The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (47 page)

James McNeill Whistler’s
White Girl
, a near-life-size, full-length portrait of his beautiful red-haired Irish model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, dressed in white against a white background, had been rejected from an earlier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and was considered, even in Paris, too suggestive by far, in that the young woman’s hair was undone and she stood on a wolf’s skin.

Many visitors found the exhibitions of American art disappointing. “Infantile arrogance,” “childish ignorance,” were two of the harsher comments from French critics, though one thought “M. Homer ought not, in
good justice, be passed over unnoticed” and another saw promise of better things to come.

Count on the fact that the Americans, once they begin the business of the fine arts, will go quickly, and will go looking toward the future. Go ahead! Forward!

Homer, who had arrived in Paris in December, stayed nearly all of 1867. “I am working hard and improving much,” he wrote a friend in August. But his correspondence was infrequent and provides little in the way of details. He shared a studio in Montmartre, studied for a while with a French artist, Frederick Rondel, and spent time painting landscapes in the artists’ colony at Cernay-la-Ville.

A painting by Homer called
The Studio
that appears to have been done in Paris had, in any event, as Henry James said, “a great deal of Paris in it.” Two painters sit playing chamber music on cello and violin, the score propped on their easels. They have the requisite beards and mustaches, and in a photograph taken in Paris that year, Homer has the tips of his large mustache waxed to sharp points in the Louis Napoleon mode. Presumably, like other American artists and students, he spent time at the exposition, but how much is unknown.

Nor, regrettably, is there any account of how much of the exposition Augustus Saint-Gaudens saw. Probably he had not money enough to attend more than once or twice. But with his zest for getting “his money’s worth,” he doubtless covered a lot of ground, and he did see something of lifelong importance to him. It was a small bronze, a standing figure by the French sculptor Paul Dubois, of
St. John the Baptist as a Child.
It “seemed extraordinary to me,” he would write years afterward, and Dubois’s work and Dubois himself were to have “profound” influence.

Americans filled Paris in such numbers as to please themselves and annoy some of those from other countries, and the British in particular. Hotel managers, shopkeepers, clerks, and floor managers at the sumptuous
new department stores—
les grands magasins
such as Le Printemps and La Samaritaine—welcomed Americans as no others. “They spend money profusely, are not much given to bargaining, and put on no airs,” wrote the
New York Times
correspondent.

In addition to the huge influx of American tourists, the size of the American colony in Paris had been growing steadily to the point where there were now more than 4,000 Americans living in the city. This was far fewer than the number of resident English or Germans, but still four times what it had been a generation earlier.

The bad feelings that had developed among many of the French toward Americans on the side of the North during the Civil War had subsided rapidly. Further, on July 2, word reached Paris that Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had been executed by a firing squad on orders from the rebel leader, Benito Juárez. Napoleon III first learned of the calamity when handed a note as he was presenting awards before a crowd of 20,000 at the exposition.

Clearly his misadventures in Mexico were finished, and this, too, had a notable effect on how Parisians felt about the throngs of American visitors that summer.

The great majority of thinking minds are … heartily glad that an end has been put to the Emperor’s projects in that direction [the
Times
correspondent wrote], and they seem desirous to make up by their present cordiality to Northerners for the dislike and hostility which was evinced toward them during the rebellion. For the prompt revival of the old feeling of friendship, we have no doubt in a great measure to thank the Exhibition.

Europeans marveled at the industrial might that had been marshaled by the North during the Civil War and America’s surging productivity since. In the words of the soon-to-be American minister to France, Elihu Washburne, a former congressman from Illinois, “The United States, having astonished all Europe by triumphantly crushing out the most stupendous
rebellion the world had ever known, and after one of the most gigantic wars in history, had bounded forward to a position of first rank among the nations of the earth.”

Such an enormous increase in productivity also meant unprecedented prosperity for a great many Americans, and with money at hand as never before in their lives, what better place to spend it than Paris? Well-to-do American women were now making annual trips to Paris to enhance their wardrobes at Worth’s. The famous couturier Charles Frederick Worth, an English expatriate, had made his establishment at 7 rue de la Paix a Paris destination, his name the very emblem of good taste in New York and San Francisco, no less than Paris or London. And if Worth’s proved insufficient, there were other high-priced dressmakers like Bobergh or Felix.

Bringing one lady to Paris cost as much as two men, wrote a young American civil engineer, Washington Roebling, who, with his wife, Emily, was in Europe gathering technical information in preparation for what was to be America’s greatest bridge, connecting Brooklyn to New York. Their money had vanished so rapidly in Paris that they had to leave earlier than they wished.

Another American of note, Henry Adams of Boston, wanted only to get out of Paris as soon as possible, but to his annoyance he and his wife, Clover, were held over for days, “waiting for ladies’ dresses and the milliner’s bills.” Paris was “horribly” expensive and crowded, the fastidious Adams reported. He had never imagined the city could be so overrun with “hordes of low Germans, English, Italians, Spaniards, and Americans, who stare and gawk and smell, and crowd every shop and street. I did not detect a single refined-looking being among them. …”

Every month, on average, one hundred Americans sojourning in Paris applied to the United States minister for the chance to be presented at court, and nearly all felt obliged to turn out in the finest, latest thing. Dr. Thomas Evans regularly supplied the emperor with the names of “
présentable
” Americans to be invited to reviews or grand balls at the Palace of the Tuileries or gala days at the palace at Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, or Compiègne.

One resident American in Paris who, like Evans, figured frequently on the royal guest list was Lillie Greenough Moulton, the wife of an independently
wealthy American named Charles Moulton. Still in her twenties, and known for her exquisite singing voice, as well as her beauty, she had become a favorite of the emperor and empress. In her diary, along with descriptions of the flowers and diamond tiaras, the dazzling uniforms and other extravagances of the court, she included this account of what was involved in just preparing for a week in the country at
la Maison de l’Empereur
at Compiègne.

I was obliged to have about twenty dresses, eight day costumes (counting my traveling suit), the green cloth dress for the hunt, which I was told was absolutely necessary, seven ball dresses, five gowns for tea. …

A professional packer came to pack our trunks, of which I had seven and C[harles] had two; the maid and the valet each had one, making, altogether, quite a formidable pile of luggage.

Transportation was provided by a special train marked
IMPéRIAL
.

There was increasing talk in Paris financial circles of the great railroad under construction across the North American continent and what it could mean to world trade, especially in combination with the new sea-level ship canal being dug at Suez with French financing and under the leadership of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. The future had never looked so large with possibilities.

“The American flag is freely displayed all over Paris, as if our countrymen were welcome,” wrote a Philadelphia physician, Dr. FitzWilliam Sargent, who for some years had been coming to Paris to study French medical practices, but was now, with his wife and children, living full-time in Europe.

“Lincoln’s portrait is often seen in shop windows with other notabilities. In short the United States are ‘looking up.’ …” Dr. Sargent’s twelve-year-old son, “Johnnie,” was also a source of much pride to him. “He sketches quite nicely and has a remarkably quick and correct eye.”

When a formal notification arrived at last, informing Augustus Saint-Gaudens he had been admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts after a wait of nine months, he enrolled immediately in the atelier of François Jouffroy. As students in painting at the École, like Thomas Eakins, aspired to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme, master of the classical mode, who put great stress on drawing the human figure, so for those who would be sculptors, Jouffroy’s atelier was, as Saint-Gaudens said, “the triumphant one.”

Jouffroy was sixty-two, the son of a baker, tall, dark, and spare, “with little, intelligent black eyes,” as Saint-Gaudens remembered. When making his critique of a student’s work, he spoke in a low, nasal voice and while customarily gazing off the whole time in some other direction from the model and the student’s efforts.

As he acknowledged, Saint-Gaudens had not yet shown himself to be a brilliant student. But Jouffroy’s compliments consoled him. He was not the least discouraged, nor did he suffer any doubts about himself, such was his youthful vanity, as he also acknowledged years afterward. The doubts came later.

At a student party soon after he joined the class, the others asked him to sing the “Marseillaise,” which, under the Second Empire, was forbidden in public places. He sang it in English, as he had with his friends at home in New York, and his performance brought a roar of approval. They urged him to sing it again. They praised his voice, told him how beautiful it was, and he believed them. In the days to follow he sang the song many times over, only to realize they were making fun of him.

“I was finally admitted to full membership and teased no more, becoming in my turn one of the most boisterous of the students.”

He made friends—friends for life, in several cases—and mostly with those from southern France, who spoke with a southern accent just as he did, because of his father.

Reminiscing later, he recalled nothing in the way of “amorous adventure.” When a girl he liked in New York wrote to ask whether he still meant to “keep company” with her, he never replied. How truly chaste he
remained is impossible to know, so extremely circumspect was he always about what he considered private matters. Friends and working associates, however, would talk a good deal later of his fondness for women.

His afternoons cutting cameos provided only the barest living. Long afterward, walking with friends in the narrow back streets of the Latin Quarter, he would point out the miserable little cafés where he had been forced to eat dreadful food as a student in order to survive. But so “soaring” was his ambition, as he later said, and so “tremendously austere” was he, he felt a kind of “Spartan-like superiority.”

A close friend, Alfred Garnier, would describe him as “possessing so strongly the qualities of a man who was bound to succeed,” yet he remained as well “the most joyous creature.” For exercise he, Garnier, and others went regularly to a gymnasium. (Gus was “crazy about wrestling.”) On holiday hiking expeditions, they would sometimes cover thirty miles, with Gus setting the pace. On one such venture they set off for Saint-Valéry-en-Caux on the coast of Normandy. “Five minutes after we reached the seashore,” Garnier remembered, “we were in the water in spite of the heavy waves, for as soon as he saw the water Gus had to enter. …” On another trek, in Switzerland, when they climbed a cathedral spire, none exclaimed over the view with such enthusiasm as Gus. “Nobody got his money’s worth so well as he. Everything seemed enchanting, everything beautiful!”

For more than a year he remained the only American among Jouffroy’s students, until 1869 when Olin Warner joined the class. Older than Gus by four years, Warner came from Vermont and was a former telegraph operator. In a stream of letters to his “Dear Ones at Home,” he expressed with appealing clarity the feelings of many American students of every kind:

Paris is the most splendid city I ever saw. …

Wine is cheaper than milk. …

I could not have gone to a better part of the world to study. …

I am entirely out of money. …