ABSTRACT

In the taxi to the gallery Vicky started to think about whether Olympia was more or less of a flirt than the barmaid. Both were ‘in-your-face’ girls, there was no doubt about it, and she thought of them both as twenty-first century role models. But Olympia, despite the apparent (superficial?) splendour of her bedroom – or was that a morning room? – definitely had something of the look of a latently hungry, frightened rat about her. Or that was how she remembered it from her last visit, which had been almost ten years before. Thin might be in still but the barmaid, in contrast, looked well-fed, if a little vacant. Her staring eyes (was that what they did?) were still a bit more ambiguously ‘comehither’, and not so mocking. Both girls were very sexy it was true – what had Manet done, according to . . . who was it? . . . Mallarmé: ‘painted with his semen’, or something like that. But there had been something wrong about the language, hadn’t there? The original French had been lost so the English had had to be re-translated back into the French. ‘Pollen’ might have any number of likely (and less likely) synonyms. Anyway, it was quite a sexy idea in any language. Vicky looked out at the Paris night – the museum would be closed soon if the traffic didn’t clear. She reflected that her memories of what she had seen were always clouding over and the girls’ faces and bodies never appeared quite as she thought they would – they . . . kept changing. Or she kept changing. The two changings were bound up together, perhaps. They both might be Manet’s creations – ‘Manet’s girls!’ – but they were

‘True? Beautiful? Attractive? No! – what is it, then?’1