The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (15 page)

Six months earlier, in September, Cooper’s nephew William, who had become very like an adopted son, was taken ill. In October, William died of consumption at age twenty-two. With the onset of winter, Cooper’s
wife, Susan, came down with a fever of some lingering indeterminate variety that had the whole family worried. Paris was notoriously unhealthy in the chill gloom of winter, the season of colds and deadly fevers.

“
Ma femme est malade et … j’attends le médecin
,” Cooper notified a French friend. The family’s Parisian doctor was doing too little for her, Cooper thought. He was too content to let nature take its course. “They [the French] are capital in all surgical or all anatomical applications, but when it comes to fevers and latent diseases, they are too timid by half.”

His own health, though uneven, was better than it had been in New York, as he liked to tell others. He was less troubled by fevers and gastric attacks. At age forty-two, he was often told he looked thirty-five. “Of course, I believe them,” he would respond. Susan, reporting in confidence to her sister, wrote that “Mr. Cooper” was quite well but for one problem. “When he goes into crowded rooms, then he is sure to suffer for the next twenty-four hours with an attack of nerves more or less violent.” But of this nothing was to be said beyond the family.

For several months there had been warnings of a possible onset of the dreaded
cholera morbus
. Reports had appeared in the Paris and London newspapers starting in August, and concern kept growing. From Boston in November, Dr. James Jackson, Sr., wrote to his son in Paris asking, “What are you to do if the cholera reaches you?” His advice was to “fly”— to leave France as fast as possible.

Cooper dismissed the talk of cholera, suspecting “a good deal of exaggeration on the subject.”

As usual, Cooper had a novel under way, his fourteenth. Beyond that he talked of doing a volume on his travels in Europe. He had been writing now for twelve years, and while the quality of his efforts was uneven, he took pride in the books and enjoyed the acclaim they brought. And he loved the money. It was for money that he had started writing in the first place, when the collapse of a family empire left him nearly destitute. According to the story told later by his daughter Sue, a story widely repeated, Cooper had been reading aloud to her mother from an English novel one evening when, after a chapter or two, he threw it aside saying he could write a better book. She had laughed at the idea, whereupon he set to work.

At no prior time had he shown the least interest in writing or entertained any thought of a literary life. At Yale, where he was the youngest student in the college, he had proven such a poor scholar and such a hellion that he was expelled at age sixteen. (Among other things, he had locked a donkey in a recitation room and exploded a homemade bomb under a dormitory door.) After a year under his father’s supervision at home in Cooperstown, the village founded by his father beside Otsego Lake in upstate New York, it was arranged for him to go to sea on a merchant ship. Finding he liked the sailor’s life, he had joined the U.S. Navy—it was then that he met his Paris walking companion, Captain Woolsey—and saw no reason not to make the navy a career, until he met Susan Augusta De Lancey, who thought it time he settled down.

Married in New York in 1811, they lived first with her parents at Mamaroneck, then moved to a farm by Otsego Lake. Cooper began building a stone manor house, and with a generous cash bequest from his father, who had died in 1809, he anticipated a serene future as an upstate country gentleman. Children were born. Debts accumulated. When his father’s unsettled estate was found to be riven with debt, and the family land holdings worth little because of a poor economy, Cooper faced bankruptcy.

His first book,
Precaution
, was a romance set in England, somewhat in the manner of a Jane Austen novel. It was not very good and only moderately successful. In England it was taken to be an English novel. But Cooper had discovered he liked the work and liked the prospect of the influence he might attain as an author. Books mattered. Without delay he tried again.

“By persuasion of Mrs. Cooper I have commenced another tale,” he wrote. (He called her his “tribunal of appeals,” “an excellent judge in everything.” He read all he wrote aloud to her and she went over every page of manuscript.) The result this time proved entirely different.
The Spy
was an all-out adventure tale set in America during the Revolutionary War. Its theme, as Cooper said, was patriotism, and it was an immediate hit.

From that point on, his success was phenomenal. The next tale,
The Pioneers
, sold 3,500 copies by noon of publication day. Less than a year later, a French translation appeared.

The Pioneers
was published in 1823, the most difficult year of Cooper’s life. The house he had built burned. His two-year-old son, Fenimore, died. He himself suffered from sunstroke as well as severe bilious attacks, as he called them, and a fever that may have been malaria.

In
The Pioneers
he had been writing about a world much like that of his boyhood, and largely to please himself. The setting was Cooperstown (called Templeton in the book), the year, 1793. It was in
The Pioneers
, too, that he introduced Natty Bumppo, a lean old frontiersman, known also as Leatherstocking for the long deerskin leggings he wore, a character very like Daniel Boone, who had died only a few years earlier.

Two more historical novels followed:
The Pilot
, a sea story, and
Lionel Lincoln
, set in Boston at the time of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Natty Bumppo appeared again in
The Last of the Mohicans
, where again the setting was upstate New York, only this time it was the New York wilderness of sixty years earlier, during the French and Indian War, and Natty, a scout, was in the prime of life. Cooper had written
The Last of the Mohicans
at top speed in three or four months. It was intense, romantic, filled with violence and bloodshed, as Natty, now also known as Hawkeye, and a Mohican friend, Chingachgook, escorted two sisters, the daughters of a British general, in a flight through the forest. Long descriptive passages of the wild American scenery—of river and waterfall and “the vast canopy of woods”—stirred readers as nothing else had by an American writer, and the book was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic.

It appeared in 1826, the year Cooper sailed for France and was already at work on still another Natty Bumppo tale called
The Prairie
. “I think
Pioneers
,
Mohicans
, and this book will form a connected series,” Cooper told a friend. “I confess
Prairie
is a favorite as far as it goes. …”

By the time he and the family were settled in Paris, he had become America’s most famous author. Morse would write of seeing Cooper’s books in the windows of every bookshop in the city. Not since the days of Benjamin Franklin had an American been so welcomed and liked— attention Cooper loved, not just for himself, but for his country.

He and Susan became frequent guests of honor at dinners given by Lafayette at his mansion on the rue d’Anjou, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré,
and were treated to overnight visits at La Grange, the general’s towered, fifteenth-century château southeast of the city. They were made the center of attention at diplomatic dinners and lavish entertainments, after which Cooper filled pages of correspondence describing the “splendors”— the setting, the food, the eminence of those present. He was hailed as the American Walter Scott, a comparison intended as a high compliment, but which privately he disliked. Artists and sculptors asked him to sit for them.

As much as he enjoyed such attention and acclaim, Cooper was far from enamored with “the mere butterflies” of Paris society. Taken by Lafayette to be “presented,” he found King Louis-Philippe perfectly courteous and was glad to hear him speak with pleasure of his time in America. But for others he encountered, Cooper had little use. “The fear of losing their butterfly distinctions and their tinsel gives great uneasiness to many of these simpletons,” he wrote privately.

Yet Cooper loved Paris. There was no denying that. He liked living there and working there—finding himself subjected to fewer distractions than in New York—and took particular satisfaction in the education his children were receiving.

The contrast between the author’s stately home and way of life, and the setting of the tale he was writing in
The Prairie
, could hardly have been more pronounced. This time, in
The Prairie
, Natty Bumppo was an old man who, to keep ahead of the advancing tide of settlement, had moved steadily westward, beyond the forests, beyond the Mississippi, just as Daniel Boone had in the last part of his life. No one had dramatized American history in such fashion. “It is a weary path, indeed,” Cooper had Natty say, “and much I have seen, and something have I suffered in journeying over it.” Even on the open prairie, Natty found it getting “crowdy.”

That such a story in such a setting, an empty landscape with no visible history, could have been written in Paris would strike some readers as absurdly incongruous. To Cooper, wherever he found himself, it was “a point of honor to continue rigidly as an American author.”

Meanwhile, he was being remunerated as no American author had been. The French edition of
The Last of the Mohicans
kept “gaining ground daily.” He was making money and saving money as never before. By 1832
he reckoned his financial prospects for the year ahead were something on the order of $20,000, and $20,000 in Europe went a long way.

To other Americans in Paris, his presence, his success and fame, were a matter of much pride. He was “our countryman Cooper,” and that he remained so distinctly American—and made no effort to conceal his prosperity—made them prouder still. A young medical student from North Carolina named Ashbel Smith, befriended by the Coopers, wrote that Cooper “more than anyone” was “the American par excellence,” adding, “And what is of importance in Paris, he lives in fine style.”

Indeed, Cooper and family—his wife, four girls, and a boy, plus three or four servants—occupied two well-appointed, spacious floors of a Louis XVI mansion, or a
hôtel particulier,
at 59 rue Saint-Dominique in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the Seventh Arrondissement, “a very
distingué
part of the town,” as Susan explained in a letter to her sister. Cooper’s was an altogether new kind of American success story. Such splendor for a writer!

The salon is near thirty feet in length, and seventeen feet high [Cooper wrote]. It is paneled in wood, and above all the doors … are allegories painted on canvas, and enclosed in wrought gilded frames. Four large mirrors are fixtures, and the windows are vast and descend to the floor.

The salon, or parlor, with its long French windows, was on the second level, “adjoining Mr. Cooper’s library,” Susan reported. The dining room, on the floor below, opened onto a garden. “We are very comfortable, very quiet, and overlook a half dozen gardens besides our own, which besides being very agreeable, gives us good air.”

The children were doing splendidly well with their music and art lessons. All five could by now “prattle like natives” in French, Italian, and German. Even the youngest, seven-year-old Paul, spoke the three languages and could read them with ease, as his father loved to boast.

But the glittering social whirl of their first years in Paris had become a thing of the past. “We [are] … very retired, don’t go out much and see but little company,” Susan wrote. Her health was the customary explanation,
but neither of them cared for fashionable society, and Cooper’s trouble with crowded rooms may have been no less a factor than her lingering ailments. “Instead of seeking society,” he had written to a friend, “I am compelled to draw back from it, on account of my health and my pursuits.” He had grown weary of the fuss the French made over him.

“The people seem to think it marvelous that an American can write.” Most of them appeared ignorant that any book had ever been published in America, “except by Dr. Franklin and
M. Cooper Américain
, as they call me.”

Though they rarely accepted an invitation, he and Susan regularly entertained such favorites among the “American circle” as Morse, Nathaniel Willis, Horatio Greenough (whenever he was in Paris), and Ashbel Smith, as well as those of any nationality sympathetic to Polish freedom, a cause Cooper fervently embraced. Willis would describe the uniquely generous hospitality of a Cooper breakfast for the Polish-American Committee, where, as probably nowhere else that side of the Atlantic, the guests were treated to hot buckwheat pancakes.

Every American welcomed into the enclave of the Coopers seems to have treasured the experience. “Some of the best hours are spent with Mr. Cooper and his family,” Emma Willard had written. “I find in him what I do not in all who bear the name American, a genuine American spirit.”

Morse became such an established presence it was as if he were part of the household. At the close of his day at the Louvre, he and Cooper would walk home to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to join the family for dinner and conversation into the night. Morse began giving the Coopers’ daughter Sue drawing lessons, which naturally inclined some to think he had more than a passing interest in her, gossip that soon reached New York and may have been true. Writing to her sister in January 1832, Susan Cooper seemed to go out of her way to stress that “our worthy friend, Mr. Morse” was drawn “more by the attraction of the father than the daughter.” Cooper insisted that his friend Morse, though “an excellent man,” was not “one to captivate a fine young woman of twenty.”