The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (46 page)

In the weeks that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, the wounded had arrived by the trainload in Philadelphia, the home of Thomas Eakins, then a student of painting. Like many parents, Eakins’s father, a man of limited
means, paid the required $25 so Thomas could avoid being drafted, a difficult decision for both father and son.

It would be hard for future generations to imagine—or would simply be forgotten—that in a city like Philadelphia more than half the male population between ages eighteen and forty-five served in the Union Army.

Most heart-wrenching for young Saint-Gaudens was seeing Abraham Lincoln lying in state at New York’s City Hall. He had waited hours in an “interminable” line, and after seeing Lincoln’s face, he went back to the end of the line to go through a second time.

In France, as he and other newly arrived Americans soon learned, the Civil War was viewed with indifference or, more often, overt sympathy for the defeated Confederates. Thus it had been since the start of the war and seemed strangely at odds with French opposition to slavery, not to say the traditional goodwill between the governments of France and the United States from the time of the American Revolution. In 1863, matters had been further complicated. With America preoccupied with the war, Napoleon III chose to install his own puppet emperor in Mexico, the young Austrian Ferdinand Joseph Maximilian. That so many Americans had taken this as a clear breach of the Monroe Doctrine only added to French sympathy for the South.

Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, who was soon to become the American minister to France, affirmed later that Louis Napoleon had been in “full sympathy with the Rebellion” and “desirous of giving it aid and comfort as far as he dared.

That was well known to everybody in Paris, which was filled with Confederates, who were flattered and feted not only at the Tuileries, but by the people generally of the city. The loyal men of our country were everywhere in the background.

A Confederate mission had been established in Paris at 25 avenue d’Antin, and a Confederate Woman’s Aid Society, organized by Southern women, collected medical supplies and clothing for the Confederate army and staged fundraising concerts and bazaars.

The one time when the “excitement” of the Civil War had come to
France’s doorstep was on June 19, 1864, the day the Confederate raider
Alabama
and the steamer USS
Kearsarge
fought to the finish off Cherbourg, within view of several thousand spectators crowded on hilltops along the shoreline. The
Alabama
, which had been wreaking havoc with Union shipping, had put in to Cherbourg for repairs. When the
Kearsarge
arrived on the scene, the
Alabama
went out to meet her. The battle raged for an hour and a half before the burning
Alabama
went to the bottom. Engravings of the drama filled the illustrated French newspapers and magazines. The painter Édouard Manet produced a dramatic portrayal of the scene. The Paris papers were filled with editorial sympathy for the
Alabama
and her brave crew. According to one journal, the
Constitutionnel
, the loss of the
Alabama
had caused “profound regret from one end of France to the other.”

For Augustus Saint-Gaudens, nothing about his growing up had been easy or shielded from the hard realities of existence. The combination of New York street life, work, and the war had made him mature beyond his years. Physically full grown by the time he arrived in Paris, he stood five feet eight. He had his father’s full head of wiry dark red hair, a long pale face like his mother, rather small, deep-set, intent pale grey-blue eyes, and a long nose his friends made fun of and that he himself made fun of in cartoons and caricatures.

People liked him for his sense of humor and exuberance, his “Celtic spirit.” “In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture,” a friend would write, “one felt the abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man.” He seemed happy by nature. He loved to sing at work or with friends, most any time, and was blessed with a rich tenor voice. One friend, Thomas Moore, would remember how, on Saturday nights after class hours at Cooper Institute, he, Gus, and two others named Herzog and Grotemeyer, “took long walks arm-in-arm to Central Park shouting airs from ‘Martha,’ the ‘Marseillaise,’ and the like, in which Gus was always the leader with his voice and magnetic presence.”

Known for looking always on the bright side, he would later in life suffer
acute spells of melancholy and insist there had been “always the
triste
undertone in my soul that comes from my sweet Irish mother.”

He had demonstrated uncommon talent in his extraordinary cameo carvings and freehand drawings. Before leaving for Paris he had modeled a remarkably strong, confident bust of his father. He considered a pencil portrait he drew of his mother to be his most prized possession. Yet he knew the question of how far his talent could take him, and how it would measure up against serious competition, had still to be resolved, and as for so many others, this was among the main reasons for his being in Paris.

He moved in at first with his Uncle François, his father’s brother, on the avenue de la Grande-Armée, and “at once” found a part-time job working for an Italian cameo cutter on Montmartre. Told his application to the École des Beaux-Arts could take months to process, he enrolled in both morning and evening classes in modeling at one of the so-called “
petites écoles
” held at the École de Médecine. From Montmartre to the École de Médecine in the Latin Quarter was a two-mile walk. On the days he was working he made the round trip.

Uncle François, who made his living as a demolition specialist, had been doing well as long as Georges Haussmann kept tearing Paris apart. But with the emperor’s plan for the city nearly completed, and the demolition about over, Uncle François was in “bad straits.” Forced to find somewhere else to live, Gus began moving from “cheaper to cheaper lodgings.” He was soon barely surviving, “miserably poor,” as he wrote years later, but he said nothing about it at the time, such was his refusal to “dwell on the ugly side of things.”

Classes at the
petite école
were a joy to him. Not even the conditions under which they were conducted could dampen his spirits.

We worked in a stuffy, overcrowded, absolutely unventilated theater, with two rows of students, perhaps twenty-five in each row, seated in a semicircle before the model who stood against the wall. Behind those who drew were about fifteen sculptors and I look back with admiration upon the powers of youth to live, work, and be joyful in an atmosphere that must have been almost asphyxiating.

As promised, the glittering Exposition Universelle of 1867 was bigger and more spectacular than anything the world had yet seen. One giant, oval-shaped, glass-and-cast-iron exhibition “palace” and more than one hundred smaller buildings filled most of the vast Champ de Mars on the Left Bank. More than 50,000 exhibitors took part. The theme was “objects for the improvement of the physical and moral condition of the masses.” By the time the fair closed, on the last day of October, 11 million people— more than twice the number who attended the Exposition of 1855—had poured across the Pont d’Iéna to the banner-festooned main entrance on the Quai d’Orsay.

They came from virtually every country. Emperor Napoleon III played host in lavish fashion to the czar of Russia, the kings of Prussia, Bavaria, and Portugal, the pasha of Egypt, and the sultan of Turkey in a red fez. There were soirées and dinners night after night, and grand balls at the luxuriously renovated Palais des Tuileries. Count Otto von Bismarck, chief minister to the king of Prussia, could be seen resplendent in his white uniform and invariably enjoying himself as much as anyone. At a ball at the Austrian Embassy, amid “mountains” of lights and flowers, grottoes, and cascades of real water, guests waltzed to music by Johann Strauss’s orchestra from Vienna. Strauss himself conducted the first performance of
The Blue Danube
in Paris, and the dancing went on until nearly daybreak.

To add to the pleasures of the city for visitors of all kinds, a new line of steam-powered sightseeing boats called Bateaux Mouches now plied the Seine.

Because of bad weather in March, the exposition had been embarrassingly slow getting under way. At the time of the official opening on April 2, nearly half of the exhibits were still unpacked. (People were calling it “The Universal Exhibition of International Boxes.”) But by May all was in full swing and Paris more dazzling than ever. No one had ever seen so many flags flying, so many lights blazing, so many people of all kinds.

“At the Grand Hôtel they were making up beds in the dining room,”
reported the
New York Times
. With the start of summer the throngs grew greater still. “Even the Americans are coming at last. The registers are filling with their names from Boston to New Orleans, and so on to San Francisco.” Among the crowds of Americans was the author Mark Twain, who, taking time out from a tour of Europe and the Holy Land, checked into the Hôtel du Louvre.

“Paris is now the great center of the world,” wrote Samuel F. B. Morse, who, at age seventy-eight, had returned with his wife and four children. (So indispensable had the telegraph become to daily life at home in the United States by this time that 50,000 miles of Western Union wire carried more than 2 million news dispatches a year, including, in 1867, the latest from the exposition in Paris.)

The displays of novel manufactured items included an almost overwhelming array of things large and small, things almost unimaginable— magnificent locomotives, steam engines, a feather-weight metal called aluminum, a giant siege gun by the German cannon maker Krupp, and a new kind of brass horn,
le saxophone
, devised by Napoleon III’s official instrument maker, Adolphe Sax. The favorite American import, to judge by the crowds it drew, was a soda fountain. The Philadelphia art student Thomas Eakins wrote to his family of waiting in a line a block long for a drink from it.

Mark Twain and a few traveling companions spent only a few days in Paris before continuing on the tour he would describe in often hilarious fashion in
Innocents Abroad
, which was to remain his best-selling book throughout his lifetime. Neither he nor any of his group had been abroad before. Travel was a “wild novelty” to them, and Paris “flashed upon us a splendid meteor,” he wrote, but he thought considerably less of the Parisians, and what humor he evoked was chiefly at their expense. He was, as would be said, not so much an American Francophobe, but a Parisphobe. The Paris barbershops were hopeless. He detested Paris guides. They “deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the first time or sees the sights alone or in the company with others as little experienced as himself.”

With few exceptions the women of Paris struck him as downright homely. The
grisettes
were the biggest disappointment of all. “I knew by
their looks that they ate garlic and onions … and I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than I formerly envied him.” Seeing the “renowned” can-can danced for the first time, he covered his face with his hands, he claimed, but “looked through my fingers.”

The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can. … Heavens!

Of the especially conspicuous presence of prostitutes in the city because of the exposition, he chose to say nothing. Yet when his brief stay was over, as he acknowledged, he gave “the beautiful city a regretful farewell.”

The number and importance of contemporary paintings and sculptures on exhibit surpassed anything seen before in one place. Though the American section of the Fine Arts Department was quite modest compared to that of the French, it was larger than it had been at the Exposition of 1855 and contained a number of works that, in time, would rank as American masterpieces. The most admiring crowds gathered about two enormous, dramatic landscapes—both befitting subjects for America, it was felt—Albert Bierstadt’s
The Rocky Mountains
and Frederic Church’s
Niagara Falls
, the only American painting to be honored with a silver medal. Among several works evoking the Civil War from a Northern point of view were John Ferguson Weir’s
The Gun Foundry
, showing the munitions works near West Point, and Winslow Homer’s
Prisoners from the Front
, in which three Confederate prisoners under guard stand before a Northern general.