THANKS GUSTAVE

The stove in the rue Hautefeuille smoked when the wind came from the river, and the wind came from the river most of that winter, so the studio smelled of coal and of the beer that came up the stairs from Andler's. Courbet was forty-six. He was the size of a door and he knew it, and he had spent twenty years telling Paris that he did not paint angels because he had never seen one. Paris had mostly forgiven him. It had not forgiven the pictures.

The Turk came in January. That was what the studio called him, though he was not a Turk in any way that would have satisfied a Turk. Khalil Bey had been an ambassador and would be one again, and in between he was in Paris with a great deal of money and a plan for spending it. He had bought the Ingres, the bath full of women. He had ordered two sleeping girls from Courbet as well, tangled in a sheet the size of a bed, to hang where his guests could pretend not to look. Now he wanted something else.

"Something for one room," he said. "Not the salon. For me."

Courbet said he did not take orders. Then he asked what size the room was.

The canvas he chose was small. Forty-six centimeters by fifty-five. He had painted hunting dogs bigger than that. He set it on the easel and looked at it for most of an afternoon without touching it, which the boy who ground his colors had never seen him do.

The problem was not the subject. He had painted women. He had painted them asleep and bathing and wrestling and dead. The problem was that every one of them had brought a story into the room with her, and the story had let the picture be hung. A woman asleep is not naked; she is asleep. A woman stepping out of a river is not naked; she is bathing. Titian's girl on her bed is Venus, so she may look at you. Manet's girl on her bed three years ago had looked at you without being Venus, and the city had wanted to put her in the river.

He understood the mechanism perfectly, because he had used it. The story was a curtain. You painted the curtain and the body behind it and the Salon hung both.

What he wanted, this time, was a picture with no curtain in it.