The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (68 page)

In letters to his mother White described Dijon as clean and cheerful. Beaune, besides the beauty of the town itself, could be said to have “good wine and pretty women.” Most enjoyable was moving with the swift current of the Rhône. The boat was a side-wheel steamer with a single, tall stack and built on the lines of a canal boat. “[It] is 275 ft. long and not over 20 ft. wide,
comme ça
,” White wrote, and drew a sketch. “She holds about two hundred passengers. …”

Avignon, with the remains of the ancient Pont d’Avignon and the enormous Palace of the Popes, both dating from feudal times, was much the most impressive spectacle on the river. Years later Saint-Gaudens would remember arriving at Avignon after nightfall, and as he walked the narrow streets, hearing “the sound of a Beethoven sonata floating from an open window into the warm summer night. …”

Stanford White thought the portal of the twelfth-century Church of Saint-Gilles “the best piece of architecture in France.” It was later to be the inspiration for a porch he designed for St. Bartholomew’s Church in New York.

At Nîmes they visited the great Roman amphitheater with its seating capacity of 20,000. “We sat on the top row and imagined ourselves ancient Romans,” White wrote. While Saint-Gaudens and McKim stayed seated where they were, White went down and rushed out into the arena, “struck an attitude and commenced declaiming” for their benefit. Warming to the role, he began stabbing imaginary gladiators until a guard appeared and chased him off.

After Nîmes, they set off by diligence over the mountains to Le Puy, the highest town in France, at 4,000 feet, then on into Burgundy and the Loire Valley. By August 13, they were back in Paris. Gus felt they had learned even more by traveling third-class than from the architecture they had seen.

To commemorate the fellowship of the expedition, he made a mock-heroic Roman medallion six inches in diameter featuring in relief caricatures of each of the three. Mock-Latin tributes decorated the circumference. At the center was a large architect’s T-square at the base of
which were inscribed the letters “KMA,” believed to have been an abbreviation for “Kiss My Ass.” Saint-Gaudens presented bronze reproductions to each of his two friends, and kept the third for himself.

Gus had “a most successful trip,” Gussie reported to her mother. “He feels he has learned a great deal from his architect friends.”

When Saint-Gaudens returned to work on the Farragut monument, White went with him to the studio to help with plans for the pedestal. For a while White stayed overnight at the apartment, until he found a place of his own. McKim lingered only a little while before returning to New York. Then White headed off again to see more of France, and returned bringing superb sketches he had done of landscapes, houses, street scenes, and cathedrals inside and out. Then it was back to work with Saint-Gaudens, their efforts marking the start of collaborations to come on some twenty projects.

Gussie appears to have welcomed White’s presence. “He is one of the nicest fellows I have ever met and Aug says he is tremendously talented,” she told her mother. White, however, was of another mind about her.

He loved being back in Paris, he wrote to his mother, “I hug S[ain]tGaudens like a bear every time I see him, and would his wife if she was pretty—but she ain’t—so I don’t.

She is very kind, however, and asks me to dinner, mends my clothes, and does all manner of things. She is an animated clothes rack, slightly deaf—a double barreled Yankee, and [I] mean to that extent that no comparison will suffice. Why fate should have ordained that such a man should be harnessed to such a woman, Heaven only knows. Nevertheless, she has been very kind to me, and I ought to be ashamed of myself for saying anything about her.

He thought Gussie’s sister Genie far prettier.

Gussie also showed uncommon patience about Gus heading off with White on social whirls. One night, with another gregarious American,
William Bunce, they went to a masked ball at the Opera and, as she reported to her parents, did not come home until half-past six the next morning.

“I have just taken this paper from Gussie as she has a headache, and I don’t think she should write any more,” Gus scrawled in his own hand. “I close this epistle and fill the page so that Gussie can’t put anything else in it.”

“I am writing in the studio,” she began another letter. Aug was washing his hands in a pail of water and talking to a friend. White was tasting some bread for his lunch and she was seated at a table writing.

The model has just come in the second day and has retired behind a curtain to get himself up in Farragut’s coat and fixings and presently will mount on the stand where Aug will go to work. He and Mr. White are still working on the pedestal. … There is to be a high circular stone seat so fashioned.

Then she made a small diagram of the pedestal. “Please don’t say anything about this as yet, [as] it is by no means fully decided upon.”

“Do you want to know how I pass my day?” White wrote to his mother. He was awakened at his lodgings by a servant at nine-thirty, then chose to stay in bed for another half-hour, until he headed out for breakfast at 3 rue Herschel—“and ring the doorbell five times, which is my private ring.”

Coffee, eggs, and oatmeal being swallowed, we forthwith make our way to the studio, and both set to work at our respective businesses. Then comes lunch hour. This is a very simple matter for Saint-Gaudens, who partakes of an unappetizing lunch packed up by his
femme.
With me it is quite an event. I go and buy all my provisions and lunch like a Seigneur [a lord] on 20 cents. Something in this way:
Pâté de foie gras;
boned chicken, or sardines, 4 cts.; two
petits pains
, well toasted, 2 cts.; rhum pudding, 3 cts.;
un petit fromage suisse
, 5 cts. and about 5 cts. worth of wine. …

Then we go to work again, and darkness—which comes here now at five o’clock—gives us a rest.

Great as the demands of the work had become, Gus and Gussie were taking more time for some pleasure together, and with others. They dined out, attended an occasional social event, and went again to the opera.

Gus loved the opera no less than ever. But he loved the theater still more. The drama of the stage, the techniques of stagecraft—costume, lighting, scenery—all appealed tremendously. He loved watching actors at work and imagining himself in their place. If he could be anything other than what he was, he liked to say, he would be an actor. “I am convinced,” he later wrote, “that if I would overcome the sense of [self-] consciousness, I should be a wonderful actor.” And if not an actor, then a playwright, which might be better still, he thought. “How wonderful,” he would say, “to create characters to portray every phase of emotion, present all points of view, and with these characters work out their destinies.”

I think anything and everything. This seeing a subject so that I can take either side with sympathy and conviction I sometimes think is a weakness. Then again I’m thinking it’s a strength. I could put it to good use as a dramatist.

With her trouble hearing and her inadequate French, Gussie found the Paris theater extremely difficult to follow, and so seldom went with him. But she seems to have had a particularly good time at one evening affair put on by George and Louisa Healy. “We went to a dancing party at Mr. Healy’s and really enjoyed it very much,” she reported to her mother.

How often Gus and Healy saw each other, or what they may have talked about, is regrettably unrecorded. Certainly they had much in common. But whether they ever compared notes on their modest beginnings in Boston and New York, or their early student years in Paris, or the Civil War and its heroes, is impossible to know.

On her growing enjoyment of Paris, Gussie was explicit: “Every time I go out I like it better and better.”

In addition to the Healys, they were meeting other noted Americans, among them Phillips Brooks, the minister of Trinity Church in Boston, and Mark Twain, who had returned to Paris with his wife. Twain would be remembered at one after-dinner gathering at 3 rue Herschel consuming one black cigar after another until he finally asked, “What is Art?” which was the signal for all to go home. Gus never liked to “talk art” and hated art theory.

Art students like Carroll Beckwith and John Sargent were regularly in and out of the apartment and the studio. The studio the two young painters shared was on the same street as Gus’s, at 73 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. A few old friends from Gus’s own student days, like Alfred Garnier and Paul Bion, also made appearances.

Gus took great interest in students and was unusually generous with his encouragement of those he thought promising. But beyond that, as Will Low would write, he had a manner of expressing himself, “of making one ‘see things,’ ” that they long remembered.

He, in all simplicity, believed himself to be virtually inarticulate [Low wrote]; and for any personal exercise of the spoken or written word he quite honestly professed much the same aversion as he, the skilled artist, would feel for the bungling attempt of the ignorant amateur.

But it was precisely because he was so intensely an artist that his mental vision was clear, and that which he saw he in turn made visible—there is no other word—to others.

Sargent particularly impressed Saint-Gaudens. Further, he liked the young man. They exchanged work—Sargent gave Saint-Gaudens one of his watercolors; Saint-Gaudens fashioned a small medallion, a sketch in relief of Sargent in profile, which he gave to him. It was the start of a long stretch of mutual admiration.

Still, the struggle to “break away” with the Farragut and achieve something beyond the ordinary continued, and grew increasingly difficult as Saint-Gaudens became ever more demanding of himself. His Civil War
memories from boyhood were strong within him—of watching from the cameo cutter’s window as the New England volunteers came marching down Broadway singing “John Brown’s Body,” of seeing Lincoln and Grant in person, and the wounded back from the battlefields. “I have such respect and admiration for the heroes of the Civil War,” he had written earlier, “that I consider it my duty to help in any way to commemorate them in a noble and dignified fashion worthy of their great service.”

New York was still, and always, home to Saint-Gaudens, and the Farragut, he knew, was to be New York’s first monument to the Civil War.

In late March he was suddenly stricken with violent intestinal pains and a high fever. “It was all Mr. White, Louis, and I could do to take care of him night and day,” Gussie wrote. Days passed before he felt strong enough to walk slowly beside her in the Luxembourg Gardens, and weeks went by before he was able to resume work. Feelings of depression—the “
triste
undertone” of his soul, as he called it—set in. Worst was the awful sense of time a-wasting. “You have no idea how hard it is for him to remain inactive when there is so much waiting for him to do,” Gussie told her father.