The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (10 page)

Perhaps as unfamiliar for the Americans as almost anything about their first weeks in Paris was the realization that they were foreigners— strangers,
les étrangers
, as the French said—something they had never been before.

“It is a queer feeling to find oneself a
foreigner
,” wrote Nathaniel Willis.

As robust a walker as any of them was James Fenimore Cooper, who in earlier years had been known to walk from New York City all the way to his country home in Westchester County, a distance of twenty-five miles. No sooner had Cooper settled in Paris in 1826 than he decided to make the entire circumference of the city on foot, taking with him an old friend, a retired American naval captain with the memorable name of Melancthon T. Woolsey, under whom Cooper had once served at sea. The captain was a good-hearted but irritable man with a big voice and, like many Americans, inclined to speak even louder when trying to make himself understood in his outstandingly bad French. “He calls the Tuileries, ‘Tullyrees,’ the Jardin des Plantes, the ‘Garden dis Plants,’ the guillotine, ‘gullyteen’ and the garçons of the cafés, ‘gassons,’ ” wrote Cooper with delight.

Starting at the Barrière de Clichy by the city’s old toll wall, they had set off at eleven in the morning, moving at a steady clip. By noon they had covered four miles.

The captain commenced with great vigor, and for near two hours, as he expressed himself, he had me a little on his lee quarter, not more, however, he thought, than was due to his superior rank. … At the Barrière du Trône, we were compelled to diverge a little from the wall, in order to get across the river by the Pont d’Austerlitz. By this time I had ranged up abeam of the commodore, and I proposed that we should follow the river up as far as the wall again, in order to do our work honestly. But to this he objected that he had no wish to puzzle himself with spherical trigonometry, that plane sailing was his humor at the moment, and that he had, moreover, just discovered that one of his boots pinched his foot.

By three o’clock they were back where they started, having completed the entire circuit, eighteen miles, in something over four hours. Then to find a cab, they had to walk another two miles.

For his first overall view of Paris, Cooper had gone to the top of Montmartre, a high hill to the north, crowned by a picturesque village and windmills. Here was the best “look-out,” and he purposely chose an over-cast day, as the most favorable kind of light.

We were fortunate in our sky, which was well veiled in clouds, and occasionally darkened by mists. A bright sun may suit particular scenes, and particular moods of the mind, but every connoisseur in the beauties of nature will allow that, as a rule, clouds and very frequently obscurity, greatly aid a landscape. … I love to study a place teeming with historical recollections, under this light, leaving the sights of memorable scenes to issue, one by one, out of the gray mass of gloom, as time gives up its facts from the obscurity of ages. …

From Montmartre one could see the whole broad sweep of the city.

The domes sprung up through the mist, like starting balloons; and here and there the meandering stream threw back
a gleam of silvery light. Enormous roofs denoted the sites of the palaces, churches, or theaters. The summits of columns, the crosses of the minor churches, and the pyramid of the pavilion-tops, seemed struggling to rear their heads from out of the plain edifices. A better idea of the vastness of the principal structures was obtained here in one hour than could be got from the streets in a twelve-month.

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, miles in the distance, towered so above everything around it as to seem to stand on a ridge of its own.

Seeing the same view another day, from the same spot but in full sunshine, Cooper found the spell had vanished. All the details he loved, the “peculiarities” of so much history, were reduced to a “confused glittering.”

Charles Sumner, for his part, chose to climb the four hundred steps to the top of Notre-Dame to see all of gigantic Paris beneath his feet—Paris, a city of nearly 800,000 people, or four times the size of New York; Paris, the capital of France and the cultural center of all Europe. The capital of his own country, which Sumner had seen on a trip a few years earlier, was a city of “great design” but of small population (a mere 25,000) and “streets without houses to adorn them or businesses to keep them lively.” There was nothing natural about its growth, and this troubled him. “It only grows under the hot-bed culture of Congress,” he had written.

The “great design” of Washington was the work of a Frenchman, the Paris-born engineer and architect Pierre-Charles L’Enfant. The new Capitol, which Sumner considered an “edifice worthy … of the greatest republic on earth,” had only just been completed in 1829 under the direction of the American architect Charles Bulfinch, who during a visit to Paris in 1787 had toured the city’s monuments with the American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson.

The view from the heights of Notre-Dame, like nearly everything about the ancient cathedral, had lately acquired unprecedented popular interest as a result of a new novel,
Notre-Dame de Paris,
by young Victor Hugo, who had set the story in the fifteenth century. It was his first novel, and a sensation. The first edition in English appeared in 1833, under the
title
The Hunchback of Notre-Dame
, a title Hugo disliked but by which the book would be known ever after.

Hugo adored Gothic architecture for all its upward aspirations, its spires, steeples, and pointed arches, its dramatic use of light and dark, for the sense of the sublime in its stained glass, the grotesque in its gargoyles. He intended the book to be a summoning call for historic preservation. “We must, if it be possible, inspire the nation with a love of its national architecture,” he wrote in the introduction. “That, its author here declares, is one of the chief aims of this book.” He saw Notre-Dame in particular, and Gothic architecture overall, as history writ large in stone before the advent of the printing press.

Hugo loved especially the view from the top of the towers, and to this, the view as he imagined it to have been in the fifteenth century, he devoted one of the most appealing chapters in the book, inspiring thereby no one knows how many thousands of his readers, then and later, to undertake the climb to see for themselves.

The cornerstone of Notre-Dame had been laid in the year 1163 by Pope Alexander III on the eastern end of the Île-de-la-Cité in the Seine. The island was the precise historic center of Paris, since it was there in 52
B.C
., under the Romans, that the city was born. It was called the Île-de-la-Cité because it once constituted all there was of Paris. As one learned in Victor Hugo’s book, the shoreline of the Seine was its first city wall, the river its first moat.

At the opposite or western end of the island, where its sharp tip pointed downstream like a ship’s prow, was the broad Pont Neuf, the New Bridge, which crossed the divided river in two sections and was, in fact, the oldest of the bridges of Paris and the largest. Built of heavy stone in 1604, it was the favorite bridge of the Parisians, a major promenade, and for the Americans it had an air of romance and a view without rival. On the Pont Neuf they felt they were truly in Paris. John Sanderson wrote that it was when he stepped out on the bridge that he began to breathe. “The atmosphere brightened, the prospect suddenly opened, and the noble river exhibited its twenty bridges, and its banks, turrets, towered and castellated, as far as the eye could pierce.”

Emma Willard described for her students back in Troy the giant equestrian
bronze of Henry IV, Henry of Navarre, “that most chivalrous, best-headed, and kindest-hearted of all the French kings,” which commanded the bridge’s midway point, where it was grounded on the end of the Île-de-la-Cité. She noted the long lines of bookstalls that reached down the river from the ends of the bridge and the great barges of the Seine, with their washlines hanging out. She wrote of the “delightful streets” called quays following the river’s edge and of what splendid promenades they were. The river itself, however, was a disappointment compared to the Hudson, she wrote, adding in true schoolmistress spirit, “But you must make the best of it as it is.”

The bridge immediately downstream, the slim, elegant Pont des Arts was her favorite, as it was for many. The first cast-iron structure in Paris, its wide wooden deck was for the convenience and pleasure of pedestrians only. Strolling over the Seine with her on the Pont des Arts, James Fenimore Cooper assured her there was no finer view in all Europe.

She had come to Paris “to see and learn.” Suggesting in one of her letters that her students at home accompany her, in a manner of speaking, to the “very heart of Paris,” she led them not to the Pont des Arts or to the shops of the Palais Royal, but to the Louvre, and few other Americans would have contested the choice. Like the cathedral at Rouen, the Louvre was a nearly overpowering reminder of the immense difference between the Old World and the New.

It was the world’s greatest, richest, most renowned museum of art in what had formerly been a royal palace. Its history was long and complicated. A great part of it had been built for Catherine de Medici in the sixteenth century. Its famous Grande Galerie on the second floor was the longest room in the world, fully 1,330 feet, or more than a quarter of a mile, in length, its entire tessellated wood floor waxed like a table top. The collection of paintings numbered 1,224, and only masterpieces were included. It had been opened to the public, the admission free, by the government of the Revolution in 1793, the same year King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were taken to the guillotine. Though the Parisian public was admitted only on Sunday, “
étrangers
” were welcome every day, much to the surprise of the Americans. They had only to show their passports.

He entered the Louvre “with a throb,” wrote Charles Sumner. Ascending its magnificent marble stairway, he rejoiced to think that such a place was not something set apart for royalty only. So numerous and vast were the galleries that he spent four hours just walking through them.

“Holmes and I actually were at the Louvre this morning three hours instead of one, such is the seduction of the masters,” recorded Thomas Appleton, who was in raptures. “O Rubens, emperor of glowing flesh and vermeil lips; Rembrandt, sullen lord of brown shades and lightning lights … O Titian, thou god of noble eyes and rich, warm life … O Veronese … when shall I repay you for all the high happiness of this day?”

Another day Appleton returned on his own to concentrate on Roman sculpture. Except for a solitary art student with his brushes and long loaf of bread, he had the gallery of sculpture to himself and took his time, catalogue in hand. Appleton could not get enough of the Louvre. On his fourth day he found himself so enthralled by a portrait of a boy by Raphael that he returned still again the next day with easel, paints, and brushes to try his hand at a copy.

Emma Willard loved seeing the many young women at work doing copies of paintings in the galleries. Women in France were not disassociated from art, or confined to the periphery. There were women artists in Paris whose works were “much esteemed and bear a high price,” she was glad to report to her students.

That the female anatomy in its natural state was so conspicuously glorified on canvas and in sculpture posed a problem for Mrs. Willard. When it came to describing the charms of the nearby Garden of the Tuileries, she chose to omit altogether the marble statues which, as Cooper said, had “little or no drapery.”

No, my dear girls, I shall not take you to examine those statues. If your mothers were here, I would leave you sitting on these shaded benches, and conduct them through the walks, and they would return and bid you depart for our America, where the eye of modesty is not publicly affronted, and virgin delicacy can walk abroad without a blush.

Had she been aware of the randy side of “that most chivalrous” King Henry IV, she no doubt would have had less to say about his statue as well.

The French thought American visitors like Mrs. Willard absurdly squeamish, and some Americans found reactions such as hers embarrassing. Crossing the Garden of the Tuileries one day, Cooper watched a fellow countryman and two women burst into laughter as they passed close to a statue, then start running, and their “running and hiding their faces, and loud giggling left no one in ignorance of the cause of their extreme bashfulness.”

John Sanderson, as devoted a teacher as Mrs. Willard, thought the statues in the Tuileries depicting classic mythology made a splendid gallery, its “silent lessons” improving public taste in the arts and “elegancies” of life. Sanderson loved all the gardens of Paris. “Who would live in this rank old Paris if it was not for its gardens?”