The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (44 page)

Brown-Séquard came to see Sumner at his hotel and after a three-hour examination determined to his satisfaction that the blows inflicted by Congressman Brooks had, because of Sumner’s seated position, severely damaged certain key points in his spinal cord. The cure the doctor recommended was “fire.” He would burn the naked skin on Sumner’s back at the key points using cotton soaked in some combustible substance. The treatment, warned Brown-Séquard, could be painful. Sumner asked him to begin at once and, at his choice, without anesthetic, lest it reduce the effect of the procedure.

Through the agony of the ordeal—conducted there in the hotel room— Sumner gripped the back of a chair with such force that he broke it in two.

Over the next two weeks he was subjected to an additional five such “treatments,” again without anesthetic. “The doctor is clear,” he explained in a letter to Longfellow, “that without this cruel treatment I should have been a permanent invalid, always subject to sudden and serious relapse. Surely this life is held sometimes on hard conditions.”

Apparently he had no second thoughts about the procedure or about
Brown-Séquard. But a number of friends and physicians at home were convinced he had been the victim of a quack experimenting with a “baseless theory” at his expense.

There seems little doubt that Brown-Séquard thought he was doing the right thing, and the fact that such a treatment was prescribed by a physician of reputation in Paris, the world’s center of advanced medicine, gave it great credence, and particularly to a patient desperate for relief.

From what is known from surviving records, the attack by Brooks had neither fractured Sumner’s skull nor caused a concussion, and this, with other evidence, strongly indicates that much of what he suffered after the attack was from what would later be called psychic wounds. His suffering was entirely real, but the indications are it derived far more from the psychological trauma of the attack than from a neurological cause.

That Sumner could barely endure being back in the Senate—back at the scene of the attack—and that his condition so noticeably improved the farther from Washington he was, strongly suggests this, as indeed it did to several physicians at the time. Almost any change of scene would have helped him. Had there been no “cruel treatment” as administered by Brown-Séquard, Paris by itself would almost certainly have proven quite as therapeutic again that summer of 1858 as it had the year before.

When in August, six weeks after the last of the treatments, Sumner received an invitation to a grand banquet to be given by a number of other Americans in Paris in honor of Samuel Morse, he was, as he told Morse in a note, still too weak and beset by pain to attend.

Morse had at last, at age sixty-seven, attained the success and recognition he had longed for. His telegraph was an established part of American life. A few years earlier in a letter to Dominique Arago, the first of the French savants to have acclaimed the importance of the invention, Morse had written proudly, “At this moment my system of telegraphing comprises about
fifteen thousand
English miles of conductors on this continent.” How many thousands of miles it reached in Europe he did not know.

Financially he was secure as he had never been, even wealthy to the point where he had been able to establish his first real home and in the
grand manner, an Italianate mansion called Locust Grove, which he built on the eastern bank of the Hudson River just below Poughkeepsie. He had married Sarah Griswold, and had had four more children. He was still bothered with rival claims to his invention and lawsuits, but all that seemed of far less consequence now, as the most enormous telegraph project yet was nearing completion, the laying of an Atlantic cable connecting America and Britain. An announcement of its success was expected any day, which made the prospect of the banquet all the more cause for excitement.

Morse arrived in Paris with nearly all his large family—his wife, three young boys, his mother-in-law, a party of fifteen in total—and checked into the Hôtel du Louvre.

On August 17, with perfect timing, on the eve of the banquet, came the news of the completion of the Atlantic cable. Messages of greeting had been exchanged across the sea by telegraph between Queen Victoria and the president of the United States, James Buchanan. As later reported in a
New York Times
account of the dinner in Paris, “the utmost enthusiasm prevailed.”

Of the eighty gentlemen gathered in formal attire at the Trois Frères Provençaux, at least one in four appear to have had something to say in tribute to Morse. “Every figure of rhetoric was exhausted in his praise,” continued the
Times
coverage of the “Great Telegraphic Festival.” Morse himself, when it came his turn, spoke modestly of his accomplishments and why all Americans should feel proud, and he was roundly and repeatedly applauded.

Greatest of all was the standing acclaim when the new American minister to France, John Y. Mason, announced that the governments of Europe, with France in their lead, had agreed to honor Professor Morse as a “benefactor of mankind.” He was to be awarded the sum of 400,000 francs (approximately $80,000), with France contributing the largest part of it.

It was a night of nights for Morse and of the kind Charles Sumner, with his oratorical flair, would have thrived on. As it was, in his note to Morse declining the invitation, he had said in a single paragraph what so many had tried to say with such formality and at such length:

I seize the moment to express in this informal manner my humble gratitude for the great discovery with which your name will always be associated. Through you civilization has made one of her surest and grandest triumphs beyond any ever won on a field of battle. Nor do I go beyond the line of most cautious truth when I add, that if mankind had yet arrived at a just appreciation of its benefactors, it would welcome such a conqueror with more than a marshal’s baton.

Morse wrote immediately to express his gratitude.

When in early September, it became known that messages over the Atlantic cable had suddenly stopped, that something had gone wrong, no one took it as anything more than a temporary inconvenience. As said in
Galignani’s Messenger
, there was “no great cause for despondency in the present interruption. It rather sets forth the necessity for more cables. …”

Feeling strong enough to get about again, Sumner departed on an excursion to Brittany, then the French Alps, to Aix-les-Bains, to try the mineral springs known for their curative value since Roman times. Noticeably improved, he moved on to Italy, then to Vienna, Prague, and Dresden, and afterward to Munich and down the Rhine to Cologne, and then back to Paris. Through the whole journey, he kept up correspondence with old friends at home and took time to be with other friends encountered en route. He was determined, by staying on the move and keeping his mind fully occupied, to “turn the corner” on his health. When, in Paris, Dr. Brown-Séquard warned that he was not yet ready to return to the United States, he promptly went off to Montpellier in the south of France and by the spring of 1859 was in Italy again, then back to France for still more sightseeing in Brittany and Normandy, stopping at Mont-Saint-Michel, Saint-Malo, and Rennes. “If anybody cares to know how I am doing, you can say better and better,” he reported to his brother.

By the autumn of 1859, once more in Paris, he was preparing at last to leave for good, ready to go home and get back to his work in the Senate. In the last few days he treated himself to a shopping binge, in true American
tourist fashion, buying china, bronzes, old manuscripts, engravings, and rare books, for which he had a passion, all to take back with him, and made an excursion to La Grange, to pay final homage to the memory of Lafayette.

A friend from Boston, the controversial Unitarian minister Theodore Parker, who had come to Europe in hope of relief from health problems of his own, was amazed by the miraculous change in “dear old Sumner.”

He walks on those great long legs of his at the rate of four or five miles an hour. His countenance is as good as ever. He walked upright and sits upright. All the trouble has vanished from his brain. … He is full of information—knowledge of facts, men, and ideas. … I never found him more cheerful or more hopeful. It is a continual feast to see him.

By the fall of 1860, George Healy and his family were well established in Illinois. Another child had been born, a sixth daughter, which made a total of seven children, and Healy had commissions aplenty, just as his Chicago friend, William Ogden, had promised. One of those who sat for his portrait was Bishop John Bernard Fitzpatrick, who conversed with Healy in French and persuaded him to return to the Catholic faith, from which he had long since strayed.

In the second week of November 1860, following the presidential elections, Healy was asked to paint the president-elect, Abraham Lincoln. On November 15, Healy took the train to Springfield for the first of several sittings in the Illinois State House. A visiting politician who happened by described how Lincoln “sat to the artist with his right foot on top of the left and both feet turned inward—pigeon fashion,” and how, telling stories the whole while, he “laughed at his own wit … and made a couple of hours pass merrily.”

During one session Lincoln sat glancing through letters and began laughing aloud over one from an unknown correspondent. “She complains of my ugliness,” he told Healy. She suggested he grow a beard, “to hide my horrible lantern jaws.” Would Healy like to paint him with
a beard, Lincoln asked. He would not, Healy said, and Lincoln laughed again “with perfect delight.”

The portrait was one of Healy’s strongest and most sensitive, and of great importance because it recorded Lincoln in color and without the beard. The head is in profile. His face is not yet marked by the burdens and strain of the years to come. It is a younger, still-untested Abraham Lincoln and as surely rendered as any portrait ever done of him.

Less than five months later, in April 1861, Healy was in Charleston, South Carolina, finishing a portrait of General Pierre Gustave Toutant Beauregard, just before Beauregard, having joined the Confederates, ordered the fateful bombardment of Fort Sumter in the harbor on April 12. Charleston went wild with excitement. Healy, who had never mixed in politics, was nonetheless, as he said, “a Northern man with Northern feelings and anti-slavery principles.” A Charleston newspaper declared that if the Yankee painter had “not left the city before the sun went down, he should be tarred and feathered.” When Healy laughed on hearing about it, his host assured him it was no laughing matter and said a carriage would be at the door in an hour and he most certainly must leave.

Back in Washington, on receiving word of the firing on Fort Sumter, Senator Charles Sumner went directly to the White House to assure President Lincoln of his full support, “heart and soul,” and told him that “under the war power the right had come to him to emancipate the slaves.”