The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (62 page)

I began to live.

—
MARY CASSATT

“I have never seen Paris so charming as on this last Christmas day,” wrote Henry James, Jr., in the fourth of his “letters” to the
New York Tribune.
“The sky was radiant and the air was soft and pure. … It was a day to spend in the streets and all the world did so.”

He had first seen Paris as a boy of twelve while touring Europe with his family. He had returned now, twenty years later, to work on a novel. To help meet expenses, he was doing two letters a month for the
Tribune,
for which he received the sizable sum of ten gold dollars a week.

In the first of his letters, dated November 22, 1875, he stressed that any American who had been to Paris before found on return that his “sense of Parisian things becomes supremely acute.” He wrote of Charles Garnier’s new opera house, finished at last and “the most obvious architectural phenomenon in Paris,” and a new play by the son of Alexandre Dumas in rehearsal at the Théâtre Français.

In the fourth letter he extolled the “amazing elasticity” of France:

Beaten and humiliated on a scale without precedent, despoiled, dishonored, bled to death financially—all this but yesterday—Paris is today in outward aspect as radiant, as prosperous, as instinct with her own peculiar genius as if her sky had never known a cloud.

Highly knowledgeable about art, no less than music and theater, James wrote admiringly of several paintings hanging in the Théâtre Français, and particularly a portrait of a lady pulling off her glove by Carolus-Duran, who, of all the modern emulators of the seventeenth-century Spanish master Diego Velázquez, James declared “decidedly the most suc cessful.”

At age twelve, James had spent hours in the Louvre with his older brother, William, where they “looked and looked again” at paintings, all the time wondering what he would make of his life. But now, at thirty-two, his career was well established. He had published dozens of reviews, travel sketches, and more than twenty-four short stories. A first novel,
Roderick Hudson
, was about to be published. The second was his reason for being back in Paris. Called
The American
, it began in the Louvre, with its protagonist, Christopher Newman, reclined on a “commodious” divan in the Salon Carré, contemplating Murillo’s
Immaculate Conception.

That James was in Europe to stay seems not yet to have entered his mind. After an uneventful crossing of the Atlantic and a brief stopover in London to freshen his wardrobe, he had had little trouble finding a suitable apartment—two bedrooms, parlor, and kitchen—on the rue de Luxembourg (now the rue Cambon), a block from the Place Vendôme. The street was relatively quiet and his windows, facing south, caught the full sunlight. “If you were to see me, I think you would pronounce me well off,” he wrote to his father, in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who had inherited his wealth and took great interest in how the family money was spent. “Considering how nice it is, it isn’t dear,” Henry assured him.

He wrote faithfully week after week—to father, mother, sister Alice, brother William—in an effort to portray the new life he had embarked upon and especially his excitement over the French writers he had already met, including Edmond de Goncourt, Émile Zola, Gustave Flaubert, and the Russian Ivan Turgenev, whom he liked best. He had also, he reported
to his mother, knowing how it would please her, “taken a desperate plunge” into the American circle by attending two balls and a dinner party. But he had no relish for such company.

He missed his family dreadfully. “I am waiting anxiously for the letter from William who was to write to me on the Sunday after yours,” he wrote to his father. “But make mother write too. I have heard from her but once since I left home. It seems an age.” “Love to all in superabundance,” he would end a long letter to his mother.

He was in Paris to work, and Paris was “an excellent place to work,” he assured his editor at the
Atlantic
, William Dean Howells, who would be publishing the new novel in installments.

Quite unlike James himself, the novel’s main character, Newman, who was new to Paris, had come solely to be amused: “I want the biggest kind of entertainment a man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything.” James portrayed him as tall, lean, and muscular, a veteran of the Civil War, a success in business with money aplenty and ready to spend, awkward still in French but decidedly interested in the company of attractive women—none of which applied to the author himself. A graduate of Harvard Law School, James had been exempted from military service because of a physical infirmity. He had never worked in business, not even a day, and was neither tall nor muscular, nor, it seemed, much interested in women beyond spirited conversation, at which he excelled. But as it was with his main character, the longer he stayed in the great French capital, the greater its appeal.

“What shall I tell you?” he began a letter to Howells one April morning. “My windows are open, the spring is becoming serious, and the soft hum of good old Paris comes into my sunny rooms. …”

“The spring is now quite settled and very lovely,” he told brother William a few weeks later. “It makes me feel extremely fond of Paris and confirms my feeling of being at home here. … I scribble along with a good deal of regularity. …” And that, as he knew William understood, was the point.

Since the brutal catastrophes of 1870–71, the numbers of Americans coming to Paris had been growing steadily. In a single week in September
1872, the Grand Hôtel, always popular with Americans (including James’s fictional Christopher Newman), had to refuse accommodations to two hundred people. Many, like James, were back for a second or third time. Among them was Senator Charles Sumner, who, at sixty-two, had returned once more in need, his physicians said, of rest and relaxation. And as before in Paris, he was “the recipient of much attention from all quarters.”

In a city focused on swift revival, Americans were welcome as never before. The economic effect of their presence was phenomenal, as confirmed by
Galignani’s Messenger:

It is generally acknowledged that the trade of Paris is now mainly sustained by American visitors who spend more money among the shopkeepers than all the rest put together. … we only wish there were more of them, for this is about the best and most effective way in which Uncle Sam can aid the new French Republic.

But an appreciable number of the French looked to America for more than monetary sustenance only. For those whose faith in the ideal of a republican form of government held firm, America remained the shining example. Indeed, one group of the faithful had conceived the idea of creating an unprecedented gift from France to the United States, to coincide with the approaching centennial of American independence in 1876.

It was to be a colossal monument called
Liberty Lighting the World
. A French sculptor chosen for the design, Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, had already been to America to see something of the country and meet with numerous Americans who shared an appreciation for the bonds between their country and France. He had returned with a plan to build an immense statue at the entrance to New York Harbor. The new Franco-American Union, established in Paris to promote the project, included several prominent Americans among its honorary members, one of whom was Minister Elihu Washburne.

As in times past, the great majority of the talented and aspiring Americans coming to the city to study were young and altogether unfamiliar
with France, its language and ways. Many would one day rank among the eminent American artists and architects of their time. James Carroll Beckwith, J. Alden Weir, Theodore Robinson, Thomas Dewing, George de Forest Brush, Abbot Thayer, Will Low, and architect Louis Sullivan were among those who arrived in Paris in the 1870s and, like so many before, their excitement was such as they would never forget. Will Low, an art student, expressed perfectly how it felt “to wake up in Paris” for the first time. “I was not yet twenty. I was quite alone. I did not speak a word of French … but I was in Paris and the world was before me.”

Those not new to the city felt much the same. Like Henry James, they had returned because for them Paris was the best of all places to get on with their work. Of particular note were painters George P. A. Healy, returning again at age fifty-nine, nearly forty years after his first arrival, Mary Cassatt of Philadelphia, and John Singer Sargent, who was young enough to have been Healy’s grandson and an American prodigy such as had not been seen in Paris since the days of Louis Moreau Gottschalk, who, as it happened, was one of the young man’s favorite composers.

Unlike all but a few of their American counterparts, each of these four spoke fluent French, and, with the exception of James, they were there in Paris with their families.

George Healy, with his wife, Louisa, several daughters and a son, took up residence in 1872 in an ample eighteenth-century “hôtel” on the heights near Montmartre, in what was known as the painters’ quarter, at 64 rue de la Rochefoucauld, which had an enormous studio next door. Healy was an American success story of a kind the French greatly respected, and both the house and the workspace befitted a figure of renown. There were numerous spacious rooms with numerous French windows, tall mirrors, white-and-gold woodwork, as well as a small conservatory and lovely walled garden with a rococo grotto. “We can give garden parties here!” exclaimed the youngest daughter, Kathleen, who was fourteen.

The Healys had been among the thousands dealt a devastating blow by the catastrophic Chicago Fire of 1871. None of the family was injured—all were away at the time—but their home on Wabash Avenue had been completely destroyed and everything in it, including much of Healy’s work, correspondence, journals, account books, and other papers of record.

Healy had thought at first of relocating in Italy. They must think carefully and choose “exactly the right place,” he told the family, “for this is really and truly our last move.” The choice was Paris, “the only logical conclusion.”

Commissions came steadily. “Healy is strong in portraits,” reported Thomas Gold Appleton to Henry Longfellow, Appleton having by then resumed his annual visits to Paris. As once Healy had painted the protagonists of the Civil War—Lincoln, Beauregard, Sherman, Grant—so now, in relatively little time, he would paint those of the Franco-Prussian War—Adolphe Thiers, Léon Gambetta, Otto von Bismarck, all three at the request of Elihu Washburne.

As a kind of postscript to his Civil War portraits, he produced a posthumous Robert E. Lee, for which Lee’s son Custis, the president of Washington and Lee College, posed in the studio on the rue de la Rochefoucauld.

Working as industriously as ever, Healy painted a full-length portrait of Emma Thursby, an American concert singer acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic, standing with a musical score in hand and wearing a magnificent blue silk and lace gown. In 1879, Nathan Appleton, half-brother of Thomas Gold Appleton and one of the American backers of a French plan to build a Panama canal, brought the celebrated leader of the project, Ferdinand de Lesseps, “The Hero of Suez,” to Healy’s studio for a portrait. “This will be an historical picture,” Healy wrote in his diary the day he completed a first sketch showing de Lesseps pointing to the place on the map where the canal was to go.

Between commissions he painted his own portrait and one of Louisa, then another of Louisa and daughter Edith sitting in the garden, Edith knitting while Louisa read aloud to her. Healy, too, loved to listen to Louisa read from Dickens, Balzac, or George Sand while he worked. If she were away or for some other reason unable to read, he would turn gloomy. “I go every morning and read … to Papa, but … that is not what Mama’s reading is, so he looks rather glum,” Edith wrote in her diary.