by Jill Jonnes
For years, Americans in Paris (or the select who were invited) had celebrated the Fourth of July at Bella Rosa, the magnificent mansion near the Bois de Boulogne belonging to Dr. Thomas Evans, longtime dentist to the nobility of Europe, and one of the American colony’s leading lights. A Quaker from Philadelphia, Dr. Evans had arrived in Paris in 1847 at age twenty-four with his wife, Agnes. Within five years, his pain-reducing services had won him appointment as official court dentist to Emperor Louis Napoleon III and his wife, Eugénie, as well as the Prince of Wales, the Russian czars, and many others. He amassed great wealth, which he used to build a palatial marble hôtel furnished with carpets from the Turkish sultan, vases from the Russian princes, and many royal bibelots. The graceful mansion was set in a verdant park with fountains, famous rose gardens, an American walnut tree and weeping willow, and several splendid aviaries stocked with rare pheasants, brilliant parrots, canaries, an ostrich, and four American bluebirds.
American diplomats assigned to Paris had long resented Dr. Evans, for not only did he have better access to the nobility of Europe, but no U.S. minister had ever been able to afford to live in comparable splendor or entertain in such lavish style. Moreover, this now-elderly man with his signature muttonchops was something of a royal sycophant and, worse yet, a bore. How many times had those at his dinner table been subjected to the story of how he secretly helped the empress Eugénie escape from Paris across the Channel to England after the fall of the Second Empire? A few years earlier he had even privately published his oft-told tale. The good dentist also loved to recount how, after a special mission to America to see how the Civil War was going, he had sailed back to Paris and convinced his friend the emperor to support President Lincoln. And then there were his two dozen noble honors and medals—French, Dutch, Russian, Prussian—awarded for services dental and diplomatic and prominently displayed in elegant cases. His wife, often bedecked with dazzling diamond necklaces, brooches, and earrings, served as further evidence of his success, for these expensive jewels were bestowed by grateful aristocratic clients and governments. One visiting American diplomat had remarked to his host while the men smoked their cigars, “Well, Doctor, we certainly owe you a debt of gratitude. For us it is a great thing to see a king or prince; but it seems that they all have opened their mouths to you.”
In 1875, Dr. Evans had purchased the weekly American Register, thus becoming a pivotal voice in the American colony. Not surprisingly, the dentist was an ardent royalist who hoped that the revived French republic would not last. He used his column, “Paris Local,” to write admiring tidbits about the remnants of aristocratic society. While James Gordon Bennett loved to attack the other English-language newspaper in Paris, the venerable Galignani’s Messenger, he did not bother often to acknowledge Evans’s American Register. Moreover, the columns of the Paris Herald somehow never managed to get the doctor’s name right, as if he were some visiting fireman not worthy of proper identification. In Bennett’s paper, Dr. Thomas Evans was invariably identified as Dr. Theodore Evans.
On this particular Fourth of July, quite a few of the longtime American colony and certainly the whole of the resident U.S. diplomatic corps were delighted to find custom turned on its head. Since the very wealthy new minister Reid had issued an open invitation to all Americans to celebrate Independence Day at his new mansion, no longer would Dr. Evans be able to lord it over his fellow countrymen, as Bennett was pleased to point out in his editorial columns: “We offer our hearty congratulations to the United States Minister for the wise step taken in the way of invitations. Instead of making a great stir and commotion by drawing up ‘visiting lists’ and ruling out Mrs. Flibertygibit, and ruling in Mrs. Humdrum, and causing heart-burnings and tempests in teapots, Mr. Whitelaw Reid simply reverted to the old ways of Washington and Jefferson, and Adams. All Americans were informed they were welcome to the Minister’s home. And they went there, and they enjoyed themselves.”
The Chicago Tribune’s reporter M. E. Sherwood declared the Reids’ soirée a great success: “Miss Eames and Miss Marie Decca sang, and everybody came, ‘some in rags, and some in tags, and some in velvet gowns.’ Ladies in bonnets and gentlemen in dusters elbowed the latest creations of Worth, and the American colony had great pleasure. . . . Champagne flowed in an unceasing stream and a bountiful supper was spread in the grand dining room.” A thousand Americans of every station happily inspected the avenue Hoche mansion and one another.
The next day Colonel Cody wrote his favorite sister, Julia, back at Scout’s Rest: “Yesterday was a busy day for me. First I went with the American Minister to the tomb of General LaFayette then to the unveiling of Barthold’s Statue, then to a reception & dinner we gave in camp—then the afternoon performance—then to the Legation reception—back for the evening show—then into my evening dress and to Minister Reid’s reception, turned in at daylight—and today I am off my feed—I am like you I can’t stand so much as I used to and I am not all well this summer. Now as we are getting old we must not kick at our breaking down, it can’t be helped, but I don’t want to break down until I get out of debt and ahead of the hounds far enough to take it easy. Sorry you & Al are not well—but don’t worry. Love to you all Brother Will. P.S. About getting ahead and not loosing it, that is a hard thing to calculate on—as I have to take such awful risks in my business—Brother.”
The elderly Dr. Evans had enthusiastically embraced one French custom: he had long kept a mistress. One of the more famous of Paris’s grandes horizontales, Méry Laurent “was tall, with an exquisite tea-rose complexion, blue eyes, and fair hair with hints of red, a laughing beauty with arched eyebrows and a wide-eyed gaze. . . . Her mouth was sensual, her bosom formidable.” Dr. Evans, nearing fifty, had been smitten back in the spring of 1872 when Laurent, twenty-three, played a small part in the Offenbach operetta Le Roi Carotte. He wooed her with giant baskets of white roses and champagne dinners. Not long after she became famous for emerging nude from a large silver shell at the Châtelet theater, he installed her in a luxurious apartment at 52 rue de Rome with a monthly allowance of five thousand francs. Every day, Evans strolled over from Bella Rosa for a lunchtime visit. As the years passed, he also provided his mistress with a pleasant little summer villa.
The doctor was a busy man who frequently traveled to attend to his far-flung patients. Given that he also had a wife, Laurent developed her own interests, which included affairs with some of the more artistic men of Paris, who flocked to her Tuesday salon. Until Manet’s death in 1883, they had been lovers, and in 1881 he had painted her portrait, titled Autumn. Evans had enjoyed meeting Laurent’s bohemian friends and inevitably began adding some of their modern art to his large but otherwise conventional collection. The ever-gay Laurent was devoted in her own way to Evans, and said that leaving him “would be a wicked thing to do. I content myself with deceiving him.”
After Manet died, Laurent took as her lover Stéphane Mallarmé, the Symbolist poet, even as he was becoming friends with James McNeill Whistler. Soon, whenever the Master was in Paris, Whistler dropped in to Laurent’s evening salon. The Butterfly met Dr. Evans and happily fed him publicity items for the American Register.
In the wake of the Fourth of July, Minister Reid felt that the warm ceremonies of republican solidarity boded well for his overarching diplomatic mission: to persuade the French government to rescind the ruinous restrictions on the import of American pork. In 1881, the last year for the free flow of pork, U.S. farmers had earned almost $4 million, a figure that plummeted to a meager $5,000 in 1888. Minister Reid’s pork problem—what the French would call l’affaire des petits cochons—began when the French discovered that the phylloxera pest that had been decimating their wine industry had almost certainly originated in the United States. Claiming to be worried about trichinosis, the French effectively banned pork imports, though some believed it was just a form of revenge.
Two years later, in 1883, the U.S. Congress retaliated with 30 percent U.S. tariffs on Frenc
h art. French master Jean-Léon Gérôme complained to one of his New York collectors about “the strange, odd idea of likening the products of the mind [art] to sardines in oil and smoked ham. All over the world works of art were duty free. In one country alone were they saddled with excessive tax, and that country was the youngest, the greatest, and the wealthiest of nations.” It was Minister Reid’s task to quietly untangle this mess.
Just a week earlier, he had written to Secretary of State James G. Blaine, who had heard once again from the aggrieved Chicago Board of Trade about pork. Reid advised that the United States would do best to bide its time until autumn. While President Sadi Carnot’s government did favor repealing the pork tariff to make available cheaper food, the Chamber of Deputies remained hostile to the proposal. In any case, the politicians were presently too absorbed by the Exposition, the possible return of Boulanger, and coming elections to take up the issue of pork.
In the meantime, Reid noted, he had learned that a reduction in the U.S. tariff on French art “would materially help in securing the concession we ask, and would besides give great satisfaction throughout France. Conversation with others confirms this opinion. As our own artists generally wish for such a reduction also, this would seem to indicate a practical and easy method of facilitating future negotiations as to the prohibition on pork.”
Right after the Fourth of July, the French horsey set, skeptical about the Wild West’s bronco-taming act, had issued a challenge to Buffalo Bill. A Monsieur Tailard of the elite Jockey Club had a “fiery untamed steed.” During a regular Wild West performance, he proposed, this wild “colt shall be lassoed, saddled and ridden within the time usually given to the bucking show of the set.” Colonel Cody was more than amenable, and on July 8, the horse, a fine-looking sixteen-hand black stallion, was delivered to the horse corral next to the arena as Buffalo Bill and the cowboys watched. “I want you to capture him,” said Cody to his men, “ride him, and subdue him; but you must be careful and not injure him. It must be done carefully and without any cruelty.” Mexican Joe and Jim Kidd vied for the honor, but in a cut of the cards, Jim Kidd won. Word of the challenge had gotten out, and a huge crowd, including much of the Jockey Club in ringside boxes, jammed the stands for the three o’clock show, with much heavy betting involved. When the time came for the bronco act, Buffalo Bill lassoed the wild stallion on his first try and with great trouble got him saddled up.
Jim Kidd sprang into the saddle, and off charged the stallion, bucking furiously. “No other horse has ever pawed so much air under a cowboy,” said the Chicago Tribune. “Once he tried to jump over the stand. But Kidd kept his seat and presently had the horse under such control that he actually took ‘Mother’ Whittaker [the Wild West’s beloved wardrobe mistress] up behind, and the two rode around the ring as the cowboy band played, ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes.’ It was the finest specimen of riding ever seen in Paris and the immense audience showed its appreciation of the young man’s skill by round after round of applause. . . . It was said one member of the Jockey Club lost 15,000 francs.”
Annie Oakley was having a wondrous Parisian summer, full of acclaim and amusements. Coached by Ira Paine, another American sharpshooter performing in Paris, she had mastered amazing new skills. Using a Smith and Wesson revolver, she shot directly through the middle of an ace of spades at ten yards. Then, even more astoundingly, that card was held sideways, and she shot and split it! President Sadi Carnot himself had paid Oakley the highest compliment, telling her, “When you feel like changing your nationality and profession there is a commission awaiting you in the French Army.”
On July 12, the monarch of the West African nation of Senegal, Dinah Salifou, a Muslim, came out to Neuilly with his entourage of veiled wives, his twelve-year-old prince, and various officials to see the Wild West. “His Sable Majesty,” as the press called him, was a striking figure in his black burnoose richly embroidered with gold. He had an intelligent face with a long sculpted beard, and his high forehead and bald head were emphasized by a distinctive conical high black hat, also covered with gold. King Salifou was riveted by Annie Oakley’s unerring blasting of glass balls and all manner of flying objects. After the pioneers’ cottage had once again been saved from the attacking Indians in the performance’s finale, King Salifou sought out Buffalo Bill in the campground and expressed his admiration for Little Missy’s sharpshooting talents.
Then the king asked Cody, “How much do you want for her?”
“Want for her?” responded Cody, nonplussed. “How do you mean?”
“To sell her. I wish to take her back with me. In my country, my people are not safe in many of the small villages. There are man-eating tigers in many districts, and even one of these animals can cause much damage. But with a person of such wonderful skills as she, it would be easy to organize parties with her as the chief huntress; the danger would be soon past. Would you consider a hundred thousand francs sufficient?”
Buffalo Bill’s eyes glinted with fun, and he called for Oakley.
“Missy,” the colonel said, introducing the king of Senegal and relating his offer.
Annie Oakley with some of the medals she won in sharpshooting contests
Miss Oakley looked wryly at Cody. “But am I for sale, Colonel?”
“Come to think of it, I guess you ain’t.”
Even as the king raised his price, Cody put an end to the joke and explained that Oakley was no slave, but her own modern woman, a citizen of the United States, and a world-class sharpshooter with a contract.
“When I told him I did not wish to go,” said Oakley, “he went down on one knee with a sweeping grace that would have done credit to ye knights of old England, and lifting my hand, raised my fingertips to his lips. He departed with the air of a soldier.” The king was learning that republics were more complicated than kingdoms. In truth, the French, who had long had a presence in his nation and now eyed it as a prospective colony, had invited this African monarch to the fair to advance their empire-building designs.
One wonders what emotions Annie Oakley felt over this seemingly amusing encounter with the Senegalese king, for her dark secret was that she had, in fact, once actually been enslaved, a terrifying episode that began when she was only ten, an episode revealed to the public only just before her death. Oakley’s childhood had started happily enough. Her parents were settlers in Ohio, doing reasonably well, when her father almost froze in a blizzard and then died in 1866. It was hard times thereafter for the widow, left with five daughters and a baby son. Little Annie wanted to help out. “I was eight years old when I took my first shot, and I still consider it one of the best shots I ever made. I saw a squirrel run down over the grass in front of the house, through the orchard and stop on a fence to get a hickory nut.” She rushed inside to get a rifle, and got the animal in her sight. “It was a wonderful shot, going right through the head from side to side.” She turned out to be an absolute natural with a gun, and her hunting helped the family scrape by.
When Annie was ten her mother remarried, and family friends, the Edingtons, who ran the Darke County poor farm, proposed that Annie come live with them, attend school, and help sew dresses for the orphans. Oakley liked her new “Auntie” but missed the country. “I was deprived of my beloved hunts through the beautiful snow-clad woods.” Then a farmer dropped by, a man she later called only the “He-Wolf,” hoping Oakley might like to come help his wife with their newborn baby. When he promised that she could hunt, she agreed. “All went well for a month,” she would later write. “Then the work began to stack up. I got up at four o’clock in the morning, got breakfast, milked the cows, fed the calves, the pigs, pumped water for the cattle, fed the chickens, rocked the baby to sleep, weeded the garden, picked wild blackberries, got dinner after digging the potatoes for dinner and picking the vegetables—and then could go hunting and trapping.” When her mother asked to have her come home, the couple would not let Oakley go but wrote her mother that she was fine and attending school.<
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“One night I nodded over the big basket of stockings I had to darn. Suddenly the ‘She-Wolf’ struck me across the ears, pinched my arms and threw me out of doors into the deep snow and locked the door. I had no shoes on and in a few minutes my feet grew numb.
“I was slowly freezing to death. So I got down on my little knees, looked towards God’s clear sky and tried to pray. But my lips were frozen stiff and there was no sound.”
The “She-Wolf,” worried because she heard her husband returning, opened the door and barked at Oakley to come in. “But I could not move, so she yanked me in, pushing me into a chair by the fire. My head sank limp just as the ‘He-Wolf’ entered and demanded to know what was the matter.”
