The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris

  Grant spoke no French, Gambetta no English, but they traded flattering comments sufficient to keep one of Healy’s daughters busy translating.

  The Grants’ stay in Paris lasted five weeks. In early December they were on their way once more, moving from one national capital to another for another year and a half.

  On Christmas Day in Paris the first snow of the winter fell.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE FARR AGUT

  His whole soul is in his art.

  —AUGUSTA HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS

  I

  Augusta Homer, an art student from Roxbury, Massachusetts, had been living in Rome, devoting her time principally to copying masterpieces in the Palazzo Barberini, when she met Augustus Saint-Gaudens and fell in love.

  Four years later in Paris, in the summer of 1877, the newlywed couple moved into a tiny first apartment on the boulevard Pereire and set up housekeeping. “We have bought a Persian rug for which we gave 110 francs, $22.00,” she wrote to her mother. “We think our little parlor looks prettily now. We had it papered last Saturday and now we must have the floors waxed. …”

  Her husband had his heart set on living in Paris. The “art current” was stronger there than anywhere, she explained to her mother, and his “whole soul” was in his art.

  Once settled, she began going with him to his new studio to paint or to help him with his work. Other days she went to the Louvre, as she had to the Palazzo Barberini, to do copies.

  Tall, slender, still in her twenties, she was known as “Gussie” and could be fairly described as attractive rather than pretty. She had large, clear blue eyes and, when smiling, her face turned radiant. Her mother and father had sent her abroad with one of her brothers, to Italy to pursue her ambitions in art. (A love of painting seemed to run in the family. Winslow Homer was her first cousin.) But she went, too, in the hope of improving her health. She suffered spells of fatigue and low spirits, and more seriously from increasing deafness, which also ran in the family. Her father, Thomas Homer, had written earlier of how “painful” it was to observe Gussie’s deafness steadily increasing and know of no way to help. Since meeting her “Mr. Saint-Gaudens,” she wrote, her hearing was no better, but her outlook and health had much improved.

  The more she knew him, the more she liked him, she had confided in the early stages of their romance. Those at home had no idea what a sculptor’s studio was like or how the work was done, or what a “perfect marvel” it was to see it done.

  And perhaps they should know what he looked like:

  Medium sized, neither short nor tall, blue eyes, straight nose. … Neither handsome nor homely and when you first meet him does not impress you as particularly talented. But the more you know him the better you like him and a more upright man I never met.

  “Mr. St.-G. is very much in love with me,” she announced to her mother in a letter from Rome dated February 8, 1874, and marked “PRIVATE.”

  “Now I must tell you who he is,” she said, and proceeded to explain that his father was a French shoemaker in New York and poor, but that there was nothing “Frenchy” about her “Mr. St.-G.” except his name and the fact that he spoke French extremely well. She stressed how much he had accomplished in his career through his own determination, and told how he had gone to work cutting cameos at age thirteen and succeeded later in being accepted at the École des Beaux-Arts. She described his years in Rome, where again he had supported himself cutting cameos, and the statue he had done of Hiawatha, and the praise it was receiving.

  Some of the most influential men in New York had taken an interest in his career, she wrote, and there seemed little doubt he would be successful ultimately. She thought he was twenty-six, or perhaps twenty-seven.

  His education in everything regarding art is complete, but he occasionally makes mistakes in speaking. But he is every inch a gentleman and there is an innate refinement about him. His treatment of me has been just what a noble man ought to do and I have told him I think a great deal of him. He does not ask or wish me to make any promises for the future as it must be at least two years before he can think of it and of course I would do nothing without your and father’s sanction.

  “I am not dead in love as they say, but perhaps would be if I thought I ought,” she added in conclusion.

  “I am very sure that the only possible objection to him is that his father is French and his mother Irish,” she wrote in another “PRIVATE” letter. “But, mother, he is neither: an American to the backbone.”

  To her New England Protestant parents, a French father and an Irish mother could only mean that the young man was a Roman Catholic. But Gussie said nothing on the subject, nor, to ease their worries, did she mention that Gus was a lapsed Catholic. That he was both a gentleman and an American, she felt, was more than sufficient qualification.

  Whatever letters he may have written to her during this period have not survived. Probably they were destroyed with much else in a studio fire long afterward. Years later, however, in an uncharacteristic burst of candor about his private life, he would mention in his Reminiscences having had love affairs with five women before meeting Gussie, and that the fifth was a very “beautiful” model named Angelina with whom he had wanted to elope to Paris, but that she had been “wise enough to refuse.”

  He hated writing letters, but in several addressed to Gussie’s parents, he made clear his honorable intentions and the seriousness of his feelings for their daughter. In a straightforward summary of his life thus far in which he expressed his reasons for feeling optimistic about his work, he concluded, saying, “What I have is a splendid future and a fine start.”

  If successful, and with your consent, I shall claim Miss Homer’s hand immediately. If not I shall then have to delay until … I am guaranteed our future welfare. … I ask your consent to my attentions to your daughter, nevertheless leaving her completely free and binding her to nothing.

  He cut her a cameo engagement ring and bought himself a new high silk hat, his first ever, and “so great was his enthusiasm,” he put it on and “promptly walked across the Piazza di Spagna in the rain, and without an umbrella,” to visit her.

  “You’ll have to get used to a Gus and Gussie in the family,” she told her mother. “How does it sound to you? …” But permission for Gussie to marry him, her parents made plain, was not to be granted until he had a commission for a major work, something he had not as yet achieved.

  They were naturally concerned about her happiness, but also about her future financial security. Once prosperous, they were living at a much-reduced standard, due to “reverses” in Thomas Homer’s mercantile business. They stood ready to help, of course, but the amount would have to be limited, all of which Gussie understood perfectly.

  In 1875, Saint-Gaudens left Rome and returned to New York, crossing again, as he had the first time, in steerage. By telegraph en route he learned that his mother had died. It was his first great sorrow, one of the most painful moments of his life, a trial, he said, “like a great fire.”

  He rented a shabby studio in the German Savings Bank Building at 14th Street and Fourth Avenue, where he also slept, his father’s house being too overcrowded as it was.

  Hearing from Gussie that there was a competition for a statue of Charles Sumner to be placed in the Boston Public Garden, he decided to try for it. But his entry was rejected. (The sculptor chosen was Thomas Ball, who had done the great equestrian statue of George Washington that stood at the entrance to the garden.)

  Soon after, Saint-Gaudens learned of plans to create a memorial in New York to Admiral David Glasgow Farragut—“Damn the Torpedoes” Farragut, the Civil War hero of the battle of Mobile Bay, which had resulted in the surrender of New Orleans. A committee had been formed to pick a sculptor. A sum of $9,000 was said to be available from the City of New York. Saint-Gaudens applied at once and contacted everyone he knew who might put in a word for him.

  To do a man like Farragut justice in bronze would be no easy u
ndertaking. The admiral had had as long and distinguished a career as any officer since the founding of the U.S. Navy. The son of a naval officer, he had gone to sea with the navy at age ten, even briefly commanded a captured ship at the age of twelve. Serving on ships of the line, he had seen much of the world before he was twenty.

  He was resourceful and intelligent—without benefit of formal schooling, he learned to speak French, Italian, Spanish, and Arabic—and above all, courageous. By the outbreak of the Civil War he had served in the navy nearly fifty years. When assigned to capture New Orleans, he commanded the largest fleet to have sailed under the American flag, and at the war’s end he became the first man ever to hold the rank of full admiral in the U.S. Navy.

  “I have made two models, a large drawing and a bust,” Saint-Gaudens wrote to Gussie’s mother. “As far as I can see I am in a fair way to have the commission.”

  His career and his marriage were riding on it. And he got it.

  Of the $9,000, he was to receive $2,000 on signing the agreement, $3,000 on completion of the statue in clay, $2,000 when the statue was cast in bronze, and a final check for $2,000 on delivery of the finished work to New York.

  In an account book later he would record, “On hand June 1, 1877 when I was married, [$]2,821.00.”

  He and Gussie were married at her family home on Winthrop Street in Roxbury. Two days later they were at sea on the steamer Abyssinia—and no steerage this time—on their way to a honeymoon in Paris and the start of work on “the Farragut.”

  Paris was essential to the work, Gus felt, not only because the “art current” ran stronger there, but because sculpture as an art form was taken more seriously than at home, and experienced craftsmen—plaster molders, foundrymen, and the like—were plentiful. The project at hand was greater and more challenging by far than anything he had ever undertaken, and he would need the best help he could get.

  II

  As an American bride in Paris, she was something of a rarity, even with the great numbers of young Americans in the city, and she was doing her best to adapt to her new role. He knew French; she did not. He knew Paris; she did not, and at this point she knew almost no one else in the city.

  Her health improved. Gus said it was the wine. She thought freedom from worry was the reason. He worked most of the time in his studio near the Arc de Triomphe. She tried to keep busy. She painted at the Louvre, went shopping for gloves at Le Bon Marché. On a night when they attended the opera, she marveled at the grand stairway and tried to imagine the glittering Paris social life she had heard so much about. “I wish someone would invite us to a big party or reception,” she wrote to her mother. “I should like to wear my wedding dress. …”

  Only think there are twenty-four families in this house who use the same entrance we do and twelve who use the same staircase [she wrote in another letter], and although we have been here more than three months we do not know by sight anyone but the family whose door is directly opposite ours. Doesn’t it seem kind of strange?

  “Aug keeps wracking his brain all the time to think of something good and original,” she reported.

  He also took time to report to her parents on her health, to kid about the weight she had put on, and to express his gratitude for their financial help. “While Gussie is wrestling with the preparations for dinner, I’ll try and wrestle with a letter,” he began one evening in the fall of 1877. “She eats more, sleeps more, walks more, talks as much … [as] I have seen her in three years.”

  You write splendid letters to her and the best part … is when you tell her, “Don’t work too hard.” She is inclined that way. … She manages to be occupied all the time and I wish we could fix it so she might be able to paint more. She can give you some lessons in cooking, if you wish any. First rate soups, first rate mackerel, first rate everything in fact … she takes care of the inner man splendidly. …

  I am much obliged to you, Mr. Homer—“much obliged” expresses very mildly how much I thank you for all you are doing and have done in regard to my finances. …

  The following spring, they moved to a larger, more beautiful, partially furnished apartment in a choice location, No. 3 rue Herschel on the Left Bank, just off the boulevard Saint-Michel and less than a block from the Luxembourg Gardens. It was all they could wish for: on the fourth floor with a fair-sized parlor and tall French windows, two bedrooms, a dining room, kitchen, a servant’s room upstairs, and a balcony off the parlor with nothing blocking the view of the gardens and the towers of the Church of Saint-Sulpice. In her letter to her parents reporting the news, she drew a plan on a separate sheet of paper. She and Gus could hardly believe their good fortune.

  They found additional furniture at bargain prices—two brass-studded Louis XVI chairs, a handsome carved chest said to be three hundred years old—and bought “a beautiful Japanese matting” to cover one wall in the parlor from floor to ceiling.

  Gussie set up her easel and painted two interior studies of the apartment and took time to write long descriptive letters to her family, her love of Paris and her happiness overflowing.

  You have no idea how beautiful the view is from my windows this morning [July 25, 1878]. The air is clear and everything is very lovely. I watch my plants on the balcony just as father does his pear trees. My geranium has two buds. The calla is putting out a new leaf. …

  Oddly, when invitations came for evening events hosted by other Americans, “Aug,” as she called him, would go while she remained at home like “Cinderella.” Late hours left her feeling “not very bright” the next day, she explained. But it may also have been that she was self-conscious about her hearing and the fact that she spoke so little French.

  Gussie’s younger sister, Eugenie (“Genie”) Homer, arrived in the autumn for a stay in Paris. Then Gus’s younger brother Louis became one of the household.

  Gus was devoted to Louis and had done all he could for him since boyhood in New York when he had been Louis’s protector from bullies. He had long encouraged Louis in his own ambitions to become a sculptor, first by teaching him how to cut cameos. Later, Louis had joined Gus in Rome, where he proved himself both a hard worker and talented. But in June 1876, Louis had disappeared. For two years no one knew his whereabouts, until suddenly in 1878 Gus heard he was in London and in desperate straits. Gus made a quick trip from Paris to rescue him.

  Louis said only that he had been married to an American girl and that she had died in childbirth. He was also in financial trouble and appeared to have a drinking problem.

  Gussie agreed to take him in—as her sister Genie wrote, Louis “tucked himself” into the servant’s room upstairs. Gus put Louis to work in the studio, glad to have his help and his company on the job. Everyone was happy with the arrangement, it seems, including Gussie, who wrote of Louis, “He is certainly the easiest person to have in the house and it’s very pleasant all around.”

  One of the few surviving letters by Bernard Saint-Gaudens, the father, reached Paris later that fall. It was addressed to his “Dear Children.” “Let Louis judge now of my anxiety during all of the time he left us without sending us news,” he began.

  However, I forgive you so long as you continue in the way you say you have marked for yourself in the future. For I say to you my dear son you will never find any peace for your soul and mind excepting in work. That is the only true source of our welfare. Through work the soul aspires to God who bestows upon it a power of will and wisdom which nothing can overthrow. …

  Working as never before and needing more space, Gus had leased a huge barnlike studio on the Left Bank at 49 rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs, at the center of a growing community of American artists. By cutting through the Luxembourg Gardens, he found, he could get from the apartment to the studio in twenty minutes or less.

  A painter, unless working on a huge mural, rarely needed the help of others and comparatively little in the way of equipment and material beyond paint, brushes, palette, and canvases. But a sculptor, and especially one
undertaking a monumental project, needed great space for others on the job and all manner of clay, sacks of plaster, ladders, scaffolding, and tools. A sculptor’s studio was a workshop.

  The new studio had once been a public dance hall, and with fourteen windows overhead, each ten feet square, there was plenty of light. But Gus decided everything had to be whitewashed—ceiling, walls, woodwork— to make the light better still. With room to spare, he told some of his favorite painter friends to set their easels “high up” on the balcony formerly used for the orchestra. One of them, Maitland Armstrong, remembered being amused “by the alternate waves of exaltation and despair that swept over Saint-Gaudens as he worked,” and how, when somebody would break out in a song, the rest would join in and Gus especially.

  For additional help on the Farragut, besides brother Louis, he hired Will Low, who also became a consistent guest at dinner. As Gussie explained to Genie, “He hasn’t a cent.”

  She kept the accounts, paid for everything, kept close records of what Gus gave Louis or loaned to some of the old friends who came around, like Alfred Garnier.

  “Gus lent Garnier $5.00,” reads one entry. “Gus gave Louis [$]5.00. Odds and ends for studio [$]2.00.”

  She also paid the monthly rents—$350 for the apartment, $465 for the studio—and recorded when Garnier and others paid back what they owed.