Seeing Red, A Review 

            Paris Red is a book about seeing and being seen. The story opens with Victorine Meurant, sketching what she sees in a shop window. She is a 17-year-old girl of the streets, all want and hunger. A life of poverty that leaves her perpetually underfed combines with her craving for experience to make her vulnerable to the attentions of Edouard Manet, a somewhat predatory upper-class man of 30 whose first move is to feed the girl.

        Victorine’s story centers on her sexual awakening during her relationship with Manet. As she begins an affair with him and becomes his model, she grows used to being looked at. But she also develops her own way of looking. Always in love with color—her own red hair (Paris red?), her bottle-green boots, Manet’s ruby tie pin—and counting a notebook and drawing pencil among her few possessions, Victorine develops her nascent artistic talent by observing Manet. She studies how he uses shapes to create his compositions and learns that she needn’t paint objects in their true colors. She takes Manet’s used tubes of paint back to her room to experiment with color. When he sees her work, he tells her that she has the eye of an artist.

           While Victorine comes into sharper focus, Manet remains opaque. The author has him give his brother’s name and vocation as his own, and he never does reveal his true name. Victorine notes that he dresses down when he’s with her, scoffing at “his pretend shabbiness, as if you could put a life on with a coat”, and that behind his beard, he hides a pitted, scarred face, even as he insists that there’s only beauty in what’s real. How fortunate for him to find a girl who asks no questions, who enjoys silence.

          Still, Victorine sees Manet for who he is. She knows about his son, and the mother of that son. She understands the appeal of his secret life in the demi-monde, where he can be something other than what he is, with whomever he pleases. “He hides what he loves,” she surmises.

          The story culminates in the collaboration between artist and model for the painting, Olympia. Victorine’s contribution is to portray this courtesan not as an idealized odalisque, but as a poor girl with dirty feet and a gaze that is challenging rather than inviting. She’s thrilled when she sees the completed work, pronouncing it, “Me, but more.” This girl who does not want to be erased will be forever remembered in the painting that signals the beginning of modern art.

            In my novel, La Luministe, Berthe Morisot, an upper-class 19^th century woman, views models as immoral creatures. She is especially threatened by Victorine Meurant, the model for Manet’s most scandalous paintings. These two women at opposite ends of the social spectrum had more in common than they knew—both were artists, and both were in love with Edouard Manet. Still, their lives never intersected.

          So I looked forward to learning the story of Victorine Meurant’s life from her own point of view. How she became an artist in her own right who exhibited at the Paris Salon. How she traveled and lived in the U.S. How she died penniless, despite Manet’s promise to take care of her. But Paris Red is not the story of a woman’s life. It’s about young girl whose eyes are opened.