abusing the young artist through thick and thin, we must be first clear as to why our eyes have been offended, and whether they ought to have been." With these words criticism began to take Manet seriously. Charles Ephrussi and Duranty, besides Zola, came forward as his first literary champions in the press. "Manet is bold" was now the phrase used about him in public. The Impressionists took the salon by storm. And Manet's bright and radiant sun was seen to be a better thing than the brown sauce of the Bolognese. It was as if a strong power had suddenly deranged the focus of opinion in all the studios, and Manet's victory brought the same salvation to French art as that of Delacroix had done forty years before and that of Courbet ten years before. _Manet et manebit._ Delacroix, Courbet, and Manet are the three great names of modern French painting, the names of the men who gave it the most decisive impulses. [Illustration: ÉDOUARD MANET.] Édouard Manet, _le maître impressioniste_, was born in 1832, in the Rue Bonaparte, exactly opposite the École des Beaux-Arts, and his life was quietly and simply spent, without passion and excitement, unusual events, or sanguinary battles. At sixteen, having passed through the _Collège Rollin_, he entered the navy with the permission of his parents, and made a voyage to Rio de Janeiro, which was accomplished without any incident of interest, without shipwreck or any one being drowned. With his cheerful, even temperament he looked on the boundless sea and satiated his eyes with the marvellous spectacle of waves and horizon, never to forget it. The luminous sky was spread before him, the great ocean rocked and sported around, revealing colours other than he had seen in the Salon. On his return he gave himself up entirely to painting. He is said to have been a slight, pale, delicate, and refined young man when he became a pupil of Couture in 1851, almost at the same time as Feuerbach. Nearly six years he remained with the master of "The Decadent Romans," without a suspicion of how he was to find his way, and even after he had left the studio he was still pursued by the shade of Couture; he worked without knowing very well what he really wanted. Then he travelled, visiting Germany, Cassel, Dresden, Prague, Vienna, and Munich, where he copied the portrait of Rembrandt in the Pinakothek; and then he saw Florence, Rome, and Venice. Under the influence of the Neapolitan and Flemish artists, to whom Ribot, Courbet, and Stevens pointed at the time, he gradually became a painter. His first picture, "The Child with Cherries," painted in 1859, reveals the influence of Brouwer. In 1861 he exhibited, for the first time, the "double portrait" of his parents, for which he received honourable mention, although--or because--the picture was entirely painted in the old Bolognese style. These works are only of interest because they make it possible to see the rapidity with which Manet learnt to understand his craft with the