What was the exact nature of this challenge? Although we know little of Victorine’s biography before she met Manet, it is possible to get a flavor of the life she led. Manet wrote her address in his notebook sometime in 1861 or 1862: 17 Rue Maître-Albert. This placed Victorine in a well-known slum of “evil haunts and taverns” (Siebert 53); the famously seedy neighborhood bar, Pére Lunette’s, was decorated with obscene prints (and a fresco of Prince Napoleon with his pants down) and frequented by girl prostitutes. In an even rougher nearby bar, fourteen-year-olds 
and old women offered themselves to customers and, when rebuffed, stole gulps of wine from their glasses, avoiding their victims’ blows (Siebert 53-55). This tough and sexualized world was Victorine’s milieu, very different than the genteel spheres in which Manet moved - unlike many bourgeois avant-garde painters of the day, he was no bohemian. Despite Manet’s reputation as a revolutionary, in most aspects of his life he was strongly conservative - to the end of his life, for instance, he sought acceptance for his paintings in the Paris Salon. In his personal life, Manet was so discreet that historians still do not know if Victorine was his mistress, or even how they met. Yet somehow, she found her way from Rue Maître-Albert to Manet’s studio, bringing a little of the sexual anarchy of the Parisian underworld with her.
Left: Manet, Edouard. Study for Olympia (second version). Louvre, Paris.
Right: Manet, Edouard. Olympia. Musée d’Orsay, Paris. (detail)