by Jill Jonnes
High up on the Tour en Fer, Gustave Eiffel had gathered fifty friends at his apartment to mark this last evening of the great Paris World’s Fair of 1889. William Hammer had arrived with a gift—a wax cylinder from Thomas Edison. Eiffel opened his Edison phonograph and installed it, and the sounds of opera flowed forth, lovely, evocative. And then, the voice of Thomas Edison himself, thanking Eiffel for his time on his tower. Hammer had also brought along an empty cylinder, and set it up to record this final evening of the fair. As Eiffel hosted his valedictory party, the tower began to fizz and pop with red fireworks. Gustave Eiffel had tasted success as sweet as comes to few men, and was savoring it thoroughly.
The neophyte American art student Art Young was down below in the happy crowd, where he had decided to spend the evening capturing in quick drawings those final fair hours. “It was a curious experience, watching the spirit of antic play shown by visitors from many lands,” he would write later. “There was something both joyous and sad about that farewell to a world event. I looked back into the grounds as two gendarmes politely but firmly closed the main gates—the walks were cluttered with newspapers, candy boxes, and other litter. Ahead of me were students, arms over shoulders, dancing in single file across the nearest bridge over the Seine. Behind them some peasants singing. And an old man in high hat and shawl, moving along with spry step.”
And so, the great Exposition Universelle of 1889 ended, a phenomenal achievement. The French could not help but glory in their triumph: An unprecedented number of visitors—French and foreign—had “shed over Paris a shower of gold,” observed The American Register, putting “Frenchmen themselves into an amiable mood.” All the prophesies of failure and warnings of certain violence had come to naught. As one French paper boasted, “The Exhibition has brought to France much foreign money, but, what is better, is the change that has taken place in the opinions of foreigners with respect to France. . . . They have seen perfect order in the streets. . . . [W]hen M. de Bismarck tells them that France is on the eve of a bloody revolution, foreigners will smile.”
There were many tallies to measure the fair’s success: By one reckoning the world had come in droves: 90,000 Americans; 32,000 Austrians; 12,000 Africans; 8,000 Asiatics; 3,000 Australians; 225,000 Belgians; 380,000 English; 160,000 Germans; 5,000 Greeks, Romanians, and Turks; 38,000 Italians; 3,500 Portuguese; 7,000 Russians; 25,000 South Americans; 56,000 Spaniards; 3,000 Swedes and Norwegians; and 52,000 Swiss. In total, they had shelled out an estimated $324 million.
Not all who came to Paris during those last weeks of the fair were of good cheer. W. D. Baldwin had arrived to check on the Otis Brothers’ ongoing lawsuit against Eiffel. Baldwin was not hopeful, he said, writing Charles Otis: “The Eiffel suit comes up on Monday next and I am going over to be present at the argument. . . . [We have] but little if any chance against Eiffel.” After the acrimonious relations, it was no surprise that Eiffel had refused to pay Otis the firm’s final $14,700 balance. His argument was simple: the Otis elevators were not working when promised.
The close of the Exposition Universelle left Parisians feeling somewhat bereft. A week after the fair’s close, Rastignac of L’Illustration lamented, “The boulevards no longer look as they did eight days ago. In place of the rolling flood of cabs and hackneys, the taxi stands have long lines of empty carriages and here and there a single shivering fare waiting in the backseat while the driver makes himself hoarse shouting, ‘Let’s go, let’s go, off to Buffalo!’”
Yes, the World’s Fair had closed, but Buffalo Bill and his Wild West show had lingered on, playing only one three o’clock show each day. To spice up what was now a familiar series of acts, Cody had introduced the pursuit and hanging of a horse thief, as well as a re-creation of his own dramatic fight to the death with Yellow Hand back in June of 1876. That Cheyenne’s purported scalp had been a much-commented-upon souvenir on prominent display in Cody’s luxurious tent. As reenacted in the Neuilly arena, Cody and an Indian charged each other on horseback, fell to the ground, and lunged into hand-to-hand combat with bowie knives. “The act is well-played,” reported Galignani’s Messenger, “and the vast audiences are daily thrilled by its actuality.” One of those watching from the grandstands was the young Nor+wegian painter Edvard Munch, who wrote his father, “Sunday I was at Bilbao Bill’s [sic]. Bilbao Bill is the most renowned trapper in America. He has come here with a large number of Indians and trappers and has set up an entire Indian village outside Paris with many Indian tents. Bilbao Bill took part in several Indian wars . . . among other things in a big fight with a well-known Indian chief and took his scalp with a knife. The knife and scalp are displayed in his tent. Many of the Indians that took part in the battle are here now and re-enact how it took place.”
Wild West performers pose before the Western backdrop.
Munch’s father, who was very ill, wrote, “It must be fun to see Indians, but I am doubtful if Mr. Bill really is an old trapper and that there is any trace of truth in knife’s and scalp’s authenticity.”
As the weather grew wintry, Nate Salsbury departed to southern France and Spain to arrange the troupe’s next engagements. The crowds still filled the stands for the single afternoon show, for not only were there the two new acts, but “Miss Oakley and Johnny Baker are both shooting splendidly, and so, too, is Daly. The charming Farrell sisters ride better than ever, and ‘Marm Whittaker’ is a decided success in her log cabin scene. It is said that a fashionable modiste of the Rue de la Paix is anxious to borrow Mrs. Whittaker’s sun-bonnet, as she wishes to introduce the fashion among Parisians.”
Wednesday, November 13, was announced as the final Wild West show, and on that day, all of Paris—American and French—overflowed the stands. “Colonel Cody’s Wild West show closed its Paris engagement most brilliantly yesterday afternoon,” reported the Paris Herald. “The American colony turned out in force to see the last of the Colonel and his gallant cowboys, of Miss Annie Oakley, of ‘Marm’ Whittaker, of Buck Taylor, of ‘good old’ Rocky Bear, and the other Indians, chiefs, braves, squaws, and papooses, of the bucking horses, baby buffalo and their other friends from the Far West. . . . Each member of the programme was greeted with hearty and prolonged applause, which became a veritable ovation when, after his shooting on horseback act, Colonel Cody was presented with a superb wreath of flowers from ‘His Paris Friends.’ ”
After tumultuous applause, the show came to its end, and those who strolled over to the Wild West camp for one last visit were not disappointed. That evening, as the cold autumnal breezes blew, the Indians hosted a religious ceremony, a farewell to the camp and Paris. “At half-past nine a great fire was lighted,” reported the Herald man, “over which a whole bullock and a number of dogs were roasted, while the Indians, with no other clothing than their war paint, danced solemnly around. Speeches were made by Red Shirt and Rocky Bear, the latter saying that in Colonel Cody God had sent the red man first an enemy and then a friend who had proved the best friend they had ever known.” Cody responded with his own praise of the Indians. Then the roast bullock and dogs were cut up, and portions handed out to those “who cared to partake.” With much handshaking and farewells, this “unique ceremony” closed. The next morning, the Wild West members would strike their tents and board their train for Marseilles, the next stop on their grand European tour.
The Washington Post declared the Exposition Universelle “the most successful affair of this kind that has ever been organized. . . . Not only has this great show reflected great credit on those who conceived it and carried it out, pouring millions into the pockets of thrifty Frenchmen, but it has put the French republic on a more secure foundation than it has hitherto rested on, and has driven its enemies into exile. In all respects it has exceeded the most sanguine expectations of its promoters. And yet we expect that the [American] World’s Fair of 1892 will beat it.”
Gustave Eiffel
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Afterword
On January 11, 1893, Gu
stave Eiffel once again found himself very much in the public eye—this time not in the familiar role of heroic engineer atop his incomparable Tour en Fer, but as a criminal defendant. In a jammed Paris courtroom deep inside the fortress-like Palais de Justice, the dour chief magistrate Samuel Périvier was grilling Eiffel, who along with four officers of the bankrupt Panama Canal Company had been charged with defrauding the now-ruined shareholders.
In the hush of the courtroom Eiffel reluctantly acknowledged to the judge that he had made a $6.6 million profit on his $13.8 million lock contract.
The spectators gasped amid angry murmurings. At Eiffel’s admission of his huge profit, the judge declared: “ ‘I consider such transaction void. The Prosecutor General will tell you more about this tomorrow and at the subsequent sittings of this court.’
“Mr. Eiffel,” reported The New York Times, “quailed visibly under these words, and the audience rose from their seats to get a better view of the manner in which he bore the reproof.”
The Panama Canal Company, having lost $280 million since 1880 on a doomed sea-level canal, had turned to Eiffel in December 1887 as a desperate last resort. He had overcome his qualms and had begun construction of a system of “liquid” locks. But the company had hemorrhaged too many millions, and in February 1889, only months before the opening of the fair, Eiffel had been ordered to stop building, while all over France investors saw their shares become so much worthless paper.
The Paris World’s Fair had been so beguiling, and such a triumph for the republican government, that it had taken some time for French outrage over the collapse of the Panama Canal Company to boil over. The Americans had long been skeptics. “It may seem passing strange,” the Paris correspondent for The New York Times had written on December 20, 1888, “almost funny indeed, that any one still believed in the Panama Canal speculation under its present manipulators. Hosts of people did and thousands of people do. I have myself heard within the last few days positively aggressive assertion, that the actual state of things is all owing to the jealousy of the United States. I know of a clerk who only this morning borrowed money—3,000 francs—to put into the stock, with the profound, earnest conviction that it would be just so much treasured gold for his children.”
Now, with the Exposition Universelle just a memory, French investors wanted to know how almost $300 million of their money had disappeared into a tropical quagmire. The Panama Affair became one of the great scandals of modern French history, for it slowly emerged that even as the Canal Company wasted vast sums excavating a sea-level canal that could not work, it had paid $4.4 million in bribes to politicians and members of the French press to support its increasingly shaky stock and bond offerings, thus encouraging French families to throw good money after bad. So much money had been wasted on the initial hopeless design that not enough remained to complete Eiffel’s version. On November 20, 1892, one of the company’s chief promoters, Baron Jacques de Reinach, had been discovered dead in his luxurious apartment, apparently a suicide, while another promoter fled to England. And so it was that Charles de Lesseps (his revered father, Ferdinand, builder of the Suez Canal, was by now senile and feeble), three other company officers, and contractor Gustave Eiffel found themselves in a Paris courtroom where an angry audience relished their comeuppance.
As David McCullough wrote in his history of the Panama Canal, “No one ever got to the bottom of the Panama Affair and no one ever will.” Certainly there were official inquiries, including 158 depositions and a final report filling “three ponderous volumes. But time and again the fact-finding stopped short of facts that might prove too embarrassing or destructive.” On February 9, 1893, restive crowds surrounded the Palais de Justice and filled the courtroom to hear the verdict in this first trial. Eiffel and his fellow defendants sat stunned when the judge pronounced them, one by one, guilty. Eiffel listened to his sentence of two years in prison and a $4,000 fine, stood up, and departed with his lawyers. Wrote the Paris Herald: “Real French patriots are chagrined to see two men like De Lesseps and Eiffel, whose names are known over the whole universe, abused and condemned to imprisonment while other political culprits escape.”
Eiffel’s tower had made him world-famous, one of the most admired men in France, and—by the end of the Exposition Universelle—richer than ever. But the very public that had so delighted in his triumph, lauding him as the beau ideal of a modern titan, now assumed that Eiffel must in fact be a venal scoundrel. His fall from grace was as utter as it was swift. Eiffel had argued that his locks were but a patriotic effort to actually build a workable canal of great national importance. But he had made far too much money on the venture when all around tens of thousands lost their meager savings. An aged silk maker in Versailles spoke for many when he described his helpless fury at the loss of savings scrimped together through a half-century of labor and frugality, declaring, “I am a man of order, but I say strongly that if a chance presents itself, I will secure justice myself.” Another ruined shareholder threatened in a note to Eiffel, “Your house will be blown up by dynamite.”
Four months later, at 10:00 a.m., on Thursday, June 8, Eiffel, his hair and beard gone visibly whiter, presented himself at the Conciergerie in the Palais de Justice to serve his prison sentence. This proud engineer, so accustomed to complete autonomy in his daily affairs, soon found himself walking through the grim corridors of France’s most famous dungeon, where Marie Antoinette spent her final weeks. And then came his first glimpse of Cell 74, where he would pass the next two years: a small room with stone walls and a plank floor, furnished with only a bed, a table, and a chair. From a high barred window, Eiffel could see only the Seine with its passing barges. Every morning the guards would awaken him at 6:30 a.m. and each night they would check at 10:00 p.m. to be sure his candle was extinguished. Eiffel was allowed the solace of providing his own meals, as well as visits every day.
One week later, on Thursday, June 15, Eiffel awoke in his small cell as usual at six thirty. Later that morning he and another Panama Canal prisoner were brought out to a waiting room where Eiffel saw his lawyers, his son, Édouard, with his wife and her mother, as well as his son-in-law, Monsieur Salles. They all cried out joyfully to Eiffel that a higher court had just voided his guilty verdict and prohibited further prosecution, noting that the three-year statute of limitations had been ignored. Eiffel, already pale from his week of incarceration, looked stunned and then, clutching his son, began to weep. The group departed the prison for his mansion on rue Rabelais, where his daughter, Claire, stood waiting. The two fell into each other’s arms, and more tears were shed.
Subsequently, the Legion of Honor also investigated Eiffel’s role. While he had earned a gigantic profit, he had built the locks as agreed until ordered to stop. He had had no position at all in the company, had opposed the original sea-level canal, and had played no part in the vast network of bribes to government officials and newspapers. The Legion of Honor therefore found no act worthy of censure, much less punishment. Yet Eiffel’s reputation remained irrevocably tarnished. He removed his name from his company, and undertook no further high-profile engineering projects.
A full decade after the Panama scandal, an admiring journalist wrote of Eiffel: “A great many people who lost their money in the Panama Canal Scheme have very bitter things to say about him; even his complete downfall and disgrace have not satisfied their rancours; they are pleased that with his own hands he raised to himself, so high that all the world may see it, a memorial tower which none looks at without remembering a certain verdict and a certain judgment. For my part, I can only say that Monsieur Eiffel always impressed me as being a straightforward, plain-spoken business man, as full of energy as he seemed devoid of cunning.”
For the van Gogh brothers, the years following the fair were rife with triumph and tragedy alike. Six of Vincent’s Provence paintings were shown in Brussels with Les Vingtistes, where the critic Albert Aurier praised his swirling sunflowers, wheat fields, and vineyard as “brillia
nt and dazzling symphonies of color and lines. . . .” “What makes his entire body of work unique is excess, excess of power, excess of nervousness, and violence in the expression.” Not only were the paintings admired, but one sold for four hundred francs. Vincent, however, had begun suffering from seizures again, leaving him too ill to paint much or attend the March Salon des Indépendants, where Gauguin, Pissarro, and Monet all hailed his paintings as the best in the show. Still, by May 16, 1890, Vincent had sufficiently recovered to depart the asylum at St.-Rémy for good, stopping first in Paris to visit with Theo, Jo, and their new three-month-old child, Vincent.
Vincent could tolerate only three days of Parisian noise and bustle before setting off for his new home in Auvers-sur-Oise, a bucolic village north of Paris long popular with painters. Dr. Paul Gachet, a patron of artists and art who amused the locals by walking a pet goat named Henriette, had agreed to supervise his case. Vincent would board in a local inn, where Dutch painter Anton Hirschig could also keep an eye on him. Inspired by the spring landscape with its multi-hued farm fields and rolling hills, van Gogh arose early to spend long, fruitful hours en plein air, turning out seventy-six paintings in the next two months. When Theo, Jo, and the baby came to visit on June 8, they passed a sunny Sunday ambling about the countryside and conversing before taking a leisurely lunch under the trees at Dr. Gachet’s house.
That summer, even as Vincent seemed comfortably settled, Theo’s health was deteriorating. He became tired and sickly, frustrated that his longtime employers, Boussod, Valadon and Company, seemed so little interested in modern art or appreciative of Theo’s years of faithful work. Vincent, hearing of Theo’s discontents, worried that his younger brother’s job, and therefore his own monthly stipend, was in jeopardy. He felt guilty about being a financial burden. And he was disappointed that Theo and Jo were not coming to see him again in July, but were traveling instead to Holland for vacation and to introduce their six-month-old son to their families.
