The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  “You mention being acquainted with young Payne, the play actor,” his mother wrote, plainly worried. “I would guard you against any acquaintance with that description of people, as it will, sooner or later, have a most corrupting effect on the morals.”

  Morse was busy, sociable, letting go of old enforced constrictions as much as he ever had or ever would, and he was as happy as he had ever been. According to a letter written years later, he even came close to falling in love, though with whom, he never said, adding only that after a time he had found love and painting to be “quarrelsome companions.”

  At Yale he had been constantly short of money. In London the problem became even more acute. He could afford “no nice dinners,” he plaintively informed his parents. “I have had no new clothes for nearly a year; my best are threadbare, and my shoes are out at the toes.”

  He had to be more than a “mere portrait painter,” he announced in another long letter dated May 2, 1814. He could not be happy unless pursuing the “intellectual branch” of art, namely history painting.

  I need not tell you what a difficult profession I have undertaken. It has difficulties in itself which are sufficient to deter any man who has not firmness enough to go through with it at all hazards, without meeting any obstacles aside from it. The more I study it, the more I am enchanted with it; and the greater my progress, the more I am struck with its beauties. …

  He was thinking of his country. “My country has the most prominent place in my thoughts. How shall I raise her name?”

  He longed to go to France to study, but again it was a matter of money. Paris, he reminded his parents, was a mere two-day journey. “I long to bury myself in the Louvre,” Morse wrote fully seventeen years before finding himself perched atop his movable scaffold there.

  His ambition, he had written in London at age twenty-three, was to be one of those who would revive the splendor of the Renaissance and rival the genius of a Raphael or Titian. Now in Paris in 1832, at age forty, painting large indeed, he was filling his enormous canvas with a virtual tour of the Renaissance that included Raphael and Titian and more.

  The London years ended for Morse in the summer of 1815, when told by his parents it was time to come home and earn a living. Back in the United States, he concentrated almost exclusively on portraits, hoping to earn enough to go to France and continue his artistic education. He divided his time between New England; Charleston, South Carolina; Washington; and New York. That his work was as fine as that of any American portraitist of the day there was little doubt. He had been transformed by his years in London from a gifted student to a painter of the first rank.

  In 1816 he met Lucretia Pickering Walker of Concord, New Hampshire. “She is very beautiful … and openhearted,” he confided to his parents. “I ventured to tell her my whole heart. …”

  “Is she acquainted with domestic affairs?” his ever-practical mother wished to know.

  Does she respect and love religion? How many brothers and sisters has she? How old are they? Is she healthy? How old are her parents? What will they be likely to do for her some years hence, say when she is twenty years old?

  In your next [letter] answer at least some of these questions. You see your mother has not lived twenty-seven years in New England without learning to ask questions.

  His object now was to make money sufficient for a “domestic” future. At one point he painted five portraits in eight days for $15 each. With “industry,” he calculated, he might average $2,000 to $3,000 a year.

  But it was not enough. He tried to think of other ways and between portraits turned his mind to inventions. Working with his brother, he developed a flexible (leather) piston pump—for use on fire engines, or as a bilge pump on ships—for which they secured a patent. On his own, he built a machine for carving marble, as a faster way to make copies of statues.

  Samuel Morse and Lucretia Walker were married at Concord in 1818. His fee for portraits had reached $60. In 1819 came his first major commission, to paint President James Monroe for the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the almost unimaginable sum of $750.

  It remained a largely itinerant life, not easy on him or Lucretia. With the addition of two children, making ends meet became an unrelieved worry. In the meantime his parents had moved to New Haven, close to the Yale campus, after the Reverend Morse was asked to leave the pulpit at Charlestown on the complaint that he was devoting too much time to geography. It was a severe blow, and particularly for a father who had so adamantly warned his son of the perils of not attending to one thing at a time.

  Morse, too, then settled his small family in New Haven. But with an increase in commissions and income, he was able to establish a studio in New York at 96 Broadway, where he could report to Lucretia at last, in December 1824, that he was “fully employed” with portraits and providing instruction for several students as well. He had resolved, he told her, never to be rushed in his work, never to paint too fast. He had no desire to be “a nine days’ wonder, all the rage for a moment and then forgotten forever.”

  “You will rejoice with me, I know, in my continued and increasing success,” he wrote to her only days into the new year. He had been chosen out of all painters to do a life-size portrait of General Lafayette to hang in New York’s City Hall. He was to receive as much as $1,000 and would be going to Washington just as soon as Lafayette could see him. His only regret was that it would mean more time away from her.

  He returned to New Haven for a few days in late January when Lucretia gave birth to their third child, a son they named Finley.

  He reached Washington on February 7, 1825, and met Lafayette the following day. “My feelings were almost too powerful for me,” he wrote to Lucretia. The general had agreed to proceed with the portrait.

  Morse had been advised that Lafayette’s features were “not good,” and in truth the general had an oddly shaped head with a slanting brow, ears that clung so close that from face-on they could hardly be seen. With advancing age (Lafayette was sixty-seven), the jowls seemed to have taken over. To Morse it was a “noble” countenance, a perfect example of “accordance between the face and the character,” showing the “firmness and consistency” that so distinguished the man.

  On the evening of February 9, Morse attended the president’s levee, where he met Cooper for the first time. It had been a day of considerable excitement in Washington. In the recent presidential election, Andrew Jackson had won a popular majority, while John Quincy Adams had carried the electoral vote. That day, the House of Representatives had resolved the issue by electing Adams president.

  “There was a great crowd [at the White House] and a great number of distinguished characters,” Morse reported in a long letter to Lucretia.

  I paid my respects to Mr. Adams and congratulated him on his election. He seemed in some degree to shake off his habitual reserve. … General Jackson went up to him and, shaking him by the hand, congratulated him cordially on his election. The General bears defeat like a man. …

  He was making good progress on the Lafayette portrait. “I have but little room in this letter to express my affection for my dearly beloved wife and children,” he wrote at the bottom of the last page. “I long to hear from you. …”

  She was never to read those words. Two days later, on February 11, in a letter from his father delivered to his hotel, Morse learned that Lucretia had died on February 7.

  “My affectionately beloved son,” the letter began. “The shock to the whole family is far beyond, in point of severity, that of any we have ever before felt. …” It had been a heart attack. She was twenty-five.

  “My whole soul seemed wrapped up in her,” Morse wrote a month later from New York. “I am ready almost to give up.”

  To my friends here, I know, I seem to be cheerful and happy, but a cheerful countenance with me covers an aching heart, and often have I feigned a more than ordinary cheerfulness to hide a more than ordinary anguish.

  He concentrated on work, of w
hich he had more than ever, leaving the care of his children to his parents. Having completed the Lafayette portrait, he went on to paint one eminent figure after another, and of the kind with whom he liked most to associate, Americans known for their ideas and worthy accomplishments. They included William Cullen Bryant, poet, and editor of the New York Evening Post; Noah Webster, lexicographer and author of the American Dictionary of the English Language; Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York, the great champion of the Erie Canal, which was completed that year, 1825; and Benjamin Silliman of Yale, who had been Morse’s science professor and would later become the president of the college.

  He took the lead in founding the National Academy of the Arts of Design in New York, as an alternative to the American Academy of Arts, then headed by John Trumbull, which Morse thought unnecessarily exclusive and stodgy. He became the first president of the National Academy and developed a series of lectures on art that he delivered at Columbia College, the first such talks ever given by an American artist.

  At a gathering of the National Academy, while awarding prizes to young artists, he told them that if they expected a painter’s life to be one of ease and pleasure, they were greatly mistaken. It was “a life of severe and perpetual toil.” They must expect “continual obstacles and discouragements, and be prepared to encounter illiberality, neglect, obscurity, and poverty.” Only an “intense and inextinguishable love of art” could sustain them to bear up, and if they did not feel this love, they should “turn while yet they might to other pursuits.”

  On June 9, 1826, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse died at New Haven, and, not long after, Samuel began explaining to his mother why he needed to go to Paris. In 1828 she, too, died. Thus, with his wife, father, and mother all taken from him, and feeling as he never had before that time was running out for him, Morse arranged for the children to stay with an aunt in New Hampshire and his brother Richard in New Haven. He lined up $2,800 in commissions to do copies in Europe, and sailed for France.

  On the lovely, springlike March afternoon when Morse and Cooper were observed by Nathaniel Willis walking in the Garden of the Tuileries, the time appears to have been nearing five o’clock. Morse would have finished his day at the Louvre by then, and he and Cooper, as was their routine, would have been on their way to Cooper’s house for the evening.

  After they passed by, Willis remained in the garden, seated on a bench presumably, notebook in hand, savoring the scene a bit longer. The palace bell rang five o’clock.

  The sun is just disappearing behind the dome of the Invalides, and the crowd begins to thin [he wrote]. Look at the atmosphere of the gardens. How deliciously the twilight softens everything. Statues, people, trees and the long perspectives down the alleys, all mellowed into the shadowy indistinctness of fairy-land. The throng is pressing out the gates … for the gardens are cleared at sundown.

  It was a Friday, Willis said, but he gave no date. To judge by his description of the weather it must have been March 23.

  III

  Cholera morbus—Asiatic cholera or Indian cholera—had been a matter of some concern in European medical circles for more than fifty years, from the time outbreaks in Calcutta in the 1780s had taken the lives of many thousands. But the far-distant Indian origins of the scourge had made it seem an “exotic production,” not the sort of thing that could strike a “civilized” European city.

  In 1826 cholera had begun to spread toward Europe, following the old trade routes. By 1830 it reached Moscow, then Poland, then Vienna in the summer of 1831. At that point many in Paris had begun to worry.

  The first word of cholera in Paris came on Wednesday, March 28, 1832, in reports in the afternoon and evening papers and in dispatches sent off to London and New York. Ten people had been taken to the old Hôtel Dieu, the main hospital on the Île-de-la-Cité, beside Notre-Dame. Seven of the ten had died. The autopsy of five bodies performed “in the presence of thirty-eight medical men and the Minister of Public Works” left no doubt.

  The terror of the disease was that it struck with such ferocity. Its victims would be seized suddenly by savage cramps, followed by vomiting, convulsions, and violent diarrhea. Their faces turned purple and broke out in a cold sweat. The eyes bulged. Lips and fingernails turned blue. Nathaniel Willis, who managed to get inside the Hôtel Dieu by passing himself off as a doctor, described a young woman in her twenties convulsed with agony. “Her eyes were started from their sockets, her mouth foamed, and her face was of a frightful, livid purple. I never saw so horrible a sight.”

  The medical student James Jackson, Jr., had himself attended the death of another victim identified only as a chiffonier, a ragman. Drawing on his notes, he described for his father the autopsy that followed:

  Stomach contained a quart of reddish fluid. … Small intestines … contained a vast quantity of red fluid … the liquid flowing from these intestines had a somewhat sour smell to me like that of all undigested vegetable food which has been vomited. … Aorta contained a great quantity of black blood liquid. …

  By April 2, there had been 735 reported cases and 100 deaths. “Vast numbers of people were leaving Paris,” read a dispatch to the New York Evening Post that would not reach the United States for another month.

  It was “a disease of the most frightful nature,” wrote young Jackson, who, like almost every American physician, had had no experience with cholera. Walking one ward of the Hôtel Dieu, he had seen fifty or more patients in rows. “It is almost like walking through an autopsy room. In many nothing but the act of respiration shows the life still exists. It is truly awful.” Jackson’s fellow student Ashbel Smith wrote in his journal on April 3:

  The official bulletin of the morning gives 1,020 new cases from yesterday. … A young man came in the other day to inquire after his father and mother. They were found … side by side in the dead room, naked, and in a pile of bodies. The disease is rapidly spreading in every direction and the consternation is terrible. The Americans are almost all leaving the city.

  Months before, when Jackson’s father had told him that should the cholera reach Paris he must “fly,” James had written to ask, “But if, as I think it highly possible, the disease is at some future time to prevail in our country, had I not better become acquainted with its physiognamy if I have an opportunity?” Jackson, who had never in his life gone against his father’s wishes, wrote now to say he would stay, hoping his father would understand. Several other American medical students made the same decision, including Smith.

  We are bound as men and physicians to stay and see this disease [James continued]. As a physician you know it and feel it. As a father you dread it. For myself, I confess, I should be unwilling to return to America and not have at least made an effort to learn the nature and best treatment of this destroyer of life.

  The common understanding was that miasmas—foul, noxious vapors from rotting garbage and human filth—were the carriers of the disease, just as malaria and yellow fever were supposedly spread. As sea air was beneficial to one’s health, the bad air of city slums could be deadly. Thus cholera was understood to be a disease of the poor, while those living in the cleaner, more airy parts of the city were believed to be safe from the scourge.

  In fact, no one knew the cause of cholera or what to do about it. “The physicians,” Jackson conceded, “are in a state of the greatest incertitude, not knowing which way to turn.”

  The actual cause, which would not become known for years, was a microorganism, the Vibrio cholerae, carried mainly by contaminated water, and in some cases by infected food. It invaded the body by mouth and rapidly attacked the intestines, killing about half its victims by dehydration in a matter of days or even hours.

  The death toll in Paris mounted. Wild rumors spread that the government was secretly poisoning the poor, and angry crowds streamed over the bridges to the Île-de-la-Cité to besiege the Hôtel Dieu, swearing revenge.

  How could it be, many were asking, that something as hideous as a medieval plague coul
d attack so great a center of civilized life and advanced learning?

  When, on April 12, James Cooper judged the worst of the epidemic had passed, he could not have been more mistaken. The calamity surged on. Moreover, the agony and loss were spreading to every part of Paris, even Cooper’s own supposedly safe Faubourg Saint-Germain. “We have had pestilence all around us, and we have had many deaths very near us,” wrote Susan Cooper in alarm.

  I have seen two instances of it myself. One, the sister of our porter, who was taken with it while here on a visit, and the other, a poor woman who sold matches at the door of our hotel. Mr. Cooper had her brought into the courtyard and we took care of her, until she was carried to the hospital where I fear she died. …

  While others fled the city in droves, the Coopers stayed, but only because they were too sick to move. He and Susan were both “in the doctor’s hands,” Cooper wrote, Susan confined to her bed with a severe “bilious attack,” he suffering from the most excruciating headaches he had ever known.

  Yet how were they to know whether they were better off remaining in Paris, where they had become in some measure acclimated, than expose themselves to the inconvenience of travel and the risk of going where “the horrors” might break out on their arrival? “It is spreading rapidly all over France,” Susan wrote. “It has by no means spared the upper classes. …” Nearly all their countrymen had fled, she noted, except the heroic American medical students at the hospitals.

  Morse, too, stayed. “Samuel was nervous even unto flight, nay so nervous he could not run,” wrote Cooper, who speculated that a thousand people were already in their graves. Some estimates were ten times that. No one could say for certain.