3. Café and Café-Concert

Herbert, Robert L.

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3. Café and Café-Concert

Robert L. Herbert

Impressionism: Art, Leisure, and Parisian Society

Even a casual glance at successive editions of guide books to Paris, from their beginnings in the 1840s to the end of the “Belle Epoque,” reveals the striking truth: leisure and entertainment took an ever-increasing place in the life of Paris...

Author

Robert L. Herbert

PublisherYale University Press

Related print edition pages: pp.59-91

https://doi.org/10.37862/aaeportal.00067.007

Stable URL: https://aaeportal.com/?id=-15804

Chapter subject tags:Degas, Edgar, 1834-1917Renoir, Auguste, 1841-1919Manet, Édouard, 1832-1883Impressionism (Art)--FranceMusic-halls (Variety-theaters, cabarets, etc.) in artOffenbach, Jacques, 1819-1880Folies-BergèreLeisure in art--France--History--19th centuryArt and society--France--History--19th centuryStreet life--France--Paris--19th centuryBars (Drinking establishments)--France--19th centuryProstitution--France--Paris--19th century

3. Café and Café-Concert

Cafés have invaded the boulevards, concerts have invaded the cafés, and crowds have invaded everywhere to the great joy of the barkeepers who are getting rich.

—Marc Constantin, 1872

Bread! Bread! they used to demand. Spectacles and hussies, that’s what they cry today.

—Anon., Paris désert. Lamentation d’un Jérémie haussmanisé, 1868

To become a harlequin is some compensation for failing to be a republican citizen.

—Henry Tuckerman, 1867

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Description: Aux Ambassadeurs, detail by Degas, Edgar

61. Degas, detail of Aux Ambassadeurs (Pl. 83).

Even a casual glance at successive editions of guide books to Paris, from their beginnings in the 1840s to the end of the “Belle Epoque,” reveals the striking truth: leisure and entertainment took an ever-increasing place in the life of Paris. In the guide books—their very growth is an index of leisure—notices devoted to idle hours and entertainment greatly expanded, while those that referred to historic sites and famous buildings simply held their own (and visiting such places is, of course, an aspect of leisure). At the end of the century the life of Paris, if one were to judge by guide books, was dominated by the following: theaters in infinite variety, opera, comic opera, vaudeville, music halls, cafés-concerts, cafés, restaurants, popular balls, circuses, racetracks, promenades (along streets as well as in parks and gardens), shopping, and excursions along the Seine and out to the suburbs, excursions that may have included bathing, boating, riverside dining, dancing, picnicking, or simply promenading. The numbers involved are not easy to establish, but they were already noteworthy by the 1860s. The American James McCabe estimated that in 1867 theaters in Paris seated a total of 30,000 on a good night, and in cafés-concerts, circuses, and other enclosed places, an additional 24,000.1 McCabe 1869, p. 65; McCabe got his figures from city officials.

Tourists came to Paris to enjoy what the natives already prized, an elegant urban culture. The extra revenues they brought contributed fundamentally to Paris’s prosperity, as did the plaudits they lavished on Parisian products catering both to body and to mind. Paradoxically, tourists—transients by definition—fitted readily into the Parisian culture of entertainment and leisure, for the city’s life was sustained by a volatile population. By 1886 the city’s inhabitants numbered 2,345,000, three times the figure for 1831. Furthermore, most of the newcomers had been born outside Paris. From 1875 to 1891, for example, only 7% of the net increase in Paris’s population was due to new births, 93% to immigration from elsewhere (and these figures do not include temporary visitors from abroad and from the provinces). Already by 1872, 7.4% of Paris’s residents were foreign-born, a huge percentage compared to prior generations and to other European cities. By 1891, only 32.2% of the capital’s population had been born in the city, whereas in London, center of a vast colonial empire, and in Boston, major city in a nation of immigrants, respectively 62.9% and 38.5% of the inhabitants were native born.

Paris’s population was also marked by a very high percentage of single men and women. Paris and its immediate suburbs had the highest divorce rate in France: in 1885, 47 divorces for every 100,000 people, compared to 3.5 for the rest of the country. Adding legal separations to divorces brought the Paris figure up to 60 per 100,000, compared to 12 for all of France. Moreover, many Parisians never married at all, for Paris had the lowest marriage rate among Caucasians in all of Western Europe and the United States. To these revealing facts we might add another: among married couples, 323 per 1000 had no children, an unusually high figure for that era.2 All demographic figures from Weber 1899, ed. 1963, and Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5.

These various statistics show us that the traditional family and the domestic hearth, so vital to middle-class mores and to traditions of painting earlier in the century, were no longer as central to Parisian life. The foreigners, the provincial immigrants, the temporary visitors, the professional couples with out children, the construction workers and laundresses who left their families in the provinces, these were the ones who populated the Second Empire and the Third Republic. It was among these uprooted peoples, living in a city undergoing constant and drastic alterations, that the flâneur and the impressionist artists took their places. Paris was indeed a city of strangers.

The burgeoning population of Paris formed an ideal clientèle for entrepreneurs of distraction, both the owners of the rapidly expanding network of entertainment, and also the municipal and national institutions which treated entertainment as instruments of policy. Henry Tuckerman, when he visited Paris in 1867, contrasted the “dignity and permanence” of American and British life with that of Paris, whose citizens, he wrote, dwelled in

a kind of metropolitan encampment, requiring no domicile except a bedroom for seven hours in the twenty-four, and passing the remainder of each day and night as nomadic cosmopolites: going to a café to breakfast, a restaurant to dine, an estaminet to smoke, a national library to study, a cabinet de lecture to read the gazettes, a public bath for ablution, an open church to pray, a free lecture room to be instructed, a thronged garden to promenade, a theatre to be amused, a museum for science, a royal gallery for art, a municipal ball, literary soirée, or suburban rendezvous, for society.

Unlike James McCabe and other American visitors in 1867, who reveled in all the glitter, Tuckerman understood that leisure and display formed a vital element of French politics, one that was used to great advantage by Louis Napoleon’s government, and one that truly characterized the new society of the French capital:

To cultivate illusions is apparently the science of Parisian life; vanity must have its pabulum and fancy her triumph, though pride is sacrificed and sense violated thereby; hence a coincidence of thrift and wit, shrewdness and sentimentality, love of excitement and patient endurance, superficial enjoyment and essential deprivation….3 Tuckerman 1867, pp. 25–27.

Offenbach and Manet

In 1867, when Tuckerman made those observations, one of the great masters of illusion and display reached the heights of a giddy climb to fame. Jacques Offenbach had two smash hits that year, both calculated to coincide with the 1867 exposition. La Vie Parisienne, commissioned expressly for the fair, was ready ahead of time (it premiered on 31 October 1866), leaving Offenbach and his habitual collaborators, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, several months to prepare La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein. The latter opened on 12 April 1867 and was, like its predecessor, a huge success. Offenbach was not an impressionist in any sense of the term, but the study of his operettas is so rewarding for the history of Impressionism that it must have its place. Moreover, Siegfried Kracauer’s Offenbach and the Paris of His Time 4 Kracauer 1937. For Offenbach one should consult also Faris 1980.is one of the great pieces of cultural history, and in many ways the ideal model for a book on Impressionism, even though the author never mentions Manet, Morisot, or Degas. Thanks to his perceptive analysis of Offenbach, we can find illuminating parallels with Manet that greatly extend our understanding of the works of this painter, himself a master of illusion and display.

Offenbach’s first major success, Orphée aux enfers of 1858, owed some of its vogue to its witty satire of contemporary society. Jupiter, forever chasing women, was seen as Louis Napoleon, and his jealous wife Juno, as Eugénie. Like the Emperor, Jupiter needed public support, so Offenbach replaced the classical chorus with voices labeled “public opinion,” making clear the manipulation of the populace. Jupiter and his courtiers used shabby subterfuges to maintain their power, and they succeeded, despite the threat of the Olympians to stage a revolution, because indulgence in pleasures was offered to all. “In short,” wrote Kracauer, “the operetta made a mock of all the glamour that surrounded the apparatus of power.” The fact that there was considerable sting in Offenbach’s spoof of the Empire was revealed by Jules Janin’s attacks on the operetta for profaning “glorious antiquity” through its allusions to contemporary society.5 Kracauer 1937, p. 176. In La Belle Hélène of 1864, Offenbach poked more fun at the vainglory which characterized Louis Napoleon’s reign (Kracauer reminds us that at a masked ball in 1857, Eugénie appeared as Night, with a Milky Way of diamonds, and two others came as the Bosphorus at sunset, and the Sea of Marmora on a misty day). Helen’s adultery is frankly justified for reasons of state, and like members of Louis Napoleon’s court, Orestes parades his girls on the “boulevards” of Sparta, boasting that the state’s coffers will pay for his excesses.

In 1866 and 1867, with La Vie Parisienne and La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein, Offenbach dropped mythological settings in favor of contemporary life. La Vie Parisienne opens in the Gare Saint-Lazare, as a party returns from the fashionable resort of Trouville; its final act takes place in a café-restaurant. In between, the visitors Baron and Baroness de Gondremark are victims of the boulevardiers Gardefeu and Bobinet, who take advantage of the foreigners’ desires to attend the latest plays, musicals, and cafés-concerts, and to embark on amorous escapades. Appropriate to the Paris exposition, for which it was initially commissioned, La Vie Parisienne gives other prominent roles to foreigners, and its chorus, suitably enough, is composed of foreign tourists:

We are going to invade

The sovereign city,

The resort of pleasure.

In La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein, set in the fictional duchy of Gerolstein, one of the principal characters is General Boum, always anxious to enjoy war; periodically he shoots his pistol into the air and sniffs the fumes, in preference to snuff. Analogies with contemporaries were not hard to find, and Offenbach had to cope repeatedly with the government’s censors.6 Faris 1980, pp. 142–46, recounts the political difficulties Offenbach encountered with this operetta, giving grist to Kracauer’s mill, although elsewhere he somewhat naively denies the validity of Kracauer’s political analysis. His original title, simply La Grande-Duchesse, was rejected on the grounds that Russia might take offense if it were thought that Catherine II were being satirized (Alexander II was in Paris for the exposition). Further, the censor objected to a young general’s declaration, “Madam, I have just won the war in eighteen days,” fearing that it would be taken as a reference to Moltke’s defeat of the Austrians at Sadowa, a campaign that had lasted eighteen days (Offenbach changed the line to “four days”). The objection was not so far-fetched. There was widespread discussion in 1867 of the possibility that Louis Napoleon might again venture on war as a way of solidifying his control, and the operetta was treading on delicate ground by having the Grand Duchess’s ministers plan a war as a solution to their own difficulties. More absurdly, the censor also forbade Hortense Schneider to wear an imaginary royal decoration, lest it offend one or another of the visiting royalty (she subsequently had her portrait painted as the Grand Duchess, wearing the forbidden grand cordon parodique).

In reviewing the social role of Offenbach’s operettas from 1855 to 1867, the year of La Grande-Duchesse, Kracauer demonstrated that Offenbach’s operettas used illusion and display as devices to undermine the pompous exterior of Empire, and to reveal the political truths that lay beneath. The offenbachiade, he wrote,

had originated in an epoch in which social reality had been banished by the Emperor’s orders, and for many years it had flourished in the gap that was left. Thoroughly ambiguous as it was, it had fulfilled a revolutionary function under the dictatorship, that of scourging corruption and authoritarianism, and holding up the principle of freedom. To be sure, its satire had been clothed in a garment of frivolity and concealed in an atmosphere of intoxication, in accordance with the requirements of the Second Empire. But the frivolity went deeper than the world of fashionable Bohemia could see.

At a time when the bourgeoisie were politically stagnant and the Left was impotent, Offenbach’s operettas had been the most definite form of revolutionary protest. It released gusts of laughter, which shattered the compulsory silence and lured the public towards opposition, while seeming only to amuse them.7 Kracauer 1937, p. 289.

What about the parallels with Manet in all of this? They fairly leap to the eye, as the French would say.8 When in Rome in 1885, Debussy admitted that he was homesick and yearned “to see Manet and hear Offenbach.” Cited in Faris 1980 p. 221. Manet once represented Offenbach, who can be seen in Music in the Tuileries (Pl. 42), a picture devoted to one of the most fashionable of the Second Empire’s social pageants. Offenbach is shown among a group of immaculately dressed contemporaries, including Manet himself, his brother Eugène, Baudelaire, and Gautier. The composer’s image would not be enough to warrant comparison with Manet, of course, and it is to his great operettas of the 1860s that we should turn. If we look first at Offenbach’s two early successes, Orphée aux Enfers (1858) and La Belle Hélène (1864), and then at two of Manet’s notorious canvases, his Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Pl. 171) and Olympia (Pl. 62), we shall see that the painter, like the musician and his librettists, offered up spoofs of the gods, saucily converted to contemporary purposes. The Déjeuner shows two men clothed in the apparently casual, but in fact elegant clothing of contemporary artists, and two women, one nude and the other, in the middle distance, in a diaphanous garment. The poses of the three foreground figures were taken from the river gods in Raimondi’s engraving after Raphael’s Judgment of Paris; the fourth figure is as much a nymph as a contemporary. Olympia is a modern version of Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Manet replaces the goddess of love with a contemporary courtesan, that kind of woman—Cora Pearl, Blanche d’Antigny, Hortense Schneider—whose public prominence symbolized the luxury and the hypocrisy of the Second Empire (Cora Pearl was for a time the favorite of Prince Napoleon, the Emperor’s cousin; in 1867 she made a few appearances as Cupid in a revival of Offenbach’s Orphée).

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62. Manet, Olympia, 1863. 130.5 × 190 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

In these, and in other pictures, Manet was, like Offenbach, making fun of tradition by clothing mythological figures in contemporary costume. His citations from past art were not generally recognized at first, but no one doubted his assault upon the conventions of art and, therefore, upon the academic tradition which was deeply embedded in government institutions. The Déjeuner was refused by the official Salon jury in 1863, but raised a furor when it was shown in the exhibition of rejected artists, the Salon des refusés. Olympia, although accepted by the jury in 1865, was subjected to virulent criticism from the defenders of tradition. Jules Janin’s discomfiture before Offenbach’s bawdy gods was felt again by Manet’s critics, unwilling to see mythological figures, so closely attached to royalty and to the authority of established art, transformed into mischievous commentaries on current society and its mores. Manet’s devotion to the pleasures of eye and brush, we might think, should have disarmed his critics, but his assault upon convention was so outrageous that only years later would the brilliance of his technique become evident and the elegance of his life be recognized as of one piece with his art.

When Offenbach was completing La Vie Parisienne and La Grande-Duchesse for the 1867 fair, Manet, hoping to benefit from the same crowds, was preparing his one-artist show in the pavilion he had erected on the place de l’Alma. His fate was the opposite of Offenbach’s. Few visitors came to his exhibition, and it received scant notice in the press. The reasons for this are many. He was not at all as well known as Offenbach, and in any event an art exhibition would not benefit as much as an operetta from the fairgoers’ thirst for entertainment. Equally to the point, Manet’s forum was not that of a comic opera, where witty satire was anticipated, and the shocking quality of his style was not sufficiently cushioned by clever adaptations of tradition; these would have been understood only by a few insiders.

Manet’s opposition to authority found another outlet in the summer of 1867, in this case an overtly political work of art that had no close parallel in Offenbach’s satirical repertoire. He embarked on a series of studies and large oils devoted to the execution in June by Juarez’s Mexican troops of France’s puppet, Emperor Maximilian. Since Maximilian’s fall meant the end of Louis Napoleon’s ambitions for Mexico, it was a defeat and, to many, a disgrace, all the more crushing because of the boastful nature of the Paris fair. Manet projected a major composition (Pl. 63) on the theme and worked on it and its related studies through 1867 and 1868. Imperial censors would have thwarted any effort to show it in public, and Manet exhibited it only a decade later. He entertained more hopes for a lithograph of the composition, but in 1869 the government censor forbade its printing, an action publicly noted by Zola which confirmed the artist’s opposition to the Empire.9 See the appendix devoted to documents about the composition and its censorship in Manet 1983.

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Description: The Execution of Emperor Maximilian by Manet, Edouard

63. Manet, The Execution of Maximilian, 1868. 252 × 305 cm. Mannheim, Stadtische Kunsthalle.

Although Manet’s failures were in striking contrast to Offenbach’s successes, there were nonetheless parallel changes in the direction their art took in 1867. For both artists, that year marked a definitive turn towards contemporary life. They no longer needed mythological or historical figures in order to comment upon their society. Goddesses and gods had been useful earlier when imperial censorship successfully stifled opposition, which therefore had to find covert ways of manifesting itself. Censorship continued in 1867, but in order to placate growing opposition, Louis Napoleon had made a turn towards the Left, and a number of liberal measures were introduced which led to a return of more overt criticism. Daumier’s cartoons, for example, became political again after 1867, following a long period of relatively subdued views, and Henri Rochefort, a journalist who had displayed little political consciousness before then, made such a success of his attacks on the Emperor that he had to flee to Belgium (a decade later Manet painted a portrait of him, and a painting of his escape from the prison of New Caledonia).

Neither Manet nor Offenbach were overtly “political” artists, but the more liberal mood of 1867 and afterwards was manifested in their work by a complete devotion to subjects drawn from current society. Their art seemed to live in the immediate present, to arise from a world of artifice, peopled by courtesans, actresses and actors, musicians, writers, bohemians, and fashionables. Their settings were frequently public places, those theaters, dances, cafés, restaurants, cafés-concerts, gardens, and parks, where their exquisite figures paraded their leisure as a way of rebuking bourgeois conventions. Their greatness resides in part in the genius with which they consistently undermined the hallowed conventions of their era by pointing mocking fingers at the cloak of hypocrisy thrown over imperial society.

Bohemians, Marginals, and Performers

Because Paris was itself a theater—tourists and residents agreed, each treating the other as characters worthy of being stared at—it is no wonder that artists devoted to contemporary life treated Parisians as actors on their painted stages. Manet, Degas, and Renoir, the chief figure painters among the impressionists, portrayed a wide cross section of the city’s population, from street people to aristocrats. Of all these people, their sympathies were extended most often to writers, painters, journalists, courtesans, dandies, musicians, and performers, that informal grouping of marginals for whom there is no blanket term unless we accept the vague one then current, “la Bohème.” Through their common interests and intersecting lives, these people formed a loosely jointed community somewhat apart from the rest of the population. They lacked the relative stability of the bourgeoisie, from whom they took their distance.

Renoir was legitimately a member of this bohemia, being the son of a tailor, a slum dweller, a porcelain worker while still a boy, and then a resident of Montmartre where he lived among that area’s assortment of shop assistants, restaurant employees, laundresses, models, concierges, workers, and performers. He frequently took his models from among them, including several figures in his Moulin de la Galette (Pl. 135), and the young performers in Little Circus Girls of 1879 who were daughters of the circus owner Fernando Wartenberg.

Degas is a quite different case. He was from a banking family, but his misanthropy and the failed fortunes of the family business in 1874 gave him a sharp-eyed and embittered distance from his own kind. His ballet dancers, ballet masters, laundresses, jockeys, journalists, musicians, cabaret performers, and milliners were all people who served or entertained the well-to-do, so Degas did not have to desert his class to construct an art devoted to them. In them he found levels of professional skill that he admired and associated with his own craft. We shall encounter them in future portions of this book.

As for Manet, he came to public attention well before Degas and Renoir, and it is his treatment of street bohemians and social marginals that we should first examine. Manet deliberately retained his place in high society, and from the confidence this gave him, he moved with a flâneur’s chic among the flotsam of Parisian society. Throughout the 1860s and 1870s he had both studio and apartment in the Batignolles, the district just north of the Gare Saint-Lazare which was being extensively refashioned by Haussmann, as we saw in Chapter One. New streets were being cut through old ones, and the hills of the Batignolles, a village annexed to the city in 1861, were being leveled to permit the extension of the railroad and of streets and boulevards coming from the center. It embraced a mixture of costly new apartment buildings, empty lots, railroad tracks, warehouses, and remnants of the old Batignolles. It was there that Manet frequently crossed the paths of the itinerants, ragpickers, and gypsies who became his models. We have already met one of them or, rather, a model treated as such, in The Street Singer (Pl. 38). In other paintings, drawings, and etchings of the period, he pictured Paris’s bohemians: The Absinthe Drinker of 1859; Gypsy with Cigarette of about 1862; The Old Musician (Pl. 65); several kinds of street entertainers, dancers, guitarists, courtesans, actresses and actors, gypsies, and three paintings of beggar-philosophers of which Plate 64 is an example. Among his models were Colardet, a ragpicker, Janvier, a locksmith (who posed for Christ, in Jesus Mocked by the Soldiers of 1865), and Lagrène, a gypsy.

The marginals that Manet represented were much admired by the generation of painters and writers he led in the 1860s, a realist school with prominent leanings toward romanticism, a fondness for Spanish art, and touches of nascent Impressionism. Ragpickers were especially favored by the artists. They were not the lowest of the working class, but self-employed men and women who formed a guild that regulated the gathering of urban detritus. They had their own clubs in Paris and the near suburbs; one of the best known, near the Panthéon, was devoted to communal drinking of absinthe. Manet, like Baudelaire, associated them with the tradition of the beggar-philosopher, a well-established Parisian type whose gradual disappearance, owing to Haussmann’s transformations and police repression, was cause for grievance. The ragpicker was a liberated spirit who moved about at night, flouting the habits of the bourgeoisie in their comfortable beds; he was despised by society (a piece of irony, since he was an entrepreneur), therefore an outcast, but this freed him from society’s restrictive conventions; he gathered up discarded scraps from the city, just as writers and painters chose bits and pieces of urban life—commonplace realities, not the ideal elements sanctioned by academics—with which to create their works.10 Citron 1961, vol. 2, p. 318 and passim. See also Françoise Cachin’s remarks in Manet 1983, no. 90. Further, ragpickers had self-esteem (Manet’s old man, Pl. 64, has an almost defiant bearing) and were proud of their opposition to a government whose agents constantly harried them. These were all comforting parallels for avantgarde artists who were in psychological if not social opposition to the mainstream.

Manet’s principal homage to street bohemians is his huge painting of 1862, The Old Musician (Pl. 65). The model for the violinist was the gypsy Jean Lagrène, an elder of the Parisian gypsy colony who lived not far from Manet’s studio in a temporary encampment, harassed by the police.11 Identified by Marilyn Brown (Brown 1978), who made an astute analysis of the picture’s combination of naturalism and allegory. Her book (Brown 1985) is the first thorough social history of the gypsy and the artistic Bohème in nineteenth-century French art. For The Old Musician, see also Hanson 1977, pp. 61–66 and Reff 1982, pp. 170–91. He had earlier hurt his arm while a construction worker on Haussmann’s projects and thereafter made his living principally as an organ grinder and artists’ model. Behind him in Manet’s picture, seated on the embankment, the ragpicker Colardet reappears. Manet has reproduced him from his Absinthe Drinker, that scandalous composition redolent of Baudelaire’s world, rejected by the Salon jury in 1859. On the right edge is a key personage of mid-century realism, the wandering Jew. Opposite him is a young girl holding a baby; from other evidence the model is known to have been a slum child from Petite Pologne, the section of the Batignolles where Manet had located his studio in 1861. Next to her are two children in unconventional costume. The one nearest the old man looks as though he might have stepped out of a Spanish painting of a beggar boy. The other, dressed in white as Gilles or Pierrot, invokes the itinerant troupes of performers who often stayed in Petite Pologne. The constant excavations there left vacant lots and upturned yellowish earth, so the setting of this painting, indefinite though it is, seems appropriate to this gathering:

So one fine day the hamlet became a village, the village a borough, and the borough a city; but a dirty city, with narrow, airless streets, without trees, without squares, formed by deposits of plaster and limestone that have been left to accumulate without care….12 Chapus 1855, p. 8.

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Description: The Ragpicker by Manet, Edouard

64. Manet, The Ragpicker, 1869. 195 × 130 cm. Los Angeles, The Norton Simon Foundation.

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Description: The Old Musician by Manet, Edouard

65. Manet, The Old Musician, 1862. 187.4 × 248.3 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Chester Dale Collection.

Unlike The Street Singer (Pl. 38), which also sprang from this arena of demolition, The Old Musician does not encourage a clear explanation of what is going on. It is true, five figures form a symmetrical half-circle around the musician, while his gaze outwards and his pizzicato invite us to complete the circle. Yet the fiction of a group in attendance upon a roadside fiddler is not easily sustained in terms of traditional painting. The figures are arbitrarily clothed and placed as though they had walked on from different dressing rooms. Only two of them look directly at the musician; the others gaze abstractedly elsewhere. How, then, can we reconcile the disparate features of this curious composition?

The strongest bond that joins Manet’s painted figures is their common origin among the street bohemians. And they are more than mere motifs. Manet not only painted them, he chose to work among them in Petite Pologne (after all, he could have found a studio elsewhere!). Like Daumier before him, and Picasso afterwards, he associated himself with artists and performers on the fringes of society (the violinist is surely a surrogate for the painter, and a flattering one since the others revolve around him). Their uprootedness was particularly appropriate to the northern edge of Paris in 1862. It was being half destroyed and half-rebuilt by “progressive” forces which thrived on itinerant labor—Lagrène is a case in point—and on the altered land values of these transformed districts, from which “insalubrious streets” and unwanted people were being removed.13 For these aspects of Haussmannization, see Clark 1985, ch. 1. By not observing all the conventions of psychological unity among his figures, by using broad strokes of paint which fail to model form with customary subtlety, Manet himself uprooted tradition in the very way he composed his picture.

There is consistency, therefore, in Manet’s choice of subject and the way he built his pictures. The transformations that Louis Napoleon, Haussmann and the “mushroom aristocracy” were imposing on Paris went more deeply than they knew and touched on the underpinnings of social structure and on the substructures of art. Manet, an oppositional Republican, member of an artistic vanguard, sought out the symbols of mobility, uncertainty and transformation, and conveyed them in unorthodox forms. One of the hidden costs of Second Empire progress was the loss of the old verities of image and form in art.

Loss, yes, but there are knowing references to tradition in The Old Musician, and they help unify it. There is a heavy “Spanish” touch throughout in both image and rendering. The broadly painted earth tones recall Velasquez and other artists of the seventeenth century. The dark costumed boy, as we saw, looks like a citation from Spanish art, and the whole arrangement has echoes of The Drinkers, a composition by Velasquez which Manet had copied.14 The various ties with earlier art are summarized in Reff 1982, pp. 171–91. The fact that the figures seem to be plucked from art history also unifies them. Despite their topicality, they appear as so many costumed players in a timeless piece of art from which specific moment and place have been removed. They are part way between the Batignolles and “art,” part way between reality in 1862 and timeless fiction. This dialectic was essential to Manet early in his career, when he was attempting to free himself from tradition. The conventions of art that he was rebelling against were in fact revivified by his consciousness of contemporary Paris and of living models. Colardet and Lagrène were real people. It is as though the painted images of Spanish and of romantic art had come to life in the Batignolles as Manet walked about. He carried with him memories of paintings and these acted, perhaps unwittingly, as guides when he chose his models. By investing traditional images with the vitality of living Parisians, painted in his new manner, he gave energy to old forms. The result was a meeting of past and present, past in the forms of prior art now revitalized, present in his cast of bohemians, cleaned up, as it were, by the art, which blanks out most of the disturbing features of the present by omitting overt signs of protest, misery, even of sentiment.

Manet’s paintings of the 1860s often have this mixture of past and present both in style and in imagery. The Déjeuner sur l’herbe (Pl. 171) and Olympia (Pl. 62) converted renaissance gods into picnickers and courtesans, and stirred controversy because they were neither historical nor modern figures. Over the course of the decade, he gradually shed more and more references to the past, but it was not until the 1870s, after the violent end of the tinsel empire in the Franco-Prussian War and the Commune, that he made a thorough break with history, and committed himself wholeheartedly to new-wrought forms as the expression of contemporary life.

His own life in the 1860s reveals the position of an artist who is of the upper class, yet partly displaced from it. He could remain an elegant member of high society, enjoying the company of a monied and cultured élite, and yet move among the city’s marginals. In that, he was like other flâneurs who had made itinerants, street entertainers and bohemians into favored subjects since the 1840s. Along with Baudelaire, Duranty and the Goncourt brothers, Manet was a member of a fashionable artistic society; like them, he encountered street bohemians in real life and then inserted them into his art, that special realm where fiction and reality mingle in disconcerting ways.

Café and Brasserie

The café was the tangible meeting place of Parisian society, the place where the social day began for some, on their way to work, the place where the more fashionable people ended their day, at 2 or 3 a.m. Edward King, in his impressions of Paris published a year after the fair of 1867, insisted that “The huge Paris world centres twice, thrice daily; it is at the café; it gossips at the café; it intrigues at the café; it plots, it dreams, it suffers, it hopes, at the café.”15 King 1868, p. 113. Native Parisians agreed, and supplied the reasons. Alfred Delvau said that Parisians thrived on publicity, on “the street, the cabaret, the café, the restaurant, in order to show ourselves in good moments or bad, to chat, to be happy or unhappy, to satisfy all the needs of our vanity or our intellect, to laugh or to cry.”16 Delvau 1867, p. 64. These words immediately precede those I have cited in epigraph at the beginning of Chapter Two. Parisians, in other words, elevated public life over the private, and for this they needed public spaces.

The café was an ideal social place because (to recall Georg Simmel’s terms) it provided a solution to the problem of nearness and remoteness. The frustration of being constantly with strangers is mitigated because the café permits close proximity without prior acquaintance. Cafés are an accommodation to one’s experience of society: one meets others in a place that offers parallels of private life—eating, drinking, resting—while it shelters these actions under the overarching social relationship. For a city marked by foreigners and recent arrivals, the neutral terrain of the café was especially valuable.

In cafés, natives and adoptive Parisians were able to observe life while displaying themselves as worthy performers in the spectacle of the capital’s culture. For the writer-flâneur Delvau and the painter-flâneur Manet, the café was a source of art. There they reconnoitred their subjects and took advantage of fellow wits to hone the edges of their observations. By appearing in the right cafés, they added to their reputations as clever commentators and this, too, eventually gave them a helpful cachet among the cultured élite who were their associates and clients. In the 1860s Manet held forth at the Café Guerbois (in what is now the avenue de Clichy) in the company of Degas, Monet, Zola, Duranty, Zacharie Astruc, and others friendly to his causes. After the Commune, when he switched allegiance to the Nouvelle Athènes on the place Pigalle, a number of journalists and writers followed there, as well as Monet, Degas, Renoir, and, occasionally, Pissarro. Before we examine several paintings of the café, we must look briefly into the history of this lively institution.

Coffee reached Western Europe in the third quarter of the seventeenth century, brought by mariners who had acquired a taste for it in the Near East. It was first established in seaports, but spread rapidly to major cities inland. Considered a dangerous stimulant, it was closely monitored by municipal and royal authorities who licensed and taxed its use. They also worried about its association with those citizens who made the new coffee houses into social and political gathering places. Already in 1675, Charles II of England tried to close down the coffee houses as places of sedition (popular pressure made him desist, however), and for the next two centuries they were frequently subjected to government surveillance and suppression.

In Paris, as elsewhere in Europe, coffee was served in restaurants (at first in specially designated sections) and in taverns, as well as in the new coffee houses. By the middle of the eighteenth century the café-tavern and café-restaurant were firmly embedded in Parisian social habits (Voltaire’s favored Café Procope is still pointed out to tourists). Over the next hundred years they increased in both numbers and variety, covering the whole range, from dark, working-class establishments to brilliant, mirror-clad interiors along the most expensive boulevards. Because tobacco and alcohol, two more well-taxed commodities, were consumed in the cafés, and because a number of them became singing clubs, where could one find more logical places for police spies to thrive? Coffee, tobacco, alcohol, and song were regarded as attributes of political opposition, so one of Louis Napoleon’s first decrees (29 December 1851) put cafés under direct governmental authority and placed an outright ban on group singing in cafés; thousands were closed down early in his reign.17 Barrows 1979.

Despite police surveillance, cafés generally prospered during the Second Empire. They took on new forms that are familiar to us from the lives of famous writers and impressionist painters. Cafés and restaurants now pushed out onto the city’s sidewalks, encouraged by Haussmann’s wider pavements; they were successful enough for their owners to be undismayed by the rental fees that they were obliged to pour into municipal coffers. For Paris of the 1860s and 1870s, characterized no longer by narrow streets but by wide avenues and spacious walkways, the sidewalk café was the perfect amenity. It served meals at all hours, it catered to the client who only wanted a beer or a coffee, and it provided a front seat for the theater of the streets. With both interior spaces and outdoor terrace, it was an irresistible lure for shoppers, tourists, and those who worked nearby. In 1876, Henry James marveled that to enjoy the evening out of doors in Paris one was not obliged to sit on stoop or curb, as in New York, but could instead choose a seat at one of the sidewalk cafés: “The boulevards are a long chain of cafés, each one with its little promontory of chairs and tables projecting into the sea of asphalt.”18 James 1875–76, p. 190. Thanks to Haussmann’s vast extension of gaslight, which facilitated nighttime shopping, the sidewalk cafés enjoyed evening hours and contributed to the sights and sounds of the nocturnal promenade. We have seen one such café already, in Degas’s Women on a Café Terrace, Evening (Pl. 47).

By Degas’s and Manet’s day, many of these emporia were called “brasseries,” since they featured beer (the term derives from copper brewing vats). Beer had not been a prominent drink in Paris before 1848, for Parisians associated it with peasants and small-town folk. This became a positive factor, however, when enthusiasm for the common man developed in the wake of the revolution of 1848. The provincials who flocked to Paris in the Second Empire brought with them their taste for beer, and so did the greatly increased number of foreign visitors, especially those from the Lowlands, Germany, and Great Britain. Many traditionalists lamented the newly won prominence of beer, considered a provincial and foreign habit when compared to wine. Marc Constantin was one of these, and in 1872, in the last sentence of his history of the café, he expressed the hope that the brasserie would disappear, “and no longer in the capital of the civilized world will we see the ignoble beer mug replacing the divine wine bottle.”19 Constantin 1872, p. 108: “…et l’on ne verrait plus dans la capitale du monde civilisé, l’ignoble chope remplacer la dive bouteille.”

Manet was no traditionalist and one sign of his being up-to-date is the beer which he featured in several of his café pictures (Pls. 66, 70, 77, 78). They attest to his whole-hearted plunge into contemporary Parisian society (consider that Between two bock beers was the title of a topical review in 1877).20 Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, eds., Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique 3 (1877): 602. Paintings of the previous decade like The Old Musician (Pl. 65) and The Ragpicker (Pl. 64), with their earthy tones and posed figures, belong as much to the mid-century as to Impressionism. It is true that Manet’s later café pictures are also posed, that they were indeed painted in the studio, and that they have many forebears among the taverns and cafés of seventeenth-century painting. All of this is well disguised, however, and they give the appearance of freshly observed works. It is this immediacy which rewards examination.

Woman Reading in a Café (Pl. 66) is the sketchiest and simplest of Manet’s café pictures, but no less revealing for that. The beer mug is the emblem of the brasserie, and the foliage beyond suggests one of those cafés that had a flowered terrace or courtyard (compare Pl. 67). The woman is in stylish dress, and holds in her gloved hands an illustrated journal on a baton, the kind one takes from a rack in the café. Such journals had grown mightily in the 1860s and 1870s, and they are closely attached to Impressionism.21 Isaacson 1982. They published flâneurs’ accounts of current life, articles and advertisements devoted to the latest fashions, and illustrations and caricatures whose subjects and whose very form—quick and summary—have obvious parallels with the painters’ art. Dominated by pictures, they could be quickly skimmed, unlike traditional “serious” journals with their wordy pages. A few of Manet’s drawings were reproduced in one of these journals, La Vie moderne, and several of the impressionists showed works in the exhibition rooms attached to the grand boulevard offices of this friendly review, founded in 1879 by Renoir’s patrons, the Charpentiers.22 Rewald 1973, pp. 430–31 and passim. Woman Reading in a Café was one of several works Manet showed there in 1880. Because journalists and painters met in cafés, and because some reviews were virtually edited in cafés (a few were actually published by such cafés-concerts as the Divan Japonais), Manet’s picture is a veritable homage to his own circle.

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Description: Woman Reading by Manet, Edouard

66. Manet, Woman Reading in a Café, 1879. 61.7 × 50.7 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. Mr. & Mrs. Lewis Larned Coburn Memorial Collection, 1933–435.

This homage is not limited to the picture’s content, for his painterly shorthand is equally calculated to stir his friends’ admiration. His bravura declares his intention of getting away with as showy a treatment as possible. Against the dark tones of the woman’s hat and clothing (the composition’s anchor) he plays the wavy flashes of grey and blueish white of her tulle collar, the crab-like curves of her tan gloves, and the rectilinear streaks of the journal, composed of delicate greys formed of lavender, blue and other tones mixed with white. The picture on the cover of the journal and the foliage to the rear are so indistinct that they have a precarious fictional life, more color and brushwork than image. All this tentativeness suits the subject admirably. It is a small occasion, but one that is perfectly typical of this glittering city, simply an elegant woman’s pause for a beer and a glance at a journal.

Chez le Père Lathuille (Pl. 67) is a larger and more complicated picture. After years of confronting official art circles Manet was now somewhat less of an enfant terrible, and his canvas was accepted for the official Salon of 1880. The greens and reds of foliage are about as indistinct as those of Woman Reading in a Café, but here they are massed in suitable areas and hence are more easily read. Manet places us in the garden terrace of a famous café-restaurant in the Batignolles district, not far from the Café Guerbois and the Nouvelle Athènes. Père Lathuille was already well known at the beginning of the century; it appears in the background of Horace Vernet’s painting of 1820, The Battle of Clichy. In 1852, the restaurant was illustrated in Edmond Texier’s Tableau de Paris (Pl. 68), where it represented the pleasures of an excursion to a “guinguette,” a freer, countrified place beyond the city’s limits. In 1862, when Manet painted The Old Musician (Pl. 65), this region had just been annexed and was undergoing its Haussmannization. By 1879, broad streets and commercial prosperity ran over its leveled hills and through its demolished village streets. Manet continued to favor the Batignolles and his painting preserves something of the old traditions: the illustration in Texier’s book shows a young woman on the lap of a man, in the midst of a wine-drinking party (the “divine wine bottle” still had pride of place in 1853!), arched over by a bower of foliage.

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Description: Chez le Père Lathuille by Manet, Edouard

67. Manet, Chez le Père Lathuille, 1879. 93 × 112 cm. Tournai, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

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Description: An Arbor at Père Lathuille by Unknown

68. An Arbor at Père Lathuille. Unsigned engraving from Edmond Texier, Tableau de Paris, 2 vols., 1852, vol. 2, p. 332.

The pair in Chez le Père Lathuille have been described as “lovers,”23 Graña 1971, pp. 87–88. but this is not so. Manet’s vignette of Batignolles life is more subtle than that, and careful observation discloses the particular adventure that is taking place here on the edge of the city. The waiter is holding a coffee urn, doubtless wondering if it is time to serve coffee to this table. He would wish to do so, because the woman is his last customer—at least the tables beyond the glass partition are empty. Of course, he would serve coffee only at the end of the meal. On the table, in effect, we see the last course. The woman holds a broad-bladed fruit knife in her right hand, and on the plate between her hands is a rounded fruit. The waiter is therefore right: she should soon finish her fruit and be ready for coffee. By now we have noticed that there is only one place setting; the man has none. The wine glass he touches is not his, it is the woman’s, white wine to go with her fruit. He fondles her glass, the familiar gesture by which a man encroaches on a woman’s terrain. His right arm rests on the back of her chair, another territorial manoeuvre. As for her, she has leaned forward and avoids his touch, her back very erect. In truth, her whole body is proper and stiff, her gloved arms forward in sphinx-like rectitude. Will she succumb to his blandishments?

The fact is that the young man did not come to this restaurant with her. Not only does he lack a meal, he lacks a chair. Unless we were to grant him peculiar simian proportions and a stool, we have to conclude that he is squatting down next to her. In the American vernacular, he is putting the make on her. She is a well-got-up woman dining alone, and he is a young artist or fashionable bohemian on the lookout for a conquest. The model was Louis Gauthier-Lathuille, the son of the proprietor of Père Lathuille whom Manet encountered while he was on military leave, and whom he first painted in uniform.24 Gauthier-Lathuille’s memoir of this encounter is cited in Tabarant 1947, pp. 352–53. The painting has recently been studied by Bradley Collins (Manet 1985) who summarizes previous discussions and adds perceptive observations. Manet then thought better of it and gave him his own artist’s smock. The woman was first posed by the actress Ellen Andrée, and then by Judith French, a cousin of Offenbach. The composition is consequently an artful concoction in which Manet used familiar Parisians to create one of the many encounters between strangers that people his art. Contemporary novels and operettas are rich in similar cases in which a younger man seeks the favors of an older woman whom he finds alone in café or theater. We do not, therefore, deal with “lovers,” but with a more equivocal relationship that characterizes urban encounters.

The subtlety of Manet’s conception becomes apparent when his picture is put alongside one by Ostade (Pl. 69) that shows a peasant couple, evidently a brothel scene. The chances are that Manet was consciously restating in modern terms the theme of courtship and seduction found in many Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century. In the Ostade, the woman is being coy enough to hold back a little, but she permits the man’s hand to lie atop hers, and we do not really doubt the outcome. Besides, the man is larger than she and dominates her, whereas Manet’s young man is in the position of a supplicant.

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Description: A Peasant courting an Elderly Woman by van Ostade, Adriaen

69. Adriaen van Ostade, Peasant Couple, 1653. Panel, 27.3 × 22.1 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.

Manet was equally subtle when he dealt with another kind of relationship in At the Café (Pl. 70). Here we are indoors in a thoroughly urban setting, not in a guinguette. A man is cut off at the left, a waitress bends over behind him, and a woman’s reddish-brown hat shows over her shoulder: fragments of a crowded interior. A young bourgeoise (posed by Ellen Andrée) looks over at us with an ambiguous, possibly bemused expression. Her right hand touches the back of the chair turned towards us, a gesture we can interpret as protecting it against another’s use or, alternatively, as a delicate invitation to come and sit. In front of her is a partly quaffed stein of lager, in connubial propinquity with a bock beer. That must be her husband next to her, because his forearm is leaning on her shoulder. Yes, it is definitely her husband (posed by the engraver Henri Guérard), because the hand that is supported by her shoulder is tapping the stick against the edge of the table, to emphasize what he is saying. His half-open mouth shows that he is apostrophizing the air, as husbands are apt to do; his left hand, thrust into his coat, completes the orator’s pose. Given this, his wife looks at us as much as to say: “Isn’t that just like a husband, prattling away and nobody listening!”

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Description: At the Café by Manet, Edouard

70. Manet, At the Café, 1878. 77 × 83 cm. Oskar Reinhart Collection, Winterthur.

Surely the girl to the right is not listening (Pl. 71)? She sits with gloved hands perched on the edge of the table, as detached from the others as the lid of a canopic urn from its body. Her rather large head is in rigid profile and set against the window as though in a separate frame. She is probably the child of the central couple, at least it is easier to assume so than to believe she came alone. Like many adolescents, she is with her parents, yet not with them. The backward letters of the poster behind the lace curtain, like those of the cubist pictures that this painting looks forward to, seem to hint of things that separate out from their customary unity. They help pull the girl away from her parents towards the outside, as though they could voice the unstated thoughts of her mind.

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Description: At the Café, detail by Manet, Edouard

71. Manet, detail of At the Café (Pl. 70).

Given his flâneur’s detachment, Manet does not interpose his own ideas, but in fact he has shrewdly placed in front of us a wry commentary upon marriage and the bourgeois family. The three figures are side by side, and yet in separate psychological worlds. This is surely a delicate prying at the bonds that are supposed to unite them, but a prying nonetheless. Manet is the alert observer of new urban truths; he usually abstains from showing us loving couples or families.

The opposite view is taken by Renoir, whose café pictures remain faithful to his insistence upon a perfect human and social harmony. In the tiny picture appropriately called The Little Café (Pl. 72), he places two beautiful young women at a table between two admiring men. It seems like one of the casual encounters fostered by the Parisian café. The man on the left is at a nearby table and merely looks over at the women. The other man leans on the table, fists bent under, while talking with them. This is perhaps the beginning of a foursome but Renoir, also a naturalist, leaves it at that.

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Description: The Little Café by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

72. Renoir, The Little Café, c. 1877. 35 × 28 cm. Collection: State Museum Krõller-Müller, Otterlo, The Netherlands.

We face a more confirmed grouping in The End of the Lunch (Pl. 73). In the garden of a Montmartre café25 The site is described in Rivière 1921, pp. 140–44, 187. a woman (posed by the ubiquitous Ellen Andrée) holds her liqueur glass and gazes at her dinner companion as he lights a cigarette. An acquaintance has come over and joins the seated woman in admiring the man. And “admiring” is the right word. Although the man fills in only a narrow angle of the canvas, he anchors the triangle of human heads. The women dominate the composition and are to be esteemed for their beauty, but they are there to serve male interest. Renoir’s conservatism shows in another way: in each of his pictures, unlike Manet’s At the Café, the figures on the edges of the composition face inwards to establish an old-fashioned pictorial balance.

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Description: The End of the Lunch by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

73. Renoir, The End of the Lunch, 1879. 100 × 81 cm. Frankfurt, Stadelsches Kunstinstitut.

Unlike Manet, therefore, Renoir recreated in painting the loving, male-oriented relationships that he aspired to, for himself and for society. His letters, his essays, and the aphorisms that his son published26 For Renoir’s social ideals see below, the last section of Chapter Five. disclose his fears of modern industrial society with its forces for disintegration, and show his determination to express ideals of social accord by way of craftmanship placed at the service of beauty. In many ways admirable, this outlook lacks the penetration of Manet, for whom the café was a microcosm of urban truths that had to be stared in the face.

Brandy and Absinthe

With Manet’s The Plum (Pl. 75), we shift from the wry amusement of Chez le Père Lathuille and At the Café to a picture that has a more perceptible emotional edge. A young woman, neatly though not elegantly dressed, sits at a café table. In front of her is the brandy plum of the title, long a Parisian specialty, and in her left hand she holds an unlit cigarette. Her other hand supports her head in the traditional gesture of pensiveness, helping create a mood far from the celebratory one of Renoir’s End of the Lunch. Is she waiting for someone to give her a light? We notice also that she has no spoon. Perhaps she is reflecting for a moment while awaiting the spoon? Manet’s anecdote may be no more complicated than that. He may have stored up a real observation of the sort and subsequently made it the basis of his picture.

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Description: Plum Brandy by Manet, Edouard

75. Manet, The Plum, c. 1878. 73.6 × 50.2 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Collection of Mr. & Mrs. Paul Mellon.

However, the effect of pensiveness, tinged with melancholy, that emanates from this painting cannot be explained by unlit cigarette and unspooned plum. There is much more here, for despite Manet’s detachment, despite his figure’s expressionless face, a sense of aloneness pervades our experience of the painting. We are caught in Georg Simmel’s dilemma of nearness and remoteness as we try to sort out our feelings. The angle of the table tells us that we are either standing or seated near this stranger; because we see underneath the table, we find that we are close enough to sense a slight discomfort. Nevertheless, we are not able to make psychological contact with the woman, hence our conclusion that she is not just alone, but lonely. She is one of the many figures by Manet or by Degas who, regardless of the absence of emotional display, convince us of the poignancy of contact with urban strangers: Manet’s Street Singer (Pl. 38), Degas’s Woman with Chrysanthemums (Pl. 59) and The Loge (Pl. 60).

The devices Manet uses to work on our perceptions are clever despite their apparent innocence. The bare table—contrast it with Renoir’s—denies the woman any comfort, and because it floats, supported only by one iron leg, it adds an element of tentativeness. Its forceful effect becomes more evident when we compare it to the draped table in Paris, Au Restaurant le Doyen (Pl. 74) by his friend Ernest Ange Duez.27 The friendship is recorded in Proust 1913, p. 110. Duez’s table is an important prop on his busy stage, but its actual rendering does not take on a vital role. He has told us all too much. We are supposed to be concerned about this lone woman, but she is hardly by herself. Eleven persons accompany her, including the men to the right whose crudely told curiosity spoils what chances the painting might have had. Manet is much more the picture-maker than Duez. Instead of giving a stage to his figure, he hems her in by that network of rectangles which compress the space and create a sensation of confinement. Her head is further bounded by the repetition of the picture’s frame in the gold casing around the metal grill behind her.28 The painting probably does not adhere to a particular geometric scheme, but its overall proportions (2:3) are duplicated in some of the subdivisions which, additionally, make use of a few repeated intervals.

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Description: Paris, Au Restaurant le Doyen by Duez, Ernest-Ange

74. Ernest Ange Duez, Paris, Au Restaurant le Doyen, 1878. 88 × 114 cm. Collection unknown. Photograph courtesy of Sotheby’s.

To many modern observers, Manet’s figure represents a specific type, namely a prostitute.29 For example, Reff 1982, no. 18. I prefer the more guarded view of Theresa Ann Gronberg (Gronberg 1984). Although she calls Manet’s woman an “urban slut,” far too strong a phrase in my view, she also shows why it would be difficult to affix a label to such a person. This is an assumption based on the fact that contemporaries frequently refer to prostitutes seated alone in a café, looking for a client. Manet represented high-class courtesans, it is true (Nana, Pl. 116), and surely encountered prostitutes among the street bohemians he knew so well. It is also true that the woman’s cigarette marks her as a liberated spirit, since “respectable” women refrained from smoking alone in cafés. However, her costume is not that of a cruising prostitute (compare her with Degas’s Women on a Café Terrace, Evening, Pl. 47) and is of the kind worn by shop attendants, milliners’ apprentices, or florists, young city women who did smoke in public. Some of these women, underpaid and frequently out of work, were obliged to turn to occasional prostitution, but their exteriors would not suffice to reveal this. Manet has avoided the conventional signs of a prostitute (provocative costume, pose, gesture, or glance), and all that we can be sure of is that we face one of the many single women who staffed Parisian commerce, one of those whose aspirations to glorious careers were so frequently checked by reality.

A momentary check, a pause in life, a bit of loneliness, this is the mood that Manet creates. How different is the down-and-out woman in Degas’s Absinthe (Pl. 76)! Shoulders slumped, eyes cast down, feet splayed out, her costume frowzy, she is the café habituée rooted to her seat, without aspirations. She will derive little comfort from the man next to her, the kind of elbow-leaner who will remain there for hours, eventually shuffling off to an uncertain destination. This is one of Degas’s most devastating images of public life. The drink in front of the woman is readily identified as absinthe, thanks to its pale, greenish color and the nearby carafe of water. As for the man’s drink, it was recognized by the Scottish owner of the picture, familiar with Paris, as a “mazagran,” cold black coffee and seltzer water in a glass.30 So defined in Delvau 1866, q. v. For the early history of Degas’s painting, see Douglas Cooper, The Courtauld Collection (London, 1954), pp. 43ff, and Pickvance 1963. A mazagran commonly served as a hangover remedy, and, since absinthe was taken by its votaries at all hours, we are entitled to view the scene as taking place in the morning. This suits the grey light which floods in through the lace-curtain windows reflected in the mirror behind the pair. Whether early morning or later in the day, the scene deserves the phrase used by Walter Crane when he saw it in 1893, “a study of human degradation, male and female.”31 Cited in Pickvance 1963. Pickvance reports George Moore’s view that the woman is a “slut” and that the scene takes place in the morning.

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76. Degas, Absinthe, 1876. 92 × 68 cm. Musée d’Orsay.

The French did not regard absinthe at all like the “hygienic beverages” (wine and beer) that we have seen in Manet’s and Renoir’s paintings. The assumption of its addictive and dangerous qualities may have contributed to the Salon jury’s rejection of Manet’s Absinthe Drinker of 1859 (the one whose figure returned three years later in The Old Musician, Pl. 65). “For this is a terrible and frightening drink, this absinthe,” wrote Alfred Delvau in 1862 (and he was no prude):

The drunkenness it gives doesn’t resemble any known drunkenness. It is not the heavy drunkenness of beer, the fierce drunkenness of brandy, the jovial drunkenness of wine. No, it makes you lose your footing right away…. It sticks immense wings on your shoulders and you leave for a country without horizon and without frontier, but also, without poetry and without sun. You think you are headed towards infinity, like all great dreamers, and you are only headed towards incoherence….32 Delvau 1862, pp. 250–51. For a straightforward account of absinthe and its constituent elements, see Avenel 1900–1905, vol. 3, pp. 152–55, the source of the facts that I cite in this discussion. Absinthe was outlawed early in the twentieth century, succeeded by presumably less deleterious drinks like Pernod. For an intelligent study of the whole issue of drink in this era, see Michael Marrus, “Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque,” Journal of Social History 7 (winter 1974): 115–41.

Absinthe had been a working-class drink at the beginning of the nineteenth century, but with the advent of the Second Empire it suddenly took on immense popularity. Like beer, it rode the crest of the ever-wider wave of alcohol that flowed through the expanding population of the capital. Entrepreneurs took over the original recipes, putting in only a trace of wormwood (the supposedly dangerous, Baudelairean ingredient that was its attraction) or none at all, adding hyssop, mint, and anise for color and flavor. It was the perfect example of Second Empire capitalism, a mass-produced, commercial, and rather fraudulent concoction taken over from le peuple, creating money for its suppliers and for café proprietors, while inducing both gaiety and despair in its users. By the end of the century its consumption by volume (130,000 hectoliters) far exceeded that of all liqueurs combined (82,000 hectoliters). When Marie Corelli published a novel in 1890 that attacked Parisian vice and decadence, she chose Wormwood for its title, certain that the notoriety of the drink would be an immediate signal of her theme.

As for Degas’s painting, it was done at a time when absinthe was a favorite target of France’s temperance movement. Furthermore, Degas placed it in front of a woman, and women’s drinking had become a volatile subject by 1876. Seven years earlier, the Goncourt brothers had published Germinie Lacerteux, a novel which horrified many because it chronicled the decline of a Parisian maid into alcoholism. Then, in the spring of 1876, Zola began the serial publication of L’Assommoir, a scandalous novel which told of a laundress’s sliding into alcoholism; it dealt also with working-class drinking and with prostitution (Nana, the laundress’s daughter). Moreover, working-class drinking had been roundly attacked since 1871 because it was convenient for the conservatives who stocked the temperance movement to believe that the horrors of the Commune were due in part to excessive drink among Parisian workers. These included the fabled pétroleuses, women accused of setting the fires that had ravaged the city. The communards were called “apostles of absinthe,”33 By Maxime Du Camp, cited in Barrows 1979. In her canny article, Barrows deals with the temperance movement of the 1870s, the covert and public attempts to control drink, and Zola’s opposition to such hypocrisy. She also has in preparation a book dealing with all aspects of cabarets and cafés. and in the early 1870s a broad campaign was launched against public drunkenness. One of Zola’s grandest efforts was to expose this campaign as a hypocritical attempt to control working-class cabarets, while leaving untouched the drinking that went on in high-class places.

Degas’s painting, therefore, joined the naturalist current led by Zola and the Goncourts. And like his literary associates, he presented his ugly story with apparent detachment, all the while using his art to engage our emotions. It is his curious construction of space that draws us into his picture and eventually obliges us to address his issue (the perfect cynic, he exposes the issue but refuses to take a stand). Unlike Duez (Pl. 74), who creates the familiar stage in front of which we can walk back and forth, Degas fashions a space which requires our involvement. In the foreground is a table with a match container and a newspaper on a baton. A folded newspaper forms a bridge to the next table, beyond which we find the sodden pair. They show no interest in reading, nor in one another. As for us, we realize we have to be seated behind that foreground table and are therefore near that couple, staring at them, although psychologically remote from them. We confront them with peculiar directness, because our eye flashes over the table tops, a passage made the swifter because Degas omitted all supports for them (careful examination of the original shows no hint of table legs). By making the marble tops hover in mid-air (the contrast with Duez is striking), by placing his two figures on the far side of a spatial hole, and by forcing us into close participation, he has created a dynamic space, an unstable and tentative one. His detachment is only a clever facade: he has manipulated us with the devices of his art.

Once we allow ourselves to play Degas’s visual game, we are caught between fiction and reality (for our own psychological reactions are real). So, too, was Degas, the artist who constantly made art out of his surroundings and who signed his name, that of the artist-reporter, along the axis of the newspaper in his picture. Degas’s actual models were also suspended somewhere between image and real life. They are the now-familiar actress and model Ellen Andrée and the bohemian artist Marcellin Desboutin. Both were in the impressionists’ orbit, friends of Zola and Duranty as well as of the painters. Manet had painted Desboutin in 1875 as the bohemian artist, and he and Renoir painted Andrée as a respectable café client (Pls. 67, 70, 73). Since they frequented the same cafés as the impressionists, their appearance on Degas’s canvas brings fiction rather close to reality, although Degas toyed with them by lowering their bohemian level to sordid depths.

Café-Concert and Music Hall: Women who Serve

The somber mood of Degas’s Absinthe is a rarity among impressionist pictures, but it is consistent with the penetration with which he and Manet portrayed café life. The same penetration shows in their representations of the kind of café that, like the brasserie, found special fortune in their generation, the café-concert. In the next section of this chapter, Degas’s portrayals of café performers will be discussed, and at that time this popular Parisian institution will be described. Meanwhile, to introduce Manet, who gave performers only a marginal presence in his major renderings of the café-concert, it need only be said that this kind of café had a stage on which singers, acrobats, comedians, musical groups, and vaudevillians took their turns amusing the clients. Many indoor cafés-concerts had rather small stages, but new ones were built in the 1860s and 1870s with huge stages, rather like music halls. Outdoor cafés-concerts used covered pavilions fronting on fenced-off areas where the clients sat. Both indoor and outdoor types charged extra for the entertainment, either by elevating the prices of their drinks, or by levying an entry fee or seat charge.

Manet represented outdoor performers only a few times, in modest works that are overshadowed by his pictures of waitresses and clients in indoor cafés-concerts. For Corner in a Café-Concert (Pl. 77), Manet asked a waitress whom he admired to pose for him in his studio and she agreed on condition that her boyfriend accompany her. It is he whom Manet placed in the foreground, with his worker’s smock, cap, and clay pipe. (The purplish tones of his drink suggest wine, the traditional drink of the Parisian worker.) His solidly planted form anchors the whole composition.34 Even in reproduction the strip of canvas Manet added to the right of this picture shows readily, its edge running up the back of this figure. This painting was once part of the Winterthur café composition (Pl. 70); both were substantially altered after the original canvas was cut in two (analysis of this complex history in Manet 1986, pp. 65–71). Such alterations have not deterred Manet specialists from claiming that these two, and other café paintings, including The Plum (Pl. 75), are renderings of specific places that they attempt to name. Much as one would like to agree, the fact that Manet altered the pictures’ backgrounds in reworking them and omitted all precise clues to location (at least, none has been revealed) seems to argue for the reverse. Beyond him sits a man, shown wittily by his grey hat, and further along is a woman in lost profile. This sequence of heads gives some depth to the composition, but serves chiefly to help induce our perception of a crowded scene. The stage is relegated to the rear, where we see a dancer or singer; to the left and right are musicians indicated by fragmentary profiles and portions of trombone, violin bow, and bass.

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Description: Corner of a Café-Concert by Manet, Edouard

77. Manet, Corner in a Café-Concert, 1878–79. 98 × 79 cm. Reproduced by courtesy of the Trustees, The National Gallery, London.

From the compact group of heads and hats in the foreground rises the brightly lit face of the waitress. Her head caps a substantial pyramid formed with the other heads and, lower down, her clutch of beer balances the raised hand of the worker. These symmetries hold the picture together, but they are inherently unstable. The waitress leans in towards the left to deposit a beer, but she looks off to the right: her professional eye is on the lookout for another client’s signal. Manet therefore characterizes her craft by showing her movements, which contrast with the placid bulk of the blue-frocked worker.

In the smaller Café-Concert (Pl. 78), Manet also typifies the busy life of a café-concert by combining a solid pictorial form with forces that threaten to break it apart. The three principal figures form a triangle, but they look in different directions and exist in three separate psychological realms. The waitress is taking advantage of a calm moment to have her own beer. She stands confidently, hand on hip, while looking off to the left. She belongs in this place and her assurance lets her dominate it. The woman in the foreground is in a pensive mood and sits in a drooping position. Like the figure in The Plum (Pl. 75), she is not a proper bourgeoise, for she is smoking, the mark of the liberated women of uncertain status who now frequented cafés. She has only recently sat down, for her cigarette is newly lit and her beer is hardly tasted. In front of her is a package in shiny blue paper, either a pastry or a sweet, a sign that she has dropped in while on her way somewhere else.

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Description: The Café-Concert by Manet, Edouard

78. Manet, Café-Concert, 1878. 47.5 × 30.2 cm. Baltimore, Walters Art Gallery.

In contrast to this wistful figure, the top-hatted male seems entirely at his ease. Hands over his cane, head erect, he looks at the performer on the stage, whom we see reflected in the mirror in the upper left. His costume is a bit eccentric and, like his cut of beard, harks back to the Second Empire. He might be a Bonapartist (he recalls Daumier’s invented figure Ratapoil) or an actor who affects such clothing.35 In the sword hilt that hangs on the brass rack to the rear, Manet may have intended a reference to the figure derived from Neapolitan comedy, Polichinelle. As Theodore Reff has shown (“The Symbolism of Manet’s Frontispiece Etching,” Burlington Magazine 104 [May 1962]: 182–87), Manet introduced his album of etchings of 1862 with a surrogate of the artist, a Polichinelle whose sword, one of his leading attributes, hangs nearby. This etched figure bears striking resemblance to the man in Café-Concert. Further, “Polichinelle” in the slang of Manet’s day meant “an amusing and eccentric man” (Delvau 1866, q.v.). He stands for the whole class of artists, actors, dandies, and entertainers, urban adventurers who belonged in these settings. With the cool detachment of the flâneur, he could move freely in such public places, treating them as stages for self-display. He shares a sense of self-confidence with the worker in Corner in a Café-Concert, despite their differences. This is because men could patronize cafés without the ambiguity or insecurity attaching to unaccompanied women, who ran the risk of attracting admirers whether they wished to or not. The contrast of the two men in Manet’s pair of café-concert pictures with the female clients in The Plum and Café-Concert shows how observant Manet really was (as well as how readily he identified with such self-possessed males).

Manet’s two pictures also show why the Parisian café-concert was such an ideal mixing place. Strangers who would not associate out on the street could here sit side by side. By giving only minor place to the performance (more sketchily painted, as though partly out of focus), Manet reminds us that singers or comedians were intended principally to draw customers for drink; the real business of the café-concert takes place in the foreground of his compositions. Patrons could keep to themselves or tide over fragmentary conversations by listening to the performance. Seated individually at tables in these smaller cafés-concerts, and not in the fixed seats of a music hall or theater, they could move about if they wished. Manet shows the casualness of these social juxtapositions, and yet he hints more at separateness than at conviviality. The glitter and attraction of the cafés are captured in the brilliance of his color and brushwork, but his figures do not communicate with one another.

Clients are only temporary visitors, but the waitresses belong there, and Manet’s two pictures are virtual celebrations of their roles. Café waitresses were greeted in Manet’s generation as typifying the new Paris. Before the Second Empire, ambulatory café service had been provided largely by men (women were frequently behind the counter), but the entrepreneurs of the rapidly spreading brasseries and cafés-concerts quickly learned that young women increased the sales of drinks. In the 1860s the Parisian café waitress became a stock figure in cartoons and illustrations. Like other young working women, she was often the prey of males and assumed to be “available.” Some were, of course, because the open society of cafés made them ideal market places for sex, as well as for other kinds of business (salesman and brokers cultivated clients there). The thronging population of Paris, which included so many single men and women, fostered the rise of clandestine prostitution, as distinct from that regulated by government. It is not surprising that brasseries à femmes came into existence, establishments in which waitresses used their jobs as covers for prostitution.36 Hollis Clayson (in a public lecture, February 1980) first raised this issue in connection with Manet’s two café-concert pictures, concluding that they represented brasseries à femmes. Subsequently, Theresa Ann Gronberg (Gronberg 1984) published a detailed analysis of clandestine prostitution as it might relate to impressionist painting, and she also stated that the two Manets show brasseries à femmes. Intelligent though both interpretations are, the internal workings of the paintings do not bear them out. Men might have felt free to regard waitresses like Manet’s as fair game, but Manet, who invented every stroke of their forms, held them aloof from any of the by-play with male clients favored by contemporary illustrators. In these arenas of drink, music, and leisure, it is they and the distant performers who embody work; Manet gives them dignity.37 Joel Isaacson puts it well when he says of Manet and Degas that “seriousness of purpose takes the form of a content respectful of human dignity within the compromising and precarious urban world they chose to depict.” (Isaacson 1982, p. 110.)

The woman facing us behind her counter in Manet’s Bar at the Folies-Bergère (Pl. 80) is a more ambiguous figure. The curious reflections in the mirror to the right provoke the issue of male-female commerce, but the picture as a whole does not resolve it. Like the waitresses, this woman is a verseuse, a server of drinks, but she does not move about. The stationary bar to which she is so firmly fixed suggests an environment different from the cafés-concerts we have just looked at, and indeed it was. The Folies-Bergère was more a music hall than café-concert, and its history has to be consulted if we are to make sense of Manet’s canvas. Shown in the Salon of 1882, it is the last ambitious picture he exhibited before his early death the following year, and his last major statement on the public places of Paris-spectacle.

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Description: A Bar at the Folies-Bergère by Manet, Edouard

80. Manet, A Bar at the Folies-Bergère, 1881–82. 96 × 130 cm. Courtauld Institute Galleries, London (Courtauld Collection).

The Folies-Bergère (near the rue Bergère) owes the first half of its name to the eighteenth-century “folie,” an open-air place where Parisians could drink or dance while being entertained. Its evolution is another capsule history of Second Empire speculation.38 For the institution, Derval 1955, and for Manet’s painting, Manet 1986, pp. 76–83. My information derives also from posters, photographs, advertisements, and music sheets, as well as from contemporary guide books. It began as a department store devoted to bedding, opened in 1860, one of the newer urban forms of commerce. Perhaps because of its favorable location on the rue Richer, just above the grands boulevards, it added a “salle des spectacles” to the rear of the store in 1863. This was so successful—active leisure being more lucrative than passive—that in 1869 the whole enterprise shifted to variety shows in emulation of London music halls. In November 1871, the talented entrepreneur Léon Sari took it over. He remodeled it inside and out, refurbishing two large spaces. One was the “Garden,” an impressive hall with balconies (covered by an awning until it was roofed over in 1925).39 That there were two spaces with different activities and mises-en-scène for long escaped the notice of art historians, who confused the interpretation of Manet’s picture by trying to adjust it to the wrong interior. An illustrated program reproduced in Manet 1986 gives the correct setting for Manet’s picture, as does Chéret’s poster (Pl. 79) and a reproduction in Derval 1955, opp. p. 59. The other, where Manet places us, was the horseshoe-shaped theater with fixed seats in the orchestra and a balcony above, supported on columns (two of them show in Manet’s mirror, near the reflected marble counter). Sari removed the seats on the ground floor under the balcony to make room for tables, chairs, several bars, and space for walking about (the promenoir). In the balcony he limited the boxes to two front tiers and left room for another promenade behind them. We are on this level in Manet’s picture, facing one of the mirrors which clad the perimeter wall (they show clearly in Chéret’s poster, Pl. 79), in front of which the woman tends her counter. The mirror reflects the balcony on the opposite side.

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Description: Aux Folies-Bergère by Chéret, Jules

79. Jules Chéret, Aux Folies-Bergère, 1875. Poster. Paris, Museé de la publicité.

Sari learned that he could make more money than would the usual café-concert if he combined its freedom of movement with some of the features of a theater. He could charge admission, and extra for seats in the orchestra and the balcony loges. In addition, he could earn money from the alcohol sold on both floors. Some clients would come for the spectacles, which were on a grander scale than a café-concert: circuses (with animals), acrobats, whole operettas, ballets, troupes of comedians, etc. Others came principally to socialize, and could ignore the stage presentation while chatting and drinking along the promenades. There was precedent for this in the ordinary café-concert, such as the one Degas shows in Café-Concert (Spectators) (Pl. 89), where there are rows of bench seats facing the stage, and tables and chairs along the rear and sides. Closer to Sari’s ambitions were the “cafés-spectacles” of the 1830s and 1840s,40 See the lithograph exhibited no. 334 in Carnavalet 1985. and the huge Ba-ta-clan, named after one of Offenbach’s operettas, a café-concert rebuilt in 1863. Sari surpassed them by offering more spectacular entertainment and better-appointed promenades. He had his own orchestra and dance troupe, but also booked the reigning favorites among vaudeville, circus, and other diversions, including the Hanlon Lees, American trapeze performers whose poster shows in the window of Manet’s At the Café (Pl. 70). In the late 1870s, Sari charged two francs for the cheapest seats and five for reserved seats, about twice the prices at the Ba-ta-clan. Drinks were much higher than in ordinary cafés, as one might expect.

Manet’s painting, therefore, evokes one of Paris’s more expensive and chic places. It is true that a student, sales clerk, or prostitute could come to the Folies-Bergère, but only by dressing up and squandering a small fortune. If the Folies was a social mixing place, it was nonetheless quite dominated by the well-to-do. Manet’s own society went there, urbane writers, critics, collectors, painters, actors, demi-mondaines, and members of the Jockey Club. Appropriately enough, several of his models and friends can be found in the reflected balcony: the painter Gaston Latouche said that he posed for the man to the right.41 Identifications summarized in Manet 1983, no. 211; the barmaid Suzon was identified in Tabarant 1931, p. 412. The Folies appears in numerous contemporary writings, the best known being J.-K. Huysmans’s Croquis parisiens (1880) and Maupassant’s Bel ami (1885). However, both authors had a writer’s interest in exaggerating its role as a prostitutes’ market. Manet’s barmaid was a waitress from the Folies-Bergère, Suzon, of whom he made a separate pastel portrait in street clothes. For the Bar she posed in his studio (where he kept a marble table used in several other café paintings), as had the woman in Corner in a Café-Concert (Pl. 77), and for the same reason: Manet felt the need of the real person as he constructed the imaginary one.

What should we make of the arresting figure he painted? Some contemporaries thought she was little better than a prostitute, since barmaids had long had a reputation for low morals, and the Folies was well known as a racy place. Many modern historians also have concluded that she should be seen as a prostitute.42 T J. Clark did so at first (Clark 1977), flatly calling her a “whore.” His book (Clark 1985), however, is a more nuanced argument and he correctly hedges: “a woman in a café-concert, selling drinks and oranges, and most probably for sale herself—or believed to be so by some of her customers” (p. 253). The relevant tradition of the dame de comptoir is extensively discussed in connection with the Bar in Ross 1982. Of course, Sari hired pretty women to enhance the sale of alcohol, and his advertisements frequently showed top-hatted men leaning on one of the bars, flirting with the barmaids (Pl. 79). These verseuses were aspiring actresses and other young women trying to make a career in Paris. Thanks to the memoirist Arnold Mortier, we have a glimpse of one of them. Writing in 1876 of the new women of the current season at the Athenée-Comique, he mentions “Blanche Rose. Blond with dark eyes. At the Folies-Bergère took care of a little bar where English bookmakers used to gather every evening. It’s for that reason that she smiled at Sari who was in the audience.”43 Mortier 1875–85, vol. 3, pp. 37–38, entry for 4 February 1876. Mortier’s volumes give a good running account of the Folies, e.g., 1874 (vol. 1, pp. 283ff) and 1877 (vol. 4, pp. 140ff). This book has an introduction by Offenbach. In these few words Mortier documents the rise of one of Sari’s barmaids who graduated to the stage. We can be quite sure that Blanche-Rose and Suzon lived less conventional lives than a proper bourgeoise, and that they might well have had lovers, or occasionally slept with a theater manager. But between this and prostitution there is an enormous gap.

In painting Suzon at her bar, Manet, like Mortier, showed he was among the cognoscenti who appreciated beautiful, modish women and used them to embody modern Paris. In his painting, the whole world of the Folies-Bergère is reduced to this young woman and to our thoughts as we confront her. She has a striking presence, all the more so because she is firmly painted, compared to the softened images in the mirror, and she is solidly installed within the shallow space, thanks to the marble counter, bearer of one of the most beautiful still lives in French painting. Centrally positioned, she utterly dominates a busy composition whose flatness is confining, despite the rather smoky distance we can see in the mirror. Squeezed though she is between mirror and counter, she has an immense dignity and self-containment. (Any doubts about this can be resolved by comparing her with Duez’s woman, Pl. 74). She is also a disconcerting figure because her matter-of-fact, cool glance seems to lack expression.

Her aloofness is all the more disturbing because the common assumptions about barmaids would make us expect a more forthcoming woman. That Manet defeats these expectations by fashioning an image of remoteness is one of the keys to his picture. In his austere figure we find the anonymity and loneliness inherent in the arbitrary encounters of modern life.44 An interpretation first proposed by Hans Jantzen, “Edouard Manet’s ‘Bar aux Folies-Bergère,’” in Essays in Honor of George Swarzenski, ed. Oswald Goetz (Chicago, 1951). We have already seen these traits of urban tension in The Plum, The Street Singer, and even in The Railroad (Pls. 75, 38, 31), works that range over Manet’s whole career. Like the Bar, these are all productions of the flâneur and the naturalist who disdains emotional involvement with the anonymous events of city life in order to master them, and who therefore grants a singular detachment to his figures, lest they reach out towards our emotions. Suzon’s impassivity should make us think again of Georg Simmel’s concept of objectivity, and also of his interpretation of the money economy which reduces human encounters to abstract terms and leads to the blasé look that protects against involvement.45 See the discussion of Simmel in Chapter Two. Clark invokes Simmel when he writes of this picture (Clark 1985, pp. 253–54). He also uses the stronger term “alienation” and believes that Manet’s painting, in both subject and form, indicates a truly profound malaise in his society and a deep crisis in French art. Suzon’s distant aspect would therefore result from Manet’s having responded not to the attraction of Sari’s performances, nor to the glamour of the society which swarmed through his building, but instead to the condition of this participant and victim of commercialized leisure.

None of this denies that we continue to have trouble reading her iconic image. Our difficulty is compounded by her displaced reflection in the mirror, a rendering that is faulty, judged by the tradition of naturalistic illusions.46 Common, however, in fashion illustrations from the 1830s onward in which, by discarding conventional perspective, an “illogical” mirror view shows the rear of a hat or cloak, e.g., “Petit courrier des dames, Modes de Longchamp,” Modes de Paris (20 April 1835). The whole reflected world is shifted to the right as though the mirror were on a slant, even though the counter seems parallel to it. Not only is Suzon’s reflection too far to the right, but the man her image addresses would have to be standing in the viewer’s spot, that is, if we demand reasonableness from the picture. Evidently it is an unreasonable construction, and sorting out its internal contradictions is the elaborate puzzle the artist has forced on us. Manet had often submitted to the Salon juries his most outrageous works, including those with strange departures from customary perspective, such as The Execution of Maximilian (Pl. 63), rejected in 1869. To tweak the noses of conservatives was part of his performance as the bel-esprit who ran circles around the stodgy bourgeoisie. And performance it was: contemporaries recount his pleasure in receiving a stream of visitors to his studio while he was painting A Bar at the Folies-Bergère.

As for Sari’s performers, they are amusingly reduced to an acrobat’s legs and trapeze in the upper left corner of the painting, so that Manet can concentrate on one edge of the vast music hall. Suzon faces us with her impassive gaze, the professional waiting for our order. Unlike her, however, the image in the mirror bends slightly towards the mustachioed man, as though responding to him. The man’s face is quite expressionless, but his direct gaze (turned into a bold stare by the fixity of painting) shows his interest in the woman. In this fashion, Manet makes us consider this woman’s actual role as professional barmaid, and her potential role as envisioned by that man. Her frontal image is correct, even distant from us; nothing hints at her availability after hours. In the mirror, her more yielding nature is revealed, detached as it were from her body by the man’s powers of wish-fulfillment.

It is precisely because Manet first establishes a cold dialogue between the statuesque barmaid and the viewer that the second dialogue in the mirror gains its peculiar force. We can’t really be that man, yet because we are in the position he would occupy in front of the bar, he becomes our second self. His disembodied image seems to stand for a male client’s hidden thoughts when facing such an attractive woman. The apparently aberrant detachment of the reflection in the mirror from the woman, and of the man from ourselves, is the game this wily artist is playing. The very fulcrum on which the picture balances, in other words, is a violation of the conventions of traditional art. To have “corrected” it would have destroyed the painting.

Café-Concert: Women who Perform

Degas did not at all follow Manet in his subtle depictions of barmaid or waitress of the café-concert. Their opposed temperaments nowhere show better than in this contrast, for Degas concentrated almost exclusively on the female performer. Beginning in 1875, he devoted about forty pastels and prints to this theme.47 Except for Plates 83 and 85, exhibited in 1877, the dates for all these are disputed by specialists. It is agreed that the largest number were done between 1875 and 1878. Only one of them (Pl. 89) features the clients of the café-concert. All the others are interpretations of singers in action. To study them is to confront more directly than with Manet the nature of the café-concert and its place in Parisian society.

Although there were various antecedents to the café-concert, the sudden rise in their popularity began in the 1850s, with the advent of the Second Empire and the dramatic changes wrought in the capital. Early historians all agree that the Café des Ambassadeurs and the Café Morel had set the vogue in the 1840s. They were housed in twin buildings designed by Jacques Hittorff in 1841 for the park-like area where the Champs-Elysées meets the place de la Concorde (a corner of the Ambassadeurs shows in Renoir’s painting of 1867, Pl. 8). Taking their cue from the open-air concerts that had for many years been held there, both cafés added outdoor pavilions behind the main buildings. This whole region had long been set aside for fairs, circuses (Hittorff also built the nearby circus building in 1841), Punch and Judy shows, and various itinerant entertainments, so Parisians of the Second Empire were conforming to a well-established tradition when they sought distraction on this once royal edge of the city.

By the 1850s, visitors and Parisians could choose among three cafés-concerts there, the Ambassadeurs, the Alcazar d’été (formerly Café Morel), and the Café de l’horloge. Extensive use of gas lamps—foreigners constantly remarked on Paris’s extravagance in this regard—extended warm-weather days well into the night. Their luminous spheres glow prominently in Degas’s best-known compositions (Pls. 83, 84, 85). At first hung from trees by café proprietors, gas lamps were spread throughout this verdant area by municipal authorities, who helped sanction its appeal as one of the principal nocturnal promenades of the city. By the 1860s it was fairly crowded with organized entertainments: cafés-concerts, municipal concerts, the circus, semi-permanent fair buildings, several theaters, an enclosed Panorama, and one of the most popular of the city’s gaslit dancing gardens, the Bal Mabille. There was no doubt of this district’s function as a place of gay abandon to compensate for the vast demolitions and removals which were dislocating the population of the city’s center.

The imperial presence was discreet but thorough. The municipal concerts, inaugurated in 1859, were frequently tied to imperial celebrations; the circus was renamed the Cirque de l’Impératrice; the Panorama held paintings of Louis Napoleon’s battles; imperial censorship passed on every song, operetta, and play performed in the various cafés and theaters. Gone were the itinerants who used to set up portable platforms and pass the hat afterwards. Their places were taken by impresarios who hired entertainers, enclosed them in pavilions and fenced-off areas, and raked in the money spent on the alcohol which sustained these new fortunes.

The impresarios chafed under constant censorship, but for all that, imperial dictatorship was at times a welcome partner. In 1863 and 1864, a sweeping set of decrees suppressed many of the privileges which had hemmed in the theatrical world, and opened theater construction and management to anyone who could put up the money and observe basic building codes. There was an immediate boom in new construction and in the conversion of buildings (such as the Folies-Bergère) to various kinds of theater: vaudeville, café-concert, comic opera, comedy, pantomime, drama, and circus. This was followed in 1866 and 1867 by another set of authoritarian decrees, of particular benefit to cafés-concerts. These wiped out the guild restrictions that had protected established theater and music by forbidding café entertainers to wear costume, employ props, or use more than brief excerpts from published plays and music.48 Changes in the laws pertaining to entertainment were regularly noted in newspapers and in guide books. They are conveniently summarized in Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5, pp. 263–67 and passim. Whether or not devised with the 1867 Universal Exposition in mind—they probably were—these decrees led to a remarkable expansion of cafés-concerts, which rose from a modest number, probably two to three dozen in the early 1860s, to more than 100 a decade later, and nearly 200 by the early 1880s.

On summer evenings the Ambassadeurs and the Alcazar d’été were especially frequented by Parisians and by foreign visitors, whom guide books directed there. Since Degas favored the Ambassadeurs, we might look at what gave it a special éclat. It had pride of place as one of the oldest cafés-concerts, and the advantage of its tree-lined surroundings. Its repertoire was much like that of the indoor cafés-concerts in the rest of the city: clowns, comedians, singers, acrobats, short plays, operettas, and vaudeville. Its personnel was also like that of its wintertime rivals: an orchestra of fifteen to twenty musicians, twelve to fifteen performers, and fifteen to thirty waiters and other salaried staff. All these employees catered to a constantly shifting clientèle of about 1,200 seated within the authorized perimeter. It was a big business, and as such it could afford to hire major stars, often plucking them from the previous winter’s greatest successes elsewhere. Notably more smart (therefore more expensive) than most of its rivals, it was regularly listed as a “very fine establishment,”49 Joanne 1870, p. 616. Café-concert staffs, average salaries, and costs are summarized by Emile Mathieu, cited in Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 12–16. even in guide books that looked down on such places as too bawdy. In some ways the Ambassadeurs was the open-air equivalent of the Folies-Bergère.

Like the Folies, the Ambassadeurs had an enterprising manager. Pierre Ducarre took it over in time for the Universal Exposition of 1867 and was its owner-director until the end of the century. Degas frequented the Ambassadeurs in the mid-1870s and seems to have admired Ducarre. He made four pencil studies of him on one sheet and began an oil of him, showing a powerful figure walking away from the observer (Pl. 81). Ducarre himself defined success in this new business in words that would have appealed to Degas: “One must always be on the lookout for novelties, for original creations, for unexpected talents. And no matter how much success is enjoyed by an establishment, one must always think of improving on it, of perfecting it.”50 Cited in Shapiro 1980, p. 155. It is Shapiro who identified Ducarre as the subject of The Impresario. The sheet of studies is reproduced in Boggs 1962 (her fig. 94), collection unknown. Studies and oil are dated c. 1876–77. Shapiro also identified the singer Libert as the subject of another sheet of studies of the same date (his fig. 4, p. 156). Ducarre launched a number of new stars, including Libert, one of the rare male performers drawn by Degas, and Emélie Bécat (Pl. 82).

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Description: The Impresario by Degas, Edgar

81. Degas, The Impresario, c. 1876–77. 48.9 × 35.6 cm. By permission of The Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Gift of Mr. & Mrs. Louis A. Benoist.

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Description: Aux Ambassadeurs: Mlle Bécat by Degas, Edgar

82. Degas, Aux Ambassadeurs: Mlle Bécat, c. 1877. Lithograph, 20.5 × 19.3 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago. William McCallin McKee Memorial Collection, 1932. 1296.

Degas was not attracted by the male singers, comedians, or acrobats who took the stage of the Ambassadeurs, any more than he was interested in male ballet dancers. Despite the fame of some men (one thinks of Paulus, whose great acclaim began around 1880, but who had already appeared at the Ambassadeurs in 1871 and 1872), it was the female singer who dominated the era. The famous Thérésa (Emma Valadon) set the tone with her smashing success in 1864 at the Ambassadeurs’ nearby rival, the Alcazar d’été. She quickly became one of the stars of Paris, “the Patti of the beer mug,” invited to appear before the imperial court, and subject of admiring phrases of Mallarmé and of Degas (“She opens her huge mouth and out comes the grossest, the most delicate, the most wittily tender voice there is.”51 Letter to Henri Lerolle, 4 December 1883, in Lettres de Degas, ed. Marcel Guérin (Paris, 1945), p. 75. The apt phrase “la Patti de la chope,” referring to the great soprano Adelina Patti, is Alfred Delvau’s (Delvau 1867, p. 180), but is frequently credited to Louis Veuillot.) Her success is a revealing index of Second Empire and Third Republic morality, not despite, but because of the slang, the sexual innuendos, the working-class origin of much of her material:

One only has to look at Mlle Thérésa to recognize that she is a child of the people. She has that kind of virility that is shared by both sexes in the lower levels of population; its charm is in its force. One of the personages that she portrays is said to have posed for a Venus; in this case the model’s marble seems to have been shaped more by a pruning hook than a chisel. Moreover, in her physiognomy, a lot of expression in the gaze; an ensemble that is not at all displeasing, and sometimes her gestures have an elegance that contrasts with the vulgarity and the excessively broad tone of her lyric repertoire.52 Paul Foucher, Entre cour et jardin, 1867, cited in Alméras 1933, p. 422. In Clark 1985, pp. 216–29, there is an acute analysis of the working-class origins of café songs.

Like that writer and the dandies who crowded the Ambassadeurs, Degas admired the street-wise virility of the women who sang on its stage. Since he worked in a silent medium, he concentrated on gesture as a way of suggesting this admirable vulgarity. The Thérésa-like figure of La Chanson du chien (Pl. 84) holds her forearms up to give prominence to her drooping hands.53 She does not quite look like Thérésa, but Michael Shapiro (Shapiro 1980) convincingly relates a study for this work (his fig. 8) to caricatures of the famous singer, so at the least she is derived from Thérésa. The “chanson du chien” has never been identified and might have been inferred from the pastel itself. Her closed eyes and uptilted chin, however, convey a sense not of a funny animal, but of entire absorption in her song: a mixture of the delicate and the gross, as Degas said. The same mixture was found in Emélie Bécat, the singer he turned to more often than to any other. He made five prints of her, including Plate 82; one contains three separate compositions of her on the same sheet. In Plate 82 she has both arms spread widely, shoulders hunched, and head bent down. Heavy bows on bodice, elbows, and the back of her costume would have accentuated the constant motions of her body. In other prints he shows her doubled forward, hands on knees, or with one arm stretched eccentrically outward, its forearm dangling down. One can imagine her singing a refrain from her first hit, Le Turbot et la crevette (The Turbot and the Shrimp):

Turbot, turbot of my heart.

You’ve got me! You’ve got me!

You’ll be my downfall.54 Reported in Shapiro 1980, p. 156. “Turbot, turbot de mon coeur/Tu m’ah! Tu m’ah! Tu f’ras mon malheur.”

Bécat was appreciated for her “epileptic style,” a frenetic use of body and limbs. In this she was like other notable café singers, for they all developed particular kinds of gesture and movement which helped identify them and which they utilized to inject sexual or political meaning into otherwise innocent-sounding phrases. These striking styles were especially necessary in the café-concert. Clients were free to come and go, to drink and chat, so it took a strong act to claim their attention. Besides, the anonymity of the well-packaged entertainment and of its huge audience could be partly disguised by the frenzied clamor of the performer, who seemed to seek a personal exchange with each client, enlisting them as participants. Edward King, that rather stuffy American visitor, lamented this participation as well as the fare offered in the outdoor café-concert:

The songs are local, glaring with coarse mannerisms and rude gestures…; a fat woman rises, makes a short, ungraceful bow, and sings a burlesque song. It is an echo of boulevard life …. The audiences are more enthusiastic here than under roofs; they rise and swing hats and bonnets, they scream and throw bouquets, and sometimes a daring suitor goes to the footlights and hands to his goddess, in person, his offering of flowers or epistle of love.55 King 1868, p. 231.

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Description: Aux Ambassadeurs by Degas, Edgar

83. Degas, Aux Ambassadeurs, 1877. Pastel over monotype, 37 × 27 cm. Lyon, Musée des Beaux-Arts.

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Description: La chanson du chien by Degas, Edgar

84. Degas, La Chanson du chien, c. 1875–78. Pastel over monotype. 55 × 45 cm. Collection unknown.

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Description: Café-Concert by Degas, Edgar

85. Degas, Café-Concert, c. 1877. Pastel over monotype, 24.1 × 44.5 cm. In the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington. William A. Clark Collection.

The singer reaching out toward her audience is the theme of two of Degas pastels (Pls. 83, 85) shown in the third impressionist exhibition in 1877 (alongside Women on a Café Terrace, Evening, Pl. 47, and several ballet dancers). Both may represent Victorine Demay, whose repertoire had many “an echo of boulevard life.”56 Physical resemblance and gestures are close to her representations in posters: Shapiro 1980, pp. 160–61. See also Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 54–56. In one she plants right hand on hip and pumps her left arm, which Degas makes disappear in the process. In the other she bends low and emphatically gestures back at herself with her left thumb. We can almost hear De-may singing to her cornet player in “Horace’s Trumpet”:

I’d like t’be the deal chair

Where you sit—so’s I can hear you better.

Or refusing the offer of a nutcracker from an admirer:

Me, I crack nuts

By sittin’ down on ‘em!57 For both songs see Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 55, 56. “Je voudrais etr’ la chaise de bois blanc/Où tu t’assieds,—afin de mieux t’entendre”; “Moi, j’cass’ des noisettes/En m’asseyant d’ssus!”

In Plate 83 we have to imagine ourselves as members of the audience seated behind three women whose costumes have the loud effects sought by women of dubious virtue, the kind the rakish man on the left comes here to meet. Just beyond are the musicians, whose diverse origins and mediocre pay are captured in their motley assortment of hats and varied cut of hair. What an urban scene this is, despite the outdoor setting: people of different positions, different attitudes, different classes (except for the working class), virtually a microcosm of the city’s varied and shifting population! Drawn by the brilliant gaslight of the stage, we look up to the singer in red (Pl. 61). She gestures off to the right, a move that renders the composition dynamic, but threatens its stability. Her rightward movement is checked by the brightly colored women to the left, who serve as a counterbalance, by the wide strip of the pavilion support which pins her down, and by the row of lights that continues the axis of her outstretched arm. Further, her potential movement is blocked by the huge volute of the bass viol, that symbol of manhood rising upward from the male orchestra.

In Plate 85, the singer, bending over to display her charms, seems to be addressing the orchestra leader. There are no customers represented here, so the orchestra takes on the role of the men in the audience to whom the singer most often appeals. Café-concert songs were usually devoted to love, and Degas alludes to them by having the women face the men, the men who run the show, as they run life, by providing the music. Their instruments—the leader’s bow, his firmly held violin scroll, and again that oversized bass—enter naughtily into the confrontation.

The women who grace the stage in both pastels were collectively known as the “corbeille,” a rich term meaning theatrical dress circle, the reserved enclosure in a stock exchange, a flower bed, a flower or fruit basket, or simply a basket. Ducarre and other impresarios quite knowingly exploited the women for their appeal; male performers were kept offstage. A few of the corbeille were entertainers awaiting their turns, some were beginners who would appear without pay in the hopes of proving themselves, and others were not performers at all, simply attractive women hired to round out the visual offering. The sexual role of the corbeille was widely commented upon. Men pursued them, of course, and the reputations of the cafés-concerts owed something to this commerce. Because the directors of the better establishments forbade open signalling from the stage, there grew up a special gestural language. The way one held an admirer’s bouquet could signal agreement to meet after the show; tapping one side of the face with a fan could be a similar positive sign. The women in Degas’s two corbeilles flourish bouquets and fans, and their separate movements and poses—in Plate 85, the woman in pale blue immediately behind the singer has turned entirely around—suggest their ambitions to be recognized as individuals.

Café-Concert: Clients and Artists

Neither Degas nor Manet was a passive recorder of what went on in the cafés-concerts. To gain a fuller understanding of their knowing interpretations, we have to look further into the nature of this particular form of commercialized entertainment. We are hindered as much as helped by modern art historians who have usually placed too much emphasis on the low life that patronized these places. It is best to begin by looking into the performers, their songs, and their clients to see the degree to which the canaille, the riffraff, were represented. We can then turn to the other social strata who fit into this strange and wonderful institution, especially since among them were artists like Manet and Degas, hardly to be counted among the riffraff.

Leading café-concert singers, like Thérésa and Bécat, were almost all from the menu people, the lower classes, and prided themselves on their origins. By birthright they had access to street slang, to gutter humor and gestures which were central to their art. The titles of some typical songs, virtually untranslatable, are a good indication: “I advise you not to stick your nose in there”; “It’s squeezing me. Move it out of here”; “I’ve helped myself to a lot.”58 From a list given in Constantin 1872, p. 94. “J’vous conseille pas d’fourrer vot’nez là-dedans”; “Ça presse. Balayez-moi ça”; “J’ai tapé dans le tas!” Both singers and songs, moreover, grew out of a populist and radical tradition that included Béranger in the first quarter of the century, as well as Pierre Dupont and Joseph Darcier, both associated with the revolution of 1848. Béranger was twice imprisoned for his songs, Dupont and Darcier suffered heavily from censorship. Darcier’s role continued well into the impressionist era, as performer, songwriter, and as Thérésa’s mentor. He was coauthor of “La canaille,” a song launched by the robust Rosa Bordas (Rosalie Martini) in 1869. Its famous refrain was “J’en suis! J’en suis!” (meaning “I am also canaille”). Bordas sang it at the Hôtel de Ville during the Commune, and when she took it up again after the bloody repression of the Paris revolt, her listeners greeted it as a pro-communard song.59 For Bordas, see Caradec and Weill 1980, p. 72. The pro-communard sentiment is made clear by Marc Constantin (Constantin 1872, p. 98) when he characterizes the applause for Bordas as “un vrai trépignement démocratique” (a really democratic stamping).

Somehow Bordas’s rendering of “La canaille” escaped the censor (perhaps because it had been approved before 1870), but we can be sure the one or more police agents or mouchards (informers) reported the incident. The more oppressive the government, the more worried it was about these “parliaments of the people.” All through the Empire, cafés and cafés-concerts were well attended by informers, great numbers were closed down for political reasons, and the government censor required approval of every café song before it could be aired. Faced with the sheer volume of such texts the censors were hard put to suppress all instances of excessive vulgarity and political dissent, especially since a singer’s wink or gesture could subvert the most innocent-sounding phrase. For example, the imperial censor may have been suspicious about “Le Sire de Framboisy,” a song by Bourgat and Laurent de Rille, but did not prevent its becoming a rallying cry for opposition to the Emperor. By burlesque expressions and dumb show, the singers made the medieval Sire and his wife into a parody of Louis Napoleon and Eugénie. Jules Vallès, that unrepentant communard, believed that in a time of censorship and repression, the famous Thérésa embodied the spirit of freedom and opposition, and “sapped an empire by holding it up to laughter.”60 From Vallès’s Le Tableau de Paris (Paris, 1883), cited in Clark 1985, p. 225. Clark seems reluctant to credit Thérésa with helping undermine the Empire, but he gives a persuasive account of censorship and its ramifications, pp. 227–34 and passim. Censorship is usefully documented in Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 63–69, as is the politicization of the café-concert, pp. 69–75. For the Sire and its interpretive burlesque, see Alméras 1933, pp. 34–36. Vallès’s phrase foretells Kracauer’s view that Offenbach’s operettas had a role in the downfall of Louis Napoleon. Café song and operetta were not all that far apart. The larger cafés-concerts frequently put on operettas, and Offenbach’s chief rival Hervé (Florimond Ronge) wrote for the café-concert, including one of Thérésa’s hits, “La gardeuse d’ours” (The Bear Keeper). For a time, he also directed the orchestra of the Eldorado, one of the leading cafés-concerts. The Ba-ta-clan, as we saw, was named for one of Offenbach’s operettas, and composers of café songs regularly mined successful operettas for phrases, refrains, and personages.

Censorship of comic opera and of café-concert programs did not end with the fall of the Second Empire. Jules Simon, minister of education in the early years of the Third Republic, was an outspoken enemy of the cafés-concerts, which “distribute and sell poison among us.”61 See Anne Joly, “Sur deux modèles de Degas,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 69 (May-June 1967): 373–74. Fear of the Commune led Simon and many others to associate cafés and cafés-concerts with the menacing canaille, and police shadowing continued. In the five months following President MacMahon’s dissolving the Chamber of Deputies on 16 May 1877, 2,200 cafés were shut down as part of a campaign to stifle the opposition.62 Caradec and Weill 1980, p. 67. It is tempting to associate this crisis with the impressionists’ surge of interest in the café and café-concert. Several of Degas’s works on this theme antedate the “coup de 16 mai,” but all of Manet’s and all but one of Renoir’s (Pl. 72) are dated from 1878 to 1880 (1882, if we include A Bar at the Folies-Bergère). Just why the impressionists did nothing on this subject until about 1875 (in Degas’s case), and ceased about 1880, is a mystery. A partial explanation might be found in the euphoria of 1878: MacMahon’s regime on its way out; World’s Fair, for which Paris received a concentrated embellishment; vast numbers of fair visitors; national holiday (see above, last section of Chapter One); return of the Marseillaise after years of government interdiction. MacMahon, general of the troops that repressed the Commune, was repudiated in the elections of October 1877, which restored a republican majority to the Chamber. Censorship gradually slackened, but police spies continued to haunt cafés and cafés-concerts (and the official censors’ posts were abolished only after the turn of the century).

Government monitoring of cafés and cafés-concerts would seem to prove that they were indeed the precincts of the canaille who resisted ordained politics and morality. However, the clients of the cafés-concerts included many middle-class and upper-class people, and we have to puzzle out their roles if we are to make sense of these marketplaces of salty entertainment, and of the impressionists’ paintings of them. It has already been remarked that the Ambassadeurs, the Folies-Bergères, and the unidentified cafés painted by Manet and Degas were rather expensive places. The artists did not frequent commonplace cafés, and prices alone largely excluded the working class from the Ambassadeurs and the Folies. Zola, in an angry polemic full of irony, asks:

Is it the worker who goes into fashionable cafés, where high prices give nice people the right to enter? They’re all there, drinking, talking business, politics, or smut. The waiters are neat, there is gold décor, no one has yet denounced cafés in parliament. Useless people drown themselves in absinthe without having the worker’s excuses, and they die softheaded, their hands unstained by any work, after having slumped over the same marble table for thirty years.63 “Causerie du dimanche,” 1872, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1970), vol. 14, p. 201. For evidence of class stratification of cafés and cafés-concerts, see Constantin 1872, pp. 47–59, Alméras 1933, pp. 327–31, and witness accounts in Tuckerman 1867, p. 90, King 1868, p. 113, Hake 1878, pp. 166–71, and Vandam 1892, vol. 2, pp. 235–36.

There is also plentiful visual evidence to confront the privileged world that Manet and Degas recreated. The Musée Carnavalet has many prints of workers’ restaurants and cafés by Henri Valentin and a host of other illustrators, and in the album of etchings that Léopold Flameng published in 1860, Paris qui s’en va, Paris qui vient, there are representations of the Cabaret de la Mère Marie and other plebeian cafés. Merely to glance at Roman Ribéra’s Café-Chantant (Pl. 86) is to see how far one can get from Degas’s Ambassadeurs (Pls. 83, 85).

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Description: Café-Chantant by Ribéra, Roman

86. Roman Ribéra, Café-Chantant, 1876. 24 × 31.7 cm. In the collection of the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington.

When Manet and Degas looked around them at the Ambassadeurs or the Folies-Bergère, they did not see the working class. They saw some clerks, shop assistants, prostitutes, and demimondaines, and a lot more middle-class and upper-class customers, including perfectly respectable women whose presence particularly irritated conservatives like Louis Veuillot.64 Veuillot 1867, pp. 138–39. These latter were slumming and were often represented in contemporary illustrations, looking out from their loges over the cheaper seats below—the audience was a wonderful part of the show. Manet and Degas would also have seen fellow artists, flâneurs, dandies, and the élite of Parisian intellectuals. If they could have grouped in one place those known to have frequented the better cafés-concerts (most of whom wrote about them), they would have spotted Delvau, Fournel, Mallarmé, the Goncourts, Daudet, Taine, Veuillot, Banville, Sardou, and Renan, as well as the composers Auber, Rossini, Hervé, and Offenbach (also the latter’s librettists Halévy, Degas’s close friend, and Meilhac).

For painters, journalists, writers, and musicians, the café-concert was a source of ideas, of useful refrains, odd tunes, popular phrases and striking costumes—therefore a productive bit of amusement. Café songs and vaudeville thrived on current events which were filtered through lively music, clever phrases, and telling gestures. In them Manet found parallels for his scintillating brushwork, his quick grasp of things, and his opposition to the stodgy terms of official painting. Degas’s sardonic wit equally found matches there for his caricatural treatment of clients and performers, and for his idiosyncratic combination of pastel over monotype, a technique that alone constituted a repudiation of the hierarchy of the fine-arts establishment. (For that matter, the compositions of his café-concert pastels owed a debt to Daumier’s cartoons.65 Reff 1976, pp. 70–86. See Isaacson 1982 for other journalistic images close to Degas.)

The combination of leisure and work that artists and writers met with in the café-concert was an irresistible lure, all the more so because they enjoyed the irreverent, fractious environment. The café-concert expressed the spirit of opposition to government and to sanctioned morality that most of them shared. For them, in an era of limited freedom of expression, it was a safe way of venting their opposition (relatively safe: police spies kept a careful eye on artists and intellectuals, not just on political activists). The working-class origins of the performers and of their language gave them the feeling of sounding the depths of their society, of communing with le peuple, even though we know that all of Thérésa’s songs, all of Bécat’s and the others’, were written by professional musicians. The origins were often among the canaille, but the products came from the hands of skilled professionals, managed by clever entrepreneurs.

The bawdy songs of the cafés-concerts helped make them into mixing places, where class differences could be partly papered over. They acted as an outlet for Parisians’ awareness of the vast army of workers on whom they depended, and for the specter of revolution, reinvigorated by the Commune in 1871. Class fears were partly discharged at the Ambassadeurs where one could flirt with dangerous sexual and political expression, in an environment that grouped several classes of client (comfortably dominated by those with money), the liberating effects of drink and tobacco, and the frequent interjection of nonsense songs and refrains which further diluted the force of the street references. Georges Rivière, Renoir’s friend, well understood how singers like Thérésa or Bécat could appeal to the bourgeoisie. In reviewing Degas’s splendid pastel shown in 1877 (Pl. 83), he wrote that the red-robed figure must be singing “a coarse song, accompanied by vulgar gestures,” and then remarked “How this gesture and this voice ought to be carefully studied in the silence of the boudoir by a pretty marquise who will court her friends’ bravos when she sings ‘Am I a pasteboard woman?’”66 “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” L’Impressionniste 1 (6 April 1877), reprinted in Venturi 1939, vol. 2, p. 313. Siegfried Kracauer reported that a British woman, hoping to establish a salon in Paris, hired Thérésa to impress her guests (Kracauer 1937, p. 260).

The café-concert let artists and writers associate with the performers who were, in a manner of speaking, their alter egos. The singer’s or the clown’s act had more than one parallel with the painting, the musical composition, or the essay. All were one form or another of entertainment, the shrewd mask held up to the public. Thérésa’s song had elements of the canaille but was written by well-paid professionals like Hervé or Darcier; Manet’s painting included a worker (Pl. 77), but was destined for a small élite of viewers.

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Description: La chanson du chien, detail by Degas, Edgar

87. Degas, detail of La Chanson du chien (Pl. 84).

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88. Degas, The Glove, c. 1878. Pastel on canvas, 53 × 41 cm. Cambridge, Harvard University Art Museums. (Fogg Art Museum). Bequest - Collection of Maurice Wertheim, Class of 1906.

For the most part, artists and writers did not look at one another. That would have brought on too much self-awareness. They looked instead at the performers, the waitresses, and the lowlife among the clients. They were like the tourists who went to a fishing village and looked only at the natives, who bought engravings of the fishing boats, not of the train that brought them there, and who tried to ignore their fellow tourists, in order to preserve an “authentic” experience. Saying this is not to deny the genuineness of Manet’s interest in young women alone in their thoughts and in waitresses at their jobs, nor to deny his revelations of urban tensions. It is instead to confirm the distance he felt from his café figures, a distance that did not exclude sympathy, but that let him maintain his male detachment and demonstrate it to his fellow fashionables.

Much the same can be said of Degas’s café-concert pastels, although his cynical penetration of contemporary foibles is a different kind of detachment. For example, his only café-concert composition that concentrates on customers (Pl. 89) gives them none of the dignity Manet confers on café clients and waitresses. Manet merely hints at possible relationships between his men and women while keeping them aloof from one another. Degas’s small pastel shows lecherous men hovering over women of doubtful virtue, and all the other figures are caricatures, victims of his compulsion to attack society. In La Chanson du chien (Pl. 87), the men and women below the singer are also caricatures, brilliant miniature heads not two inches high in the foreground, and hardly more than half an inch in the distance. It is as though the woman’s animal posture had the power to metamorphose her auditors. At the base of the composition a pair of dark-rimmed glasses peers up over a pyramidal snout, and among the tiny heads to the rear is the profile of a porcine male under a round, yellow hat.

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Description: Café-Concert (Spectators) by Degas, Edgar

89. Degas, Café-Concert (Spectators), c. 1875–78. Pastel over monotype, 21 × 43 cm. Collection unknown.

To the modern observer there is an oddly familiar aspect to this crowd milling among trees under the looming presence of a singer on a raised platform. We are reminded of the outdoor concerts of our own era in city parks or college grounds. Public concerts by rock musicians, in fact, find their ancestry in the Parisian café-concert. They perpetuate its salient features in their own versions of eccentric costumes and gestures, suggestive body movements, incessantly repeated refrains. They also draw much of their material from working-class culture, and performers scare the bourgeoisie, as did Thérésa, Darcier, and Bécat, with their vulgarity and their uninhibited private lives. (Nonetheless, like Thérésa, they are greeted by royalty.)

Degas’s vision seems equally modern. In La Chanson du chien we even have the familiar experience of being suspended somewhere on the boom of a camera that has zoomed in on the performer. This is because his images of café singers have contributed to the way we frame entertainers of our own period. It is not enough simply to say that his forms and compositions look forward to twentieth-century art. That is the customary circular reasoning of art historians: an artist is modern because he was… modern. The real explanation is that Degas invented forms that suited the café-concert, and the two moved together into our century.

His most powerful rendering of a café-concert singer is The Glove (Pl. 88), exhibited with the impressionists in 1879; or perhaps we should say that something in our own culture makes us single it out with that particular kind of praise (it is not more beautiful nor more animated than Plate 83, but it is more powerful). Again we have zoomed in on the entertainer as though aided by the moving camera (how could we have explained where we are located in the terms of Degas’s generation?). We are extremely close to her, to an absolute stranger who is singing to us. We share the curious experience of the café-concert in which we can be absorbed in the song, hence in a private moment with the singer, and yet be part of a multitude: the combination of nearness and remoteness that Georg Simmel pinpointed as the essence of urban life.

Degas’s singer has a forceful presence. Her head is lit from below, resulting in a potent ugliness that we associate with photographic negatives and with the garish effects of klieg lights, those artificial suns which require the performer’s thick make-up. (It was Henry Tuckerman who said that Paris and Parisians were characterized above all by a predilection for artifice.67 See above, the second section of Chapter Two.) The singer’s mouth is open so wide that our own facial muscles stretch as we reckon up the loud note she is holding. There is a quickness about this picture, a poster-like immediacy which seizes hold of our perception. Arm rises from black circle, and head from black trapezoid; both are set against vertical stripes whose strident tones give rhythm to the silent song. The forearm is suspended at an aggressive angle, its black glove echoing the nighttime void to the right. It arrests motion and commands us to listen to the perpetually held note. Everything makes us concentrate on the one event: this woman is belting out a song, overpowering us. To us—we can never escape our own vision—she needs only a microphone in that upraised hand to become a contemporary. From her we can trace the performer that marks her age: Thérésa, Yvette Guilbert, Edith Piaf, Judy Garland, Janis Joplin.68 Degas’s model was an acquaintance, Alice Desgranges, not a café singer. She is identified in Lemoisne 1946–49, vol. 2, p. 262, and is discussed in Shapiro 1980, pp. 161–62. She is wrongly called Thérésa in Clark 1985, p. 221, but she strikes a pose that Thérésa favored in many posters and photographs. Our century has brought with it a vast rise in entertainment, particularly music, which has become one of the basic motors of industrial society. Paris of the impressionist era set us on that path, and Degas invented forms that invested its earliest images with remarkable animation and enduring force.

~

Description: La Loge by Renoir, Pierre-Auguste

90. Renoir, The Loge, 1874. 80 × 63.5 cm. Courtauld Institute Galleries, London (Courtauld Collection).

1 McCabe 1869, p. 65; McCabe got his figures from city officials. »

2 All demographic figures from Weber 1899, ed. 1963, and Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5. »

3 Tuckerman 1867, pp. 25–27. »

4 Kracauer 1937. For Offenbach one should consult also Faris 1980. »

5 Kracauer 1937, p. 176. »

6 Faris 1980, pp. 142–46, recounts the political difficulties Offenbach encountered with this operetta, giving grist to Kracauer’s mill, although elsewhere he somewhat naively denies the validity of Kracauer’s political analysis. »

7 Kracauer 1937, p. 289. »

8 When in Rome in 1885, Debussy admitted that he was homesick and yearned “to see Manet and hear Offenbach.” Cited in Faris 1980 p. 221. »

9 See the appendix devoted to documents about the composition and its censorship in Manet 1983. »

10 Citron 1961, vol. 2, p. 318 and passim. See also Françoise Cachin’s remarks in Manet 1983, no. 90. »

11 Identified by Marilyn Brown (Brown 1978), who made an astute analysis of the picture’s combination of naturalism and allegory. Her book (Brown 1985) is the first thorough social history of the gypsy and the artistic Bohème in nineteenth-century French art. For The Old Musician, see also Hanson 1977, pp. 61–66 and Reff 1982, pp. 170–91. »

12 Chapus 1855, p. 8. »

13 For these aspects of Haussmannization, see Clark 1985, ch. 1. »

14 The various ties with earlier art are summarized in Reff 1982, pp. 171–91. »

15 King 1868, p. 113. »

16 Delvau 1867, p. 64. These words immediately precede those I have cited in epigraph at the beginning of Chapter Two. »

17 Barrows 1979. »

18 James 1875–76, p. 190. »

19 Constantin 1872, p. 108: “…et l’on ne verrait plus dans la capitale du monde civilisé, l’ignoble chope remplacer la dive bouteille.” »

20 Edouard Noël and Edmond Stoullig, eds., Les Annales du théâtre et de la musique 3 (1877): 602. »

21 Isaacson 1982. »

22 Rewald 1973, pp. 430–31 and passim. »

23 Graña 1971, pp. 87–88. »

24 Gauthier-Lathuille’s memoir of this encounter is cited in Tabarant 1947, pp. 352–53. The painting has recently been studied by Bradley Collins (Manet 1985) who summarizes previous discussions and adds perceptive observations. »

25 The site is described in Rivière 1921, pp. 140–44, 187. »

26 For Renoir’s social ideals see below, the last section of Chapter Five. »

27 The friendship is recorded in Proust 1913, p. 110. »

28 The painting probably does not adhere to a particular geometric scheme, but its overall proportions (2:3) are duplicated in some of the subdivisions which, additionally, make use of a few repeated intervals. »

29 For example, Reff 1982, no. 18. I prefer the more guarded view of Theresa Ann Gronberg (Gronberg 1984). Although she calls Manet’s woman an “urban slut,” far too strong a phrase in my view, she also shows why it would be difficult to affix a label to such a person. »

30 So defined in Delvau 1866, q. v. For the early history of Degas’s painting, see Douglas Cooper, The Courtauld Collection (London, 1954), pp. 43ff, and Pickvance 1963. »

31 Cited in Pickvance 1963. Pickvance reports George Moore’s view that the woman is a “slut” and that the scene takes place in the morning. »

32 Delvau 1862, pp. 250–51. For a straightforward account of absinthe and its constituent elements, see Avenel 1900–1905, vol. 3, pp. 152–55, the source of the facts that I cite in this discussion. Absinthe was outlawed early in the twentieth century, succeeded by presumably less deleterious drinks like Pernod. For an intelligent study of the whole issue of drink in this era, see Michael Marrus, “Social Drinking in the Belle Epoque,” Journal of Social History 7 (winter 1974): 115–41. »

33 By Maxime Du Camp, cited in Barrows 1979. In her canny article, Barrows deals with the temperance movement of the 1870s, the covert and public attempts to control drink, and Zola’s opposition to such hypocrisy. She also has in preparation a book dealing with all aspects of cabarets and cafés. »

34 Even in reproduction the strip of canvas Manet added to the right of this picture shows readily, its edge running up the back of this figure. This painting was once part of the Winterthur café composition (Pl. 70); both were substantially altered after the original canvas was cut in two (analysis of this complex history in Manet 1986, pp. 65–71). Such alterations have not deterred Manet specialists from claiming that these two, and other café paintings, including The Plum (Pl. 75), are renderings of specific places that they attempt to name. Much as one would like to agree, the fact that Manet altered the pictures’ backgrounds in reworking them and omitted all precise clues to location (at least, none has been revealed) seems to argue for the reverse. »

35 In the sword hilt that hangs on the brass rack to the rear, Manet may have intended a reference to the figure derived from Neapolitan comedy, Polichinelle. As Theodore Reff has shown (“The Symbolism of Manet’s Frontispiece Etching,” Burlington Magazine 104 [May 1962]: 182–87), Manet introduced his album of etchings of 1862 with a surrogate of the artist, a Polichinelle whose sword, one of his leading attributes, hangs nearby. This etched figure bears striking resemblance to the man in Café-Concert. Further, “Polichinelle” in the slang of Manet’s day meant “an amusing and eccentric man” (Delvau 1866, q.v.). »

36 Hollis Clayson (in a public lecture, February 1980) first raised this issue in connection with Manet’s two café-concert pictures, concluding that they represented brasseries à femmes. Subsequently, Theresa Ann Gronberg (Gronberg 1984) published a detailed analysis of clandestine prostitution as it might relate to impressionist painting, and she also stated that the two Manets show brasseries à femmes. Intelligent though both interpretations are, the internal workings of the paintings do not bear them out. »

37 Joel Isaacson puts it well when he says of Manet and Degas that “seriousness of purpose takes the form of a content respectful of human dignity within the compromising and precarious urban world they chose to depict.” (Isaacson 1982, p. 110.) »

38 For the institution, Derval 1955, and for Manet’s painting, Manet 1986, pp. 76–83. My information derives also from posters, photographs, advertisements, and music sheets, as well as from contemporary guide books. »

39 That there were two spaces with different activities and mises-en-scène for long escaped the notice of art historians, who confused the interpretation of Manet’s picture by trying to adjust it to the wrong interior. An illustrated program reproduced in Manet 1986 gives the correct setting for Manet’s picture, as does Chéret’s poster (Pl. 79) and a reproduction in Derval 1955, opp. p. 59. »

40 See the lithograph exhibited no. 334 in Carnavalet 1985. »

41 Identifications summarized in Manet 1983, no. 211; the barmaid Suzon was identified in Tabarant 1931, p. 412. The Folies appears in numerous contemporary writings, the best known being J.-K. Huysmans’s Croquis parisiens (1880) and Maupassant’s Bel ami (1885). However, both authors had a writer’s interest in exaggerating its role as a prostitutes’ market. »

42 T J. Clark did so at first (Clark 1977), flatly calling her a “whore.” His book (Clark 1985), however, is a more nuanced argument and he correctly hedges: “a woman in a café-concert, selling drinks and oranges, and most probably for sale herself—or believed to be so by some of her customers” (p. 253). The relevant tradition of the dame de comptoir is extensively discussed in connection with the Bar in Ross 1982. »

43 Mortier 1875–85, vol. 3, pp. 37–38, entry for 4 February 1876. Mortier’s volumes give a good running account of the Folies, e.g., 1874 (vol. 1, pp. 283ff) and 1877 (vol. 4, pp. 140ff). This book has an introduction by Offenbach. »

44 An interpretation first proposed by Hans Jantzen, “Edouard Manet’s ‘Bar aux Folies-Bergère,’” in Essays in Honor of George Swarzenski, ed. Oswald Goetz (Chicago, 1951). »

45 See the discussion of Simmel in Chapter Two. Clark invokes Simmel when he writes of this picture (Clark 1985, pp. 253–54). He also uses the stronger term “alienation” and believes that Manet’s painting, in both subject and form, indicates a truly profound malaise in his society and a deep crisis in French art. »

46 Common, however, in fashion illustrations from the 1830s onward in which, by discarding conventional perspective, an “illogical” mirror view shows the rear of a hat or cloak, e.g., “Petit courrier des dames, Modes de Longchamp,” Modes de Paris (20 April 1835). »

47 Except for Plates 83 and 85, exhibited in 1877, the dates for all these are disputed by specialists. It is agreed that the largest number were done between 1875 and 1878. »

48 Changes in the laws pertaining to entertainment were regularly noted in newspapers and in guide books. They are conveniently summarized in Gourdon de Genouillac 1893–98, vol. 5, pp. 263–67 and passim. »

49 Joanne 1870, p. 616. Café-concert staffs, average salaries, and costs are summarized by Emile Mathieu, cited in Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 12–16. »

50 Cited in Shapiro 1980, p. 155. It is Shapiro who identified Ducarre as the subject of The Impresario. The sheet of studies is reproduced in Boggs 1962 (her fig. 94), collection unknown. Studies and oil are dated c. 1876–77. Shapiro also identified the singer Libert as the subject of another sheet of studies of the same date (his fig. 4, p. 156). »

51 Letter to Henri Lerolle, 4 December 1883, in Lettres de Degas, ed. Marcel Guérin (Paris, 1945), p. 75. The apt phrase “la Patti de la chope,” referring to the great soprano Adelina Patti, is Alfred Delvau’s (Delvau 1867, p. 180), but is frequently credited to Louis Veuillot. »

52 Paul Foucher, Entre cour et jardin, 1867, cited in Alméras 1933, p. 422. In Clark 1985, pp. 216–29, there is an acute analysis of the working-class origins of café songs. »

53 She does not quite look like Thérésa, but Michael Shapiro (Shapiro 1980) convincingly relates a study for this work (his fig. 8) to caricatures of the famous singer, so at the least she is derived from Thérésa. The “chanson du chien” has never been identified and might have been inferred from the pastel itself. »

54 Reported in Shapiro 1980, p. 156. “Turbot, turbot de mon coeur/Tu m’ah! Tu m’ah! Tu f’ras mon malheur.” »

55 King 1868, p. 231. »

56 Physical resemblance and gestures are close to her representations in posters: Shapiro 1980, pp. 160–61. See also Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 54–56. »

57 For both songs see Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 55, 56. “Je voudrais etr’ la chaise de bois blanc/Où tu t’assieds,—afin de mieux t’entendre”; “Moi, j’cass’ des noisettes/En m’asseyant d’ssus!” »

58 From a list given in Constantin 1872, p. 94. “J’vous conseille pas d’fourrer vot’nez là-dedans”; “Ça presse. Balayez-moi ça”; “J’ai tapé dans le tas!” »

59 For Bordas, see Caradec and Weill 1980, p. 72. The pro-communard sentiment is made clear by Marc Constantin (Constantin 1872, p. 98) when he characterizes the applause for Bordas as “un vrai trépignement démocratique” (a really democratic stamping). »

60 From Vallès’s Le Tableau de Paris (Paris, 1883), cited in Clark 1985, p. 225. Clark seems reluctant to credit Thérésa with helping undermine the Empire, but he gives a persuasive account of censorship and its ramifications, pp. 227–34 and passim. Censorship is usefully documented in Caradec and Weill 1980, pp. 63–69, as is the politicization of the café-concert, pp. 69–75. For the Sire and its interpretive burlesque, see Alméras 1933, pp. 34–36. »

61 See Anne Joly, “Sur deux modèles de Degas,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 69 (May-June 1967): 373–74. »

62 Caradec and Weill 1980, p. 67. It is tempting to associate this crisis with the impressionists’ surge of interest in the café and café-concert. Several of Degas’s works on this theme antedate the “coup de 16 mai,” but all of Manet’s and all but one of Renoir’s (Pl. 72) are dated from 1878 to 1880 (1882, if we include A Bar at the Folies-Bergère). Just why the impressionists did nothing on this subject until about 1875 (in Degas’s case), and ceased about 1880, is a mystery. A partial explanation might be found in the euphoria of 1878: MacMahon’s regime on its way out; World’s Fair, for which Paris received a concentrated embellishment; vast numbers of fair visitors; national holiday (see above, last section of Chapter One); return of the Marseillaise after years of government interdiction. »

63 “Causerie du dimanche,” 1872, Oeuvres complètes (Paris, 1970), vol. 14, p. 201. For evidence of class stratification of cafés and cafés-concerts, see Constantin 1872, pp. 47–59, Alméras 1933, pp. 327–31, and witness accounts in Tuckerman 1867, p. 90, King 1868, p. 113, Hake 1878, pp. 166–71, and Vandam 1892, vol. 2, pp. 235–36. »

64 Veuillot 1867, pp. 138–39. »

65 Reff 1976, pp. 70–86. See Isaacson 1982 for other journalistic images close to Degas. »

66 “L’Exposition des Impressionnistes,” L’Impressionniste 1 (6 April 1877), reprinted in Venturi 1939, vol. 2, p. 313. Siegfried Kracauer reported that a British woman, hoping to establish a salon in Paris, hired Thérésa to impress her guests (Kracauer 1937, p. 260). »

67 See above, the second section of Chapter Two. »

68 Degas’s model was an acquaintance, Alice Desgranges, not a café singer. She is identified in Lemoisne 1946–49, vol. 2, p. 262, and is discussed in Shapiro 1980, pp. 161–62. She is wrongly called Thérésa in Clark 1985, p. 221, but she strikes a pose that Thérésa favored in many posters and photographs. »

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