The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (20 page)

In addition to aristocrats, soldiers, and priests, he chose not to include any representation of upper-middle-class Paris, the numerous bourgeois, or the many European tourists who comprised such a substantial part of the regular flow of visitors. As he had included only his pick of the more than a thousand paintings in the museum’s collection, so, too, the clientele was limited to his personal preferences.

Nor did he provide the least sign or hint of the deadly scourge then raging outside the museum or the inner torment of the figure at center stage. Instead there is a feeling of great security and well-being. Far from cold or threatening, the painting glows with warmth, in the Salon’s deep red walls, and promise, in the gleam of sunshine from the skylights down the vaulted Gallery.

Cooper had been on hand through the whole effort, keeping Morse company. “He is with me two or three hours at the gallery (the hours of his relaxation) every day as regularly as the day comes,” Morse reported to his brothers in mid-July when more than 200 people a day were dying of cholera.

Shortly afterward Cooper and family departed for an extended sojourn in Germany and Switzerland, relieved to put Paris behind them at last. Ever the faithful correspondent, Cooper would write frequently to Morse, to describe the sights he and the family were seeing and the improvement in Susan Cooper’s health. He hoped Morse would not leave Paris until the following spring, so they could all sail home together.

But Morse had made up his mind. By the time the Coopers returned to Paris in mid-October, Morse was gone. His work at the Louvre at an end, his affairs settled, and having paid an emotional farewell to Lafayette, he sailed from Le Havre on the American packet
Sully
on October 6.
The Gallery of the Louvre
was stowed securely belowdecks.

But Morse was taking something of more importance home with him— an idea inspired by a system used outside of Paris to send overland messages, a semaphore apparatus that used mechanically operated arms or flaps from atop tall towers spaced six miles apart. Messages were read by telescope. This served well enough in clear weather, but not in fog, rain, or at night. For this French system the word “telegraph” had first come into use.

Morse would later say his first mention of the possibility of an electric telegraph took place during the voyage home on the
Sully.
He would recall “the manner, the place, and the moment when the thought of making an electric wire the means of communicating intelligence first came into my mind and was uttered.” But according to Cooper and his family, Morse had talked frequently of the idea during their evenings together through the spring of 1832, months before Morse ever left Paris. “I confess I thought the notion evidently chimerical, and as such spoke of it in my family,” Cooper would later tell Morse. “I always set you down as a sober-minded, common-sense sort of a fellow, and thought it a high flight for a painter to make to go off on the wings of the lightning.”

Richard Habersham, too, would remember passing the evening in the rooms they shared listening to Morse go on about the French telegraph being too slow, and that on the invitation of a French authority Morse had gone to examine the French system at close hand.

I recollect also [Habersham wrote] that in our frequent visits to Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper’s in the rue Saint-Dominique, these subjects, so interesting to Americans, were often introduced, and that Morse seemed to harp on them. …

But whenever Morse began talking about an electric telegraph—and the question would later become a matter of importance—there was no doubt the germ of the idea had taken hold of him in France. Assuredly,
neither Habersham nor Cooper and his family would have said so had it not been true.

By the summer of 1833 in New York, Morse had completed the final touches on
The Gallery of the Louvre
. On August 9, he wrote to Cooper, “My picture,
c’est fini.
” It went on public view in the second-floor gallery of the well-known bookstore Carvill & Company, at Broadway and Pine Street. The charge for admission was 25 cents.

The reviews were respectful, complimentary, even enthusiastic. “Every artist and connoisseur was charmed with it,” wrote the critic William Dunlap. “Here shine in one grand constellation, the brilliant effusions of those great names destined to live as long as the art of painting exists,” declared the
NewYork Mirror.

We do not know which most to admire, in contemplating this magnificent design, the courage which could undertake such a Herculean task, or the perseverance and success with which it has been completed.

We have never seen anything of the kind before in this country. Its effect on us is different from that made by any other painting. …

We may truly congratulate the country that such a collection is in its possession. We can say with a friend of ours, a distinguished artist who has never been in Europe, that we never had an idea of the old masters until we saw Morse’s picture of the Louvre.

The public, however, showed little interest. As a commercial venture, the painting was no more a success than Morse’s
House of Representatives
had been.

Eventually it was bought by a man named George Hyde Clarke, who lived near Cooper’s old home on Otsego Lake and whose portrait Morse had painted before leaving for France. The purchase price was $1,300. Morse had hoped to get $2,500.

That
The Gallery of the Louvre
would one day, in 1982, be purchased for a museum in Chicago for $3,250,000, the highest sum ever paid until then for a work by an American artist, would in Morse’s time have been unimaginable.

Cooper and his family left Paris in the spring of 1833. They had been away from home longer than intended—for the younger children more than half a lifetime. But none ever regretted the time in Paris. Cooper had written eight novels since leaving home, and privately he talked now of calling a halt to his writing. But there would be much more to come, including
Gleanings in Europe
, devoted to his experiences and observations in France, and two more immensely popular Natty Bumppo tales,
The Pathfinder
and
The Deerslayer
, the latter of which many considered his masterpiece.

It had been seven years since Cooper and the family set sail for France from New York and the man on a passing ship had called out ominously, “You will never come back.” Now he was on his way back, and he wanted to go. Unlike Morse, he was never to see Paris again.

It is no trifle to be a medical student in Paris.

—
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Like all great cities, Paris was a composite of many worlds within, each going about its particular, preoccupying ways quite independent, or seemingly independent, of the others. As notable as any of these worlds, and of far-reaching importance, was Paris Médicale, the Paris of numerous hospitals and illustrious physicians, of medical technicians, nurses, interns, and patients numbering in the many thousands; a celebrated medical school, the École de Médecine, and several thousand students from every part of France and much of the world.

This, too, was Paris—
their
Paris for those caught up in it— unmistakably different from fashionable Paris, or political Paris, intellectual Paris, financial Paris, or the visitor’s Paris, not to say the Paris pictured in the minds of so many who had never been there, or the Paris of the desperately poor.

The population of medical Paris equaled that of a small city, and included every variety of humankind, virtually every known ailment and affliction, much suffering—suffering sometimes relieved, often not—and a constant presence of death. Much about the standard procedures in the
hospitals and surgical amphitheaters was, to the uninitiated, revolting, and among some of the celebrated performers of such procedures, professional rivalries and jealousies flourished as much as within any opera company.

It was not a closed world. Visitors were welcome to nearly all of it, and more often than not what they saw, the dedication and kindness of the nurses, the orderliness and scale of the care given, seemed everything that could be desired. As a place to learn, it had no equal, and with all its components it was as proud an achievement as any Paris could claim.

Largest of the hospitals was the Hôtel Dieu, an immense five-story pile of a building that stood by Notre-Dame on the Île-de-la-Cité—on the square, or
parvis
, of Notre-Dame (to the right as one faced the cathedral), its back to the Seine. Founded in 1602, it was the oldest hospital in Paris and possibly in all Europe. Its only claim to architectural distinction was an entrance foyer with Doric columns approached by a broad three-sided stone stairway. An annex nearly as large as the main building stood directly behind, on the other side of the river, the two buildings connected by a covered bridge.

This one hospital, with 1,400 beds, served more than 15,000 patients a year, and as in all Paris hospitals, patients were treated free of charge.

Second in size of the general hospitals and more beautifully situated was the Hôpital de la Pitié, which faced the Jardin des Plantes, a short distance away on the other side of the Seine. It had 800 beds, and while the Hôtel Dieu was considered preeminent in surgery, La Pitié was known for its clinical medicine and particularly for the treatment of diseases of the chest such as tuberculosis.

The Hôpital de la Charité, also on the Left Bank, was half-again smaller and timeworn in appearance, but much on a par with the other two and distinguished by several acclaimed physicians especially popular among the medical students. La Charité stood on the narrow rue Jacob, almost directly across the street from one of the most important historic sites in American history, the Hôtel d’York, where in 1783, Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and John Jay had signed the Treaty of Paris that officially ended the Revolutionary War. But few of the American medical students seemed aware of this.

The Hôpital des Enfants Malades, on the rue de Sèvres, was the first
children’s hospital in the world. The immense Hôpital de la Salpêtrière, founded originally for beggars in the seventeenth century and built on what had been a site for making saltpeter, was an asylum for indigent and deranged women. For indigent and deranged men, there was the larger Hôpital de Bicêtre on a hill well to the south. The Hôpital Saint-Louis, in the northeastern part of Paris, had been built by King Henry IV to combat the plague. A handsome complex of brick and stone pavilions with the look of a château, it served now as a hospital for diseases of the skin, the first of its kind anywhere.