The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (35 page)

Richard began his studies at the École and William started painting under Couture in 1846, and for brief periods, Richard, too, enrolled in Couture’s atelier to study painting and drawing. William was also among the first Americans attracted to the work of those French artists—and particularly the influential painter of peasants, Jean-François Millet—who had settled in the picturesque hamlet of Barbizon thirty miles southeast of Paris.

From the training and inspiration each of the brothers was to experience in the next several years in France would come great strides for each in his work. “Mr. William Hunt is our most promising artist here,” reported Thomas Appleton to his father.

In the spring of 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell, “with a very slender purse and few introductions of any value,” found herself in the “unknown world” of
Paris. What made her situation different from that of other American visitors was her profession. She was a doctor—the first American woman to have become a doctor. Like her male counterparts from the United States, she had come to Paris to further her training in medicine and surgery. (Given that medicine was still understood to be an art, she, too, belonged in the third of Margaret Fuller’s categories.)

English by birth, she had moved to America as a child, settling eventually with her family in Cincinnati. As a young woman, she taught school, before declaring her ambition to become a doctor, and preferably a surgeon, at a time when any woman who entertained such ideas was commonly considered “either mad or bad.” A physician writing in the
Boston Medical and Surgical Journal
categorically declared that women were “not constituted” for the profession, they being of such “
nervous
or
excitable
” temperament. “Let woman not assume the prerogatives of
man
by entering the arena and noisy business of life, for which she has not the faculties in common with
man
.”

The idea of winning a doctor’s degree, Elizabeth would write, gradually assumed “the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.” When she mentioned what was on her mind to a well-known Cincinnati doctor, he was horrified by the very thought. However, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was then living in Cincinnati and a neighbor, told her the idea, though impractical, if carried out might prove highly useful.

Refused by medical schools in Philadelphia and New York, Elizabeth finally gained admission to the Geneva Medical School in upstate New York. In 1849, after little more than a year of study, she was granted a medical degree.

Yet she felt still the need to know more, and as she later wrote, her teachers and friends urged her to go to Paris. She was twenty-eight, a tiny woman only five feet one, according to her passport application, with a round face, light grey eyes, and sandy hair.

One after another the Paris physicians she saw showed no interest in her or any inclination to help, until she met Pierre Louis, who advised her to enter La Maternité, the world’s leading maternity hospital.

On the last day of June, Elizabeth Blackwell stepped through a small
door in a high grey wall on the rue Saint-Jacques, into the cloistered life of La Maternité, where young women trained to become midwives under the famous “
sage-femme
-in-chief,” Madame Madeleine-Edmée-Clémentine Charrier. “So send a welcome greeting to the Voluntary Prisoner,” Elizabeth wrote the next day to her family.

Imagine a large square of old buildings, formerly a convent, set down in the center of a great court with a wood and garden behind, and many little separate buildings all around, the whole enclosed by very high walls, over the tops of which, shining out beautifully against the clear sky, may be seen the dome of the Panthéon [or] the Hôtel des Invalides. … The inner court is surrounded by
les cloîtres
, a most convenient arched passage which gives covered communication to the whole building, and which I suppose was formerly traversed by shaven monks on their way to the church. …

She lived in a long dormitory, or
dortoir
, with twenty girls, all French, most of whom were ten years younger than she, and “all pretty and pleasant, of no education except their studies in the institution.” Each was provided a narrow bed with an iron bedstead, one chair, and a small lamp. The brick floors were so highly polished she had difficulty walking on them. She should be pictured trying to get about in a great white apron, she wrote to her mother. “And how French girls do chatter!”

From the time the morning began at five-thirty, their whole day was occupied with lectures and work in the wards and clinics. There was scarcely a pause. No distractions were permitted, no newspapers, no books unless medical works. A bell at noon announced the first meal of the day, which consisted of a loaf of bread, a small bottle of wine, soup, boiled meat and vegetables, all “eaten in haste.”

Madame Charrier, by Elizabeth’s description, was “a little deformed woman, elderly, but with a fresh color still and kind blue eyes,” and generally loved by her students. In consideration of Elizabeth’s foreignness, Madame insisted she sit beside her during lectures, so she would thoroughly understand.

Several days out of the week were “
en service,
” when each student spent the day (or night) serving in the wards. Every morning three students went before Madame Charrier for a one-hour oral examination of what they had learned, and in her volatile Gallic responses to the answers, Madame Charrier seemed to mimic the extremes of mood of Paris itself. “If they answer promptly and well … her face grows beautiful, and her ‘
Bien! très bien!
’ really does me good, it is so hearty,” Elizabeth wrote. But if the student hesitated, or answered in too low a voice, or seemed not to know what she should, then followed a terrific scolding.

Alternately satirical and furious, she becomes perfectly on fire, rises upon her chair, claps her hands, looks up to heaven, and the next moment if a good answer has redeemed the fault, all is forgotten, her satisfaction is as great as her anger. … At first I was a little shocked at this stormy instruction, but really it seems almost necessary now, and produces wonderful results.

It was a routine and life, a world within the medical world of Paris, entirely separate from and very unlike that of the male “medicals,” but as one of the French physicians stressed to Elizabeth, it offered the opportunity of “seeing all that was remarkable” in the deliveries of more babies in a shorter space of time—four months—than anywhere else in the world, indeed, as many as in the entire practice of some doctors.

With her time at La Maternité nearing its end, Elizabeth contracted a serious eye infection that confined her to bed for weeks and ultimately cost her her sight in one eye, thus ending whatever aspirations she may still have had for a career in surgery.

“How kind everybody was!” she wrote of the care she received.

The training at La Maternité had been a trying time, she conceded, with no privacy, poor air, poor food, hard work, and little sleep. “Yet the medical experience was invaluable at that period of pioneer effort. It enabled me later to enter upon practice with a confidence in one important branch of medicine that no other period of study afforded.”

Within a few years, she would found the New York Infirmary and College for Women, a hospital run entirely by women.

The same summer of 1849, while Elizabeth Blackwell was confined to her study of obstetrics, yet another American pioneer was making his presence felt in a different way and in the altogether different setting of an international peace conference presided over by Victor Hugo at the Salle Sainte-Cécile on the rue Saint-Lazare. William Wells Brown, one of the eight hundred delegates, was a lecturer and writer, an ardent abolitionist, and a fugitive slave.

Born in Kentucky, he had told his story in
Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave
, a book published in 1847. His mother was a slave, his father a slave master. At age ten he had heard the cries of his mother as she was being flogged by an overseer. Several times he tried to escape to freedom before succeeding at last, at age eighteen, by getting away to Ohio, where he found shelter with a Quaker named Wells Brown, whose name he took for his own. In the years since, he had worked on steamships on Lake Erie, acquired an education, and made a name for himself as a speaker for abolitionist societies in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. He was handsome and articulate, and audiences invariably found his story extremely compelling.

When Brown first applied for a passport earlier that summer, in a letter to Secretary of State John M. Clayton, saying “I am a native of the state of Kentucky and I am a colored man,” he never received a direct answer but was later informed that passports were not granted to “persons of color.” Only through the government of Massachusetts was he able to obtain a certificate permitting him to get as far as England. Once there, he succeeded in arranging for a passport through the American embassy in London.

Nor had he been given financial help by any antislavery society or by friends to cover the cost of his trip. He went, as he said, entirely at his own expense.

On the final day of the Paris conference, August 24, at the request of Victor Hugo, Brown spoke for peace and against slavery in a speech quoted at length in the Paris papers. With the abolition of war, he proclaimed, “we shall break … in pieces every yoke of bondage and let all
the oppressed go free,” to which the audience broke into sustained cheers. He had been a slave for nearly twenty years. He knew whereof he spoke. Here in Paris he could utter his sentiments “freely.” To do so in the United States, he reminded them, would be to risk his life.

He was tremendously pleased by the response of the audience, and even more by the welcome he received later at a lavish reception given by the French foreign minister, Alexis de Tocqueville. At home he could have been present at such a reception only as a servant. Curious to know more about him, Madame de Tocqueville asked him to sit beside her on the sofa. The only disapproving look he saw among the many watching was from the American consul, Robert Walsh.

Before his stay in Paris ended, Brown covered much of the city on foot, setting off from the Hôtel Bedford at first light before the sessions of the conference began. He saw most of the major sights on both sides of the Seine, and though unable to speak French, he enjoyed it all. Never once, under any circumstance, was he made to feel anything but welcome.

William Wells Brown was to become a prolific author, historian, and the first black American novelist and playwright, with his novel titled
Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter
(1853) and a play,
The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom
(1863). Having come to Paris while in his early thirties, he would continue writing for another thirty years.