The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  Framing the north side of the garden was a long row of handsome townhouses that lined the new rue de Rivoli, and from an elevated terrace running the length of the north side one could see the beautiful Place Vendôme with its immense, bronze column made of melted-down cannon taken by Napoleon’s army at the battle of Austerlitz. To the west, past the octagonal pond, was the enormous Place Louis XV, or Place de la Concorde, where once the guillotine had stood, and beyond the long perspective of the Champs-Élysées extended upward to the giant, but still uncompleted Arc de Triomphe.

  On the south rim of the garden another elevated terrace offered strollers an uninterrupted view of the Seine. On this same terrace Thomas Jefferson had settled himself day after day to watch construction of the domed Hôtel de Salm across the river, so “smitten” by its neoclassical elegance that he would later rebuild his own Monticello to achieve a similar look.

  Galignani’s Guide proclaimed the Garden of the Tuileries “the most fashionable promenade in Paris,” and late afternoon was the time to see the show. Even the plump “Citizen King,” Louis-Philippe himself, could occasionally be seen out for a stroll, looking very like the banker he once was, in top hat and black frock coat and carrying a green umbrella.

  For many who frequented the garden, whether to walk or to linger comfortably on a shaded bench or hired chair, the children were the favorite part of the show, all happily laughing and running about, and all amazingly (to the Americans) chattering away in French, while watched over by immaculate, full-skirted Swiss maids. “I have been there repeatedly since I have been in Paris, and have seen nothing like the children,” Nathaniel Willis reported to his readers in the NewYork Mirror. “They move my heart always, more than anything under heaven.” It was enough to make one forget Napoleon and his wars.

  But then Paris was a continuing lesson in the enjoyment to be found in such simple, unhurried occupations as a walk in a garden or watching children at play or just sitting observing the human cavalcade. One learned to take time to savor life, much as one took time to savor a good meal or glass of wine. The French called it “l’entente de la vie,” the harmony of life.

  John Sanderson, watching the parade of fashionable women on the wide path of the Garden, said, “I never venture in here without saying that part of the Lord’s Prayer about temptation. …”

  Sanderson kept thinking how much city life at home could be improved by public spaces of such beauty. At home the value of city property was reckoned almost exclusively by what could be built on it. Independence Square, he had heard Philadelphians calculate, was worth a thousand dollars a foot, “every inch of it.” Pride in new railroads and the like too often lead Americans to measure value by the capacity to answer some practical, physical need. “Utility with all her arithmetic very often miscalculates,” he wrote.

  Let us have gardens, then, and other public places where we may see our friends, and parade our vanities, if you will, before the eyes of the world. Did you ever know anyone who was not delighted with a garden?

  Sooner or later all the newly arrived Americans crossed the Seine to walk the labyrinth of narrow streets in the Latin Quarter. Or to see the great inner courtyard of the Sorbonne, or the Luxembourg Palace and its magnificent gardens. Or take in the “curiosities” at the Jardin des Plantes, including the famous Zarafa, the only giraffe in all of France, which stood eleven and a half feet high, even higher when she stretched her neck.

  The quantities of books to be browsed among in one little shop after another, and the low prices, even for rare books, were astonishing. A student could buy “a library on the street from a quarter of a mile of books at six sous a volume,” reported an exuberant Sanderson. “I have just bought Rousseau in calf, octavo, at ten sous!”

  Here, too, in the Latin Quarter were the poor. Compared to the Right Bank, it stood apart “as if the city of some other people.”

  To the west, on the same side of the river, was the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the Seventh Arrondissement, the quiet neighborhood where Cooper and his family lived. Farther beyond stood the Hôtel des Invalides, the immense gold-domed barracks and military hospital built in the days of Louis XIV.

  Père Lachaise, the city’s largest, most famous cemetery, was a good walk back over the river to the northeast. There one could stroll among weeping willows and some 50,000 grave markers and the marble tombs of the eminent dead of France.

  Or for those with the stomach for it, there was another popular attraction of which no mention was to be found in Galignani’s Guide. At the Paris morgue on the Île-de-la-Cité unidentified bodies taken from the Seine were regularly put on public display. Most of the bodies had been caught in a net stretched across the river for that purpose downstream at Saint-Cloud. Some were murder victims, but the great majority were suicides. Stripped of their clothes, they lay stretched out on black marble tables, on the chance someone might claim them. Otherwise, after three days, they were sold to doctors for ten francs each. Crowds of people came to see. As Sanderson noted, “You can stop in on your way as you go to the flower market, which is just opposite.”

  Joining the throngs of promenading Parisians, the Americans walked the length of the Grand Avenue of the Champs-Élysées, nearly two miles, from the Place de la Concorde gently uphill to where Napoleon’s colossal Arc de Triomphe, under construction since 1806, was at long last nearing completion. On a fine Sunday three or four thousand elegant carriages went rolling by on the avenue, in a show of fancy horses and the latest high fashions.

  At a corner along the way, at the rue de Berri, stood the stone mansion where Jefferson had resided. Another few miles beyond the city was what had once been Benjamin Franklin’s splendid estate on an elevated setting in the village of Passy. Less than a mile beyond that, at Auteuil, was the mansion where John and Abigail Adams had lived.

  Such reminders of their own history were particularly refreshing for the Americans, engulfed as they were every day by a French past infinitely richer. A lightning rod Franklin installed at his estate at Passy was still to be seen. As the Americans were pleased to learn, it had been the first lightning rod in all of France.

  In his Notre-Dame de Paris, describing the view from the top of the great cathedral, Victor Hugo had written that in all the eye could see there was “nothing that did not belong to the art of architecture.” And from the countless miles they covered at ground level, and all they took in, the Americans, too, came to see and appreciate how much of the transcending appeal of Paris, the spell of Paris, derived from light, color, and architecture.

  It was not just that they had never known a city of such size or variety, or with so much history, but they had never known one where the look and mood could be so strikingly different in different light. The Seine could be any of a dozen shades of mud-brown or chalky green, gleaming silver or a deep indigo, depending on the time of year, the time of day, or simply whether the sun was out. The change could be astonishing, theatrical. In the gloom of winter, sand-colored bridges and palaces could look as leaden as the skies overhead, just as in full sunshine—even in winter— the same bridges and palaces would glow with such golden warmth it was as if they were lit from within.

  Naturally most Americans, unlike their countryman Cooper, greatly preferred Paris in sunshine. It was then—and there was no better time than late afternoon—when the gardens were at their loveliest, when strong, brilliant light and the sharpness of shadows presented great façades and belfries, gilded domes and chimney pots, at their best, vividly defining their character. Then especially it became manifest that whether the mode was the Gothic Hugo adored, or the Baroque or classical, architects built with light no less than with brick and stone.

  Nathaniel Willis, having spent his first week walking the city in drizzling rain, said that when the sun burst forth at last it so changed all his previous impressions that he had to set off and see it all a second time. “And it seemed to me another city,” he wrote. “I never realized so forcibly the bea
uty of sunshine. Architecture, particularly, is nothing without it.”

  II

  The glories of the art of architecture, of the arts on all sides, in and out of doors, the conviction of the French that the arts were indispensable to the enjoyment and meaning of life, affected the Americans more than anything else about Paris, and led many to conclude their own country had a long way to go. Something had awakened within them. Most would never again look upon life in the same way, as they said themselves repeatedly in so many words.

  Charles Sumner found himself feeling “cabined, cribbed, confined” by his own ignorance of art, but on a second visit to the Louvre during which he concentrated his attention on works by Raphael and Leonardo, he felt the thrill of a great awakening. “They touched my mind, untutored as it is, like a rich strain of music.”

  To his amazement, John Sanderson had begun to love art almost as much as he loved nature. “In our own country, we have nothing yet to show in the way of great works of art,” he wrote. “It is a mighty advantage these old countries have over us.”

  To judge by their letters and journals, and the unabashed enthusiasm expressed, the performing arts surpassed anything the Americans had ever seen or imagined. They could hardly get enough of the opera and theater. Some, it would seem, went nearly every night.

  “The evening need never hang heavy on the stranger’s hands,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, having dispensed altogether with his initial misgivings about Paris. The very air now seemed charged with excitement. “More than twenty theaters are blazing with light and echoing with fine music … not to mention concerts … shows innumerable,” he wrote. “The theater is the passion of the French and the taste and splendor of their dramatic exhibitions can hardly be exceeded.”

  There were two opera houses, both exuberantly ornate and spacious: the Théâtre Italien, on the Place des Italiens, where Italian opera was performed, and the Salle Le Peletier, home to the company now known as the Paris Opera, at that time sometimes called the Grand Opéra and known, too, for its corps de ballet.

  Faultlessly attired and wearing a turban, Emma Willard went escorted by her son to the Italian Opera for a performance of Otello. She was pleased especially with the vantage point of their box seats, not so much for the view of the stage as the show of “genteel society,” as she was frank to say. She later described the richly carved and gilded embellishments of the theater, the crimson curtain, the gorgeously lighted chandeliers. And the music, when it began, was much to her liking. But the audience interested her far more, and having had the foresight to bring “an excellent eyeglass,” she studied every detail, every gesture.

  I never saw so many well dressed ladies together before; but it was not so much new forms of things which I saw as it was a greater perfection of material, of making and putting on. In manners also, one remarks a difference between these people and those we see at home under similar circumstances. All seem to live not for themselves, but for others. Nobody looks dreamy—but all are animated—gentlemen are on alert if a glove or fan is dropped, and ladies never forget the appropriate nod, or smile of thanks.

  Mrs. Willard approved entirely the French regard for fashion as an art unto itself. “We may make many valuable improvements from the instruction of French women in regard to dress, which after all is no unimportant affair to a woman.”

  It is incredible what a nice eye a French woman has for dress and personal appearance. It is like a musician whose ear has become so acute that he discovers discords where to ordinary persons there seems perfect harmony.

  Charles Sumner made a point of going to a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, notwithstanding that he could claim no more knowledge of music than of painting. The part of Don Ottavio was sung by Giovanni Battista Rubini, the leading Italian tenor of the day, but Sumner was surprised to find himself carried away by the “singular power” of all the performers. He had never heard anything like it, never known such feelings as swept over him.

  While the Paris Opera was second to none in all of Europe in its elaborate scenery and costuming, and the glitter of the audience was no less than at the Italian Opera, it was the dazzling Marie Taglioni, considered the greatest dancer in the world, that “tout Paris” turned out for, filling all 1,300 seats of the Salle Le Peletier performance after performance. “Have you seen Taglioni?” was often the first question a foreign visitor was asked on arriving in Paris.

  Her Italian father, Philippe Taglioni, a famous maître de ballet, had started her dancing as a child, and by age twenty-three she had made her debut at the Paris Opera. She had dark hair and large, luminous dark eyes. Her skin was uncommonly pale, her arms and legs uncommonly long and thin. By the time someone like Nathaniel Willis saw her perform, she was in her late twenties but looked younger. She had been one of the first to dance on the tips of her toes, and was known for her floating leaps and for her costume, with its tight bodice and short gauzy skirt, the prototype of the tutu. So lavish was the praise for her beauty and artistry that many went to see her for the first time wondering whether they might be disappointed.

  “No language can describe her motion,” wrote Nathaniel Willis after seeing her in the role of the dancing girl in Le Dieu et la Bayadère, the part that had made her famous. “She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke, or a flake of down. Her difficulty seems to be to keep to the floor.”

  Her figure is small, but rounded to the very last degree of perfection; not a muscle swelled beyond the exquisite outline; not an angle, not a fault. … Her face is most strangely interesting, not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half-retiring sweetness that you sometimes see blended with the secluded reserve and unconscious refinement of young girls just “out” in a circle of high fashion.

  John Sanderson felt utter joy watching her. He had never seen anything to compare. “Mercy! How deficient we are in our country in these elegant accomplishments. In many things we are still in our infancy, in dancing we are not yet born.”

  Nathaniel Willis wondered to what degree the response of an audience enhanced the quality of a performance on stage. Taglioni’s performance was a triumph of art, and she was applauded as an artist, but then the “overwhelming tumult of acclamation” she received for her most brilliant moments came from “the hearts of the audience, and as such must have been both a lesson and the highest compliment for Taglioni.” Here, he thought, was the great contrast with the theater at home. “We shall never have a high-toned drama in America, while, as at present, applause is won only by physical exertion, and the nice touches of genius and nature pass undetected and unfelt.”

  What Willis appreciated most about the French theater was that the actors did not look like actors, or play their parts as if acting. He liked their naturalness, their “unstudied” facial expressions. “And when they come upon stage, it is singularly without affectation, and as the character they represent would appear.”

  Wendell Holmes and his fellow medical students, for all the pressures on them in their studies, took time to attend both the opera and the theater. Even James Jackson, Jr., the most intense of students, went along. By “indulging” himself this way, he was better able to study and maintain his health, he assured his father, knowing his father’s own love of music.

  Indeed, while at the opera, I long for your company almost as much as while at the hospital, as I feel in both places how strongly you would sympathize with me—for I did not know what music was in America and I assure you I will not allow myself to neglect it altogether here. …

  Like others, Holmes and Jackson wrote dutifully to their parents every week, sometimes comparing notes with one another in the process. “James Jackson has just come up to my room to write home a letter, and reminded me that I must have one ready for the next packet,” Holmes began one letter. “Well, here we are, Jackson at my desk and I at my table, both of us in a little hurry, but not willing to let the day pass without our weekly tribute.”

  Of the many theaters in Paris, the fa
mous old Théâtre Français, adjacent to the Palais Royal, was foremost and immensely popular largely because of Mademoiselle Mars, who was to French drama of the time what Taglioni was to dance. Here were performed the great classical French works—the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Molière—and in the finest style and according to strict rules. For the Americans intent on learning French, it was common practice to bring along a copy of the play to follow what was being said. Such theater was indispensable to the intelligent foreigner, Holmes explained to his parents, both as a guide to French manners and as “the best standard” of the language. In consideration of his parents’ views on such matters, he added, “There is no need of cutting or tearing off this last page about theaters—where society is far advanced they must exist and are a blessing.”

  Mademoiselle Mars, whose real name was Anne Françoise Boutet, had been an unrivaled favorite on the French stage for nearly thirty years and had made Molière her pièce de résistance. Her pronunciation was considered the finest model of classic French.

  “Molière could not have had a proper conception of his own genius, not having seen Mademoiselle Mars,” wrote Sanderson, who had waited in line for more than two hours to buy a ticket. Charles Sumner saw her in Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes. “Her voice is like a silver flute, her eye like a gem.” He knew he would remember the evening as long as he lived.

  And following the theater, there was more. “Thousands in merry moods throng the walks,” wrote Thomas Appleton, who had no medical studies to cope with, and few if any worries about spending money. His wealthy father, a Boston merchant, banker, and textile manufacturer, had told him there was no reason to deny himself whatever was “comfortable.”