The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough
Children are born there with a sense of beauty equally delicate with any in the world in whom it dies a lingering death of smothered desire and pining, weary starvation. I know because I have felt it.
It was a severe indictment of her own upbringing, indeed of American life, and not until she came to Paris had it struck her so emphatically.
More important was the realization that the beauty of Paris was not just one of the pleasures of the city, but it possessed a magically curative power to bring one’s own sense of beauty back to life. “One in whom this sense had long been repressed, in coming into Paris, feels a rustling and a waking within him, as if the soul were crying to unfold her wings.” Instead of scorning the lighthearted, beauty-loving French, she decided, Americans ought to recognize how much was to be learned from them.
Of the outstanding New Englanders whose brilliance distinguished American letters in the 1850s, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and now Harriet Beecher Stowe had all made pilgrimages to Paris. In 1858 followed yet another, Nathaniel Hawthorne. Herman Melville had passed through in 1849, but his stay had been so brief and uneventful it seems to have mattered little to him. The only one of the New England “immortals” who did not come was Henry Thoreau, but then he seldom went anywhere.
Hawthorne, his wife, and three children arrived for a week’s visit in the bitter cold of January. They had come over from England, where Hawthorne was serving as the American consul at Liverpool, and they stopped at the newly opened Hôtel du Louvre, just across the rue de Rivoli from the museum.
“The splendor of Paris, so far as I have seen, takes me altogether by surprise,” Hawthorne recorded at the end of his first day. London was nothing by comparison. The emperor deserved great credit for the changes brought about in so little time, he thought. Every visitor looking at Paris ought, selfishly, to wish him a long reign. As for the masterpieces in the Louvre, Hawthorne found them “wearisome,” much preferring to watch the crowd of Sunday visitors. If he took any interest in the paintings by Rembrandt, or saw any similarity to his own work, as Mrs. Stowe had, he made no mention of it.
Great as were the improvements in transatlantic travel, the perils of the sea had by no means become a thing of the past. In 1854 came news of a terrible tragedy, when the largest of the American “floating palaces,” the Arctic, on a return voyage to New York, collided with another ship in the fog off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. The death toll numbered between 350 and 372 passengers and crew. Two years later, a Cunard steamer, Pacific, set out on a winter crossing from Liverpool to New York, with 186 passengers and crew, and was never heard from again.
Still, the ocean travelers from America kept coming, and with the approach of the 1855 Paris Exposition, their numbers grew even larger. “Perhaps never before have there been so many Americans in Europe as at the present time,” reported the New York Times. Among them were the James family of New York, beneficiaries of an inherited fortune—father, mother, four sons, and a daughter. His intention, said the elder James, was “to educate the babies in strange lingoes.” The oldest of the children, William and Henry, were fourteen and twelve respectively. Set loose on their own in Paris, the two boys would often head down the Champs-Élysées and through the Tuileries to the Louvre. Henry would remember how he “looked and looked again” at the pictures, and how he wondered at the “still-present past” of Paris, the “mysteries of fifty sorts,” as he tried to fathom what he might make of his life.
The exposition, staged largely on the Champs-Élysées, was an enormous success. There were more than 5,000 exhibits, and in the course of the year more than 5 million visitors descended on Paris. When Queen Victoria and Prince Albert arrived, 800,000 people lined the streets to see them ride by. (With France and Britain then joined as allies of the Turks against the Russians in the Crimean War, the presence of the British monarchs had more than conventional symbolism.)
Flags flew everywhere. Hotels posted COMPLET (FULL) signs. Prices soared. For the emperor and his prefect of the Seine, Haussmann, it was a clear confirmation of their claim that the sums being spent on the city would be returned in full with the money spent by ever-more visitors.
Although the vast demolition and construction continued, it was astonishing how much had already been accomplished. “Paris is singly transformed,” wrote an amazed and approving Prince Albert.
French intellectuals complained that in planning the exposition too much attention was devoted to the Palais de l’Industrie, too much fuss made over the material products of industry and technology. American visitors, however, were delighted to see such attention and the gold medals conferred on Singer sewing machines, Colt revolvers, McCormick reapers, and Professor Morse’s telegraph.
Of the 796 French artists represented at the Gallery of Fine Arts, there were forty paintings by Ingres, the official favorite of the French government, and thirty-five by Delacroix. American painters, by contrast, were so few—a scant twelve in all—as to be barely noticeable. Among them were William Morris Hunt and George Healy, who had thirteen of his portraits accepted, as well as his latest work—Benjamin Franklin pleading the cause of American independence before Louis XVI—for which Healy received a gold medal.
If the emperor and others in power drew one clear conclusion from the Exposition, it was that the next one must be bigger and more dazzling still.
In his years painting portraits, George Healy had had the pleasure of conversing while he worked with many outstanding talkers, but he had never met the equal of William B. Ogden from Chicago, who that summer of the exposition came to Healy’s studio for several sittings. Ogden, a real estate developer and railroad man, had been Chicago’s first mayor when it had numbered all of 4,000 people, and he loved to go on about the city’s “marvelous future.” The more Ogden talked, the more interested Healy grew. Now forty-two, he had been wondering if it might be time for a change.
I had often thought of returning to the United States and settling there; but the difficulties of moving with a large family, the uncertainty as to where I should go, the fear of being considered by my country-people, according to a frank saying of the time, as a “blasted foreigner,” had made me hesitate.
Ogden offered the hospitality of his Chicago home until Healy could get settled, and promised “a rich harvest” of commissions among those he knew. So in the fall of 1855, Healy joined the hundreds of other Americans homeward bound from the Exposition. Because Louisa was soon to give birth to another child, she, the baby (a son), and five little girls would follow later. It had been twenty-one years since Healy arrived in Paris as a student. Whether it crossed his mind that he might return again is not known.
With the departure of Healy, one generation in American art made its exit from the stage of Paris while another, as if on cue, made its entrance, and fittingly, in a decidedly different form.
James McNeill Whistler was only just twenty-one. He was small (five feet four inches) and a dandy—slim, with long curly black hair and a black mustache. So high-spirited and noisy was he, so overflowing with wit and self-confidence, many failed to take him seriously.
Much of his boyhood had been spent in St. Petersburg, Russia—his father, Major George Whistler, a civil engineer and West Point graduate, had helped build the first railroad connecting St. Petersburg to Moscow for Czar Nicholas I—and there the boy had first shown his gift for drawing. At sixteen, like his father, he entered West Point, which he instantly loathed. The only course in which he excelled was drawing. In his third year he was discharged for failure in chemistry. “Had silicon been a gas,” he loved to say, “I would have been a major general.”
Like the young George Healy, Whistler had come to Paris for proper training in an atelier, but with the difference that he already spoke excellent French and had all but memorized a recent French novel about the carefree life of artists in the Latin Quarter, Scènes de la Vie de Bohémienne (Scenes of Bohemian Life) by Henri Murger, which was lat
American students who knew “Jimmie” Whistler in Paris at that time described him as full of “go,” “eccentric,” “always smoking cigarettes, which he made himself,” and “no end of fun.” Nor would his “peculiar” hat be forgotten—a big yellow straw hat with a broad brim and low crown wrapped in a broad black ribbon with its long ends hanging down. It was the signature touch of his Vie de Bohémienne look.
Elated with the new life, he seemed in no hurry to decide on an atelier or settle down to work. He did, however, take up with a young dressmaker named Héloïse, and together they moved into a small studio-bedroom on the rue Jacob. When eventually he entered the popular atelier of Charles Gleyre, he seems to have spent limited time there. Yet what he took away from the experience was of lasting value—that line mattered more than color, and that of all colors, black was of greatest importance, black “the universal harmonizer.”
He and Héloïse moved from the rue Jacob to cheaper quarters, then moved again. “I don’t think he stayed long in any rooms,” another student remembered. He never had enough money, yet kept on enjoying himself expansively at restaurants like Lalouette’s, famous for its burgundy at one franc a bottle and for allowing art students unlimited credit.
“His genius, however, found its way in spite of an excess of the natural indolence and love of pleasure,” said another of his student circle. In fact, Whistler was concentrating on work more than it appeared. In a sense, he was never not working. As would be said, “Everything he enjoyed as a student he turned to his profit as an artist. The women he danced with at night were his models by day.” He was drawing, doing etchings of exceptional vitality, and spending long days at the Louvre working on copies.
He made many friends among the French students, including one Henri Fantin-Latour, who would prove as valued as any of his lifetime. He also began going back and forth to London, and in 1859, having parted company with Héloïse, he moved there, his student days at an end. But by no means was Whistler finished with Paris, or Paris with him.
He left owing Monsieur Lalouette, the restaurant owner, 3,000 francs, all of which, in time, he paid back.
III
In the nearly twenty years since his student days at the Sorbonne, Charles Sumner had become one of the most eloquent and disputatious figures in American politics. With his imposing height, his rare command of the English language, and his deep, powerful voice, he could rouse and inspire audiences as could few others, and when unleashing his passion for causes, he seldom failed to provoke storms of criticism, even outrage. He had argued for world peace, spoken out fearlessly against the Mexican War and slavery, and with little or no apparent concern over whom he offended. His friends worried for his safety. “For heaven’s sake don’t let him do himself harm while trying to help other people,” Thomas Appleton wrote to his father from England.
It was Sumner’s continuing part in the “question” of slavery, above all, that had propelled him to national prominence. He was one of the founders of the Free Soil Party and, in 1851, at age forty, was elected to the United States Senate. Having once concluded—while observing how black students were treated at the Sorbonne—that the attitude toward and treatment of African-Americans at home was contrary to the “natural order of things,” Sumner had made plain his hatred of slavery and never gave up on it. “I think slavery a sin, individual and national,” he wrote, “and I think it the duty of each individual to cease committing it.”
The first news of the savage physical attack on Sumner in the United States Senate reached Paris on June 9, 1856. Within days all Europe knew the sensational story.
The assault had taken place on May 22, after Sumner, earlier in the week, delivered his longest, most strident and contentious speech yet, “The Crime against Kansas,” as he called it. Like Webster’s reply to Hayne, it was one of the most important orations in the history of the Senate and was delivered to a packed chamber over the course of two days. And again it was a Massachusetts senator who stood at center stage.
But such was Sumner’s wrath that, unlike Webster, he launched into personal attacks of a kind traditionally not tolerated in the Senate, with the result that the speech and the ensuing attack on Sumner were to have consequences far beyond those resulting from what Webster had declaimed.
He would expose “the whole crime” of slavery “without sparing language,” Sumner told a friend in advance, and he did. In printed form the speech ran more than a hundred pages, and he had memorized every word. He denounced not only “the reptile monster,” slavery, and the “swindle” of the Kansas-Nebraska Act, which was the center of the debate, but he singled out for acid scorn several members of the Senate who had perpetuated “human wrongs,” one of whom, Senator Andrew P. Butler of South Carolina, was not present to reply. Sumner likened Butler to a silly old Don Quixote in love with the “harlot slavery.” “He cannot open his mouth but out there flies a blunder.”
To no one’s surprise the speech was immediately denounced in the South and acclaimed in the North. The abolitionists, and especially in Massachusetts, were overjoyed. “Your speech,” wrote Sumner’s close friend Henry Longfellow, “is the greatest voice on the greatest subject that has yet been uttered.”
An incensed congressman named Preston S. Brooks of South Carolina, who was a slaveholder and kinsman of Senator Butler, brooded for more than a day over what he ought to do to defend the honor of South Carolina in the face of such insults. The main question on his mind was whether to go after Sumner with a horsewhip or his heavy, gutta-percha cane. He chose the cane, having decided, he later explained, that Sumner with his size and strength might readily “wrest” a whip from his hand and turn on him with it, and then where would he be?
It was early afternoon when Brooks slipped into the back of the Senate Chamber and stood waiting. Only a few others were still present. Sumner was alone at his desk busily signing papers.
Brooks approached and addressed him. “Mr. Sumner,” he said, “I have read your speech over carefully. It is a libel on South Carolina and Mr. Butler, who is a relative of mine. …” When Sumner looked up, Brooks struck the first backhanded blow to the head.
Sumner’s desk, like other desks in the Senate, was screwed to the floor, and with his long legs, he could sit only with his knees wedged tightly underneath. Desperate to defend himself, he rose up with such explosive force that he ripped the desk loose from the floor.
Brooks kept striking, left and right—“thirty first-rate stripes,” he later boasted—until the supposedly unbreakable cane shattered. “I wore my cane out completely, but saved the head which is gold.”
Sumner lay on the floor unconscious and covered with blood. Brooks slipped quietly out of the chamber. After several minutes, Sumner regained consciousness and was taken to his lodgings and put to bed.
In Kansas, abolitionist John Brown and his men, hearing the news of the attack on Sumner, “went crazy,” as one of them would recall, and rushed off to slaughter five innocent men in the infamous Pottawatomie Massacre.
Congressman Brooks received only a fine of $300 for what he had done. Instead, he was a hero in the South, greeted with cheers wherever he went and presented with gifts of gold-headed canes.
Sumner never fully recovered from the attack. After a long convalescence, he tried to return to his work in the Senate but found it impossible. He could walk only with difficulty. Getting out of a chair was painful. His condition was described as “an oppressive sense of weight or stricture on the brain,” and this was greatly increased by any mental effort, even by conversation.
With the arrival of the New Year, when he tried again to resume his duties in the Senate, he found even one day too much for him. His doctors advised a trip abroad—for the beneficial effects of days at sea and for “a complete separation from the cares and responsibilities that must beset him at home.”
The voyage was a far cry from what it had been on the packet
He had come on board looking extremely feeble, walking with the support of a cane. At forty-six, he might have been taken for a man in his late sixties. For the first seven days he was confined to his stateroom, suffering from seasickness. But the morning he emerged, it was obvious the voyage, seasickness included, had done worlds of good. A newspaper correspondent on board described how the senator could rise from a chair without difficulty and could be seen walking the deck with no cane.
To look at Mr. Sumner now and converse with him as he stands firmly on the unsteady deck … I can understand why a ruffian, a chivalric ruffian, would choose knocking such a man when he was down rather than attempt to knock him down.
He became openly sociable, taking time to talk with nearly everyone among the passengers and crew. It was said he could have been elected by a landslide to any office he wished on board.
“The sea air, or seasickness, or absolute separation from politics at home, or all combined, have given me much of my old strength,” he wrote after landing at Le Havre. For the first time since his student days in France, he was keeping a journal again.
On the overland ride to Paris—by rail rather than diligence—he stopped at Rouen as before and again took time to visit the cathedral. From Rouen to Paris, the day was fine. “Civilization seemed to abound,” he wrote of the passing scenery. He was looking forward with greatest anticipation to so much he remembered of Paris—the opera, the theater, a few favorite restaurants, and time with old friends, like the peripatetic Thomas Appleton, who, he knew, was already there.