Manet did not cry out, did not want to swell up: he searched in a real slump: nothing and nobody could help him. In this search, only an impersonal torment guided him. This torment was not the painter's alone: even the laughers, without understanding it, were waiting for these figures that revolted them but that would later fill the void that was opening up in them.
The unwilling midwife of modern painting, a man of scandal at his own expense, an innocent destroyer of the subject, a chance instrument of a kind of metamorphosis: such is the Manet of Bataille.
