Chapter Nine

Saints and Sinners

(1880)

The day before yesterday,” wrote Nadezhda von Meck, “there arrived from Paris a young pianist who has just won a first prize in Marmontel’s class at the Conservatoire.” His technique is brilliant, she added, but he certainly did not look as old as he claimed to be. “He says he’s twenty, but looks sixteen.”1

The young man in question was Claude Debussy, and Madame von Meck, Tchaikovsky’s patroness, had hired him for the summer to give lessons to the children. Fresh from the Paris Conservatoire, Debussy was not twenty, as Madame von Meck suspected, but only eighteen. Nor had he quite the credentials that he had led her to believe: in actuality he had never won first prize for piano at the Conservatoire. Much to his father’s disappointment, he had only garnered a second prize.

Still, the young man was unquestionably musical—a remarkable enough fact in itself, given his background. His forebears had been Burgundian peasants, who made their way to Paris by the mid-nineteenth century (and en route changed the spelling of the family name from “de Bussy” to “Debussy”). None among this large clan had ever shown any sign of musical ability, and in fact Debussy’s father was not much of a success at anything, having tried his hand as a clerk, a low-level civil servant, and a china seller before marrying Debussy’s mother (formerly his mistress) nine months before the child was born, in 1862.

Young Debussy, who at that age went by “Claude-Achille” or simply “Achille,” received no formal education but learned to read and write from his mother. She was a stern woman who had no love for her other children but favored Claude-Achille—whom (much to his distress) she kept firmly by her side.2 But his aunt cajoled him into piano lessons, which opened new vistas. He appeared to have sufficient talent that his father, who had planned a career as a seaman for him, “got the idea that I should study just music,” Debussy later remarked, acidly adding, “he being someone who knew nothing about it.”3

Debussy’s father was like that—prone to sudden whims and propelled by naive notions. It was one of these enthusiasms that in the spring of 1871 thrust him into the Commune uprising, where he became a captain and participated in the fighting at Fort d’Issy, just outside Paris’s walls. Arrested and imprisoned, he served one year of his sentence before being released, with temporary but stringent restrictions on his civil rights. It was during this bleak period, which Debussy rarely mentioned in his later years, that the youngster made his acquaintance with the piano. Impressed with the boy’s dexterity, the father immediately had visions of the concert stage, a dream that received added impetus from one of the senior Debussy’s fellow prisoners, whose mother claimed to have been a pupil of Chopin. There is no evidence that this actually was true, but Debussy’s father bought it wholesale and enrolled the boy with Madame Mauté, who—whatever her credentials—must have been an inspiring teacher. Debussy certainly thought so, and in later years was generous with his credit. But with all due respect to Madame Mauté, she unquestionably was working with remarkable material. Indeed, in 1872 at the age of ten, Debussy showed enough talent that he was accepted by the Paris Conservatoire on the first try.

This amounted to starting at the top, and Debussy’s father was delighted. But although Debussy did not always electrify his teachers, he was surprisingly successful—especially given the Conservatoire’s innate conservatism and the youngster’s unhesitating willingness to challenge it (“One is suffocated by your rhythms,” he once informed a startled instructor). By the time he joined the von Meck family in Interlaken, Debussy was sufficiently self-assured and talented to win a return visit the following summer. This would bring him to Moscow and to further adventures.

But in the meantime, he had given up on becoming a concert pianist and had decided to be a composer. He had also met a lovely thirty-two-year-old married woman by the name of Marie-Blanche Vasnier.

The lit de parade (lying-in-state bed) of Valtesse de la Bigne (Edouard Lièvre, 1829–1886). Wood frame with gilded bronze and green silk velvet, Paris, circa 1875. Paris, Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Photo: Les Arts Décoratifs, Paris / Jean Tholance. © ADAGP, Paris.

* * *

As the new decade opened, the French government not only purchased Rodin’s controversial The Bronze Age but also commissioned him to sculpt a monumental doorway for a Museum of the Decorative Arts, planned for the site of the former Palais d’Orsay—an impressive building that had spectacularly burned during the Commune. As it happened, the museum never materialized there, and eventually the Compagnie Paris-Orléans built the Gare d’Orsay on the site. In another twist to the story, Rodin would work for years on his huge and intricate vision, which he could not seem to complete. But in 1880, when he embarked on his commission, he envisioned a triumphant ending for the massive doorway, which—inspired by Dante—he called The Gates of Hell.

The work was to be at least twenty feet high, which was far too large for Rodin’s Montparnasse studio. Well equipped to deal with this sort of problem, the government provided him with a studio in the Dépôt des Marbres, a workplace for sculptors employed in sizable public projects, located at the western end of Rue de l’Université by the Champ de Mars.

Once upon a time, this strip of land between the Rue de l’Université and the Seine had been little more than several small islets. Then, in the eighteenth century, these were merged to form the Ile des Cygnes. The king gave the island to the City of Paris, which eventually filled in the narrow channel between island and Left Bank. This created a larger land mass at the river’s bend and removed the Ile des Cygnes from the map (another island, just downriver, inherited the name). In 1880, the City of Paris ceded this property to the state, in return for the adjoining exposition park at the Champ de Mars. Part of the property that the state acquired became the Dépôt des Marbres.

In the distant future, the site would house a formidable warren of government buildings, which would in time make way for the Musée du Quai Branly. But in Rodin’s day, it was a vast overgrown courtyard filled with blocks of marble, hidden “in a corner so deserted and monastic that you might think yourself in the provinces.”4 The description is that of Paul Gsell, who compiled in book form the lengthy conversations he held with Rodin toward the end of the sculptor’s life.

Although most of Gsell’s book consisted of Rodin’s thoughts and words, Gsell remained as narrator and interviewer. “Along one side of this courtyard,” he wrote, “is a row of a dozen ateliers which have been granted to different sculptors.” By the time Gsell was writing, Rodin occupied two of these ateliers, one to house the plaster cast of his Gates of Hell (“astonishing even in its unfinished state”) and the other in which to work.5

Rodin’s method of work was undoubtedly unusual. From early in his career, he paid nude models to walk about his atelier or rest, simply to observe them continuously. Thus accustomed to the human body, much as were the ancient Greeks, he “became familiar with the sight of muscles in movement”—a fundamental element of his sculpture. “He follows his models with his earnest gaze,” Gsell added, “and when this one or that makes a movement that pleases him, he instantly asks that the pose be kept.” Then he quickly seized the clay.6

“I obey Nature in everything,” Rodin told Gsell, “and I never pretend to command her.” Gsell pressed him on this point. Don’t your sculptures differ from your models? he asked—even if only to accentuate the power of an emotion or the essence of a truth? Rodin contemplated this possibility, and then gave a carefully qualified response. “I accentuate the lines which best express the spiritual state that I interpret,” he told Gsell.7

It was the same answer that he would have given thirty years earlier, as he started to work on his great Gates of Hell.

* * *

Although Rodin differed from the Impressionists on many points, he shared their attempt to capture light. As art critic and historian Bernard Champigneulle notes, the Impressionists tried to do this by breaking light into its component colors, while Rodin broke up the surfaces of his sculptures to create “subtle projections and recesses so as to catch the vibrations of light.”8 This, plus his disregard—even contempt—for tradition, placed Rodin squarely among the artistic revolutionaries of his time.

But although a revolutionary, Rodin was in many ways a practical man. Whether or not he was aware of Renoir’s comment about the current art market, he would have agreed with him that there were barely fifteen art-lovers in Paris “capable of appreciating a painter without the Salon.”9 Rodin had always believed that the same held true for sculptors and that the Salon, as narrow-minded as it was, offered the only sure road to success. The Impressionists, by bolting for their own exhibitions, had satisfyingly thumbed their noses at the art establishment, but in Rodin’s view they had given up their one sure chance at persuading the public—a public that remained unpersuaded far longer than it would have, had the Impressionists not embraced their renegade status.

By 1880, the original Impressionists were already dividing on this point. Manet (who did not consider himself an Impressionist) had always opted for the Salon, however badly it treated him. In 1880—pressed by financial need as well as by bitter quarrels with Degas—both Renoir and Monet joined him. Degas, who had fanned the flames by pushing second-rate protégés into the group exhibition, was livid at what he viewed as Renoir’s and Monet’s desertion. “Degas has produced chaos among us,” wrote Impressionist mainstay Gustave Caillebotte to Pissarro. “It’s really too bad for him that he has the unfortunate character he does.”10

But Degas, although difficult, was not the only factor pushing the original Impressionists Salon-ward. Among this group, only Morisot and Caillebotte were independently wealthy, and Morisot could best be described as comfortably well-off rather than rich.11 All the others—including the once well-to-do Degas and Manet—were in need of a steady income. Renoir, the son of a tailor, had grown up in poverty and longed for income and respectability. Monet, a child of the bourgeoisie, had chosen his renegade posture, but found it difficult to accept the deprivations that this entailed. Now, with a household of eight children, he could no longer afford the luxury of exhibiting solely with other Impressionists. By late 1879, his paintings were beginning to bring in higher prices, and he decided to stop selling them for a pittance, as he so often had in the past. As part of this positive change in his professional life, he joined Renoir in abstaining from the Impressionists’ fifth exhibition (which did not do well), and then he proceeded to exhibit in a one-man show at the gallery of the fashionable magazine La Vie Moderne, founded by Zola’s and Goncourt’s publisher, Georges Charpentier, and located on the chic Boulevard des Italiens.12

Monet, much like Renoir and Rodin, was on his way to success.

* * *

Edouard Manet, too, longed for success. And yet, despite the constant drumbeat of rejection, he could not help but continue to paint as he did—primarily Parisian cityscapes and the people who inhabited them, including down-and-out subjects such as his first rejection by the Salon, The Absinthe Drinker (not to be confused with Degas’ later work with a similar subject and title). Over the years, the Salon had accepted some of his pictures but rejected far more, finding their realism shocking and vulgar. In this, the Salon juries were fulminating not only against the blatant eroticism of Manet’s courtesan Olympia or his unclothed woman nonchalantly seated between two properly clothed men in Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, but also against his direct assault upon artistic conventions and traditions. The Salon was as quick to dismiss his depictions of everyday life in The Laundry as it was to condemn these more sensational paintings. Still, among those paintings that it did accept was the picture of a woman and child in front of Gare Saint-Lazare (The Railroad). Oddly enough, no one on the Salon jury recognized Manet’s respectable-looking model here as the same Victorine Meurent who had so readily posed for both Olympia and Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe.

Striving to depict everyday life in all its realism and naturalness, Manet began to adopt some of the Impressionists’ techniques. Yet he differed significantly from his Impressionist colleagues by remaining primarily a studio painter, one who preferred to paint the people and places of the city rather than rural landscapes. He was also a brilliant portraitist, who painted his parents (a somber work that marked his first acceptance to the Salon, in 1861) and his friends, including the poet Stéphane Mallarmé and Zola (whose portrait the Salon accepted in 1868). Manet painted multiple portraits of Berthe Morisot, and his stunning The Balcony, in which she is the central figure, was accepted by the 1869 Salon. Clemenceau never liked the portrait that Manet did of him, but then again, Clemenceau did not like Rodin’s portrait bust of him either.

Manet took Clemenceau’s lack of enthusiasm in stride, but was annoyed by sitters who wanted their portraits changed to something more flattering. “Is it my fault,” he demanded of his friend Antonin Proust, “if [the poet George] Moore looks like a squashed egg yolk?”13 But far more discouraging was Manet’s failure to win any formal commissions from the state. He had, of course, hoped that once his republican friends came into power, he would see some commissions come his way. But much to his disappointment, most of his political friends (with the exception of Proust, who in 1881 became minister of culture) were much too traditional in their tastes to appreciate what Manet was doing. Even Clemenceau’s portrait had been at Manet’s request. “It is strange,” Manet commented to Proust, “how reactionary republicans can be when it comes to art.”14

Manet’s ongoing problem was his failure to find connoisseurs willing to buy his works. When in 1872 the dealer Paul Durand-Ruel “discovered” Manet, the dealer bought twenty-two of Manet’s works—the first time the painter had ever really sold anything. Durand-Ruel became a major booster, but by 1880 Manet’s primary patron was the discerning opera singer Jean-Baptiste Fauré, whose portrait Manet showed at the 1877 Salon. By the time of Manet’s death, Fauré owned some sixty-seven of Manet’s works, including Le Déjeuner sur l’Herbe, The Fifer (rejected by the Salon of 1866), and The Railway.

Fauré was a godsend, but Manet needed to sell more than this to pay the bills for his debonair lifestyle. And so, in the spring of 1880, when the editor of La Vie Moderne invited him to provide the first one-man exhibition in its Boulevard des Italiens galleries, Manet was quick to accept. He gathered the best of his recent works, including a portrait of Madame Zola, and put together what has been termed a “dazzling show.” Perhaps just as gratifying was the Salon’s acceptance of two of his works, his portrait of Antonin Proust and his depiction of a flirting couple at a garden restaurant on the Avenue de Clichy, Chez le Père Lathuille.

But he was ill, and his condition was deteriorating rapidly. At first he told his family that he was suffering from a snakebite that he had received long before in a Brazilian jungle. It was true that as a teenager Manet had sailed to Rio de Janeiro on a training vessel, in what proved to be an unsuccessful attempt to enter the Navy. But the snakebite may have been the product of Manet’s decidedly ironic sense of humor, for it soon became all too evident that he was suffering from syphilis. Since 1878 he had been experiencing attacks of paralysis, and by 1880 he had to be careful to conserve his strength. He apologized to Madame Zola for not coming in person to make the request to borrow her portrait for La Vie Moderne exhibition, “but I am not allowed to climb stairs.”15 After that, he departed for five long months to Bellevue, west of Paris, for water treatment.

There the weather was bad, and he was lonely and bored. “I’m living here like a shellfish,” he wrote one friend, begging him to tell him “what’s going on.”16 But worst of all, despite his vigorous protests to the contrary, he knew that he was not getting any better.

* * *

Manet was probably fortunate to be well out of Paris that summer, when the stench throughout the city, notoriously bad in summer, was worse than ever. Despite the sewer system established by Haussmann and Belgrand (which already extended some six hundred kilometers by the time of Belgrand’s death in 1878), unsanitary filth continued to pile up on Paris streets. The increase in the number of horses was one source of the problem, but not the only one, and on bad days even a well-perfumed handkerchief could not mask the stench.

Protected from this unpleasantness, Manet remained in Bellevue, where he quietly celebrated France’s first national commemoration of 14 July—sending up cheers for the Republic as well as for the amnesty just granted to the exiled Communards. In addition to Louise Michel, these included Henri Rochefort, the radical journalist who (despite Victor Hugo’s pleading) had been sent to New Caledonia. Soon after his arrival, Rochefort dramatically escaped in a small whaleboat and eventually ended up in Geneva. This episode, followed by the amnesty and Rochefort’s triumphant return to Paris, prompted Manet to consider the idea of a dramatic painting of Rochefort’s escape, set against the background of the open sea. Although not a landscape painter, Manet had always enjoyed painting the sea, and this, coupled with the subject’s dramatic possibilities, inspired Manet to regard it as a sure-fire submission to the 1881 Salon.

In the meantime, he anxiously awaited visitors, and on occasion even attempted some visits of his own—including one to his nearby Bellevue neighbor, the charming and notorious courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne. Red-haired and beautiful, Valtesse de la Bigne had brought several rich and titled men to financial ruin. She had also captivated some of the most sophisticated men in town, including Manet, who referred to her as “la belle Valtesse” and had painted her the year before.

Born Louise Emilie Delabigne, Valtesse de la Bigne was sufficiently intelligent and charming to draw an entourage of admiring writers and artists such as Manet. Zola also paid court to Valtesse—although in his case from a desire to get the characters and setting right for his upcoming novel Nana. Flattered by his journalistic interest, Valtesse even agreed to show him her bedroom—until then off-limits to all but her most highly paying patrons. Zola (who seems to have limited his visit to note taking) used her over-the-top boudoir as the model for Nana’s bedroom. Even if the fictional Nana was nowhere near the sophisticated creature that Valtesse had become, the bed said it all. It was “a bed such as had never existed before,” Zola wrote, “a throne, an altar, to which Paris would come in order to worship her sovereign nudity.”17

* * *

Another, and completely different, fictional courtesan was Marguerite Gautier, the tragic heroine of La dame aux camélias. Gautier was the creation of Alexandre Dumas fils, son of the famed author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. Every bit as romantic as his father, although far less flamboyant and self-indulgent, Dumas fils wrote La dame aux camélias in memory of the great tragic love affair of his youth.

The woman, whose name was Marie Duplessis, was of course young and beautiful, emanating the sort of fragility that virtually demanded protection. She had taken to reckless expenditure and drinking to combat her boredom and unhappiness, which her admirers did everything to alleviate. Her demands grew in proportion to their willingness to fulfill them, yet she remained unhappy. Even their roses left her cold. Perhaps she was allergic to roses, or perhaps not, but they made her dizzy. Only camellias, which are odorless, would do.

Dumas, who was but twenty at the time, was helplessly in love with Marie and eager to provide the protection she needed. But most unfortunately, he did not possess the requisite fortune, and Marie was accustomed to going through fortunes. It was true that Dumas’ father was one of the nineteenth century’s most successful playwrights and novelists, with an income to match, but Dumas père was in his own way as irresponsible with money as was Marie. No matter how much Dumas père earned (and it was a lot), he always managed to outspend his income. An epic womanizer (much like his friend Victor Hugo), he spent freely, was an easy target for loans, and supported not only his current mistresses but also those who had come before.

Dumas fils possessed neither his father’s taste for adventure nor his gargantuan appetite for life. But he did have this one love, and he desperately wanted to keep her for himself. It was not to be. Not only was Marie a devourer of fortunes, but she suffered from a disease of the lungs, which the nineteenth century viewed with romantically infused trepidation. If pretty young girls had to die in nineteenth-century novels, this was the way to do it, and by the time Dumas met her, Marie was in an advanced state of consumption.

Tender and compassionate in his love, Dumas won her over and seems to have dreamed of reforming her. But this proved impossible. His debts began to mount, even as he realized that she was false to him. Finally, the wounded young man left the beautiful courtesan. Many months later, hearing that she was very ill, he wrote from Madrid to beg forgiveness. She never replied. A pale ghost of her former self, she continued to make the rounds of all the stylish places, but became ever more ill. After a long and difficult decline, she finally died.

Young Dumas was devastated by the news, and upon learning of her death, wrote a novel about her—La dame aux camélias. In it, he portrayed the Lady of the Camellias as he would have liked her to have been. Marie never would have recognized herself as a penitent who renounces her degrading life for the man she loves. But the story was heartrendingly romantic, and it was an enormous hit. It became an even bigger hit when Dumas turned it into a play.

And it became bigger yet, thirty years later, when Sarah Bernhardt made it her own.

* * *

Sarah Bernhardt had known Dumas père from childhood, when he was one of a coterie of distinguished men in attendance on her mother, Youle—a courtesan who had attained a comfortable place in the Parisian demimonde. It was Dumas who provided his box for Sarah’s first evening at the Comédie-Française, a performance of Molière’s Amphitryon. It was a comedy, but Sarah did not laugh. Instead, she felt so sorry for the duped wife that she burst into loud sobs. Most of the members of her party were embarrassed by this outburst, but Dumas was not. Moved by the unusual degree of empathy she had showed, he tucked her in that night with words she would always remember: “Good-night, little star.”18

When it came time for Sarah to audition for the Conservatoire, it was Dumas who helped her practice a scene from Racine’s Phèdre. After that, their careers continued to intersect, with Bernhardt eventually performing in two of his plays, while his son’s La dame aux camélias would in time become one of her signature pieces. But in 1880, when Bernhardt decided to bring La dame aux camélias on her first American tour, she had never before played the role.

By now Alexandre Dumas père was dead and Alexandre Dumas fils was king of the French theater. He was successful, rich, and honored, culminating in his acceptance to the Académie Française (an honor that had eluded his father). He had also developed a strong moral streak, probably in reaction to his father’s earthy embrace of life. Of course, moral streaks have their limits, and Dumas fils quietly kept a mistress, to divert him from his increasingly unstable wife. Still, by the time that Sarah Bernhardt was preparing to cross the Atlantic with La dame aux camélias, she and its author had little in common. They certainly encountered one another with some frequency in the world of the theater, and Bernhardt had been involved in an altercation with him during the rehearsals for L’etranger, the first play he had written for the Comédie-Française. The altercation ended amicably enough, but there does not seem to have been any particular friendship between them afterward.

Indeed, Dumas fils would have frowned on the sort of shenanigans in which Bernhardt (and his father) took such delight. Preceded by sizzling stories of her flamboyant lifestyle, Bernhardt hit New York with gale force. Her elegance and beauty seduced, while the luxury to which she was accustomed left Americans gasping. Once front and center in the public’s attention, she made sure that this translated into success at the box office. Anticipating that Americans would understand little of what was being said onstage, which remained entirely in French, she made sure to entertain her audience visually, providing her productions with spectacular costumes—such as her gown for La dame aux camélias, which was embroidered in pearls. Treated to spectacle both on stage and off, Americans swooned with delight.

Traveling was difficult, even with a luxuriously appointed private train to provide accommodations in the remoter corners of the country. But Bernhardt gamely pressed on, playing more than 150 performances in fifty cities and towns before returning to France. She made a fortune in the process and looked forward to return engagements in the years to come.

* * *

Sarah Bernhardt would not be the only famous Parisian to cross the Atlantic in the upcoming years. While Bernhardt was wooing audiences in the States, work resumed on the Statue of Liberty at the foundry of Gaget, Gauthier et Companie, located at 25 Rue de Chazelles (17th), just north of Parc Monceau.19 By 1880, individual French citizens had contributed enough to pay for designing and building the statue, as well as shipping her to New York (Americans were to pay for the pedestal). With the French end of the fund-raising virtually complete, an essential milestone had been reached, but now came the problem of engineering the enormous structure. Following the unexpected death of Viollet-le-Duc in 1879, Bartholdi turned to an expert in wind resistance to do the job—the up-and-coming Gustave Eiffel.

Borrowing from his long experience with bridges and viaducts, Eiffel dramatically changed Liberty’s interior framework from what Viollet-le-Duc had in mind. Instead of sand-filled coffers, Eiffel devised a huge iron pylon that supported the statue’s skin of shaped copper sheets. These he indirectly attached to the pylon by a skeletal framework of iron strips—an innovative and flexible construction that allowed the statue to withstand the changing temperatures and high winds of its future harbor home.

In the meantime, Bartholdi was busy creating Liberty’s exterior. He had nurtured his vision for many years, beginning with sketches and small study models and gradually progressing to larger models. From an approximately 4-foot-high terra cotta model he constructed one scaled at one-sixteenth the final version (about 9 feet, not including its pedestal). He then magnified this version to one that was four times as large (approximately 36 feet) and then divided this larger model into sections that he enlarged to their final dimensions (a whopping 151 feet, including the arm and torch).

The construction process itself was a remarkable undertaking, which Paris’s Musée des Arts et Métiers commemorates. Near a scale model of Lady Liberty are two tiny reproductions of the Paris foundry where Bartholdi wrought his final colossus. The one depicts his workmen in the process of enlarging a replica of Liberty’s head, while the other illustrates the head’s final assembly. The museum also has on display an impressive full-size replica of Liberty’s index finger.

The whole enterprise was so astonishing that Parisians paid to visit the foundry of Gaget, Gauthier et Compagnie to watch as the work progressed. And gradually the statue began to rise—a starting vision above the housetops.

* * *

Parisians were undoubtedly dazzled by the enormous statue of Liberty that was slowly rising in their backyard. Many, especially the workers of Montmartre and Belleville, were also furious at the basilica of Sacré-Coeur that was beginning to rise in their midst. In the summer of 1880, these two strands came together in a proposal to the city council that a colossal statue of Liberty be placed “on the summit of Montmartre, in front of the church of Sacré-Coeur, on land belonging to the city of Paris.”20

The idea was to block any sight of Sacré-Coeur with another huge monument, one dedicated to liberal and secular ideals. By October, the city council had decided by an overwhelming majority to ask the government to build, in place of the basilica, a work of unquestionable national significance. To accomplish this, the council asked the government to revert to public ownership the land on which the basilica was being built. Arguing that unless the government did something to prevent its rise, Sacré-Coeur would forever constitute a provocation to civil war, the council then dumped the entire proposal in the lap of the Chamber of Deputies.

There it disappeared for a time, giving Cardinal Guibert and the other fervent supporters of Sacré-Coeur a chance to catch their breath—and to pull whatever political strings were left to pull.

* * *

In late 1880, as Sacré-Coeur began to rise, thousands tried to force their way into the offices of the newly formed Compagnie Universelle du Canal Interocéanique, in the hopes of obtaining shares in this hugely promising venture. The idea of linking the Atlantic and Pacific oceans via a canal was not a new one, but Ferdinand de Lesseps—the man who had single-mindedly pushed through the Suez Canal—was behind the endeavor, which augured its success. De Lesseps’s vision of a forty-five-mile canal across Panama’s isthmus was a bold one, but as his many enthusiastic backers were quick to point out, to the bold go the rewards. And without question, the anticipated financial rewards of a cross-isthmus canal were enormous.

De Lesseps was not an engineer, and indeed ignored the advice of engineers, most especially that of Gustave Eiffel, who insisted that locks would be essential to this sea-level project. Eiffel also predicted that the canal would take far longer to build, and at a far greater cost (both human and monetary) than de Lesseps so confidently predicted. But at this point, no one was paying any attention to the experts. The public, sold on de Lesseps’s celebrity and the chance of untold riches, barnstormed the company in the attempt to get in on a piece of the action.

The great Panama Canal affair had begun.

* * *

Flaubert dead! Edmond de Goncourt was devastated. He had visited the great novelist only a few weeks before, and Gustave Flaubert had seemed perfectly well. And now Goncourt was traveling to Rouen to bury him.

The funeral took place in the little church where Madame Bovary had gone to confession, but most of the crowd, to Goncourt’s irritation, seemed more interested in the idea of a good meal and a spree following the burial, and the word “brothel” even began to circulate. Daudet, Zola, and Goncourt refused to join in the anticipated revelries. Instead, they returned to Paris “talking reverently about the dead man.”21

Goncourt, who had truly been fond of Flaubert, was uncharacteristically subdued. “The fact is,” he remarked sadly to his journal, he and Flaubert “were the two old champions of the new school, and I feel very lonely today.”22