The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  Richard began his studies at the École and William started painting under Couture in 1846, and for brief periods, Richard, too, enrolled in Couture’s atelier to study painting and drawing. William was also among the first Americans attracted to the work of those French artists—and particularly the influential painter of peasants, Jean-François Millet—who had settled in the picturesque hamlet of Barbizon thirty miles southeast of Paris.

  From the training and inspiration each of the brothers was to experience in the next several years in France would come great strides for each in his work. “Mr. William Hunt is our most promising artist here,” reported Thomas Appleton to his father.

  In the spring of 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell, “with a very slender purse and few introductions of any value,” found herself in the “unknown world” of Paris. What made her situation different from that of other American visitors was her profession. She was a doctor—the first American woman to have become a doctor. Like her male counterparts from the United States, she had come to Paris to further her training in medicine and surgery. (Given that medicine was still understood to be an art, she, too, belonged in the third of Margaret Fuller’s categories.)

  English by birth, she had moved to America as a child, settling eventually with her family in Cincinnati. As a young woman, she taught school, before declaring her ambition to become a doctor, and preferably a surgeon, at a time when any woman who entertained such ideas was commonly considered “either mad or bad.” A physician writing in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal categorically declared that women were “not constituted” for the profession, they being of such “nervous or excitable” temperament. “Let woman not assume the prerogatives of man by entering the arena and noisy business of life, for which she has not the faculties in common with man.”

  The idea of winning a doctor’s degree, Elizabeth would write, gradually assumed “the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.” When she mentioned what was on her mind to a well-known Cincinnati doctor, he was horrified by the very thought. However, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was then living in Cincinnati and a neighbor, told her the idea, though impractical, if carried out might prove highly useful.

  Refused by medical schools in Philadelphia and New York, Elizabeth finally gained admission to the Geneva Medical School in upstate New York. In 1849, after little more than a year of study, she was granted a medical degree.

  Yet she felt still the need to know more, and as she later wrote, her teachers and friends urged her to go to Paris. She was twenty-eight, a tiny woman only five feet one, according to her passport application, with a round face, light grey eyes, and sandy hair.

  One after another the Paris physicians she saw showed no interest in her or any inclination to help, until she met Pierre Louis, who advised her to enter La Maternité, the world’s leading maternity hospital.

  On the last day of June, Elizabeth Blackwell stepped through a small door in a high grey wall on the rue Saint-Jacques, into the cloistered life of La Maternité, where young women trained to become midwives under the famous “sage-femme-in-chief,” Madame Madeleine-Edmée-Clémentine Charrier. “So send a welcome greeting to the Voluntary Prisoner,” Elizabeth wrote the next day to her family.

  Imagine a large square of old buildings, formerly a convent, set down in the center of a great court with a wood and garden behind, and many little separate buildings all around, the whole enclosed by very high walls, over the tops of which, shining out beautifully against the clear sky, may be seen the dome of the Panthéon [or] the Hôtel des Invalides. … The inner court is surrounded by les cloîtres, a most convenient arched passage which gives covered communication to the whole building, and which I suppose was formerly traversed by shaven monks on their way to the church. …

  She lived in a long dormitory, or dortoir, with twenty girls, all French, most of whom were ten years younger than she, and “all pretty and pleasant, of no education except their studies in the institution.” Each was provided a narrow bed with an iron bedstead, one chair, and a small lamp. The brick floors were so highly polished she had difficulty walking on them. She should be pictured trying to get about in a great white apron, she wrote to her mother. “And how French girls do chatter!”

  From the time the morning began at five-thirty, their whole day was occupied with lectures and work in the wards and clinics. There was scarcely a pause. No distractions were permitted, no newspapers, no books unless medical works. A bell at noon announced the first meal of the day, which consisted of a loaf of bread, a small bottle of wine, soup, boiled meat and vegetables, all “eaten in haste.”

  Madame Charrier, by Elizabeth’s description, was “a little deformed woman, elderly, but with a fresh color still and kind blue eyes,” and generally loved by her students. In consideration of Elizabeth’s foreignness, Madame insisted she sit beside her during lectures, so she would thoroughly understand.

  Several days out of the week were “en service,” when each student spent the day (or night) serving in the wards. Every morning three students went before Madame Charrier for a one-hour oral examination of what they had learned, and in her volatile Gallic responses to the answers, Madame Charrier seemed to mimic the extremes of mood of Paris itself. “If they answer promptly and well … her face grows beautiful, and her ‘Bien! très bien!’ really does me good, it is so hearty,” Elizabeth wrote. But if the student hesitated, or answered in too low a voice, or seemed not to know what she should, then followed a terrific scolding.

  Alternately satirical and furious, she becomes perfectly on fire, rises upon her chair, claps her hands, looks up to heaven, and the next moment if a good answer has redeemed the fault, all is forgotten, her satisfaction is as great as her anger. … At first I was a little shocked at this stormy instruction, but really it seems almost necessary now, and produces wonderful results.

  It was a routine and life, a world within the medical world of Paris, entirely separate from and very unlike that of the male “medicals,” but as one of the French physicians stressed to Elizabeth, it offered the opportunity of “seeing all that was remarkable” in the deliveries of more babies in a shorter space of time—four months—than anywhere else in the world, indeed, as many as in the entire practice of some doctors.

  With her time at La Maternité nearing its end, Elizabeth contracted a serious eye infection that confined her to bed for weeks and ultimately cost her her sight in one eye, thus ending whatever aspirations she may still have had for a career in surgery.

  “How kind everybody was!” she wrote of the care she received.

  The training at La Maternité had been a trying time, she conceded, with no privacy, poor air, poor food, hard work, and little sleep. “Yet the medical experience was invaluable at that period of pioneer effort. It enabled me later to enter upon practice with a confidence in one important branch of medicine that no other period of study afforded.”

  Within a few years, she would found the New York Infirmary and College for Women, a hospital run entirely by women.

  The same summer of 1849, while Elizabeth Blackwell was confined to her study of obstetrics, yet another American pioneer was making his presence felt in a different way and in the altogether different setting of an international peace conference presided over by Victor Hugo at the Salle Sainte-Cécile on the rue Saint-Lazare. William Wells Brown, one of the eight hundred delegates, was a lecturer and writer, an ardent abolitionist, and a fugitive slave.

  Born in Kentucky, he had told his story in Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, a book published in 1847. His mother was a slave, his father a slave master. At age ten he had heard the cries of his mother as she was being flogged by an overseer. Several times he tried to escape to freedom before succeeding at last, at age eighteen, by getting away to Ohio, where he found shelter with a Quaker named Wells Brown, whose name he took for his own. In the years since, he had worked on steamships on Lake Erie, acquired an education,
and made a name for himself as a speaker for abolitionist societies in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. He was handsome and articulate, and audiences invariably found his story extremely compelling.

  When Brown first applied for a passport earlier that summer, in a letter to Secretary of State John M. Clayton, saying “I am a native of the state of Kentucky and I am a colored man,” he never received a direct answer but was later informed that passports were not granted to “persons of color.” Only through the government of Massachusetts was he able to obtain a certificate permitting him to get as far as England. Once there, he succeeded in arranging for a passport through the American embassy in London.

  Nor had he been given financial help by any antislavery society or by friends to cover the cost of his trip. He went, as he said, entirely at his own expense.

  On the final day of the Paris conference, August 24, at the request of Victor Hugo, Brown spoke for peace and against slavery in a speech quoted at length in the Paris papers. With the abolition of war, he proclaimed, “we shall break … in pieces every yoke of bondage and let all the oppressed go free,” to which the audience broke into sustained cheers. He had been a slave for nearly twenty years. He knew whereof he spoke. Here in Paris he could utter his sentiments “freely.” To do so in the United States, he reminded them, would be to risk his life.

  He was tremendously pleased by the response of the audience, and even more by the welcome he received later at a lavish reception given by the French foreign minister, Alexis de Tocqueville. At home he could have been present at such a reception only as a servant. Curious to know more about him, Madame de Tocqueville asked him to sit beside her on the sofa. The only disapproving look he saw among the many watching was from the American consul, Robert Walsh.

  Before his stay in Paris ended, Brown covered much of the city on foot, setting off from the Hôtel Bedford at first light before the sessions of the conference began. He saw most of the major sights on both sides of the Seine, and though unable to speak French, he enjoyed it all. Never once, under any circumstance, was he made to feel anything but welcome.

  William Wells Brown was to become a prolific author, historian, and the first black American novelist and playwright, with his novel titled Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) and a play, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1863). Having come to Paris while in his early thirties, he would continue writing for another thirty years.

  That summer of 1849 also marked the return to Paris of George Healy and his family from their time in the United States, and the start of preparations for the departure for home by Richard Rush and his daughters.

  There had been a change in the administration in Washington and, to his regret, Rush was recalled. He felt he had done his job well, never abandoning his duties for a single day since he arrived. Alexis de Tocqueville sent a note that touched him deeply. “It is with great concern that I see you leaving the position you have occupied here and have filled with so much usefulness to the interests of your country and our own.” Rush and his daughters would sail in October.

  Healy established himself in an enormous studio on the rue de l’Arcade and set to work on the largest, most ambitious painting of his career, his Webster’s Reply to Hayne, which measured a colossal fifteen by twenty-seven feet. (Samuel Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre, at six by nine feet, was small by comparison.)

  The scene was the United States Senate on January 26, 1830, the culminating moment of the historic debate over whether the states that had created the Constitution had the right to withdraw support from the policies of the federal government. An ardent “nationalist,” Webster championed the position that all of the states had created the Constitution and the federal government, and that no state or states could nullify that government. “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” was the ringing declaration of the speech so long remembered and quoted.

  Healy positioned Webster in the foreground, standing foursquare in the classic orator’s manner—back arched, left hand on the corner of a desk—addressing the packed chamber. Webster wears a white cravat, a buff-colored vest, and a blue dress coat with brass buttons. A play of light on him, like a sunbeam, adds to his dramatic presence.

  In addition to Webster, Healy rendered no fewer than 120 other identifiable faces, including those of Senators Joseph Y. Hayne, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, and General Lewis Cass. John Quincy Adams, who can be seen looking on from the visitors’ gallery, was not actually present for Webster’s great moment. Nor were several others whom Healy chose to make part of the scene, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Healy even included two of his favorite Frenchmen, Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Couture, seating them near Adams.

  According to a pamphlet testifying to the authenticity of the painting, 111 likenesses were “carefully executed” from life. But it also appears Healy relied in part on daguerreotype portraits. Such details of the Senate chamber as the great carved eagle over the Senate president’s chair and the spindled storage space of the desks crammed with papers were presented quite as they were.

  Healy labored at what he called “my big picture” for two years, and with no guarantee of compensation. Further, in 1850, he and his wife, Louisa, suffered the tragic loss of two children, when their youngest son, George, Jr., succumbed to scarlet fever and the eldest, Arthur, at age ten, fell down some stone steps during play hour at school and died soon afterward.

  Healy put the final touches to Webster’s Reply to Hayne in his Paris studio in the summer of 1851 and in a matter of weeks was on his way with the painting to Boston, where in September it was shown for the first time at the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Hill. People came by the hundreds to pay a 25-cent admission fee. One Saturday, escorted by Healy, Webster himself came, and as reported, “It was a proud moment that, for our young American artist. …”

  “Receive my sincerest compliments on your great picture,” wrote Henry Longfellow. “You have done wonders with a subject of extreme difficulty, and I am rejoiced to see your labors crowned with such complete success.”

  The painting later went on display in New York at the National Academy of Design, and as in Boston, the public response was enthusiastic, while mixed among the critics. Much the fullest praise was for Healy’s portrayal of Webster, the strongest part of the painting.

  The countenance—an admirable likeness of the statesman— is kindled with the inspiration of eloquence [said the New York Times]. The person … is drawn up with a majestic self-reliance, expressive of strong inner consciousness of adequacy for the remarkable occasion which prompted the effort. The eyes are glowing with animation, the shaggy brows, rather raised, show the exultant, triumphant gaze of the orator. …

  Does the painting have artistic greatness? asked the New York Evening Post. “We must answer decidedly that it does not.” A man making a speech, said the reviewer, was no fit subject for the realm of Art, whatever the painter’s skill.

  As a commercial enterprise, at 25 cents a ticket, the painting proved a disappointment as it continued on tour. Before long it was back in Boston, on display at no charge in Faneuil Hall, one of the nation’s most historic sites. Eventually, following Webster’s death in 1852, it was purchased by the city of Boston for $2,500, less than half what Healy had hoped to receive, to hang permanently in the Hall.

  Healy would never regret the time he had devoted to the painting. “However onerous to an artist such undertakings usually are, and this one proved particularly so to me,” he said it had been an honor to paint so many of his illustrious countrymen and Webster most especially.

  On September 14, 1851, James Fenimore Cooper died at his home in Cooperstown, one day from his sixty-second birthday. His death was the first of an American writer of international reputation.

  Old friends who had seen him in New York not long before had thought he looked in fine health, “a very castle of a man,” as Washington Irving said, but in fact he had been suffering from diseases of the i
ntestines and kidneys for some time.

  Irving was one of those notables who spoke at a memorial tribute in New York, and a published Memorial included letters from Emerson, Longfellow, Charles Sumner, Samuel Morse, and Richard Rush. Morse chose to keep his remarks short, recalling simply the “eventful time” he and Cooper had spent in Paris together twenty years past. “I never met with a more sincere, warm-hearted, constant friend.”

  They were words that would have touched Cooper more than any, unless it was the tribute from Richard Rush, who said—and perhaps with Morse in mind as well—that the nation’s enduring fame would rest above all on the great American names in literature and science.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  A CITY TRANSFORMED

  At last I have come into a dreamland.

  —HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

  I

  Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the improbable president of the Second Republic—or prince-president, as some preferred to call him—was not an easy man to fathom. His face in repose was nearly impossible to read: pale, grave in expression, and dominated by a large nose, an outsized mustache, its tips waxed, and a pointed goatee. The small pale blue eyes showed scarcely a sign of life. The eyelids drooped, causing him to look half asleep. George Sand likened him to a “sleepwalker.” Yet he had a surprisingly bright smile, and though of less than average height and a bit bowlegged, he sat a horse well and looked perfectly cast parading on horseback.

  Some of the political elite of Paris took him for a “crétin,” certain he would be easy to manipulate. Victor Hugo, on the other hand, was favorably impressed. The British ambassador was “charmed.” Richard Rush found the president “courteously attentive,” and Rush’s replacement as American minister, William C. Rives of Virginia, would report being received in a manner “most cordial and flattering.”