The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (18 page)

We are bound as men and physicians to stay and see this disease [James continued]. As a physician you know it and feel it. As a father you dread it. For myself, I confess, I should be unwilling to return to America and not have at least made an effort to learn the nature and best treatment of this destroyer of life.

The common understanding was that miasmas—foul, noxious vapors from rotting garbage and human filth—were the carriers of the disease, just as malaria and yellow fever were supposedly spread. As sea air was beneficial to one’s health, the bad air of city slums could be deadly. Thus cholera was understood to be a disease of the poor, while those living in the cleaner, more airy parts of the city were believed to be safe from the scourge.

In fact, no one knew the cause of cholera or what to do about it. “The physicians,” Jackson conceded, “are in a state of the greatest incertitude, not knowing which way to turn.”

The actual cause, which would not become known for years, was a microorganism, the
Vibrio cholerae
, carried mainly by contaminated water, and in some cases by infected food. It invaded the body by mouth and rapidly attacked the intestines, killing about half its victims by dehydration in a matter of days or even hours.

The death toll in Paris mounted. Wild rumors spread that the government was secretly poisoning the poor, and angry crowds streamed over the bridges to the Île-de-la-Cité to besiege the Hôtel Dieu, swearing revenge.

How could it be, many were asking, that something as hideous as a medieval plague could attack so great a center of civilized life and advanced learning?

When, on April 12, James Cooper judged the worst of the epidemic had passed, he could not have been more mistaken. The calamity surged on. Moreover, the agony and loss were spreading to every part of Paris, even Cooper’s own supposedly safe Faubourg Saint-Germain. “We have had pestilence all around us, and we have had many deaths very near us,” wrote Susan Cooper in alarm.

I have seen two instances of it myself. One, the sister of our porter, who was taken with it while here on a visit, and the other, a poor woman who sold matches at the door of our hotel. Mr. Cooper had her brought into the courtyard and we took care of her, until she was carried to the hospital where I fear she died. …

While others fled the city in droves, the Coopers stayed, but only because they were too sick to move. He and Susan were both “in the doctor’s hands,” Cooper wrote, Susan confined to her bed with a severe “bilious attack,” he suffering from the most excruciating headaches he had ever known.

Yet how were they to know whether they were better off remaining in Paris, where they had become in some measure acclimated, than expose themselves to the inconvenience of travel and the risk of going where “the horrors” might break out on their arrival? “It is spreading rapidly all over France,” Susan wrote. “It has by no means spared the upper classes. …” Nearly all their countrymen had fled, she noted, except the heroic American medical students at the hospitals.

Morse, too, stayed. “Samuel was nervous even unto flight, nay so nervous he could not run,” wrote Cooper, who speculated that a thousand people were already in their graves. Some estimates were ten times that. No one could say for certain.

“The churches are all hung in black,” wrote Nathaniel Willis, reporting for his readers in New York. “There is a constant succession of funerals, and you cross the biers and hand-barrows of the sick, hurrying to the hospitals at every turn, in every quarter of the city.”

A young French woman, Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin, who had just
published her first novel under the pen-name George Sand, lived directly across the Seine from the morgue on the Île-de-la-Cité and could see from her window the wagonloads of dead bodies being delivered. She and her friends had made a pact to meet at the Luxembourg Gardens every day at a certain time to be sure they were all still alive.

Strangely, though, much of life in Paris went on as usual. People strolled the parks and boulevards and dined at the cafés, as though they had not a worry. Willis attended a masquerade ball at the Théâtre des Variétés, where two thousand people carried on with their revels through the night, until seven in the morning. It was all unbearably macabre.

There was a
cholera-waltz
, and a
cholera-galopade
, and one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of the cholera itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence.

Week after week the weather remained incongruously delightful. Picture the most perfect day in June, but without the full heat of an American summer, wrote James Jackson, trying to fathom how this could be.

I walk by the riverside and the waters are flowing mildly and calmly, undisturbed, while the glorious sun in its fullest splendor is glowing above and the sky is of the finest blue without a cloud and the air of the clearest and purest. All seems beauty.

Believing, like others, that the cholera was in decline, and exhausted from his efforts at the hospitals, Jackson decided after a month it was time he left for London. He had done all he could to help, he felt, and had seen more and learned more firsthand than he could ever have anticipated.

Meanwhile, at the Louvre, Samuel Morse toiled on. He was there each morning from the moment the great bronze doors opened. Friends knew always where to find him. There is no evidence that he missed a day, or that Cooper was not on hand to lend support. As would be said of Cooper’s novels, his hero, his “model man,” whether woodsman, sailor, or gentleman, was always “bent on bringing some especial thing to pass.” Here
now in the Louvre was his friend Morse, under pressures of a kind none could have foreseen, trying with all that was in him to bring some exceedingly special thing to pass.

Morse was terrified. In his youth he had taken the dying Hercules as a subject. Now, bending to this Herculean task, with death all about, he could only wonder if it was to mean his demise. Five weeks into the epidemic, on May 6, he wrote to his brothers, “My anxiety to finish my picture and return drives me, I fear, to too great application. …”

All the usual securities of life seem to be gone. Apprehension and anxiety make the stoutest hearts quail. Any one feels, when he lays himself down at night, that he will in all probability be attacked before daybreak.

He had to be finished by August 10, the day the Louvre closed for the summer. By September, he prayed, he would be homeward bound.

Most days he could be found maneuvering his scaffold from one part of the museum to another, to work on copies of the different paintings in his composition. Possibly, in painting his copies, he made use of a camera obscura, a large dark box in which the image of an object may be projected through a small convex lens onto a facing surface. It was a device artists had employed for a long time, and the sort of thing Morse found fascinating.

The thirty-eight pictures in his painting-of-paintings included works by twenty-two masters. Five—Veronese, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Rubens, and Guido Reni—were represented twice; two, Murillo and Van Dyck, three times. Titian appeared four times. The single work by Leonardo da Vinci was the
Mona Lisa
.

Each had to be so rendered as to catch the very character of the original. Each had to have the look of that particular painter. It was as if a single actor were required to play twenty-two different parts in a performance, and all so well that there could be no mistaking who was who.

That there be no question which paintings and painters he considered
most important, Morse clustered several immediately beside and above the open door to the Grand Gallery, the focal point of his composition. He positioned Titian’s portrait of Francis I, the king of France, at almost the exact center of the canvas, against the upper right-hand corner of the door, and painted it somewhat larger than it really was relative to the others. To Morse, Titian was a veritable god among painters, and Francis I was the French monarch who, in the sixteenth century, first began collecting paintings for the Louvre, including the
Mona Lisa
. Morse placed another Titian,
Supper at Emmaus
, directly over the door, and to the left he put Murillo’s
Holy Family
.

By far the largest painting in the arrangement was the largest painting in the Louvre, the monumental work depicting Christ’s first miracle,
The Marriage at Cana
, by the sixteenth-century Venetian Paolo Veronese. To have effectively created a foreshortened version of so complicated a painting was a tour de force in itself. Its position on the side wall at far left made it number one if the arrangement was “read” from left to right.

Significantly, a total of sixteen, or nearly half of the thirty-eight paintings chosen by the devout Morse, including the giant Veronese, were of religious subjects.

Some days, when copying a picture hung at the highest level—up at “the skyline,” as artists said—he could be seen perched ten or twelve feet above the floor. There was, also, a certain irony to the fact that in this biggest undertaking of his career he had to spend the greatest part of his time painting small, not large, working with small brushes on his miniature renditions on the canvas.

So concerned was he about finishing in time, he decided to concentrate his efforts on the copies—work that could only be done at the Louvre—and paint the frames for each later, back in New York.

The bond of friendship between Cooper and Morse held fast through the long ordeal of the cholera epidemic. If anything, it grew stronger. Acutely sensitive to the extreme stress under which Morse worked, Cooper continued to praise and encourage him, even implying he might purchase the painting once it was completed. Or at least that was Morse’s impression.
And as terrified for his own life as Morse may have been, he readily understood the weight of worry and responsibility for an entire family that Cooper had to bear.

But there was more. For some time Cooper had been subjected to criticism of a kind that cut deeply and that Morse thought unjust. The trouble had begun with the publication of a book of Cooper’s titled
Notions of the Americans
, one of those he had written while in Paris. It was a novel in the form of a series of letters supposedly written by an Englishman traveling in America at the time of Lafayette’s visit. Cooper had done it partly to please Lafayette, but mainly as a way to correct what he saw as egregious misconceptions about his country held by many in Britain and Europe. The book was not Cooper at his best. The writing was stiff, didactic, and so laudatory of his country and the “American Dream” that it raised outcries on both sides of the Atlantic at a time when real English authors were traveling the United States and offering a decidedly different view.

The most scathing and engaging of these had appeared that same calamitous spring of 1832 and became a huge success in England.
Domestic Manners of the Americans
was a rollicking satirical tour of the New World in which the author, Frances Trollope, had a grand time finding almost nothing to like about America and Americans. She made great sport of the way Americans ate, for example, describing the “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured.” She did not like Americans, she wrote in her concluding chapter. “I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions.” Her book, as well as the frequent anti-American snobbery to be found in publications like the
Edinburgh Review
, in addition to critical commentary of a like kind in print in his own country, riled Cooper as nothing ever had, and in defense he became still more boastful, even bombastic about being an American, and spoke more disparagingly of Europeans and their failings.