CHAPTER TWO

VOILÀ PARIS!

The origin of Paris and the character of its first inhabitants are necessarily involved in deep obscurity. According to historians whose opinions are generally received, an errant tribe obtained permission of the Senones, at a very remote period, to settle upon the banks of the Seine, near their territory. Upon the island now called Île de la Cité they constructed huts, which served as a fortress for them to retreat with their flocks and effects when an attack from any of the neighboring tribes was apprehended. To their fortress they gave the name of Lutèce, and themselves assumed that of Parisii, which most probably was derived from their contiguity to the country of the Senones, the word par and bar being synonymous, and signifying frontier. According to this derivation theParisii would be dwellers on the frontier.

—GALIGNANI’S NEW PARIS GUIDE

I

The first impressions were often badly disappointing.

Much of Paris in the 1830s was still a medieval city. So after rolling smoothly along the broad, tree-lined final approach on the main road from Rouen, the American adventurers suddenly found themselves plunged into a dark labyrinth of narrow, filthy, foul-smelling streets running off every which way. Ancient stone buildings, some black with centuries of smoke and soot, crowded on all sides. Wagons and drays and shouting vendors with pushcarts clogged the way. People could be seen living in the most wretched squalor. To picture what the rat population might be took no great stretch of imagination.

“Voilà Paris!” the conductor would call from atop the diligence. “Voilà Paris!”

“And with my mind full of the splendid views of squares, and columns, and bridges, as I had seen them in prints, I could scarce believe I was in Paris,” wrote Nathaniel Willis. “The streets run zig-zag and abut against each other as if they did not know which way to run,” wrote John Sanderson. “As for the noise of the streets, I need not attempt to describe it.

What idea can ears, used only to the ordinary and human noises, conceive of this unceasing racket—this rattling of cabs and other vehicles over the rough stones, this rumbling of the omnibuses. For the street cries—one might have relief from them by file and handsaw.

Even as the famous bridges on the Seine, the splendors of gardens and palaces and the gilded dome of the Invalides came into view, the close proximity of such appalling poverty and immeasurable riches was both startling and unsettling. After years of living in Paris, James Fenimore Cooper said he still struggled to adjust to a country comprised of “dirt and gilding … bedbugs and laces.”

Many, like Emma Willard, arrived so utterly exhausted that under the circumstances little if anything could have pleased them. Gone was any trace of the “sublimity” she had felt at the cathedral in Rouen. “We were amidst dirt and disorder, fatigued … and strange eyes seemed to glare upon us.”

But the famous allure and vitality of the great city won them over soon enough. Never in their lives had the Americans seen such parks and palaces, or such beautiful bridges or so many bridges. Or so many people of every kind. For those staying at the best hotels, such comforts and attentions as awaited them almost immediately, magically alleviated whatever initial disappointment they had felt.

To Nathaniel Willis the Hôtel des Étrangers on the rue Vivienne was everything the weary traveler longed for. Arriving in the rain at mid-morning after a long night on the road, he was shown every courtesy, including his choice of several “quite pretty” rooms. The beds were surely the best in the world, he thought. “Five mattresses are successively piled on an elegant mahogany bedstead” to a thickness of eighteen inches. The pillow was “a masterpiece.” There was simply no “opiate” like a French pillow. Then followed a breakfast that carried the day:

There are few things bought with money that are more delightful than a French breakfast. If you take it at your room, it appears in the shape of two small vessels, one of coffee and one of hot milk, two kinds of bread, with a thin, printed slice of butter, and one or two of some thirty dishes from which you can choose, the latter flavored exquisitely enough to make one wish to be always at breakfast, but cooked and composed I know not how or of what. The coffee has an aroma peculiarly exquisite, something quite different than any I have ever tasted before; and the petit pain, a slender biscuit between bread and cake, is, when crisp and warm, a delightful accompaniment.

And the cost was a third that of steak and coffee at home and the civility of the service worth three times the money.

The location on the bustling rue Vivienne was ideal. The Palais Royal, with all its famous enticements, the Louvre, and the Garden of the Tuileries were only a little way down the street, southward toward the Seine. Up the street in the other direction was the Bourse, which with its grandiose Doric columns looked more like a palace or temple than what it was, a stock exchange.

Best of all, Galignani’s, the English bookstore and reading room, a favorite gathering place, stood across the street from the hotel. There one could pass long, comfortable hours with a great array of English and even American newspapers. Parisians were as avid readers of newspapers as any people on earth. Some thirty-four daily papers were published in Paris, and many of these, too, were to be found spread across several large tables. The favorite English-language paper was Galignani’s own Messenger, with morning and evening editions Monday through Friday. For the newly arrived Americans, after more than a month with no news of any kind, these and the American papers were pure gold.

Of the several circulating libraries in Paris, only Galignani’s carried books in English, and indispensable was Galignani’s New Paris Guide in English. Few Americans went without this thick little leather-bound volume, fully 839 pages of invaluable insights and information, plus maps.

Like Nathaniel Willis, schoolmistress Emma Willard delighted in her first breakfast at the fashionable Hôtel de l’Europe on the rue de Richelieu, and in the café au lait in particular. Nothing could exceed it, she wrote, adding, “the bread is fine and the butter exquisite.” She was also much the better after a restorative night’s sleep.

Breakfast concluded and accompanied by a young lady from New York traveling with her father, whom she had met on board ship and identified in her letters only as “Miss D,” Mrs. Willard set forth full of expectations for a first walk in Paris, down the rue de Richelieu in the direction of the Seine and into the luxurious garden and arcades of the Palais Royal. The spectacle of the immense garden with its fountain playing was “brilliant and beautiful,” and, enclosed as it was by the Palais, blessedly removed from the clamor of the streets. It was also, much to her approval, “promenaded by multitudes of the elegant and fashionable.”

We took the rounds under the arcades, upon the finely paved marble walk. … And surely we had never seen anything with which to compare the splendor of the shops. … You have not the least idea of the elegance of some of the painted porcelain; and then there are such quantities. … Jewelry, too, abounds in all its dazzling sheen … and hats of many fashions, with snowy plumes. …

Having purchased a few “wearable things,” she and her companion returned to the hotel to announce they had found the Paris they had expected to see.

Samuel Morse had hardly unpacked at his hotel when he was handed an invitation to a soirée at the home of Lafayette. On his arrival, the warmth of his welcome from the general took Morse’s breath away. “When I went in he instantly recognized me, took me by both hands, said he was expecting to see me in France, having read in the American papers that I had embarked.”

In her turn, Mrs. Willard sent off a note to “apprise” General Lafayette that she had arrived, expecting to receive no answer for days, given his importance in the new government as commander of the army. But the following morning the general himself appeared to greet her with open affection. For nearly an hour they reminisced about his visit to her school, talked of their families, and discussed politics and the new government. “His heart seemed to expand as to a confidential sister,” she wrote with boundless pride. No welcome to Paris could have pleased her more, and it was not to be her only time with him, as he had graciously assured her.

The Palais Royal, the Louvre, the Palace and Garden of the Tuileries, were all in the first of the twelve arrondissements, or districts, of Paris. It was the royal arrondissement par excellence. As Wendell Holmes wrote, in an effort to explain to his parents how things were arranged, the Palais Royal was the great center of the luxury and splendor of Paris.

He, however, had “fairly settled” in the quite different Sixth Arrondissement, across the Seine in the Pays Latin, the Latin Quarter, on the Rive Gauche, the Left Bank. The ancient College of the Sorbonne and the School of Law were there. So, too, were the École de Médecine and several major hospitals, and hence it was where the medical students lived in high, dingy old houses closely packed along narrow, unpaved streets with gutters down the middle and rarely a sidewalk. (Describing the choices this left to the pedestrian, Holmes wrote, “If he keeps near the wall his feet probably become victims of some animal or vegetable abomination. If on the other hand he keeps to the middle he is almost inevitably splashed by the horses with mud of an intensity that defies competition.”) In this same crowded, compact neighborhood lived and worked the medical-book sellers, instrument makers, medical artists, preparers of natural and artificial skeletons, in addition to professors and lecturers of highest renown who were advancing the art and science of medicine as nowhere else in the world.

Holmes, like his fellow Bostonians James Jackson, Jr., and Mason Warren, found lodgings on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, a street barely wide enough for two carts to pass. Consistent with his nature, Holmes had no complaints.

Those who, like Holmes or John Sanderson, arrived in late June or early July were delighted from the outset by the long summer days of northern Europe. In Paris, as they had to remind themselves, they were as far north as Newfoundland. And what pleasure to be out and about in daylight at ten at night! In December, as they would discover, it would still be pitch dark at eight in the morning, and night again by four in the afternoon. Winter, too, brought endless rain, mud, snow, and fog, often heavy fog. The penetrating cold of a Paris winter was commonly said to be worse even than in London.

Charles Sumner, who arrived in late December, took a room near the Sorbonne, intending to devote his time first to learning French, but was so distressed by the dank, bone-chilling weather he could hardly concentrate on anything. A blazing fire had little effect.

The cold continues intolerable [he wrote in his journal], and my chamber, notwithstanding all my exertions, frigid beyond endurance. I go to bed tonight earlier than usual—the clock this moment striking midnight—in the hope of escaping the cold. My French grammar will be my companion.

In the morning he studied as close by the fire as he dared sit, bundled to the neck in an overcoat. “I freeze behind, and my hair is so cold that I hesitate to touch it with my hand.”

Yet life had never been so exhilarating. To a friend at home Sumner wrote, “My voyage has already been compensated for—seasickness, time, money, and all—many times over.”

They were in Paris! It was no longer something to read about at home, or talk about at sea. They were there—this was nearly always the first thought on awakening each morning. Paris was right there out the window, out the door, and the common impulse was to get out and walk, to get one’s bearings, certainly, but also, as they discovered, Paris was a place where one wanted to walk, where to walk—flâner, as the French said—was practically a way of life. (“Ah! To wander over Paris!” wrote Honoré de Balzac. “What an adorable and delectable existence is that! Flânerie is a form of science, it is the gastronomy of the eye.”)

In spirited letters and diary entries, the Americans described walking the uncommonly broad sidewalks of grand avenues and boulevards under “noble” chestnut trees, or venturing off into the “charming irregularities” of the endless side streets. A mile was nothing. Without realizing it, one could walk the whole day in an effort to see everything. Or to ward off homesickness, which often hit with surprising force. Interestingly, “Home, Sweet Home,” a favorite song then throughout the English-speaking world, was written by an American in Paris. “Mid pleasures and palaces / Though we may roam,” wrote John Howard Payne, “Be it ever so humble, / There’s no place like home.”

The French had a different idea about distances. A destination described as only “two steps away” could turn out to be a walk of several miles. Aching legs were common by day’s end. The soles of good Boston (or New York or Philadelphia) shoes wore thin sooner than expected.

When the walking became too much, there were the famous Paris omnibuses, giant, horse-drawn public conveyances that went to all parts of the city and were available from eight in the morning until eleven at night, and that some of the Americans found an even better way to relieve spells of homesickness or melancholy. “If you get into melancholy,” wrote John Sanderson, “an omnibus is the best remedy you can imagine.

Whether it is the queer shaking over the rough pavement, I cannot say, but you have always an irresistible inclination to laugh. … I often give six sous just for the comic effect of an omnibus. Precipitate jolts against a neighbor one never saw, as the ponderous vehicle rolls over the stones, gives agitation to the blood and brains and sets one thinking.

But walk they did more often than not, and were amazed by the thousands of Parisians doing the same, and how friendly they were. Galignani’s Guide made a point of the “uniform politeness which pervades all classes,” and it seemed true. “Indeed,” wrote Holmes, “the only very disagreeable people one meets are generally Englishmen.”

Of the foreigners in the city, the Americans were but a tiny minority, probably less than a thousand during the 1830s, a mere fraction compared to the English in Paris, or the Germans and Italians.

It was also disconcerting for the Americans to find how little Parisians knew about America, though over time this was to be remedied in good measure by Baron Alexis de Tocqueville’s De la Démocratie en Amérique, or Democracy in America, as it would be titled in English. After a nine-month visit to the United States, and more than a year at work in an attic room in Paris, de Tocqueville had produced as clear-eyed and valuable a study of America as any yet published, in which he wrote about the nature of American politics, the evils of slavery, the American love of money, and of how, from the beginning, “the originality of American civilization was most clearly apparent in the provisions made for public education.” Volume I appeared in 1835. A second volume followed in 1840.

Increasingly, with every passing day, the Americans were struck by how entirely, unequivocally French Paris was. Every sign was in French, the money was French, every overheard conversation was in French. Hardly a soul spoke a word of English. All this they had been forewarned about, but the difference between what one had been told and what one came to understand firsthand was enormous.

Facing necessity, they began to learn a few words—that left was gauche; right, droite; that a waiter was a garçon; a baker, a boulanger; and that some words, like “façade” and “rat,” were the same in both languages. Even the more hesitant were surprised to find themselves saying bonjour, très bien, and merci quite naturally, even venturing a whole sentence— “Excusez-moi, je ne comprends pas.”

To find that every noun had a gender—that a hand was feminine, while a foot was masculine—and that one was expected to know which was which, seemed to some of the newcomers too much to cope with, and often illogical or even unfair. Why were all four seasons—hiver, printemps, été, and automne—masculine, for instance. Could not spring perhaps be feminine? And how a word looked on a printed page or menu and how it was pronounced could be worlds apart.

But then if one were clearly making an effort to learn the language, the French were nearly always ready to help. Indeed, so appealing was the attitude of nearly everyone the Americans encountered that there was seldom cause to complain. “You ask a man the way,” wrote Holmes’s friend Thomas Appleton, “and he will go to the end of the street to show you.” The Americans soon found themselves adopting the same kind of civility.

The fashion for mustaches and beards among the French dandies, the Parisian “exquisites,” had little or no appeal, however. “Don’t you hate to see so many ninnies in mustaches?” wrote John Sanderson. Beards annoyed him still more. “One loves the women just because they have no beards on their faces.” If a man was born a fool, Sanderson concluded, he could be a greater fool in Paris than anywhere on earth, such were the opportunities.

By the 1830s trousers had replaced britches as the fashion. Light tan trousers, a dark tight-fitting frock coat, a bright-colored vest coat, top hat, fine straw-colored or white kid gloves, laceless shoes or boots always highly polished, and a malacca cane or furled umbrella under the arm comprised the à la mode wardrobe of the gentleman flâneur. For women who dressed à la dernière mode it was the full, flounced skirt, puffed and banded sleeves, and large flowered hats that tied with a large ribbon beneath the chin.

Some years earlier, in 1826, nineteen-year-old Henry Longfellow had reported happily from Paris to his brother in New England how he had “decorated” himself with a claret-colored coat and linen pantaloons, and how on Sundays he added “the glory of a little French hat—glossy and brushed.” Learning of this, his father wrote, “You should remember that you are an American, and as you are a visitor for a short time only in a place, you should retain your own national costume.” But for Longfellow, Paris instilled what was to be a lifelong love of fine clothes, as it would, too, for young Mason Warren and Thomas Appleton.

Nathaniel Willis was delighted to find that in men’s apparel shops only attractive young women greeted the prospective customer.

No matter what is the article of trade—hats, boots, pictures, books, jewelry, anything or everything that gentlemen buy— you are waited upon by girls always handsome and always dressed in the height of the mode. They sit on damask-covered settees behind the counter; and when you enter, bow and rise to serve you with a grace and a smile of courtesy that would become a drawing room.

John Sanderson claimed to have been nearly “ruined” financially by one pretty sales clerk with a way of “caressing and caressing each of one’s fingers, as she tries on a pair of gloves one doesn’t want.”

Though it seemed hard to believe, there were no drunks reeling about in the streets, as in cities at home. Nor did men chew tobacco and spit, and no one abused public property. Park benches showed no other marks than the natural wear of people sitting on them. White marble statues in public gardens remained as pristine as if inside a museum.

Surprising, too, was the presence of dogs everywhere and the way the French doted on them. No woman of fashion, it seemed, made an appearance except in the company of her dog, a très petit chien most often and with a step as stylish as her own. Amazingly also, the women of Paris could walk quite as fast as a man.

Especially appealing was the great quantity of glass everywhere—glass doors, huge plate-glass windows fronting shops and cafés. And mirrors, mirrors everywhere, mirrors large and small, great gilt-framed mirrors in hotel lobbies, entire walls of mirrors in cafés and restaurants that multiplied the size of rooms, multiplied the light of day no less than the glow of gaslight and candles after dark, and doubled or tripled the human presence.

The French seemed to take every meal in public, even breakfast, and whenever dining, showed not the slightest sign of hurry or impatience. It was as if they had nothing else to do but sit and chatter and savor what seemed to the Americans absurdly small portions. Or sip their wine ever so slowly.

“The French dine to gratify, we to appease appetite,” observed John Sanderson. “We demolish dinner, they eat it.”

The general misconception back home was that French food was highly seasoned, but not at all, wrote James Fenimore Cooper. The genius in French cookery was “in blending flavors and in arranging compounds in such a manner as to produce … the lightest and most agreeable food.” The charm of a French dinner, like so much in French life, was the “effect.”

A dinner here does not oppress one. The wine neither intoxicates nor heats, and the frame of mind and body, in which one is left, is precisely that best suited to intellectual and social pleasures. I make no doubt that one of the chief causes of the French being so agreeable as companions is, in a considerable degree, owing to the admirable qualities of their table. A national character may emanate from a kitchen. Roast beef, bacon, pudding, and beer and port, will make a different man in time from Château Margaux, côtelettes, consommés and soufflés. The very name vol-au-vent is enough to make one walk on air!

Ralph Waldo Emerson, another of Wendell Holmes’s Boston friends, turned up in Paris in 1833, the same year as Holmes, but a little later that summer and by way of Italy. Having concluded he no longer wished to be a minister of the gospel, Emerson was trying to decide at age thirty what to make of his life. Far from charmed by Paris, he found it, after the antiquity of Italy, a “loud modern New York of a place.” Yet repent he did. In a matter of days he was calling it “the most hospitable of cities.” Walking the boulevards in ideal weather, he was captivated by the human scenery and the multitude of ingenious ways some men made a living.

One vendor had live snakes crawling about him as he sold soaps. Another had an offering of books spread across the ground. Half a dozen more strutted up and down selling walking sticks and canes. Here a boot-black “brandished” his brush at every passing shoe; there a man sat cleaning old silver spoons.

Then a person who cut profiles with scissors. “Shall be happy to take yours, sir.” Then a table of card puppets. … Then a hand organ. … Then a flower merchant. Then a bird shop with 20 parrots, four swans, hawks, and nightingales. …

In stark contrast were the beggars—pitiful men without arms or legs, ancient, hunched women who pleaded mainly with their eyes, and ragged street boys singing mournfully in Italian. Nathaniel Willis kept seeing a woman who sat playing a violin while holding in her lap a sleeping child so still and pale that Willis wondered if it might be made of wax.

Henry Longfellow, who made a return visit to Paris in 1836, loved the crowds as much as anything about the city. When a friend from home, accompanying him on a walk, showed no interest in the passing parade, but insisted on talking about predestination and the depravity of human nature, it was more than Longfellow could bear.

Sundays brought out the greatest crowds, and for many Americans this took getting used to, in that no one seemed the least inclined to keep the Sabbath. The Bostonians found it especially difficult to accept. As said, Boston on Sunday remained “impatient of all levity.” In Paris it was not only meant to be a day of enjoyment for everyone, but remarkably everyone seemed entirely at ease with enjoyment. “Vivez joyeux” was the old saying. “Live joyfully.”

Church bells rang, but hardly more than on other mornings—the bells of the great cathedrals were as characteristic of the city as any sound—and most churches were filled through a succession of services that began at an early hour. But shops, cafés, and restaurants all did business as usual. The opera and theaters were open. The great public gardens were filled with tens of thousands of people, more people than some of the Americans had ever seen all in one place. It was on Sunday only that the Musée du Louvre was open to the public, and to the astonishment of the Americans, the enormous Sunday crowds at the museum included people from all walks of life, as though everyone cared about art.

On Sundays nearly every public garden had its elegant rotundas for dancing. (Happy the nation that once a week could forget its cares, the English author Laurence Sterne had once written of life in Paris.) There were public ballrooms in all parts of the city. John Sanderson hired a cabriolet and escorted a lady from New Orleans to half a dozen different public dances where they found everyone having a perfectly grand time. These Parisians had the right idea, he thought.

Perhaps as unfamiliar for the Americans as almost anything about their first weeks in Paris was the realization that they were foreigners— strangers, les étrangers, as the French said—something they had never been before.

“It is a queer feeling to find oneself a foreigner,” wrote Nathaniel Willis.

As robust a walker as any of them was James Fenimore Cooper, who in earlier years had been known to walk from New York City all the way to his country home in Westchester County, a distance of twenty-five miles. No sooner had Cooper settled in Paris in 1826 than he decided to make the entire circumference of the city on foot, taking with him an old friend, a retired American naval captain with the memorable name of Melancthon T. Woolsey, under whom Cooper had once served at sea. The captain was a good-hearted but irritable man with a big voice and, like many Americans, inclined to speak even louder when trying to make himself understood in his outstandingly bad French. “He calls the Tuileries, ‘Tullyrees,’ the Jardin des Plantes, the ‘Garden dis Plants,’ the guillotine, ‘gullyteen’ and the garçons of the cafés, ‘gassons,’ ” wrote Cooper with delight.

Starting at the Barrière de Clichy by the city’s old toll wall, they had set off at eleven in the morning, moving at a steady clip. By noon they had covered four miles.

The captain commenced with great vigor, and for near two hours, as he expressed himself, he had me a little on his lee quarter, not more, however, he thought, than was due to his superior rank. … At the Barrière du Trône, we were compelled to diverge a little from the wall, in order to get across the river by the Pont d’Austerlitz. By this time I had ranged up abeam of the commodore, and I proposed that we should follow the river up as far as the wall again, in order to do our work honestly. But to this he objected that he had no wish to puzzle himself with spherical trigonometry, that plane sailing was his humor at the moment, and that he had, moreover, just discovered that one of his boots pinched his foot.

By three o’clock they were back where they started, having completed the entire circuit, eighteen miles, in something over four hours. Then to find a cab, they had to walk another two miles.

For his first overall view of Paris, Cooper had gone to the top of Montmartre, a high hill to the north, crowned by a picturesque village and windmills. Here was the best “look-out,” and he purposely chose an over-cast day, as the most favorable kind of light.

We were fortunate in our sky, which was well veiled in clouds, and occasionally darkened by mists. A bright sun may suit particular scenes, and particular moods of the mind, but every connoisseur in the beauties of nature will allow that, as a rule, clouds and very frequently obscurity, greatly aid a landscape. … I love to study a place teeming with historical recollections, under this light, leaving the sights of memorable scenes to issue, one by one, out of the gray mass of gloom, as time gives up its facts from the obscurity of ages. …

From Montmartre one could see the whole broad sweep of the city.

The domes sprung up through the mist, like starting balloons; and here and there the meandering stream threw back a gleam of silvery light. Enormous roofs denoted the sites of the palaces, churches, or theaters. The summits of columns, the crosses of the minor churches, and the pyramid of the pavilion-tops, seemed struggling to rear their heads from out of the plain edifices. A better idea of the vastness of the principal structures was obtained here in one hour than could be got from the streets in a twelve-month.

The Cathedral of Notre-Dame, miles in the distance, towered so above everything around it as to seem to stand on a ridge of its own.

Seeing the same view another day, from the same spot but in full sunshine, Cooper found the spell had vanished. All the details he loved, the “peculiarities” of so much history, were reduced to a “confused glittering.”

Charles Sumner, for his part, chose to climb the four hundred steps to the top of Notre-Dame to see all of gigantic Paris beneath his feet—Paris, a city of nearly 800,000 people, or four times the size of New York; Paris, the capital of France and the cultural center of all Europe. The capital of his own country, which Sumner had seen on a trip a few years earlier, was a city of “great design” but of small population (a mere 25,000) and “streets without houses to adorn them or businesses to keep them lively.” There was nothing natural about its growth, and this troubled him. “It only grows under the hot-bed culture of Congress,” he had written.

The “great design” of Washington was the work of a Frenchman, the Paris-born engineer and architect Pierre-Charles L’Enfant. The new Capitol, which Sumner considered an “edifice worthy … of the greatest republic on earth,” had only just been completed in 1829 under the direction of the American architect Charles Bulfinch, who during a visit to Paris in 1787 had toured the city’s monuments with the American minister to France, Thomas Jefferson.

The view from the heights of Notre-Dame, like nearly everything about the ancient cathedral, had lately acquired unprecedented popular interest as a result of a new novel, Notre-Dame de Paris, by young Victor Hugo, who had set the story in the fifteenth century. It was his first novel, and a sensation. The first edition in English appeared in 1833, under the title The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, a title Hugo disliked but by which the book would be known ever after.

Hugo adored Gothic architecture for all its upward aspirations, its spires, steeples, and pointed arches, its dramatic use of light and dark, for the sense of the sublime in its stained glass, the grotesque in its gargoyles. He intended the book to be a summoning call for historic preservation. “We must, if it be possible, inspire the nation with a love of its national architecture,” he wrote in the introduction. “That, its author here declares, is one of the chief aims of this book.” He saw Notre-Dame in particular, and Gothic architecture overall, as history writ large in stone before the advent of the printing press.

Hugo loved especially the view from the top of the towers, and to this, the view as he imagined it to have been in the fifteenth century, he devoted one of the most appealing chapters in the book, inspiring thereby no one knows how many thousands of his readers, then and later, to undertake the climb to see for themselves.

The cornerstone of Notre-Dame had been laid in the year 1163 by Pope Alexander III on the eastern end of the Île-de-la-Cité in the Seine. The island was the precise historic center of Paris, since it was there in 52 B.C., under the Romans, that the city was born. It was called the Île-de-la-Cité because it once constituted all there was of Paris. As one learned in Victor Hugo’s book, the shoreline of the Seine was its first city wall, the river its first moat.

At the opposite or western end of the island, where its sharp tip pointed downstream like a ship’s prow, was the broad Pont Neuf, the New Bridge, which crossed the divided river in two sections and was, in fact, the oldest of the bridges of Paris and the largest. Built of heavy stone in 1604, it was the favorite bridge of the Parisians, a major promenade, and for the Americans it had an air of romance and a view without rival. On the Pont Neuf they felt they were truly in Paris. John Sanderson wrote that it was when he stepped out on the bridge that he began to breathe. “The atmosphere brightened, the prospect suddenly opened, and the noble river exhibited its twenty bridges, and its banks, turrets, towered and castellated, as far as the eye could pierce.”

Emma Willard described for her students back in Troy the giant equestrian bronze of Henry IV, Henry of Navarre, “that most chivalrous, best-headed, and kindest-hearted of all the French kings,” which commanded the bridge’s midway point, where it was grounded on the end of the Île-de-la-Cité. She noted the long lines of bookstalls that reached down the river from the ends of the bridge and the great barges of the Seine, with their washlines hanging out. She wrote of the “delightful streets” called quays following the river’s edge and of what splendid promenades they were. The river itself, however, was a disappointment compared to the Hudson, she wrote, adding in true schoolmistress spirit, “But you must make the best of it as it is.”

The bridge immediately downstream, the slim, elegant Pont des Arts was her favorite, as it was for many. The first cast-iron structure in Paris, its wide wooden deck was for the convenience and pleasure of pedestrians only. Strolling over the Seine with her on the Pont des Arts, James Fenimore Cooper assured her there was no finer view in all Europe.

She had come to Paris “to see and learn.” Suggesting in one of her letters that her students at home accompany her, in a manner of speaking, to the “very heart of Paris,” she led them not to the Pont des Arts or to the shops of the Palais Royal, but to the Louvre, and few other Americans would have contested the choice. Like the cathedral at Rouen, the Louvre was a nearly overpowering reminder of the immense difference between the Old World and the New.

It was the world’s greatest, richest, most renowned museum of art in what had formerly been a royal palace. Its history was long and complicated. A great part of it had been built for Catherine de Medici in the sixteenth century. Its famous Grande Galerie on the second floor was the longest room in the world, fully 1,330 feet, or more than a quarter of a mile, in length, its entire tessellated wood floor waxed like a table top. The collection of paintings numbered 1,224, and only masterpieces were included. It had been opened to the public, the admission free, by the government of the Revolution in 1793, the same year King Louis XVI and his wife, Marie Antoinette, were taken to the guillotine. Though the Parisian public was admitted only on Sunday, “étrangers” were welcome every day, much to the surprise of the Americans. They had only to show their passports.

He entered the Louvre “with a throb,” wrote Charles Sumner. Ascending its magnificent marble stairway, he rejoiced to think that such a place was not something set apart for royalty only. So numerous and vast were the galleries that he spent four hours just walking through them.

“Holmes and I actually were at the Louvre this morning three hours instead of one, such is the seduction of the masters,” recorded Thomas Appleton, who was in raptures. “O Rubens, emperor of glowing flesh and vermeil lips; Rembrandt, sullen lord of brown shades and lightning lights … O Titian, thou god of noble eyes and rich, warm life … O Veronese … when shall I repay you for all the high happiness of this day?”

Another day Appleton returned on his own to concentrate on Roman sculpture. Except for a solitary art student with his brushes and long loaf of bread, he had the gallery of sculpture to himself and took his time, catalogue in hand. Appleton could not get enough of the Louvre. On his fourth day he found himself so enthralled by a portrait of a boy by Raphael that he returned still again the next day with easel, paints, and brushes to try his hand at a copy.

Emma Willard loved seeing the many young women at work doing copies of paintings in the galleries. Women in France were not disassociated from art, or confined to the periphery. There were women artists in Paris whose works were “much esteemed and bear a high price,” she was glad to report to her students.

That the female anatomy in its natural state was so conspicuously glorified on canvas and in sculpture posed a problem for Mrs. Willard. When it came to describing the charms of the nearby Garden of the Tuileries, she chose to omit altogether the marble statues which, as Cooper said, had “little or no drapery.”

No, my dear girls, I shall not take you to examine those statues. If your mothers were here, I would leave you sitting on these shaded benches, and conduct them through the walks, and they would return and bid you depart for our America, where the eye of modesty is not publicly affronted, and virgin delicacy can walk abroad without a blush.

Had she been aware of the randy side of “that most chivalrous” King Henry IV, she no doubt would have had less to say about his statue as well.

The French thought American visitors like Mrs. Willard absurdly squeamish, and some Americans found reactions such as hers embarrassing. Crossing the Garden of the Tuileries one day, Cooper watched a fellow countryman and two women burst into laughter as they passed close to a statue, then start running, and their “running and hiding their faces, and loud giggling left no one in ignorance of the cause of their extreme bashfulness.”

John Sanderson, as devoted a teacher as Mrs. Willard, thought the statues in the Tuileries depicting classic mythology made a splendid gallery, its “silent lessons” improving public taste in the arts and “elegancies” of life. Sanderson loved all the gardens of Paris. “Who would live in this rank old Paris if it was not for its gardens?”

Designed by the great seventeenth-century landscape architect André Le Nôtre, the Garden of the Tuileries covered sixty-seven acres, all enclosed by an iron fence and everything—paths, statues, basins, fountains, flower beds, rows of trees—laid out in formal symmetry. A broad, smooth central path—the main avenue for strolling—ran its length, with huge ponds, the Bassin Rond and the Bassin Octagonal, at either end. Just beyond the eastern perimeter stretched the immense Palais des Tuileries, where King Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie-Amélie resided with their numerous family. Begun in the sixteenth century by Catherine de Medici, it was dominated by the central dome of the Pavillon de l’Horloge.

Framing the north side of the garden was a long row of handsome townhouses that lined the new rue de Rivoli, and from an elevated terrace running the length of the north side one could see the beautiful Place Vendôme with its immense, bronze column made of melted-down cannon taken by Napoleon’s army at the battle of Austerlitz. To the west, past the octagonal pond, was the enormous Place Louis XV, or Place de la Concorde, where once the guillotine had stood, and beyond the long perspective of the Champs-Élysées extended upward to the giant, but still uncompleted Arc de Triomphe.

On the south rim of the garden another elevated terrace offered strollers an uninterrupted view of the Seine. On this same terrace Thomas Jefferson had settled himself day after day to watch construction of the domed Hôtel de Salm across the river, so “smitten” by its neoclassical elegance that he would later rebuild his own Monticello to achieve a similar look.

Galignani’s Guide proclaimed the Garden of the Tuileries “the most fashionable promenade in Paris,” and late afternoon was the time to see the show. Even the plump “Citizen King,” Louis-Philippe himself, could occasionally be seen out for a stroll, looking very like the banker he once was, in top hat and black frock coat and carrying a green umbrella.

For many who frequented the garden, whether to walk or to linger comfortably on a shaded bench or hired chair, the children were the favorite part of the show, all happily laughing and running about, and all amazingly (to the Americans) chattering away in French, while watched over by immaculate, full-skirted Swiss maids. “I have been there repeatedly since I have been in Paris, and have seen nothing like the children,” Nathaniel Willis reported to his readers in the NewYork Mirror. “They move my heart always, more than anything under heaven.” It was enough to make one forget Napoleon and his wars.

But then Paris was a continuing lesson in the enjoyment to be found in such simple, unhurried occupations as a walk in a garden or watching children at play or just sitting observing the human cavalcade. One learned to take time to savor life, much as one took time to savor a good meal or glass of wine. The French called it “l’entente de la vie,” the harmony of life.

John Sanderson, watching the parade of fashionable women on the wide path of the Garden, said, “I never venture in here without saying that part of the Lord’s Prayer about temptation. …”

Sanderson kept thinking how much city life at home could be improved by public spaces of such beauty. At home the value of city property was reckoned almost exclusively by what could be built on it. Independence Square, he had heard Philadelphians calculate, was worth a thousand dollars a foot, “every inch of it.” Pride in new railroads and the like too often lead Americans to measure value by the capacity to answer some practical, physical need. “Utility with all her arithmetic very often miscalculates,” he wrote.

Let us have gardens, then, and other public places where we may see our friends, and parade our vanities, if you will, before the eyes of the world. Did you ever know anyone who was not delighted with a garden?

Sooner or later all the newly arrived Americans crossed the Seine to walk the labyrinth of narrow streets in the Latin Quarter. Or to see the great inner courtyard of the Sorbonne, or the Luxembourg Palace and its magnificent gardens. Or take in the “curiosities” at the Jardin des Plantes, including the famous Zarafa, the only giraffe in all of France, which stood eleven and a half feet high, even higher when she stretched her neck.

The quantities of books to be browsed among in one little shop after another, and the low prices, even for rare books, were astonishing. A student could buy “a library on the street from a quarter of a mile of books at six sous a volume,” reported an exuberant Sanderson. “I have just bought Rousseau in calf, octavo, at ten sous!”

Here, too, in the Latin Quarter were the poor. Compared to the Right Bank, it stood apart “as if the city of some other people.”

To the west, on the same side of the river, was the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the Seventh Arrondissement, the quiet neighborhood where Cooper and his family lived. Farther beyond stood the Hôtel des Invalides, the immense gold-domed barracks and military hospital built in the days of Louis XIV.

Père Lachaise, the city’s largest, most famous cemetery, was a good walk back over the river to the northeast. There one could stroll among weeping willows and some 50,000 grave markers and the marble tombs of the eminent dead of France.

Or for those with the stomach for it, there was another popular attraction of which no mention was to be found in Galignani’s Guide. At the Paris morgue on the Île-de-la-Cité unidentified bodies taken from the Seine were regularly put on public display. Most of the bodies had been caught in a net stretched across the river for that purpose downstream at Saint-Cloud. Some were murder victims, but the great majority were suicides. Stripped of their clothes, they lay stretched out on black marble tables, on the chance someone might claim them. Otherwise, after three days, they were sold to doctors for ten francs each. Crowds of people came to see. As Sanderson noted, “You can stop in on your way as you go to the flower market, which is just opposite.”

Joining the throngs of promenading Parisians, the Americans walked the length of the Grand Avenue of the Champs-Élysées, nearly two miles, from the Place de la Concorde gently uphill to where Napoleon’s colossal Arc de Triomphe, under construction since 1806, was at long last nearing completion. On a fine Sunday three or four thousand elegant carriages went rolling by on the avenue, in a show of fancy horses and the latest high fashions.

At a corner along the way, at the rue de Berri, stood the stone mansion where Jefferson had resided. Another few miles beyond the city was what had once been Benjamin Franklin’s splendid estate on an elevated setting in the village of Passy. Less than a mile beyond that, at Auteuil, was the mansion where John and Abigail Adams had lived.

Such reminders of their own history were particularly refreshing for the Americans, engulfed as they were every day by a French past infinitely richer. A lightning rod Franklin installed at his estate at Passy was still to be seen. As the Americans were pleased to learn, it had been the first lightning rod in all of France.

In his Notre-Dame de Paris, describing the view from the top of the great cathedral, Victor Hugo had written that in all the eye could see there was “nothing that did not belong to the art of architecture.” And from the countless miles they covered at ground level, and all they took in, the Americans, too, came to see and appreciate how much of the transcending appeal of Paris, the spell of Paris, derived from light, color, and architecture.

It was not just that they had never known a city of such size or variety, or with so much history, but they had never known one where the look and mood could be so strikingly different in different light. The Seine could be any of a dozen shades of mud-brown or chalky green, gleaming silver or a deep indigo, depending on the time of year, the time of day, or simply whether the sun was out. The change could be astonishing, theatrical. In the gloom of winter, sand-colored bridges and palaces could look as leaden as the skies overhead, just as in full sunshine—even in winter— the same bridges and palaces would glow with such golden warmth it was as if they were lit from within.

Naturally most Americans, unlike their countryman Cooper, greatly preferred Paris in sunshine. It was then—and there was no better time than late afternoon—when the gardens were at their loveliest, when strong, brilliant light and the sharpness of shadows presented great façades and belfries, gilded domes and chimney pots, at their best, vividly defining their character. Then especially it became manifest that whether the mode was the Gothic Hugo adored, or the Baroque or classical, architects built with light no less than with brick and stone.

Nathaniel Willis, having spent his first week walking the city in drizzling rain, said that when the sun burst forth at last it so changed all his previous impressions that he had to set off and see it all a second time. “And it seemed to me another city,” he wrote. “I never realized so forcibly the beauty of sunshine. Architecture, particularly, is nothing without it.”

II

The glories of the art of architecture, of the arts on all sides, in and out of doors, the conviction of the French that the arts were indispensable to the enjoyment and meaning of life, affected the Americans more than anything else about Paris, and led many to conclude their own country had a long way to go. Something had awakened within them. Most would never again look upon life in the same way, as they said themselves repeatedly in so many words.

Charles Sumner found himself feeling “cabined, cribbed, confined” by his own ignorance of art, but on a second visit to the Louvre during which he concentrated his attention on works by Raphael and Leonardo, he felt the thrill of a great awakening. “They touched my mind, untutored as it is, like a rich strain of music.”

To his amazement, John Sanderson had begun to love art almost as much as he loved nature. “In our own country, we have nothing yet to show in the way of great works of art,” he wrote. “It is a mighty advantage these old countries have over us.”

To judge by their letters and journals, and the unabashed enthusiasm expressed, the performing arts surpassed anything the Americans had ever seen or imagined. They could hardly get enough of the opera and theater. Some, it would seem, went nearly every night.

“The evening need never hang heavy on the stranger’s hands,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, having dispensed altogether with his initial misgivings about Paris. The very air now seemed charged with excitement. “More than twenty theaters are blazing with light and echoing with fine music … not to mention concerts … shows innumerable,” he wrote. “The theater is the passion of the French and the taste and splendor of their dramatic exhibitions can hardly be exceeded.”

There were two opera houses, both exuberantly ornate and spacious: the Théâtre Italien, on the Place des Italiens, where Italian opera was performed, and the Salle Le Peletier, home to the company now known as the Paris Opera, at that time sometimes called the Grand Opéra and known, too, for its corps de ballet.

Faultlessly attired and wearing a turban, Emma Willard went escorted by her son to the Italian Opera for a performance of Otello. She was pleased especially with the vantage point of their box seats, not so much for the view of the stage as the show of “genteel society,” as she was frank to say. She later described the richly carved and gilded embellishments of the theater, the crimson curtain, the gorgeously lighted chandeliers. And the music, when it began, was much to her liking. But the audience interested her far more, and having had the foresight to bring “an excellent eyeglass,” she studied every detail, every gesture.

I never saw so many well dressed ladies together before; but it was not so much new forms of things which I saw as it was a greater perfection of material, of making and putting on. In manners also, one remarks a difference between these people and those we see at home under similar circumstances. All seem to live not for themselves, but for others. Nobody looks dreamy—but all are animated—gentlemen are on alert if a glove or fan is dropped, and ladies never forget the appropriate nod, or smile of thanks.

Mrs. Willard approved entirely the French regard for fashion as an art unto itself. “We may make many valuable improvements from the instruction of French women in regard to dress, which after all is no unimportant affair to a woman.”

It is incredible what a nice eye a French woman has for dress and personal appearance. It is like a musician whose ear has become so acute that he discovers discords where to ordinary persons there seems perfect harmony.

Charles Sumner made a point of going to a performance of Mozart’s Don Giovanni, notwithstanding that he could claim no more knowledge of music than of painting. The part of Don Ottavio was sung by Giovanni Battista Rubini, the leading Italian tenor of the day, but Sumner was surprised to find himself carried away by the “singular power” of all the performers. He had never heard anything like it, never known such feelings as swept over him.

While the Paris Opera was second to none in all of Europe in its elaborate scenery and costuming, and the glitter of the audience was no less than at the Italian Opera, it was the dazzling Marie Taglioni, considered the greatest dancer in the world, that “tout Paris” turned out for, filling all 1,300 seats of the Salle Le Peletier performance after performance. “Have you seen Taglioni?” was often the first question a foreign visitor was asked on arriving in Paris.

Her Italian father, Philippe Taglioni, a famous maître de ballet, had started her dancing as a child, and by age twenty-three she had made her debut at the Paris Opera. She had dark hair and large, luminous dark eyes. Her skin was uncommonly pale, her arms and legs uncommonly long and thin. By the time someone like Nathaniel Willis saw her perform, she was in her late twenties but looked younger. She had been one of the first to dance on the tips of her toes, and was known for her floating leaps and for her costume, with its tight bodice and short gauzy skirt, the prototype of the tutu. So lavish was the praise for her beauty and artistry that many went to see her for the first time wondering whether they might be disappointed.

“No language can describe her motion,” wrote Nathaniel Willis after seeing her in the role of the dancing girl in Le Dieu et la Bayadère, the part that had made her famous. “She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke, or a flake of down. Her difficulty seems to be to keep to the floor.”

Her figure is small, but rounded to the very last degree of perfection; not a muscle swelled beyond the exquisite outline; not an angle, not a fault. … Her face is most strangely interesting, not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half-retiring sweetness that you sometimes see blended with the secluded reserve and unconscious refinement of young girls just “out” in a circle of high fashion.

John Sanderson felt utter joy watching her. He had never seen anything to compare. “Mercy! How deficient we are in our country in these elegant accomplishments. In many things we are still in our infancy, in dancing we are not yet born.”

Nathaniel Willis wondered to what degree the response of an audience enhanced the quality of a performance on stage. Taglioni’s performance was a triumph of art, and she was applauded as an artist, but then the “overwhelming tumult of acclamation” she received for her most brilliant moments came from “the hearts of the audience, and as such must have been both a lesson and the highest compliment for Taglioni.” Here, he thought, was the great contrast with the theater at home. “We shall never have a high-toned drama in America, while, as at present, applause is won only by physical exertion, and the nice touches of genius and nature pass undetected and unfelt.”

What Willis appreciated most about the French theater was that the actors did not look like actors, or play their parts as if acting. He liked their naturalness, their “unstudied” facial expressions. “And when they come upon stage, it is singularly without affectation, and as the character they represent would appear.”

Wendell Holmes and his fellow medical students, for all the pressures on them in their studies, took time to attend both the opera and the theater. Even James Jackson, Jr., the most intense of students, went along. By “indulging” himself this way, he was better able to study and maintain his health, he assured his father, knowing his father’s own love of music.

Indeed, while at the opera, I long for your company almost as much as while at the hospital, as I feel in both places how strongly you would sympathize with me—for I did not know what music was in America and I assure you I will not allow myself to neglect it altogether here. …

Like others, Holmes and Jackson wrote dutifully to their parents every week, sometimes comparing notes with one another in the process. “James Jackson has just come up to my room to write home a letter, and reminded me that I must have one ready for the next packet,” Holmes began one letter. “Well, here we are, Jackson at my desk and I at my table, both of us in a little hurry, but not willing to let the day pass without our weekly tribute.”

Of the many theaters in Paris, the famous old Théâtre Français, adjacent to the Palais Royal, was foremost and immensely popular largely because of Mademoiselle Mars, who was to French drama of the time what Taglioni was to dance. Here were performed the great classical French works—the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Molière—and in the finest style and according to strict rules. For the Americans intent on learning French, it was common practice to bring along a copy of the play to follow what was being said. Such theater was indispensable to the intelligent foreigner, Holmes explained to his parents, both as a guide to French manners and as “the best standard” of the language. In consideration of his parents’ views on such matters, he added, “There is no need of cutting or tearing off this last page about theaters—where society is far advanced they must exist and are a blessing.”

Mademoiselle Mars, whose real name was Anne Françoise Boutet, had been an unrivaled favorite on the French stage for nearly thirty years and had made Molière her pièce de résistance. Her pronunciation was considered the finest model of classic French.

“Molière could not have had a proper conception of his own genius, not having seen Mademoiselle Mars,” wrote Sanderson, who had waited in line for more than two hours to buy a ticket. Charles Sumner saw her in Molière’s Les Femmes Savantes. “Her voice is like a silver flute, her eye like a gem.” He knew he would remember the evening as long as he lived.

And following the theater, there was more. “Thousands in merry moods throng the walks,” wrote Thomas Appleton, who had no medical studies to cope with, and few if any worries about spending money. His wealthy father, a Boston merchant, banker, and textile manufacturer, had told him there was no reason to deny himself whatever was “comfortable.”

Appleton adored the restaurants and cafés of Paris, especially after dark when the light from their windows was like “the blaze of day.” He had made a point of dining at several of the finest, including the Rocher de Cancale, known for its oysters, and Tortoni’s, on the boulevard des Italiens, where in summer after the opera the haut ton flocked to “take ices.”

“Cafés abound in Paris, particularly in the principal streets and the boulevards,” the newcomers read in their Galignani’s guidebook.

It is impossible to conceive either their number, variety, or elegance, without having seen them. In no other city is there anything to resemble them; and they are not only unique, but in every way adapted for convenience and amusement.

The most celebrated concentration was at the Palais Royal, where the modern restaurant had originated in the eighteenth century. The Café de Foy, the oldest and still one of the finest in Paris, Périgord, Café Corazza, and Véry were all in the Palais Royal. For the cost of a dinner at Véry, it was said, one could live comfortably in the provinces for a month. “Alas, my poor roasting and frying countrymen!” wrote Sanderson after dining at Véry and observing other Americans trying with equal difficulty to fathom the choices offered on the menu. “Your best way in this emergency,” he advised, “is to call the garçon and leave all to him, and sit still like a good child and take what is given to you.”

The gaslit Café des Mille Colonnes outdid them all in mirrors, and the elegant Trois Frères Provençaux was where Holmes, Jackson, Warren, and others of the medical students convened regularly on Sundays. As much as the food and the wine, they relished the talk that went with such evenings in such an atmosphere. Talk helped one shape one’s thoughts, said Holmes, the greatest talker of the lot.

At Véfour, which many considered the most beautiful, rows of tables were covered with snow-white cloths, and the garçons [waiters] dressed to match. Each had one jacket pocket filled with silver spoons, another with silver forks, a corkscrew in a vest pocket and a snow-white napkin, or serviette, on the left arm. The menu was the size of a newspaper.

At the Café des Aveugles, below ground level, a small band of blind musicians played. The Café de la Paix was described in Galignani’s Guide as richly decorated and much frequented by “ladies of easy virtue and Parisian dandies of the second order.”

The Palais Royal, Holmes liked to say, was to Paris what Paris was to Europe. If enjoyment was the object of life, as some philosophers held, no one spot in the world offered such a variety of choices. The principal restaurants and the shops shimmering with jewelry and Sèvres china were on the garden level, as well as shoemakers, linen drapers, waistcoat makers, and tailors. On the level above were still more restaurants and a number of gambling houses. Some of the gambling houses were “très élégantes,” and to the surprise of newly arrived Americans one saw “beautiful women engaged in various games of hazard.” Other establishments catered to a rougher trade. As Galignani’s Guide warned, in the Palais Royal were “haunts where the stranger, if he ventures to enter, should be upon his guard against the designs of the courtesan and the pickpocket.”

(It was not that gambling went on at the Palais Royal only. It was everywhere and an unfamiliar spectacle for many Americans. In many states at home, gambling was a criminal offense. “Billiards, cards, faro, and other games of hazard, are to be found at every … street and alley of Paris,” wrote John Sanderson. “The shuffling of cards or rattling of dice is a part of the music of every Parisian saloon. …”)

Prostitutes of varying degrees of sophistication, allure, and price maintained a conspicuous presence throughout much of the city wherever crowds congregated. But the young Americans said little or nothing on the subject in their letters or even in the privacy of their diaries. Dire warnings by parents and teachers weighed heavily, as did the dread of syphilis, and few wished to acknowledge succumbing to the pleasures of the flesh or even suggest that when in Paris one might do as the Parisians did.

But then they were on their own as never before. “Young men are very fond of Paris no doubt,” wrote Emerson, “because of the perfect freedom—freedom from observation as well as interference—in which each one walks. …” There were, it seemed, some advantages after all to being a “stranger.”

While making no case for prostitution, John Sanderson could not bring himself to disapprove of, let alone scorn, the young working women of Paris who, because of pitifully meager wages as shop clerks and the like, chose to make “arrangements.” These were the grisettes, so called because of the grey (grises) skirts and blouses they often wore.

“They are very pretty, and have the laudable little custom of falling deeply in love with one for five or six francs a piece,” John Sanderson wrote. To many a student in the Latin Quarter, a grisette was “a branch of education.”

If a student is ill, his faithful grisette nurses him and cures him; if he is destitute, she works for him. … Thus a mutual dependence endears them to each other; he defends her with his life, and sure of his protection, she feels her consequence and struts in her new starched cap. … She is the most ingenious imitation of an innocent woman that is in the world.

If a young man’s morals were “out of order” at home, Paris was not exactly the place to send him, Sanderson conceded. To keep a mistress was not only acceptable in Paris society, but was nearly always mentioned to one’s credit.

If you can preserve him by religious and other influences from either, as well as from the dangers of an ascetic and solitary abstinence—for solitude has its vices as well as dissipation— so much the better. He will be a better husband, a better citizen, and a better man. But let me tell you that to educate a young man of fortune and leisure to live through a youth of honesty, has become excessively difficult even in any country; and to expect that with money and address he will live entirely honest in Paris, where women of good quality are thrown in his face—women of art, of beauty, and refined education—it is to attribute virtues to human nature she is no way entitled to.

Any problems or complaints the Americans had were comparatively few and seldom of great or lasting consequence. The long delay in mail from home remained a constant annoyance, and at times a worry. Family and friends were repeatedly urged to write, yet time after time when one went to pick up the mail, there was nothing. Months could pass with not a word from home. Emma Willard grew so distraught over this she was nearly ill, as she wrote to her sister. “My anxiety deprives me of sleep, and preys upon my health.”

Many, like Charles Sumner, found winter’s cold, unrelieved greyness— la grisouille, as it was called—more nearly than they could take. Emerson thought Paris unduly expensive. Nathaniel Willis thought one’s time as well as one’s money disappeared much too fast. Others besides Holmes did not care for the English men and women they met, and none of the Americans liked being taken for English.

Sumner hated seeing so many soldiers about the streets, the public gardens, and standing guard at every museum and palace. It seemed nearly impossible to be out of sight of soldiers. They were part of the picture, and this took getting used to.

Emma Willard was appalled to learn that more than a third of the children in Paris were born out of wedlock. During a visit to the Hospice des Enfants-Trouvés, the Hospital for Foundlings, seeing the numbers of babies ranged in rows of cribs, she was heartstricken, exactly as Abigail Adams had been on a similar tour long before. Like Abigail Adams, Mrs. Willard was touched by the devotion shown by the nuns to the care of the infants, but felt there had to be something dreadfully amiss about a society in which so many babies were abandoned.

But the long-awaited letters from home nearly always arrived. Charles Sumner found relief from the cold by moving to different lodgings. Those short of money seemed to find ways to get by. Those like Emma Willard and John Sanderson, who had left home in quest of better health, found their health greatly improved.

“On prend l’essence de la vie dans la ville.” “One captures the essence of life in the city,” the French said. To be in Paris was to have the world at one’s feet—“le monde à ses pieds.”

Wendell Holmes adjusted to the new life so quickly and easily it took him by surprise. Of all the young Americans none adapted to Paris so readily and enthusiastically. He felt entirely at home, as if he had always lived in Paris, which was remarkable, given he had known nothing the least like his new life. He had no trouble learning French, and from his friends among the French students he quickly picked up on the “little practical matters” that helped him make the most of the city, including “economy,” he assured his parents:

An American or Englishman when he first comes to Paris … is always extravagant and this for two reasons—first, because he is under an excitement to find himself in a strange place and indifferent to the base motive of economy, and next because he is totally ignorant of the thousand expedients for avoiding expense which have sprung from the philosophy of the Parisians. Thus he pays his garçon (servant) double what he ought to, he gives money to the little rascally beggars who never dare to ask a Frenchman. He takes a cabriolet when he should take an omnibus. He calls for twice as much at the restaurants as he wants—ignorant, poor creature, that while an Englishman values everything in proportion to its price, the Frenchman’s eulogy is “magnifique et pas cher!”

Holmes liked the French. He adored the food and enjoyed especially congenial gathering places like the Café Procope, close to the École de Médecine, which everyone knew was once a favorite of Voltaire and Benjamin Franklin. It had been started in 1670 by a Sicilian named Francesco Procopio del Cotillo, who was said to have introduced coffee to Paris.

“I am getting more and more a Frenchman,” Holmes told his parents. “I love to talk French, to eat French, to drink French every now and then. …” Paris was “paradise”—though, to be sure, a very different variety of paradise than envisioned in Boston. For years afterward Holmes would delight in quoting a remark of Appleton’s, “Good Americans, when they die, go to Paris.”

Appleton, who rarely ceased having a good time, chose after a month or so to move on and see more of Europe as he had always intended. But in 1836 he was back again when his father decided to bring five of the family to Europe in grand style, which included a suite of rooms at the famous Hôtel Meurice on the rue de Rivoli overlooking the Garden of the Tuileries. On the question of whether to be a painter or a writer, Appleton remained unresolved, and as it turned out, for all his considerable talent for both, he would be neither seriously. Nor would he ever settle for any fixed occupation. His father advised him not to be overly concerned about money and thanks to his father’s fortune, he never had to be. He would continue as he had right along, writing and painting for his own pleasure, a convivial devotee of the arts, generous with his money, beloved for his wit, his gift for talk and for friendship. He was too devoted to Boston ever to choose the life of an expatriate, but he would travel to Europe and return to Paris time after time, never able to get enough of it.

For the rest there was work at hand and for all the limitless fascination and pleasures of Paris, the work mattered foremost and consumed much the greatest part of all their time and energy. Work was their reason for being there, and they never lost sight of that. Like the young Boston artist George Healy, they had a strong desire to make something of themselves, and with few exceptions they were working longer hours and with far greater concentration than ever in their lives. Even James Cooper, who had already made something of himself, not only completed The Prairie, the third of his “Leather-Stocking” novels, but six other books as well. Some days, according to his wife, Susan, he worked such long hours and became so agitated he could hardly hold his pen.

Samuel Morse, who arrived in Paris on New Year’s Day, 1830, had gone at once, predictably, to the Louvre and walked up and down the Grand Gallery for three hours, trying in his excitement to take it all in and decide which paintings to copy. Two weeks later he left for Italy, not returning until the following year and thus missing the July Revolution. But in September 1831, he returned, and that autumn at the Louvre conceived the idea for what was to be the most difficult, ambitious painting of his career.

George Healy had done little else but “study hard.” How exactly he managed to get by—with scarcely any money and speaking no French at first—he never said. “But manage he did,” a daughter would one day write. Somehow he talked his way into the studio, or atelier, of the then-celebrated painter Baron Antoine-Jean Gros. He was the sole American student, but having set up his easel, he became to all intents and purposes, in his daughter’s words, a French painter, seeing things from a French point of view. “He lived like his comrades, whom he greatly liked. … It was often a hard life, but a singularly interesting and varied one also.”

True to his assignment from the NewYork Mirror, Nathaniel Willis kept turning out his letters, as did John Sanderson in his effort to be, as he said, “the Boswell of Paris.” Sanderson went home to stay in 1836. His book Sketches of Paris: In Familiar Letters to His Friends; by an American Gentleman in Paris, as descriptive and delightful as anything on the subject by any American of the day, would be widely read on both sides of the Atlantic. It was published in Philadelphia in 1838, and in London that same year under the title The American in Paris. A French edition appeared in Paris in 1843.

Emma Willard never slackened in a busy social schedule that included Lafayette and Cooper and their families and grand soirées sufficient to feast her eyes on diamonds, rubies, emeralds, and ostrich feathers beyond anything she had ever imagined. She studied and approved highly the attention given to elevated conversation in such society. She spent more time at the Louvre. She undertook her own survey of French schools and arranged to stay longer than planned. “It seems as if a spell was laid upon me that I cannot go from this place,” she explained. Before departing at last for home in the spring of 1831, her head filled with so much that she had seen and learned, she recruited a first teacher of French for her school, Madame Alphise de Courval. As would be said of Emma Willard, few people ever derived more benefit from a time abroad, and “the effect was speedily seen in the renewed éclat of the Troy Female Seminary.”

Sumner, the ultimate industrious scholar, never let up attending lectures at the Sorbonne—on natural history, geology, geography, Egyptology, Greek history, the history of the English Parliament, the history of philosophy, Latin poetry, criminal law, the Byzantine emperor Justinian and the Justinian Code—and made time as well to sit in on lectures at the hospitals. He had been as determined in his efforts to master French as he was about nearly everything, and after a month, with the help of two tutors, he was able to follow the lectures with little difficulty. In six weeks he was taking part in conversations in French with students and faculty alike and on all manner of subjects.