The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (13 page)

Any problems or complaints the Americans had were comparatively few and seldom of great or lasting consequence. The long delay in mail from home remained a constant annoyance, and at times a worry. Family and friends were repeatedly urged to write, yet time after time when one went to pick up the mail, there was nothing. Months could pass with not a word from home. Emma Willard grew so distraught over this she was nearly ill, as she wrote to her sister. “My anxiety deprives me of sleep, and preys upon my health.”

Many, like Charles Sumner, found winter’s cold, unrelieved greyness—
la grisouille
, as it was called—more nearly than they could take. Emerson thought Paris unduly expensive. Nathaniel Willis thought one’s time as well as one’s money disappeared much too fast. Others besides Holmes did not care for the English men and women they met, and none of the Americans liked being taken for English.

Sumner hated seeing so many soldiers about the streets, the public gardens, and standing guard at every museum and palace. It seemed nearly impossible to be out of sight of soldiers. They were part of the picture, and this took getting used to.

Emma Willard was appalled to learn that more than a third of the children in Paris were born out of wedlock. During a visit to the Hospice des Enfants-Trouvés, the Hospital for Foundlings, seeing the numbers
of babies ranged in rows of cribs, she was heartstricken, exactly as Abigail Adams had been on a similar tour long before. Like Abigail Adams, Mrs. Willard was touched by the devotion shown by the nuns to the care of the infants, but felt there had to be something dreadfully amiss about a society in which so many babies were abandoned.

But the long-awaited letters from home nearly always arrived. Charles Sumner found relief from the cold by moving to different lodgings. Those short of money seemed to find ways to get by. Those like Emma Willard and John Sanderson, who had left home in quest of better health, found their health greatly improved.

“
On prend l’essence de la vie dans la ville
.” “One captures the essence of life in the city,” the French said. To be in Paris was to have the world at one’s feet—“
le monde à ses pieds
.”

Wendell Holmes adjusted to the new life so quickly and easily it took him by surprise. Of all the young Americans none adapted to Paris so readily and enthusiastically. He felt entirely at home, as if he had always lived in Paris, which was remarkable, given he had known nothing the least like his new life. He had no trouble learning French, and from his friends among the French students he quickly picked up on the “little practical matters” that helped him make the most of the city, including “economy,” he assured his parents:

An American or Englishman when he first comes to Paris … is always extravagant and this for two reasons—first, because he is under an excitement to find himself in a strange place and indifferent to the base motive of economy, and next because he is totally ignorant of the thousand expedients for avoiding expense which have sprung from the philosophy of the Parisians. Thus he pays his
garçon
(servant) double what he ought to, he gives money to the little rascally beggars who never dare to ask a Frenchman. He takes a cabriolet when he should take an omnibus. He calls for twice as much at the restaurants as he wants—ignorant, poor creature, that while an Englishman values everything in proportion to its price, the Frenchman’s eulogy is “
magnifique et pas cher!
”

Holmes liked the French. He adored the food and enjoyed especially congenial gathering places like the Café Procope, close to the École de Médecine, which everyone knew was once a favorite of Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. It had been started in 1670 by a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio del Cotillo, who was said to have introduced coffee to Paris.

“I am getting more and more a Frenchman,” Holmes told his parents. “I love to talk French, to eat French, to drink French every now and then. …” Paris was “paradise”—though, to be sure, a very different variety of paradise than envisioned in Boston. For years afterward Holmes would delight in quoting a remark of Appleton’s, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”

Appleton, who rarely ceased having a good time, chose after a month or so to move on and see more of Europe as he had always intended. But in 1836 he was back again when his father decided to bring five of the family to Europe in grand style, which included a suite of rooms at the famous Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli overlooking the Garden of the Tuileries. On the question of whether to be a painter or a writer, Appleton remained unresolved, and as it turned out, for all his considerable talent for both, he would be neither seriously. Nor would he ever settle for any fixed occupation. His father advised him not to be overly concerned about money and thanks to his father’s fortune, he never had to be. He would continue as he had right along, writing and painting for his own pleasure, a convivial devotee of the arts, generous with his money, beloved for his wit, his gift for talk and for friendship. He was too devoted to Boston ever to choose the life of an expatriate, but he would travel to Europe and return to Paris time after time, never able to get enough of it.

For the rest there was work at hand and for all the limitless fascination and pleasures of Paris, the work mattered foremost and consumed much the greatest part of all their time and energy. Work was their reason for being there, and they never lost sight of that. Like the young Boston artist George Healy, they had a strong desire to make something of themselves, and with few exceptions they were working longer hours and with far greater concentration than ever in their lives. Even James Cooper, who had already made something of himself, not only completed
The Prairie
, the third of his “Leather-Stocking” novels, but six other books as well.
Some days, according to his wife, Susan, he worked such long hours and became so agitated he could hardly hold his pen.

Samuel Morse, who arrived in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1830, had gone at once, predictably, to the Louvre and walked up and down the Grand Gallery for three hours, trying in his excitement to take it all in and decide which paintings to copy. Two weeks later he left for Italy, not returning until the following year and thus missing the July Revolution. But in September 1831, he returned, and that autumn at the Louvre conceived the idea for what was to be the most difficult, ambitious painting of his career.

George Healy had done little else but “study hard.” How exactly he managed to get by—with scarcely any money and speaking no French at first—he never said. “But manage he did,” a daughter would one day write. Somehow he talked his way into the studio, or
atelier
, of the then-celebrated painter Baron Antoine-Jean Gros. He was the sole American student, but having set up his easel, he became to all intents and purposes, in his daughter’s words, a French painter, seeing things from a French point of view. “He lived like his comrades, whom he greatly liked. … It was often a hard life, but a singularly interesting and varied one also.”

True to his assignment from the
NewYork Mirror
, Nathaniel Willis kept turning out his letters, as did John Sanderson in his effort to be, as he said, “the Boswell of Paris.” Sanderson went home to stay in 1836. His book
Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends; by an American Gentleman in Paris
, as descriptive and delightful as anything on the subject by any American of the day, would be widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. It was published in Philadelphia in 1838, and in London that same year under the title
The American in Paris
. A French edition appeared in Paris in 1843.

Emma Willard never slackened in a busy social schedule that included Lafayette and Cooper and their families and grand soirées sufficient to feast her eyes on diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and ostrich feathers beyond anything she had ever imagined. She studied and approved highly the attention given to elevated conversation in such society. She spent more time at the Louvre. She undertook her own survey of French schools and arranged to stay longer than planned. “It seems as if a spell was laid upon me that I cannot go from this place,” she explained. Before departing at
last for home in the spring of 1831, her head filled with so much that she had seen and learned, she recruited a first teacher of French for her school, Madame Alphise de Courval. As would be said of Emma Willard, few people ever derived more benefit from a time abroad, and “the effect was speedily seen in the renewed
éclat
of the Troy Female Seminary.”

Sumner, the ultimate industrious scholar, never let up attending lectures at the Sorbonne—on natural history, geology, geography, Egyptology, Greek history, the history of the English Parliament, the history of philosophy, Latin poetry, criminal law, the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the Justinian Code—and made time as well to sit in on lectures at the hospitals. He had been as determined in his efforts to master French as he was about nearly everything, and after a month, with the help of two tutors, he was able to follow the lectures with little difficulty. In six weeks he was taking part in conversations in French with students and faculty alike and on all manner of subjects.

My country has the most prominent place in my thoughts. How shall I raise her name?

—
SAMUEL F. B. MORSE

Never during his time abroad had James Fenimore Cooper had so much to report about a friend and fellow countryman as he did now about Samuel Morse. Morse was “hard at work” at the Louvre, Cooper wrote in one letter. Morse “has created a sensation” at the Louvre, he said in another. “He is painting an exhibition picture that I feel certain must take.” Beyond that, Morse was “just as good a fellow as there is going.”

The “good fellows” of life mattered greatly to Cooper. “Friends are rare in any land,” he had his frontiersman hero, Natty Bumppo, observe in
The Prairie
, and those he counted as friends knew his many kindnesses and genuine interest in their aspirations and concerns. He was a great organizer of clubs, a most faithful correspondent.

Cooper and Morse had met first at a reception at the White House seven years earlier, at the time of Lafayette’s visit, and found how much they had in common. Back in New York they saw more of each other. But as often happens to sojourners far from home in foreign lands, their time together, first in Italy, now in France, had led to a fast friendship.

Growing up in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Samuel Finley Breese Morse had been known in the family as Finley. To Cooper he was Samuel, or Master Samuel, or plain Morse, and there was no mistaking Cooper’s pride in him. “Crowds get round the picture, for Samuel has quite made a hit in the Louvre,” Cooper wrote to William Dunlap, a painter and art critic in New York who would, Cooper knew, spread the word among their “set” at home.

It was the month of March in the year of 1832—a year that would prove to be one of the most calamitous in the history of Paris—and well before such other Americans as Wendell Holmes, George Healy, and Charles Sumner arrived on the scene. The weather, as Nathaniel Willis noted, was “deliciously spring-like.”

At age forty-two, having spent half his life as an artist, Samuel Morse felt he had at last reached his stride, and that his time in Europe had already been of immeasurable value. During a year and more in Italy he had spent long days working in the Vatican galleries and other museums. He studied paintings, made copies on commission, including one of Raphael’s
School of Athens
, for which he was to receive $100. He did landscapes, filled notebooks with sketches of and comments on churches, street scenes, and processions. At the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, a sixteenth-century portrait by Veronese had awakened him as no painting ever had to a new understanding of color.