Best 3 quotes of Mary Mcauliffe on MyQuotes

Mary Mcauliffe

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    Mary Mcauliffe

    In the meantime, he anxiously awaited visitors, and on occasion even attempted some visits of his own—including one to his nearby Bellevue neighbor, the charming and notorious courtesan Valtesse de la Bigne. Red-haired and beautiful, Valtesse de la Bigne had brought several rich and titled men to financial ruin. She had also captivated some of the most sophisticated men in town, including Manet, who referred to her as “la belle Valtesse” and had painted her the year before. Born Louise Emilie Delabigne, Valtesse de la Bigne was sufficiently intelligent and charming to draw an entourage of admiring writers and artists such as Manet. Zola also paid court to Valtesse—although in his case from a desire to get the characters and setting right for his upcoming novel Nana. Flattered by his journalistic interest, Valtesse even agreed to show him her bedroom—until then off-limits to all but her most highly paying patrons. Zola (who seems to have limited his visit to note taking) used her over-the-top boudoir as the model for Nana’s bedroom. Even if the fictional Nana was nowhere near the sophisticated creature that Valtesse had become, the bed said it all. It was “a bed such as had never existed before,” Zola wrote, “a throne, an altar, to which Paris would come in order to worship her sovereign nudity.

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    Mary Mcauliffe

    Manet, however, was enthralled; he proceeded to give the title Nana to his painting of the courtesan Henriette Hauser, naming it after the daughter of the alcoholic laundress Gervaise Lantier in L’assommoir. Zola had not yet even begun to write his novel Nana, but the references in Manet’s painting were clear. When the Salon (presumably scandalized) rejected it, he brashly showed it in the window of a shop on the Boulevard des Capucines, virtually on the doorstep of the Opéra Garnier, where it created a succès de scandale. Zola, of course, appreciated the value of scandal in promoting his novels and was adept at creating it.

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    Mary Mcauliffe

    Returning to Paris the day after the empire’s fall, Hugo was greeted by a huge crowd at the Gare du Nord. Never one to shy from an audience, he pushed his way through the mob and into a café, where he spoke from a balcony: “Citizens,” he told them, “I have come to do my duty.” He had come, he added, “to defend Paris, to protect Paris”—a sacred trust, given Paris’s position as the “center of humanity.”6 After that, he climbed aboard an open carriage, from where he spoke again to the fervent crowd before making his way to the house of a friend, near Place Pigalle. There the young Montmartre mayor, Georges Clemenceau, warmly welcomed him.