64. 1st textuality in Degas's art. Both Duranty and Riviere wanted to find a straightforward social Edgar physiognomies of class and profession in Degas's pictures that was not there, so they had to Degas, make do, as we shall see, with the "language of bodily impropriety and gestural inuendo" in Women on Degas's work, to borrow Armstrong's excellent phrase.147 But Riviere's concoction of a story is the Terrace of not entirely inappropriate to what is in the picture, even if it does rest heavily on that one pro- a Cafe in the vocative thumb-in-mouth maneuver, a matter to which we shall return. Evening, In a generally sympathetic review of the third Impressionist show published in Le Petit Par- 1877, isien, Alexandre Pothey emphasized the truthfulness of Degas's observation of his motif as he pastel over wrote: "Monsieur Degas seems to have issued a challenge to the philistines, that is to say to the monotype, classics. Women on the Terrace of a Cafe in the Evening are of a terrifying realism. These Musee painted, blighted creatures, sweating vice, who recount to one another the doings and gestures d'Or say, of the day, you have seen them right enough, you know them, and you will come across them Paris. 148 again in a little while on the boulevard." The critic Bernadille wrote this in Le Frangais: "Monsieur Degas lacks neither fantasy nor wit nor observation in his watercolors [sic]. He has gathered at the tables of a bistro, or in the cafes-concerts and the corps de ballet, types of a cynical and quasi-bestial truthfulness, bearing all the vices of civilization written in large letters 149 on their triple layers of makeup. But his wit has a heavy hand and a crude expression." The writer Jacques published these comments in UHomme Libre: "The studies in the boulevard 106 cafes are no less finished and no less curious, though cruel — passably so. I would be permitted