The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (77 page)

It was, said
The Times
, certain to be the most discussed painting of the year, and “without exception the most ambitious picture of our time.”

But coming here has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am.

—
AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

No particular notice was taken of the small elderly gentleman strolling with the younger woman on the rue de la Paix and in the garden of the Palais Royal. No heads turned, no one responded to his characteristic smile with a sign of recognition.

At home in Boston everybody knew who he was. In London in recent weeks, he had been a center of attention at grand dinners, warmly greeted by the prime minister, dukes and earls and literary notables like Robert Browning and Oscar Wilde. He had been given a party by the Royal College of Surgeons and received honorary degrees from all three of Britain’s greatest centers of learning: Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

But in the Paris he so loved, he knew “not a soul” and no one knew him. As he would write, “Our most intimate relations were with the people of the hotel,” and given his amiable outlook, this was perfectly acceptable.

At the peak of summer 1886, seventy-seven-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., had returned to Europe accompanied by his widowed daughter,
Amelia, on what he called a “Rip Van Winkle experiment,” a trip he had long promised himself. Fifty years earlier, he had left the France of Louis-Philippe and François Guizot. Now nearly all his Boston comrades from those earlier Paris days, his fellow “medicals,” fellow poets and authors, were gone. Mason Warren, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, even Thomas Appleton and Henry Longfellow, were all dead. Of those close companions who had sat with him through lectures by Dupuytren or followed the legendary Dr. Louis on his hospital rounds, only Henry Bowditch remained.

The only familiar faces to be seen now in Paris were in paintings at the Louvre, though at first nothing was to be found where he looked for it, so extensively had things been rearranged. “But when I found them, they greeted me, so I fancied, like old acquaintances. The meek-looking ‘Belle Jardinière’ was as lamb-like as ever. … Titian’s young man with the glove was the calm, self-contained gentleman I used to admire.”

He and Amelia were in Paris for a week only. While she did some shopping, he walked the old neighborhood of the École de Médecine, pleased to find the house where he lived on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince unchanged except for a shop on the street level. Tempted to go inside and make inquiries, he decided against it. “What would the shopkeeper know about M. Bertrand, my landlord of half a century ago; or his first wife, to whose funeral I went; or his second, to whose bridal I was bidden?”

From the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Holmes made the short walk to the Panthéon, not, he explained, to pay homage to it as a “sacred edifice” or the final resting place of great men, but to see León Foucault’s famous pendulum. “I was thinking much more of Foucault’s grand experiment, one of the most sublime visible demonstrations of a great physical fact in the records of science.” And there it was, a heavy weight swinging slowly back and forth from a wire reaching nearly three hundred feet to the dome overhead, proving, as its direction appeared to change, the rotation of the earth.

Only one man did Dr. Holmes hope to meet while in Paris, and this he resolved by going on his own initiative to the office of Louis Pasteur at 14 rue Vauquelin to pay an unannounced call.

“I sent my card in … and presently he came out and greeted me. I told
him I was an American physician who wished to look in his face and take his hand—nothing more.”

Reflecting later on the great changes he had seen as a result of French strides in science since he was a student in Paris, Holmes wrote that the stethoscope was almost a novelty in those days, the microscope never even mentioned by any clinical instructor he had had.

It was not just that the world of his student days was long past, or that he and his American contemporaries had all but disappeared, but that American medical students in Paris now numbered relatively few. Due in good part to what he and others had brought back from Paris, medical education in the United States had so greatly advanced that study in Paris was not necessarily an advantage any longer. Those who were ambitious to excel in clinical medicine or surgery could get superb training at home.

It being summer, much of Paris was characteristically quiet, and at night Holmes found himself too tired to go to the theater or the opera.

But there was joy still in seeing the beautiful bridges on the Seine. “Nothing looked more nearly the same as of old than the bridges,” he wrote. The Pont Neuf looked not the least different to him and evoked all the good feelings of old.

Stopping at the Café Procope, once his favorite for breakfast, he thought it much improved in appearance. He sat contentedly over a cup of coffee, daydreaming of Voltaire and the other luminaries of the far past who had gathered there.

“But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my early friends and companions that came up before me in all the freshness of their young manhood?” He need never chase off to Florida in search of Ponce de León’s fountain of youth, Holmes decided. It was here. In Paris.

Three years after Holmes’s visit—at the time of the 1889 exposition— Augustus Saint-Gaudens, too, returned to Paris, and his stay was also short. Apparently he came alone, and he wrote nothing of a wish to see the fair or anyone in particular, only that he was “desirous of returning in what measure I could to my student life and environment.”

He appears to have kept largely to himself, staying not at a hotel, but in “a little box of a room” on the Left Bank, in the studio apartment of a friend and former assistant, sculptor Frederick MacMonnies. Of his impressions of Paris, he mentioned no more than its “monumental largeness.” As for his opinions on the fair, he said only that they were “too complex and result in so much vanity that I’ll modestly refrain. …”

What seems to have made the most lasting impression was a scene he observed the first morning in the small garden below his window in the “box.” From the door of a studio opening onto the garden came a man of about his own age, “an old chap,” in dressing gown and slippers and smoking a pipe.

He trudged along in among the paths over to one particular flowerbed which was evidently his little property, and with great care watered the flowers with a diminutive watering pot. Soon after another codger appeared in another door, in trousers and slippers. He also fussed and shuffled in his little plot.

Such “codgers” could well be the very comrades of his youth at the Beaux-Arts, he thought, and here they were in the midst of crowded, bustling Paris so contentedly cultivating their flower gardens, “the blue smoke from their pipes of peace rising philosophically among the greenery, in harmony with it all.” He envied that harmony and their contentment.

It would be said in the family that Saint-Gaudens had made the trip in 1889 out of a “deeply felt need” to see what was being done in Paris, “thereby widening his artistic horizon.” This may have been true. But there was more to the explanation. He had his own private reasons, as would come to light later.

Great numbers of aspiring American artists, sculptors, and architects kept arriving in the city all the while, and among them several who, in the future, were to figure prominently in the arts at home.

Maurice Prendergast, the son of a Boston grocer, had crossed the Atlantic
in a cattle boat to enroll in the Académie Julian in 1891. John White Alexander was in his thirties when he and his wife settled in Paris the same year. In very little time his large, strikingly composed paintings of beautiful young women in elegant settings were to have wide recognition.

James Earle Fraser had spent most of his boyhood on a ranch in South Dakota. His father was a railroad engineer. The talented young man had come to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he would later be “discovered” by Saint-Gaudens.

Henry O. Tanner was tall, cultivated, and the only African-American at the Académie Julian. The son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he had been born in Pittsburgh. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Thomas Eakins, he had been the lone black student. He, too, sailed from America in 1891, but intended only to stop briefly in Paris before going on to study in Rome. As he wrote, “Strange that after having been in Paris a week, I should find conditions so to my liking that I completely forgot … my plans to study in Rome. …”

In a café on the Left Bank, on one of his first mornings in Paris, Tanner met Robert Henri for the first time. They found they had the Pennsylvania Academy in common and a friendship began. “He’s modest … not in the opinion that he is a big man, so he will get on,” wrote Henri, who helped give Tanner “a start” at the Académie Julian.

Tanner’s expenses were being covered by patrons at home, a white American minister and his wife named Hartzwell, and by a $75 commission he had received before setting sail. His total expenses the first year in Paris would come to $365, as he carefully recorded. In addition to having little money, he spoke no French.

Never had he seen or heard such bedlam as at the Académie, Tanner was to write in a lively chronicle of his student experiences. Nor had he ever tried to see or breathe in such a smoke-shrouded room.

Never were windows opened. They were nailed fast at the beginning of the cold season. Fifty or sixty men smoking in such a room for two or three hours would make it so that those in the back rows could hardly see the model.

At no time was he made to feel unwanted or inferior because of his color, which had not always been so in Philadelphia. Only in some restaurants did he know he was unwelcome, but that, he knew, was because he did not drink wine. “In the cheap restaurants to which I went, they did not care to serve one unless one took wine—they made little or no profit on the food. … I was thus an undesirable customer and several times forced to change my restaurant.”

The occasional appearance of students’ parents in Paris was not uncommon. The chance to see the new life their offspring were leading, and enjoy a bit of Paris themselves, was all but irresistible if one could afford it, and the effect of the experience could be profound.

William Dean Howells, the novelist and former editor of the
Atlantic Monthly
, whose son John was studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, had been enjoying himself thoroughly, buoyed by the spirit of Paris and the chance to catch up with old friends like James McNeill Whistler, whose part-time residence on the rue du Bac had become something of a rendezvous for visiting Americans of like mind and interests. But then at a gathering in Whistler’s garden, Howells was seen standing alone, uncharacteristically downcast. He had just received word that he must return home. His father was dying.