The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (50 page)

The day before, Sunday, the Germans had cut all roads into the city. At one o’clock Monday afternoon, September 19, 1870, the last train left Paris. The Germans were at the gates and nearly 2 million people, civilians and soldiers, were now trapped.

“And it seems odd to be in this world, and still not in it,” Washburne wrote.

He had become accustomed to constant, almost instantaneous communication with Washington. At the time the new Republic was proclaimed two weeks before, he had sent off one telegram after another reporting the situation as it developed, and Washington had responded at once with telegraphed instructions to recognize the new government without delay—a very different situation from what Richard Rush had experienced in 1848. Now all telegraph lines had been cut.

How another nation could willfully do harm to Paris, the capital city of “light and civilization,” was more than most Parisians could fathom. “It is in Paris that the beating of Europe’s heart is felt. Paris is the city of cities,” Victor Hugo had written in a widely circulated appeal to the Germans. “There has been an Athens, there has been a Rome, and there is a Paris. …” And Paris would not yield to force, Hugo declared: “Paris, pushed to extremities; Paris supported by all France aroused, can conquer, and will conquer; and you will have tried in vain this course of action which already revolts the world.”

Until war broke out that summer, the Paris life for the Washburne family had been entirely to their liking. A French governess for the children had been found and a cordon bleu cook—a Madame Francis and her husband, who served as her assistant—a chambermaid, and a nurse. A French tutor worked with the children every morning but Sunday, and with the children about the house day and night, it seemed more like a home than an official residence.

So relatively small was the “American Colony” in Paris that Washburne had soon become acquainted with many. They came to the house for consultation and advice, and to attend receptions. A few even came to the house to be married, with the American minister often performing the service. Daughter Marie would remember her father’s first secretary, Colonel Wickham Hoffman, saying that if the bride was pretty, the minister kissed her, otherwise it fell to his lot.

Compared to Washburne’s life in Washington and the strain of the Civil War years on the congressman, the assignment to Paris had been “most agreeable.” His wife, Adele, fluent in French, was a great help. He spoke French well enough, but compared to her he “hobbled” in the language, as he said. “Her tact, her grace, her cordial unaffected manner have won her many friends,” he had written proudly to a friend in Illinois.

At the start of summer he had had sufficient free time even to sit for George Healy, who was back in Paris briefly and doing a portrait of Wash-burne’s brother Cadwallader. There was enough similarity, Healy told him, that his cooperation would be of great help, and Washburne had been glad to oblige. Such tranquil days now seemed a world apart.

He had sent Adele and the three youngest children, Susie, Marie, and two-year-old Elihu, Jr., to Brussels for their safety. Of their three older children, Hempstead was in school in the United States, William in school in London. Only the oldest son, twenty-one-year-old Gratiot, had remained with his father.

Troops were now quartered in the house next door. Other houses up the avenue had been left in the care of servants. Washburne’s friend Dr. Evans, having managed the escape of the empress, was still in England, and the other neighbors had “picked up their hats in a hurry,” in Wash-burne’s expression.

Of all the ambassadors of major powers in Paris, he alone had chosen to remain, along with the representatives of Belgium, Denmark, the Netherlands, Sweden, and Switzerland. All the rest “ran away,” as Washburne put it privately in his diary. (In explanation for his departure, the British diplomat Lord Richard Bickerton Pennell Lyons would write, “I thought it would be, on all accounts, inexpedient for me to allow myself to be shut up in Paris. …”)

Washburne had felt duty-bound to stay and do everything he could for those of his countrymen still there, come what may. Nearly all had wanted to get out but, with business to attend to or other preoccupations, had missed their chance. Charles May and another American named William Reynolds, salesmen for the Remington Arms Company, had simply waited too long. A few, like the medical student Mary Putnam, chose to stay of their own free will. Another was Nathan Sheppard, a lecturer on modern English literature at Chicago University and an acquaintance of Washburne’s, who was trying his hand as a war correspondent for the
Cincinnati Gazette.
For some Americans, like the elderly Moultons of the banking family, Paris had been home for so long they simply could not bring themselves to leave.

Now choice in the matter was no longer anyone’s privilege to make, and Washburne least of all. “However anxious I might be myself to get away, I would deem it a species of cowardice to avail myself of my diplomatic privilege to depart and leave my
nationaux
behind me to care for themselves.”

He had, besides, just succeeded with the most overwhelming task of his life, and while it had left him totally exhausted, he had learned a great deal and gained immeasurable respect in many quarters at home and in Europe.

Through the panic and confusion of the past several weeks, before the start of the siege, Washburne had not only had the responsibility on his hands for the safe, efficient departure of thousands of Americans, but of some 30,000 Germans who had been ordered to leave the country. Numbers of Germans were being arrested as spies and in some cases convicted and shot.

Some of the German population of Paris had long established businesses and owned property, but the great majority were men and women employed in the most menial kind of labor, as laundresses, street cleaners, and garbage collectors. They were poor and uneducated and with numerous children. As the one remaining representative of a neutral power, Washburne found himself called upon by both the French and Prussian governments to see to the safe exodus of the Germans in the midst of the most tense of days.

“Employers discharged their [German] workmen. Those who would gladly have kept them dared not,” wrote Colonel Hoffman, the first secretary.

The suffering, both moral and physical, was very great. It must be borne in mind that many of these people had been settled for years in Paris. They had married there. Their children had been born there. … We have heard much … of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, and of the Huguenots from France, and our sympathies are deeply stirred. … I do not see why the expulsion of the Germans does not rank with these. …

Washburne and his staff at the legation issued safe-conduct passes and arranged for special trains that left from the Gare du Nord every night. Washburne worked twelve to eighteen hours a day, so hard that the rest of the staff felt duty-bound to keep up. As an assistant secretary named Frank Moore wrote, there was “no holding him back” when he decided to do something.

The American Legation occupied a shabby apartment up two flights of winding stairs in a seven-story building at 95 rue de Chaillot, just off the Champs-Élysées. It was a walk of nearly two miles from Wash-burne’s house, up the avenue de l’Impératrice to the Arc de Triomphe, then down the Champs-Élysées, which, door to door, took about half an hour.

His office was anything but impressive, of medium size only and furnished with a single desk, a few chairs, and a black marble mantelpiece on which stood a clock made of the same gloomy material. To add to the overall depressing mood, there was a dark green rug worn nearly black with age.

So great were the crowds waiting at the front door of the legation each morning, and packed inside on the winding stairs, that six
gendarmes
were needed to keep order. Day after day 500 to 1,000 people stood waiting. Many were old and obviously in no condition to travel. Some had no money. There were women in various stages of pregnancy. One day a child was born on a bench outside near the door.

“I am depressed and sad at the scenes of misery, suffering, and anguish,” Washburne wrote to his wife Adele on September 2.

Yesterday forenoon a poor woman came into the Legation with three children, a babe in arms, one about three and the oldest about five. When about to leave the depot the night before her husband was seized as a … spy—and carried off to prison. There she was left in the depot without a cent of money … and there she remained all night and yesterday made her way to the Legation bringing the children with her. She wept as if her heart would break and the two little children joined in—the baby alone unconscious of the situation. I at once gave her money to go out and get something to eat and sent off a man to look after her husband. …

The crowd to go off last night was so great that I went to the depot myself. There were at least two thousand persons to whom we had given … cards entitling them to tickets, and such was the mob … pulling … squeezing, yelling, and swearing [such as] you never heard. It was impossible for the railroad to send them off and about 500 were left. They broke down the railing and one of my men was nearly squeezed to death. I did not get away from there until midnight.

Not all the Germans had gotten out by the time the city was cut off, but most, more than 20,000, had departed in safety, thanks to numerous French officials and those who ran the railroad, but mainly because of the unstinting efforts of the American minister. As Wickham Hoffman would write, “Everything that energy and kindness of heart could do to facilitate the departure of those poor people, and to mitigate its severity, was done by our minister.

“And here let me remark that no one could have been better fitted for the difficult task. …

Had he been brought up in diplomacy, he would have hesitated and read up on precedents which did not exist, and so
let the propitious moment pass. … It is quite as well that the head of an embassy should be a new man. He will attach much less importance to trifles, and act more fearlessly in emergencies.

Elihu Benjamin Washburne, who turned fifty-four that September, was a remarkable man who had served energetically and effectively in Congress for sixteen years but whose appointment as minister to France by President Ulysses S. Grant was regarded in some quarters as woefully inappropriate and he himself quite unsuited for a diplomatic role of almost any kind, let alone one of such prestige and importance as Paris.

Raised on a farm in Maine, he had gotten his start in the law and politics in the rough mining town of Galena, Illinois, and by appearance and manner, he could far more readily have passed for an ordinary countryman than a diplomat. Five feet ten-and-a-half inches tall, he dressed plainly in dark blue or black broadcloth. In a day when nearly every man adorned his face with some variety of beard or mustache, he remained unfashionably clean-shaven. His iron-grey hair, cut long in back, over-hung his shirt collar. He had a high forehead and bushy eyebrows. His large, intense eyes, his most striking feature, were grey-blue. An enthusiastic talker, he spoke in a deep, full voice and seldom left any doubt about what he meant.

He had had no prior diplomatic experience. For all his influence in Congress, he had served on no committee concerned with foreign affairs. Nor had he shown any interest in such matters. That he had none of the easy savoir faire considered requisite for his new role was taken as a further serious drawback. A judgment expressed by
The Nation
at the time of his appointment was the accepted view of many: “He goes as minister to France, a post for which he may have some qualifications, but what they are it would be difficult to say.”

The
New York World
had called him “a man of narrow mind” who had “never originated an important measure, never acted a distinguished or influential part on any occasion.” A still more biting dismissal was that of the habitually spiteful Gideon Welles, President Lincoln’s secretary of the
navy, who considered Washburne “coarse, uncultivated,” and devoid of “enlarged views.” “He may represent correctly the man who appoints him [Grant], but is no credit to his country.”