The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  Appleton adored the restaurants and cafés of Paris, especially after dark when the light from their windows was like “the blaze of day.” He had made a point of dining at several of the finest, including the Rocher de Cancale, known for its oysters, and Tortoni’s, on the boulevard des Italiens, where in summer after the opera the haut ton flocked to “take ices.”

  “Cafés abound in Paris, particularly in the principal streets and the boulevards,” the newcomers read in their Galignani’s guidebook.

  It is impossible to conceive either their number, variety, or elegance, without having seen them. In no other city is there anything to resemble them; and they are not only unique, but in every way adapted for convenience and amusement.

  The most celebrated concentration was at the Palais Royal, where the modern restaurant had originated in the eighteenth century. The Café de Foy, the oldest and still one of the finest in Paris, Périgord, Café Corazza, and Véry were all in the Palais Royal. For the cost of a dinner at Véry, it was said, one could live comfortably in the provinces for a month. “Alas, my poor roasting and frying countrymen!” wrote Sanderson after dining at Véry and observing other Americans trying with equal difficulty to fathom the choices offered on the menu. “Your best way in this emergency,” he advised, “is to call the garçon and leave all to him, and sit still like a good child and take what is given to you.”

  The gaslit Café des Mille Colonnes outdid them all in mirrors, and the elegant Trois Frères Provençaux was where Holmes, Jackson, Warren, and others of the medical students convened regularly on Sundays. As much as the food and the wine, they relished the talk that went with such evenings in such an atmosphere. Talk helped one shape one’s thoughts, said Holmes, the greatest talker of the lot.

  At Véfour, which many considered the most beautiful, rows of tables were covered with snow-white cloths, and the garçons [waiters] dressed to match. Each had one jacket pocket filled with silver spoons, another with silver forks, a corkscrew in a vest pocket and a snow-white napkin, or serviette, on the left arm. The menu was the size of a newspaper.

  At the Café des Aveugles, below ground level, a small band of blind musicians played. The Café de la Paix was described in Galignani’s Guide as richly decorated and much frequented by “ladies of easy virtue and Parisian dandies of the second order.”

  The Palais Royal, Holmes liked to say, was to Paris what Paris was to Europe. If enjoyment was the object of life, as some philosophers held, no one spot in the world offered such a variety of choices. The principal restaurants and the shops shimmering with jewelry and Sèvres china were on the garden level, as well as shoemakers, linen drapers, waistcoat makers, and tailors. On the level above were still more restaurants and a number of gambling houses. Some of the gambling houses were “très élégantes,” and to the surprise of newly arrived Americans one saw “beautiful women engaged in various games of hazard.” Other establishments catered to a rougher trade. As Galignani’s Guide warned, in the Palais Royal were “haunts where the stranger, if he ventures to enter, should be upon his guard against the designs of the courtesan and the pickpocket.”

  (It was not that gambling went on at the Palais Royal only. It was everywhere and an unfamiliar spectacle for many Americans. In many states at home, gambling was a criminal offense. “Billiards, cards, faro, and other games of hazard, are to be found at every … street and alley of Paris,” wrote John Sanderson. “The shuffling of cards or rattling of dice is a part of the music of every Parisian saloon. …”)

  Prostitutes of varying degrees of sophistication, allure, and price maintained a conspicuous presence throughout much of the city wherever crowds congregated. But the young Americans said little or nothing on the subject in their letters or even in the privacy of their diaries. Dire warnings by parents and teachers weighed heavily, as did the dread of syphilis, and few wished to acknowledge succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh or even suggest that when in Paris one might do as the Parisians did.

  But then they were on their own as never before. “Young men are very fond of Paris no doubt,” wrote Emerson, “because of the perfect freedom—freedom from observation as well as interference—in which each one walks. …” There were, it seemed, some advantages after all to being a “stranger.”

  While making no case for prostitution, John Sanderson could not bring himself to disapprove of, let alone scorn, the young working women of Paris who, because of pitifully meager wages as shop clerks and the like, chose to make “arrangements.” These were the grisettes, so called because of the grey (grises) skirts and blouses they often wore.

  “They are very pretty, and have the laudable little custom of falling deeply in love with one for five or six francs a piece,” John Sanderson wrote. To many a student in the Latin Quarter, a grisette was “a branch of education.”

  If a student is ill, his faithful grisette nurses him and cures him; if he is destitute, she works for him. … Thus a mutual dependence endears them to each other; he defends her with his life, and sure of his protection, she feels her consequence and struts in her new starched cap. … She is the most ingenious imitation of an innocent woman that is in the world.

  If a young man’s morals were “out of order” at home, Paris was not exactly the place to send him, Sanderson conceded. To keep a mistress was not only acceptable in Paris society, but was nearly always mentioned to one’s credit.

  If you can preserve him by religious and other influences from either, as well as from the dangers of an ascetic and solitary abstinence—for solitude has its vices as well as dissipation— so much the better. He will be a better husband, a better citizen, and a better man. But let me tell you that to educate a young man of fortune and leisure to live through a youth of honesty, has become excessively difficult even in any country; and to expect that with money and address he will live entirely honest in Paris, where women of good quality are thrown in his face—women of art, of beauty, and refined education—it is to attribute virtues to human nature she is no way entitled to.

  Any problems or complaints the Americans had were comparatively few and seldom of great or lasting consequence. The long delay in mail from home remained a constant annoyance, and at times a worry. Family and friends were repeatedly urged to write, yet time after time when one went to pick up the mail, there was nothing. Months could pass with not a word from home. Emma Willard grew so distraught over this she was nearly ill, as she wrote to her sister. “My anxiety deprives me of sleep, and preys upon my health.”

  Many, like Charles Sumner, found winter’s cold, unrelieved greyness— la grisouille, as it was called—more nearly than they could take. Emerson thought Paris unduly expensive. Nathaniel Willis thought one’s time as well as one’s money disappeared much too fast. Others besides Holmes did not care for the English men and women they met, and none of the Americans liked being taken for English.

  Sumner hated seeing so many soldiers about the streets, the public gardens, and standing guard at every museum and palace. It seemed nearly impossible to be out of sight of soldiers. They were part of the picture, and this took getting used to.

  Emma Willard was appalled to learn that more than a third of the children in Paris were born out of wedlock. During a visit to the Hospice des Enfants-Trouvés, the Hospital for Foundlings, seeing the numbers of babies ranged in rows of cribs, she was heartstricken, exactly as Abigail Adams had been on a similar tour long before. Like Abigail Adams, Mrs. Willard was touched by the devotion shown by the nuns to the care of the infants, but felt there had to be something dreadfully amiss about a society in which so many babies were abandoned.

  But the long-awaited letters from home nearly always arrived. Charles Sumner found relief from the cold by moving to different lodgings. Those short of money seemed to find ways to get by. Those like Emma Willard and John Sanderson, who had left home in quest of better health, found their health greatly improved.

  “On prend l’essence de la vie dans la ville.” “One captures
the essence of life in the city,” the French said. To be in Paris was to have the world at one’s feet—“le monde à ses pieds.”

  Wendell Holmes adjusted to the new life so quickly and easily it took him by surprise. Of all the young Americans none adapted to Paris so readily and enthusiastically. He felt entirely at home, as if he had always lived in Paris, which was remarkable, given he had known nothing the least like his new life. He had no trouble learning French, and from his friends among the French students he quickly picked up on the “little practical matters” that helped him make the most of the city, including “economy,” he assured his parents:

  An American or Englishman when he first comes to Paris … is always extravagant and this for two reasons—first, because he is under an excitement to find himself in a strange place and indifferent to the base motive of economy, and next because he is totally ignorant of the thousand expedients for avoiding expense which have sprung from the philosophy of the Parisians. Thus he pays his garçon (servant) double what he ought to, he gives money to the little rascally beggars who never dare to ask a Frenchman. He takes a cabriolet when he should take an omnibus. He calls for twice as much at the restaurants as he wants—ignorant, poor creature, that while an Englishman values everything in proportion to its price, the Frenchman’s eulogy is “magnifique et pas cher!”

  Holmes liked the French. He adored the food and enjoyed especially congenial gathering places like the Café Procope, close to the École de Médecine, which everyone knew was once a favorite of Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. It had been started in 1670 by a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio del Cotillo, who was said to have introduced coffee to Paris.

  “I am getting more and more a Frenchman,” Holmes told his parents. “I love to talk French, to eat French, to drink French every now and then. …” Paris was “paradise”—though, to be sure, a very different variety of paradise than envisioned in Boston. For years afterward Holmes would delight in quoting a remark of Appleton’s, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”

  Appleton, who rarely ceased having a good time, chose after a month or so to move on and see more of Europe as he had always intended. But in 1836 he was back again when his father decided to bring five of the family to Europe in grand style, which included a suite of rooms at the famous Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli overlooking the Garden of the Tuileries. On the question of whether to be a painter or a writer, Appleton remained unresolved, and as it turned out, for all his considerable talent for both, he would be neither seriously. Nor would he ever settle for any fixed occupation. His father advised him not to be overly concerned about money and thanks to his father’s fortune, he never had to be. He would continue as he had right along, writing and painting for his own pleasure, a convivial devotee of the arts, generous with his money, beloved for his wit, his gift for talk and for friendship. He was too devoted to Boston ever to choose the life of an expatriate, but he would travel to Europe and return to Paris time after time, never able to get enough of it.

  For the rest there was work at hand and for all the limitless fascination and pleasures of Paris, the work mattered foremost and consumed much the greatest part of all their time and energy. Work was their reason for being there, and they never lost sight of that. Like the young Boston artist George Healy, they had a strong desire to make something of themselves, and with few exceptions they were working longer hours and with far greater concentration than ever in their lives. Even James Cooper, who had already made something of himself, not only completed The Prairie, the third of his “Leather-Stocking” novels, but six other books as well. Some days, according to his wife, Susan, he worked such long hours and became so agitated he could hardly hold his pen.

  Samuel Morse, who arrived in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1830, had gone at once, predictably, to the Louvre and walked up and down the Grand Gallery for three hours, trying in his excitement to take it all in and decide which paintings to copy. Two weeks later he left for Italy, not returning until the following year and thus missing the July Revolution. But in September 1831, he returned, and that autumn at the Louvre conceived the idea for what was to be the most difficult, ambitious painting of his career.

  George Healy had done little else but “study hard.” How exactly he managed to get by—with scarcely any money and speaking no French at first—he never said. “But manage he did,” a daughter would one day write. Somehow he talked his way into the studio, or atelier, of the then-celebrated painter Baron Antoine-Jean Gros. He was the sole American student, but having set up his easel, he became to all intents and purposes, in his daughter’s words, a French painter, seeing things from a French point of view. “He lived like his comrades, whom he greatly liked. … It was often a hard life, but a singularly interesting and varied one also.”

  True to his assignment from the NewYork Mirror, Nathaniel Willis kept turning out his letters, as did John Sanderson in his effort to be, as he said, “the Boswell of Paris.” Sanderson went home to stay in 1836. His book Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends; by an American Gentleman in Paris, as descriptive and delightful as anything on the subject by any American of the day, would be widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. It was published in Philadelphia in 1838, and in London that same year under the title The American in Paris. A French edition appeared in Paris in 1843.

  Emma Willard never slackened in a busy social schedule that included Lafayette and Cooper and their families and grand soirées sufficient to feast her eyes on diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and ostrich feathers beyond anything she had ever imagined. She studied and approved highly the attention given to elevated conversation in such society. She spent more time at the Louvre. She undertook her own survey of French schools and arranged to stay longer than planned. “It seems as if a spell was laid upon me that I cannot go from this place,” she explained. Before departing at last for home in the spring of 1831, her head filled with so much that she had seen and learned, she recruited a first teacher of French for her school, Madame Alphise de Courval. As would be said of Emma Willard, few people ever derived more benefit from a time abroad, and “the effect was speedily seen in the renewed éclat of the Troy Female Seminary.”

  Sumner, the ultimate industrious scholar, never let up attending lectures at the Sorbonne—on natural history, geology, geography, Egyptology, Greek history, the history of the English Parliament, the history of philosophy, Latin poetry, criminal law, the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the Justinian Code—and made time as well to sit in on lectures at the hospitals. He had been as determined in his efforts to master French as he was about nearly everything, and after a month, with the help of two tutors, he was able to follow the lectures with little difficulty. In six weeks he was taking part in conversations in French with students and faculty alike and on all manner of subjects.

  CHAPTER THREE

  MORSE AT THE LOUVRE

  My country has the most prominent place in my thoughts. How shall I raise her name?

  —SAMUEL F. B. MORSE

  I

  Never during his time abroad had James Fenimore Cooper had so much to report about a friend and fellow countryman as he did now about Samuel Morse. Morse was “hard at work” at the Louvre, Cooper wrote in one letter. Morse “has created a sensation” at the Louvre, he said in another. “He is painting an exhibition picture that I feel certain must take.” Beyond that, Morse was “just as good a fellow as there is going.”

  The “good fellows” of life mattered greatly to Cooper. “Friends are rare in any land,” he had his frontiersman hero, Natty Bumppo, observe in The Prairie, and those he counted as friends knew his many kindnesses and genuine interest in their aspirations and concerns. He was a great organizer of clubs, a most faithful correspondent.

  Cooper and Morse had met first at a reception at the White House seven years earlier, at the time of Lafayette’s visit, and found how much they had in common. Back in New York they saw more of each other. But as often happens to
sojourners far from home in foreign lands, their time together, first in Italy, now in France, had led to a fast friendship.

  Growing up in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Samuel Finley Breese Morse had been known in the family as Finley. To Cooper he was Samuel, or Master Samuel, or plain Morse, and there was no mistaking Cooper’s pride in him. “Crowds get round the picture, for Samuel has quite made a hit in the Louvre,” Cooper wrote to William Dunlap, a painter and art critic in New York who would, Cooper knew, spread the word among their “set” at home.

  It was the month of March in the year of 1832—a year that would prove to be one of the most calamitous in the history of Paris—and well before such other Americans as Wendell Holmes, George Healy, and Charles Sumner arrived on the scene. The weather, as Nathaniel Willis noted, was “deliciously spring-like.”

  At age forty-two, having spent half his life as an artist, Samuel Morse felt he had at last reached his stride, and that his time in Europe had already been of immeasurable value. During a year and more in Italy he had spent long days working in the Vatican galleries and other museums. He studied paintings, made copies on commission, including one of Raphael’s School of Athens, for which he was to receive $100. He did landscapes, filled notebooks with sketches of and comments on churches, street scenes, and processions. At the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, a sixteenth-century portrait by Veronese had awakened him as no painting ever had to a new understanding of color.