Mademoiselle Victorine...Victorine's Paris

VICTORINE’S PARIS

ANDRE DE MONTPELLIER

—a friend and confidante of Victorine Laurent

"We are searching for that modern painter who will wrest from life its epic side and will make us see and understand how heroic we are in our cravats and our polished boots."

Charles Baudelaire

Chaque époque rêve la suivante.(Every epoch dreams its successor)

Michelet

The past is sometimes as unpredictable as the future. When I reflect back upon Paris in the time of the Impressionists, I realize we were the painters and scribes of that fleeting moment and of all the suggestions of eternity within it, refracting Beauty into this cursed spectrum we call the modern era. It was a place fueled by pleasure, wealth and sex. What impelled us toward that particular place in that cataclysmic time? Manet, Wagner, Freud: the hand of some Force shook the cup that tumbled out these dice. I was merely an inconsequential participant who observed and absorbed it all.

During the height of the Second Empire, I was a budding novelist wrestling with my first masterpiece. At that time, I prostituted myself to pay the rent by churning out gossip for a rag called Le Moniteur. Through no fault of my own, I was forced to earn a living this way by generations of illustrious ancestors who drank and gambled away the family fortune, casting me adrift on the treacherous sea of Parisian society with nothing but my title, Marquis, and my noble name, de Montpellier.

My impeccable bloodlines did insure me entree to imperial balls and aristocratic salons from which I regaled my readers about adulterous love affairs and fashion pageantry. My editor, a bottom feeder named Dowd, continually demanded stories about one woman in particular, the one the public clamored for, Victorine Laurent. She was the symbol of our tempestuous modern times, the personification of everything that was Paris, its ostentatious beauty, its glorious seductions, its shameful reputation. You see, each epoch has its defining persona and our moment had an Athena, a tumultuous divinity, the woman called Mademoiselle Victorine. So Paris was Victorine and more importantly, Victorine was Paris.

Orsay Railway Station during Victorine’s time. Today, the Musee D’Orsay where Impressionist masterpieces (including Manet’s portraits of Victorine) are permanently exhibited

Conciergerie—the jail for political prisoners where Victorine is incarcerated by order of Emperor Napoleon III

The gates open and the carriage pulls into the entrance of Victorine’s mansion on the rue Van Dyck

Victorine’s mansion—view from the back garden facing the Parc Monceau

Bridge in the Parc Monceau as seen from the conservatory of Victorine’s mansion

Pathway in the Parc Monceau where Victorine sees Philippe strolling toward her and Alexander

Place Vendome—during the final chapter, Victorine and Andre turn a corner to find leftist rebels pulling down the statue at the top of the Napoleon Column

Napoleon’s Column in the Place Vendome where the left wing rabble pulls down the head of Napoleon during the Commune uprising

View of the Seine River from the Pont Au Change

Photos by Bill Einstein.