The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  Two more historical novels followed: The Pilot, a sea story, and Lionel Lincoln, set in Boston at the time of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

  Natty Bumppo appeared again in The Last of the Mohicans, where again the setting was upstate New York, only this time it was the New York wilderness of sixty years earlier, during the French and Indian War, and Natty, a scout, was in the prime of life. Cooper had written The Last of the Mohicans at top speed in three or four months. It was intense, romantic, filled with violence and bloodshed, as Natty, now also known as Hawkeye, and a Mohican friend, Chingachgook, escorted two sisters, the daughters of a British general, in a flight through the forest. Long descriptive passages of the wild American scenery—of river and waterfall and “the vast canopy of woods”—stirred readers as nothing else had by an American writer, and the book was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic.

  It appeared in 1826, the year Cooper sailed for France and was already at work on still another Natty Bumppo tale called The Prairie. “I think Pioneers, Mohicans, and this book will form a connected series,” Cooper told a friend. “I confess Prairie is a favorite as far as it goes. …”

  By the time he and the family were settled in Paris, he had become America’s most famous author. Morse would write of seeing Cooper’s books in the windows of every bookshop in the city. Not since the days of Benjamin Franklin had an American been so welcomed and liked— attention Cooper loved, not just for himself, but for his country.

  He and Susan became frequent guests of honor at dinners given by Lafayette at his mansion on the rue d’Anjou, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and were treated to overnight visits at La Grange, the general’s towered, fifteenth-century château southeast of the city. They were made the center of attention at diplomatic dinners and lavish entertainments, after which Cooper filled pages of correspondence describing the “splendors”— the setting, the food, the eminence of those present. He was hailed as the American Walter Scott, a comparison intended as a high compliment, but which privately he disliked. Artists and sculptors asked him to sit for them.

  As much as he enjoyed such attention and acclaim, Cooper was far from enamored with “the mere butterflies” of Paris society. Taken by Lafayette to be “presented,” he found King Louis-Philippe perfectly courteous and was glad to hear him speak with pleasure of his time in America. But for others he encountered, Cooper had little use. “The fear of losing their butterfly distinctions and their tinsel gives great uneasiness to many of these simpletons,” he wrote privately.

  Yet Cooper loved Paris. There was no denying that. He liked living there and working there—finding himself subjected to fewer distractions than in New York—and took particular satisfaction in the education his children were receiving.

  The contrast between the author’s stately home and way of life, and the setting of the tale he was writing in The Prairie, could hardly have been more pronounced. This time, in The Prairie, Natty Bumppo was an old man who, to keep ahead of the advancing tide of settlement, had moved steadily westward, beyond the forests, beyond the Mississippi, just as Daniel Boone had in the last part of his life. No one had dramatized American history in such fashion. “It is a weary path, indeed,” Cooper had Natty say, “and much I have seen, and something have I suffered in journeying over it.” Even on the open prairie, Natty found it getting “crowdy.”

  That such a story in such a setting, an empty landscape with no visible history, could have been written in Paris would strike some readers as absurdly incongruous. To Cooper, wherever he found himself, it was “a point of honor to continue rigidly as an American author.”

  Meanwhile, he was being remunerated as no American author had been. The French edition of The Last of the Mohicans kept “gaining ground daily.” He was making money and saving money as never before. By 1832 he reckoned his financial prospects for the year ahead were something on the order of $20,000, and $20,000 in Europe went a long way.

  To other Americans in Paris, his presence, his success and fame, were a matter of much pride. He was “our countryman Cooper,” and that he remained so distinctly American—and made no effort to conceal his prosperity—made them prouder still. A young medical student from North Carolina named Ashbel Smith, befriended by the Coopers, wrote that Cooper “more than anyone” was “the American par excellence,” adding, “And what is of importance in Paris, he lives in fine style.”

  Indeed, Cooper and family—his wife, four girls, and a boy, plus three or four servants—occupied two well-appointed, spacious floors of a Louis XVI mansion, or a hôtel particulier, at 59 rue Saint-Dominique in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the Seventh Arrondissement, “a very distingué part of the town,” as Susan explained in a letter to her sister. Cooper’s was an altogether new kind of American success story. Such splendor for a writer!

  The salon is near thirty feet in length, and seventeen feet high [Cooper wrote]. It is paneled in wood, and above all the doors … are allegories painted on canvas, and enclosed in wrought gilded frames. Four large mirrors are fixtures, and the windows are vast and descend to the floor.

  The salon, or parlor, with its long French windows, was on the second level, “adjoining Mr. Cooper’s library,” Susan reported. The dining room, on the floor below, opened onto a garden. “We are very comfortable, very quiet, and overlook a half dozen gardens besides our own, which besides being very agreeable, gives us good air.”

  The children were doing splendidly well with their music and art lessons. All five could by now “prattle like natives” in French, Italian, and German. Even the youngest, seven-year-old Paul, spoke the three languages and could read them with ease, as his father loved to boast.

  But the glittering social whirl of their first years in Paris had become a thing of the past. “We [are] … very retired, don’t go out much and see but little company,” Susan wrote. Her health was the customary explanation, but neither of them cared for fashionable society, and Cooper’s trouble with crowded rooms may have been no less a factor than her lingering ailments. “Instead of seeking society,” he had written to a friend, “I am compelled to draw back from it, on account of my health and my pursuits.” He had grown weary of the fuss the French made over him.

  “The people seem to think it marvelous that an American can write.” Most of them appeared ignorant that any book had ever been published in America, “except by Dr. Franklin and M. Cooper Américain, as they call me.”

  Though they rarely accepted an invitation, he and Susan regularly entertained such favorites among the “American circle” as Morse, Nathaniel Willis, Horatio Greenough (whenever he was in Paris), and Ashbel Smith, as well as those of any nationality sympathetic to Polish freedom, a cause Cooper fervently embraced. Willis would describe the uniquely generous hospitality of a Cooper breakfast for the Polish-American Committee, where, as probably nowhere else that side of the Atlantic, the guests were treated to hot buckwheat pancakes.

  Every American welcomed into the enclave of the Coopers seems to have treasured the experience. “Some of the best hours are spent with Mr. Cooper and his family,” Emma Willard had written. “I find in him what I do not in all who bear the name American, a genuine American spirit.”

  Morse became such an established presence it was as if he were part of the household. At the close of his day at the Louvre, he and Cooper would walk home to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to join the family for dinner and conversation into the night. Morse began giving the Coopers’ daughter Sue drawing lessons, which naturally inclined some to think he had more than a passing interest in her, gossip that soon reached New York and may have been true. Writing to her sister in January 1832, Susan Cooper seemed to go out of her way to stress that “our worthy friend, Mr. Morse” was drawn “more by the attraction of the father than the daughter.” Cooper insisted that his friend Morse, though “an excellent man,” was not “one to captivate a fine young woman of twenty.”

  Morse lived modestly in a few small rooms on a side street, th
e rue de Surène, on the Right Bank, which, to meet expenses, he shared with another American artist named Richard Habersham. Except for his evenings with the Coopers, he appears to have had no other life in Paris apart from his work at the Louvre—no theater, no opera, no convivial evenings at restaurants, no social life of any kind. Still, he and Cooper saw each other, as he recorded, “daily … almost hourly” in these “eventful years” of 1831, 1832.

  They had much in common. Both were the sons of prominent fathers. Both had attended Yale and were of roughly the same age. Both were talented, ambitious, and bright. Each considered himself a historian in his way. Each was devout in his Protestant faith, Morse more so than Cooper, and fittingly for the son of a preacher, he would have preferred that Cooper were more religious. Morse gave time to prayer every day and saw the unfolding of his life, his burdens and struggles, the decisions he made, in religious terms. That Cooper said grace at meals and read family prayers every evening apparently did not suffice.

  Both loved music—Cooper played the flute, Morse the piano—and both took with utmost seriousness their roles as gentlemen, “gentlemen in all republican simplicity,” in Cooper’s phrase. It was how they had been raised and educated. If asked, they would have said that, as Americans abroad, gentlemanly deportment was of even greater importance, since they were a reflection on their country.

  (The question of what constituted a gentleman was given serious consideration by other Americans who came to Paris. Wendell Holmes decided, after looking at Titian’s painting at the Louvre of the young man with a glove in his hand, that Titian “understood the look of a gentleman as well as anyone that ever lived.”)

  Cooper’s father, William, remembered as a kind of “genius in land speculation,” had served as the first judge of Otsego County and was twice elected to Congress. He had known George Washington. Gilbert Stuart had painted his portrait. His famous son would recall with affection “my noble-looking, warm-hearted father” who could “lighten the way with his anecdote and fun.”

  Morse’s father, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, was of an entirely different variety, a Congregational clergyman and scholar known across the country and abroad as “the father of American geography.” He was the author of Geography Made Easy and The American Geography. His Elements of Geography, for children, was a standard in nearly every school. When young Samuel entered Yale as a freshman, he was at once, inevitably, nicknamed “Geography” Morse.

  Cooper had been expelled from Yale by the time Morse arrived at age fourteen, and while Morse graduated with the class of 1810, he was only a fair student. His younger brothers, who followed him to Yale, were, as he acknowledged, “very steady and good scholars” and “much esteemed.” He was always short of money, and continuously begging his parents for more, which, it happened, was exactly as it had been for his father when he was at Yale.

  That Samuel had a lively mind was obvious. But with the exception of some courses in science, he had shown little serious interest in his studies. In one way only had he distinguished himself as an undergraduate, and that was in drawing and painting. Already he was doing miniature portraits for a dollar a piece.

  But much differed between Cooper and Morse. Cooper was famous; Morse was not. Cooper had made himself fluent in French, Morse continued to struggle with the language. Morse had no family with him, nothing remotely like the financial security Cooper enjoyed. For Morse there had been no late awakening to what he wanted to make of his life. He had not just shown a knack for painting at Yale; he had known then that he must be an artist. “I was made for a painter,” he told his parents at age nineteen, and pleaded for money enough to study under one of the most accomplished young artists of the time, Washington Allston of Boston.

  For years his parents had worried that he was “unsteady.” “Attend to one thing at a time,” the Reverend Morse preached repeatedly. The “steady and undissipated attention to one object” was the “sure mark of a superior genius.” But when the boy declared he wanted to “attend” to painting as his “one object,” his parents found that unacceptable. Best that he form no plans, his father wrote. “Your mama and I have been thinking and planning for you.”

  From the pulpit of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, Jedidiah Morse espoused an unyielding, orthodox Calvinism and sent his sons to his alma mater, in large part because Yale remained free from the corruptions of the new liberal Unitarianism espoused at Harvard. With his long, pale, Puritan face he seemed severe and humorless as the grave, as well as exceptionally learned. At home “Papa” preached hard work and frugality, dutiful obedience to parents and gratitude for the blessings of heaven. Samuel’s mother, Elizabeth Morse, was of the same mind, but more plainspoken. The daughter of a New Jersey judge, granddaughter of the president of Princeton College, she had “no use of Segars or Brandy or Wine or anything of the kind,” as she had reminded Samuel during his college years. “The main business of life is to prepare for death,” she told him.

  As he well knew, she had had more than her share of experience with death’s reality. Of the eleven children she had given birth to, only three, Samuel and his two brothers, Sidney and Richard, had survived.

  That Jedidiah and Elizabeth Morse were also attentive, warmhearted parents who cared deeply for their three sons and their welfare, the three sons would have been the first to confirm. And so it was that in a matter of months after Samuel’s return home from Yale, having seen at first hand how intent was his desire to make the most of what God-given talent he had, they acquiesced. Not only could he study under Washington Allston, he could, as Allston strongly urged, go to London with him and his wife to study there.

  To an acquaintance in London, the Reverend Morse wrote as follows, by way of an introduction for his son. The letter also said much about the father:

  His parents had designed him for a different profession, but his inclination for the one he has chosen was so strong, and his talents for it, in the opinion of some good judges, so promising, that we thought it not proper to attempt to control his choice.

  In this country, young in the arts, there are few means of improvement. These are to be found in their perfection only in older countries, and in none, perhaps, greater than yours. In compliance, therefore, with his earnest wishes and those of his friend and patron, Mr. Allston (with whom he goes to London), we have consented to make the sacrifice of feeling (not a small one), and a pecuniary exertion to the utmost of our ability, for the purpose of placing him under the best advantage of becoming eminent in his profession, in the hope that he will consecrate his acquisitions to the glory of God and the best good of his fellow men.

  In contrast to James Cooper, who had taken up the pen at age thirty and burst virtually full-blown as a successful writer, having had no training or served any sort of apprenticeship, Morse spent four years in London, working as he never had, driven, as he said, by a desire to “shine.”

  His progress under Allston’s tutelage was astonishing. Allston, who was in his early thirties, was himself hard at it and painting better than he ever had, and this Morse found thrilling to behold. As a teacher, Allston was exceedingly demanding. His critiques could be “mortifying,” Morse wrote, “when I have been painting all day very hard and begin to be pleased with what I have done … to hear him after a long silence say, ‘Very bad, sir. That is not flesh, it is mud, sir. It is painted with brick dust and clay!’ ” At such moments Morse felt like slashing the canvas with his palette knife. He felt angry and hurt, but with reflection came to see that Allston was no flatterer, but a friend, “and that really to improve I must see my faults.”

  Allston could also take the palette and brushes from Morse and with a few deft strokes show him just how it should be done. “Oh, he is an angel on earth.”

  Allston introduced him to the legendary Benjamin West, under whom Allston had studied. West, who had grown up near Philadelphia, was by then in his seventies, yet youthful in spirit and revered as no other living historical pa
inter. He had arrived in London in 1763, during what was to have been temporary study abroad, and never left. In the half century since, he had become the favorite of King George III and one of the greatest of all teachers. Among the many Americans who had studied under West over the years were John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, and Thomas Sully. His interest in young artists was as great as ever.

  Morse was amazed to learn West had painted more than six hundred pictures, and was then at work on nine or ten different pieces at once. West questioned him closely on the state of the arts in America, and “appeared very zealous that they should flourish there.”

  Morse met West just as the War of 1812 broke out between Britain and the United States, and thus found himself living among the enemy, which was exactly what had happened to West during the American War for Independence.

  “Paint large!” West told him.

  When Morse finished a historical canvas, The Dying Hercules, measuring six by eight feet, West came at once to see it and had only compliments. “Mr. West … told me that were I to live to his age, I should never make a better composition,” Morse noted proudly. The painting was selected to hang in an exhibition at the Royal Academy, and for the first time Morse saw his work praised in print.

  It was Allston, however, who had brought him to where he was in his work, Morse stressed. He could hardly say enough for Allston. Through him he met other painters, as well as an acclaimed young American actor, John Howard Payne, and the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Morse was reading Chaucer and Dante. (“These are necessary to a painter,” he explained to his parents.) He took up the harpsichord and, contrary to the old home preachments, began smoking cigars and drinking wine. He attended the theater, saw the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons in one of her last performances, even tried his hand at writing a farce.