Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (18 page)

Liberty’s hand and torch didn’t arrive at the seaport in Philadelphia until the end of September 1876. Newspaper illustrators captured the surreal scene of men hauling the giant appendage along the wharf. The official inauguration occurred on October 3, with only one month left for viewing before the entire exposition would be taken down.

Luckily for Bartholdi, the torrid weather, which had kept attendance to a scattering over the summer months, now let up. The days cooled and the tally of people crossing through the exposition gates each day multiplied by a factor of ten. Bartholdi began to receive enthusiastic visitors to his stall by the side of the lake. The huge hand jutted up above the kiosk’s roof, and the title now read “Statue of Liberty” on a sign below the wrist. Bartholdi sold souvenirs—including a bust with drooping rays—and photographs. Visitors who wished to climb a little ladder in the forearm to the balcony around the torch had to buy a ticket for the privilege.

The visitors came for the thrill, but the press seemed bewildered as to the statue’s provenance or purpose. One report noted that the arm and torch near Machinery Hall were “an exact copy of a portion of the great bronze statue one hundred and forty-five feet in height, entitled ‘Liberty Lighting the World’ which the citizens of Paris were about to give the U.S.” In fact, the French had amassed only a small fraction of the money needed, the projected expense of which now seemed to be more along the lines of 1 million francs, not 400,000. The donations had come in slowly ever since the first months of fundraising.

The isolated limb also added to anxieties about what role America was expected to play to make this statue a reality. A September 29, 1876,
New York Times
editorial starkly expressed American doubts:

“It is true that at first the story that the Frenchmen intended to make us so large a present was received with some degree of incredulity, especially as the illustrated papers promptly published pictures of the statue with a lighted torch in its right hand and an enthusiastic public consisting of four men and three women standing in admiration at its base. . . . Events have apparently justified the fears. . . . A dismal report now reaches us from France that work upon the statue has been suspended in consequence of a lack of funds . . .

“From present appearances we have now all of the statue that we shall have unless we are willing to pay the cost of finishing it and it is more than doubtful if the American public is ready to undertake any such task. For the feeblest mathematician can easily calculate that if it costs 200,000 francs to make one arm of the proposed statue, it will cost a great many times that amount to finish it.”

The editorial infuriated Bartholdi. He gave an interview to a Philadelphia newspaper in which he said he might allow that city to claim the statue instead of New York. This remark triggered the rivalry for which Bartholdi had hoped.

On December 6, 1876, Frederick Law Olmsted, then the commissioner of parks for New York City, recommended that the hand of the statue be put up in Madison Square Park, while the committee awaited the arrival of the body. Bartholdi must have been greatly relieved to have more than one month for people to view the piece. He certainly didn’t want to ship it back to Paris right away.

Madison Square Park was where Bartholdi had placed his Opera backdrop to great effect on the Fourth of July. One of the most fashionable spots in the city, these ten acres attracted the uptown crowd for outdoor concerts and caught the eye of visitors to the Union League Club or stylish hotels that bordered the green.

When the hand and flame were finally installed on Washington’s birthday, 1877, the wrist reached the tops of the trees and rooftops. The flame was high enough to be visible for many blocks around. On a boxy white pedestal, approximately fifteen feet high, Bartholdi displayed a small model and a painting of the statue as it would appear in situ on Bedloe.

It would be a long-standing advertisement for his project and its fundraising. With that good news, he could take a bit of vacation, a break that ultimately led to a significant change in his life.

That December, Bartholdi returned to Newport. He apparently arrived at the La Farge home on Sunnyside Place with a woman around his age, voluptuous, dark-haired, with close-set eyes and a small, prim mouth. Bartholdi introduced her as Jeanne-Émilie and the La Farges greeted them with the usual geniality granted a friend and his wife who had returned to the United States after a long time away.

There was only one problem. In the course of the Bartholdis’ stay, La Farge discovered that Bartholdi and this wife were not in fact married.

Jeanne-Émilie had been a model, it seemed, and Bartholdi feared his mother would not consent to the marriage had he told her he wanted to wed such a woman. It was not that Charlotte opposed Bartholdi’s marrying in general; she had been anxious through Bartholdi’s whole adult life for him to find a match. For example, while he was on his second trip to Egypt, she had sent invitations to his wedding to a woman to whom he had never proposed, and she had urged him to find a future spouse in Bordeaux during the war. Charlotte wanted a wedding but probably would not have rejoiced at this one.

La Farge refused to pander to Charlotte’s imagined prejudices. It was scandalous for Bartholdi to stay at La Farge’s home with an unmarried woman. With his reputation at stake, La Farge asked Bartholdi and Jeanne-Émilie if they would agree to be wed, presumably in exchange for La Farge’s help laundering the story. The lovers agreed.

And so it was arranged for the two to marry on December 20, 1876. They registered their marriage on the fifteenth and sent out large invitations on white stock, in elegant script:

Mr. and Mrs. John La Forge [
sic
] have the honor of inviting

you to take part in the marriage of

Miss Jeanne Emilie de Puysieux, their niece,

with Mr. Auguste Bartholdi,

Statuaire, Chevalier de la Légion d’honneur

Newport, Rhode Island (États Unis), 20 December 1876

The part about Jeanne being La Farge’s niece was a subterfuge. While the ruse found acceptance at the time in newspaper accounts, and in some histories of Bartholdi that followed, it is hard to believe that John La Farge Jr., who later spent time with Bartholdi and Jeanne-Émilie on several occasions (and who went on to be a priest), would erroneously characterize it as a charade in his memoirs; if Jeanne-Émilie was his relative, he surely would have known it, since the Bartholdis were favorite guests of his father.

The invitation might have been produced merely to allow Bartholdi to send a copy to Charlotte, since the only attendees at the event were the couple, the La Farges, and the Reverend Charles T. Brooks, a Unitarian minister, who was the only man of the cloth authorized to marry non-Catholics of a Protestant denomination not represented in Newport. The ceremony took place in the southern parlor of the La Farge home.

When Bartholdi wrote the news to his mother, he told her that Jeanne-Émilie had been orphaned as a child and brought up by her adoptive parents in Canada. Those parents had died, and she had been taken in by a woman in Newport with the last name Walker. When that woman died, Jeanne-Émilie inherited nothing. Bartholdi said he had first met her in 1871 and encountered her again in 1876.

He claimed in another letter that the illness that had struck him in Philadelphia had caused him to journey to Canada for recuperation. The symptoms had intensified and he had found it necessary to send word to La Farge that he might need assistance. While he waited for a reply, so he told his mother, a relative of the La Farges arrived whom Bartholdi had met five years earlier. She cordially gave her hand in greeting and then stayed by his side, taking care of him until La Farge himself arrived.

In Bartholdi’s letter to his mother, he apologized for the marriage but explained that he had chosen what he wanted in a wife. Jeanne-Émilie was neither beautiful nor ambitious, he wrote, but she was warmhearted. He later described his new wife’s ardent wish to be accepted by Charlotte: “On Christmas Day when we left church she told me: ‘I did not understand the minister, but I prayed all the time for your mother to like me.’”

Bartholdi had been an admirer of women throughout his life but seemingly unmoved by great romantic passions. One theory is that he had seen the worst side of such love in the devastating affair of his brother and wanted none of that pain or distraction. Jeanne-Émilie would provide a sunny, modest support for him through life, causing him no complications in terms of demands for a certain standard of living.

In her own letter to Charlotte introducing herself, Jeanne-Émilie wrote ardently, hoping to be brought into her mother-in-law’s affections. Charlotte gave her blessing, but her final verdict on Jeanne-Émilie was not so generous.

One important coincidence seems to be passed over in accounts of Liberty’s history. Rumors at the time of Liberty’s construction suggested that the body of the statue was modeled after Bartholdi’s paramour, later his wife. If that information is true—it was never confirmed by Bartholdi—and combined with the detail from La Farge’s student’s account that the model for Liberty was created in the painter’s studio, it could perhaps have been the case that Jeanne-Émilie posed for the body of the Liberty statue back in 1871 and Bartholdi fell in love with her at that time.

Jeanne-Émilie would soon need to see him through a number of worries. Back in Paris, Monduit had retired, passing his business to his younger partners, Emile Gaget and J. B. Gauthier. Bartholdi would need to become accustomed to working with them alone. The torch and hand had devoured all of the funds raised thus far in France. As for Bartholdi’s fountain, no one had come forward to buy the piece for their town or city. Bartholdi not only hadn’t raised money for the Liberty statue with the sale of the fountain; he now bore the cost of removing the piece and shipping it . . . somewhere.

But his marriage to Jeanne-Émilie would be a long and happy one, helping him through such trials. Bartholdi would later say, in explaining his love for her: “There’s no lack of people who would find fault with the party I chose. But I am alone in this decision, the others can not feel for me. For me to have value in their eyes, I would have made a brilliant marriage, without affection, but that would just kill me slowly after having earned the congratulations and simultaneously the envy of everyone. . . . Jeanne is for me a ray of sun in a sad room.”

In later years, he would remark gently to Jeanne of their childlessness, “Children? But have not we already made a girl together, Liberty?”

8
Making a Spectacle

Before he left the United States at the end of January 1877, Bartholdi had managed one significant step forward with his colossus. He had created a committee of businessmen to support it.

Money had condensed quickly at the top of New York society in the 1870s and to great benefit, the
New York Times
explained. A Vanderbilt with a million dollars to spend was better than a hundred men with ten thousand dollars each to dole out, the paper argued. A millionaire knew how to dispense money for the greater good. A member of the upper middle class merely frittered away pocket change.

A New York banker or industrialist understood his implied responsibility. He did not content himself with merely amassing a fortune, building a Newport mansion, traveling on the Continent with his wife while his children strolled in Gramercy Park with their nanny. The New York businessman gazed at the city around him and imagined the library, park, or museum that would make the metropolis more beautiful, more refined, more salubrious for its citizenry.

Before Bartholdi returned to France, a healthy assortment of such men gathered on Fifteenth Street in the Century Club, which encouraged the pursuit of arts and letters and discouraged such entertainments as chess, billiards, and cards as injurious to good conversation. The subject of conversation: Lady Liberty.

Richard Butler had all but signed on to Bartholdi’s scheme from the first time they met. It is impossible to say how heavily Bartholdi pushed the notion of substantial French support to Butler. Did he claim that France so embraced the project that America need only provide a base for Liberty to rest her feet? No matter. Butler would later say that he swore to Bartholdi from those early days that he would never desert the cause, no matter how difficult it became. His epic loyalty earned him the job of secretary of the American Committee.

Somehow Bartholdi had also managed to convince the lawyer William M. Evarts to join the committee as chairman. This was a true coup. Thin to the point of emaciation, with a broad forehead, hollowed cheeks, piercing gray eyes, and a sharp pinched nose, Evarts would have been recognized by anyone who had picked up an illustrated newspaper over the past decades. In 1860 he had argued the Lemmon case before the New York Court of Appeals, advocating for slaves who had been transported through New York State, where slavery was illegal. Evarts’s legal opponent argued that property rights reigned supreme, so the slave owner had committed no crime. Evarts countered that New York could not allow a felony in its state, regardless of the residence of the person who committed the crime. He won the case.

Evarts had also been one of Lincoln’s earliest and staunchest advocates, and had just represented victorious President Rutherford B. Hayes in the disputed national election, which had almost put the country on the brink of another civil war. He would, in a few months, be named secretary of state, and this made the timing of Bartholdi’s formation of the committee particularly fortunate.