more vividly in painted form—in the work of Manet and his associates. The focus of Gastagnary's comments about genre painting in 1869 was Manet's work, including The Balcony [FIGURE 19], which, as Castagnary pointed out at length, flouted his requirements for coherent, legible genre painting at every point: "He arranges his people at random without any reason or meaning for the composi- tion." The poses and details in Manet's paintings quite failed to add up to a coherent reading; in The Balcony he had not indicated the relationship between 34 the figures and what they were doing on the balcony. g to Antonin Accordin Proust, Manet himself mocked the anecdotal reading of details that paintings like those of Stevens (a personal friend of his) invited: Alfred Stevens had painted a picture of a woman drawing aside a curtain [FIGURE 20]. At the bottom of this curtain there was a feather duster which played the part of the useless adjective in a fine phrase of prose or the padding in a well-turned verse. "It's 35 quite clear," said Manet, "this woman is waiting for the valet." The motives behind Manet's dislocated compositions have been much discussed. The original viewers of the works had various ways of dealing with them. For the most hostile critics, they were simply evidence of the artist's incompetence. However, two other approaches help in focusing more clearly on the problems the pictures raised for viewers. One of these was to see Manet's paintings as a direct attack on the Toulmouche mode, and thence on the whole vogue for fashionable luxury, while the other claimed that Manet was concerned with color and touch alone, without regard to the subjects he was treating. Manet's paintings, wrote Marius Ghaumelin in 1869, "have greatly scandalized the lovers of neat, tidy, sentimental bourgeois painting"; they lacked "expression, sentiment, and composition." In 1870, in praising Manet's Salon exhibits, his friend Edmond Duranty made the opposition still clearer: Against refined, artful painting, Manet opposes a systematic naivete and a scorn of all seductive devices. He places his figures against a dull slate gray background, as if he was puritanically protesting against the trompe-1'oeil curtains and the bric-a-brac furnishings that the greater and the lesser toulmoucherie . . . heap up for fear of being taken as paupers.36 29