The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (66 page)

The family kept almost entirely to themselves. Paris or not, their life together was little changed. They could as well have been in Philadelphia. They had no interest in Paris society or any society—Mary had no patience for it—and they rarely entertained. They lived “as usual,” Katherine said in a letter to her son Alexander. “We … make no acquaintances among the Americans who form the colony, for as a rule they are people one wouldn’t want to know at home. …” Of Mary’s French Impressionist friends, only Degas and Berthe Morisot, given their social class, were considered acceptable.

Just as in the Sargent family, where no one did much of anything but John, so the Cassatts did little else besides sit and read, or sit for Mary, or go off for a walk, while she worked away, intent, as she later said, “on fame and money.”

After eight and a half years of unstinting service as the American minister to France, Elihu Washburne had concluded the time had come to step aside. He had served longer in the role than anyone else. A new president, Rutherford B. Hayes, had taken office. Adele’s health had become a concern, and the lease on the residence on the avenue de l’Impératrice was about to expire.

He submitted his resignation and on September 10 he and the family said goodbye to Paris. But not before he had George Healy paint his and Adele’s portraits, and commissioned Healy to do still another of Ulysses S. Grant. The former president, having embarked on a world tour, was expected in Paris two months later.

“After a reasonably good passage to New York,” Washburne would write simply in his
Recollections
, “we reached what was thereafter to be our home at Chicago. …”

As expected, the arrival of General Grant and his family caused considerable stir, though it hardly compared to the fuss once made over General Tom Thumb or George Catlin and his Indians. The former president, his wife, Julia, and their son Jesse, stayed at the Hôtel Bristol on the Place Vendôme. They were feted by President MacMahon at the Élysée Palace and at a dinner given by the new American minister, Edward Noyes. They attended the opera, shopped at the Palais Royal and Worth’s, strolled the boulevards and gardens. At the invitation of the Committee of the Franco-American Union, they went to the workshops of Gaget, Gauthier & Compagnie on the rue de Chazelles, to view the progress being made on Monsieur Bartholdi’s statue.

Grant agreed that Paris was beautiful, he wrote to friends at home, but could not imagine wanting to live there. “It has been a mystery to me how so many Americans can content themselves here, year after year, with nothing to do.”

The sitting for Healy went well. Grant had posed for the painter ten years before and enjoyed his company. As always, Healy talked the whole time he worked. When Grant learned that Healy had recently completed a portrait of Léon Gambetta and expressed an interest in meeting him, Healy arranged a family dinner at his home. “The contrast between the two was a very striking one,” he later wrote:

Grant with his characteristic square American head, full of will and determination, his reddish beard sprinkled with grey, his spare gestures, and taciturnity; and this Frenchman, with his southern exuberant manner, his gestures, his quick replies, the mobility of expression on his massive face. … They seemed typical representatives of the two nations.

Grant spoke no French, Gambetta no English, but they traded flattering comments sufficient to keep one of Healy’s daughters busy translating.

The Grants’ stay in Paris lasted five weeks. In early December they were on their way once more, moving from one national capital to another for another year and a half.

On Christmas Day in Paris the first snow of the winter fell.

His whole soul is in his art.

—
AUGUSTA HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS

Augusta Homer, an art student from Roxbury, Massachusetts, had been living in Rome, devoting her time principally to copying masterpieces in the Palazzo Barberini, when she met Augustus Saint-Gaudens and fell in love.

Four years later in Paris, in the summer of 1877, the newlywed couple moved into a tiny first apartment on the boulevard Pereire and set up housekeeping. “We have bought a Persian rug for which we gave 110 francs, $22.00,” she wrote to her mother. “We think our little parlor looks prettily now. We had it papered last Saturday and now we must have the floors waxed. …”

Her husband had his heart set on living in Paris. The “art current” was stronger there than anywhere, she explained to her mother, and his “whole soul” was in his art.

Once settled, she began going with him to his new studio to paint or to help him with his work. Other days she went to the Louvre, as she had to the Palazzo Barberini, to do copies.

Tall, slender, still in her twenties, she was known as “Gussie” and could
be fairly described as attractive rather than pretty. She had large, clear blue eyes and, when smiling, her face turned radiant. Her mother and father had sent her abroad with one of her brothers, to Italy to pursue her ambitions in art. (A love of painting seemed to run in the family. Winslow Homer was her first cousin.) But she went, too, in the hope of improving her health. She suffered spells of fatigue and low spirits, and more seriously from increasing deafness, which also ran in the family. Her father, Thomas Homer, had written earlier of how “painful” it was to observe Gussie’s deafness steadily increasing and know of no way to help. Since meeting her “Mr. Saint-Gaudens,” she wrote, her hearing was no better, but her outlook and health had much improved.

The more she knew him, the more she liked him, she had confided in the early stages of their romance. Those at home had no idea what a sculptor’s studio was like or how the work was done, or what a “perfect marvel” it was to see it done.

And perhaps they should know what he looked like:

Medium sized, neither short nor tall, blue eyes, straight nose. … Neither handsome nor homely and when you first meet him does not impress you as particularly talented. But the more you know him the better you like him and a more upright man I never met.

“Mr. St.-G. is very much in love with me,” she announced to her mother in a letter from Rome dated February 8, 1874, and marked
“PRIVATE.”

“Now I must tell you who he is,” she said, and proceeded to explain that his father was a French shoemaker in New York and poor, but that there was nothing “Frenchy” about her “Mr. St.-G.” except his name and the fact that he spoke French extremely well. She stressed how much he had accomplished in his career through his own determination, and told how he had gone to work cutting cameos at age thirteen and succeeded later in being accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts. She described his years in Rome, where again he had supported himself cutting cameos, and the statue he had done of Hiawatha, and the praise it was receiving.

Some of the most influential men in New York had taken an interest in his career, she wrote, and there seemed little doubt he would be successful ultimately. She thought he was twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven.

His education in everything regarding art is complete, but he occasionally makes mistakes in speaking. But he is every inch a gentleman and there is an innate refinement about him. His treatment of me has been just what a noble man ought to do and I have told him I think a great deal of him. He does not ask or wish me to make any promises for the future as it must be at least two years before he can think of it and of course I would do nothing without your and father’s sanction.

“I am not
dead
in love as they say, but perhaps would be if I thought I ought,” she added in conclusion.

“I am very sure that the only possible objection to him is that his father is French and his mother Irish,” she wrote in another “
PRIVATE
” letter. “But, mother, he is neither: an American to the backbone.”

To her New England Protestant parents, a French father and an Irish mother could only mean that the young man was a Roman Catholic. But Gussie said nothing on the subject, nor, to ease their worries, did she mention that Gus was a lapsed Catholic. That he was both a gentleman and an American, she felt, was more than sufficient qualification.

Whatever letters he may have written to her during this period have not survived. Probably they were destroyed with much else in a studio fire long afterward. Years later, however, in an uncharacteristic burst of candor about his private life, he would mention in his
Reminiscences
having had love affairs with five women before meeting Gussie, and that the fifth was a very “beautiful” model named Angelina with whom he had wanted to elope to Paris, but that she had been “wise enough to refuse.”

He hated writing letters, but in several addressed to Gussie’s parents, he made clear his honorable intentions and the seriousness of his feelings for their daughter. In a straightforward summary of his life thus far in which he expressed his reasons for feeling optimistic about his work, he concluded, saying, “What I have is a splendid future and a fine start.”

If successful, and with your consent, I shall claim Miss Homer’s hand immediately. If not I shall then have to delay until … I am guaranteed our future welfare. … I ask your consent to my attentions to your daughter, nevertheless leaving her completely free and binding her to nothing.

He cut her a cameo engagement ring and bought himself a new high silk hat, his first ever, and “so great was his enthusiasm,” he put it on and “promptly walked across the Piazza di Spagna in the rain, and without an umbrella,” to visit her.

“You’ll have to get used to a Gus and Gussie in the family,” she told her mother. “How does it sound to you? …” But permission for Gussie to marry him, her parents made plain, was not to be granted until he had a commission for a major work, something he had not as yet achieved.

They were naturally concerned about her happiness, but also about her future financial security. Once prosperous, they were living at a much-reduced standard, due to “reverses” in Thomas Homer’s mercantile business. They stood ready to help, of course, but the amount would have to be limited, all of which Gussie understood perfectly.

In 1875, Saint-Gaudens left Rome and returned to New York, crossing again, as he had the first time, in steerage. By telegraph en route he learned that his mother had died. It was his first great sorrow, one of the most painful moments of his life, a trial, he said, “like a great fire.”

He rented a shabby studio in the German Savings Bank Building at 14th Street and Fourth Avenue, where he also slept, his father’s house being too overcrowded as it was.

Hearing from Gussie that there was a competition for a statue of Charles Sumner to be placed in the Boston Public Garden, he decided to try for it. But his entry was rejected. (The sculptor chosen was Thomas Ball, who had done the great equestrian statue of George Washington that stood at the entrance to the garden.)

Soon after, Saint-Gaudens learned of plans to create a memorial in New York to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut—“Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut, the Civil War hero of the battle of Mobile Bay, which had resulted
in the surrender of New Orleans. A committee had been formed to pick a sculptor. A sum of $9,000 was said to be available from the City of New York. Saint-Gaudens applied at once and contacted everyone he knew who might put in a word for him.

To do a man like Farragut justice in bronze would be no easy undertaking. The admiral had had as long and distinguished a career as any officer since the founding of the U.S. Navy. The son of a naval officer, he had gone to sea with the navy at age ten, even briefly commanded a captured ship at the age of twelve. Serving on ships of the line, he had seen much of the world before he was twenty.