88 younger artist's studio to see the unfinished Rolla: "You have to make them understand that Testing 'your' woman is not a model. Where's the dress she's taken off? Then put a corset on the the Limits 117 floor!" In an interview conducted by Felix Feneon in 1920, Gervex recalled doing exactly what he was told: "It was at his instigation that I put this petticoat so stiffly starched, this corset, all this lingerie in the foreground."118 Degas was apparently satisfied that his suggestion ac- counted for the painting's removal. His reaction to the event, according to Vollard, encouraged Gervex to see the cowardly inability of the Salon to exhibit an unavoidably contemporary, sex- 119 ualized woman: "You see . . . they understood that she's a woman who takes her clothes off." We shall never know with certainty whether Gervex was disappointed or pleased by the events of the spring of 1878. Without registering his feelings about the rejection, he reported to Feneon in 1920 that he knew it was the "modernity" of the discarded clothing that inculpated his otherwise inoffensive painting: "This nude would certainly have passed muster, illuminated as it is by the conflict of lamp light and the first rays of sun at dawn, but these feminine remains 12 gave, it appears, a spice of modernity to the work that was too irritating." ° Gervex's memoirs, published in 1924, grant no credit to Degas for the offending motif and indicate that the action taken by the Salon administration came as a genuine surprise to the young artist. In these recollections, his official reminiscences about Rolla, he highlighted two aspects of the painting that he said he "counted upon" to guarantee its success: the technically demanding lighting (combining daylight and gaslight within the same canvas) and the still life — "several details that seemed audacious at the time, such as the crush of feminine lingerie 121 near the bed, the way it is piled next to the nude flesh of the woman." But he reported that all the "camarades" who visited his studio to see the picture prior to the Salon predicted only the greatest success for it. The comrades included Manet, Degas, Alfred Stevens, and Princess Mathilde Bonaparte - all of whom Gervex trusted, and none of whom found the picture immoral. But hearsay evidence recorded years after the event and the self-serving memoirs of the seventy-two-year-old painter are not very reliable sources of information concerning Gervex's actual work on Rolla in 1878. After all, by the 19208 Gervex had become a rich member of the French Institute and was nearing the end of an exemplary career as a successful artist; he had been richly rewarded by the state and generously patronized by prosperous and loyal private clients. But a return to the painting itself can tell us something about his inclusion of the still life, for, even though the "depouille feminine" was probably Degas's idea, it was the young Gervex who worked out the foreground jumble in detail (see fig. 44). The choreography of the cane, hat, and corset in the chair shows that Gervex immersed, even lost himself, in the licentiousness of his subject, allowing small but apparently irresistible 122 indecencies to intrude upon the field he had chosen in 1878, the terrain of the Salon nude. Indeed the lack of restraint that Gervex showed in placing the cane in the still life points to the vulnerability of the genre of the nude, to the ways in which the nude was almost always a strained synthesis of opposing forces, perpetually in danger of slipping out of equilibrium as a consequence of even the smallest push in the direction of deviance. Gervex's handling of the discarded clothing shows that he had ideas about the sexuality of the prostitute — notions in wide circulation at the time — that worked against maintaining the chaste equipoise required of the acceptable Salon nude.