The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

by David McCullough

  He made friends—friends for life, in several cases—and mostly with those from southern France, who spoke with a southern accent just as he did, because of his father.

  Reminiscing later, he recalled nothing in the way of “amorous adventure.” When a girl he liked in New York wrote to ask whether he still meant to “keep company” with her, he never replied. How truly chaste he remained is impossible to know, so extremely circumspect was he always about what he considered private matters. Friends and working associates, however, would talk a good deal later of his fondness for women.

  His afternoons cutting cameos provided only the barest living. Long afterward, walking with friends in the narrow back streets of the Latin Quarter, he would point out the miserable little cafés where he had been forced to eat dreadful food as a student in order to survive. But so “soaring” was his ambition, as he later said, and so “tremendously austere” was he, he felt a kind of “Spartan-like superiority.”

  A close friend, Alfred Garnier, would describe him as “possessing so strongly the qualities of a man who was bound to succeed,” yet he remained as well “the most joyous creature.” For exercise he, Garnier, and others went regularly to a gymnasium. (Gus was “crazy about wrestling.”) On holiday hiking expeditions, they would sometimes cover thirty miles, with Gus setting the pace. On one such venture they set off for Saint-Valéry-en-Caux on the coast of Normandy. “Five minutes after we reached the seashore,” Garnier remembered, “we were in the water in spite of the heavy waves, for as soon as he saw the water Gus had to enter. …” On another trek, in Switzerland, when they climbed a cathedral spire, none exclaimed over the view with such enthusiasm as Gus. “Nobody got his money’s worth so well as he. Everything seemed enchanting, everything beautiful!”

  For more than a year he remained the only American among Jouffroy’s students, until 1869 when Olin Warner joined the class. Older than Gus by four years, Warner came from Vermont and was a former telegraph operator. In a stream of letters to his “Dear Ones at Home,” he expressed with appealing clarity the feelings of many American students of every kind:

  Paris is the most splendid city I ever saw. …

  Wine is cheaper than milk. …

  I could not have gone to a better part of the world to study. …

  I am entirely out of money. …

  The further I go the harder it looks to me and the more

  difficulties I encounter, but I am determined to succeed. …

  In Jouffroy’s atelier Gus led all in determination, and in making noise, “singing and whistling to split the ears.” He would happily recall how he loved to “bawl” the andante of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, or the serenade from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Yet for all the joie de vivre, the carryings-on with friends, he remained oddly shy with people he did not know. He cared nothing about what he wore, or what was in or out of fashion, and greatly disliked any and all affectations, as he would through life.

  Concentrated effort at modeling and drawing day after day for three years produced clear progress. Jouffroy, while not a sculptor of the highest rank, was an exceptional teacher, and his atelier a center for what was the new movement in sculpture in France, which took its inspiration from the Italian Renaissance. In this regard, Saint-Gaudens had come to his studies in Paris at a highly advantageous time.

  It was then, too, in his student years in Paris that he reached certain conclusions about work that were to stand as his guiding principles, and that he was one day, in turn, to stress again and again to students of his own.

  Conceive an idea. Then stick to it. Those who hang on are the only ones who amount to anything.

  You can do anything you please. It’s the way it’s done that makes the difference.

  A good thing is no better for being done quickly.

  In November 1869, with all appropriate pageantry, the Suez Canal was opened, joining the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The Empress Eugénie, present for the ceremony, stood on the deck of the imperial yacht wearing a big straw hat and waving a white handkerchief. “There was a real Egyptian sky,” she would remember, “a light of enchantment, a dreamlike resplendence. …” The canal was a triumph. It brought France la gloire. Its builder, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was Europe’s reigning hero. The timing seemed perfect. In America, earlier that summer, the transcontinental railroad had been completed. As the popular French novelist Jules Verne would postulate, it was now theoretically possible to go around the world in just eighty days. Those in France who had invested in the de Lesseps project—and there were thousands—would profit handsomely.

  All the while “the resplendence” and pageantry of the Second Empire and its capital city continued. The exposition had come and gone, but the show of Paris never closed. The lights burned bright. Such arrays of the newest, most fashionable merchandise displayed in countless shops and grand department stores tantalized no less than ever. The music of Gounod and Offenbach, the can-can, the opening of the new Folies Bergère music hall, restaurants that stayed open through the night, the daytime spectacle of top-hatted and bonneted gentry at their leisure in the dappled sunshine of public gardens all continued, as did the steady incoming flow of affluent Americans.

  Of the prominent, well-to-do American families in Paris in 1869, two from New York are particularly of note, and chiefly because of their children: the Theodore Roosevelts, the frail, asthmatic oldest son of whom, young Theodore, or “Teedie,” was eleven; and the George Frederick Joneses (whose way of life was said to have inspired the expression “keeping up with the Joneses”), and whose studious, red-haired daughter Edith, the future Edith Wharton, had her first portrait painted in Paris at age eleven, during what turned out to be a family stay of two years.

  But all this was worlds apart from the life of the impoverished young New Yorker trying to become a sculptor. So desperately poor was Saint-Gaudens still that out of pride as much as necessity he had assumed an attitude of “deepest scorn” for all “ordinary amusements.” His one indulgence was the opera. He had come to adore the music of the opera, and with orders for cameos increasing somewhat, was inclined to treat himself now and then.

  As it happened, Saint-Gaudens and several friends were at the opera the night of July 15, 1870, the night no one in Paris would ever forget, when news came that France had declared war on Prussia.

  It was near the end of a performance of Daniel-François Auber’s La Muette de Portici. One of the leads, Madame Marie Sasse, came onstage carrying a tricolor flag and asked the audience to join in singing the “Marseillaise.” “Then,” remembered Alfred Garnier, “everyone went crazy.”

  The audience poured out onto the boulevard des Italiens, where crowds were shouting “À Berlin”—“On to Berlin!” To Gus and Garnier, it seemed utter madness. They found themselves hammering with fists and canes at some of those shouting the loudest.

  To Gus the empire was nothing but “nonsense” and “rottenness.” He and his friends were ardent republicans and saw the war as the emperor’s doing. None of it made sense, any more than singing the “Marseillaise,” the hymn of the French Revolution, had any connection with any of the Napoleons—yet now it was the emperor’s war song!

  The madness grew worse by the day. Paris rang with the “Marseillaise.” More crowds marched shouting for war. The government-controlled press unanimously called for war.

  “No language can measure the probable consequences and results,” wrote the American minister Elihu Washburne in a dispatch to President Ulysses S. Grant. “Everything is brought to a standstill and ordinary people stand aghast with amazement. But the great crowd[s] are mad with excitement and things are rushed as in a giddy whirl.” The French minister of war assured the people that any conflict with Prussia would be “a mere stroll, walking stick in hand.”

  The emperor, who was ill and suddenly aged, privately opposed the war. He knew France to be unprepared, the same conclusion Otto von Bismarck had reached during his visit to Paris in 1867. The fact was
, the Germans had more than 400,000 well-trained, well-equipped troops, whereas the French soldiers numbered only 250,000 and were poorly equipped. The issue supposedly at stake, the succession of the Spanish throne, was ridiculous. But that seemed of little interest, and the emperor let himself be swayed by those close around him whose hubris greatly exceeded their judgment.

  On July 28, pale and tired and dressed in the full uniform of a general, he departed for the front from Saint-Cloud by private train, looking anything but confident, the pain of a bladder stone too great for him to have appeared on horseback. He was entering the campaign in command of the army having never been a general, or even a colonel. On reaching the front, at Metz, he reported to the Empress Eugénie that nothing was prepared. “I regard us as already lost.”

  In the first weeks of August one humiliating French defeat followed another in rapid succession, at Wissembourg, Forbach, and Wörth. An American observer with the German army, General Philip Sheridan, called the German infantry “as fine as I ever saw.” The Krupp guns had twice the range of the French pieces.

  The news, when it reached Paris, was devastating. Many refused to believe it. “No person not in Paris at the time could have any adequate idea of the state of feeling which the extraordinary news from the battlefield had created,” wrote the American minister, Washburne.

  (Telegraph dispatches from American newspaper correspondents in France had also stirred great popular interest in the war in the United States. Papers in New York or Boston or Cincinnati now carried on-the-scene descriptions of battles only days after they happened. To enable a correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial to follow the French army, Washburne had devised a special passport and “covered it all over with big seals.”)

  On September 2 came the ultimate, overwhelming French defeat at the small border fortress of Sedan, where Napoleon III insisted, despite the pain he was in, on riding into battle, as if preferring to be killed rather than face the disgrace to come.

  Sedan was the most sudden, catastrophic defeat in French history. More than 104,000 of the emperor’s troops surrendered and the emperor was taken prisoner.

  Paris learned what had happened late the afternoon of September 3 and the Second Empire instantly collapsed. It had been all of seven weeks since the night in July when war was declared and jubilant crowds swarmed through Paris shouting “À Berlin!”

  On September 4, a beautiful sunny Sunday, in the midst of disaster and with the certain prospect of the Germans marching on Paris, the new minister of the interior, the flamboyant Léon Gambetta, climbed onto the sill of an enormous open window at the Hôtel de Ville to proclaim to the crowd below the birth of the Third Republic.

  “Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his dynasty have forever ceased to reign in France,” he shouted. Suddenly it had become a day for rejoicing. And for Elihu Washburne no less than any other “étranger” in Paris. “I am rejoiced beyond expression at the downfall of this miserable dynasty and the establishment of the Republic,” he wrote privately.

  “So perishes a harlequin, and all his paraphernalia of Empire collapses as suddenly as a windbag pricked with a pin,” wrote an American medical student named Mary Putnam, equally overjoyed.

  France, or at least Paris, gives itself up not to panic, but to a perfect outburst of joy, to the jubilation of a fête day. It crowns the statue of Strasbourg with flowers, it promenades on the Place de la Concorde, the rue de Rivoli, before the Hôtel de Ville, as if to salute the return of a triumphant army. It forgets Prussia, it forgets even the Emperor, it is wild with delight crying, “Vive la République, à toi citoyen! Nous avons la République!”

  Augustus Saint-Gaudens knew nothing of what had happened, however. Early that same Sunday he had left Paris by train for Limoges, to visit his brother Andrew, who had found work in a porcelain factory there. He had felt a need to get away and think about what he ought to do.

  On the fateful afternoon the Republic was proclaimed, with the clamor growing louder and more threatening outside the Palace of the Tuileries, the Empress Eugénie decided it was time to attempt an escape. She never believed this could happen to her, that she would exit in disgrace like King Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie-Amélie. For days, looking pale and worn, she had stayed on courageously. Others urged her to leave while she could. Now servants were departing, throwing aside their livery on the way out the doors.

  “I yield to force,” she said calmly at last. Leaving everything behind— money, jewelry—she went by way of rooms that connected the palace to the Louvre. She was accompanied only by the ambassadors of Austria and Italy and a few loyal attendants. There was no prearranged plan. No attempt was made at disguise. She left wearing the same simple black cashmere dress she had been wearing for days, plus a dark shawl and a black derby hat with a veil.

  She hurried down the long Grande Galerie of the Louvre and through the Salon Carré into the Salle des Sept-Cheminées, where, for an instant, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa caught her eye. How strange, she later said, that this painting of ill omen should be the last she ever saw of the Louvre.

  Once outside, on the rue de Rivoli, she and a lady-in-waiting, Madame Adélaïde-Charlotte Lebreton, went off by a common, one-horse cab as fast as possible up the Champs-Élysées to the avenue de l’Impératrice, on an impulse that Dr. Evans might help her.

  They arrived at about five o’clock to find Evans not at home. When he returned an hour or so later, accompanied by a long-time American colleague, Dr. Edward Crane, he was told two unidentified ladies “very anxious” to see him were waiting in the library.

  Thomas Evans had been well established in Paris professionally and socially for nearly twenty years. He had come to France knowing no one, speaking no French, and with little in savings. He now resided on the avenue de l’Impératrice, where, as said in the Paris Guide of 1867, one saw “smiles everywhere, people dressed to the nines … elegance, too, and what splendors!” The house he and his wife, Agnes, called Bella Rosa had, in addition to a fine library, a white and gold ballroom, stained-glass windows, and a grand staircase of Pyrénées marble designed by Charles Garnier, the architect for the new Opéra. There were extensive grounds, a fountain, a stable with stalls for twenty horses. Evans knew all the prominent and well-to-do Americans in Paris, as well as Minister Washburne, who lived farther down the avenue. He and Agnes entertained in lavish style and customarily spent holidays at the most fashionable seaside resorts. Agnes was at the moment on holiday at Deauville on the Normandy coast.

  He was charming and handsome, if a bit too well fed, and had every reason to be pleased with himself, having received the highest professional honors, including the French Legion of Honor. Such heights were unimaginable for a dentist at home in the United States or in France. In Paris, when he first arrived, he had found those who specialized in treating diseases of the teeth ranked with barbers. Physicians looked down on dentistry, considering it hardly comparable to their own profession. Dentists sent for by well-to-do patients were expected to enter the house by the back door, like ordinary tradesmen.

  For all that he had adapted to life in Paris, Evans never lost his strong allegiance to his own country. Most obvious had been his open support of the North throughout the Civil War, lobbying the emperor on the subject at every chance, despite the Southern sympathies of much of his clientele, not to say the emperor himself.

  Further, from the time France went to war that summer, Evans had taken a lead in preparing for the medical emergency to be faced. He wasted no time establishing what he called the American International Sanitary Committee, paid for by him and a circle of American friends in Paris.

  On a flat stretch of open land across the avenue from Bella Rosa, tents went up for a field hospital, or “field ambulance,” over which he flew an American flag. Supplies of canned beef, biscuits, candles, ether, bedding, and clothing were stocked—all under the direction of Evans and his colleague Crane. The sick and wounded to be cared for would be more than the Paris
hospitals could handle, and a well-supplied, well-staffed facility in the open air would be far preferable to crowding them into airless churches and public buildings, as was the usual way. No one with any realistic sense of the gravity of the crisis to come failed to appreciate the value of how much Dr. Evans had already accomplished.

  As soon as he stepped into the library and saw who was waiting, Evans knew what was expected of him. Without hesitation, he offered the empress his help, despite all he stood to lose if things went wrong, as they both knew without saying. “We were thoroughly impressed with the idea that we were about to engage in an undertaking attended with many risks,” he would write, “and that it would require great discretion on our parts if it was to be successfully executed.”

  They agreed to wait until morning before leaving the house. The empress had had little or no sleep for days. Evans made up a bed for her himself, in his wife’s bedroom, because he dared not trust the servants.

  At five o’clock he knocked at her door and they were on their way before daybreak, both dressed as they had been the night before. They were a party of four—Evans and Crane, the empress and her lady-in-waiting— traveling in Evans’s own enclosed landau, a trusted coachman driving. They headed straight for Deauville and, with Evans doing the talking at checkpoints and a change of horses, they sailed through. No one recognized the empress, not even at Deauville.

  Evans appealed to an English yachtsman, Sir John Burgoyne, and his wife to take the empress across the Channel to asylum in England. Lady Burgoyne responded, “Well, why not?”

  After an extremely rough crossing, the empress and Evans were landed safely on the other side.

  In Paris, meantime, no one knew anything about this. There were only rumors, the most common of which was that the empress had managed to get away to Belgium. Later the same day as her escape from the city with Evans, September 5, Victor Hugo, after years in exile, returned to Paris to wild acclaim.