This victory left Manet depressed and disheartened. The smaller controversy over Déjeuner sur l’herbe had so intimidated him that he had waited two years to exhibit Olympia; now, he became severely depressed and worked little (Farwell 206). He painted Victorine a few more times, but in relatively minor works, few of which were exhibited. Soon she dropped out of his life and perhaps from Paris entirely: she may have sailed to America (Lipton 5). Was Manet’s defeat as a painter also his rejection as a lover? We will probably never know. We do know, however, that in his time apart from Victorine, Manet had time to reflect and mature. In the years after Olympia, he established himself as an artist, becoming a mentor to a new generation of painters: the Impressionists. His life and his career were less easily threatened than they had been ten years before when he faced Olympia. By the time Manet returned to Victorine for Gare Saint-Lazare (1873), he finally held the high ground.
Gare Saint-Lazare showcases Manet’s newfound sense of control over Victorine. Playing prim and proper nanny to a little girl dressed in white is perhaps the unlikeliest role Manet ever had Victorine play, but this is exactly the point. By forcing Victorine to finally cede her identity to play the role he asks, Manet displays his power over her. Whereas before, Victorine’s body seemed to rebel against its outlandish costumes, here it is forced to submit. Her body language speaks of this submission. The position of her torso is direct but deferential; she sits slightly bent as if in a bow, nearly facing us. The sense of tension and confrontation that pervaded the early painting is almost gone here. Perhaps this is because Manet has stripped her of any ammunition for a challenge: 
Victorine in Gare Saint-Lazare is strangely de-sexualized. Her garb most closely matches that of The Street Singer, but here there are no sensuous red cherries at her lips. There is, in fact, little hint of sensuality at all. The curve of her breasts is lost in shadow, the shape of her thighs beneath the skirt is covered quite naturally by the objects in her lap. The presence of Victorine’s once-powerful, sexual body is barely felt. Olympia has been defeated. Had her charms simply worn off with age? Or was it just that Manet was no longer frightened by them?
Manet had, after all, confronted those demons ten years before, when he completed the canvas that showed Victorine at her height. At the time, certainly, he was bewildered by Olympia’s terrifying power over others and over himself. Yet in the intervening years, he had seen the anarchic sexuality unleashed in Olympia channeled into the building of a relatively successful artistic career. Victorine’s sexuality no longer seemed as much of a threat to the stable upper-class life Manet desired; in fact, it became a part of that life. As, perhaps, it always had been; what Manet had really discovered in revealing Victorine’s anarchic sexuality was his own anarchic tendencies. After all, it was perhaps less Victorine herself than Manet’s fascination with her that is victorious in Olympia. Perhaps what Manet was really terrified of was not the anarchic sexuality of Victorine, but the part of himself that answered to it. Manet was ever the reluctant revolutionary, a constant contradiction; he was inspired to paint provocative canvases, and yet yearned to have these same canvases accepted at the stodgy Salon. The conflict in his early paintings of Victorine is perhaps as much within himself as with her. It is then this internal drama, played out on canvas, that renders Manet’s early works so compelling. The control so strongly displayed in Gare Saint-Lazare, then, is not so much Manet’s control over Victorine as it is Manet’s control of himself.
Manet, Edouard. Gare Saint-Lazare. National Gallery, Washington, DC.