The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (74 page)

Sargent, obviously put out, told her there was nothing he could do, that it was against the rules of the Salon to retire a picture and that he had painted Amélie exactly as she was dressed.

“Defending his cause made Sargent feel much better,” wrote Curtis. “Still we talked it over until 1 o’clock here last night and I fear he has never had such a blow.”

The reviews were essentially of three kinds, those that objected to Madame Gautreau’s décolletage, those repulsed by the color of her skin, and those that, seeing “modernity” in the approach, applauded Sargent’s courage.

The
New York Times
dismissed the painting out of hand as a “caricature,” far below Sargent’s usual standard. “The pose of the figure is absurd, and the bluish coloring atrocious.” The
Times
of London conceded only that the portrait was “most interesting.” But the French critic Louis de Fourcaud, writing in the
Gazette des Beaux-Arts
, called it a masterpiece of characterization. It should be kept in mind, he wrote, that “in a person of this type everything relates to the cult of self and the increasing concern to captivate those around her.

Her sole purpose in life is to demonstrate by her skills in contriving incredible outfits which shape her and exhibit her and which she can carry off with bravado. …

Sargent had been living and working in Paris for a full decade and in that time had received only expressions of admiration and praise. He had never known an adverse review or even mild criticism, let alone public mockery. His portrait of Madame Gautreau was in fact a masterpiece and in time would be so recognized. He hung on to it, renaming it
Madame X
. He also repainted the fallen shoulder strap, restoring it to its proper place. Years later, when he sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum in New York for $1,000, he would remark that it was perhaps the best thing he had done.

He and Amélie Gautreau seem to have had no further contact, though she, too, eventually changed her opinion about the painting and expressed pride in it.

Yet hard hit as he was and angry over what had happened, Sargent appears to have had no doubts about his ability or his ambition to keep painting. Feeling an immediate need for a change of scene, he followed up on an earlier plan to go to London. He left Paris in late May 1884, not to return until December.

All the while that Sargent was painting his Spanish dancer, the Boit daughters, and
Madame X
, work had been proceeding in Paris on another very different rendition of the female form on a scale never before seen.

Lady Liberty
, France’s colossal gift to America, had been rising steadily within her scaffolding upward from the courtyard of the Gaget, Gauthier & Cie. workshop on the rue de Chazelles, until she loomed high over the rooftops. Sculptor Auguste Bartholdi’s unprecedented creation was now on display for all to see.

The first rivet of her skin of copper sheets had been driven in 1881. And with the support of an inner skeleton—pylon and ingenious trusswork— designed by France’s master-builder in iron, Gustave Eiffel, the gigantic goddess had been growing steadily higher until the spring of 1884, when she was complete all the way to the tip of her upheld torch, 151 feet above street level.

She was a startling spectacle even to Parisians accustomed to spectacles, and her presence was to be brief, as everyone knew. The whole gigantic structure would soon be taken down piece-by-piece to be shipped to New York.

Photographers set up tripods and cameras to record the phenomenon of her towering over her Paris neighborhood. A French artist, Victor Dargaud, painted a scene of people in the street below craning their necks to see the uppermost reaches of the arm and torch, where men still at work looked like mere specks against the sky.

The disassembly began in December. Every piece was labeled, packed in more than two hundred wooden chests, and shipped off by rail to Rouen to be put aboard a French war vessel, the
Isère
, which sailed on May 21, 1885.

The pedestal on which Liberty was to stand on little Bedloe’s Island had been designed by Richard Morris Hunt, the first American architect to have been trained at the École des Beaux-Arts. Hunt’s pedestal stood eighty-nine feet tall, and thus Liberty and her torch would reach more than 240 feet above New York Harbor.

Even before the statue was on its way over the Atlantic, word began circulating in Paris that the civil engineer Eiffel had a still more audacious project in mind, a wrought-iron tower nearly 1,000 feet tall to be completed in time for the 1889 Exposition Universelle. Nothing like it had ever been attempted. The towers of Notre-Dame were by comparison a mere 226 feet high. The Washington Monument, the world’s tallest stone structure, was, at 555 feet, little more than half the height of Eiffel’s proposed centerpiece for the exposition.

It was to stand on the Champ de Mars, the old military parade ground where every exposition had been held since 1867. Eiffel’s estimated cost for the project was 5 million francs, approximately $1 million.

Though the great majority of Parisians seemed taken with the idea, protests erupted at once. The tower was denounced as much too large, too dangerous, unacceptably ugly—“a project,” it was said, “more in character with America (where taste is not very developed).”

In the past twenty years, since the end of the Civil War, feats of American engineering and construction had been attracting the attention of the world. The Mississippi River had been spanned for the first time, at St. Louis, with an unprecedented steel-and-masonry railroad bridge designed by James Buchanan Eads. The newly completed Brooklyn Bridge, the largest suspension bridge in the world, demonstrated dramatically the first use of steel cables.

Further, American inventions were the talk everywhere and rapidly becoming part of European life, as Samuel Morse’s telegraph had. Paris was particularly affected. Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone, invented in 1876, and Thomas Edison’s electric light bulb, introduced in 1879, as well as his system to generate electricity, took hold rapidly. In 1880 there were nearly 500 telephone “subscribers” in Paris. By 1883 there were more than 2,000. The Paris Opera and the Saint-Lazare railway station had converted from gas to electric lights.

That France, too, was well advanced in science and technology, pioneering with numerous inventions like the use of caissons for underwater construction, a system adopted by the builders of the Brooklyn Bridge, seemed wholly beside the point to those opposed to Monsieur Eiffel and his tower. So greatly did they fear the takeover of art by industry and technology that the very thought of such a monstrous intrusion on the beauty of Paris was completely abhorrent.

The general understanding was that the tower would not be permanent, but would be taken down at some point in the future. In the fall of 1886 a government committee voted to proceed. When, at the start of 1887, the first stages of construction got under way on the Champ de Mars and it could be seen, by the placement of their foundations, that the four great angled legs upon which the tower would stand encompassed an area of fully two and a half acres, those against it became even more incensed. They saw the whole centuries-long preeminence of art and architecture, the entire human scale of the Paris they loved, direly threatened. The glorious evidence of their country’s past and culture would be hideously overshadowed by an iron monstrosity. And what possible use would it serve, they asked.

Le Temps
carried a petition signed by fifty highly prominent, highly
irate figures in French arts and letters, including Charles Garnier, architect of the Opera, painter Ernest Meissonier, composer Charles Gounod, writers Alexandre Dumas and Guy de Maupassant.

We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, and devoted lovers of the beauty of Paris, to date intact, do protest with all our strength and with all our indignation, in the name of unappreciated French taste, in the name of French art and French history, now under attack, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower, which public spitefulness, often characterized by common sense and the spirit of justice, has already baptized, “the Tower of Babel.”

Not even “the commercial nation of America” would want such a structure, the petition insisted.

In his response Eiffel asked whether it was because of their artistic value that the pyramids had so captured the imagination of the world. “The tower will be the highest edifice which men have ever built. So why should what is admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris?” Addressing the question of artistic value, he said the tower would have its own beauty.

He also correctly sensed that the majority of the people of France favored the project as a stunning symbol of the amazing rejuvenation of their country since the “
Débâcle
” of 1870. In less than twenty years, under the Third Republic, the national income had nearly doubled, industrial production tripled. The whole idea of the forthcoming 1889 exposition was to celebrate such modern progress, as well as the centennial of the French Revolution.

The steady advance of French accomplishment would have seemed without limit were it not for recent unsettling reports from Panama that Ferdinand de Lesseps’s attempt to dig a canal there at sea level like his prior triumph at Suez, was proving far more difficult and costly than promised.

But if anyone of the day embodied the French genius for success, it
was Gustave Eiffel. Indeed, faith in the Panama canal had revived almost from the moment it was announced that Eiffel—who had warned against attempting a sea-level canal at Panama—would now be designing locks for the project. No other civil engineer in France inspired such confidence. To a large degree the decision to go ahead with the tower rested on his reputation.

Born and raised in Dijon, and trained in Paris at the École Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Eiffel had, by 1887, become France’s master builder. Without question, he was one of the engineering geniuses of the Industrial Age, known especially for such unprecedented iron structures as the Garabit Viaduct, with its arches four hundred feet above the Truyère River. For nearly thirty years he had built railroads, train stations, and bridges all over France, Europe, even in Russia and China. Nothing he had built had ever failed.

The chief problem to contend with in constructing the tower, he knew, was wind, and it was in answer to that reality that the design emerged. As the great French architect and earlier builder in iron, Henri Labrouste, had preached, “in architecture form must always be appropriate to the function for which it is intended.” (Or as the Paris-trained American architect Louis Sullivan would later say more succinctly and famously, “Form follows function.”)

The tower would rise in three stages. Once under way, it proceeded upward in amazingly rapid time. Its critics were even more taken aback by the spectacle. It was called “a metal spiderweb,” “a work of disconcerting ugliness” and utter “coarseness.” A professor of mathematics predicted from his calculations that at a height of 748 feet the tower would collapse. Others stressed that in any event it would never be finished in time for the exposition.

By April it had reached its first platform level, where a visitor’s promenade and four restaurants were to be located at an elevation of 189 feet. By September, it was up to the second platform at 379 feet. From there the ironwork of the enormous spire began its long tapering ascent to the top, the men on the job working in all weather.

By March 1889, the tower was finished, not only ahead of schedule but ahead of every other building under construction for the exposition. On
Sunday, March 31, Eiffel and a delegation of ten willing to brave a climb of 1,170 steps unfurled a huge Tricolor from on top.

“You will remember always,” Eiffel told them against a stiff March wind, “the great effort we have made in common to show all that, thanks to her engineers and her workers, France still holds an important place in the world. …”

From such a height, wrote a reporter from
Le Figaro
who had made the climb, Paris appeared like a tiny stage set.