The artist had now a considerable following, and was supported by several vigorous pens in the press, notably that wielded by Emile Zola, who had been introduced to Manet by an old school friend become artist, Cézanne. Zola’s campaign in 1866, following upon the rejection by the Salon of the _Fifre de la Garde_, saw some hard fights. Zola saluted Manet as the greatest artist of the age, and incidentally overturned a few pedestals in the Academy. Animosity directed against the artist was transferred to the journalist, and Zola was soon ejected from his position under M. de Villemessant as art critic to the _Figaro_ (then famous as _l’Événement_). Artists of the old school used to buy copies of this journal containing the offending articles, seek out Zola or Manet on the boulevards, and then destroy the paper under their eyes with every manifestation of scorn. About this time the gatherings in the Café Guerbois, in the Rue Guyot, behind the Parc Monceau, were held twice a week regularly, and the School of Batignolles became an established fact. The group was mixed, and held together more through comradeship than through identical aims. It included Whistler, Legros, Fantin-Latour, Monet, Degas (a young man fresh from the Ecole des Beaux Arts), Duranty, Zola, Vignaux, sometimes Proust, Henner, and Alfred Stevens. To these names should be added Pissarro, Sisley, Renoir, Bazille, and Cézanne. Monet had been attracted by Manet since the little exhibition at Monsieur Martinet’s in 1863, although they did not meet until 1866, the year that Camille Pissarro joined the camp. Fantin-Latour was an old chum, the friendship commencing in 1857, and he commemorated these gatherings in a picture of the members of the group, which attracted much attention in the Salon of 1870. [Illustration: PORTRAIT OF M. P——, THE LION-HUNTER · EDOUARD MANET ] The home life of Edouard Manet was strangely different from what one would expect of such an artist, so notorious in the Paris of the Empire that when he entered a café its frequenters turned to stare at the incomer. Manet lived with his wife and his mother in the Rue St. Pétersbourg. The old lady, faithful to her remembrance of the age of Charles X. and the Citizen King, lived amidst souvenirs of the past. Modernity was entirely absent from the little household, and those who anticipated evidences of the spirit of revolution which characterised Manet in the world of the boulevards here discovered the atmosphere, even the decoration and furniture, of the Louis-Philippe period. Romance had also entered into the hitherto prosaic Manet family. Mlle. Berthe Morisot, a clever young artist from Bourges, had married Manet’s brother Eugène, and became an ardent follower of her brother-in-law’s artistic doctrines, whom she aided frequently.