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.
EPILOGUE
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.
The home he and Gussie had established, called Aspet after his father’s birthplace in France, was set on an open hillside above the Connecticut River, with an uninterrupted view of Mount Ascutney to the west, across the river in Vermont. It was as beautiful a setting as any in New England, with Hanover and Dartmouth College just up the river.
Gus put Fraser in charge of building a barn-size studio, and he and Gussie continued efforts begun earlier to turn what had been an old inn into a comfortable home. Inevitably, Gus made a number of architectural changes to the exterior. Inside, the parlor was furnished with the same chairs, lamps, and wall hangings they had bought in Paris when first married. On the parlor walls were hung two of Gussie’s interior paintings of the apartment at 3 rue Herschel.
To his surprise, Gus discovered he loved living in the country, and greatly enjoyed time spent out-of-doors, even in winter.
Still, as ever, work came first.
Work on the Sherman involved mostly details such as the reins on the horse’s bridle. The plaster cast that had been in New York was shipped to New Hampshire. Then casts of the changes were dispatched to Paris, where the finished bronze was still in progress. Mainly it was a process of switching parts, but all this took another year.
When the finished bronze arrived from France, it was set up on the lawn outside the studio and the gilding applied there by hand.
On the morning of the unveiling in New York—Memorial Day, May 30, 1903—Gus and Gussie chose to be seated where there seemed the least chance of being noticed.
Thousands of people had gathered on the Grand Army Plaza at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street. There were flags and banners flying, a marching band, dignitaries, speeches, and well above the crowd, on an eleven-foot pedestal designed by Charles McKim, rode the gleaming, golden Sherman on his horse heading southward, his cloak flying and with the golden Victory, her palm branch held high, leading the way.
“The sculptor took no part in the exercise,” wrote the New York Times, “but was the recipient of many congratulations when he had been discovered with Mrs. Saint-Gaudens in an inconspicuous place.…”
In 1904, a fire destroyed the studio at Cornish. In 1906, Gus’s old friend and collaborator Stanford White was murdered, shot to death at Madison Square Garden by the crazed husband of a former mistress, Evelyn
Nesbit. All this was extremely hard on Gus, while his health and strength kept deteriorating.
Yet, with a new studio under roof, the work moved forward.
“We are not dead yet, By Jingo! are we!” he wrote one fine spring day to Edwin Abbey. “If you were to see the establishment I have here, you would think I was, although I am stretched out on a couch at this moment in the flickering sunlight. I will stick at it until I am finally straightened out. That’s the only thing, after all. Work, I mean.…”
He did more relief portraits, more busts and statues. At the request of President Theodore Roosevelt he created designs for the United States gold coinage.
Gussie conscientiously looked after him, saw to his comforts and needs, and more even than in previous years kept the accounts, handled sales of duplicate castings, and managed the property.
The last and one of the most spirited of his relief portraits was of her standing in profile with his beloved sheepdog. (Whatever objections she had had in Paris to his having a dog had long since vanished.) He gave the dog a face very like what he drew of himself in his cartoons and, as a close look revealed, he put a heart on Gussie’s sleeve.
By early summer 1907 it was plain that he was dying.
In late July, an assistant, Henry Hering, described how Saint-Gaudens had become so weak and in such pain from his illness that he had to be carried to the studio each day, and how, once he was seated before his work, the look of pain and worry would vanish from his face.
Hering wrote also of “Mrs. St-G,” describing her devotion to her husband through it all as “very true and beautiful.”
In the evenings Hering often joined the Saint-Gaudenses, Homer, and a nurse at the dinner table, where Saint-Gaudens wished the others to talk and let him listen. “Now and then,” Hering wrote, “he would ask that we talk louder so that Mrs. might hear, though it was harder than usual with her, for, poor lady, she said almost nothing—sitting there with the love of her youth.”
Augustus Saint-Gaudens died at home in Cornish, of cancer, on the evening of August 3, 1907, at age fifty-nine. Only the doctor was at the bedside. Gussie was waiting outside the door. It is said that when the doctor told her, she fainted on the floor.
Of the later lives of Davida Clark and son Louis, little is known.
Gussie lived until 1926, devoting most of her time to seeing to the memory of her husband and appreciation of his work. In 1919, at her wish, their home at Cornish and its furnishings, his studio, and much of his work, became the Saint-Gaudens Memorial, incorporated by the State of New Hampshire. Later, it would become, and remains, a property of the National Park Service.
Homer Saint-Gaudens, after a career as a writer and in the theater as a Broadway director, served for twenty-eight years as the director of arts at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh.
John Singer Sargent, while maintaining his studio and residence in London, spent more and more time in the United States, as if making up for what he had missed in his youth. He traveled back and forth repeatedly, working on the murals for the Boston Public Library and doing portraits, including a full-length portrait of Theodore Roosevelt, but devoting increasing time to landscapes in oil and watercolor. He painted in Maine, Florida, and the Rocky Mountains.
Informed that he was to be knighted in England, he declined the honor, saying it would be impossible since he was an American.
Sargent never married and never stopped painting until his death at age sixty-nine, from heart failure while he slept, the night of April 14, 1925, at his home in London. His glasses had been pushed up on his forehead. Beside him lay an open volume of Dictionnaire Philosophique by Voltaire.
Mary Cassatt died a year after Sargent, on June 14, 1926, at her château at Beaufresne, north of Paris. She was eighty-one.
She had stayed on in France with no wish to live anywhere else, even through the First World War, and she kept painting until she began to lose her eyesight from cataracts. Looked after by a devoted maid-companion, Mathilde Valet, she found her greatest pleasure in her gardens, where she had more than two hundred varieties of chrysanthemums, and in being taken for daily drives in her 1906 Renault Landau.
A much younger American painter named George Biddle, who had been greatly influenced by her work, was invited to join her for lunch at Beaufresne a few months before her death. On arrival he was told by Mathilde Valet that Miss Cassatt was unable to join him for lunch, but she would see him in her room afterward.
He found her propped up in bed, “quite blind” and “terribly emaciated,” he wrote, but when she began to talk, the whole room became charged with her “electric vitality.”
She regretted missing lunch with him, she said, but hoped he found the Château Margaux to his liking. It was the last bottle of a case of wine given to her by her brother fifteen years before.
“Miss Cassatt as usual did the talking. Her mind galloped along. … What abysses and reinforcements of courage and life and enthusiasm still lay hidden inside that frail body.…”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
For the steadfast, resourceful part he played in the research for this book, and for his unfailing good cheer, I wish to express my gratitude first of all to Mike Hill. As with three of my previous books, his efforts have been vital, and it was he who unraveled, as no one had, the full extent of the Elihu Washburne diary at the Library of Congress. (See the Notes for Chapter 9.)
My daughter Dorie Lawson has been of immense editorial help with the source notes and proofreading, and for that and all her other efforts I am extremely thankful. And my great appreciation to Melissa Marchetti, who has typed and retyped the entire manuscript in its many drafts, handled correspondence, and assisted with the source notes and illustrations.
I am most grateful also to my son-in-law Tim Lawson, a highly gifted artist who went with me to look at particular paintings and sculpture in Boston, New York, Chicago, and at the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site in New Hampshire, and who, from his professional experience and knowledge, offered many valuable insights.
Betsey Buddy has provided research help in Paris, and for this and much that she and her husband, Mike Buddy, have had to say about Paris, and much that is second nature to her from teaching French for thirty years, I am most grateful.
In the course of writing the book I have been fortunate to draw on the resources of some thirty-two institutions as well as the knowledge and advice of many people who gave generously of their time. Any inaccuracies there may be in what I have written are my doing, not theirs.
I thank especially Jeffrey Flannery, the always helpful head of the Manuscript Reading Room at the Library of Congress, and Gerard Gawalt, Grant Harris, Carol Armbruster, Jerome Brooks, Norman Chase, Elizabeth Faison, and Elvin Felix also of the Library of Congress; Henry J. Duffy, curator of the Saint-Gaudens National Historic Site, who knows more about Augustus Saint-Gaudens than anyone; Elizabeth Kennedy of the Terra Foundation for American Art, who provided a private viewing of Samuel Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre at a time when it was in storage in Chicago and who was good enough to read and comment on a first draft of my account of the painting and its story; Erica E. Hirshler, senior curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, who graciously led me on a tour of the museum’s collection of the works of Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent, as well as providing a backstage look at the Paris water-colors by Edward D. Boit; Jock Reynolds and Helen Cooper of the Yale University Art Gallery for their guidance and insights; Peter Drummey of the Massachusetts Historical Society, from whom I always learn something of value; Stephen Z. Nonack of the Boston Athenaeum, who put me on to the remarkable account by Charles May of his escape from Paris by balloon; Sarah Cash and Beth Shook of the Corcoran Gallery of Art; Beth Prindle of the Boston Public Library; Jack Eckert of the Countway Library of the Harvard Medical School; Jennifer M. Deprizio of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum; Nancy Iannucci of the Emma Willard School; Jay Satterfield, head of special collections at the Rauner Library, Dartmouth Co
llege; Howard J. Kittell, president of the Hermitage, the home of President Andrew Jackson, and Judge George Paine and Ophelia Paine, who generously arranged for the tour there; Lynn Turner, collections manager at the U.S. State Department; Marisa Bourgoin, Margaret Zoller, Wendy Hurlock Baker, and Liza Kirwin at the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art; Jim Shea and Anita Israel at the Longfellow House, George Washington’s Headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts; Pat Heller at the University of Pennsylvania Dental School Library; Elder Marlin Jensen at the Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Salt Lake City; Nancy Anderson at the National Gallery of Art; Nancey Drinkwine and Jen Colby-Morse at the Washburn-Norlands Living History Center, Livermore, Maine; Diana Skvarla, Scott Strong, and Melinda Smith at the Office of the Senate Curator; William Truettner at the Smithsonian American Art Museum; Stephanie Malmros, University of Texas Center for American History; Adam Lovell, Detroit Historical Society; and old friends Richard A. Baker, former historian of the U.S. Senate, and Charles Bryan, former head of the Virginia Historical Society.
For their assistance and many courtesies I wish to thank also the staffs of the Beinecke Library of Yale; the NewYork Historical Society; the Houghton Library at Harvard; the Boston Art Commission; Faneuil Hall in Boston; the Simpson Library at the University of Mary Washington, Fredericksburg, Virginia; the Alderman Library at the University of Virginia; and in Paris, the Bibliothèque Nationale and the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève.
Others to whom I am greatly indebted are Ed Wise, for introducing me to the music and story of Louis Moreau Gottschalk; sculptor Lawrence Nowlan, for taking the time to explain in his studio the processes and challenges of large-scale sculpture; Dr. Robert P. Laurence, Ryan O’Donnell, Arthur and Kim Grinnell, Anne Simonnet, Zoe Geer, Kerck Kelsey, James A. Percoco, Denny daRosa, Karen Ogden, David Acton, Tom Ford, James Symington, Dr. William Maguire; and in Paris, Alice Jouve, Fred and Marie-Cécile Street, Odile Hellier, proprietor of the Village Voice Bookshop, Agnes and Laurent Perpère, the staff of the historic Hôtel du Louvre, and especially concierge Carmelo Helguera, and former U.S. ambassador to France Craig R. Stapleton and Dorothy W. Stapleton for their hospitality in Paris and their stories about the ambassador’s residence at 41 rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré.