Sacré Bleu

Pissarro was uncomfortable being called cher by this strange, enshrouded, unescorted woman. “Well there was no cow in the scene, so I didn’t paint a cow. I paint what I see.”

“A realist then? Like Corot and Courbet?”

“Something like that,” said Pissarro. “I’m more interested in light and color than painting a narrative.”

“Oh, I’m interested in light and color as well,” said the woman, squeezing the painter’s arm and playfully hugging it to her breast. “Particularly the color blue. A blue cow, perhaps?”

Pissarro felt sweat beading on his scalp. “Pardon me, mademoiselle, I must find my friend.”

Pissarro pushed through the crowd, passing hundreds of paintings without even looking—feeling as if he was rushing through a jungle, away from some dark voodoo ritual he had stumbled upon. (Which had happened to him as a boy on Saint Thomas, and even now he could not pass any of Paris’s cathedrals without suspecting that inside, some dark ritual involving bloody chicken feathers and entranced, sweat-slick African women was going on. To a secular Caribbean Jew, Catholicism was like a malevolent, mystical stepchild lying in wait.)

He caught up to Lessard in the “M” gallery. The baker was standing just outside a semicircle of people gathered around a large canvas. They were pointing and laughing.

The baker looked up at his friend. “Are you all right? You look as if you’ve seen a ghost.”

“I’ve just been mercilessly flirted with by a strange woman,” said Pissarro.

“All the little frogs are not at the river this Sunday then?” Little frogs, les grenouilles, was the term for the flirty young girls, mostly shopgirls, seamstresses, or part-time models, who spent their weekends at leisure on the banks of the Seine in (or out of) colorful dresses, in search of a drink, a song, a laugh, a husband, or often just a drunken tumble in the bushes, and generally pursuing another invention new to the working class: fun.

Pissarro smiled at Lessard’s joke, then let his smile fall as he looked at the painting that was drawing so much attention. It was a nude, a young woman sitting on the bank of a river, with two fully clothed young men, their picnic lunch in disarray on the ground beside them. Some distance in the background, another young woman in white petticoats waded in the river. The nude woman stared out of the canvas, directly at the viewer, a wry smile on her lips, as if to say, “What do you think is going on here?”

“The painter’s name is Édouard Manet,” said Lessard. “Do you know him?”

Pissarro couldn’t look away from the canvas. “I know of him. He was a student of Thomas Couture when I was studying with Corot.”

A woman worked her way to the front of the semicircle, made a great show of looking the painting up and down, then covered her eyes and hurried away, fanning herself as if she might faint at any second.

“I don’t understand,” said Lessard. “There are hundreds of nudes in the exhibition. They act as if they’ve never seen one before.”

Pissarro shook his head as he stroked his long beard, graying already, even though he was only thirty-three. He couldn’t look away from the painting. “Those others are goddesses, heroines, myths. This is different. This changes everything.”

“Because she’s too skinny?” asked the baker, trying to understand why people would laugh at a scene that seemed so unfunny.

“No, because she’s real,” said Pissarro. “I envy this Manet the work, but not the discomfort he must be feeling.”

“Looks to me like she’s deciding which of these two she’s going to bonk in the bushes.” Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe—Édouard Manet, 1863

“Him?” said a familiar woman’s voice at his ear, bosoms again pressed against his arm. “He didn’t have to pose bare-assed on the grass for hours on end.”

ÉDOUARD MANET FELT AS IF ALL OF PARIS WERE LINING UP TO SPIT IN HIS FACE. “This picture will set the city on its ear,” he’d told his friend Charles Baudelaire a week before. Now he wanted to fire a letter off to the poet (who was away in Strasbourg) to vent the horror he was experiencing at having people laugh at his work.

Manet was thirty-one, the son of a magistrate, with a good education and family money. He was broad-shouldered, lean-hipped, and had his blond beard trimmed according to the latest fashion. He liked to be seen in the cafés, talking philosophy and art with his friends, the center of attention—a wit, a raconteur, and a bit of a dandy. But today he wanted to fade into the very marble of the walls.

He took his butter-yellow

leather gloves from his top hat and pretended to be concentrating on pulling them on as he made his way out of the gallery, hoping he might avoid attention, but just as he was sliding around a marble column into the next gallery, he heard his name called and made the mistake of looking over his shoulder.

“Monsieur Manet! Please.” A very tall, well-dressed young gentleman approached, flanked on one side by a slight fellow with a light goatee in a worn linen suit and on the other by a stout young man with a full, dark beard, wearing a fine black suit, with lace shirt cuffs extending from his sleeves.

“Excuse me, Monsieur Manet,” said the tall man. “I am Frédéric Bazille, and these are my friends—”

“The painter Monet,” said the youth with the lace cuffs. He clicked his heels and bowed slightly. “Honored, sir.”

“Renoir,” said the thin fellow with a shrug.

“Are you not a painter as well?” asked Manet, noting paint on the cuffs of Renoir’s jacket.

“Well, yes, but I find it better not to announce it at the outset, in case I need to borrow money.”