The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (36 page)

That summer of 1849 also marked the return to Paris of George Healy and his family from their time in the United States, and the start of preparations for the departure for home by Richard Rush and his daughters.

There had been a change in the administration in Washington and, to his regret, Rush was recalled. He felt he had done his job well, never abandoning his duties for a single day since he arrived. Alexis de Tocqueville sent a note that touched him deeply. “It is with great concern that I see you leaving the position you have occupied here and have filled with so much usefulness to the interests of your country and our own.” Rush and his daughters would sail in October.

Healy established himself in an enormous studio on the rue de
l’Arcade and set to work on the largest, most ambitious painting of his career, his
Webster’s Reply to Hayne
, which measured a colossal fifteen by twenty-seven feet. (Samuel Morse’s
Gallery of the Louvre
, at six by nine feet, was small by comparison.)

The scene was the United States Senate on January 26, 1830, the culminating moment of the historic debate over whether the states that had created the Constitution had the right to withdraw support from the policies of the federal government. An ardent “nationalist,” Webster championed the position that all of the states had created the Constitution and the federal government, and that no state or states could nullify that government. “Liberty
and
Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” was the ringing declaration of the speech so long remembered and quoted.

Healy positioned Webster in the foreground, standing foursquare in the classic orator’s manner—back arched, left hand on the corner of a desk—addressing the packed chamber. Webster wears a white cravat, a buff-colored vest, and a blue dress coat with brass buttons. A play of light on him, like a sunbeam, adds to his dramatic presence.

In addition to Webster, Healy rendered no fewer than 120 other identifiable faces, including those of Senators Joseph Y. Hayne, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, and General Lewis Cass. John Quincy Adams, who can be seen looking on from the visitors’ gallery, was not actually present for Webster’s great moment. Nor were several others whom Healy chose to make part of the scene, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Healy even included two of his favorite Frenchmen, Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Couture, seating them near Adams.

According to a pamphlet testifying to the authenticity of the painting, 111 likenesses were “carefully executed” from life. But it also appears Healy relied in part on daguerreotype portraits. Such details of the Senate chamber as the great carved eagle over the Senate president’s chair and the spindled storage space of the desks crammed with papers were presented quite as they were.

Healy labored at what he called “my big picture” for two years, and with no guarantee of compensation. Further, in 1850, he and his wife, Louisa, suffered the tragic loss of two children, when their youngest son,
George, Jr., succumbed to scarlet fever and the eldest, Arthur, at age ten, fell down some stone steps during play hour at school and died soon afterward.

Healy put the final touches to
Webster’s Reply to Hayne
in his Paris studio in the summer of 1851 and in a matter of weeks was on his way with the painting to Boston, where in September it was shown for the first time at the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Hill. People came by the hundreds to pay a 25-cent admission fee. One Saturday, escorted by Healy, Webster himself came, and as reported, “It was a proud moment that, for our young American artist. …”

“Receive my sincerest compliments on your great picture,” wrote Henry Longfellow. “You have done wonders with a subject of extreme difficulty, and I am rejoiced to see your labors crowned with such complete success.”

The painting later went on display in New York at the National Academy of Design, and as in Boston, the public response was enthusiastic, while mixed among the critics. Much the fullest praise was for Healy’s portrayal of Webster, the strongest part of the painting.

The countenance—an admirable likeness of the statesman— is kindled with the inspiration of eloquence [said the
New York Times
]. The person … is drawn up with a majestic self-reliance, expressive of strong inner consciousness of adequacy for the remarkable occasion which prompted the effort. The eyes are glowing with animation, the shaggy brows, rather raised, show the exultant, triumphant gaze of the orator. …

Does the painting have artistic greatness? asked the
New York Evening Post
. “We must answer decidedly that it does not.” A man making a speech, said the reviewer, was no fit subject for the realm of Art, whatever the painter’s skill.

As a commercial enterprise, at 25 cents a ticket, the painting proved a disappointment as it continued on tour. Before long it was back in Boston, on display at no charge in Faneuil Hall, one of the nation’s most historic sites. Eventually, following Webster’s death in 1852, it was purchased by
the city of Boston for $2,500, less than half what Healy had hoped to receive, to hang permanently in the Hall.

Healy would never regret the time he had devoted to the painting. “However onerous to an artist such undertakings usually are, and this one proved particularly so to me,” he said it had been an honor to paint so many of his illustrious countrymen and Webster most especially.

On September 14, 1851, James Fenimore Cooper died at his home in Cooperstown, one day from his sixty-second birthday. His death was the first of an American writer of international reputation.

Old friends who had seen him in New York not long before had thought he looked in fine health, “a very castle of a man,” as Washington Irving said, but in fact he had been suffering from diseases of the intestines and kidneys for some time.

Irving was one of those notables who spoke at a memorial tribute in New York, and a published
Memorial
included letters from Emerson, Longfellow, Charles Sumner, Samuel Morse, and Richard Rush. Morse chose to keep his remarks short, recalling simply the “eventful time” he and Cooper had spent in Paris together twenty years past. “I never met with a more sincere, warm-hearted, constant friend.”

They were words that would have touched Cooper more than any, unless it was the tribute from Richard Rush, who said—and perhaps with Morse in mind as well—that the nation’s enduring fame would rest above all on the great American names in literature and science.

At last I have come into a dreamland.

—
HARRIET BEECHER STOWE

Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, the improbable president of the Second Republic—or prince-president, as some preferred to call him—was not an easy man to fathom. His face in repose was nearly impossible to read: pale, grave in expression, and dominated by a large nose, an outsized mustache, its tips waxed, and a pointed goatee. The small pale blue eyes showed scarcely a sign of life. The eyelids drooped, causing him to look half asleep. George Sand likened him to a “sleepwalker.” Yet he had a surprisingly bright smile, and though of less than average height and a bit bowlegged, he sat a horse well and looked perfectly cast parading on horseback.

Some of the political elite of Paris took him for a “
crétin,
” certain he would be easy to manipulate. Victor Hugo, on the other hand, was favorably impressed. The British ambassador was “charmed.” Richard Rush found the president “courteously attentive,” and Rush’s replacement as American minister, William C. Rives of Virginia, would report being received in a manner “most cordial and flattering.”

As time passed, Louis Napoleon was seen more and more as a study in contrasts, a mixture of opposites, at once naïve and calculating, sincere
and full of schemes. “He was very much better than what his previous life and crazy enterprises led one to expect,” wrote Alexis de Tocqueville, who in a brief turn as foreign minister had the opportunity to observe the president at close hand.

As a private person he possessed some attractive qualities—a kindly disposition, humanity, gentleness and even tenderness, a perfect simplicity. … His power of concealing his thoughts, resulting from his conspiratorial past, was aided by the immobility of his countenance … for his eyes were as dull as opaque glass.

The president was, in addition, a notorious womanizer, a “
grand coureur de femmes
,” which was considered highly admirable by some, regrettable by others, and either way a common explanation for the half-asleep look. “His vulgar pleasures weakened his energies,” was all de Tocqueville had to contribute on the subject.

The one American who enjoyed anything like a friendship with the president was Dr. Thomas W. Evans, a sociable Philadelphian who had become the foremost dentist in Paris, due both to his professional skill— he was reputedly the first in Paris to specialize in gold fillings—and the fact that Louis Napoleon was his patient. To Evans, the president was a “charmer” whose “extraordinary self-control” and “seeming impassiveness” were greatly to his advantage. Rather than cold and calculating, Evans found him generous and affectionate. Those who spoke ill of him, according to Evans, were either his political enemies or people who did not know the man.

“My power is in an immortal name,” he himself was fond of saying, and indeed, except for the name, he would seem to have come out of nowhere and with almost nothing to qualify him for high position or to account for his popularity. Except in infancy, he had never lived in Paris. As a consequence of schooling in Switzerland and Germany, he spoke French with a slight German accent, and after years of exile in London, enjoyed a cup of tea quite as much as any Englishman.

Born in 1808, the son of the first Napoleon’s brother Louis Bonaparte,
he had lived abroad with his mother during most of his youth, and in 1830, having tried and failed at a ludicrously inept attempt to overthrow King Louis-Philippe, he had been exiled to the United States, where he stayed only briefly before settling in London. (Like Louis-Philippe, he spoke English with ease and, as Thomas Evans had discovered, preferred conversing in English when he did not care to have others nearby understand what was said.)

In 1840, still trusting to his star, he had launched a second clumsy attempt at insurrection, but this time was sentenced to life imprisonment northeast of Paris in the medieval Castle of Ham, replete with moat and drawbridge. There, provided with a young companion, a laundress who bore him two sons, he spent five and a half years reading history, political theory, and military treatises. To those surprised by the range of his knowledge, he liked to say, “Do you forget my years of study at the university of Ham?”

Then in 1846 he shaved off his mustache and beard, disguised himself in the clothes of a workman, put a plank over his shoulder, walked out of the prison, and escaped to London to pursue his “destiny” still again.

His popular strength, as shown by his overwhelming victory in the presidential election of 1848, was mainly in rural France. Yet even in Paris, what opposition there was remained relatively quiet. In the time since the election, he had become more popular still. His name, he liked to say, was a complete program in itself. “It stands for order, authority, religion, the welfare of the people, national dignity. …” And this, after so much unrest and appalling bloodshed, was what people longed for—order above all.

As a leader, Louis Napoleon also had a marked gift for grand-style theatrics and display of a kind long missing in the life of the nation. Presidential balls at the Élysée Palace were now large and exuberantly lavish, with guests announced by title even though titles had been done away with by the constitution. Paris dearly loved a show, as he understood. At public appearances, he was commonly greeted with cries of “
Vive l’empire! Vive l’empereur!
”