The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  Between times Morse went off on long walks through the city, and at least once, perhaps more often, he took the old route across the river to the rue Saint-Dominique where Cooper had lived.

  One wonders, too, if during this time in Paris, or later, Morse ever crossed paths with George Healy. He had to have known about Healy’s success—Healy was to be made an honorary member of the National Academy of Design. And one wonders what Morse, who had given up painting, may have felt about such success achieved at so young an age.

  Back when Morse was resettling in New York, after his work at the Louvre, Healy had been just setting off on his first venture to Paris. On reaching New York, and finding the departure of his ship delayed, he had gone to call on Morse.

  “So you want to be an artist?” Morse had said. “You won’t make your salt!” Healy’s grandmother had earlier told him the same thing in almost the same words.

  “Then, sir,” Healy replied, “I must take my food without salt.”

  In the first week of September, one of the luminaries of French science, the astronomer and physicist Dominique-François-Jean Arago, arrived at the house on the rue Neuve des Mathurins for a private showing of the “wonderful discovery.” “He gave it a thorough examination, questioned the inventor with great minuteness,” wrote Edward Kirk, “and declared himself satisfied with the results and its capacity to do all that was claimed for it.”

  Arago offered at once to introduce Morse and his invention to the Académie des Sciences at their next meeting to be held in just six days on September 10. To prepare himself, Morse began jotting down notes on what should be said: “My present instrument is very imperfect in its mechanism, and only designed to illustrate the principle of my invention. …”

  The savants of the Académie convened in the great hall of the Institut de France, the magnificent seventeenth-century landmark on the Left Bank facing the Seine and the Pont des Arts. Just over the river stood the Louvre, where, six years earlier, Morse the painter had nearly worked himself to death. Now he stood “in the midst of the most celebrated scientific men of the world,” as he wrote to his brother Sidney. There was not a familiar face to be seen, except for Professor Arago and one other, Alexander von Humboldt, who in those other days at the Louvre had come to watch him at his labors.

  At Morse’s request Arago explained to the audience how the invention worked, and what made it different and superior to other such devices, while Morse stood by to operate the instrument. Everything worked to perfection.

  It was, as would be said, the proudest triumph of Morse’s career thus far. “A buzz of admiration and approbation filled the whole hall,” he wrote to Alfred Vail, “and the exclamations, ‘Extraordinaire!’ ‘Très bien!’ ‘Très admirable!’ I heard on all sides.”

  The event was acclaimed in the Paris and London papers and in the Academy’s own weekly bulletin, the Comptes Rendus. In a long, prescient letter written two days later, the American patent commissioner, Morse’s friend Henry Ellsworth, who happened to be in Paris at the time, said the occasion had shown Morse’s telegraph “transcends all yet made known,” and that clearly “another revolution is at hand.”

  I do not doubt that within the next ten years, you will see electric power adopted between all commercial points of magnitude on both sides of the Atlantic, for purposes of correspondence, and men enabled to send their orders or news of events from one point to another with the speed of lightning itself. … The extremities of nations will be literally wired together. … In the United States, for instance, you may expect to find at no very distant day the Executive messages, and the daily votes of each House of Congress made known at Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Portland—at New Orleans, Cincinnati, etc.—as soon as they can be known in Baltimore or even the opposite extremity of Pennsylvania Avenue! … Abstract imagination is no longer a match for reality in the race that science has instituted on both sides of the Atlantic.

  That he was in Paris made him feel greater pride than ever, Ellsworth conceded. “In being abroad, among strangers and foreigners, one’s nationality of feeling may be somewhat more excusable than at home.”

  Acclaim from the savants and the press was one thing, progress with the French government was another. Minister Lewis Cass provided Morse with a “most flattering” letter of introduction to carry on his rounds, but to no effect. After his eighth or ninth call at the office of the Ministre de l’Intérieur, Morse was still able to speak to no one above the level of a secretary, who asked only that he leave his card.

  “Everything moves at a snail’s pace here,” he lamented a full two months after his day of glory at the Academy. “Dilatoriness” was to be expected, Lewis Cass told him, and little could be done about it.

  Morse, who had intended at midsummer to stay no more than a month in Paris, was still there at the start of the new year, 1839, and with Edward Kirk’s help, still holding his Tuesday levees upstairs on the rue Neuve des Mathurins. That there was no decline in interest in his invention made the “dilatoriness” even more maddening.

  It would be at home in America that his invention would have much the best chance, Morse decided. “There is more of the ‘go-ahead’ character with us. … Here there are old systems long established to interfere, and at least to make them cautious before adapting a new project, however promising. Their railroad operations are a proof in point.” (Railroad-building in France had been later starting than in the United States and was moving ahead at a much slower pace.)

  By March, fed up with the French bureaucracy, embarrassed by the months wasted in waiting and by his worsening financial straits, Morse decided it was time to go home. But before leaving, he paid a visit to Monsieur Louis Daguerre, a theatrical scenery painter. “I am told every hour,” wrote Morse with a bit of hyperbole, “that the two great wonders of Paris just now, about which everyone is conversing, are Daguerre’s wonderful results in fixing permanently the image of the camera obscura and Morse’s electro-magnetic telegraph.” And so, for a second time, Samuel Morse would bring home to America an idea from France of consequences far beyond what he or anyone could then have foreseen.

  Morse and Daguerre were of about the same age, but where Morse could be somewhat circumspect, Daguerre was bursting with joie de vivre. Neither spoke the other’s language with any proficiency, but they got on at once—two painters who had turned their hands to invention.

  Skilled in theatrical lighting and scenic effects from years in the theater, Daguerre had devised his own secret technique for painting scenes on huge, transparent theater drops, or scrims, as large as seventy-one by forty-five feet—a view of a Swiss valley or the interior of an English cathedral—which when lit from behind and set off by a few well-placed props, had a reality beyond anything seen before. He had built his own large theater, the Diorama, in which to put on his show, and from its opening day, in 1822, Parisians had come “flocking.”

  Daguerre had proven himself a master illusionist with light. The audience sat on a revolving platform, so it was as if the scenes were passing before them, and they found it almost impossible to believe what they were seeing was not real. The Diorama, proclaimed a reviewer in the Journal de Paris, marked an “epoch in the history of painting.” “We cannot sufficiently urge Parisians who like pleasure without fatigue to make the journey to Switzerland and to England without leaving the capital.”

  Seeing the results of Daguerre’s latest invention, Morse was struck with amazement. Years before he had tried to see if it were possible to fix the image produced with a camera obscura, by using paper dipped in a solution of nitrate of silver, but had given it up as hopeless.

  Daguerre had been experimenting with the idea of reproducing visual images for a long time, working with an older colleague named Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce, who had since died. What Daguerre finally accomplished with his little daguerreotypes was clearly, Morse saw—and reported without delay in a letter to his brothers—“one of the most beautiful discoveries of the
age.”

  They are produced on a metallic silver-coated [copper] surface, the principal pieces about 7 inches by 5 [inches], and they resemble aquatint engravings, for they are in simple chiaroscuro, and not in colors. But the exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it. For example: In a view up the street, a distant sign would be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be read with the naked eye. By the assistance of a powerful lens, which magnified fifty times, applied to the delineation, every letter was clearly and distinctly legible, and so also were the minutest breaks and lines in the walls of the buildings and the pavements of the streets. The effect of the lens upon the picture was in a great degree like that of a telescope in nature.

  The daguerreotype marked the birth of photography, but other artists seeing Daguerre’s accomplishment were not so enthusiastic as Morse. To Delacroix it marked the death of art.

  Morse stayed more than an hour and came away overjoyed. But a return visit by Daguerre to Morse’s rooms on the rue Neuve des Mathurins, to see Morse’s telegraph, was cut short when word came that the Diorama had caught fire and burned to the ground, those in the audience barely escaping with their lives.

  Morse’s account of his visit with Daguerre, published by his brothers in the New York Observer on April 20, 1839, was the first news of the daguerreotype to appear in the United States and was quickly picked up by newspapers all over the country. Once Morse arrived back in New York, having crossed by steamship for the first time, aboard the Great Western, he wrote immediately to Daguerre to assure him that “throughout the United States your name alone will be associated with the brilliant discovery which justly bears your name.” He also saw to it that Daguerre was made an honorary member of the National Academy, the first honor Daguerre received outside of France.

  With help from a professor of chemistry at New York University, John William Draper, Morse experimented with making daguerreotype portraits, something Daguerre himself had not bothered with, deciding it was impractical, since the subject would have to remain motionless for as long as fifteen or twenty minutes. By 1840, Morse and Draper were sufficiently satisfied with their results to open a daguerreotype portrait studio on the top floor of the university building. Thus, Samuel Morse, the painter of portraits, had proudly become a portrait photographer.

  Still he kept plugging away with work on the telegraph, his old longing “to shine” by no means dormant.

  Four years later, in July of 1844, news reached Paris and the rest of Europe that Professor Morse had opened a telegraph line, built with Congressional appropriation, between Washington and Baltimore, and that the telegraph was in full operation between the two cities, a distance of thirty-four miles. From a committee room at the Capitol, Morse had tapped out a message from the Bible to his partner Alfred Vail in Baltimore: “What hath God wrought!” Afterward others were given a chance to send their own greetings.

  A few days later, interest in Morse’s device became greater by far at both ends when the Democratic National Convention being held at Baltimore became deadlocked and hundreds gathered about the telegraph in Washington for instantaneous news from the floor of the convention itself. Martin Van Buren was tied for the nomination with the former minister to France, Lewis Cass. Ultimately, on the eighth ballot, the convention chose a compromise candidate, a little-known senator from Tennessee, James K. Polk.

  In Paris, Galignani’s Messenger reported that newspapers in Baltimore were now able to provide their readers with the latest information from Washington up to the very hour of going to press. “This is indeed the annihilation of space.”

  III

  The spring of 1845, just a year following Morse’s triumph at Washington, marked the appearance in Paris of a decidedly different variety of American, the first wave of American curiosities or exotics—“les sensations américaines”—who were the cause of great popular commotion.

  It began with P. T. Barnum—Phineas Taylor Barnum—the flamboyant New York showman, and his tiny protégé Tom Thumb, and not even Barnum, for all his extravagant claims, foresaw the sensation they caused.

  Almost immediately afterward came the American painter of Plains Indians, George Catlin, bringing an entire gallery of his pictures, more than five hundred in total, as well as a party of painted and feathered real-life “Ioways.” It was the most memorable visit of an American painter to Paris of all time.

  Coinciding with all this excitement, a virtuoso American pianist, Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans, gave his first concert in Paris at the Salle Pleyel on the rue de Rochechouart, which appears to have been the first solo performance ever by an American on a Paris stage. What made it particularly notable was that Gottschalk was fifteen years old.

  With a genius for publicity and humbug, P. T. Barnum had made himself famous a few years earlier when he opened his American Museum on Broadway. In no time it became the most popular attraction in New York. “The people like to be humbugged,” he would explain. By chance, Barnum had also discovered a child from Bridgeport, Connecticut, named Charles Stratton, a midget who stood not quite two feet high and weighed sixteen pounds. The boy was five. Barnum renamed him Tom Thumb, or General Tom Thumb, fitted him out in a miniature uniform something like that of Napoleon, and said his age was eleven.

  He was a perfectly formed, bright-eyed little fellow with light hair and ruddy cheeks [Barnum later wrote] and … I took the greatest pains to educate and train [him] … devoting many hours to the task by day and by night, and I was very successful, for he was an apt pupil. …

  Barnum had opened his museum, he was frank to say, “for the opportunity it afforded for rapidly making money.” In the tiny “General” he had found a gold mine. He paid the boy’s parents $3 a week and put him on display in the museum, where he became such an instant favorite that Barnum raised the weekly salary to $20. Then “to test the curiosity of men and women on the other side of the Atlantic,” Barnum took Tom, his parents, a tutor, and three or four others on a trip to Europe, first to London, then Paris. Under a new agreement, Tom was to receive a weekly $50.

  In London the Lilliputian Wonder was a “decided hit” on stage in Piccadilly and, later, resplendent in his uniform, at a command performance before Her Majesty Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace. But London was not Paris. “The French are exceedingly impressionable,” wrote Barnum, “and what in London is only excitement, in Paris becomes a furor.”

  He settled Tom and his entourage in the Hôtel Bedford on the rue de Rivoli and swung into action. He hired a brand-new auditorium with a seating capacity of 3,000, the Salle de Concert on the rue Vivienne, hired an orchestra, and made the rounds of the Paris newspapers to drum up publicity.

  The winter in Paris had been unusually severe and signs of spring were late in coming. The branches of a well-known chestnut tree in the Garden of the Tuileries, normally mint-green by early March, were still as bare as in the middle of winter. Then, suddenly, on the first official day of spring, March 21, the sun shone brilliantly and the boulevards were at once fully “animated” in the spirit of the season. Crowds thronged the ChampsÉlysées. Tout Paris paraded by in their elegant equipages, providing a first glimpse of the new spring fashions.

  Yet Tom Thumb stole the show, sporting a top hat, riding in a no-less-fancy miniature carriage with four grey ponies and four tiny liveried coachmen. The crowd along the avenue broke into cheers for “General Tom Pouce.”

  Because of the reception given “the General” at Buckingham Palace, Barnum had no trouble arranging for a comparable appearance before King Louis-Philippe and his royal court at the Tuileries Palace on the evening of March 23. Tom came attired this time as the perfect upper-bourgeois gentleman in a well-fitting black coat, white vest, and a glittering diamond shirt pin, and was at once the center of attention and delight. Barnum had coached his “apt pupil” well.

  When a lady (who undoub
tedly had also been coached) asked Tom in English if he planned to marry, he replied, “Certainly.”

  “And how many have you engaged to marry?”

  “Eight, all told.”

  “But they tell me you are fickle and faithless.”

  “It is true.”

  “In England the ladies ran after you a great deal, and you let them kiss you.”

  “That was to avoid hurting their feelings.”

  “How many times have you been kissed?”

  “A million.”

  The king asked the General if he spoke French.

  “A little,” he replied.

  “What can you say in French?” asked the king.

  “Vive le Roi!”

  Tom performed an original dance, posed in imitation of such well-known statues as David and Goliath, Samson, and Hercules. Resuming his role as perfect gentleman, he consulted a tiny pocket watch and offered a pinch of snuff from a tiny box sparkling with faux jewels. For his last act he danced a Highland fling in Scottish bonnet and kilts.

  Reportedly the wardrobe he brought to Paris could be packed in a hat box, and while on tour he slept in a bureau drawer.

  The following day the Paris papers announced drolly the public levees, “FOR A SHORT TIME ONLY,” for “The American Man in Miniature” at the Salle de Concert:

  He is smaller than any infant that ever walked! He is lively, intelligent, and symmetrical in his proportions. He will relate his history, sing a variety of songs, DANCE …

  Admission for the best seats in the hall was 3 francs; second-best, 2 francs.