The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (8 page)

The origin of Paris and the character of its first inhabitants are necessarily involved in deep obscurity. According to historians whose opinions are generally received, an errant tribe obtained permission of the Senones, at a very remote period, to settle upon the banks of the Seine, near their territory. Upon the island now called
Île de la Cité
they constructed huts, which served as a fortress for them to retreat with their flocks and effects when an attack from any of the neighboring tribes was apprehended. To their fortress they gave the name of
Lutèce,
and themselves assumed that of
Parisii,
which most probably was derived from their contiguity to the country of the Senones, the word
par
and
bar
being synonymous, and signifying
frontier.
According to this derivation the
Parisii
would be
dwellers on the frontier.

—
GALIGNANI’S NEW PARIS GUIDE

The first impressions were often badly disappointing.

Much of Paris in the 1830s was still a medieval city. So after rolling smoothly along the broad, tree-lined final approach on the main road from Rouen, the American adventurers suddenly found themselves plunged
into a dark labyrinth of narrow, filthy, foul-smelling streets running off every which way. Ancient stone buildings, some black with centuries of smoke and soot, crowded on all sides. Wagons and drays and shouting vendors with pushcarts clogged the way. People could be seen living in the most wretched squalor. To picture what the rat population might be took no great stretch of imagination.

“
Voilà Paris!
” the conductor would call from atop the diligence. “
Voilà Paris!
”

“And with my mind full of the splendid views of squares, and columns, and bridges, as I had seen them in prints, I could scarce believe I was in Paris,” wrote Nathaniel Willis. “The streets run zig-zag and abut against each other as if they did not know which way to run,” wrote John Sanderson. “As for the noise of the streets, I need not attempt to describe it.

What idea can ears, used only to the ordinary and human noises, conceive of this unceasing racket—this rattling of cabs and other vehicles over the rough stones, this rumbling of the omnibuses. For the street cries—one might have relief from them by file and handsaw.

Even as the famous bridges on the Seine, the splendors of gardens and palaces and the gilded dome of the Invalides came into view, the close proximity of such appalling poverty and immeasurable riches was both startling and unsettling. After years of living in Paris, James Fenimore Cooper said he still struggled to adjust to a country comprised of “dirt and gilding … bedbugs and laces.”

Many, like Emma Willard, arrived so utterly exhausted that under the circumstances little if anything could have pleased them. Gone was any trace of the “sublimity” she had felt at the cathedral in Rouen. “We were amidst dirt and disorder, fatigued … and strange eyes seemed to glare upon us.”

But the famous allure and vitality of the great city won them over soon enough. Never in their lives had the Americans seen such parks and palaces, or such beautiful bridges or so many bridges. Or so many people of
every kind. For those staying at the best hotels, such comforts and attentions as awaited them almost immediately, magically alleviated whatever initial disappointment they had felt.

To Nathaniel Willis the Hôtel des Étrangers on the rue Vivienne was everything the weary traveler longed for. Arriving in the rain at mid-morning after a long night on the road, he was shown every courtesy, including his choice of several “quite pretty” rooms. The beds were surely the best in the world, he thought. “Five mattresses are successively piled on an elegant mahogany bedstead” to a thickness of eighteen inches. The pillow was “a masterpiece.” There was simply no “opiate” like a French pillow. Then followed a breakfast that carried the day:

There are few things bought with money that are more delightful than a French breakfast. If you take it at your room, it appears in the shape of two small vessels, one of coffee and one of hot milk, two kinds of bread, with a thin, printed slice of butter, and one or two of some thirty dishes from which you can choose, the latter flavored exquisitely enough to make one wish to be always at breakfast, but cooked and composed I know not how or of what. The coffee has an aroma peculiarly exquisite, something quite different than any I have ever tasted before; and the
petit pain
, a slender biscuit between bread and cake, is, when crisp and warm, a delightful accompaniment.

And the cost was a third that of steak and coffee at home and the civility of the service worth three times the money.

The location on the bustling rue Vivienne was ideal. The Palais Royal, with all its famous enticements, the Louvre, and the Garden of the Tuileries were only a little way down the street, southward toward the Seine. Up the street in the other direction was the Bourse, which with its grandiose Doric columns looked more like a palace or temple than what it was, a stock exchange.

Best of all, Galignani’s, the English bookstore and reading room, a favorite
gathering place, stood across the street from the hotel. There one could pass long, comfortable hours with a great array of English and even American newspapers. Parisians were as avid readers of newspapers as any people on earth. Some thirty-four daily papers were published in Paris, and many of these, too, were to be found spread across several large tables. The favorite English-language paper was Galignani’s own
Messenger
, with morning and evening editions Monday through Friday. For the newly arrived Americans, after more than a month with no news of any kind, these and the American papers were pure gold.

Of the several circulating libraries in Paris, only Galignani’s carried books in English, and indispensable was
Galignani’s New Paris Guide
in English. Few Americans went without this thick little leather-bound volume, fully 839 pages of invaluable insights and information, plus maps.

Like Nathaniel Willis, schoolmistress Emma Willard delighted in her first breakfast at the fashionable Hôtel de l’Europe on the rue de Richelieu, and in the café au lait in particular. Nothing could exceed it, she wrote, adding, “the bread is fine and the butter exquisite.” She was also much the better after a restorative night’s sleep.

Breakfast concluded and accompanied by a young lady from New York traveling with her father, whom she had met on board ship and identified in her letters only as “Miss D,” Mrs. Willard set forth full of expectations for a first walk in Paris, down the rue de Richelieu in the direction of the Seine and into the luxurious garden and arcades of the Palais Royal. The spectacle of the immense garden with its fountain playing was “brilliant and beautiful,” and, enclosed as it was by the Palais, blessedly removed from the clamor of the streets. It was also, much to her approval, “promenaded by multitudes of the elegant and fashionable.”

We took the rounds under the arcades, upon the finely paved marble walk. … And surely we had never seen anything with which to compare the splendor of the shops. … You have not the least idea of the elegance of some of the painted porcelain; and then there are such quantities. … Jewelry, too, abounds in all its dazzling sheen … and hats of many fashions, with snowy plumes. …

Having purchased a few “wearable things,” she and her companion returned to the hotel to announce they had found the Paris they had expected to see.

Samuel Morse had hardly unpacked at his hotel when he was handed an invitation to a soirée at the home of Lafayette. On his arrival, the warmth of his welcome from the general took Morse’s breath away. “When I went in he instantly recognized me, took me by both hands, said he was expecting to see me in France, having read in the American papers that I had embarked.”

In her turn, Mrs. Willard sent off a note to “apprise” General Lafayette that she had arrived, expecting to receive no answer for days, given his importance in the new government as commander of the army. But the following morning the general himself appeared to greet her with open affection. For nearly an hour they reminisced about his visit to her school, talked of their families, and discussed politics and the new government. “His heart seemed to expand as to a confidential sister,” she wrote with boundless pride. No welcome to Paris could have pleased her more, and it was not to be her only time with him, as he had graciously assured her.

The Palais Royal, the Louvre, the Palace and Garden of the Tuileries, were all in the first of the twelve arrondissements, or districts, of Paris. It was the royal arrondissement par excellence. As Wendell Holmes wrote, in an effort to explain to his parents how things were arranged, the Palais Royal was the great center of the luxury and splendor of Paris.

He, however, had “fairly settled” in the quite different Sixth Arrondissement, across the Seine in the Pays Latin, the Latin Quarter, on the Rive Gauche, the Left Bank. The ancient College of the Sorbonne and the School of Law were there. So, too, were the École de Médecine and several major hospitals, and hence it was where the medical students lived in high, dingy old houses closely packed along narrow, unpaved streets with gutters down the middle and rarely a sidewalk. (Describing the choices this left to the pedestrian, Holmes wrote, “If he keeps near the wall his feet probably become victims of some animal or vegetable abomination. If on the other hand he keeps to the middle he is almost inevitably splashed
by the horses with mud of an intensity that defies competition.”) In this same crowded, compact neighborhood lived and worked the medical-book sellers, instrument makers, medical artists, preparers of natural and artificial skeletons, in addition to professors and lecturers of highest renown who were advancing the art and science of medicine as nowhere else in the world.

Holmes, like his fellow Bostonians James Jackson, Jr., and Mason Warren, found lodgings on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a street barely wide enough for two carts to pass. Consistent with his nature, Holmes had no complaints.

Those who, like Holmes or John Sanderson, arrived in late June or early July were delighted from the outset by the long summer days of northern Europe. In Paris, as they had to remind themselves, they were as far north as Newfoundland. And what pleasure to be out and about in daylight at ten at night! In December, as they would discover, it would still be pitch dark at eight in the morning, and night again by four in the afternoon. Winter, too, brought endless rain, mud, snow, and fog, often heavy fog. The penetrating cold of a Paris winter was commonly said to be worse even than in London.

Charles Sumner, who arrived in late December, took a room near the Sorbonne, intending to devote his time first to learning French, but was so distressed by the dank, bone-chilling weather he could hardly concentrate on anything. A blazing fire had little effect.

The cold continues intolerable [he wrote in his journal], and my chamber, notwithstanding all my exertions, frigid beyond endurance. I go to bed tonight earlier than usual—the clock this moment striking midnight—in the hope of escaping the cold. My French grammar will be my companion.

In the morning he studied as close by the fire as he dared sit, bundled to the neck in an overcoat. “I freeze behind, and my hair is so cold that I hesitate to touch it with my hand.”

Yet life had never been so exhilarating. To a friend at home Sumner
wrote, “My voyage has already been compensated for—seasickness, time, money, and all—many times over.”