The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (80 page)

Among those expressing approval of the Sherman and Victory was the renowned American historian Henry Adams, who was so taken by it that he stopped nearly every day for another look. But then Adams’s feelings about the sculptor were like those of no one else, because of what Saint-Gaudens had achieved with the Adams Memorial.

It had been their mutual friend John La Farge who had urged Adams to commission Saint-Gaudens to make the statue in memory of Adams’s wife, Clover, following her suicide in Washington in 1885. Suffering from depression, she had swallowed potassium cyanide, the chemical she used for retouching photographs.

At a meeting with Saint-Gaudens in New York, Adams had given the
sculptor a general idea of what he had in mind for the monument, whereupon Saint-Gaudens is said to have seated a young assistant on a stand and thrown an Indian rug over his head.

Adams requested that the figure be neither conspicuously male or female. He wanted it to convey complete repose and he wanted no name or anything inscribed on it. Lastly, he had no wish to see it until it was finished. He then left on extended tours of Japan and the Pacific Islands, taking La Farge with him as a companion.

Upon seeing the monument for the first time, after its installation at Rock Creek Cemetery, Adams was entirely satisfied. “The whole meaning and feeling of the figure is in its universality and anonymity,” he wrote. His name for it was
The Peace of God
.

Adams had been coming to Paris much of his life and professed to dislike it. Yet one way and another he managed to return often. This time, staying at the Hotel Brighton on the rue de Rivoli, he found Paris surprisingly to his liking. Several American friends were in town, and most days were taken up with buying books, reading, and making notes for a new project on medieval cathedrals. Not even the heat of summer appeared to bother him.

“Paris delights me,” he wrote to his friend John Hay, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, “but not for its supposed delights. It is the calm of its seclusion that charms … the cloister-like peace that it brings on in the closing years of life. I reflect on the goodness of all things. …”

Pleased to learn Saint-Gaudens was in Paris, Adams invited him to dine, even “risked” going to Saint-Gaudens’s studio “to draw him out for a stroll” in the Bois de Boulogne.

Adams was ten years older than Saint-Gaudens and, at five feet four, a good six inches shorter. Where Saint-Gaudens’s thick head of hair remained a distinguishing feature, Adams was, as he said, “very—very bald.” They made a distinctive pair when seen together, quite apart from the fact that one was the descendant of American presidents and diplomats, the other the son of an immigrant shoemaker.

That the sculptor was, for all his great talent, “most inarticulate” when
discussing his work utterly fascinated Adams, and especially when he considered the other artists with whom Saint-Gaudens consorted.

All the others—the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford White—were exuberant [Adams wrote]; only Saint-Gaudens could never discuss or debate on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work the forms that he felt.

Such simplicity of thought was “excessive,” Adams decided, though he did recognize that the sculptor’s health was poor, his spirits low that summer, and that he, Adams, who suffered his own spells of
ennui
, may not have been the ideal companion for him.

That Saint-Gaudens sensed what Adams found wanting in him is suggested in a letter he wrote to Gussie, who had gone home to Boston to be with her dying mother.

He had been tearing up his old letters, he told her, so “inane” did they seem. The only “readable” parts he found were in her handwriting. “Evidently I must content myself with expression in bronze. That makes me mad for we always wish for what is around the corner out of reach.”

But in a letter to Will Low he showed no hesitation about expressing his feelings, going on at length about his love of France, but also said he intended to remain in Paris only until the 1900 exposition.

He confided, too, that he had been “very sick” and knew now the meaning of nervous prostration. “It is fearful, and I pity from the bottom of my heart many whom I had looked upon before as possessing a
maladie imaginaire
.”

From a surviving note in his hand to his brother Louis, it is also known that his mistress, Davida Clark, had come to Paris with their son, Louis, and that she did not like France and wanted to go home. But how long she had been there, whether she had come of her own accord or at his request, where she was staying, or when she and the boy left, there is no telling.

Gussie arrived back in Paris on November 12.

Your father is about the same, perhaps less nervous than when I went away, and he is still poking about on the Victory [she wrote to Homer], so that even the studio is very little changed. … I have been here four days and have been three times to the bronze founders at Mont Rouge, so you can see I have little time for anything else. …

“Your father has been made a member of the Institut de France,” she reported again to Homer two weeks later. “It is a very great honor, higher than the Legion of Honor … a
much
greater honor.

“Your father sends a great [deal] of love and hopes you are getting [on] well in every way. He only
signs
his letters now. I write even to White, McKim … and the like. …”

The main concentration at 3 rue de Bagneux was on the fine points of the “big” Sherman. Inevitably, there was further trouble with the horse’s upraised left hind leg, which kept sagging, even as Saint-Gaudens’s assistants kept plugging the cracks. When he said it looked as if it might be out of proportion, they assured him everything was as it should be. He insisted he was right. A measurement was taken and the leg was found to be three inches too long. So more work was required.

Between times he had begun studies for a group of figures for the entrance to the Boston Public Library, a project for which his brother Louis had also been recruited.

Louis was to create two large marble lions to stand guard on a grand marble stairway inside the main entrance. He had been working off and on for Gus in Paris, still battling depression and alcoholism. But his talents were great, as no one appreciated more than Gus, who counted on him and continued to stand by him.

His own principal preoccupation at the studio had become the finishing touches on the figure of Victory, upon which, he felt, the effect of the entire work depended. And at long last, as he wrote to Gussie, he was “on the homestretch with Victory.”

Late in October, feeling the need again for a break, Saint-Gaudens invited two French friends to go with him on a visit to the famous cathedral at Amiens, north of Paris on the Somme River. He wanted especially to see the statues on the doorways of the west front, which were considered among the greatest of all Gothic sculpture.

Knowing Henry Adams’s interest in the subject, he invited him to join them. He had come to quite like Adams for all his prickly manner and obvious disdain for a large portion of humanity. Adams openly disliked much about his own country, just at the time when Saint-Gaudens was feeling more of a patriot than ever. Adams loathed bankers, robber barons, and the crass, boorish politicians he observed all about him in Washington. He was anti-Semitic, though he would get over that with time. But those who knew him knew how much heart and kindness were beneath the surface, and the brilliance of mind. Later, in a caricature relief, Saint-Gaudens would portray Adams as a porcupine—“Porcupine Poeticus”— to illustrate the “outward gruffness and inner gentleness” of the man.

More than a hundred years earlier, alone at a desk in Paris, Adams’s great-grandfather, John Adams, had written for those at home a statement of his purpose in life that had come down in the family as a kind of summons:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

For his part Henry Adams had produced a monumental, multivolume
History of the United States
, covering the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, that many then and later considered the finest American history ever written. Now he had ventured into the Middle Ages.

French cathedrals had had the same powerful effect on Adams as on Charles Sumner and others years before, when seeing the cathedral at Rouen for the first time. His travels and studies for his book had already
made him an authority on the subject, while to Saint-Gaudens it was all still new.

Adams had chosen to concentrate on Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, and had come to see architecture as an expression of the energy of a given age. The energy of the Middle Ages, he surmised, was the power of the image of the Virgin Mary, while at the center of his own time was the power of the electric dynamo.

As between the twelfth century and the approaching twentieth century, he had no difficulty recognizing which he preferred. “Every day opens new horizons and the rate we are going gets faster and faster till my twelfth century head spins, and I hang on to the straps and shut my eyes,” he would write to his friend Elizabeth Cameron.

(The automobile, considered a curiosity or toy only ten years earlier, could now be seen and heard all through Paris. A bicycle maker, Armand Peugeot, had introduced a French-built car in 1891. By 1895 there were more than two hundred Peugeot automobiles on the road, as well as others made by Louis Renault. On a single day in Paris in the spring of 1900, fifty “automobilists” were arrested for speeding.)

For Adams his day at Amiens with Saint-Gaudens would serve as part of what he would later call his “education,” but not because of the cathedral. As he was to write in his autobiographical
The Education of Henry Adams:

Not until they found themselves actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on Adams’s mind that, for his purposes, Saint-Gaudens on the spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself.

As for Saint-Gaudens’s two French friends, they were far too bourgeois for Adams, “conventional as death” and of no matter whatever.

Saint-Gaudens, Adams concluded, was a man of the Renaissance, the natural child of Benvenuto Cellini, the Italian sculptor who had worked under Michelangelo, in contrast to Adams himself, “a quintessence of Boston,” who through curiosity, not heredity, had come to think like Cellini.

Standing before the Virgin at Amiens, Adams felt her become for him “more than ever a channel of force,” while for Saint-Gaudens she remained only “a channel of taste.” The sculptor, Adams wrote, did not feel her as a power, “only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity. …”

Adams would later conclude that for a symbol of power, Saint-Gaudens “instinctively preferred the horse,” as was “plain” in the horse of his Sherman monument. “Doubtless Sherman also felt it so.” But at the time, in a letter to Elizabeth Cameron, Adams said that the cathedral at Amiens was “a new life” for Saint-Gaudens, that it “overpowered him.”

As expected, the Exposition Universelle of 1900 offered just about everything for everyone. The largest world’s fair yet, it covered nearly 250 acres on two sides of the Seine and included an American rolling sidewalk, a
trottoir roulant
, on which to get about, something never seen before. A glorious new Pont Alexandre III, as beautiful as any bridge in Paris, now spanned the river with a single arch to link the two sides of the fair-grounds. The first part of a new Paris metro system had been opened, and there was a Big Wheel to ride, a copy of the one built by George Ferris that had caused a sensation at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. And there was still, of course, the ever-popular Eiffel Tower, which had not been taken down for the very reason of its popularity.

Tickets for general admission to the fair were cheap, the equivalent of eleven cents. Attendance far exceeded even the record numbers set in 1889. Fifty million people would crowd through the gates this time.

The public response was overwhelmingly favorable. Newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic were filled with praise. American papers described the “number of smart, well-dressed persons” in attendance and Paris aglow with electric illumination.
Scientific American
magazine called the new Pont Alexandre III one of the most beautiful ever built.