CHAPTER THREE

MORSE AT THE LOUVRE

My country has the most prominent place in my thoughts. How shall I raise her name?

—SAMUEL F. B. MORSE

I

Never during his time abroad had James Fenimore Cooper had so much to report about a friend and fellow countryman as he did now about Samuel Morse. Morse was “hard at work” at the Louvre, Cooper wrote in one letter. Morse “has created a sensation” at the Louvre, he said in another. “He is painting an exhibition picture that I feel certain must take.” Beyond that, Morse was “just as good a fellow as there is going.”

The “good fellows” of life mattered greatly to Cooper. “Friends are rare in any land,” he had his frontiersman hero, Natty Bumppo, observe in The Prairie, and those he counted as friends knew his many kindnesses and genuine interest in their aspirations and concerns. He was a great organizer of clubs, a most faithful correspondent.

Cooper and Morse had met first at a reception at the White House seven years earlier, at the time of Lafayette’s visit, and found how much they had in common. Back in New York they saw more of each other. But as often happens to sojourners far from home in foreign lands, their time together, first in Italy, now in France, had led to a fast friendship.

Growing up in Charlestown, Massachusetts, Samuel Finley Breese Morse had been known in the family as Finley. To Cooper he was Samuel, or Master Samuel, or plain Morse, and there was no mistaking Cooper’s pride in him. “Crowds get round the picture, for Samuel has quite made a hit in the Louvre,” Cooper wrote to William Dunlap, a painter and art critic in New York who would, Cooper knew, spread the word among their “set” at home.

It was the month of March in the year of 1832—a year that would prove to be one of the most calamitous in the history of Paris—and well before such other Americans as Wendell Holmes, George Healy, and Charles Sumner arrived on the scene. The weather, as Nathaniel Willis noted, was “deliciously spring-like.”

At age forty-two, having spent half his life as an artist, Samuel Morse felt he had at last reached his stride, and that his time in Europe had already been of immeasurable value. During a year and more in Italy he had spent long days working in the Vatican galleries and other museums. He studied paintings, made copies on commission, including one of Raphael’s School of Athens, for which he was to receive $100. He did landscapes, filled notebooks with sketches of and comments on churches, street scenes, and processions. At the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, a sixteenth-century portrait by Veronese had awakened him as no painting ever had to a new understanding of color.

Besides the time he had spent with Cooper and his family in Rome, including a moonlight tour of the Colosseum, Morse struck up a friendship in Florence with a young American sculptor, Horatio Greenough, a friend of Cooper’s, whom Morse saw as a fellow spirit “wholly bent” on “excellence in his art.” Greenough had paid Morse the compliment of doing a bust of him. To Greenough, who was still in his twenties, Morse seemed well on in years. He enjoyed teasing Morse for his straitlaced Puritan ways, calling him “wicked Morse,” and kept telling him it was time he married again. A man “without a true love,” insisted Greenough (who was happily single), “is a ship without ballast, a one-tined fork, half a pair of scissors.”

When Morse returned to Paris in the fall of 1831, Cooper thought his work “amazingly improved.” Morse had no sooner unpacked than Cooper commissioned him to paint a copy of a Rembrandt, Tobit and the Angel, that Cooper judged to be as difficult an assignment as any painting in the Louvre.

Cooper considered himself an artist as a writer, and reviewers of his novels often likened his eye for description to that of a painter. In France, Balzac wrote of Cooper that in his hands the art of the pen had never come closer to the art of the brush. Cooper took serious interest in painting and favored the company of artists. In the New York lunch club he had started—the Bread and Cheese—the artists outnumbered the literary men.

To Cooper, the art of portraiture, when it went beyond a skillful likeness to a delineation of character, had an especially strong appeal. Seeing a portrait of Jefferson by Thomas Sully, Cooper had experienced a complete change of mind. His staunch Federalist family background had given way, he said, and he saw “a dignity, a repose” in Jefferson he had never seen in other portraits. “I saw nothing but Jefferson standing before me, a gentleman … in all republican simplicity, with a grace and ease on the canvas. …”

From the time Morse took up his ambitious project at the Louvre, Cooper could not keep away. He came every day, climbing the long flight of marble stairs to the second floor to sit and watch.

It was to be a giant interior view of the Louvre. The canvas Morse had prepared measured six by nine feet, making it greater in size than his House of Representatives of a decade earlier. And it was to be an infinitely greater test of his skill. Instead of a crowd of congressmen’s faces to contend with, he had set himself to render a generous sampling of the world’s greatest works of art, altogether thirty-eight paintings—landscapes, religious subjects, and portraits, including Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa—and convey in miniature the singular beauty and power of each.

Interior views displaying the treasures of great European art collectors had been an established convention since the seventeenth century. One stunning example of the genre was The Picture Gallery of Cardinal Silvio Valenti Gonzaga, painted in 1749 by Giovanni Paolo Panini, which presented the collection Morse had seen at the Palazzo Colonna in Rome, though in a setting only somewhat like that of the Palazzo. In 1831, just a year ahead of Morse, a British artist, John Scarlett Davis, had done one of the Louvre, a painting Morse probably knew about and may have been inspired by. But very few Americans had ever seen such paintings, and no American artist had yet undertaken the interior of the Louvre. Morse’s view was to be nearly twice the size of the Davis canvas, which in conception, compared to what Morse had in mind, was prosaic, even banal.

American painters had been coming to Paris for a long time—notably Benjamin West, John Singleton Copley, and John Trumbull in the late eighteenth century—and they had registered great delight in the city. Trumbull had come as the guest of Jefferson, and in the library of Jefferson’s home on the Champs-Élysées he and Jefferson had first discussed the idea of a painting to commemorate the signing of the Declaration of Independence. On a small piece of paper, Jefferson had drawn a rough floor plan of the room at Independence Hall as he remembered it, and Trumbull, on the same piece of paper, had made a quick thumbnail sketch of how he envisioned the scene that was to become the best-known work painted by an American.

Rembrandt Peale and John Vanderlyn were among the other American painters who came later to Paris, Vanderlyn spending seven years in all. Robert Fulton, artist and inventor, spent time there at intervals from 1797 to 1804, during which he both painted and worked on ideas for steamboats and submarines.

No American prior to Morse, however, had set himself to so great and difficult a Paris subject, a task that could require a year’s work, as Morse appreciated.

He had decided, in effect, to rehang the walls of the elegant Salon Carré, or Square Room, the heart of the Louvre’s picture galleries. He would select his own chefs d’œuvre from the museum’s collection and arrange them on canvas to his liking. This in itself was an enormously ambitious undertaking, in that it meant walking the length and breadth of the Louvre for days, taking time to look seriously at some 1,250 paintings, then, as his own jury of one, decide which to include and how to arrange them.

As it was, the paintings hanging in the Salon Carré were contemporary French works, most in the Romantic style, including Théodore Géricault’s highly dramatic Raft of the Medusa. Romantic art, with its emphasis on drama, color, and vigorous brushwork, was at its height. Just the year before, in 1831, at the French Academy’s Salon, the annual exhibition of contemporary art held at the Louvre, Eugène Delacroix had presented his Liberty Leading the People, a huge heroic tribute to the Revolution of 1830, in which its commanding figure, the resolute Liberty, her breast bared, leads the charge to victory, the tricolor held high. The brilliant young Delacroix, who had become the commanding figure in the Romantic revolt against academic art, also included himself in the painting as a handsome, resolute citizen at Liberty’s side, armed with a musket.

But Morse, whose work was fundamentally academic, failed to appreciate or take much interest in the Romantics and their revolt. He would choose instead those sixteenth- and seventeenth-century European masterworks—mainly from the Italian Renaissance—that he loved especially, and by the artists he most admired, but also, importantly, works he felt his fellow Americans ought to know and learn to appreciate. He was a man on a mission, a kind of cultural evangelical, as would be said. He would bring the good news of time-honored European art home to his own people, for their benefit and for the betterment of his country.

It was not a new idea. In the same spirit, Jefferson had purchased some sixty-three paintings while in Paris, mostly copies, in the belief that they, like the hundreds of books he selected from bookstalls by the Seine, could help increase American appreciation of the fine arts and the world of ideas.

The great virtue of Morse’s project was that so many acknowledged masterworks could be seen all together. It would be his own musée imaginaire, which he would take on tour at home, though unlike the Louvre, he would charge admission. He had had the same idea with his House of Representatives and with no success. But this, he felt, was such a vastly different subject that the public would respond differently. He was intensely enthusiastic, but then he was by nature intensely enthusiastic.

Cooper loved what he saw emerging and the “sensation” it was causing. He had a regular routine—work at his desk in the morning, then proceed to the Louvre (a walk of a mile and a half or more from his home across the Seine) to spend the afternoon with Morse.

I get up at eight, read the papers, breakfast at ten, sit down to the quill at 1/2 past ten, work till one, throw off my morning gown, draw on my boots and gloves, take a cane … go to the Louvre, where I find Morse stuck up on a high working stand. …

Morse worked from a tall, movable scaffold of his own contrivance, which he shifted about from point to point in the galleries to copy his chosen subjects, some of which were hung quite high.

His painting was of a wall full of pictures in the Salon Carré hung floor-to-ceiling and cheek-by-jowl—the standard mode for French exhibitions. Just left of center in the composition, through a large open doorway, could be seen the long, high-vaulted Grande Galerie with its skylights stretching away as if forever, like a glowing vista in a landscape. To the left and right of the main wall of paintings were portions of the sidewalls, these, too, solid with pictures though much foreshortened like the side-walls of a stage set. In fact, the net effect of the whole arrangement was very like that of a stage set, and it was Morse’s plan to place a half dozen or more figures on stage, as it were, for added interest and to give human scale to the room.

He worked all day “uninterruptedly,” Sundays included, from nine o’clock until just before four, when the guards came through to call out that the museum was closing. Visitors flowed through the galleries the whole time, and other artists and students worked at their easels doing copies. But Morse up on his scaffold remained the undisputed center of curiosity and topic of conversation. Sitting astride a chair close at hand, Cooper enjoyed the show more than anyone, occasionally, for comic relief, offering his friend a little unsolicited advice: “Lay it on here, Samuel— more yellow—the nose is too short—the eye too small—damn it, if I had been a painter what a picture I should have painted.”

Nathaniel Willis, who was fascinated by faces, tried to fathom why, in a crowd, he could always recognize an American. There was something distinctive about the American face, something he had never noticed until coming to Paris. The distinguishing feature, he decided, was “the independent, self-possessed bearing of a man unused to look up to anyone as his superior in rank, united to the inquisitive, sensitive, communicative expression which is the index to our national character.”

To Willis, Cooper and Morse were the essence of the “national character,” and on a gentle, sunny afternoon in the Garden of the Tuileries that March, seeing them approaching along one of the wide gravel walks, Willis took note. A fashion plate himself, he had been observing the passing parade of French dandies, their heads “fresh from the hairdresser” and sporting the whitest of white gloves. Then Cooper and Morse came into view, and what contrast there was between these two good American faces!

Morse with his kind, open, gentle countenance, the very picture of goodness and sincerity; and Cooper, dark and corsair-looking, with his brows down over his eyes, and his strongly lined mouth fixed in an expression of moodiness and reserve.

The two faces were not equally just to their owners, Willis thought. Morse was all that his face bespoke, but Cooper was by no means as dark and moody as he appeared, as anyone who knew him could attest. Cooper himself called it his “chameleon face.”

In a portrait painted at home ten years before by John Wesley Jarvis, it is an intensely serious James Fenimore Cooper who fixes his bright black eyes on the viewer. A ruddy face from the brow down, it is dominated by a nose burned red by the sun, while the unusually broad forehead is pale white, the mark of a man who spent much time out of doors, his hat pulled low over the eyes.

On a marble bust carved in Paris by a leading French sculptor, Pierre-Jean David, Cooper’s face is leaner and handsomer, the brow, if anything, broader still, and there is a tenacious set to the jaw. Cooper’s family thought it an excellent likeness, which was not the case of another bust by Horatio Greenough, where the “corsair-look” was too much in evidence.

Cooper and Morse were about the same height, and from Morse’s passport we know he stood five feet nine. The rest of the passport description reads as follows:

Forehead: High

Eyes: Black

Nose: Straight

Mouth: Large

Chin: Regular

Hair: Black & Grey

Face: Long

In several portraits Morse did of himself, starting in his college years, his countenance is quite as kind, open, and gentle as Nathaniel Willis said, and boyish verging on pretty. Greenough also rendered Morse and gave due emphasis to the high forehead, straight nose, and large mouth. The boyish look, however, is no longer in evidence. The face Greenough modeled is leaner, the hair tousled, and there are creases at the corners of the wide mouth. It might be the bust of a handsome actor or poet. It is a gentle, romantic, somewhat soulful face, yet with an unmistakable look of purpose about it.

II

Cooper’s afternoons at the Louvre with Morse were a welcome diversion from much on his mind. They were part of that “little pleasure concealed in the bottom of the cup” he had hoped to find living abroad. In the eyes of many, Cooper, with his established reputation and attractive family, was the center of the small American circle in Paris. But for Cooper, Morse and Morse’s work at the Louvre had become a redeeming center of interest and enjoyment.

Six months earlier, in September, Cooper’s nephew William, who had become very like an adopted son, was taken ill. In October, William died of consumption at age twenty-two. With the onset of winter, Cooper’s wife, Susan, came down with a fever of some lingering indeterminate variety that had the whole family worried. Paris was notoriously unhealthy in the chill gloom of winter, the season of colds and deadly fevers.

“Ma femme est malade et … j’attends le médecin,” Cooper notified a French friend. The family’s Parisian doctor was doing too little for her, Cooper thought. He was too content to let nature take its course. “They [the French] are capital in all surgical or all anatomical applications, but when it comes to fevers and latent diseases, they are too timid by half.”

His own health, though uneven, was better than it had been in New York, as he liked to tell others. He was less troubled by fevers and gastric attacks. At age forty-two, he was often told he looked thirty-five. “Of course, I believe them,” he would respond. Susan, reporting in confidence to her sister, wrote that “Mr. Cooper” was quite well but for one problem. “When he goes into crowded rooms, then he is sure to suffer for the next twenty-four hours with an attack of nerves more or less violent.” But of this nothing was to be said beyond the family.

For several months there had been warnings of a possible onset of the dreaded cholera morbus. Reports had appeared in the Paris and London newspapers starting in August, and concern kept growing. From Boston in November, Dr. James Jackson, Sr., wrote to his son in Paris asking, “What are you to do if the cholera reaches you?” His advice was to “fly”— to leave France as fast as possible.

Cooper dismissed the talk of cholera, suspecting “a good deal of exaggeration on the subject.”

As usual, Cooper had a novel under way, his fourteenth. Beyond that he talked of doing a volume on his travels in Europe. He had been writing now for twelve years, and while the quality of his efforts was uneven, he took pride in the books and enjoyed the acclaim they brought. And he loved the money. It was for money that he had started writing in the first place, when the collapse of a family empire left him nearly destitute. According to the story told later by his daughter Sue, a story widely repeated, Cooper had been reading aloud to her mother from an English novel one evening when, after a chapter or two, he threw it aside saying he could write a better book. She had laughed at the idea, whereupon he set to work.

At no prior time had he shown the least interest in writing or entertained any thought of a literary life. At Yale, where he was the youngest student in the college, he had proven such a poor scholar and such a hellion that he was expelled at age sixteen. (Among other things, he had locked a donkey in a recitation room and exploded a homemade bomb under a dormitory door.) After a year under his father’s supervision at home in Cooperstown, the village founded by his father beside Otsego Lake in upstate New York, it was arranged for him to go to sea on a merchant ship. Finding he liked the sailor’s life, he had joined the U.S. Navy—it was then that he met his Paris walking companion, Captain Woolsey—and saw no reason not to make the navy a career, until he met Susan Augusta De Lancey, who thought it time he settled down.

Married in New York in 1811, they lived first with her parents at Mamaroneck, then moved to a farm by Otsego Lake. Cooper began building a stone manor house, and with a generous cash bequest from his father, who had died in 1809, he anticipated a serene future as an upstate country gentleman. Children were born. Debts accumulated. When his father’s unsettled estate was found to be riven with debt, and the family land holdings worth little because of a poor economy, Cooper faced bankruptcy.

His first book, Precaution, was a romance set in England, somewhat in the manner of a Jane Austen novel. It was not very good and only moderately successful. In England it was taken to be an English novel. But Cooper had discovered he liked the work and liked the prospect of the influence he might attain as an author. Books mattered. Without delay he tried again.

“By persuasion of Mrs. Cooper I have commenced another tale,” he wrote. (He called her his “tribunal of appeals,” “an excellent judge in everything.” He read all he wrote aloud to her and she went over every page of manuscript.) The result this time proved entirely different. The Spy was an all-out adventure tale set in America during the Revolutionary War. Its theme, as Cooper said, was patriotism, and it was an immediate hit.

From that point on, his success was phenomenal. The next tale, The Pioneers, sold 3,500 copies by noon of publication day. Less than a year later, a French translation appeared.

The Pioneers was published in 1823, the most difficult year of Cooper’s life. The house he had built burned. His two-year-old son, Fenimore, died. He himself suffered from sunstroke as well as severe bilious attacks, as he called them, and a fever that may have been malaria.

In The Pioneers he had been writing about a world much like that of his boyhood, and largely to please himself. The setting was Cooperstown (called Templeton in the book), the year, 1793. It was in The Pioneers, too, that he introduced Natty Bumppo, a lean old frontiersman, known also as Leatherstocking for the long deerskin leggings he wore, a character very like Daniel Boone, who had died only a few years earlier.

Two more historical novels followed: The Pilot, a sea story, and Lionel Lincoln, set in Boston at the time of the Battle of Bunker Hill.

Natty Bumppo appeared again in The Last of the Mohicans, where again the setting was upstate New York, only this time it was the New York wilderness of sixty years earlier, during the French and Indian War, and Natty, a scout, was in the prime of life. Cooper had written The Last of the Mohicans at top speed in three or four months. It was intense, romantic, filled with violence and bloodshed, as Natty, now also known as Hawkeye, and a Mohican friend, Chingachgook, escorted two sisters, the daughters of a British general, in a flight through the forest. Long descriptive passages of the wild American scenery—of river and waterfall and “the vast canopy of woods”—stirred readers as nothing else had by an American writer, and the book was an immediate success on both sides of the Atlantic.

It appeared in 1826, the year Cooper sailed for France and was already at work on still another Natty Bumppo tale called The Prairie. “I think Pioneers, Mohicans, and this book will form a connected series,” Cooper told a friend. “I confess Prairie is a favorite as far as it goes. …”

By the time he and the family were settled in Paris, he had become America’s most famous author. Morse would write of seeing Cooper’s books in the windows of every bookshop in the city. Not since the days of Benjamin Franklin had an American been so welcomed and liked— attention Cooper loved, not just for himself, but for his country.

He and Susan became frequent guests of honor at dinners given by Lafayette at his mansion on the rue d’Anjou, in the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and were treated to overnight visits at La Grange, the general’s towered, fifteenth-century château southeast of the city. They were made the center of attention at diplomatic dinners and lavish entertainments, after which Cooper filled pages of correspondence describing the “splendors”— the setting, the food, the eminence of those present. He was hailed as the American Walter Scott, a comparison intended as a high compliment, but which privately he disliked. Artists and sculptors asked him to sit for them.

As much as he enjoyed such attention and acclaim, Cooper was far from enamored with “the mere butterflies” of Paris society. Taken by Lafayette to be “presented,” he found King Louis-Philippe perfectly courteous and was glad to hear him speak with pleasure of his time in America. But for others he encountered, Cooper had little use. “The fear of losing their butterfly distinctions and their tinsel gives great uneasiness to many of these simpletons,” he wrote privately.

Yet Cooper loved Paris. There was no denying that. He liked living there and working there—finding himself subjected to fewer distractions than in New York—and took particular satisfaction in the education his children were receiving.

The contrast between the author’s stately home and way of life, and the setting of the tale he was writing in The Prairie, could hardly have been more pronounced. This time, in The Prairie, Natty Bumppo was an old man who, to keep ahead of the advancing tide of settlement, had moved steadily westward, beyond the forests, beyond the Mississippi, just as Daniel Boone had in the last part of his life. No one had dramatized American history in such fashion. “It is a weary path, indeed,” Cooper had Natty say, “and much I have seen, and something have I suffered in journeying over it.” Even on the open prairie, Natty found it getting “crowdy.”

That such a story in such a setting, an empty landscape with no visible history, could have been written in Paris would strike some readers as absurdly incongruous. To Cooper, wherever he found himself, it was “a point of honor to continue rigidly as an American author.”

Meanwhile, he was being remunerated as no American author had been. The French edition of The Last of the Mohicans kept “gaining ground daily.” He was making money and saving money as never before. By 1832 he reckoned his financial prospects for the year ahead were something on the order of $20,000, and $20,000 in Europe went a long way.

To other Americans in Paris, his presence, his success and fame, were a matter of much pride. He was “our countryman Cooper,” and that he remained so distinctly American—and made no effort to conceal his prosperity—made them prouder still. A young medical student from North Carolina named Ashbel Smith, befriended by the Coopers, wrote that Cooper “more than anyone” was “the American par excellence,” adding, “And what is of importance in Paris, he lives in fine style.”

Indeed, Cooper and family—his wife, four girls, and a boy, plus three or four servants—occupied two well-appointed, spacious floors of a Louis XVI mansion, or a hôtel particulier, at 59 rue Saint-Dominique in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, in the Seventh Arrondissement, “a very distingué part of the town,” as Susan explained in a letter to her sister. Cooper’s was an altogether new kind of American success story. Such splendor for a writer!

The salon is near thirty feet in length, and seventeen feet high [Cooper wrote]. It is paneled in wood, and above all the doors … are allegories painted on canvas, and enclosed in wrought gilded frames. Four large mirrors are fixtures, and the windows are vast and descend to the floor.

The salon, or parlor, with its long French windows, was on the second level, “adjoining Mr. Cooper’s library,” Susan reported. The dining room, on the floor below, opened onto a garden. “We are very comfortable, very quiet, and overlook a half dozen gardens besides our own, which besides being very agreeable, gives us good air.”

The children were doing splendidly well with their music and art lessons. All five could by now “prattle like natives” in French, Italian, and German. Even the youngest, seven-year-old Paul, spoke the three languages and could read them with ease, as his father loved to boast.

But the glittering social whirl of their first years in Paris had become a thing of the past. “We [are] … very retired, don’t go out much and see but little company,” Susan wrote. Her health was the customary explanation, but neither of them cared for fashionable society, and Cooper’s trouble with crowded rooms may have been no less a factor than her lingering ailments. “Instead of seeking society,” he had written to a friend, “I am compelled to draw back from it, on account of my health and my pursuits.” He had grown weary of the fuss the French made over him.

“The people seem to think it marvelous that an American can write.” Most of them appeared ignorant that any book had ever been published in America, “except by Dr. Franklin and M. Cooper Américain, as they call me.”

Though they rarely accepted an invitation, he and Susan regularly entertained such favorites among the “American circle” as Morse, Nathaniel Willis, Horatio Greenough (whenever he was in Paris), and Ashbel Smith, as well as those of any nationality sympathetic to Polish freedom, a cause Cooper fervently embraced. Willis would describe the uniquely generous hospitality of a Cooper breakfast for the Polish-American Committee, where, as probably nowhere else that side of the Atlantic, the guests were treated to hot buckwheat pancakes.

Every American welcomed into the enclave of the Coopers seems to have treasured the experience. “Some of the best hours are spent with Mr. Cooper and his family,” Emma Willard had written. “I find in him what I do not in all who bear the name American, a genuine American spirit.”

Morse became such an established presence it was as if he were part of the household. At the close of his day at the Louvre, he and Cooper would walk home to the Faubourg Saint-Germain, to join the family for dinner and conversation into the night. Morse began giving the Coopers’ daughter Sue drawing lessons, which naturally inclined some to think he had more than a passing interest in her, gossip that soon reached New York and may have been true. Writing to her sister in January 1832, Susan Cooper seemed to go out of her way to stress that “our worthy friend, Mr. Morse” was drawn “more by the attraction of the father than the daughter.” Cooper insisted that his friend Morse, though “an excellent man,” was not “one to captivate a fine young woman of twenty.”

Morse lived modestly in a few small rooms on a side street, the rue de Surène, on the Right Bank, which, to meet expenses, he shared with another American artist named Richard Habersham. Except for his evenings with the Coopers, he appears to have had no other life in Paris apart from his work at the Louvre—no theater, no opera, no convivial evenings at restaurants, no social life of any kind. Still, he and Cooper saw each other, as he recorded, “daily … almost hourly” in these “eventful years” of 1831, 1832.

They had much in common. Both were the sons of prominent fathers. Both had attended Yale and were of roughly the same age. Both were talented, ambitious, and bright. Each considered himself a historian in his way. Each was devout in his Protestant faith, Morse more so than Cooper, and fittingly for the son of a preacher, he would have preferred that Cooper were more religious. Morse gave time to prayer every day and saw the unfolding of his life, his burdens and struggles, the decisions he made, in religious terms. That Cooper said grace at meals and read family prayers every evening apparently did not suffice.

Both loved music—Cooper played the flute, Morse the piano—and both took with utmost seriousness their roles as gentlemen, “gentlemen in all republican simplicity,” in Cooper’s phrase. It was how they had been raised and educated. If asked, they would have said that, as Americans abroad, gentlemanly deportment was of even greater importance, since they were a reflection on their country.

(The question of what constituted a gentleman was given serious consideration by other Americans who came to Paris. Wendell Holmes decided, after looking at Titian’s painting at the Louvre of the young man with a glove in his hand, that Titian “understood the look of a gentleman as well as anyone that ever lived.”)

Cooper’s father, William, remembered as a kind of “genius in land speculation,” had served as the first judge of Otsego County and was twice elected to Congress. He had known George Washington. Gilbert Stuart had painted his portrait. His famous son would recall with affection “my noble-looking, warm-hearted father” who could “lighten the way with his anecdote and fun.”

Morse’s father, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse, was of an entirely different variety, a Congregational clergyman and scholar known across the country and abroad as “the father of American geography.” He was the author of Geography Made Easy and The American Geography. His Elements of Geography, for children, was a standard in nearly every school. When young Samuel entered Yale as a freshman, he was at once, inevitably, nicknamed “Geography” Morse.

Cooper had been expelled from Yale by the time Morse arrived at age fourteen, and while Morse graduated with the class of 1810, he was only a fair student. His younger brothers, who followed him to Yale, were, as he acknowledged, “very steady and good scholars” and “much esteemed.” He was always short of money, and continuously begging his parents for more, which, it happened, was exactly as it had been for his father when he was at Yale.

That Samuel had a lively mind was obvious. But with the exception of some courses in science, he had shown little serious interest in his studies. In one way only had he distinguished himself as an undergraduate, and that was in drawing and painting. Already he was doing miniature portraits for a dollar a piece.

But much differed between Cooper and Morse. Cooper was famous; Morse was not. Cooper had made himself fluent in French, Morse continued to struggle with the language. Morse had no family with him, nothing remotely like the financial security Cooper enjoyed. For Morse there had been no late awakening to what he wanted to make of his life. He had not just shown a knack for painting at Yale; he had known then that he must be an artist. “I was made for a painter,” he told his parents at age nineteen, and pleaded for money enough to study under one of the most accomplished young artists of the time, Washington Allston of Boston.

For years his parents had worried that he was “unsteady.” “Attend to one thing at a time,” the Reverend Morse preached repeatedly. The “steady and undissipated attention to one object” was the “sure mark of a superior genius.” But when the boy declared he wanted to “attend” to painting as his “one object,” his parents found that unacceptable. Best that he form no plans, his father wrote. “Your mama and I have been thinking and planning for you.”

From the pulpit of the First Congregational Church of Charlestown, Jedidiah Morse espoused an unyielding, orthodox Calvinism and sent his sons to his alma mater, in large part because Yale remained free from the corruptions of the new liberal Unitarianism espoused at Harvard. With his long, pale, Puritan face he seemed severe and humorless as the grave, as well as exceptionally learned. At home “Papa” preached hard work and frugality, dutiful obedience to parents and gratitude for the blessings of heaven. Samuel’s mother, Elizabeth Morse, was of the same mind, but more plainspoken. The daughter of a New Jersey judge, granddaughter of the president of Princeton College, she had “no use of Segars or Brandy or Wine or anything of the kind,” as she had reminded Samuel during his college years. “The main business of life is to prepare for death,” she told him.

As he well knew, she had had more than her share of experience with death’s reality. Of the eleven children she had given birth to, only three, Samuel and his two brothers, Sidney and Richard, had survived.

That Jedidiah and Elizabeth Morse were also attentive, warmhearted parents who cared deeply for their three sons and their welfare, the three sons would have been the first to confirm. And so it was that in a matter of months after Samuel’s return home from Yale, having seen at first hand how intent was his desire to make the most of what God-given talent he had, they acquiesced. Not only could he study under Washington Allston, he could, as Allston strongly urged, go to London with him and his wife to study there.

To an acquaintance in London, the Reverend Morse wrote as follows, by way of an introduction for his son. The letter also said much about the father:

His parents had designed him for a different profession, but his inclination for the one he has chosen was so strong, and his talents for it, in the opinion of some good judges, so promising, that we thought it not proper to attempt to control his choice.

In this country, young in the arts, there are few means of improvement. These are to be found in their perfection only in older countries, and in none, perhaps, greater than yours. In compliance, therefore, with his earnest wishes and those of his friend and patron, Mr. Allston (with whom he goes to London), we have consented to make the sacrifice of feeling (not a small one), and a pecuniary exertion to the utmost of our ability, for the purpose of placing him under the best advantage of becoming eminent in his profession, in the hope that he will consecrate his acquisitions to the glory of God and the best good of his fellow men.

In contrast to James Cooper, who had taken up the pen at age thirty and burst virtually full-blown as a successful writer, having had no training or served any sort of apprenticeship, Morse spent four years in London, working as he never had, driven, as he said, by a desire to “shine.”

His progress under Allston’s tutelage was astonishing. Allston, who was in his early thirties, was himself hard at it and painting better than he ever had, and this Morse found thrilling to behold. As a teacher, Allston was exceedingly demanding. His critiques could be “mortifying,” Morse wrote, “when I have been painting all day very hard and begin to be pleased with what I have done … to hear him after a long silence say, ‘Very bad, sir. That is not flesh, it is mud, sir. It is painted with brick dust and clay!’ ” At such moments Morse felt like slashing the canvas with his palette knife. He felt angry and hurt, but with reflection came to see that Allston was no flatterer, but a friend, “and that really to improve I must see my faults.”

Allston could also take the palette and brushes from Morse and with a few deft strokes show him just how it should be done. “Oh, he is an angel on earth.”

Allston introduced him to the legendary Benjamin West, under whom Allston had studied. West, who had grown up near Philadelphia, was by then in his seventies, yet youthful in spirit and revered as no other living historical painter. He had arrived in London in 1763, during what was to have been temporary study abroad, and never left. In the half century since, he had become the favorite of King George III and one of the greatest of all teachers. Among the many Americans who had studied under West over the years were John Trumbull, Gilbert Stuart, Charles Willson Peale, and Thomas Sully. His interest in young artists was as great as ever.

Morse was amazed to learn West had painted more than six hundred pictures, and was then at work on nine or ten different pieces at once. West questioned him closely on the state of the arts in America, and “appeared very zealous that they should flourish there.”

Morse met West just as the War of 1812 broke out between Britain and the United States, and thus found himself living among the enemy, which was exactly what had happened to West during the American War for Independence.

“Paint large!” West told him.

When Morse finished a historical canvas, The Dying Hercules, measuring six by eight feet, West came at once to see it and had only compliments. “Mr. West … told me that were I to live to his age, I should never make a better composition,” Morse noted proudly. The painting was selected to hang in an exhibition at the Royal Academy, and for the first time Morse saw his work praised in print.

It was Allston, however, who had brought him to where he was in his work, Morse stressed. He could hardly say enough for Allston. Through him he met other painters, as well as an acclaimed young American actor, John Howard Payne, and the British poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Morse was reading Chaucer and Dante. (“These are necessary to a painter,” he explained to his parents.) He took up the harpsichord and, contrary to the old home preachments, began smoking cigars and drinking wine. He attended the theater, saw the great tragic actress Sarah Siddons in one of her last performances, even tried his hand at writing a farce.

“You mention being acquainted with young Payne, the play actor,” his mother wrote, plainly worried. “I would guard you against any acquaintance with that description of people, as it will, sooner or later, have a most corrupting effect on the morals.”

Morse was busy, sociable, letting go of old enforced constrictions as much as he ever had or ever would, and he was as happy as he had ever been. According to a letter written years later, he even came close to falling in love, though with whom, he never said, adding only that after a time he had found love and painting to be “quarrelsome companions.”

At Yale he had been constantly short of money. In London the problem became even more acute. He could afford “no nice dinners,” he plaintively informed his parents. “I have had no new clothes for nearly a year; my best are threadbare, and my shoes are out at the toes.”

He had to be more than a “mere portrait painter,” he announced in another long letter dated May 2, 1814. He could not be happy unless pursuing the “intellectual branch” of art, namely history painting.

I need not tell you what a difficult profession I have undertaken. It has difficulties in itself which are sufficient to deter any man who has not firmness enough to go through with it at all hazards, without meeting any obstacles aside from it. The more I study it, the more I am enchanted with it; and the greater my progress, the more I am struck with its beauties. …

He was thinking of his country. “My country has the most prominent place in my thoughts. How shall I raise her name?”

He longed to go to France to study, but again it was a matter of money. Paris, he reminded his parents, was a mere two-day journey. “I long to bury myself in the Louvre,” Morse wrote fully seventeen years before finding himself perched atop his movable scaffold there.

His ambition, he had written in London at age twenty-three, was to be one of those who would revive the splendor of the Renaissance and rival the genius of a Raphael or Titian. Now in Paris in 1832, at age forty, painting large indeed, he was filling his enormous canvas with a virtual tour of the Renaissance that included Raphael and Titian and more.

The London years ended for Morse in the summer of 1815, when told by his parents it was time to come home and earn a living. Back in the United States, he concentrated almost exclusively on portraits, hoping to earn enough to go to France and continue his artistic education. He divided his time between New England; Charleston, South Carolina; Washington; and New York. That his work was as fine as that of any American portraitist of the day there was little doubt. He had been transformed by his years in London from a gifted student to a painter of the first rank.

In 1816 he met Lucretia Pickering Walker of Concord, New Hampshire. “She is very beautiful … and openhearted,” he confided to his parents. “I ventured to tell her my whole heart. …”

“Is she acquainted with domestic affairs?” his ever-practical mother wished to know.

Does she respect and love religion? How many brothers and sisters has she? How old are they? Is she healthy? How old are her parents? What will they be likely to do for her some years hence, say when she is twenty years old?

In your next [letter] answer at least some of these questions. You see your mother has not lived twenty-seven years in New England without learning to ask questions.

His object now was to make money sufficient for a “domestic” future. At one point he painted five portraits in eight days for $15 each. With “industry,” he calculated, he might average $2,000 to $3,000 a year.

But it was not enough. He tried to think of other ways and between portraits turned his mind to inventions. Working with his brother, he developed a flexible (leather) piston pump—for use on fire engines, or as a bilge pump on ships—for which they secured a patent. On his own, he built a machine for carving marble, as a faster way to make copies of statues.

Samuel Morse and Lucretia Walker were married at Concord in 1818. His fee for portraits had reached $60. In 1819 came his first major commission, to paint President James Monroe for the City of Charleston, South Carolina, for the almost unimaginable sum of $750.

It remained a largely itinerant life, not easy on him or Lucretia. With the addition of two children, making ends meet became an unrelieved worry. In the meantime his parents had moved to New Haven, close to the Yale campus, after the Reverend Morse was asked to leave the pulpit at Charlestown on the complaint that he was devoting too much time to geography. It was a severe blow, and particularly for a father who had so adamantly warned his son of the perils of not attending to one thing at a time.

Morse, too, then settled his small family in New Haven. But with an increase in commissions and income, he was able to establish a studio in New York at 96 Broadway, where he could report to Lucretia at last, in December 1824, that he was “fully employed” with portraits and providing instruction for several students as well. He had resolved, he told her, never to be rushed in his work, never to paint too fast. He had no desire to be “a nine days’ wonder, all the rage for a moment and then forgotten forever.”

“You will rejoice with me, I know, in my continued and increasing success,” he wrote to her only days into the new year. He had been chosen out of all painters to do a life-size portrait of General Lafayette to hang in New York’s City Hall. He was to receive as much as $1,000 and would be going to Washington just as soon as Lafayette could see him. His only regret was that it would mean more time away from her.

He returned to New Haven for a few days in late January when Lucretia gave birth to their third child, a son they named Finley.

He reached Washington on February 7, 1825, and met Lafayette the following day. “My feelings were almost too powerful for me,” he wrote to Lucretia. The general had agreed to proceed with the portrait.

Morse had been advised that Lafayette’s features were “not good,” and in truth the general had an oddly shaped head with a slanting brow, ears that clung so close that from face-on they could hardly be seen. With advancing age (Lafayette was sixty-seven), the jowls seemed to have taken over. To Morse it was a “noble” countenance, a perfect example of “accordance between the face and the character,” showing the “firmness and consistency” that so distinguished the man.

On the evening of February 9, Morse attended the president’s levee, where he met Cooper for the first time. It had been a day of considerable excitement in Washington. In the recent presidential election, Andrew Jackson had won a popular majority, while John Quincy Adams had carried the electoral vote. That day, the House of Representatives had resolved the issue by electing Adams president.

“There was a great crowd [at the White House] and a great number of distinguished characters,” Morse reported in a long letter to Lucretia.

I paid my respects to Mr. Adams and congratulated him on his election. He seemed in some degree to shake off his habitual reserve. … General Jackson went up to him and, shaking him by the hand, congratulated him cordially on his election. The General bears defeat like a man. …

He was making good progress on the Lafayette portrait. “I have but little room in this letter to express my affection for my dearly beloved wife and children,” he wrote at the bottom of the last page. “I long to hear from you. …”

She was never to read those words. Two days later, on February 11, in a letter from his father delivered to his hotel, Morse learned that Lucretia had died on February 7.

“My affectionately beloved son,” the letter began. “The shock to the whole family is far beyond, in point of severity, that of any we have ever before felt. …” It had been a heart attack. She was twenty-five.

“My whole soul seemed wrapped up in her,” Morse wrote a month later from New York. “I am ready almost to give up.”

To my friends here, I know, I seem to be cheerful and happy, but a cheerful countenance with me covers an aching heart, and often have I feigned a more than ordinary cheerfulness to hide a more than ordinary anguish.

He concentrated on work, of which he had more than ever, leaving the care of his children to his parents. Having completed the Lafayette portrait, he went on to paint one eminent figure after another, and of the kind with whom he liked most to associate, Americans known for their ideas and worthy accomplishments. They included William Cullen Bryant, poet, and editor of the New York Evening Post; Noah Webster, lexicographer and author of the American Dictionary of the English Language; Governor DeWitt Clinton of New York, the great champion of the Erie Canal, which was completed that year, 1825; and Benjamin Silliman of Yale, who had been Morse’s science professor and would later become the president of the college.

He took the lead in founding the National Academy of the Arts of Design in New York, as an alternative to the American Academy of Arts, then headed by John Trumbull, which Morse thought unnecessarily exclusive and stodgy. He became the first president of the National Academy and developed a series of lectures on art that he delivered at Columbia College, the first such talks ever given by an American artist.

At a gathering of the National Academy, while awarding prizes to young artists, he told them that if they expected a painter’s life to be one of ease and pleasure, they were greatly mistaken. It was “a life of severe and perpetual toil.” They must expect “continual obstacles and discouragements, and be prepared to encounter illiberality, neglect, obscurity, and poverty.” Only an “intense and inextinguishable love of art” could sustain them to bear up, and if they did not feel this love, they should “turn while yet they might to other pursuits.”

On June 9, 1826, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse died at New Haven, and, not long after, Samuel began explaining to his mother why he needed to go to Paris. In 1828 she, too, died. Thus, with his wife, father, and mother all taken from him, and feeling as he never had before that time was running out for him, Morse arranged for the children to stay with an aunt in New Hampshire and his brother Richard in New Haven. He lined up $2,800 in commissions to do copies in Europe, and sailed for France.

On the lovely, springlike March afternoon when Morse and Cooper were observed by Nathaniel Willis walking in the Garden of the Tuileries, the time appears to have been nearing five o’clock. Morse would have finished his day at the Louvre by then, and he and Cooper, as was their routine, would have been on their way to Cooper’s house for the evening.

After they passed by, Willis remained in the garden, seated on a bench presumably, notebook in hand, savoring the scene a bit longer. The palace bell rang five o’clock.

The sun is just disappearing behind the dome of the Invalides, and the crowd begins to thin [he wrote]. Look at the atmosphere of the gardens. How deliciously the twilight softens everything. Statues, people, trees and the long perspectives down the alleys, all mellowed into the shadowy indistinctness of fairy-land. The throng is pressing out the gates … for the gardens are cleared at sundown.

It was a Friday, Willis said, but he gave no date. To judge by his description of the weather it must have been March 23.

III

Cholera morbus—Asiatic cholera or Indian cholera—had been a matter of some concern in European medical circles for more than fifty years, from the time outbreaks in Calcutta in the 1780s had taken the lives of many thousands. But the far-distant Indian origins of the scourge had made it seem an “exotic production,” not the sort of thing that could strike a “civilized” European city.

In 1826 cholera had begun to spread toward Europe, following the old trade routes. By 1830 it reached Moscow, then Poland, then Vienna in the summer of 1831. At that point many in Paris had begun to worry.

The first word of cholera in Paris came on Wednesday, March 28, 1832, in reports in the afternoon and evening papers and in dispatches sent off to London and New York. Ten people had been taken to the old Hôtel Dieu, the main hospital on the Île-de-la-Cité, beside Notre-Dame. Seven of the ten had died. The autopsy of five bodies performed “in the presence of thirty-eight medical men and the Minister of Public Works” left no doubt.

The terror of the disease was that it struck with such ferocity. Its victims would be seized suddenly by savage cramps, followed by vomiting, convulsions, and violent diarrhea. Their faces turned purple and broke out in a cold sweat. The eyes bulged. Lips and fingernails turned blue. Nathaniel Willis, who managed to get inside the Hôtel Dieu by passing himself off as a doctor, described a young woman in her twenties convulsed with agony. “Her eyes were started from their sockets, her mouth foamed, and her face was of a frightful, livid purple. I never saw so horrible a sight.”

The medical student James Jackson, Jr., had himself attended the death of another victim identified only as a chiffonier, a ragman. Drawing on his notes, he described for his father the autopsy that followed:

Stomach contained a quart of reddish fluid. … Small intestines … contained a vast quantity of red fluid … the liquid flowing from these intestines had a somewhat sour smell to me like that of all undigested vegetable food which has been vomited. … Aorta contained a great quantity of black blood liquid. …

By April 2, there had been 735 reported cases and 100 deaths. “Vast numbers of people were leaving Paris,” read a dispatch to the New York Evening Post that would not reach the United States for another month.

It was “a disease of the most frightful nature,” wrote young Jackson, who, like almost every American physician, had had no experience with cholera. Walking one ward of the Hôtel Dieu, he had seen fifty or more patients in rows. “It is almost like walking through an autopsy room. In many nothing but the act of respiration shows the life still exists. It is truly awful.” Jackson’s fellow student Ashbel Smith wrote in his journal on April 3:

The official bulletin of the morning gives 1,020 new cases from yesterday. … A young man came in the other day to inquire after his father and mother. They were found … side by side in the dead room, naked, and in a pile of bodies. The disease is rapidly spreading in every direction and the consternation is terrible. The Americans are almost all leaving the city.

Months before, when Jackson’s father had told him that should the cholera reach Paris he must “fly,” James had written to ask, “But if, as I think it highly possible, the disease is at some future time to prevail in our country, had I not better become acquainted with its physiognamy if I have an opportunity?” Jackson, who had never in his life gone against his father’s wishes, wrote now to say he would stay, hoping his father would understand. Several other American medical students made the same decision, including Smith.

We are bound as men and physicians to stay and see this disease [James continued]. As a physician you know it and feel it. As a father you dread it. For myself, I confess, I should be unwilling to return to America and not have at least made an effort to learn the nature and best treatment of this destroyer of life.

The common understanding was that miasmas—foul, noxious vapors from rotting garbage and human filth—were the carriers of the disease, just as malaria and yellow fever were supposedly spread. As sea air was beneficial to one’s health, the bad air of city slums could be deadly. Thus cholera was understood to be a disease of the poor, while those living in the cleaner, more airy parts of the city were believed to be safe from the scourge.

In fact, no one knew the cause of cholera or what to do about it. “The physicians,” Jackson conceded, “are in a state of the greatest incertitude, not knowing which way to turn.”

The actual cause, which would not become known for years, was a microorganism, the Vibrio cholerae, carried mainly by contaminated water, and in some cases by infected food. It invaded the body by mouth and rapidly attacked the intestines, killing about half its victims by dehydration in a matter of days or even hours.

The death toll in Paris mounted. Wild rumors spread that the government was secretly poisoning the poor, and angry crowds streamed over the bridges to the Île-de-la-Cité to besiege the Hôtel Dieu, swearing revenge.

How could it be, many were asking, that something as hideous as a medieval plague could attack so great a center of civilized life and advanced learning?

When, on April 12, James Cooper judged the worst of the epidemic had passed, he could not have been more mistaken. The calamity surged on. Moreover, the agony and loss were spreading to every part of Paris, even Cooper’s own supposedly safe Faubourg Saint-Germain. “We have had pestilence all around us, and we have had many deaths very near us,” wrote Susan Cooper in alarm.

I have seen two instances of it myself. One, the sister of our porter, who was taken with it while here on a visit, and the other, a poor woman who sold matches at the door of our hotel. Mr. Cooper had her brought into the courtyard and we took care of her, until she was carried to the hospital where I fear she died. …

While others fled the city in droves, the Coopers stayed, but only because they were too sick to move. He and Susan were both “in the doctor’s hands,” Cooper wrote, Susan confined to her bed with a severe “bilious attack,” he suffering from the most excruciating headaches he had ever known.

Yet how were they to know whether they were better off remaining in Paris, where they had become in some measure acclimated, than expose themselves to the inconvenience of travel and the risk of going where “the horrors” might break out on their arrival? “It is spreading rapidly all over France,” Susan wrote. “It has by no means spared the upper classes. …” Nearly all their countrymen had fled, she noted, except the heroic American medical students at the hospitals.

Morse, too, stayed. “Samuel was nervous even unto flight, nay so nervous he could not run,” wrote Cooper, who speculated that a thousand people were already in their graves. Some estimates were ten times that. No one could say for certain.

“The churches are all hung in black,” wrote Nathaniel Willis, reporting for his readers in New York. “There is a constant succession of funerals, and you cross the biers and hand-barrows of the sick, hurrying to the hospitals at every turn, in every quarter of the city.”

A young French woman, Amandine-Aurore-Lucie Dupin, who had just published her first novel under the pen-name George Sand, lived directly across the Seine from the morgue on the Île-de-la-Cité and could see from her window the wagonloads of dead bodies being delivered. She and her friends had made a pact to meet at the Luxembourg Gardens every day at a certain time to be sure they were all still alive.

Strangely, though, much of life in Paris went on as usual. People strolled the parks and boulevards and dined at the cafés, as though they had not a worry. Willis attended a masquerade ball at the Théâtre des Variétés, where two thousand people carried on with their revels through the night, until seven in the morning. It was all unbearably macabre.

There was a cholera-waltz, and a cholera-galopade, and one man, immensely tall, dressed as a personification of the cholera itself, with skeleton armor, bloodshot eyes, and other horrible appurtenances of a walking pestilence.

Week after week the weather remained incongruously delightful. Picture the most perfect day in June, but without the full heat of an American summer, wrote James Jackson, trying to fathom how this could be.

I walk by the riverside and the waters are flowing mildly and calmly, undisturbed, while the glorious sun in its fullest splendor is glowing above and the sky is of the finest blue without a cloud and the air of the clearest and purest. All seems beauty.

Believing, like others, that the cholera was in decline, and exhausted from his efforts at the hospitals, Jackson decided after a month it was time he left for London. He had done all he could to help, he felt, and had seen more and learned more firsthand than he could ever have anticipated.

Meanwhile, at the Louvre, Samuel Morse toiled on. He was there each morning from the moment the great bronze doors opened. Friends knew always where to find him. There is no evidence that he missed a day, or that Cooper was not on hand to lend support. As would be said of Cooper’s novels, his hero, his “model man,” whether woodsman, sailor, or gentleman, was always “bent on bringing some especial thing to pass.” Here now in the Louvre was his friend Morse, under pressures of a kind none could have foreseen, trying with all that was in him to bring some exceedingly special thing to pass.

Morse was terrified. In his youth he had taken the dying Hercules as a subject. Now, bending to this Herculean task, with death all about, he could only wonder if it was to mean his demise. Five weeks into the epidemic, on May 6, he wrote to his brothers, “My anxiety to finish my picture and return drives me, I fear, to too great application. …”

All the usual securities of life seem to be gone. Apprehension and anxiety make the stoutest hearts quail. Any one feels, when he lays himself down at night, that he will in all probability be attacked before daybreak.

He had to be finished by August 10, the day the Louvre closed for the summer. By September, he prayed, he would be homeward bound.

Most days he could be found maneuvering his scaffold from one part of the museum to another, to work on copies of the different paintings in his composition. Possibly, in painting his copies, he made use of a camera obscura, a large dark box in which the image of an object may be projected through a small convex lens onto a facing surface. It was a device artists had employed for a long time, and the sort of thing Morse found fascinating.

The thirty-eight pictures in his painting-of-paintings included works by twenty-two masters. Five—Veronese, Poussin, Claude Lorrain, Rubens, and Guido Reni—were represented twice; two, Murillo and Van Dyck, three times. Titian appeared four times. The single work by Leonardo da Vinci was the Mona Lisa.

Each had to be so rendered as to catch the very character of the original. Each had to have the look of that particular painter. It was as if a single actor were required to play twenty-two different parts in a performance, and all so well that there could be no mistaking who was who.

That there be no question which paintings and painters he considered most important, Morse clustered several immediately beside and above the open door to the Grand Gallery, the focal point of his composition. He positioned Titian’s portrait of Francis I, the king of France, at almost the exact center of the canvas, against the upper right-hand corner of the door, and painted it somewhat larger than it really was relative to the others. To Morse, Titian was a veritable god among painters, and Francis I was the French monarch who, in the sixteenth century, first began collecting paintings for the Louvre, including the Mona Lisa. Morse placed another Titian, Supper at Emmaus, directly over the door, and to the left he put Murillo’s Holy Family.

By far the largest painting in the arrangement was the largest painting in the Louvre, the monumental work depicting Christ’s first miracle, The Marriage at Cana, by the sixteenth-century Venetian Paolo Veronese. To have effectively created a foreshortened version of so complicated a painting was a tour de force in itself. Its position on the side wall at far left made it number one if the arrangement was “read” from left to right.

Significantly, a total of sixteen, or nearly half of the thirty-eight paintings chosen by the devout Morse, including the giant Veronese, were of religious subjects.

Some days, when copying a picture hung at the highest level—up at “the skyline,” as artists said—he could be seen perched ten or twelve feet above the floor. There was, also, a certain irony to the fact that in this biggest undertaking of his career he had to spend the greatest part of his time painting small, not large, working with small brushes on his miniature renditions on the canvas.

So concerned was he about finishing in time, he decided to concentrate his efforts on the copies—work that could only be done at the Louvre—and paint the frames for each later, back in New York.

The bond of friendship between Cooper and Morse held fast through the long ordeal of the cholera epidemic. If anything, it grew stronger. Acutely sensitive to the extreme stress under which Morse worked, Cooper continued to praise and encourage him, even implying he might purchase the painting once it was completed. Or at least that was Morse’s impression. And as terrified for his own life as Morse may have been, he readily understood the weight of worry and responsibility for an entire family that Cooper had to bear.

But there was more. For some time Cooper had been subjected to criticism of a kind that cut deeply and that Morse thought unjust. The trouble had begun with the publication of a book of Cooper’s titled Notions of the Americans, one of those he had written while in Paris. It was a novel in the form of a series of letters supposedly written by an Englishman traveling in America at the time of Lafayette’s visit. Cooper had done it partly to please Lafayette, but mainly as a way to correct what he saw as egregious misconceptions about his country held by many in Britain and Europe. The book was not Cooper at his best. The writing was stiff, didactic, and so laudatory of his country and the “American Dream” that it raised outcries on both sides of the Atlantic at a time when real English authors were traveling the United States and offering a decidedly different view.

The most scathing and engaging of these had appeared that same calamitous spring of 1832 and became a huge success in England. Domestic Manners of the Americans was a rollicking satirical tour of the New World in which the author, Frances Trollope, had a grand time finding almost nothing to like about America and Americans. She made great sport of the way Americans ate, for example, describing the “total want of all the usual courtesies of the table, the voracious rapidity with which the viands were seized and devoured.” She did not like Americans, she wrote in her concluding chapter. “I do not like their principles, I do not like their manners, I do not like their opinions.” Her book, as well as the frequent anti-American snobbery to be found in publications like the Edinburgh Review, in addition to critical commentary of a like kind in print in his own country, riled Cooper as nothing ever had, and in defense he became still more boastful, even bombastic about being an American, and spoke more disparagingly of Europeans and their failings.

Nathaniel Willis had observed that Cooper’s stern countenance ought not to be taken as representative of the man. So Morse felt Cooper and his opinions needed some explaining for those at home no less than in Europe. He knew the man, he knew the respect he commanded in Paris. “He has a bold, original, independent mind, thoroughly American,” Morse wrote to his brothers in New York, who had established a religious newspaper, the New York Observer.

He loves his country and her principles ardently. … I admire exceedingly his proud assertion of the rank of an American … for I know no reason why an American should not take rank, and assert it, too, above any artificial distinctions that Europe has made. We have no aristocratic grades … and crosses, and other gewgaws that please the great babies of Europe. …

Morse was exhausted and angry.

There can be no condescension to an American. An American gentleman is equal to any title or rank in Europe, kings and emperors not excepted. …

Cooper sees and feels the absurdity of these distinctions, and he asserts his American rank and maintains it too, I believe, from a pure patriotism. Such a man deserves the support and respect of his countrymen. …

Willis, who felt he had very much “arrived” by being included in Cooper’s circle, said no American could live “without feeling every day what we owe to the patriotism as well as the genius of this gifted man.” Reluctantly, Willis had decided the time had come for him to move on and continue his travels, to Italy next. “Paris is a home to me, and I leave it with a heavy heart,” he wrote.

Morse kept working, the epidemic notwithstanding, and the crowds kept coming to see the American painter and his picture. Even Alexander von Humboldt, the world-famous naturalist and explorer, came to watch and to chat with Morse. In all Europe there was no more revered embodiment of the life of the mind.

He “took pains to find me out,” Morse wrote, his spirits lifted.

By the start of summer, cholera had struck New York, and in Paris had abated somewhat. But by no means was the danger past, as some contended. Probably 12,000 people had already died in Paris. By summer’s end at least 18,000 would be dead in six months’ time, considerably more lives taken than during the entire Reign of Terror. According to surviving records, no Americans died in Paris of cholera. In New York the epidemic left 3,515 dead.

For several years now, it had become the custom among a number of Americans in Paris to celebrate the Fourth of July with a grand patriotic banquet, and to include General Lafayette as guest of honor. If, because of the cholera epidemic, there was any reluctance to hold the event that summer of 1832, or any thought of canceling it, no evidence is to be found. For Morse and Cooper, it was to be a particularly affecting occasion, their last Fourth of July in Paris and a last opportunity to honor Lafayette.

The dinner was held at Lointier on the rue de Richelieu, a favorite restaurant among Americans. Morse presided as President of the Day, with Cooper as Vice President. Eighty guests, including Lafayette and the American minister to France, William C. Rives, pulled up their chairs to the table and, before the evening was out, joined in toasts to George Washington and the new president of the United States, Andrew Jackson, King Louis-Philippe, and the City of Paris, some twenty toasts in all.

But Morse’s toast to Lafayette brought the greatest response, with spirited applause following nearly every line. The imagery he chose for his windup, in tribute to the general’s strength as a leader, suggests his own homeward voyage, and the ways of winds and storm-tossed seas, were also much on his mind. In any event, he brought the whole crowd cheering to its feet.

Some men were “like the buoys upon tide-water,” Morse said. “They float up and down as the current sets this way or that.”

If you ask at an emergency where they are, we cannot tell you. We must first consult the almanac. We must know the quarter of the moon, the way of the wind, the time of the tide. …

But gentlemen, our guest … is a tower amid the waters. … He stands there now. The winds have swept by him, the waves dashed around him, the snows of winter have lighted upon him, but still he is there.

I ask you, therefore, gentlemen, to drink with me in honor of General Lafayette.

In the weeks remaining, before the Louvre closed for the summer, Morse pressed on. Concentrating on the immense canvas overall, he found himself well pleased, even to the point of bragging a bit to his brothers, calling it “a splendid and valuable” work. “I am sure it is the most correct one of its kind ever painted, for everyone says I have caught the style of each of the masters.”

Whether he began work on the figures in the scene during these last days at the Louvre, or saved them for later, is not entirely clear, but most likely they were added in New York. Either way they were part of his plan and who they were—those he included and those he did not—was of no small importance.

In the completed painting which Morse titled The Gallery of the Louvre, there would be ten figures. And though he was to provide viewers a key to all the paintings in the scene, he would identify none of the people. Still, four were quite obvious to anyone who knew them.

Most conspicuous was Morse himself standing front and center, leaning over the right shoulder of an attractive young art student, giving her instructions. The subject she is sketching—and that Morse is helping her understand—is the colossal Veronese, The Marriage at Cana, on the left-hand wall. The identity of the student is not known. Nor is that of another young woman working on a miniature at a table to the right. The seated artist wearing a red turban on the left is believed to be Morse’s American friend and roommate, Richard Habersham.

Upstage, by the doorway, a figure wearing the traditional peaked white cap of the women of Brittany, and the child she holds by the hand, are the only ones in the scene with their faces toward the glow and splendors of the Grand Gallery beyond. As an accent, her cap serves as an instructor’s pointer calling attention to the painting above, The Holy Family, by Murillo. But she and the child serve, too, as reminders that the museum and its riches are there not for artists and connoisseurs only, but for people of all kinds and ages.

The well-dressed man entering the Salon Carré through the doorway, his high-crowned black hat in hand, has the appearance of Horatio Greenough, and fittingly, his eye is fixed on the single work of sculpture on display, Diane Chasseresse—Diana of the Hunt—at the far right.

But after the figure of Morse, it is the threesome in the left-hand corner who are of greatest interest, and they are, unmistakably, Cooper and his wife watching their daughter Sue at her easel working on a copy. Possibly, as later speculated, Morse included them because he expected Cooper to buy the painting. Morse himself never said. Most likely, he included the Coopers for the same reason he had added his father, the Reverend Morse, and his Yale professor Benjamin Silliman to the faces in the gallery in his House of Representatives, because it gave him great pleasure to do so.

With the presence of Cooper, his wife, and daughter, Greenough and young Habersham, the scene becomes something distinctly more than a tour de force showcase of Old World masterpieces. It may be taken as well as a kind of family portrait—Morse and his Paris family.

But seldom in family portraits does one member so upstage the others as Morse does here. By placing himself as he has, so conspicuously, so immodestly front and center and larger than anyone, he has rendered a self-portrait intended to present much that he wished to be known and remembered about himself, beyond the fact that the whole huge panorama is the result of his own efforts and ability. In the tableau with the student, most obviously, he is presenting himself not as an artist only, but as a teacher—a teacher in the spirit of Benjamin West and Washington Allston—and a founder and first president of the National Academy of Design. The Salon Carré becomes thereby a sumptuous, treasure-laden classroom for the master.

And if a man be known by the company he keeps, there in the corner is his friend Cooper, with his upraised finger pointing, like the white Brittany hat, to Murillo’s Holy Family, as he, the cultivated gentleman, talks of what he sees and appreciates in a great work of art. Further, as a readily recognizable American somebody, Cooper provides a distinct note of national pride.

By rendering Sue Cooper as he did, with her head turned to listen to her father, Morse seems to suggest his interest in her may indeed have been romantic, and if not, here was visible reason why it could have been.

Of the ten figures in Morse’s tableau, six, or more than half, are Americans—Americans in Paris making the most of their time. And six, counting the child, are females, which would appear Morse’s way of encouraging women in their aspirations in art.

As may be said of nearly all paintings, nothing is included by chance. Every element is the result of conscious choice, and what an artist chooses to leave out is also of importance in understanding a finished work. That there is a complete absence in Morse’s Salon Carré of French aristocrats, French soldiers and priests, could only have been intentional. Aristocrats, soldiers, priests, were ubiquitous, and as commonly present at the Louvre as they were in almost any public place or gathering in Paris.

Like Cooper, Morse had no use for the “mere butterflies” of Paris society, and no more liking for the sight of soldiers everywhere than would Charles Sumner. Such disdain for almost anything connected with the Catholic Church, for priests, and the dictates of the Vatican that had permeated Morse’s Calvinist upbringing, had only hardened as a consequence of his experiences in Europe. In Rome he had written in his notebooks of priests “dissipating their time in gambling” and “disfiguring the landscape with their uncouth dress,” of the “numberless bowings and genuflections and puffings of incense” at the Catholic services he attended. He had been willing to remove his hat when entering a Catholic church, but not in the street when religious processions passed. “If it were a mere civility I should not object,” he wrote, “but it involves acquiescence in what I see to be idolatry and of course in the street I cannot do it. … No man has a right to interfere with my rights of conscience.”

Once, on a street in Rome, when a religious procession passed and Morse failed to remove his hat, a soldier, one of the cardinal’s guards, had knocked it off with his gun, cursing him as il diavolo. Thinking about it later, Morse decided he could not blame the soldier, only a religion that would resort to such force.

In addition to aristocrats, soldiers, and priests, he chose not to include any representation of upper-middle-class Paris, the numerous bourgeois, or the many European tourists who comprised such a substantial part of the regular flow of visitors. As he had included only his pick of the more than a thousand paintings in the museum’s collection, so, too, the clientele was limited to his personal preferences.

Nor did he provide the least sign or hint of the deadly scourge then raging outside the museum or the inner torment of the figure at center stage. Instead there is a feeling of great security and well-being. Far from cold or threatening, the painting glows with warmth, in the Salon’s deep red walls, and promise, in the gleam of sunshine from the skylights down the vaulted Gallery.

Cooper had been on hand through the whole effort, keeping Morse company. “He is with me two or three hours at the gallery (the hours of his relaxation) every day as regularly as the day comes,” Morse reported to his brothers in mid-July when more than 200 people a day were dying of cholera.

Shortly afterward Cooper and family departed for an extended sojourn in Germany and Switzerland, relieved to put Paris behind them at last. Ever the faithful correspondent, Cooper would write frequently to Morse, to describe the sights he and the family were seeing and the improvement in Susan Cooper’s health. He hoped Morse would not leave Paris until the following spring, so they could all sail home together.

But Morse had made up his mind. By the time the Coopers returned to Paris in mid-October, Morse was gone. His work at the Louvre at an end, his affairs settled, and having paid an emotional farewell to Lafayette, he sailed from Le Havre on the American packet Sully on October 6. The Gallery of the Louvre was stowed securely belowdecks.

IV

But Morse was taking something of more importance home with him— an idea inspired by a system used outside of Paris to send overland messages, a semaphore apparatus that used mechanically operated arms or flaps from atop tall towers spaced six miles apart. Messages were read by telescope. This served well enough in clear weather, but not in fog, rain, or at night. For this French system the word “telegraph” had first come into use.

Morse would later say his first mention of the possibility of an electric telegraph took place during the voyage home on the Sully. He would recall “the manner, the place, and the moment when the thought of making an electric wire the means of communicating intelligence first came into my mind and was uttered.” But according to Cooper and his family, Morse had talked frequently of the idea during their evenings together through the spring of 1832, months before Morse ever left Paris. “I confess I thought the notion evidently chimerical, and as such spoke of it in my family,” Cooper would later tell Morse. “I always set you down as a sober-minded, common-sense sort of a fellow, and thought it a high flight for a painter to make to go off on the wings of the lightning.”

Richard Habersham, too, would remember passing the evening in the rooms they shared listening to Morse go on about the French telegraph being too slow, and that on the invitation of a French authority Morse had gone to examine the French system at close hand.

I recollect also [Habersham wrote] that in our frequent visits to Mr. J. Fenimore Cooper’s in the rue Saint-Dominique, these subjects, so interesting to Americans, were often introduced, and that Morse seemed to harp on them. …

But whenever Morse began talking about an electric telegraph—and the question would later become a matter of importance—there was no doubt the germ of the idea had taken hold of him in France. Assuredly, neither Habersham nor Cooper and his family would have said so had it not been true.

By the summer of 1833 in New York, Morse had completed the final touches on The Gallery of the Louvre. On August 9, he wrote to Cooper, “My picture, c’est fini.” It went on public view in the second-floor gallery of the well-known bookstore Carvill & Company, at Broadway and Pine Street. The charge for admission was 25 cents.

The reviews were respectful, complimentary, even enthusiastic. “Every artist and connoisseur was charmed with it,” wrote the critic William Dunlap. “Here shine in one grand constellation, the brilliant effusions of those great names destined to live as long as the art of painting exists,” declared the NewYork Mirror.

We do not know which most to admire, in contemplating this magnificent design, the courage which could undertake such a Herculean task, or the perseverance and success with which it has been completed.

We have never seen anything of the kind before in this country. Its effect on us is different from that made by any other painting. …

We may truly congratulate the country that such a collection is in its possession. We can say with a friend of ours, a distinguished artist who has never been in Europe, that we never had an idea of the old masters until we saw Morse’s picture of the Louvre.

The public, however, showed little interest. As a commercial venture, the painting was no more a success than Morse’s House of Representatives had been.

Eventually it was bought by a man named George Hyde Clarke, who lived near Cooper’s old home on Otsego Lake and whose portrait Morse had painted before leaving for France. The purchase price was $1,300. Morse had hoped to get $2,500.

That The Gallery of the Louvre would one day, in 1982, be purchased for a museum in Chicago for $3,250,000, the highest sum ever paid until then for a work by an American artist, would in Morse’s time have been unimaginable.

Cooper and his family left Paris in the spring of 1833. They had been away from home longer than intended—for the younger children more than half a lifetime. But none ever regretted the time in Paris. Cooper had written eight novels since leaving home, and privately he talked now of calling a halt to his writing. But there would be much more to come, including Gleanings in Europe, devoted to his experiences and observations in France, and two more immensely popular Natty Bumppo tales, The Pathfinder and The Deerslayer, the latter of which many considered his masterpiece.

It had been seven years since Cooper and the family set sail for France from New York and the man on a passing ship had called out ominously, “You will never come back.” Now he was on his way back, and he wanted to go. Unlike Morse, he was never to see Paris again.