The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (49 page)

She hurried down the long Grande Galerie of the Louvre and through the Salon Carré into the Salle des Sept-Cheminées, where, for an instant, Géricault’s
Raft of the Medusa
caught her eye. How strange, she later said, that this painting of ill omen should be the last she ever saw of the Louvre.

Once outside, on the rue de Rivoli, she and a lady-in-waiting, Madame Adélaïde-Charlotte Lebreton, went off by a common, one-horse cab as fast as possible up the Champs-Élysées to the avenue de l’Impératrice, on an impulse that Dr. Evans might help her.

They arrived at about five o’clock to find Evans not at home. When he returned an hour or so later, accompanied by a long-time American colleague, Dr. Edward Crane, he was told two unidentified ladies “very anxious” to see him were waiting in the library.

Thomas Evans had been well established in Paris professionally and socially for nearly twenty years. He had come to France knowing no one, speaking no French, and with little in savings. He now resided on the avenue de l’Impératrice, where, as said in the
Paris Guide
of 1867, one saw “smiles everywhere, people dressed to the nines … elegance, too, and what splendors!” The house he and his wife, Agnes, called Bella Rosa had, in addition to a fine library, a white and gold ballroom, stained-glass windows, and a grand staircase of Pyrénées marble designed by Charles Garnier, the architect for the new Opéra. There were extensive grounds, a fountain, a stable with stalls for twenty horses. Evans knew all the prominent and well-to-do Americans in Paris, as well as Minister Washburne, who lived farther down the avenue. He and Agnes entertained in lavish style and customarily spent holidays at the most fashionable seaside resorts. Agnes was at the moment on holiday at Deauville on the Normandy coast.

He was charming and handsome, if a bit too well fed, and had every reason to be pleased with himself, having received the highest professional honors, including the French Legion of Honor. Such heights were unimaginable for a dentist at home in the United States or in France. In
Paris, when he first arrived, he had found those who specialized in treating diseases of the teeth ranked with barbers. Physicians looked down on dentistry, considering it hardly comparable to their own profession. Dentists sent for by well-to-do patients were expected to enter the house by the back door, like ordinary tradesmen.

For all that he had adapted to life in Paris, Evans never lost his strong allegiance to his own country. Most obvious had been his open support of the North throughout the Civil War, lobbying the emperor on the subject at every chance, despite the Southern sympathies of much of his clientele, not to say the emperor himself.

Further, from the time France went to war that summer, Evans had taken a lead in preparing for the medical emergency to be faced. He wasted no time establishing what he called the American International Sanitary Committee, paid for by him and a circle of American friends in Paris.

On a flat stretch of open land across the avenue from Bella Rosa, tents went up for a field hospital, or “field ambulance,” over which he flew an American flag. Supplies of canned beef, biscuits, candles, ether, bedding, and clothing were stocked—all under the direction of Evans and his colleague Crane. The sick and wounded to be cared for would be more than the Paris hospitals could handle, and a well-supplied, well-staffed facility in the open air would be far preferable to crowding them into airless churches and public buildings, as was the usual way. No one with any realistic sense of the gravity of the crisis to come failed to appreciate the value of how much Dr. Evans had already accomplished.

As soon as he stepped into the library and saw who was waiting, Evans knew what was expected of him. Without hesitation, he offered the empress his help, despite all he stood to lose if things went wrong, as they both knew without saying. “We were thoroughly impressed with the idea that we were about to engage in an undertaking attended with many risks,” he would write, “and that it would require great discretion on our parts if it was to be successfully executed.”

They agreed to wait until morning before leaving the house. The empress had had little or no sleep for days. Evans made up a bed for her himself, in his wife’s bedroom, because he dared not trust the servants.

At five o’clock he knocked at her door and they were on their way before daybreak, both dressed as they had been the night before. They were a party of four—Evans and Crane, the empress and her lady-in-waiting— traveling in Evans’s own enclosed landau, a trusted coachman driving. They headed straight for Deauville and, with Evans doing the talking at checkpoints and a change of horses, they sailed through. No one recognized the empress, not even at Deauville.

Evans appealed to an English yachtsman, Sir John Burgoyne, and his wife to take the empress across the Channel to asylum in England. Lady Burgoyne responded, “Well, why not?”

After an extremely rough crossing, the empress and Evans were landed safely on the other side.

In Paris, meantime, no one knew anything about this. There were only rumors, the most common of which was that the empress had managed to get away to Belgium. Later the same day as her escape from the city with Evans, September 5, Victor Hugo, after years in exile, returned to Paris to wild acclaim.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens learned the news of a new republic only after arriving at Limoges. “I am heart and soul in the French cause,” he declared, and departed for Paris again on the next available train.

But on the train with him on all sides were women weeping for husbands and sons at the front. At Paris he saw volunteers from Brittany marching into the city with no uniforms other than simple white blouses. Crowded with them, “in utter confusion and dust,” as he wrote, were droves of sheep and cattle being led to the Jardin des Plantes in preparation for the coming siege. “They seemed to me like so many innocent men condemned to death marching to their doom,” he wrote to an American in Connecticut named Elmira Whittlesey, who, during a stay in Paris, had commissioned some of his cameos. To judge by the length and candor of the letter, she was someone in whom he placed considerable trust. “I could not restrain my feelings and I kissed some of the poor fellows as they marched along. I feel sure now that most of them are already dead, a sacrifice to the ambition of a couple of scoundrels.”

He had received an eight-page letter from his mother “in terrible grief,” begging him to stay out of French political affairs and come home, whatever the cost. He had never felt so low, so seized by the “
triste
undertone” of his nature. He may have been heart and soul in the French cause, but he was not French. He was an American.

Earlier that summer there had been an estimated 13,000 Americans in Paris, mostly tourists. Since the declaration of war in July, they had been leaving by the thousands. The American colony in Paris that numbered over 4,500 would all but disappear. Other American artists and art students had already gone. Thomas Eakins had left in July. Mary Cassatt, another Philadelphian, had departed. Gus’s French relations in Paris all urged him to go. Even his brother Andrew intended to leave. By September it seemed anyone with an American passport was getting out while it was still possible. The crush of the crowds at the railroad stations was “awful,” recorded one American who had seen his family off. Trains for Le Havre, or the south of France, as Gus knew, were jammed to capacity.

His French friends, however, were going off to fight. Alfred Garnier had not hesitated to enlist. Olin Warner, though an American, had signed up to serve with a corps of friends of France, organized as a supplement to the regular forces.

Back in Limoges again, Gus wrote plaintively to Garnier, “
Je suis persuadé, et je ne t’en blâme pas, que tu dois te dire: Voilà un lâche!
”—“I feel persuaded you think me a coward, and I don’t blame you!”

If only his parents were there in France, it would make such a difference. He would not hesitate to enlist. “But they are getting old, and love me. They have worked hard all their lives, are poor, and are still working. What would happen if they should lose me now?”

He made up his mind. He would stick to the pursuit he had come for. He would keep going in his mission to become a sculptor. He had not yet reached the point in his work where he was ready to go home. If unable to continue his studies in Paris, then he would go to the next-best place. For the time being, he would go to Rome.

I shall deem it my duty therefore to remain at my post.…

—
ELIHU WASHBURNE

From the window of the
grand salon
of his residence on the avenue de l’Impératrice, by the entrance to the Bois de Boulogne, the American minister Elihu Washburne looked out on two large, imposing cannon newly positioned close to his front door. Beyond in the fading light, soldiers were cooking their suppers. It was a lovely, clear September evening and, as he wrote in his diary, all was perfectly still except for the occasional distant sound of cannon fire.

There are no carriages passing on the grand avenue, that great artery through which has passed for so many years all the royalty, the wealth, the fashion, the frivolity, the vice of Paris … and there is the silence of death.

“Has the world ever witnessed such change in so short a time,” he wondered. “It to me seems like a dream.”

Paris had become an armed camp. There were soldiers everywhere— encamped all about the Arc de Triomphe and down the Champs-Élysées—more
than 300,000, he had been told, regular army troops in red
képis
and red trousers, reservists of the Garde Mobile and the Garde Nationale, “the People’s Army,” in blue uniforms and armed with whatever was available. Streets and avenues were filled with tents, baggage wagons, horses, and forage. The Tuileries Garden had become an artillery park, the Bois de Boulogne, a vast stockyard for 100,000 sheep and 80,000 head of cattle.