Die Rue Montorgueil

On 30 June 1878 Paris threw its first great national holiday since the disasters of 1870 and the Commune, a festival of peace and work tied to the World's Fair then filling the city. The streets went wild with tricolour flags. Monet, out walking the Rue Montorgueil with his paints, spotted a balcony, climbed up and asked a stranger for leave to work from it. What he carried down is less a street than a storm of red, white and blue dashes, the flags and the crowd dissolving into pure flicker. Down at the far end a banner reads Vive la France. Manet, that same day, painted the same kind of scene from a window on another street.