Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (8 page)

Four hundred Egyptian troops had arrived before him in Paris to serve as his bodyguards. These burly men wore white cotton jackets, petticoats, broad crimson sashes, long white gaiters, and white fezzes with red tassels. “They all look as if they had been hewn out of the ‘gross darkness that might be felt,” wrote Howard Payson Arnold in a report brimming with the prejudices of the time, “and if Nature had exhausted the contents of all her soot-pots, she could not have made them blacker. If they were caught out in a shower of ink, every drop would show on them like a chalk-mark.”

Near the temple stood a low structure, behind which sat a tall hatbox-shaped addition. Three pennants flew from the roof. Faux ancient tomb paintings of servants and kings decorated the exterior walls, but inside, a visitor found the most modern of wonders. This was where de Lesseps depicted the work being done on the tremendous canal through Egypt. Not only was this exhibit meant to appease nervous European investors who wondered if the work would ever be finished; it would help him curry favor with this new khedive. Receiving praise in the international newspapers was key to smoothing out future negotiations.

The most extraordinary aspects of the canal’s exposition display came about after a dispute with this khedive. In the original contract, signed by the khedive’s uncle, Said, the Wali had promised de Lesseps the use of twenty thousand slaves annually. The new khedive, Ismail the Magnificent, annulled the slave clause, because he hated the idea of Europeans completing moneymaking projects using unpaid Egyptian muscle.

Enraged by this significant renegotiation halfway through the project, de Lesseps asked the khedive if it would be acceptable to have the French emperor settle their disagreement. The khedive agreed—a foolish choice since not only was de Lesseps French; he was the cousin of the emperor’s wife, Eugénie.

Napoléon III decided in de Lesseps’s favor, determining that the khedive should pay 3.8 million pounds to de Lesseps for breach of the original agreement. The khedive, honor-bound, did so. De Lesseps then used the khedive’s money to hire workers and finance the invention and creation of astounding digging and dredging machines. De Lesseps, not the Egyptians, earned great accolades for his visionary thinking. As a friend of Bartholdi’s later wrote, the large dredge and conveyors created to make the canal were “the highest expressions of modern industry. You will see machines as grandiose as cathedrals and as precise as Greenwich marine watches. I visited one which did the work of 300 workers with only fifteen men; it extracted 80,000 cubic meters of earth in a month.”

The pavilion also held two table-height dioramas about twenty-five feet by ten feet, showing how the canal would stretch from Port Said in the North past Ismailia to Port Suez in the South. On one wall hung a large painting of a female fellah, a slave, carrying a jug of water and a baby. This image represented the Suez Canal Company, almost as a logo, which Bartholdi clearly noted.

Bartholdi managed to meet the khedive during the latter’s Parisian visit, to see if he might pitch his own talents. He would have found nothing terribly impressive about the khedive in person. Ismail the Magnificent was short, flabby, plagued by eczema, and observed the world through literally half-closed eyes whose focus tended to float to the side, creating a disconcerting effect on whomever he might be speaking to. What he possessed, though, was access to unlimited resources. He’d commissioned an extensive rail infrastructure remodeling, building of new palaces, and an entire new quarter of Cairo to be modeled on Paris. Gaining favor from the khedive would let Bartholdi skip the headache of public subscriptions and small government subsidies to create his work.

In conversation, the khedive, who spoke fluent French, was clever and warm, if cynical. When Bartholdi discussed the idea of erecting a monumental statue for Egypt to crown the engineering achievement of the yet-to-be-completed canal, the khedive did nothing to discourage Bartholdi’s ambition. After all, as no money or contracts changed hands, the khedive had nothing to lose in the arrangement.

What figure could Bartholdi create that would strike awe in the khedive? Monuments tended to blend into their surroundings over time. His General Rapp made a respectable commemoration of the hero in the square in Colmar, but nothing about the piece would lead observers to wonder what kind of genius created such a landmark. Bartholdi wanted to astound, to put his viewers in the frame of mind he had experienced when he was in Egypt, to encourage them to contemplate the eternal. He needed to devise a work that would appeal to the ego of the khedive, a man who would later tell a writer, “Every man has a mania. My mania is stone.” He also needed to find an idea that would impress Mariette, the khedive’s director of antiquities, the man who had unearthed the tombs below the sphinx and put on the temple display at the expo.

Bartholdi’s first idea was a fountain and a monument to Muhammad Ali, the late leader whom de Lesseps’s father had cultivated to rule Egypt. The monument would be a rounded pavilion, with an enormous turbaned statue sitting cross-legged on a lion’s back on the roof. In another version, the lion would recline in Muhammad’s lap. Perhaps Bartholdi never presented these projects to the khedive. He didn’t mention having done so in his letters, instead opting to propose a much bolder idea.

Bartholdi dreamed of a lighthouse. This lighthouse would recall the Colossus, a statue of Apollo that had towered over the harbor of Rhodes. With its pedestal, Bartholdi’s statue would be nearly forty feet larger than that ancient work, the tallest statue ever made. The statue of St. Carlo Borromeo in Italy stood 114 feet on its foundation. No one in nearly two thousand years had dared build as high as the Apollo. This giant would be a woman, a fellah, in fact. She would look very similar to the slave woman on the wall fresco of the Suez Pavilion. Bartholdi was a dreamer, but he was practical as well, and understood that his work would have to flatter de Lesseps, too.

The khedive, for his part, would be pleased to remind the people of what he had done for the fellaheen. During the 1867 Paris Universal Exposition, when Laboulaye’s antislavery group publicly excoriated the khedive for turning a blind eye to the continued practice of trafficking in slaves, the khedive had claimed that if he were given authority to search European vessels, he could snuff the practice in weeks, since it was Europeans who were stealing his people as slaves.

Bartholdi’s slave woman for the khedive, as sketched, would stretch upward, thrusting a lamp into the sky with her right hand, her foot a step forward, her hips thrust out slightly. Her lamp beams would light the sea, and she would stand as a grand ornament at the mouth of the Suez Canal, the most monumental construction humankind had yet known.

Bartholdi took out a block of clay and began shredding off the excess.

Bartholdi planned to travel to Egypt in April 1869 to present his final ideas to the khedive. If he were able to get his works built, this would be his grandest commission to date and well worth the trouble and the cost of the travel. He wrote to his mother from Paris: “I am going to devote myself entirely to my Egypt business; it has the advantage of frankly showing its impossible side; but at least . . . I am seizing all means of possible support. I have excellent ones but with this, there is an aspect of the lottery and a play of luck is needed. I will do all that I can to seize the occasion . . . and if I fail, it is because there will not be a ghost of a chance.

“I showed my project to the Emperor and Empress,” he said, referring to Napoléon III and his wife, Eugénie. “It seemed that all the world was enchanted, but they limited themselves to making wishes for my success. . . . As little as this is, it permits me to say that there are [such] wishes without having to lie.

“I will equally have the support of Mr. Nieuwerkerke,” he said, referring to the head of the Louvre and director of the national museums. “By the end of the week, I will have collected all [the support] that I can get. After that, I will seize the bull by the horns.”

On April 8, 1869, Bartholdi found himself in the khedive’s antechamber, in Ismailia, his maquette and sketches beside him. He probably was not feeling overly optimistic. When he met de Lesseps in Alexandria a few days earlier, the creator of the Suez Canal had “thrown a lot of cold water on my enthusiasm.” Bartholdi would have to trump de Lesseps’s negativity with a firm endorsement from the khedive.

Beyond the palace walls, the streets of Ismailia, the City of Beauty and Enchantment, lay in a near-perfect grid. The city had been founded only six years earlier to serve as the hub for the building of the canal, and the khedive had named it after himself. Unlike Cairo, with its screaming donkey-sellers and women paid to caterwaul lamentations for the dead, in Ismailia smart little villas rested in well-tended gardens on streets with French names.

Bartholdi had waited two hours for Ismail the Magnificent. Egyptians, it had been noted, enjoyed making others “cool their heels,” as a way of showing dominance. Bartholdi understood that artists supplicating for commissions required significant patience, even from men who, like Ismail, were roughly his age, but he felt as though the noon guns could fire for a week without his making any progress.

When it finally came time for the khedive’s private physician to usher Bartholdi into the royal apartments, the only suggestion that the sculptor was not in Paris came from the circular divan that took up almost half the room. The khedive greeted Bartholdi, his strabismic eyes gazing at Bartholdi’s pencil mustache and short, narrow beard, just like the one Napoléon III had made popular.

Also in attendance, along with the servants, was Auguste Mariette, the director of antiquities who had organized the exhibits at the Egyptian Pavilion that included Bartholdi’s Champollion. The presence of this expert in colossal statuary, and preestablished supporter of Bartholdi, could only have fueled his hopes.

After a few pleasantries, Bartholdi placed down his statuette.

His model for the canal harbor was a robed fellah, an Egyptian slave woman, holding a torch above her head. Her other arm hung down with the palm upturned. The actual statue he proposed would be an eighty-six-foot-tall colossus that would sit atop a forty-six-foot pedestal, surpassing the height of the legendary harbor statue of Rhodes.

The khedive asked a few technical questions. He was known for his interest in discussing the minutiae of any engineering project, and Bartholdi took great pleasure in explaining that his statue would be not only the world’s largest sculpture, but also a working lighthouse.

The khedive must have been pleased with the fellah
form of the statue—he called himself “prince of the fellaheen,” since he had at least in his own mind done so much to emancipate those slaves. However, this reputation was undeserved. In 1874,
Appleton’s Journal
would report that there is “no where in the world—not even Zanzibar of the Australasian islands—where the slave traffic is carried on more audaciously, openly and barbarously, than on the northern confines of Ismail Pasha’s dominions.”

But at this moment in Ismailia in the spring of 1869, Bartholdi ignored any such suffering he might have seen from the train window as he rumbled across the deserts and through the villages of Egypt. Above all else, he wanted to secure his commission. He tried his best to eulogize his statue: She will be magnificent. A lighthouse to the world, a tribute to you and your achievements. Not only will she be the tallest sculpture in the world; she will be a technical marvel. She will be called “Egypt (or Progress) Carrying the Light to Asia.”

The khedive considered the somewhat stolid form.
I would prefer the light emanate from her head, the way fellah women hold their burdens,
he told Bartholdi.

Bartholdi knew this would not be aesthetically successful, but who was he to debate?

Of course,
he said.
This would be easier.

Bartholdi requested permission to leave his drawings with the khedive and to meet with him again when the khedive would be journeying to France a month later, to drum up anticipation for the unveiling of the canal.

“And with a small salute,” Bartholdi reported, “I retire.”

Bartholdi did not leave Egypt right away. He knew he needed to secure de Lesseps’s endorsement but de Lesseps hadn’t attended the Paris meeting when Bartholdi’s statue was shown to Napoléon III and de Lesseps’s cousin, Eugénie, nor was he present when Bartholdi met the khedive that day in Ismailia.

De Lesseps did take Bartholdi on a tour through Ismailia, however. He listened to Bartholdi’s pitch but offered no firm endorsement. De Lesseps’s canal was almost done. He had endured ten years of crises, countenanced some say thousands of deaths, and ridden renegade costs that doubled his original estimate.

Bartholdi was nothing but an artist with a maquette and some sketches.

On April 11, 1869, Bartholdi wrote to his mother: “At this moment I am with M. De Lesseps at Ismailia in the middle of the isthmus. I acted as if he was devoted to my projects; he is very amiable to me; his hospitality is very gracious. I can only reproach him for one thing, which is that he has hardly supported me in my enterprise. I pardon him although generally one prefers one’s affairs to those of others; still one needs to consider how much he is occupied by his great work. My project being only a very accessory detail, he does not wish to exert himself on its behalf. Nevertheless he shows me much amiability and sympathy like someone who says: Try to succeed and I will be enchanted by it.”