He finished Olympia the year of his marriage, and refused to exhibit it; Baudelaire insisted to the contrary.  It was shown at the Salon of 1865 (where Monet exhibited for the first time) and became the scandal of the day.  Again the painter was bombarded with invectives.  This awful nude, to be sure, was no more unclothed than is Cabanel’s Venus, but the latter is pretty and painted with soap-suds and sentimentality.  The Venus of Titian is not a whit more exposed than the slim, bony, young woman who has just awakened in time to receive a bouquet at the hands of her negress, while a black cat looks on this matutinal proceeding as a matter of course.  The silhouette has the firmness of Holbein; the meagre girl recalls a Cranach.  It is not the greatest of Manet; one could say, despite the bravura of the performances, that the painter was indulging in an ironic joke.  It was a paint pot flung in the face of Paris.  Olympia figured at the 1887 exhibition in the Pavilion Manet.  An American (the late William M. Laffan) tried to buy her.  John Sargent intervened, and a number of the painter’s friends, headed by Claude Monet, subscribed a purse of twenty thousand francs.  In 1890 Monet and Camille Pelletan presented to M. Fallieres, then Minister of Instruction, the picture for the Luxembourg, and in 1907 (January 6), thanks to the prompt action of Clemenceau, one of Manet’s earliest admirers, the hated Olympia was hung in the Louvre.  The admission was a shock, even at that late day when the din of the battle had passed.  When in 1884 there was held at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts a memorial exposition of Manet’s works, Edmond About wrote that the place ought to be fumigated, and Gerome “brandished his little cane” with indignation.  Why all the excitement in official circles?  Only this:  Manet was a great painter, the greatest painter in France during the latter half of the nineteenth century.  Beautiful paint always provokes hatred.  Manet won.  Nothing succeeds like the success which follows death. (Our only fear nowadays is that his imitators won’t die.  Second-rate Manet is as bad as second-rate Bouguereau.) If he began by patterning after Hals, Velasquez, and Goya, he ended quite Edouard Manet; above all, he gave his generation a new vision.  There will be always the battle of methods.  As Mr. MacColl says:  “Painting is continually swaying between the chiaroscuro reading of the world which gives it depth and the colour reading which reduces it to flatness.  Manet takes all that the modern inquisition of shadows will give to strike his compromise near the singing colours of the Japanese mosaic.”