The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (81 page)

Some people were disappointed; others disapproved. “It is too big, and there are too many things to do,” some visitors said. Among a certain
number of intellectuals the whole affair was dismissed as an “odious bazaar,” no more than a vulgar display of nationalism. And inevitably some who had traveled a long way to be there felt let down. Two representatives of the American Midwest were overheard expressing their views as follows:

FIRST CHICAGOAN
: “It don’t compare with the World’s Fair of Chicago.”

SECOND CHICAGOAN
: “Of course not. I knew that before I left Chicago.”

Henry Adams’s great objection was the number of Americans everywhere. “All Americans are in Paris,” he wrote. “I pass my time hiding from them.”

More than forty countries participated, again a record. American products and inventions drew much attention, and grand prizes and gold medals went to American machinery, farm equipment, cameras, even a California wine—a higher total in awards than any other country except France.

Adams, who could not stay away, toured the Galerie des Machines one day with a friend from Washington whom he greatly admired, Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution. For more than ten years Langley had been experimenting with flights of his own heavier-than-air machines, a field much ridiculed at the time, and using lightweight steam engines he had had great success. His experimental “air-ships” looked like gigantic, four-winged dragonflies. In 1896, one flew under its own power 3,000 feet over the Potomac River, another more than 4,000 feet—the first free flights of heavier-than-air machines in history.

Langley was to be yet another part of Adams’s “education” in France. Ignoring most of the industrial exhibits, he led Adams straight to see the “forces” of power. “His chief interest was the new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor and of the automobile,” which to Adams had become a “a nightmare.”

From the internal combustion engine they moved on to the great hall, where Adams “began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the cross.”

The exhibition of American art (which Adams and Langley took no time for) brought many of those young Americans who had been studying in Paris their first international recognition. Paintings by Cecilia Beaux, Robert Henri, Henry O. Tanner, and others of their generation were to be seen alongside those of such established American masters as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and James Whistler. Mary Cassatt had entered one of her mother-and-child paintings. John Singer Sargent had several of his recent portraits.

One American whose work was not to be seen this time was George P. A. Healy, who had died in Chicago in 1894. Healy had shown his work at every Paris exposition since 1855, when he had fourteen of his paintings hanging.

Among the French and other European artists on display, along with Carolus-Duran and Edgar Degas, was a nineteen-year-old Spaniard, Pablo Picasso.

The paintings and sculpture were all to be seen in the exposition’s Grand Palais, built especially for the fair, an enormous wedding cake of a building entirely in the spirit of the Belle Époque, which stood between the new Pont Alexandre III and the Champs-Élysées. And for all who entered, the first spectacle—indeed, one of the most memorable spectacles of the fair—was a vast ground-floor space flooded with light from a giant glass-and-iron dome overhead and crowded from end to end with sculptures of all shapes and sizes.

For Saint-Gaudens it was the setting for a public display of his work such as he had never experienced. Though it annoyed him that so many pieces had been placed together “pell-mell,” he knew such a collection had never been seen all in one place, nor was such an exhibit likely to occur again. And while patience was required getting about the maze of “arms, legs, faces and torsos in every conceivable posture,” there were many “very remarkable” works to be seen.

Four of his own major works were on display—plaster casts of General Sherman and Victory, the Shaw Memorial,
The Puritan,
and
Amor
Caritas
—and Sherman and his horse rode highest among them. In addition, fourteen reproductions of his relief portraits were on exhibit, including those of William Dean Howells and Robert Louis Stevenson.

For his work overall Saint-Gaudens received the Grand Prize and the
Amor Caritas
would be purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum.

But it was an incident witnessed by only a few apparently that had to have meant worlds to him. Auguste Rodin was seen to stop before the Shaw Memorial and take off his hat and stand silently bareheaded in respect.

Saint-Gaudens had mixed feelings about Rodin. He liked much of his early work, but Homer Saint-Gaudens would remember standing with his father in front of Rodin’s famous
Balzac
and hearing his father say the statue gave him “too much the effect of a guttering candle.”

Still, Rodin was France’s greatest living sculptor, and here he was paying public tribute to an American. For Saint-Gaudens it was one of life’s choice moments.

Just as Saint-Gaudens was riding so high, everything turned black as night. Gussie had left for the United States to make arrangements for their return home. In late June of 1900, struck by severe stomach pains, Gus went to three leading Paris physicians, all of whom told him he had a tumor of the lower intestine and that an operation must be performed without delay.

Almost at once he was overcome by a terrifying suicidal depression. If the end were near, let it be at his own time and choosing. Life was no longer bearable.

Of those still with him in Paris, none was closer on a day-to-day basis, or more devoted to him or aware of his changing moods than James Fraser, who knew nothing of Saint-Gaudens’s cancer but worried increasingly about his worsening state of mind.

Years later Fraser put down on paper, as best he could remember, what happened and what Saint-Gaudens had said.

Fraser had come to work at 3 rue de Bagneux early one morning that
June and was in the large studio alone when suddenly Saint-Gaudens burst through the door and went straight into his own studio. Then Fraser heard the outer door of Saint-Gaudens’s studio open and slam shut, after which all was silent.

An hour or so later, Saint-Gaudens returned and asked Fraser to come into his office. He had something he must tell him.

“I went in,” Fraser wrote, “and I noticed that his look was unusual and very excited. …”

“I have just had the most extraordinary experience [Saint-Gaudens began] … it now appears that I am seriously ill and must go home for an operation. I am greatly worried and have been sleepless for many nights.

“Suddenly, this morning, I decided that I would end it all, and when I came here this morning I had definitely made up my mind to jump in the Seine. As I left here I practically ran down the rue de Rennes toward the Seine, and when I looked up at the buildings they all seemed to have written across the top a huge word in black letters—‘Death—Death—Death.’ This on all the buildings …

“I ran—I was in so much of a hurry! I reached the river and went up on the bridge and as I looked over the water, I saw the Louvre in the bright sunlight and suddenly everything was beautiful to me, the Louvre was wonderful—more remarkable than I had ever seen it before.

“Whether the running and the hurrying had changed my mental attitude, I can’t say—possibly it might have been the beauty of the Louvre’s architecture or the sparkling water of the Seine—whatever it was, suddenly the weight and blackness lifted from my mind and I was happy and found myself whistling.”

“And he still seemed excited and happy and I felt he had passed a dreadful crisis and was safe for the time,” Fraser wrote. Saint-Gaudens
had said it was Paris—the morning light of Paris, the sparkle of the Seine from the Pont des Arts, the architecture of Paris—that had saved him.

Saint-Gaudens left in mid-July 1900, but not before stopping at 3 rue de Bagneux to give a few final instructions on Sherman and Victory, which he insisted be cast in bronze in Paris.

At the very time many thousands of Americans were arriving by ship for the exposition, Saint-Gaudens sailed for home so ill he had to be accompanied by a physician. Gussie met the ship at New York, and they went directly to Boston, where he was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital for the first of two operations. The second followed that November.

Afterward, having settled to stay at their home in Cornish, New Hampshire, Gussie did everything possible to see to his care and well-being. He established another studio and kept on working, though at an easier pace.

The arrival of the new year, 1901, marked the start of the twentieth century, and by spring—with both the exposition and winter behind—Paris was Paris once again, all its particular magic in abundant evidence.

As reported in the press, the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne were “in the most charming phase of delicate spring foliage.” With skies clear above, the temperature ideal, the white blossoms of the horse chestnut trees at their peak, “the whole world” was out strolling the avenues and public gardens, or just sitting in the outdoor cafés contentedly “indulging in that refined kind of loafing at which the nation excels.”

And daylight stayed longer, making evening promenades all the more pleasurable.

At the Opera, Gounod’s
Faust
and Wagner’s
Tannhäuser
were being warmly received. At the École des Beaux-Arts, a first-ever retrospective show of the drawings and paintings of Honoré Daumier had become one
of the most successful attractions of the season, and was “daily thronged” by American art students only just discovering Daumier.

Notice appeared also of a young American “making her mark” with a performance of Greek and Florentine dances at a studio on the avenue de Villiers. Isadora Duncan was twenty-three. She had arrived in Europe with her mother, brother, and sister the year before. So great was their excitement at being in Paris that she and her brother, an artist, would get up at five in the morning and begin the day by dancing in the Luxembourg Gardens.

“We had no money … but we wanted nothing,” she would remember.

What the new century might hold for them and their generation, there was no telling. For now it was enough just being in Paris.

The Sherman Monument was not unveiled in New York until 1903, Augustus Saint-Gaudens having decided after his recovery from surgery that both Sherman and Victory needed further attention. Thus, with the help of his brother Louis, James Fraser, and ten or so additional assistants, “final touches” continued at Cornish, New Hampshire.