The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (3 page)

Such ardent love of learning was also accompanied by the possibility of practical advantages. Only a few years earlier, Sumner’s friend Henry Wadsworth Longfellow had returned from a sojourn in Europe with a sufficient proficiency in French, Spanish, Italian, and German to be offered, at age twenty-eight, a professorship of modern languages at Harvard, an opportunity that changed his life.

“The thought of going abroad makes my heart leap,” Sumner wrote. “I feel, when I commune with myself about it, as when dwelling on the countenance and voice of a lovely girl. I am in love with
Europa
.”

There were as well artists and writers headed for Paris who were no less ambitious to learn, to live and work in the company of others of like mind and aspiration, inspired by great teachers and in a vibrant atmosphere of culture far beyond anything available at home.

Even someone as accomplished as Samuel Morse deemed Paris essential. Morse had been painting since his college years at Yale and at the age of twenty-eight was commissioned to do a portrait of President James Monroe. In 1822 he had undertaken on his own to paint the House of Representatives in session, a subject never attempted before. When, in
1825, he was chosen to paint for the City of New York a full-length portrait of Lafayette during the general’s visit, his career reached a new plateau. He had followed Lafayette to Washington, where Lafayette agreed to several sittings. Morse was exultant. But then without warning his world had collapsed. Word came of the death of his wife, Lucretia, three weeks after giving birth to their third child. Shattered, inconsolable, he felt as he never had before that his time was running short and that for the sake of his work he must get to Paris.

He needed Paris, he insisted. “My education as a painter is incomplete without it.” He was weary of doing portraits and determined to move beyond that, to be a history painter in the tradition of such American masters as Benjamin West and John Trumbull. On his passport, lest there be any misunderstanding, he wrote in the space for occupation, “historical painter.”

For a much younger, still struggling, and little known artist like George P. A. Healy of Boston, Paris was even more the promised land. While Morse longed to move beyond portraits, young Healy had his heart set on that alone. He was the oldest of the five children of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother. Because his father, a sea captain, had difficulty making ends meet, he had been his mother’s “right hand man” through boyhood, helping every way he could. At some point, his father’s portrait had been done by no one less than Gilbert Stuart, and his grandmother, his mother’s mother, had painted “quite prettily” in watercolors. But not until he was sixteen had the boy picked up a brush. Once started, he had no wish to stop.

Small in stature, “terribly timid,” as he said, and an unusually hard worker for someone his age, he had a way about him that was different from others and appealing, and for someone with no training, his talent was clearly exceptional.

When the friendly proprietor of a Boston bookstore agreed to put one of his early efforts in the window—a copy Healy had made of a print of
Ecce Homo
by the seventeenth-century Italian master Guido Reni—a Catholic priest bought it for $10, a fortune to the boy. At age eighteen, he received his first serious encouragement from an accomplished artist, Thomas Sully, who upon seeing some of his canvases told him he should
make painting his profession. “Little Healy,” as he was called, rented a studio and began doing portraits. He would paint anyone willing to sit for him. Mainly he painted his own portrait, again and again.

Most important, the beautiful Sally Foster Otis, the wife of Senator Harrison Gray Otis and the acknowledged “queen of Boston society,” agreed to sit for her portrait after Healy, summoning all his courage, climbed the steps to her front door on Beacon Hill and stated his business.

“I told her that I was an artist, that my ambition was to paint a beautiful woman and that I begged her to sit for me.” She agreed, and the resulting work led to further opportunities to do others of “the right set” in Boston. One small, especially lovely portrait left little doubt of Healy’s ability and would be long treasured by one of Beacon Hill’s most prominent families and their descendants. It was of young Frances (“Fanny”) Appleton, who lived next door to Mrs. Otis.

But he knew how much he had still to learn to reach the level of skill to which he aspired, and made up his mind to go to Paris. As he would explain, “In those far-off days there were no art schools in America, no drawing classes, no collections of fine plaster casts and very few picture exhibitions.” After scraping together money enough to take him to Europe and to help support his mother for a year or two, he proceeded with his plan.

I knew no one in France, I was utterly ignorant of the language, I did not know what I should do when once there; but I was not yet one-and-twenty, and I had a great stock of courage, of inexperience—which is sometimes a great help—and a strong desire to be my very best.

Like Charles Sumner, Samuel Morse, Wendell Holmes, and others, Healy did not just wish to go to Paris, he was determined to go and “study hard.”

Among the writers was Nathaniel Parker Willis, like Morse a graduate of Yale, who with his poems and magazine “sketches” had already, at twenty-five, attained a national reputation. It was Willis who was traveling as a correspondent of sorts, having been assigned by the
NewYork Mirror
to provide a series of “letters” describing his travels abroad. He was
a sociable, conspicuously handsome, even beautiful young man with flowing light brown locks, and a bit of a dandy. Wendell Holmes would later describe him as looking like an “anticipation of Oscar Wilde.” Willis was, besides, immensely talented.

And so, too, was John Sanderson, a teacher in his fifties known at home in Philadelphia for his literary bent. He was going to Paris for reasons of health partly, but also to write about his observations in a series of letters, intending to “dress them up one day into some kind of shape for the public.”

Except for Cooper and Morse, those embarking for France knew little at all about life outside their own country, or how very different it would prove to be. Hardly any had ever laid eyes on a foreign shore. None of the Bostonians had traveled more than five hundred miles from home. Though Cooper and his family spent a year in advance of their departure learning French, scarcely any of the rest had studied the language, and those who had, like Holmes and Sumner, had never tried actually speaking it.

The newspapers they read, in Boston or New York or Philadelphia, carried occasional items on the latest Paris fashions or abbreviated reports on politics or crime in France, along with periodic notices of newly arrived shipments of French wine or wallpaper or fine embroidery or gentlemen’s gloves, but that was about the limit of their cognizance of things French. The Paris they pictured was largely a composite of the standard prints of famous bridges and palaces, and such views as to be found in old books or the penny magazines.

Many of them were familiar from childhood with the fables of La Fontaine. Or they had read Voltaire or Racine or Molière in English translations. But that was about the sum of any familiarity they had with French literature. And none, of course, could have known in advance that the 1830s and ’40s in Paris were to mark the beginning of the great era of Victor Hugo, Balzac, George Sand, and Baudelaire, not to say anything of Delacroix in painting or Chopin and Liszt in music.

It may be assumed they knew the part played by the French army and navy and French money during the American Revolution. They appreciated Lafayette’s importance and knew that with the deaths of Jefferson
and Adams in 1826, he became the last living hero of the struggle for American independence. They knew about Napoleon and the French Revolution of 1789 and the horrors of the Terror. And fresh in mind was the latest violent upheaval, the July Revolution of 1830, the Paris revolt that had lasted just three days and resulted, at a cost of some 3,000 lives, in the new “Citizen King,” Louis-Philippe.

Although born of the powerful Orléans family, the new ruler in his youth had supported the Revolution of 1789 and served bravely as an officer in the republican army before fleeing the Terror in 1793. For years he had been unable to return to France. Considered a moderate, Louis-Philippe was now king largely because of the support of the hugely popular Lafayette.

When news of the July Revolution reached America, it was cause for celebration. The tricolor was unfurled on the streets of American cities. The “Marseillaise” was sung in theaters. New Yorkers put on a parade two and a half miles long. Louis-Philippe, as Americans knew, had spent three years of his exile from France living in the United States and traveled far and wide over much of the country. Well-mannered, still in his twenties, and with little or no money, he had made a favorable impression everywhere he went. He had worked for a while as a waiter in a Boston oyster house. He had been a guest of George Washington’s at Mount Vernon, and this, and the fact that he now had the approval of Lafayette, contributed greatly to how Americans responded to the new regime in Paris.

Again except for Cooper and Morse, few of those bound for Paris in the 1830s had ever been to sea, or even on board a seagoing ship, and the thought, given the realities of sea travel, was daunting, however glorious the prospects before them.

The choice was either to sail first to England, then cross the Channel, or sail directly to Le Havre, which was the favored route. Either way meant a sea voyage of 3,000 miles—as far as from New York to the coast of the Pacific—or more, depending on the inevitable vagaries of the winds. And there were no stops in between.

Steamboats by this time were becoming a familiar presence on the rivers
and coastal waters of America, but not until 1838 did steam-powered ships cross the Atlantic. As it was, by sailing ship, the average time at sea was no better than it had been when Benjamin Franklin set off for France in 1776. One could hope to do it in as little as three weeks, perhaps less under ideal conditions, but a month to six weeks was more likely.

Nor were there regular passenger vessels as yet. One booked passage on a packet—a cargo ship that took passengers—and hoped for the best. But even the most expensive accommodations were far from luxurious. That there could be days, even weeks of violent seas with all the attendant pitching of decks, flying chinaware and furniture, seasickness and accidents, went without saying. Cramped quarters, little or no privacy, dismal food, a surplus of unrelieved monotony were all to be expected. Then, too, there was always the very real possibility of going to the bottom. Everyone knew the perils of the sea.

In 1822, the packet
Albion
out of New York, with 28 passengers on board, had been caught in a fearful gale and dashed on the rocks on the coast of Ireland. Of the passengers, several of whom had been bound for Paris, only two were saved. At the time when James Fenimore Cooper and his family sailed, in the spring of 1826, a London packet fittingly named
Crisis
had been missing nearly three months, and in fact would never be heard from again.

All who set sail for France were putting their lives in the hands of others, and to this could be added the prospect of being unimaginably far from friends, family, and home, entirely out of touch with familiar surroundings, virtually everything one knew and loved for months, possibly even years to come. In
The Sketch Book,
a work familiar to many of the outward-bound venturers, Washington Irving, describing his own first crossing of the Atlantic, made the point that in travel by land there was always a kind of “continuity of scene” that gave one a feeling of being connected still to home.

But a wide sea voyage severs us at once. It makes us conscious of being cast loose from the secure anchorage of settled life, and sent adrift upon a doubtful world. It interposes a gulf not merely imaginary, but real, between us and our homes—a
gulf subjected to tempest and fear and uncertainty, rendering distance palpable, and return precarious.

Sailings were regularly listed in the newspapers, and it was important to choose a good ship. Most were brigs: two-masted square-riggers carrying cargo of various kinds. The most desirable berths, those having the least motion, were near the middle of the ship. Fare to Le Havre was expensive, approximately $140.

The last days before departure were filled with arranging the clothes needed for a long absence, selecting a stock of books to fill time at sea, and packing it all in large black trunks. Acquaintances who had made the trip before advised bringing an ample supply of one’s own towels.

There were final calls to be made on friends, some of whom could be counted on to question the very thought of such a venture, whatever one’s reasons. Hours were devoted to farewell letters, parting sentiments, and words to the wise set down for children or younger siblings. “I am very glad, my dear, to remember your cheerful countenance,” wrote Charles Sumner to his ten-year-old sister from his room at the Astor House in New York the night before sailing. “I shall keep it in my mind as I travel over the sea and land. … Try never to cry. … If you find your temper mastering you, always stop till you can count
sixty
, before you say or do anything.”