The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (67 page)

He was resourceful and intelligent—without benefit of formal schooling, he learned to speak French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic—and above all, courageous. By the outbreak of the Civil War he had served in the navy nearly fifty years. When assigned to capture New Orleans, he commanded the largest fleet to have sailed under the American flag, and at the war’s end he became the first man ever to hold the rank of full admiral in the U.S. Navy.

“I have made two models, a large drawing and a bust,” Saint-Gaudens wrote to Gussie’s mother. “As far as I can see I am in a fair way to have the commission.”

His career and his marriage were riding on it. And he got it.

Of the $9,000, he was to receive $2,000 on signing the agreement, $3,000 on completion of the statue in clay, $2,000 when the statue was cast in bronze, and a final check for $2,000 on delivery of the finished work to New York.

In an account book later he would record, “On hand June 1, 1877 when I was married, [$]2,821.00.”

He and Gussie were married at her family home on Winthrop Street in Roxbury. Two days later they were at sea on the steamer
Abyssinia
—and no steerage this time—on their way to a honeymoon in Paris and the start of work on “the Farragut.”

Paris was essential to the work, Gus felt, not only because the “art current” ran stronger there, but because sculpture as an art form was taken more seriously than at home, and experienced craftsmen—plaster molders, foundrymen, and the like—were plentiful. The project at hand was
greater and more challenging by far than anything he had ever undertaken, and he would need the best help he could get.

As an American bride in Paris, she was something of a rarity, even with the great numbers of young Americans in the city, and she was doing her best to adapt to her new role. He knew French; she did not. He knew Paris; she did not, and at this point she knew almost no one else in the city.

Her health improved. Gus said it was the wine. She thought freedom from worry was the reason. He worked most of the time in his studio near the Arc de Triomphe. She tried to keep busy. She painted at the Louvre, went shopping for gloves at Le Bon Marché. On a night when they attended the opera, she marveled at the grand stairway and tried to imagine the glittering Paris social life she had heard so much about. “I wish someone would invite us to a big party or reception,” she wrote to her mother. “I should like to wear my wedding dress. …”

Only think there are twenty-four families in this house who use the same entrance we do and twelve who use the same staircase [she wrote in another letter], and although we have been here more than three months we do not know by sight anyone but the family whose door is directly opposite ours. Doesn’t it seem kind of strange?

“Aug keeps wracking his brain all the time to think of something good and original,” she reported.

He also took time to report to her parents on her health, to kid about the weight she had put on, and to express his gratitude for their financial help. “While Gussie is wrestling with the preparations for dinner, I’ll try and wrestle with a letter,” he began one evening in the fall of 1877. “She eats more, sleeps more, walks more, talks as much … [as] I have seen her in three years.”

You write splendid letters to her and the best part … is when you tell her, “Don’t work too hard.” She is inclined that way. … She manages to be occupied all the time and I wish we could fix it so she might be able to paint more. She can give you some lessons in cooking, if you wish any. First rate soups, first rate mackerel, first rate everything in fact … she takes care of the inner man splendidly. …

I am much obliged to you, Mr. Homer—“much obliged” expresses very mildly how much I thank you for all you are doing and have done in regard to my finances. …

The following spring, they moved to a larger, more beautiful, partially furnished apartment in a choice location, No. 3 rue Herschel on the Left Bank, just off the boulevard Saint-Michel and less than a block from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was all they could wish for: on the fourth floor with a fair-sized parlor and tall French windows, two bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, a servant’s room upstairs, and a balcony off the parlor with nothing blocking the view of the gardens and the towers of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. In her letter to her parents reporting the news, she drew a plan on a separate sheet of paper. She and Gus could hardly believe their good fortune.

They found additional furniture at bargain prices—two brass-studded Louis XVI chairs, a handsome carved chest said to be three hundred years old—and bought “a beautiful Japanese matting” to cover one wall in the parlor from floor to ceiling.

Gussie set up her easel and painted two interior studies of the apartment and took time to write long descriptive letters to her family, her love of Paris and her happiness overflowing.

You have no idea how beautiful the view is from my windows this morning [July 25, 1878]. The air is clear and everything is very lovely. I watch my plants on the balcony just as father does his pear trees. My geranium has two buds. The calla is putting out a new leaf. …

Oddly, when invitations came for evening events hosted by other Americans, “Aug,” as she called him, would go while she remained at home like “Cinderella.” Late hours left her feeling “not very bright” the next day, she explained. But it may also have been that she was self-conscious about her hearing and the fact that she spoke so little French.

Gussie’s younger sister, Eugenie (“Genie”) Homer, arrived in the autumn for a stay in Paris. Then Gus’s younger brother Louis became one of the household.

Gus was devoted to Louis and had done all he could for him since boyhood in New York when he had been Louis’s protector from bullies. He had long encouraged Louis in his own ambitions to become a sculptor, first by teaching him how to cut cameos. Later, Louis had joined Gus in Rome, where he proved himself both a hard worker and talented. But in June 1876, Louis had disappeared. For two years no one knew his whereabouts, until suddenly in 1878 Gus heard he was in London and in desperate straits. Gus made a quick trip from Paris to rescue him.

Louis said only that he had been married to an American girl and that she had died in childbirth. He was also in financial trouble and appeared to have a drinking problem.

Gussie agreed to take him in—as her sister Genie wrote, Louis “tucked himself” into the servant’s room upstairs. Gus put Louis to work in the studio, glad to have his help and his company on the job. Everyone was happy with the arrangement, it seems, including Gussie, who wrote of Louis, “He is certainly the easiest person to have in the house and it’s very pleasant all around.”

One of the few surviving letters by Bernard Saint-Gaudens, the father, reached Paris later that fall. It was addressed to his “Dear Children.” “Let Louis judge now of my anxiety during all of the time he left us without sending us news,” he began.

However, I forgive you so long as you continue in the way you say you have marked for yourself in the future. For I say to you my dear son you will never find any peace for your soul and mind excepting in work. That is the only true source of our welfare. Through work the soul aspires to God who bestows
upon it a power of will and wisdom which nothing can overthrow. …

Working as never before and needing more space, Gus had leased a huge barnlike studio on the Left Bank at 49 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, at the center of a growing community of American artists. By cutting through the Luxembourg Gardens, he found, he could get from the apartment to the studio in twenty minutes or less.

A painter, unless working on a huge mural, rarely needed the help of others and comparatively little in the way of equipment and material beyond paint, brushes, palette, and canvases. But a sculptor, and especially one undertaking a monumental project, needed great space for others on the job and all manner of clay, sacks of plaster, ladders, scaffolding, and tools. A sculptor’s studio was a workshop.

The new studio had once been a public dance hall, and with fourteen windows overhead, each ten feet square, there was plenty of light. But Gus decided everything had to be whitewashed—ceiling, walls, woodwork— to make the light better still. With room to spare, he told some of his favorite painter friends to set their easels “high up” on the balcony formerly used for the orchestra. One of them, Maitland Armstrong, remembered being amused “by the alternate waves of exaltation and despair that swept over Saint-Gaudens as he worked,” and how, when somebody would break out in a song, the rest would join in and Gus especially.

For additional help on the Farragut, besides brother Louis, he hired Will Low, who also became a consistent guest at dinner. As Gussie explained to Genie, “He hasn’t a cent.”

She kept the accounts, paid for everything, kept close records of what Gus gave Louis or loaned to some of the old friends who came around, like Alfred Garnier.

“Gus lent Garnier $5.00,” reads one entry. “Gus gave Louis [$]5.00. Odds and ends for studio [$]2.00.”

She also paid the monthly rents—$350 for the apartment, $465 for the studio—and recorded when Garnier and others paid back what they owed.

In addition to the Farragut in its various stages, which Gus positioned
at the center of the studio, he was busy with a number of low reliefs in clay, and had still another project of importance under way.

Before leaving New York for Paris, he had been asked to help with the new Trinity Church in Boston. Henry Hobson Richardson, the architect chosen to design the church, had assigned the decoration of the interior to a gifted artist, John La Farge, who in turn had recruited Saint-Gaudens to assist him. Like Saint-Gaudens, Richardson was a product of the École des Beaux-Arts, and was emerging as one of America’s most brilliant architects. La Farge, too, had studied in Paris, though briefly, and Saint-Gaudens jumped at the chance to work with both of them. (He would later call LaFarge “a spur to higher endeavor equal if not greater than any other I have received.”) On the eve of Saint-Gaudens’s departure for Paris, La Farge had asked him to do an altar screen, a sculptured panel of angels in high relief, for St. Thomas Church in New York. Now this, too, occupied long hours in the Paris studio.

Two others of importance who had worked on Trinity Church and thus became friends of Saint-Gaudens were architects Charles McKim and Stanford White. Still in their twenties, they had since left Richard-son’s employ—McKim to start his own firm, White to see something of the world. Saint-Gaudens liked them both, but particularly White, whose high spirits and humor, uninhibited love of art and architecture and music, seemed as limitless as his energy.

White had grown up in New York in an atmosphere of art and music and books. His father was a recognized authority on Shakespeare, a composer and cellist. As a boy, Stanford had shown exceptional talent for drawing and painting, but La Farge, a friend of the family who was constantly short of money, had warned that as an artist he would have trouble supporting himself, and told him to take up architecture. So at age nineteen he went to work as an apprentice to Richardson.

He and Saint-Gaudens had met first in New York. White was climbing the cast-iron stairway in the German Savings Bank Building one day when he heard a strong tenor voice at full volume singing the Andante of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony. Deciding to investigate, he found Gus at work in his studio.

The friendship with Charles McKim came a little later, and according
to Saint-Gaudens, it was their “devouring love of ice cream” that brought them together.

Early in 1878, hearing that White was planning a trip to Europe, Saint-Gaudens wrote to say he was “pegging away” at the Farragut, but that the limited interest of his subject’s clothing made the job “a hard tug.” From the point of view of sculpture, Saint-Gaudens disliked modern clothing. Here he had only a cap, sword, field glasses, belt, and buttons to work with—not much, he lamented, adding, “When you come over I want to talk with you about the pedestal. Perhaps something might be done with that.”

White’s response came at once, “I hope you will let me help you with the Farragut pedestal. … Then I should go down to Fame, even if it is bad, reviled for making a poor base for a good statue.” In June, White reported he was on his way to Paris and that McKim was coming, too.

They arrived in midsummer, 1878, and after extended discussions with the sculptor in his crowded “ball-room studio,” and much conviviality with Gus, his wife, and friends—dining at Foyot’s, a favorite restaurant of students beside the Luxembourg Gardens, seeing Sarah Bernhardt in Racine’s
Phèdre
—they succeeded in convincing Gus it was time he took a break and head off with them to the south of France.

Gus was itching to go. As he wrote long afterward, there had been, before White’s arrival, “little of the adventurous swing of life” he had once known in his student days.

Gussie encouraged him to go, apparently. It seems the only thing she ever flatly said no to was his wish that they get a dog.

The stated purpose of the expedition was to look at Gothic and Roman architecture along the Rhône. “It’s really a business trip,” she assured her mother. They were to be gone less than two weeks and traveling third-class.

So, as Saint-Gaudens wrote, the “three red-heads” started on their way. (White, in addition to a thick, reddish-brown mustache, had close-cropped red hair that stood straight up as stiff as a brush. And though McKim had little hair left on top of his head, it, too, was red.) Their route was from Paris by train to Dijon, Beaune, and Lyon, then by boat from Lyon down the Rhône to Avignon, Arles, Saint-Gilles, and Nîmes; then
back northward over the mountains by diligence to Langogne, Le Puy, and to Bourges, Tours, and Blois, then back to Paris by way of Orléans.