The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (45 page)

In Paris the April weather was all it was supposed to be. One fine, sunny day followed another, the temperature in the seventies. Some days not a cloud was visible. Along the Champs-Élysées the fashionable paraded themselves as customary, pleased with the weather and the crowds, delighted to be seen in their new spring finery and to be part of the glittering show.

Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
had its premiere (the consensus was that it needed work), and among the new translations available in the bookshops was Longfellow’s
Hiawatha
. In the Garden of the Tuileries and the Luxembourg Gardens, strollers slowed or paused to enjoy the long beds of flowers in bloom.

With great military pageantry and solemnity, the mortal remains of Napoleon were transferred from the Chapel of Saint-Jérome in the Invalides, where they had rested for twenty years, to lie at last beneath the church’s great dome. Emperor Napoleon III in full uniform and the Empress Eugénie in “deep mourning” descended into the crypt to sprinkle holy water on the coffin.

The emperor’s vision of a great imperial city moved steadily forward, with no little racket and raising of dust, and still mountains of rubble were everywhere. Demolition for the “prolongation” of the broad boulevards continued—the boulevard Malesherbes was on schedule for completion that summer—and it was announced that the French architect Charles Garnier had won the design competition for the Théâtre de l’Opéra, the monumental structure intended to epitomize more than any other the splendor of the Second Empire. Like Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Charles Sumner, most Americans liked what they saw of the new Paris.

News of Fort Sumter broke by trans-Atlantic “telegraphic dispatches” on Saturday, April 27. “
THE CIVIL WAR IN THE STATES
,” ran the headline in
Galignani’s Messenger
the next day. The city of Washington was described as “in a frantic state of excitement.”

As the news grew steadily more alarming, more and more Americans in Paris were hurriedly making ready to leave. A correspondent for the
New York World
wrote of the crowds of Americans gathered day after day at Galignani’s and other centers for dispatches, and how, though there was some excitement and “a little angry discussion,” the general feeling was one of gloom and sadness.

We who are residing in a foreign country, away from the immediate scene of action, perhaps can feel more deeply than those at home the evil effects of the present distracted condition of our country. Here men from every section of it … heretofore felt a pride and a pleasure in grasping the hand of an American, from whatever portion of the Union he may have come from. But this has given place to the feeling of bitterness, and the men from the North and South are now, in
Europe, looking upon each other as enemies. The effect of the last news will be to send to America most of those who are now here, as the feeling on both sides appears to be that in the present crisis every man should be where his services may be obtained if needed.

For Americans the good time in Paris was put on hold, and no one could say for how long.

I was chiefly impressed by Gus’s possessing so strongly the qualities of a man who was bound to succeed.

—
ALFRED GARNIER

Augustus Saint-Gaudens came to Paris the first time in 1867, the year it seemed the whole world came to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, the grand, gilded apogee of Second Empire exuberance.

He arrived on an evening in February, by train after dark and apparently alone. He was nineteen years old, a redheaded New York City boy, a shoemaker’s son, who had been working since the age of thirteen. He was not one of the first ambitious young Americans to come to Paris following the Civil War. He was younger than most, however, and in background and the future he had in store, he was like no one else. Until now he had never been away from home.

I walked with my heavy carpet bag from the Gare du Havre down to the Place de la Concorde where I stood bewildered with the lights of that square and of the avenue des Champs-Élysées bursting upon me. Between the glory of it all and the
terrible weight of the bag … I made my way up the interminable avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe. …

His French father, the proprietor of a shoe shop on Fourth Avenue, had asked if he would like to attend the great exposition and offered to pay his passage. He crossed on the steamer
City of Boston
in steerage and was “sicker than a regiment of dogs” the whole way.

The young man had more in mind than the exposition. He planned to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts and remain in Paris as long as need be. Like young George Healy more than thirty years before—and Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Elizabeth Blackwell, and others—he had something he was determined to accomplish, and thus become accomplished himself. He was, as he said, bound to be a sculptor. That no American had ever been accepted as a student in sculpture at the École did not deter him. But first he needed a job. In his pocket he had $100 saved by his father for him from his own small wages.

Gus, as he was known, had been born in Dublin, Ireland, on March 1, 1848. His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, who came from the village of Aspet, in the foothills of the Pyrénées in southern France, had found work in a Dublin shoe factory. There he met Mary McGuiness of Ballymahon, in a shoe store where she did the binding for slippers. It was because of the famine in Ireland that the couple emigrated to America when Gus was six months old.

In New York, after a struggle, Bernard Saint-Gaudens managed to establish his own small store on Lispenard Street. The sign read
FRENCH LADIES’ BOOTS AND SHOES
, and with virtually everything French much in fashion, he did well enough to get by, the clientele of his “small establishment” including some Astors and Belmonts.

Two more children were born, sons Andrew and Louis. At home the father addressed the children in French, and in the accent of southern France, and they customarily spoke French to him. Their mother spoke always in English in her “sweet Irish brogue,” as Gus said. He would describe his father as short and stocky, with dark red hair, red mustache, and a “picturesque personality.” His mother had wavy black hair and a “typical long, generous, loving Irish face.”

They lived for a time on Duane Street, then Forsyth Street, then the Bowery, then in an apartment over a grocery store on 21st Street. The boy survived countless street fights with neighborhood gangs, “heroic charges and counter charges” amid showers of stones. There was Sunday school at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street, and the inevitable recital of a prayer ending with the words “through my fault, through my fault, through my grievous fault,” which always left him wondering what in the world his fault might be. School was “one long imprisonment.” But there were also “the delights” of
Robinson Crusoe
, the first book he read, and a friend of his father’s, an ophthalmologist named Cornelius Agnew, who had studied in Paris and who, after seeing some drawings Gus had done of shoemakers at work, encouraged him to keep drawing.

When, on the boy’s thirteenth birthday, his father announced it time he went to work and asked what he would like to do, Gus said he hoped it could be something that would help him become an artist. His father apprenticed him to a cameo cutter named Louis Avet, a fellow Frenchman.

Cameos for men were much in style as scarf pins, with the heads of dogs, horses, and lions—lion heads were especially in demand—cut from amethyst and other stones. Louis Avet was highly accomplished in the art and, as Gus quickly learned, an exceedingly hard taskmaster who flew into rages and made the boy’s time “a miserable slavery.” But the training was superb, and Saint-Gaudens later attributed his habit of work to Avet— and of singing at his work, as Avet had. “When he was not scolding me, he sang continuously.”

The boy worked ten-hour days and spent the first part of his apprenticeship polishing the backgrounds of stone cameos done by his master, but was soon allowed to do more, including custom-colored cameo portraits on conch shells.

The art of cutting cameos, as said, was a species of sculpture rather than engraving. The artisan worked at a small bench with a multitude of steel engraving tools, or burins, with different-shaped points, these powered by a foot pedal that the cutter pumped as one did a sewing machine. The piece of stone or shell was fixed with cement to a stick, to hold it fast while the cutter worked. As said in an article in
Scientific American
magazine, “Sculptured heads are the best model for the learner to study and the
figures of statuary the best guide.” For portraits most cutters worked from photographs.

To work with painstaking care was of the essence. There could be no rushing the process. The success of a cameo was in its design, and thus Gus learned the infinite importance of design to any work to be taken seriously. In little time he was producing remarkably accomplished, even exquisite, work.

The apprenticeship with Avet lasted three years, until the day when, in one of his rages, Avet fired him for dropping crumbs on the floor during lunch. Quite possibly the temper outbursts came from jealousy—that someone so young had such talent and had advanced so far so rapidly. In any event, recognizing the mistake he had made, Avet went to Bernard Saint-Gaudens and offered to hire Gus back at a higher wage. The boy refused. He later spoke of it as one of his most heroic acts ever and would treasure all his life the memory of the look of pride on his father’s face.

He went to work for another French cutter, Jules Le Brethon, who specialized in larger shell cameos and who, in temperament and understanding, was the antithesis of Avet, except that he, too, sang the whole day long.

Large shell cameos with carved portraits had become highly fashionable as part of the well-dressed woman’s attire, and it was working with and learning from his new employer for another three years that decided Gus on a career as a sculptor. Not only did he like giving physical dimension to a subject; he had come to appreciate the importance of faces. Generously, Le Brethon allowed him an hour a day in which to model in clay on his own.

Encouraged by his father, Gus began taking evening drawing classes at the Cooper Institute. Later he attended evening classes at the National Academy of Design. “I became a terrific worker,” he would remember, “toiling every night until eleven o’clock after class was over, in the conviction that in me another heaven-born genius had been given the world.”

Indeed, I became so exhausted with the confining work of cameo-cutting by day and drawing at night that in the morning mother literally dragged me out of bed, pushed me over
to the washstand, where I gave myself a cat’s lick somehow or other, drove me to the seat at the table, administered my breakfast, which consisted of tea and large quantities of long French loaves of bread with butter, and tumbled me downstairs out into the street, where I awoke.

The apprenticeship years under the two cameo cutters were also the years of the Civil War, and the day-to-day presence, the excitement and tragedy, of the war were seldom out of mind. Bernard Saint-Gaudens became an outspoken abolitionist. Soldiers thronged the streets. Once, from an open window while at Louis Avet’s workshop, the boy had watched a whole contingent of New England volunteers march down Broadway on their way to war singing “John Brown’s Body.” Another day he saw “Grant himself” with his slouch hat parade by on horseback. Greatest of all was the thrill of seeing President Lincoln, who with his height seemed “entirely out of proportion” with the carriage in which he rode.

The boy would remember the crowds outside the newspaper offices, and the sight of legless and armless men back from the battlefields would never be forgotten. One day during the Draft Riots, Monsieur Le Brethon sent him home for his safety.

Of the many American art students and artists who came to Paris after the Civil War, scarcely any had been unaffected by the war. Some had served in it; others had been witnesses to camp life and the horrors of a war that had left more than 600,000 men dead. Henry Bacon, a landscape painter, had enlisted in the Thirteenth Massachusetts Regiment and was badly wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Winslow Homer had covered the war as an artist correspondent for
Harper’s Weekly
. By the end of 1866, when he came to Paris, Homer had done more than twenty paintings with the war as his subject, including
The Veteran in a New Field
, a powerful image of a lone figure swinging a scythe, like the reaper of death, in a golden wheat field, evoking memories of slaughter in the wheat field at Gettysburg.