freshment in a cafe often included a male admirer in such a scene. It appears that conceptualiz- 103 ing almost any woman in a cafe as a sexual object was an essential part of many records of this Testing modern subject. the Limits In Renoir's At the Cafe of circa 1877 (fig. 61), for example, two thoroughly respectable 144 women rivet their attention upon a man who has paused at their table to chat. We know they are respectable because of their appearance, but Renoir could not resist showing this twinned female pulchritude acknowledged by a second man who is eavesdropping: the fellow in the top hat at the left (considered to be a likeness of Georges Riviere, a supporter of the Impressionists) leers appreciatively in the direction of the women. In a cafe picture attributed to Gervex, Group at Table of about 1880 — 85 (fig. 62), two seated women chat and read side-by-side, but there is a man close by to add the apparently indispensable note of male attraction to the "charms" of women seated in a cafe. Giovanni Boldini's Cafe Conversation of circa 1875-80 (fig. 63) puts a slightly different twist on an example of the same genre of modern-life painting. The two well- dressed women in his painting are alone on a cafe terrace, but their attention is not centered on their refreshment or on each other. They are busy meddling, looking at something or someone beyond the right margin of the picture. The demeanor of the woman at right suggests, for ex- ample, that the explorations of her eyes are flirtatious. The iconographies of these cafe subjects fall, therefore, into three general categories (which convey in turn interconnected beliefs about women in cafes): (i) a woman alone was likely to be a prostitute and was likely to be soliciting; (2) prostitutes together were relaxing, not working, and would be left alone by men; and (3) unchaperoned, respectable women would be ogled by men and might flirt back. Degas's Women on the Terrace of a Cafe in the Evening, a pastel over monotype of 1877 (fig. 64), appears at first to be an example of the second category: an image of prostitutes taking their ease, having a drink, resting their feet, getting caught up with one another (especially since a man is shown hurrying past them in the distance). Upon close inspection, however, it is instead a picture that crosses the boundary between genres and blurs certain of the usual dis- tinctions drawn between ways of picturing prostitutes at work and prostitutes at rest. Degas borrowed the picture from its owner, Gustave Caillebotte, to exhibit it in the third Impressionist exhibition in 1877. It bore its present title, but its setting has long been identified 145 as a cafe on the notorious boulevard Montmartre. Reviewers of Degas's twenty-two-piece ex- hibit in the 1877 show found that the picture was especially truthful. Georges Riviere, friend and partisan of the independent group, recorded his view of Degas in his journal, LTmpressionniste. Unlike many twentieth-century critics, Riviere, like Edmond Duranty (a close friend of the artist and author of the 1876 La Nouvelle Peinture), believed that Degas was as concerned with narration in his work as he was with aesthetic issues. "M. Degas," he wrote, "how best to speak about this essentially Parisian artist, whose every work contains as much literary and philosophical talent as it does expertise in drawing and the science of colora- tion? . . . Here are some women at the door of a cafe in the evening. There is one who clicks her fingernail against her teeth, saying: 'not even that,' which is a poem in itself. Another rests a large gloved hand on the table. In the distance, the boulevard with its gradually thinning 146 swarm. Again it is an extraordinary page of history." It is not surprising that Riviere found an anecdote in Women on the Terrace of a Cafe, because he believed that a legible story was a char- acteristic part of Degas's art. As Carol Armstrong has shown, Duranty tended to look for a real-