The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (43 page)

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
Albany
in 1837. Sumner departed New York this time in the comforts of the steamship
Fulton
, with flags flying and a booming thirty-one-gun salute in his honor.

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.

Once in Paris, he “sallied forth” without delay, “astonished at the magnificence which I saw, beyond all my expectations.” He was off to the opera the first night, for two hours of
Guillaume Tell.
The next morning he and Appleton took a drive through the city. “The improvements are prodigious,” he wrote, his spirits soaring. He attended performances at the French opera, the Italian opera, and the Opéra Comique seven or eight nights running, and the theater as well. He did it all, it seems— strolled the Garden of the Tuileries, went to the Louvre, “played the
flâneur” at the Palais Royal, dined at Trois Frères Provençaux, Véry’s, the Café Anglais. Sumner dined with Appleton at least a dozen times. He crossed the Seine and “revived” old recollections at the Sorbonne. From his “beautiful apartment” at the Hôtel de la Paix, on the rue de la Paix, he could watch “all the movement of Paris.”

Not only had Paris been transformed; he had, too. Such vitality as he had shown walking the deck of the
Fulton
was even greater now, as he kept a schedule that might have exhausted someone half his age.

Alexis de Tocqueville came to call and converse candidly about the political picture in France. (“He did not disguise his opposition to the government … said that it was a ‘
gouvernement de bâtards.
’ ”) Another day Sumner joined de Tocqueville for breakfast with several French political figures, among whom was François Guizot, who assured Sumner that he, too, opposed slavery. When someone at the table asked which of the foreign accents in French was the least agreeable to a Frenchman, Guizot, with no hesitation, said German, and recalled that Louis-Philippe judged a man’s ability by the languages he spoke. In a matter of days, Sumner had arranged for a French tutor who spoke no English to come to his hotel every morning to read and speak French to him.

He met and conversed at length with the poet-politician Alphonse de Lamartine, who told him nobody could anticipate the future of France: “With a people so changeable, nothing is certain but change.”

At a dinner party he met the American dentist Thomas Evans. “He speaks of the emperor in warmest terms of admiration,” Sumner recorded, “and describes him as laborious and happy, beginning the day with a cold bath, and meeting his wife with a kiss.”

Sumner had never married. His interest in women was considerable, and the face of a particularly beautiful woman could move him deeply. But he was often uncomfortable with women. His work and his friends were his life, and he had many close friends to whom he was devoted, like Longfellow, Appleton, and Samuel Gridley Howe, ardent antislavery leader and pioneer in education for the blind.

On April 23, from Paris, Sumner wrote a long letter to Howe. His time, he said, was indeed “intensely occupied,” but he did tire. His legs
dragged after a walk that once would have been nothing. By then he was also fighting a cold—“they call it
la grippe
here.” But
la grippe
or not, he was in Paris, and Paris, he could report, was “very gay and beautiful, and abounding in interesting people.”

He began feeling a little of the old urge to get back to Washington. “I tremble for Kansas. … How disgusting it seems the conduct of those miserable men who thus trifle with the welfare of this region! My blood boils at this outrage, and I long to denounce it again from my place.”

Young Henry James, who through his father met Sumner at this time, was surprised to find the martyr looking so well, his wounds all “rather disappointingly healed.”

The pace of sightseeing and social occasions with “interesting people” hardly slackened. At one evening affair he chatted with the Russian novelist Ivan Turgenev, who predicted that serfdom would be abolished in Russia within ten years. At two other gatherings he had the chance to catch up with Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was back in Paris and making her own effort to learn French.

He visited the Imperial Library, watched in amazement a military review on the Champ de Mars, where 60,000 troops paraded, more soldiers than he had ever seen or expected ever to see again. He made a return visit to the École de Médecine, even “plunged into the dissecting rooms, strong with the stench of human flesh.”

Appleton accompanied him on a shopping expedition for gifts to take home, including a dessert service for Appleton’s sister, Fanny, who had become Mrs. Henry Longfellow. Dining together night after night, they talked on for hours as only they could.

They were two thorough Bostonians close to the same age—Sumner the older by a year. They had known each other for more than twenty years, ever since they had met at Harvard. Appleton had chosen a life devoted mainly to his own enjoyment, nothing like Sumner’s. (As Appleton had written to his father earlier from Paris, “I dine out very often, eat and drink as much as I wish, sleep well after it, paint in pastels, talk a good deal in a very superior way. …”) Still, it would have been hard to find two Americans of the day who had anything approaching their range of common interests, their knowledge and love of opera, theater, art, books,
travel, and ideas. Or who could expand on any or all with such compelling vitality.

Possibly there was a homosexual side to their friendship, but there is no evidence of this. Appleton may have been ambiguous sexually, but beyond that nothing is known, and while Sumner’s political enemies would have leapt at the chance to destroy him with charges of scandal of any kind, none was ever made.

Sometimes when dining in Paris they were joined by another guest. One evening it was an American naval officer, William Lynch, the author of a recent, popular book about his explorations of the River Jordan and the Dead Sea. More often it was the two friends to themselves. Regrettably neither recorded anything of these occasions. Still, it is easy to picture them in a setting such as Trois Frères Provençaux, enjoying perhaps a salt cod with garlic, a
spécialité de la maison
, and a bottle or more of Château Carbonnieux from Bordeaux, the evening sailing along on all manner of observations on Mozart or Verdi or Donizetti’s
Maria Stuarda
, one of the operas they had recently attended and enjoyed, or going on about Keats or Dumas or the cathedral at Rouen or Paris itself. And while Sumner would have contributed little in the way of humor, Appleton would have more than compensated.

For Sumner it was the best medicine possible, talk of the kind he thrived on, and hardly to be found among the politicians in Washington. If Preston Brooks with his attack had brought him near death, was it not his old friend Appleton who had observed, “When good Americans die they go to Paris”?

On May 24, after a stay of two months, Sumner left for a tour of the provinces. Then followed another two months of headlong sightseeing in London, Germany, the Netherlands, Brussels, and Scotland, until it became too much. Feeling unwell again, he consulted a London specialist in phrenology, who told Sumner that his brain, “although apparently functionally sound,” would ultimately give way under the pressure of public life in America.

By early December 1857 he had returned to Washington, in time for the new session of Congress, only to find himself exhausted by just sitting and listening. He could neither work nor abide the whole “vileness and
vulgarity” of the capital. When in late December he left again, he felt better almost at once. Still, he tried returning to Washington several times, but to no avail.

Through all his prolonged disability and absence from the Senate, the people of Massachusetts remained loyal to Sumner. There were no serious calls for his resignation, little or no talk of someone taking his place, and in this, as he knew, he was extremely fortunate.

When several doctors advised a return to Europe, he sailed again for Le Havre, leaving on May 22, 1858, two years to the day since the attack in the Senate.

The excruciating ordeal Sumner was subjected to in the summer of 1858 need never have happened. Some American acquaintances in Paris had recommended that he see a French-American physician named Charles Edward Brown-Séquard, reputedly “a bold experimenter on animals and human beings, adventurous in practice as in theory.”