Prince Said Toussoum was more open-minded toward British individuals. He married an Englishwoman and died in Alexandria in his twenty-sixth year.
Although Ida persisted in thinking them childlike, the Egyptians were multilingual, having been schooled in Europe, and quite cosmopolitan. They were sensitive to slights, and Ida thought it was for that reason that they declined to visit on Thursday nights when the girls “received” acquaintances. In the beginning, the Americans’ social life revolved around the McCall Mission, a community of American Protestants doing evangelical and social work in Paris, and occasional visitors from Meadville and Titusville.
Their weekly entertainment budget was twelve cents, but callers seemed not to mind. Ida described the evenings in a letter home: “Our salon is about as big as the west bedroom so you can imagine that receiving more than one is hard. We had seven last week. We borrow two cups and saucers of Madame and have three of our own and manage to give everyone a thimbleful of tea.”
Eventually, the Tewfiks were persuaded to join in: “We delighted the Egyptians by telling them they are more like Americans than the French are. And they are! These French!! but I cannot describe them. You’d call me home by cable.”5
Her disapproval of men amazed the Frenchwomen she met. After she complained that a man had interrupted her work in the Bibliothèque Nationale to flirt with her, her French teacher laughed and said that Ida was very modest and might have enjoyed being admired. “Isn’t that Frenchy!” Ida commented.6
Inspired by everything around her, Ida let fanciful ideas about her Titusville French tutor Séraphin Claude and his wife play in her mind and she filled the backs of steamer announcements with a story about them.
Ida called it “France Adorée” and in it she revealed much of herself by creating characters who hid their feelings under feigned aloofness. The story, set in Paris, traces two couples: a devoted older married pair named Bonnet, after her landlady, and a young American man and woman who talk constantly about dedication to their work. Before leaving America for France, the heroine, named Bertha, has arranged for the Bonnets to see France one last time with her. But M. Bonnet dies on the boat just in sight of land, and Bertha promises the wife she will visit his Paris grave. In Paris she meets Scott (whom the author named after her nephew) and strikes up a friendship with him that centers around their studies and work. When she is ready to return home, she reveals this sentimental duty and asks Scott to tend Bonnet’s grave so she can leave with a good conscience. After seeing this new side of Bertha, Scott responds with unexpected tenderness. The tale concludes: “Could it be that Scott had a vein of sentiment, too?” The reader is left to think they may meet again in America, but it is important to note that Tarbell leaves Scott not with a girl but a corpse.
Feeling that anything was possible now that she had come to France, Ida decided to submit her story to Scribner’s Magazine. She balanced the fact that her manuscript was unsolicited against the detail that it had the cachet of a Paris postmark. After mailing it, she forced herself to forget about it. She returned to work on Mme Roland and to her one-woman newspaper syndicate.
She was eager to tell her readers how fine the French were. She had been warned that they were vicious, but she found them decent, polite, and enterprising, especially the women who had resolved the dilemma of work versus home by being partners with their husbands in family businesses. Their knowledge impressed her. Her landlady Mme Bonnet scoffed at the idea of education for women; at the same time she herself was well-read and sufficiently fluent in English to compose letters in that language at night when she couldn’t sleep.
“To my surprise I found these people, working so busily and constantly, were not restless like the Americans; nor were they generally envious. I had a feeling that my concierge, who never had been across the Seine to the Right Bank, who lived in a room almost filled by her huge bed and its great feather puffs, who must have looked long at a sou before she spent it, would not have changed places with anybody in Paris.”7 If Balzac found the bourgeoisie scheming, and Zola portrayed them as hypocrites, Tarbell idealized them as respecting themselves and their tasks.
In turn, she noted that they regarded her single state “with a mixture of horror and commiseration which to a genuine American old maid is one of the most delicious things in the world to see.”8 They called her “une femme travailleuse,” a hard-working woman. “I was treated with respect because of my working quality. It was not saying that I should not have gone farther and faster if I had been a beauty, if I had had what they call charm and the fine secret of using it, but they were willing to take me for what I had.”9
Starting out, Ida paced herself to the rhythm of the industrious bourgeoisie. She would arise at six and buy breakfast rolls and café au lait; write from eight to noon; then clear up for lunch, dress, and explore the city, returning at last for supper and an evening of reading. She read Le Figaro in particular as it gave her story leads.
She sent as many topics to as many newspapers as she could. The month she arrived the Chicago Union Signal published her report on Paris safety: “The woman who sees nothing while seeing everything and who preserves her countenance … can go to restaurants and find she is not by any means the only woman who is dining alone.” She added the startling news that girls in cafés took out their compacts to check their appearances in public, but did not feel it advisable to add that these same mademoiselles openly nuzzled their escorts’ shoulders.
In September 1891, the Pittsburgh Dispatch published her report that Lohengrin had been presented under police protection because anti-German sentiment still festered twenty-five years after the Prussian War; hunters were requesting to use the government’s smokeless gun-powder; and that there was talk of reducing the number of hours Frenchwomen might work daily to ten.
The Dispatch introduced her work with the announcement that Miss Tarbell had a syndicate of prominent journals that she would furnish with a series on Parisian municipal affairs: “From what we know of Miss Tarbell, she is bound to make a place for herself in American literature,” it said. As autumn gave way to winter, all her editors seemed pleased, but not one was inclined to pay.
She told herself that poverty was picturesque. At the Bibliothèque Nationale, where she worked almost daily, the poor came in to warm their toes and groom themselves with broken combs. Those snapping the frayed threads of their clothes were often too old to work, were victims of the bankruptcy of the Panama Company, or they were deposed aristocracy. From her bedroom window, Tarbell often watched “The Countess,” a tall white-haired woman who lived in a garret across the street. Wearing a gown and cape of faded and patched silk, she turned over the contents of the garbage cans scavenging for food. Tarbell saw the poor as gallant and convinced herself that if they could survive so could she.
On November 12, 1891, her first payment arrived—six dollars from the Cincinnati Times-Star. When her calculations revealed that her fee amounted to four words per penny, she realized that she had never worked harder for so little. Still, at least now she could buy shoes. Focusing her next article on the poor, she volunteered to work at a soup kitchen in Faubourg Saint Antoine where people had once gathered to storm the Bastille. While researching how the city licensed its beggars, she bought a preprinted fortune from a blind man. It read: “You are going to have an uncomfortable affair with a young person, but two of your friends will console you and introduce you into better society. You will spend many happy days in a great city, but at last your interests will force you to leave. Afterward surrounded by friends and all the pleasures of life, you will see your days pass happily by.”
The mendicant’s prediction proved nearly correct, if the affair with the young person and the consoling friends are interpreted as referring to a group of people Ida met when her Sorbonne classes opened after traditional post-vacation delays in November.
Americans found each other quickly in the Latin Quarter and Ida soon grew close to a group of young scholars connected with
Johns Hopkins University: John and Ada Vincent, Fred and Mary Emery, and Charles Downer Hazen, a young historian whose specialty was the French Revolution. Hazen was eleven years Ida’s junior and so short he came only to her chin. Although he was well aware of the need to carve out a career, he was easily distracted by the joy of simple desultory loafing. After she mentioned him in several letters, her family began to tease her. She replied that he was “the dearest little fellow in the world and Mary Henry’s particular friend (you see I am careful to explain that he isn’t mine. And don’t any more misunderstand about my relation to boys).”10
Ida’s desire to do literary work, which her family found so alien, was a matter of course to the Johns Hopkins men. Now the social life of Ida and her roommates moved beyond the McCall Mission. In this new group their animation could be unbridled and Ida, who ordinarily had a shy primness in the presence of strangers, soon forgot herself and entered in. Once, en route to Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the tombs of French kings, a hapless Frenchman entered their train compartment. They took out their guidebooks and simultaneously read aloud until they drove him from their midst. Later, Ida showed off by plucking a yellow posy from the tomb of England’s exiled James II.
In couples they went to see the cancan. In the Moulin Rouge, a vast dance hall glowing with rosy-orange gaslights, the air was full of the scent of rice powder and tobacco. Toots from a powerful brass band heralded the arrival of high-kicking risqué dancers in long skirts that they tossed above their heads. The garden outside offered roving monkeys, a mammoth wooden elephant that opened like a Trojan horse to reveal an orchestra, and a comic who “sang” opera through his derriere. One can only guess Ida’s reaction to all this and speculate as to whether she ever noticed a man about twenty-seven years old, pince-nez on his nose, swaying his small body forward with the aid of a cherry wood cane and answering to the name of Toulouse-Lautrec.
Ida reported her experience in a comparatively short paragraph placed between news of the Sorbonne and an excursion to Saint-Germain. “I’m not going to do anything I daren’t tell—if I can help it,” she wrote as if she were a woman teetering between childhood and adolescence, “but here goes—I have been to see the can-can … It was intensely interesting you may be sure. We went to a place called the Moulin Rouge (Red Mill). The outside is built like a mill and painted red. The huge blades of the wheel, which revolves, are filled with red lights. There was a stage performance which wasn’t at all bad and a great deal of good music. There was no noise, drunkenness or disorder.”
Perhaps evil is as evil thinks—perhaps she really did not know why groups of girls sat around at little tables soliciting for their gentlemen friends, but clearly she did sense something vaguely disturbing: “When I get home I’ll tell you what I saw. Someway I don’t like to write it. Strange, isn’t it?”11 Titillation wasn’t something Ida knew how to describe.
Ida and her Americans made a particular point to go to all the art exhibitions and to note what was new: “What is called the Impressionist School have several pictures and they are very interesting though not always particularly beautiful. It is surprising to see the way some of these French men handle color. The blues and greens fairly howl they are so bright and intense.”12
In her own life there were sharp contrasts of tone and intensity. Ida had lost a sale to the Dispatch because overseas mails were slow; she was worried about her sister’s health and the suicide of her father’s partner, which left Franklin liable for debts. All at once a bonanza of communications arrived. First, Bishop Vincent wanted her to teach in Calcutta, suggesting that literary work might open up there. This she ignored. Harper’s Bazaar bought her story on blue-and-white Copenhagen china and encouraged her to submit more. The McClure Syndicate asked her to write on “Marrying Day in Paris” for a munificent ten dollars. And finally, Scribner’s Magazine sent a check for one hundred dollars—almost as much as she had brought with her from America. Ida read the letter in one amazed glance—the editors said they would accept “France Adorée,” her story about her French tutor, provided they could make some changes.
As Mary Henry announced triumphantly that they could now move to the Champs Elysées, Ida sat down weeping with joy. Here was vindication for all she had endured at the hands of T. L. Flood. Success at Scribner’s canceled out failure at The Chautauquan. Here was the first proof that there was a place for her outside Meadville.
Scribner’s editors asked her permission to condense the beginning of her story and improve the Bonnets’ broken English. In the first thrill of acceptance, Ida sat down and wrote a gushing letter saying how right they were to ask for these changes and how foolish she had been not to have done that in the first place. Rereading it, she realized her gratitude was making her grovel. She destroyed her first letter and wrote a simple reply thanking them for accepting the manuscript and inquiring if they would be interested in a short biographical series on Mme Roland written from the standpoint of newly released material. It was the first formal step toward publication of her projected book.
Far more than her syndicate’s success, the sale allowed Ida more freedom to plan what she wanted to do with her time in Paris. She had been toying with the notion of taking a degree but decided to enroll only in those classes that would further the biography.
She decided to extend her stay to two years, hoping at the end of that time to have a manuscript to submit to a publisher, possibly even the august Charles Scribner and Sons. Knowing she would not go back to Titusville for years made choosing her first Christmas decorations especially poignant. Fashionable jewelry stores displayed cakes of diamonds and bouquets of rubies and pearls. She lingered before the windows of religious supply houses gazing at the life-sized Nativity scenes until she settled at last on a little ceramic dog, a model of the ruffled canines owned by rich Parisians, to send to Titusville as a Christmas present to her entire family.
Ida and her roommates were homesick at Christmas, but they made a family of themselves and gave each other five-cent presents. Ida’s gifts reflected the long hours she worked and the items she had to borrow. She received a candlestick, a pen so she would no longer have to use Annie’s, a paper knife, French flags, and a pipe to curl her hair with. “Nobody in Paris had more fun, I’m sure, than we. It isn’t money after all that makes the best of things,”13 she wrote home.
The Tarbells had no cause to complain that Ida never wrote them. She was as faithful in her letters to her family as some are to their diaries, and she had the strange habit, which her father shared, of signing her full name: “Lovingly, Ida M. Tarbell” or “Ida M.T.” Judging from her missives, Ida missed her family, worried about being so far away from them, and felt guilty about being in Paris when she could have been helping them at home. She did not write of those moments when she was nearly mad with love of Paris or when she thought she could not bear to again live in the United States, but she insisted on knowing every detail of their lives. If a week passed without a letter from Titusville, she was furious. She once lashed out: “This is a rather large piece of paper, but I think I can fill two sides of it in scolding you. I am in a very bad state of mind to be candid. I have had no letter from you this week and I am cross in consequence.”14
Esther did her best to fill her absent daughter’s request and sent ten-page letters whose bulk never failed to amaze Ida’s landlady. Under orders to tell everything, Esther wrote letters that were streams of discontent. She said she found peace only in Hatch Hollow and complained about her daughter-in-law Ella: she was always ill when company came and either lay abed with nameless vapors or returned to her parents in Illinois, leaving Esther to cook for Will. “When I was sick no one took care of my children—they were left to run wild while I struggled back on my feet,”15 she once wrote. But of Ida, Esther never complained. She expressed her love and joy over Ida’s progress: “It is all so much more than you could have expected when you left America.”
Esther was the family correspondent, but Sarah and I
da sometimes exchanged private letters. In these, Ida was much jauntier. Letters from Sarah, who was now almost thirty, were not so full of fun and often brought Ida pain. News that Franklin’s partner had committed suicide, leaving him responsible for debts, came from Sarah. So did word that Sarah had told a Mrs. Chamberlain the full story of Ida’s troubles with Flood. She wrote that the woman was on Ida’s side and that her family had never liked Flood: “They all thought Dr. Flood could do the meanest little things of any man they knew and shan’t tell our folks I said anything.”16
The sisters’ relationship is not entirely clear. The six years’ difference in age that had made Ida an occasional baby-sitter in her youth was insignificant in their adulthood. Sarah had lent Ida money to help her finance her stay in Paris, something that haunted Ida when she learned that Sarah’s surgery (the exact nature of which is unknown) incurred medical expenses. She had implored her family to sell some of her own household possessions—particularly a treasured rug—but that had not proved necessary.
As Sarah recuperated, she occupied her time with the craze for spiritualism until she and Will’s wife suspected they had contacted Ella’s late grandfather and gave up in fright. Sarah’s more serious pursuit was painting.
Franklin Tarbell built a studio for Sarah in an upstairs room with a window so large it was like a wall of glass. Unfortunately, Titusville had an inordinate number of cloudy days when Sarah had to contemplate the exhibitions Ida wrote about from Paris instead of painting her own works.
Sarah Asenath Tarbell was a feisty woman with as much spirit as her mother and elder sister, but less stamina to support it. Her health was a worry until her late twenties, and she seemed also to have allowed herself to be tied to home. Will once wrote Ida unsympathetically of the relationship between Sarah and Esther—“the old series of making each other sick” is the way he described it—but they were also overcome by tears whenever they left each other for long.
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