laude Monet, subscribed a purse of
twenty thousand francs. In 1890 Monet and Camille Pelletan presented
to M. Fallieres, then Minister of Instruction, the picture for the
Luxembourg, and in 1907 (January 6), thanks to the prompt action of
Clemenceau, one of Manet's earliest admirers, the hated Olympia was
hung in the Louvre. The admission was a shock, even at that late day
when the din of the battle had passed. When in 1884 there was held at
the Ecole des Beaux-Arts a memorial exposition of Manet's works,
Edmond About wrote that the place ought to be fumigated, and Gerome
"brandished his little cane" with indignation. Why all the excitement
in official circles? Only this: Manet was a great painter, the
greatest painter in France during the latter half of the nineteenth
century. Beautiful paint always provokes hatred. Manet won. Nothing
succeeds like the success which follows death. (Our only fear nowadays
is that his imitators won't die. Second-rate Manet is as bad as
second-rate Bouguereau.) If he began by patterning after Hals,
Velasquez, and Goya, he ended quite Edouard Manet; above all, he gave
his generation a new vision. There will be always the battle of
methods. As Mr. MacColl says: "Painting is continually swaying between
the _chiaroscuro_ reading of the world which gives it depth and the
colour reading which reduces it to flatness. Manet takes all that the
modern inquisition of shadows will give to strike his compromise near
the singing colours of the Japanese mosaic."

What a wit this Parisian painter possessed! Duret tells of a passage
at arms between Manet and Alfred Stevens at the period when the
former's Le Bon Bock met for a wonder with a favourable reception at
the Salon of 1873. This portrait of the engraver Belot smoking a pipe,
his fingers encircling a glass, caused Stevens to remark that the man
in the picture "drank the beer of Haarlem." The _mot_ nettled Manet,
whose admiration for Frans Hals is unmistakably visible in this
magnificent portrait. He waited his chance for revenge, and it came
when Stevens exhibited a picture in the Rue Lafitte portraying a young
woman of fashion in street dress standing before a portiere which she
seems about to push aside in order to enter another room. Manet
studied the composition for a while, and noting a feather duster
elaborately painted which lies on the floor beside the lady,
exclaimed: "Tiens! elle a done un rendezvous avec le valet de
chambre?"

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