The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (78 page)

Sensing something was wrong, a younger American came over to speak with him. Suddenly, Howells turned and put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and said, “Oh, you are young, you are young—be glad of it and
live
.”

Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do—but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven’t done so—and now I’m old. It’s too late. It has gone past me—I’ve lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!

Some years later the young man, Jonathan Sturges, told the story to Henry James, stressing the intensity with which Howells had spoken. It became the germ of another James novel set in Paris,
The Ambassadors
, in which the main character, in an outburst, delivers the same message in almost exactly the same words.

In the spacious comforts of the home that he and Louisa had established on the rue de la Rochefoucauld twenty years before, George Healy had begun slowing down. He still went out to his studio part of every day, still walked down to the Church of the Holy Trinity to hear daily mass, though on the uphill walk home he moved considerably more slowly than he once had.

His large family was Healy’s delight. A note in his diary at Christmas-time, 1891, reads:

My grandson, Georges De Mare, came to the studio to say they are waiting for me. The Christmas tree was all lighted up; about fifty children crowded around it, joy reflected in their faces; the parlors filled with people. Indeed, it was the loveliest picture one could see.

Healy was the last one left in Paris of those aspiring young Americans who had sailed to France filled with such high hopes in the 1830s. It had been nearly fifty-seven years since he set off from Boston with scarcely any money, knowing no French and knowing no one in Paris.

His love for the city was greater than ever. But for all the years he had lived there, he never thought of himself as anything other than an American. “His love of France and the French never changed him from an out-and-out American,” a granddaughter, Marie De Mare, would write.

In 1892, Healy decided it was time to go. In March he and Louisa sailed for home, to spend their remaining years in Chicago.

The Augustus Saint-Gaudens who arrived in Paris again in October of 1897 for an indefinite stay was by almost any measure a stunning example not only of success, but of persistent hard work and great talent justly
recognized and rewarded. At age fifty-one, he was America’s preeminent sculptor, honored, revered by colleagues, repeatedly in demand for projects of national importance. Consequently, too, he had become wealthy. His finest work, it seemed certain, would stand down the years as some of the highest achievements of American art.

Since the unveiling of his Farragut in New York in 1880, he had never been without work. For a public park in Springfield, Massachusetts, he had done
The Puritan
, a striding, heroic figure in bronze that seemed to embody all the courage and purpose of seventeenth-century New England Protestant fervor.

A pensive, standing Lincoln unveiled in 1887 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park captured as no work of sculpture yet had the depth of mind of the Great Emancipator.

In Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington sat the hooded figure of the Adams Memorial, Saint-Gaudens’s most enigmatic, mysterious creation, and the subject of never-ending speculation about its meaning.

In contrast were the
Amor Caritas
, a magnificent winged angel for a funerary monument raising a tablet over her head, and his beautiful
Diana
, the archer, the only nude he ever rendered, which stood thirteen feet high atop the tower of New York’s new thirty-two-story Madison Square Garden, designed by Stanford White.

Greatest of all, many felt, was another Civil War monument, this at Boston, which for the first time portrayed African-Americans as heroes. The Shaw Memorial, a giant bronze frieze, set at the edge of the Boston Common opposite the Massachusetts State House, commemorated the bravery and sacrifice of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the first black unit in the Union Army, most of whose members, including Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, were killed in a frontal attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor in 1863.

The positioning of Shaw on horseback moving forward with his marching men, the unflinching look in their faces and distinct individuality of each face, had a total effect beyond that of any memorial in the nation.

Saint-Gaudens had never taken such infinite pains with a work. It preoccupied him over a span of fourteen years before he was satisfied. Commissioned in 1884, it was not unveiled until May 31, 1897.

Presenting him with an honorary degree that spring, the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, had said: “Augustus Saint-Gaudens—a sculptor whose art follows and ennobles nature, enforces fame and lasting remembrance, and does not count the mortal years it takes to mold immortal fame.”

Between times, he had produced numerous relief portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the artists William Merritt Chase and Kenyon Cox, his son Homer Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent’s sister Violet, one of the loveliest of all his reliefs, in which she sits strumming a guitar and for which Sargent, in return, painted a portrait of young Homer with his mother.

For a while, Saint-Gaudens taught at the Art Students League in New York. He served as an advisor on sculpture for the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, and along with Sargent and Edwin Abbey, he agreed to help with the sculpture and murals for a magnificent new Boston Public Library to be located opposite Trinity Church on Copley Plaza. Charles McKim was the architect. His inspiration for the building had been the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris.

More recently, as a kind of capstone to Saint-Gaudens’s major contributions to the memory of the Civil War, New York City had commissioned an equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman to stand at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street by the entrance to Central Park, and work on it was under way.

By the late 1890s Saint-Gaudens was operating four studios in New York. He and Gussie were living in considerable style at a new address on West 45th Street and had purchased a country home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

So it came as a shock when suddenly, with so much going on, he announced they were moving to Paris, and that work on the Sherman would continue there.

“I suppose through overwork I had become nervous and completely disaffected with America,” he would later offer in explanation. Nothing would “right things” but “getting away from the infernal noise, dirt, and confusion” of New York. Worst on his nerves was the unending din outside his main studio at 36th and Broadway:

… with the elevated road discharging oil on the persons beneath, the maddening electric cars adding their music, the ambulance wagons tearing by, jangling their diabolic gongs in order that the moribund inside may die in the spirit of the surroundings, and the occasional frantic fire engine racing through it all with bells clanging, fire, smoke, hell, and cinders.

More besides his own troubles beset him. Gussie had suffered a miscarriage in 1885. His father had died after a prolonged struggle. And so had his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, of tuberculosis, at age forty-four.

The Scottish writer had come to matter greatly to Saint-Gaudens. Stevenson’s books, beginning with
New Arabian Nights
, had set him “aflame,” and during five sittings for a relief portrait, as the ailing Stevenson lay propped in bed in a hotel room in New York, writing and smoking a cigarette, they had talked steadily on all manner of subjects. Saint-Gaudens brought young Homer to meet the famous author, and would eventually do numerous reliefs and medallions of him.

Brother Louis Saint-Gaudens, still a mainstay for Gus, suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, Louis said, of “the high pressure tension” at the studio. “So Augustus went [on] to more and greater glories, and Louis went to a sanitarium,” Louis would write. But then Augustus, too, said Louis, began to “show the strain of his heroic labors. …”

That he had, indeed, become seriously depressed, Saint-Gaudens acknowledged. “But I was sick,” in a “deplorable mental condition,” “miserably blue,” he would write. And Gussie had been suffering in the same way.

The medical term in fashion was “neurasthenia,” its symptoms described as “mental irritability” and “morbid fear” often experienced by “gentlemen of middle life,” insomnia, “dyspepsia”—all brought on by nervous exhaustion.

A Feeling of Profound Exhaustion
[reads a contemporary medical text] … Attacks of a sensation of absolute exhaustion, as though the body had not strength to hold together. … This feeling of exhaustion, though not exactly pain in the usual
sense of the word, is yet, in many cases, far worse than pain. These attacks may come on suddenly without warning. … The
going-to-die
feeling is quite common in these cases. …

The definition given a century later would be “a syndrome marked by ready fatigability of body and mind usually by worrying and depression. …”

In photographs taken about the time he returned to Paris, Saint-Gaudens appears truly exhausted. He looks almost haunted, and older than his age. Always thin, he had become gaunt. There was more gray in his thick head of hair and the short beard had turned nearly white. William Dean Howells was to describe him as having the face of “a weary lion.”

His son Homer would later say that New York had taken its toll, that his father had been “crippled for the remainder of his life by the ardor of his work.” But, Homer insisted, his father’s sickness was not what had taken him back to Paris.

Quite on the contrary, it was his knowledge that his art had reached its strength … [and] in Paris alone he could measure himself with his contemporaries, place his work before the world’s most critical audience, and learn, once for all, wherein it was good and wherein bad.

Doubtless all this was valid, and from much he said later, there is no question that Saint-Gaudens agreed. But it would appear, too, that the burden of the very success he had achieved, and the added complications and responsibilities such success brought with it, had become too much for him.

At some point early in the 1880s—it may have been after the triumph of the Farragut monument—Saint-Gaudens began having an affair with the stunning young Swedish model who had posed for the nude
Diana
and probably for the
Amor Caritas
as well. She was Albertina Hulgren but went by the name Davida Clark.

Relatively little is known about her, but in the summer of 1889, she had
a baby, a boy, whom she named Louis, and this, it would seem, had something to do with Saint-Gaudens heading off to Paris that same summer. After his return, he established a separate ménage for her and the child in Noroton, Connecticut, and it is believed he provided support for the child thereafter.

It has been speculated that Gussie found out soon afterward, but no one knows. The only supposed details of the affair came nearly fifty years after Saint-Gaudens’s death, from a woman in New Hampshire named Frances Grimes, who was then ninety-two. She had been an assistant to and reputed confidante of the sculptor late in his life and told a local newspaperman that Saint-Gaudens had had “many affairs,” but that in the case of Davida he was “madly in love.” How much of what she said was valid, how much the imaginings of a very old woman, is impossible to know. It is clear, however, that her claim that Gus and Gussie no longer lived together after Gussie learned of the affair is wholly mistaken.

With age Gussie’s deafness and the sense of isolation it brought became an increasing handicap. Her battles with poor health and depression were equal, if not greater, than his own. She suffered back pains and, with her deafness, an almost constant ringing in her ears. Some people found her difficult to like, as Stanford White had in Paris years before, and attributed her ailments to hypochondria. But Saint-Gaudens is not known ever to have written or said a critical word about her.

She began spending much of her time away from home, traveling to health spas in places like Nova Scotia and Bermuda, whether for her health only or for relief from the strains of their marriage is again not clear. Probably it was both.

Long adamant about keeping personal matters private, Saint-Gaudens became even more so. His infidelity was not a subject about which he was proud. That some of his circle, like Frederick MacMonnies and Stanford White, both of whom were married, were known as “ladies’ men” and seemed to enjoy talk of their philandering, Saint-Gaudens found repellent.