128 equivocally.31 Her imperious manner, her soigne style of dress, and her action (she appears to 32 Suspicious adjust the stuffing in a hat on display) fix her identity as the keeper of the shop. Professions Manet's decision to use a mature, bare-shouldered woman as the sole occupant of the shop may well have been rooted in a familiarity and fascination with the reputation of the manager or owner for organizing millinery shop employees into a clandestine prostitution operation. Al- though Manet and Renoir were very different kinds of painters, they shared an interest in the subject of the eroticized, contemporary working woman, while, at the same time, leaving aside the telltale signs of her legendary moral corruption. Beginning in the early i88os, probably in 1882, Degas did at least sixteen pastels and 33 paintings of milliners. Degas's often-quoted artistic credo and Gustave Coquiot's disparage- ments of the artist's modiste pictures are apt prefaces to a close study of two of these images. In Degas's words: "No art is less spontaneous than mine. What I do is the result of reflection and of study of the great masters; of inspiration, spontaneity, temperament, I know nothing. One must re-do the same subject ten times, one hundred times. Nothing in art should resemble an 34 accident, even movement." According to Coquiot's 1924 study of Degas's milliner images: [In a millinery shop] between 5 and 7, at a shot, everyone on the bridge, the commotion of trying things on, of recriminations, enthusiasms, cries, swoons, rages, jealousies, de- ceptions. . . . Degas does not go beyond the short anecdote.' His paintings and drawings of milliners are not savoury successes. . . . That he cannot give us, Degas, the character of this group of females, so be it! . . . but, in truth, he could have surpassed the photo- graphic document, this painter called artist of "modern truth." . . . Degas has never con- sidered what could really be at the center of feminine thinking!35 According to Coquiot, Degas recorded the appearance of the women accurately enough, but he did not reveal the meaning of the milliner, because, using Coquiot's terms, the "courte anecdote" and the "document photographique" were inadequate indications of the "verite" of the subject. By and large, Coquiot's complaints are legitimate: the milliner pictures do lack drama and do not allow an easy interpretation. But, as Degas's remarks remind us, if drama and interpretation are missing, their absence is not due to a lack of probity in method. Those qualities were not part of Degas's interest in the subject or his purpose in presenting it. One of the pictures, an oil on canvas of 1882 — 85, entitled At the Milliner (fig. 77), contains two women who are readily identifiable as customer and milliner. As usual in Degas's treat- ment of this particular combination of women, the customer trying on a hat predominates and the milliner plays a subordinate role. Also as usual, his picturing of the transaction is based upon firmly drawn distinctions of class, showing a rigidly maintained social hierarchy. But in this picture Degas's presentation of customer and milliner is odd: the milliner holds a hat for a faceless customer, who dons another and inspects her featureless self in the mirror. The generally broad handling of the work mitigates the peculiarity of the blank phantom of a face reflected in the mirror as a white, featureless oval laid down in parallel striations of white, as is the balance of the reflection. The blankness of the reflected face is matched by the cus- tomer's mittenlike, undifferentiated, orangy, gloved hands. As a result of the schematic features given to the customer, the specificity of the bare pink hands of the milliner reaching in with a hat from the right edge comes as a surprise. Her fingers are separately drawn, and they bend, separate, and arch to the maximum, like claws. They appear exaggerated in the context of this