Between Fact and Fiction

Abstract

Chapter 8 explores the more and less serious conditions for an artist to turn the first subject of a painting into another subject. Why did Murger make Marcel paint a Red Sea Passage as the first image in a repetitive string of so many more political and social passages of liberation? Whence came the models for Marcel? One answer, the more familiar, uses facts of art-history; the other, less familiar, turns to a literary world of fiction, to find behind Murger’s story the most Parisian tellings of the Red Sea anecdote.