The Crucibles

He had watched the battle through his host’s field glasses from the top of a cliff six miles away. He wasn’t alone, hundreds of weekend bathers had come from Paris on the new Saturday excursion train, and many skipped the return and stayed on when they heard that the coaled-up Alabama would be steaming out to challenge the Kearsarge as soon as the swells dropped and the sea becalmed.

Sure enough, on Sunday at 10.30 am, the Alabama left Cherbourg’s harbour. The Kearsarge Master and crew were holding church when they saw it coming at them. The Master made the sign of the cross, called all to quarters, and turned the Kearsarge north towards international waters. Napoleon III, who favoured the Confederate cause, had brokered agreements to ensure the battle would be fought at least six miles offshore. The ironclad Couronne was on hand to referee.

They circled each other seven times. The Rebel raider fired first. On the fifth circle, it took three fatal shells near the waterline. Twenty minutes later, just over an hour into the fight, it sank out of sight.

He made a few quick sketches of what he saw and returned to the house for lunch.

A few days later, a friend’s yacht took him to the Federal ship while it lay at anchor off Boulogne-sur-Mer. Onboard, he met and sketched some of the officers and men, including the gun loader Pease, a Black man from Fogo Island whom the ship’s Master singled out as one of the best men in the ship.

He watched Pease and the cook, a freeman named Fisher, and seven more White and Black sailors perform in a minstrel show. A freeman from Alexandria, Virginia, named Hamfat sang “Round De Home” and danced the “Essence of Old Virginny”. The crowd laughed and cheered.

Only two of these sketches survive – of the ship, not the crew, and based on newspaper photographs.

He would show the lone painting in a commercial gallery. Zola and other friends suggested that he submit it to the Salon. “Don’t give the malicious something more to laugh at,” said Baudelaire. The year before, his official submission, Dead Christ with Angels, had been met with bewilderment. Not just because Christ’s wound was on the wrong side of his chest. More outrageous was the comportment of the angels. Why were they mournful? Had the Christ not risen? They should be exultant. What Mary of Magdala saw through her tears as she peered into the cave's dark interior was not the hallucination of a hysteric. It was a historical fact. Proof of the resuscitated god.

For the upcoming Salon, he would be what many said he was, Zola and Baudelaire included, the painter of modern life. They would see this if he showed them only what he wanted to show, the earlier picture, from that most prolific period two years before, which only the closest friends had seen, which didn’t need a battle or an angel or a goddess, it just needed a naked woman, so he had chosen the first to come along – Crevette, the sapphiste, who he had put on the grass next to his brothers the year before, and in the stream behind and now here, stretched out on clean white sheets like a corpse awaiting burial. He wanted bright, luminous spots, so he had added a bouquet, a gift from a regular trick; and he wanted dark spots, hence the cat in a corner and Laure, the beautiful nursemaid who lived down the street from the studio, whose portrait he painted a few months before – since lost – and who stands in the corner of his children in the Tuileries.¹

“What does all this mean?” Zola asked him, after the disastrous Salon opening, a week after the funeral in Springfield. “You hardly know, nor do I.”

They had moved it high above a doorway. To keep it safe, they told him.

“To hide it, Edouard,” said Zola.

“From whom?”

“From the mob that wants your blood.”

“You are angry because you recognise her.”

“Who?”

“Crevette.”

Ten years later, the Salon accepted Victorine’s self-portrait. Everything he submitted, they rejected.

Victorine Meurent, Self-Portrait, 1876.

Edouard Manet, Olympia, Déjeuner sur l'herbe (Le Bain), Enfants aux Tuileries, 1862.

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