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He associated daily with Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Whistler, Duranty, Fantin-Latour, and the crowd that first went to the Café Guerbois in the Batignolles hence the derisive nickname, "The Batignolles School"; later to the Nouvelle Athènes, finally to the Café de la Rochefoucauld.

Thus it must be firmly established that from this moment Manet passed as an innovator, years before Impressionism existed or was even thought of. This is an important point: it will help to clear up the twofold origin of the movement which followed. To his realism, to his return to composition in the modern spirit, and to the simplifying of planes and values, Manet owed these attacks, though at that time his colour was still sombre and entirely influenced by Hals, Goya and Courbet. From that time the artist became a chief. As his friends used to meet him at an obscure Batignolles café, the café Guerbois (still existing), public derision baptized these meetings with the name of "L'Ecole des Batignolles." Manet then exhibited the Angels at the Tomb of Christ, a souvenir of the Venetians; Lola de Valence, commented upon by Baudelaire in a quatrain which can be found in the Fleurs du Mal; the Episode d'un combat de taureaux (dissatisfied with this picture, he cut out the dead toreador in the foreground, and burnt the rest). The Acteur tragique (portrait of Rouvière in Hamlet) and the Jésus insulté followed, and then came the Gitanos, L'Enfant

This subject has apparently been overlooked in recent years, but in the olden times it was extensively discussed. Swinger, Harderus, Tackius, Guerbois, Hueber, Therrin, Castellanau, Pauquet, and others have written extensively upon this theme. It is said that the inhabitants of cold countries, such as the Laplanders and the Danes, are the most susceptible to this malady.

True, alas, it is, that gone is the Paris of Paris's glory gone that Paris that called to Louise with the luring melody of a zithered soul. True, alas, it is, that the Paris of the Guerbois, with its crowd of other days Degas and Cladel and Astruc and the rest of them is no more.