s response is not recorded, but her parents certainly would not have agreed with Manet. For years, Madame Morisot had chaperoned young Berthe and her sister on their regular outings to the Louvre, where they studied and painted. For years, Madame Morisot had disapproved of the young men they had met there, but Edouard Manet and his two brothers, Gustave and Eugène, were a different matter. The Manet brothers came from exactly the sort of social milieu that would recommend them to the family of a sheltered young woman of the Parisian haute bourgeoisie such as Berthe Morisot.

Still, there was an element of danger to the brothers, especially Edouard, that Madame Morisot found worrisome, even if her daughter did not. Elegant and sophisticated, Edouard was a ladies’ man. He was also a painter of provocative pictures. His Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe (Luncheon on the Grass), with its startling juxtaposition of clothed men and a nude woman, as well as his Olympia, with its brazenly sexual courtesan, created a hullabaloo in the art world before eventually being acknowledged as masterpieces. And then there was the matter of his politics. Madame Morisot, who along with her husband was a firm supporter of Thiers, thought Manet’s sympathy for the Communards was totally incomprehensible. By contrast, she and her husband took considerable pride in their son, Tiburce, and his decision to join the Versailles government’s general staff. Yet neither of the senior Morisots was enamored with the full-fledged monarchists in the Versailles government. The Morisots were—like Thiers—constitutional monarchists, and they were just as wholeheartedly anti-Communard.

For his part, Manet was appalled by the suffering he saw in Paris during Bloody Week. He had left Paris toward the end of the siege, not returning until late May. His response to what he saw was based on sympathy with human suffering as well as revulsion at the brutality of the Versailles troops. But Manet, like Clemenceau and Zola, was no Communard. He was instead an ardent supporter of a liberal republic, a patriot who had—along with Edgar Degas—joined the National Guard to defend Paris from the Prussians.13 He was appalled by the violence and repression practiced by the government troops, but he was equally unnerved by the Commune. For every story of a friend or acquaintance who had experienced a close brush with death at the hands of a government firing squad, there were stories of mistaken identities and narrow escapes from death at the hands of the Communards.

Among the latter, one of the most striking stories is that of Pierre-Auguste Renoir, who was quietly painting along the Seine when several passing Communards took note of the “mysterious signs” with which he covered his canvas. Anyone who painted like this, they concluded, could not be a real painter; he must be a spy, hard at work at creating a plan of the quays of the Seine in preparation for the landing of enemy troops. Ignoring his protests, they brought him back to the mairie of the sixth arrondissement to be shot. Here, Renoir most fortunately spotted a familiar face—Raoul Rigault, who now was the Commune’s police chief but who in the days of the Second Empire had once found refuge with Renoir while on the run from the police. Rigault embraced Renoir, presented him with accolades to the crowd (“La Marseillaise for Citizen Renoir!”) and promptly released him—now equipped with a pass to leave Paris.

In addition to his artistic daring and liberal political persuasions, Edouard Manet had yet another problem—at least, from the senior Morisots’ point of view. Not only was he a womanizer, he also was a married man. To make matters worse, his marriage was hardly a conventional one. His wife, Suzanne Leenhoff, came from a respectable-enough Dutch family and had been the piano teacher to the Manet brothers before attracting Edouard’s attentions. She may also have attracted the attentions of Edouard’s father, and the son she bore out of wedlock could have been the child of either—although the boy, who was treated kindly by the family, was never acknowledged by either man. In any case, Suzanne was Edouard’s mistress for many years before he most surprisingly married her, shortly after his father’s death. Shielded by the entire Manet family, she escaped the kind of social ostracism one might expect, and eventually she was accepted even by Edouard’s formidable mother, Madame Manet.

Still, Edouard Manet seems to have remained a problem for the senior Morisots—especially since, by 1871, Berthe Morisot was still unmarried and approaching the age of thirty. Worried about her daughter’s future, Madame Morisot found Berthe’s determination to paint quite incomprehensible. Originally, when the teen-aged Berthe and her sister Edma first showed a flair for art, the Morisot parents had unhesitatingly provided their daughters with teachers. After all, it was considered appropriate for a young woman in their circle to paint or to play a musical instrument competently. But while Monsieur and Madame Morisot were embarked on burnishing their daughters’ social graces, Berthe soon realized that she possessed ability and need for expression that far outstripped the conventional amateurism that her social standing and gender permitted. Even more dismaying, she was developing an entirely unconventional way of painting. Having rejected the static stage sets of the studio for the more revolutionary out-of-doors, she was already striving to capture the fleeting moments of everyday life—the style that derisive critics would soon call Impressionism.

Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, painting in tandem, were simultaneously pressing for this same goal. “I have a dream,” Claude Monet wrote in 1869, envisioning the magic glow of light on water that enveloped the Grenouillère, the famed floating café on the banks of the Seine in Croissy-sur-Seine, near Paris.14 Renoir shared this dream, and the two artists agreed to paint the scene together. Shortly after, Camille Pissarro made his own artistic breakthrough with Monet, painting in the nearby hills above Bougival. What is especially remarkable about Berthe Morisot, though, is that although she was unable—because of gender and background—to join her fellow artists at local cafés, she developed her vision and techniques on her own.

Driven by an increasingly clear and radical vision of what to paint and how, Berthe Morisot was plagued with constraints. Although the Salon (the official exhibition of the Académie des Beaux-Arts) opened its prestigious doors to her most conservative paintings, her artistic integrity recoiled from this acclaimed but stodgy venue. At the same time, her parents urged her to marry. Appalled by the fate of her sister, who reluctantly set aside her paintbrushes when she wed, Berthe held marriage at arm’s length, enduring chaperones for every outing and remaining resignedly in her parents’ home. Men unquestionably found her dark beauty attractive, but with the single exception of the painter Puvis de Chavannes, whom she found stuffy, her talent and intelligence kept most suitors at bay.

And then there was Edouard Manet. Manet seemed fascinated by Berthe Morisot, painting her almost a dozen times, including his famous The Balcony, where she appears—dark and ravishing—as the painting’s focus. In another of his paintings, Berthe Morisot with a Fan, she seems flirtatious, showing a pink-slippered foot and ankle while coyly hiding her face behind a fan. Although political differences certainly had an impact on Madame Morisot’s increasing disapproval of Edouard Manet, his friendship with her daughter, along with its dangers, may well have exacerbated her alarm.

Still, Berthe seems to have resisted Edouard, maintaining the quiet decorum that her milieu demanded. After all, affairs were not on the approved list for an unmarried woman of Paris’s haute bourgeoisie. As it turned out, Madame Morisot need not have worried.

* * *

While Berthe Morisot remained in Cherbourg with her married sister, others—including Edouard Manet—were returning to Paris. Still others had never left, sticking it out through the worst of the siege and the Commune uprising. Among these, Edmond de Goncourt claims a special place, thanks to the journal that he kept during these and subsequent events, right up until his death in 1896.

Originally the journal was the joint production of Edmond and his brother Jules, both of whom had taken great pleasure in the enterprise, ever since starting it in 1851. When Jules died in 1870, Edmond was sufficiently distraught that he considered stopping the journal, but fortunately—given the enormity of events—he changed his mind. Nobly born, financially independent, and notoriously temperamental, Edmond had an arrogance, egocentricity, and extreme sensitivity that made him a difficult friend. Yet his taste, sensibilities, and wit managed to win him a circle of friends that included some of the most interesting literary figures in Paris.

In addition to the journal, Edmond and his brother had written a good deal of art criticism (successful), some plays (less successful), and a series of novels featuring pathological cases in starkly realistic settings. Their masterpiece, Germinie Lacerteux (published in 1865), had a great influence on young Emile Zola and the emerging Naturalist movement. But although Zola was counted among Edmond de Goncourt’s closest friends, Goncourt scarcely bothered to hide his envy over Zola’s success. Much to Goncourt’s dismay, his affected and elaborate style turned off readers, whereas Zola’s hard-hitting and straightforward prose appealed to an ever-larger following. But this, too, served to reinforce Goncourt’s disdain for a world that did not sufficiently appreciate him.

Not surprisingly, Edmond de Goncourt’s opinion of the Commune was less than flattering. “What is happening,” he wrote on March 28, “is nothing less than the conquest of France by the worker and the reduction to slavery under his rule of the noble, the bourgeois, and the peasant.” Yet he could find a kind of beauty in the horror. “Against the night sky,” he wrote during the height of the confrontation, Paris “looked like one of those Neapolitan gouaches of an eruption of Vesuvius on a sheet of black paper.”15

Upon closer inspection, of course, this macabre beauty disappeared. Within the city, Goncourt noted the ever-present smoke, along with chilling reminders of the fighting: “here a dead horse; there, beside the paving-stones from a half-demolished barricade, a peaked cap swimming in a pool of blood.” Touring the ruins, he listed the Palais Royal as burned, but its two wings intact; the Tuileries burned and in need of rebuilding; the Palais de Justice “decapitated,” with “nothing left of the new buildings but the iron skeleton of the roof”; the Prefecture of Police “a smouldering ruin”; and the burned-out Hôtel de Ville “all pink and ash-green and the colour of white-hot steel, or turned to shining agate where the stonework has been burnt by paraffin.”16

He was witness to a Paris in ruins, with ashes and destruction everywhere. But despite the terrible damage and the enormous amount of suffering, the shattered city was already showing surprising signs of life. The day after the Commune had been annihilated, Goncourt sanguinely wrote: “This evening one can hear the movement of Parisian life starting up again, and its murmur like a distant tide.” Two days later, he added: “Across the paving-stones which are being replaced, the people of Paris, dressed in their travelling-clothes, are swarming in to take possession of their city once more.”17

Zola, writing to Cézanne soon after his return, put it more succinctly: “Paris is coming to life again.”18

Sarah Bernhardt agreed. One morning soon after her own return, she received a notice of rehearsal from the Odéon theater. “I shook out my hair,” she wrote, “stamped my feet, and sniffed the air like a young horse snorting.” She had realized, with typical exuberance, that “life was commencing again.”19

But perhaps Edouard Manet put it best of all. Writing to Berthe Morisot on June 10, he told her, “I hope, Mademoiselle, that you will not stay a long time in Cherbourg. Everybody is returning to Paris; besides, it’s impossible to live anywhere else.”20