Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (17 page)

Bartholdi had studied under Viollet-le-Duc as a young man. He turned to the restorer now for advice on how to translate his clay maquette into reality. In addition to the many castles Viollet-le-Duc had refurbished throughout France, he had just completed restoring Notre Dame, a project that had taken a quarter century of his life.

His collaborator in that project, as well as many other endeavors, was ironworks expert Honoré Monduit. He presided over one of Paris’s busiest forges, which he had inherited from his father. When Haussmann was creating new railroad stations, city buildings, and grand hotels, there was no end of work available to men capable of working the finer details of metals by hand. Monduit’s workshop rang with the hammering of horses and eagles, and the roar of massive furnaces.

Viollet-le-Duc was a fabulously energetic character who obsessed over the wings of bats as the natural complement to Gothic arches. He wore fourteen-inch cuffs draped over his hands, thus proving, according to one newspaper, that “he never worked.” He transformed restoration work into artistry. He would imagine himself as the original architect come back to life, put to the task of fixing his own project. This ghost of the artist would survey the modern tools and materials available and begin hammering away. The method could be risky but Viollet-le-Duc’s imaginative streak, combined with a relentless work ethic, led him from success to success. In 1873 the French government asked him to produce a map of the French Alps. In two months he had completed the beautiful renderings by himself. In the evenings he would work on his book
How to Build a House,
which examined how people living in a structure used it, and thus how the building could answer their needs.

Even a tumble into an icy crevasse in 1870 yielded information for his hungry mind. After three hours of waiting for help, he emerged not only with his life intact but with detailed sketches of the icicles he found and their relation to glacier formation.

Viollet-le-Duc’s participation in the Liberty project with Bartholdi would imbue the proposal with prestige. Viollet-le-Duc possessed the innovative spirit necessary for the challenges of this modern miracle.

Bartholdi probably visited Viollet-le-Duc’s studio between the hours of seven and ten in the morning, since those were the only times when Viollet-le-Duc was not in seclusion with his sketches or manuscripts.

As each of his employees arrived—and he had thousands around the country—Viollet-le-Duc would greet the sculptor or blacksmith or glass painter with the words “Here, sir, is your work,” and hand him the sketch he had specified on tinted paper, using India ink and Chinese white for the highlights.

At ten o’clock he would close his studio and sketch for eight hours until dinner. After an hour’s meal, he would read or write in his library until midnight.

Now, with Bartholdi turning to him for answers, Viollet-le-Duc proposed copper for the statue, hammered in the same repoussé method as the Borromeo on Lake Maggiore. Viollet-le-Duc and Monduit had used that technique on the copper dome and eagles for the new Opera House in Paris. They had also, in 1865, teamed up to make Aimée Millet’s twenty-three-foot-tall Vercingétorix the same way, with iron bracings for the interior.

The dome and Vercingétorix, however ornate, presented simpler engineering issues than Liberty. Bartholdi’s statue would need to be strong enough to withstand punishing hurricanes and baking heat, and she could not be forged on an iron carcass, as Viollet-le-Duc’s eagles for the Opera House dome had been. If made of iron, the forms themselves would be too heavy to move. A lighter material was necessary for the molding carcass.

Viollet-le-Duc decided that a wood-slatted frame would allow the subtlety of line and form that Bartholdi sought. Copper sheets could not be hammered directly against wood slats, however, since ridges would be left on the metal. Viollet-le-Duc needed something smoother. He and Monduit decided on plaster, similar to a découpage shell. The plaster would have to be spread thickly, then sanded down for precision. Another form, boards resembling a topographic map, would be constructed to echo the edges. The sheets of copper—the thickness of two pennies stacked—could be laid over that second wood form, and with hammers and little levers the copper could be banged into shape. Sheets of lead could then be pressed onto the molds to help perfect the curve of the copper.

How would Liberty stand? Borromeo’s repoussé copper form had stone up to the hips in the interior. Viollet-le-Duc came up with a somewhat strange but innovative revision of that idea. He imagined the statue’s base bolstered to the same point by metal containers filled with sand. If an area later needed repair, the sand could be let out of the adjacent containers, the containers removed, and the repair undertaken.

Viollet-le-Duc adjusted the design of the folds of Liberty’s
stola
so she would have a stronger base, but exactly what would support the structure
above
the waist had not yet been determined. This was an odd omission because Viollet-le-Duc was famous for dutifully sketching even the smallest details of a lock or hinge for his clients. This meticulous architect had not truly worked out the plan of structural support for Liberty. At least not yet.

Bartholdi, Viollet-le-Duc, and Monduit set out to build the torch and hand in six months to have it ready for the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Bartholdi doubled the scale of the maquette he had presented at the banquet, making a Liberty model of about seven feet, then expanded her size a third time, to 37.75 feet. He also cleaned the lines and angles that would stop the eye from flowing freely over her form.

At that point, Monduit considered her in slices. For instance, the first section would be the lowest part: the base, the feet, and the dress’s hem. Next would be the slice of her lower draperies. The third section would go halfway up her knee. Higher up would be the slice with the head and shoulders, and beyond that, at the very top, the hand with the torch.

The slices of the nearly thirty-eight-foot model would be enlarged four times. The men drew marks or dots on every section of the model, and by measuring from dot to dot they recorded a number that they then multiplied by four to make the bigger version. They cased the model in plumb lines—vertical guides—and likewise dropped plumb lines in the studio from ceiling to floor in the corresponding dimensions.

The copper to make the statue came from Pierre-Eugène Secrétan, a copper merchant and director of the Society of Metals in France. He had a deep love of art and possessed one of the most extraordinary collections of paintings and sculptures of the time. When he donated the copper, the stuff was headed to its lowest price per pound in recent history—about fourteen cents. Bartholdi made a bust of the gentleman to thank him for the substantial donation and tried to secure the Legion of Honor medal for him, to no avail.

Secrétan largely disappeared from the acknowledgments of contributors to the statue both in newspapers of the time and in later histories, and one has to wonder if perhaps Bartholdi and his colleagues didn’t begin to suspect Secrétan’s integrity. Years later Secrétan would be bankrupted by the copper crash. More significantly, it would be discovered that he had masterminded an illegal syndicate to corner the copper market. He created his illegal operation in 1887, during which time he and his conspirators purchased more copper than they knew what to do with and nearly brought down French banks with their loans for the purchases. He would later be dubbed “King of the Copper Ring,” and win prison time for his illegal actions.

Bartholdi’s team now consisted of Laboulaye, for the ideas and enthusiasm; Viollet-le-Duc for the engineering; Monduit as fabricator; his dear assistant, Simon, to oversee the modeling; a Monsieur Bargeret to supervise the copper work and mounting of the plates; and a team of fifty workers to put the plates together.

Bartholdi could boast that the best men France had to offer had signed on to his Liberty project. Amid all the hustle, Bartholdi’s project still had only half of the estimated money to create the statue and nothing yet for its future pedestal.

Philadelphia’s parks department did, however, agree to construct a temporary pedestal for the hand of Liberty, since Philadelphia was the host of the Centennial Exposition. The department set to work in anticipation of the arrival of Bartholdi’s creation, hopefully for the beginning of the fair on May 10, but certainly for the July Fourth anniversary of American independence. For two months, Monduit’s workers labored over the wood and plaster forms. In March, as they went to move the thirteen-foot plaster hand for the application of the copper, the piece fell and broke. Work had to start all over again from the beginning.

This was a catastrophe. Bartholdi could not stay behind in Paris to oversee the new plaster casting and the molding of the copper. For world expositions, each participating nation was expected to send a jury of experts to review the contributions from around the world and submit a report back to its government and people. Bartholdi had been named secretary of the French jury charged with creating a report on the decorative arts in America. His cousin Baron Jean-François Bartholdi had been posted to Washington, D.C., as minister of France to the United States two years earlier, and had played a big role in the French participation in the exposition.

Auguste Bartholdi wrote a will, leaving the completion of his colossus to his assistant Marie Simon, Soitoux the artist, and Gauthier the ironworker, should he perish, and he headed off.

The ship on which Auguste Bartholdi and the French jury sailed contained 250 cases of French works, including several pieces by Bartholdi, but not his Liberty torch and hand. He had created a fountain, which he hoped might be sold to an individual or a municipality to raise money for the Liberty statue. He had four other sculptures on board, including his older
Génie dans les griffes de la Misère
(“Genius in the Grip of Misery,” from 1859), and
Le Génie funèbre,
very much in the spirit of his onetime mentor Ary Scheffer, human forms of deep sorrow and anguish. He also brought his paintings
Old California
and
New California.

On board the ship to America, Bartholdi—now forty-one years old—sketched comical portraits of the French jury, which he later sold as a little book of thirty drawings to raise funds for Liberty. In one he depicts himself among his peers, ignoring his companions, staring intensely into the distance while cradling his demitasse in one hand.

Had Bartholdi’s torch been ready for the exposition’s opening on May 10, 1876, he might have enjoyed a flurry of newspaper coverage even amid the other exciting demonstrations. His piece would have been more stunning in newspaper etchings than the re-created colonial village the expo organizers had prepared. On this Philadelphia exhibition ground, which was more than twice the size of Paris’s 1867 exposition on the Champ de Mars, Americans could see Alexander Graham Bell’s display of the telephone. H. J. Heinz showed off mass-market ketchup. At the exposition’s opening ceremony, Ulysses S. Grant flipped the switch on the massive Corliss engine that ran all of the machinery throughout the park.

Those marvels grabbed public admiration, but Bartholdi’s torch still sat in a Paris workshop, slowly taking form. As the days inched toward July, Bartholdi was furious that he would not have his torch for the Fourth of July celebration. His only advertisement for the project would be the massive canvas backdrop that had been used in the Paris Opera house when Gounod’s cantata was performed weeks before. This canvas, however, was not in Philadelphia. Bartholdi had managed to arrange for it to be hung in Madison Square during New York City’s Fourth of July centennial celebration parade.

As eight o’clock struck that night in New York, twenty-five thousand men began marching in the twilight: Masons and militiamen, French soldiers and immigrants in colorful costumes, Spaniards, Italians, Germans, British, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Scandinavians, Russians, and the diversity of America represented by “Negroes,” Chinese, and Indians. Crowds cheered. Firecrackers and Roman candles rattled the windowpanes. The men carried banners in one hand, or played musical instruments or sang. Every marcher carried a lantern or torch, creating a river of light along the parade route.

As the marchers passed Madison Square, they could see billowing down the front of the New York Club and covering half the building a long canvas with a beam projecting onto it, isolating the image in the darkness. On that canvas stood Liberty, shining her light across the busy New York Harbor.

People hung out of windows to sing and shout for the stream of patriots marching down Manhattan. One estimate put the crowd at one million. The event went on past midnight, breaking up peacefully around 1 a.m.

Newspapers the next day ran drawings of the scene in Madison Square Park, with Bartholdi’s banner the visual highlight. He had won public attention not through his statue, but through a sketched dream of his statue. He began to dream of creating a diorama for the entrance to Central Park, including his giant hand, and began to work to secure the site.

Unfortunately, Bartholdi did not have the full benefit of his usual high energy. At one point he fell sick in Philadelphia, and doctors told him he should return to France to recover. Instead he went to recuperate at the house of his friend John La Farge, the painter in whose studio Bartholdi allegedly had crafted the first model for Liberty on his 1871 American visit.