CHAPTER EIGHT

BOUND TO SUCCEED

I was chiefly impressed by Gus’s possessing so strongly the qualities of a man who was bound to succeed.

—ALFRED GARNIER

I

Augustus Saint-Gaudens came to Paris the first time in 1867, the year it seemed the whole world came to Paris for the Exposition Universelle, the grand, gilded apogee of Second Empire exuberance.

He arrived on an evening in February, by train after dark and apparently alone. He was nineteen years old, a redheaded New York City boy, a shoemaker’s son, who had been working since the age of thirteen. He was not one of the first ambitious young Americans to come to Paris following the Civil War. He was younger than most, however, and in background and the future he had in store, he was like no one else. Until now he had never been away from home.

I walked with my heavy carpet bag from the Gare du Havre down to the Place de la Concorde where I stood bewildered with the lights of that square and of the avenue des Champs-Élysées bursting upon me. Between the glory of it all and the terrible weight of the bag … I made my way up the interminable avenue des Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe. …

His French father, the proprietor of a shoe shop on Fourth Avenue, had asked if he would like to attend the great exposition and offered to pay his passage. He crossed on the steamer City of Boston in steerage and was “sicker than a regiment of dogs” the whole way.

The young man had more in mind than the exposition. He planned to enroll at the École des Beaux-Arts and remain in Paris as long as need be. Like young George Healy more than thirty years before—and Wendell Holmes, Charles Sumner, Elizabeth Blackwell, and others—he had something he was determined to accomplish, and thus become accomplished himself. He was, as he said, bound to be a sculptor. That no American had ever been accepted as a student in sculpture at the École did not deter him. But first he needed a job. In his pocket he had $100 saved by his father for him from his own small wages.

Gus, as he was known, had been born in Dublin, Ireland, on March 1, 1848. His father, Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens, who came from the village of Aspet, in the foothills of the Pyrénées in southern France, had found work in a Dublin shoe factory. There he met Mary McGuiness of Ballymahon, in a shoe store where she did the binding for slippers. It was because of the famine in Ireland that the couple emigrated to America when Gus was six months old.

In New York, after a struggle, Bernard Saint-Gaudens managed to establish his own small store on Lispenard Street. The sign read FRENCH LADIES’ BOOTS AND SHOES, and with virtually everything French much in fashion, he did well enough to get by, the clientele of his “small establishment” including some Astors and Belmonts.

Two more children were born, sons Andrew and Louis. At home the father addressed the children in French, and in the accent of southern France, and they customarily spoke French to him. Their mother spoke always in English in her “sweet Irish brogue,” as Gus said. He would describe his father as short and stocky, with dark red hair, red mustache, and a “picturesque personality.” His mother had wavy black hair and a “typical long, generous, loving Irish face.”

They lived for a time on Duane Street, then Forsyth Street, then the Bowery, then in an apartment over a grocery store on 21st Street. The boy survived countless street fights with neighborhood gangs, “heroic charges and counter charges” amid showers of stones. There was Sunday school at St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Mulberry Street, and the inevitable recital of a prayer ending with the words “through my fault, through my fault, through my grievous fault,” which always left him wondering what in the world his fault might be. School was “one long imprisonment.” But there were also “the delights” of Robinson Crusoe, the first book he read, and a friend of his father’s, an ophthalmologist named Cornelius Agnew, who had studied in Paris and who, after seeing some drawings Gus had done of shoemakers at work, encouraged him to keep drawing.

When, on the boy’s thirteenth birthday, his father announced it time he went to work and asked what he would like to do, Gus said he hoped it could be something that would help him become an artist. His father apprenticed him to a cameo cutter named Louis Avet, a fellow Frenchman.

Cameos for men were much in style as scarf pins, with the heads of dogs, horses, and lions—lion heads were especially in demand—cut from amethyst and other stones. Louis Avet was highly accomplished in the art and, as Gus quickly learned, an exceedingly hard taskmaster who flew into rages and made the boy’s time “a miserable slavery.” But the training was superb, and Saint-Gaudens later attributed his habit of work to Avet— and of singing at his work, as Avet had. “When he was not scolding me, he sang continuously.”

The boy worked ten-hour days and spent the first part of his apprenticeship polishing the backgrounds of stone cameos done by his master, but was soon allowed to do more, including custom-colored cameo portraits on conch shells.

The art of cutting cameos, as said, was a species of sculpture rather than engraving. The artisan worked at a small bench with a multitude of steel engraving tools, or burins, with different-shaped points, these powered by a foot pedal that the cutter pumped as one did a sewing machine. The piece of stone or shell was fixed with cement to a stick, to hold it fast while the cutter worked. As said in an article in Scientific American magazine, “Sculptured heads are the best model for the learner to study and the figures of statuary the best guide.” For portraits most cutters worked from photographs.

To work with painstaking care was of the essence. There could be no rushing the process. The success of a cameo was in its design, and thus Gus learned the infinite importance of design to any work to be taken seriously. In little time he was producing remarkably accomplished, even exquisite, work.

The apprenticeship with Avet lasted three years, until the day when, in one of his rages, Avet fired him for dropping crumbs on the floor during lunch. Quite possibly the temper outbursts came from jealousy—that someone so young had such talent and had advanced so far so rapidly. In any event, recognizing the mistake he had made, Avet went to Bernard Saint-Gaudens and offered to hire Gus back at a higher wage. The boy refused. He later spoke of it as one of his most heroic acts ever and would treasure all his life the memory of the look of pride on his father’s face.

He went to work for another French cutter, Jules Le Brethon, who specialized in larger shell cameos and who, in temperament and understanding, was the antithesis of Avet, except that he, too, sang the whole day long.

Large shell cameos with carved portraits had become highly fashionable as part of the well-dressed woman’s attire, and it was working with and learning from his new employer for another three years that decided Gus on a career as a sculptor. Not only did he like giving physical dimension to a subject; he had come to appreciate the importance of faces. Generously, Le Brethon allowed him an hour a day in which to model in clay on his own.

Encouraged by his father, Gus began taking evening drawing classes at the Cooper Institute. Later he attended evening classes at the National Academy of Design. “I became a terrific worker,” he would remember, “toiling every night until eleven o’clock after class was over, in the conviction that in me another heaven-born genius had been given the world.”

Indeed, I became so exhausted with the confining work of cameo-cutting by day and drawing at night that in the morning mother literally dragged me out of bed, pushed me over to the washstand, where I gave myself a cat’s lick somehow or other, drove me to the seat at the table, administered my breakfast, which consisted of tea and large quantities of long French loaves of bread with butter, and tumbled me downstairs out into the street, where I awoke.

The apprenticeship years under the two cameo cutters were also the years of the Civil War, and the day-to-day presence, the excitement and tragedy, of the war were seldom out of mind. Bernard Saint-Gaudens became an outspoken abolitionist. Soldiers thronged the streets. Once, from an open window while at Louis Avet’s workshop, the boy had watched a whole contingent of New England volunteers march down Broadway on their way to war singing “John Brown’s Body.” Another day he saw “Grant himself” with his slouch hat parade by on horseback. Greatest of all was the thrill of seeing President Lincoln, who with his height seemed “entirely out of proportion” with the carriage in which he rode.

The boy would remember the crowds outside the newspaper offices, and the sight of legless and armless men back from the battlefields would never be forgotten. One day during the Draft Riots, Monsieur Le Brethon sent him home for his safety.

Of the many American art students and artists who came to Paris after the Civil War, scarcely any had been unaffected by the war. Some had served in it; others had been witnesses to camp life and the horrors of a war that had left more than 600,000 men dead. Henry Bacon, a landscape painter, had enlisted in the Thirteenth Massachusetts Regiment and was badly wounded at the Second Battle of Bull Run. Winslow Homer had covered the war as an artist correspondent for Harper’s Weekly. By the end of 1866, when he came to Paris, Homer had done more than twenty paintings with the war as his subject, including The Veteran in a New Field, a powerful image of a lone figure swinging a scythe, like the reaper of death, in a golden wheat field, evoking memories of slaughter in the wheat field at Gettysburg.

In the weeks that followed the Battle of Gettysburg, the wounded had arrived by the trainload in Philadelphia, the home of Thomas Eakins, then a student of painting. Like many parents, Eakins’s father, a man of limited means, paid the required $25 so Thomas could avoid being drafted, a difficult decision for both father and son.

It would be hard for future generations to imagine—or would simply be forgotten—that in a city like Philadelphia more than half the male population between ages eighteen and forty-five served in the Union Army.

Most heart-wrenching for young Saint-Gaudens was seeing Abraham Lincoln lying in state at New York’s City Hall. He had waited hours in an “interminable” line, and after seeing Lincoln’s face, he went back to the end of the line to go through a second time.

In France, as he and other newly arrived Americans soon learned, the Civil War was viewed with indifference or, more often, overt sympathy for the defeated Confederates. Thus it had been since the start of the war and seemed strangely at odds with French opposition to slavery, not to say the traditional goodwill between the governments of France and the United States from the time of the American Revolution. In 1863, matters had been further complicated. With America preoccupied with the war, Napoleon III chose to install his own puppet emperor in Mexico, the young Austrian Ferdinand Joseph Maximilian. That so many Americans had taken this as a clear breach of the Monroe Doctrine only added to French sympathy for the South.

Congressman Elihu B. Washburne of Illinois, who was soon to become the American minister to France, affirmed later that Louis Napoleon had been in “full sympathy with the Rebellion” and “desirous of giving it aid and comfort as far as he dared.

That was well known to everybody in Paris, which was filled with Confederates, who were flattered and feted not only at the Tuileries, but by the people generally of the city. The loyal men of our country were everywhere in the background.

A Confederate mission had been established in Paris at 25 avenue d’Antin, and a Confederate Woman’s Aid Society, organized by Southern women, collected medical supplies and clothing for the Confederate army and staged fundraising concerts and bazaars.

The one time when the “excitement” of the Civil War had come to France’s doorstep was on June 19, 1864, the day the Confederate raider Alabama and the steamer USS Kearsarge fought to the finish off Cherbourg, within view of several thousand spectators crowded on hilltops along the shoreline. The Alabama, which had been wreaking havoc with Union shipping, had put in to Cherbourg for repairs. When the Kearsarge arrived on the scene, the Alabama went out to meet her. The battle raged for an hour and a half before the burning Alabama went to the bottom. Engravings of the drama filled the illustrated French newspapers and magazines. The painter Édouard Manet produced a dramatic portrayal of the scene. The Paris papers were filled with editorial sympathy for the Alabama and her brave crew. According to one journal, the Constitutionnel, the loss of the Alabama had caused “profound regret from one end of France to the other.”

For Augustus Saint-Gaudens, nothing about his growing up had been easy or shielded from the hard realities of existence. The combination of New York street life, work, and the war had made him mature beyond his years. Physically full grown by the time he arrived in Paris, he stood five feet eight. He had his father’s full head of wiry dark red hair, a long pale face like his mother, rather small, deep-set, intent pale grey-blue eyes, and a long nose his friends made fun of and that he himself made fun of in cartoons and caricatures.

People liked him for his sense of humor and exuberance, his “Celtic spirit.” “In his spare but strong-knit figure, his firm but supple hands, his manner of carrying himself, his every gesture,” a friend would write, “one felt the abounding vitality, the almost furious energy of the man.” He seemed happy by nature. He loved to sing at work or with friends, most any time, and was blessed with a rich tenor voice. One friend, Thomas Moore, would remember how, on Saturday nights after class hours at Cooper Institute, he, Gus, and two others named Herzog and Grotemeyer, “took long walks arm-in-arm to Central Park shouting airs from ‘Martha,’ the ‘Marseillaise,’ and the like, in which Gus was always the leader with his voice and magnetic presence.”

Known for looking always on the bright side, he would later in life suffer acute spells of melancholy and insist there had been “always the triste undertone in my soul that comes from my sweet Irish mother.”

He had demonstrated uncommon talent in his extraordinary cameo carvings and freehand drawings. Before leaving for Paris he had modeled a remarkably strong, confident bust of his father. He considered a pencil portrait he drew of his mother to be his most prized possession. Yet he knew the question of how far his talent could take him, and how it would measure up against serious competition, had still to be resolved, and as for so many others, this was among the main reasons for his being in Paris.

He moved in at first with his Uncle François, his father’s brother, on the avenue de la Grande-Armée, and “at once” found a part-time job working for an Italian cameo cutter on Montmartre. Told his application to the École des Beaux-Arts could take months to process, he enrolled in both morning and evening classes in modeling at one of the so-called “petites écoles” held at the École de Médecine. From Montmartre to the École de Médecine in the Latin Quarter was a two-mile walk. On the days he was working he made the round trip.

Uncle François, who made his living as a demolition specialist, had been doing well as long as Georges Haussmann kept tearing Paris apart. But with the emperor’s plan for the city nearly completed, and the demolition about over, Uncle François was in “bad straits.” Forced to find somewhere else to live, Gus began moving from “cheaper to cheaper lodgings.” He was soon barely surviving, “miserably poor,” as he wrote years later, but he said nothing about it at the time, such was his refusal to “dwell on the ugly side of things.”

Classes at the petite école were a joy to him. Not even the conditions under which they were conducted could dampen his spirits.

We worked in a stuffy, overcrowded, absolutely unventilated theater, with two rows of students, perhaps twenty-five in each row, seated in a semicircle before the model who stood against the wall. Behind those who drew were about fifteen sculptors and I look back with admiration upon the powers of youth to live, work, and be joyful in an atmosphere that must have been almost asphyxiating.

II

As promised, the glittering Exposition Universelle of 1867 was bigger and more spectacular than anything the world had yet seen. One giant, oval-shaped, glass-and-cast-iron exhibition “palace” and more than one hundred smaller buildings filled most of the vast Champ de Mars on the Left Bank. More than 50,000 exhibitors took part. The theme was “objects for the improvement of the physical and moral condition of the masses.” By the time the fair closed, on the last day of October, 11 million people— more than twice the number who attended the Exposition of 1855—had poured across the Pont d’Iéna to the banner-festooned main entrance on the Quai d’Orsay.

They came from virtually every country. Emperor Napoleon III played host in lavish fashion to the czar of Russia, the kings of Prussia, Bavaria, and Portugal, the pasha of Egypt, and the sultan of Turkey in a red fez. There were soirées and dinners night after night, and grand balls at the luxuriously renovated Palais des Tuileries. Count Otto von Bismarck, chief minister to the king of Prussia, could be seen resplendent in his white uniform and invariably enjoying himself as much as anyone. At a ball at the Austrian Embassy, amid “mountains” of lights and flowers, grottoes, and cascades of real water, guests waltzed to music by Johann Strauss’s orchestra from Vienna. Strauss himself conducted the first performance of The Blue Danube in Paris, and the dancing went on until nearly daybreak.

To add to the pleasures of the city for visitors of all kinds, a new line of steam-powered sightseeing boats called Bateaux Mouches now plied the Seine.

Because of bad weather in March, the exposition had been embarrassingly slow getting under way. At the time of the official opening on April 2, nearly half of the exhibits were still unpacked. (People were calling it “The Universal Exhibition of International Boxes.”) But by May all was in full swing and Paris more dazzling than ever. No one had ever seen so many flags flying, so many lights blazing, so many people of all kinds.

“At the Grand Hôtel they were making up beds in the dining room,” reported the New York Times. With the start of summer the throngs grew greater still. “Even the Americans are coming at last. The registers are filling with their names from Boston to New Orleans, and so on to San Francisco.” Among the crowds of Americans was the author Mark Twain, who, taking time out from a tour of Europe and the Holy Land, checked into the Hôtel du Louvre.

“Paris is now the great center of the world,” wrote Samuel F. B. Morse, who, at age seventy-eight, had returned with his wife and four children. (So indispensable had the telegraph become to daily life at home in the United States by this time that 50,000 miles of Western Union wire carried more than 2 million news dispatches a year, including, in 1867, the latest from the exposition in Paris.)

The displays of novel manufactured items included an almost overwhelming array of things large and small, things almost unimaginable— magnificent locomotives, steam engines, a feather-weight metal called aluminum, a giant siege gun by the German cannon maker Krupp, and a new kind of brass horn, le saxophone, devised by Napoleon III’s official instrument maker, Adolphe Sax. The favorite American import, to judge by the crowds it drew, was a soda fountain. The Philadelphia art student Thomas Eakins wrote to his family of waiting in a line a block long for a drink from it.

Mark Twain and a few traveling companions spent only a few days in Paris before continuing on the tour he would describe in often hilarious fashion in Innocents Abroad, which was to remain his best-selling book throughout his lifetime. Neither he nor any of his group had been abroad before. Travel was a “wild novelty” to them, and Paris “flashed upon us a splendid meteor,” he wrote, but he thought considerably less of the Parisians, and what humor he evoked was chiefly at their expense. He was, as would be said, not so much an American Francophobe, but a Parisphobe. The Paris barbershops were hopeless. He detested Paris guides. They “deceive and defraud every American who goes to Paris for the first time or sees the sights alone or in the company with others as little experienced as himself.”

With few exceptions the women of Paris struck him as downright homely. The grisettes were the biggest disappointment of all. “I knew by their looks that they ate garlic and onions … and I sorrow for the vagabond student of the Latin Quarter now, even more than I formerly envied him.” Seeing the “renowned” can-can danced for the first time, he covered his face with his hands, he claimed, but “looked through my fingers.”

The idea of it is to dance as wildly, as noisily, as furiously as you can; expose yourself as much as possible if you are a woman; and kick as high as you can. … Heavens!

Of the especially conspicuous presence of prostitutes in the city because of the exposition, he chose to say nothing. Yet when his brief stay was over, as he acknowledged, he gave “the beautiful city a regretful farewell.”

The number and importance of contemporary paintings and sculptures on exhibit surpassed anything seen before in one place. Though the American section of the Fine Arts Department was quite modest compared to that of the French, it was larger than it had been at the Exposition of 1855 and contained a number of works that, in time, would rank as American masterpieces. The most admiring crowds gathered about two enormous, dramatic landscapes—both befitting subjects for America, it was felt—Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains and Frederic Church’s Niagara Falls, the only American painting to be honored with a silver medal. Among several works evoking the Civil War from a Northern point of view were John Ferguson Weir’s The Gun Foundry, showing the munitions works near West Point, and Winslow Homer’s Prisoners from the Front, in which three Confederate prisoners under guard stand before a Northern general.

James McNeill Whistler’s White Girl, a near-life-size, full-length portrait of his beautiful red-haired Irish model and mistress, Joanna Hiffernan, dressed in white against a white background, had been rejected from an earlier exhibition at the Royal Academy in London and was considered, even in Paris, too suggestive by far, in that the young woman’s hair was undone and she stood on a wolf’s skin.

Many visitors found the exhibitions of American art disappointing. “Infantile arrogance,” “childish ignorance,” were two of the harsher comments from French critics, though one thought “M. Homer ought not, in good justice, be passed over unnoticed” and another saw promise of better things to come.

Count on the fact that the Americans, once they begin the business of the fine arts, will go quickly, and will go looking toward the future. Go ahead! Forward!

Homer, who had arrived in Paris in December, stayed nearly all of 1867. “I am working hard and improving much,” he wrote a friend in August. But his correspondence was infrequent and provides little in the way of details. He shared a studio in Montmartre, studied for a while with a French artist, Frederick Rondel, and spent time painting landscapes in the artists’ colony at Cernay-la-Ville.

A painting by Homer called The Studio that appears to have been done in Paris had, in any event, as Henry James said, “a great deal of Paris in it.” Two painters sit playing chamber music on cello and violin, the score propped on their easels. They have the requisite beards and mustaches, and in a photograph taken in Paris that year, Homer has the tips of his large mustache waxed to sharp points in the Louis Napoleon mode. Presumably, like other American artists and students, he spent time at the exposition, but how much is unknown.

Nor, regrettably, is there any account of how much of the exposition Augustus Saint-Gaudens saw. Probably he had not money enough to attend more than once or twice. But with his zest for getting “his money’s worth,” he doubtless covered a lot of ground, and he did see something of lifelong importance to him. It was a small bronze, a standing figure by the French sculptor Paul Dubois, of St. John the Baptist as a Child. It “seemed extraordinary to me,” he would write years afterward, and Dubois’s work and Dubois himself were to have “profound” influence.

Americans filled Paris in such numbers as to please themselves and annoy some of those from other countries, and the British in particular. Hotel managers, shopkeepers, clerks, and floor managers at the sumptuous new department stores—les grands magasinssuch as Le Printemps and La Samaritaine—welcomed Americans as no others. “They spend money profusely, are not much given to bargaining, and put on no airs,” wrote the New York Times correspondent.

In addition to the huge influx of American tourists, the size of the American colony in Paris had been growing steadily to the point where there were now more than 4,000 Americans living in the city. This was far fewer than the number of resident English or Germans, but still four times what it had been a generation earlier.

The bad feelings that had developed among many of the French toward Americans on the side of the North during the Civil War had subsided rapidly. Further, on July 2, word reached Paris that Emperor Maximilian of Mexico had been executed by a firing squad on orders from the rebel leader, Benito Juárez. Napoleon III first learned of the calamity when handed a note as he was presenting awards before a crowd of 20,000 at the exposition.

Clearly his misadventures in Mexico were finished, and this, too, had a notable effect on how Parisians felt about the throngs of American visitors that summer.

The great majority of thinking minds are … heartily glad that an end has been put to the Emperor’s projects in that direction [the Times correspondent wrote], and they seem desirous to make up by their present cordiality to Northerners for the dislike and hostility which was evinced toward them during the rebellion. For the prompt revival of the old feeling of friendship, we have no doubt in a great measure to thank the Exhibition.

Europeans marveled at the industrial might that had been marshaled by the North during the Civil War and America’s surging productivity since. In the words of the soon-to-be American minister to France, Elihu Washburne, a former congressman from Illinois, “The United States, having astonished all Europe by triumphantly crushing out the most stupendous rebellion the world had ever known, and after one of the most gigantic wars in history, had bounded forward to a position of first rank among the nations of the earth.”

Such an enormous increase in productivity also meant unprecedented prosperity for a great many Americans, and with money at hand as never before in their lives, what better place to spend it than Paris? Well-to-do American women were now making annual trips to Paris to enhance their wardrobes at Worth’s. The famous couturier Charles Frederick Worth, an English expatriate, had made his establishment at 7 rue de la Paix a Paris destination, his name the very emblem of good taste in New York and San Francisco, no less than Paris or London. And if Worth’s proved insufficient, there were other high-priced dressmakers like Bobergh or Felix.

Bringing one lady to Paris cost as much as two men, wrote a young American civil engineer, Washington Roebling, who, with his wife, Emily, was in Europe gathering technical information in preparation for what was to be America’s greatest bridge, connecting Brooklyn to New York. Their money had vanished so rapidly in Paris that they had to leave earlier than they wished.

Another American of note, Henry Adams of Boston, wanted only to get out of Paris as soon as possible, but to his annoyance he and his wife, Clover, were held over for days, “waiting for ladies’ dresses and the milliner’s bills.” Paris was “horribly” expensive and crowded, the fastidious Adams reported. He had never imagined the city could be so overrun with “hordes of low Germans, English, Italians, Spaniards, and Americans, who stare and gawk and smell, and crowd every shop and street. I did not detect a single refined-looking being among them. …”

Every month, on average, one hundred Americans sojourning in Paris applied to the United States minister for the chance to be presented at court, and nearly all felt obliged to turn out in the finest, latest thing. Dr. Thomas Evans regularly supplied the emperor with the names of “présentable” Americans to be invited to reviews or grand balls at the Palace of the Tuileries or gala days at the palace at Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, or Compiègne.

One resident American in Paris who, like Evans, figured frequently on the royal guest list was Lillie Greenough Moulton, the wife of an independently wealthy American named Charles Moulton. Still in her twenties, and known for her exquisite singing voice, as well as her beauty, she had become a favorite of the emperor and empress. In her diary, along with descriptions of the flowers and diamond tiaras, the dazzling uniforms and other extravagances of the court, she included this account of what was involved in just preparing for a week in the country at la Maison de l’Empereur at Compiègne.

I was obliged to have about twenty dresses, eight day costumes (counting my traveling suit), the green cloth dress for the hunt, which I was told was absolutely necessary, seven ball dresses, five gowns for tea. …

A professional packer came to pack our trunks, of which I had seven and C[harles] had two; the maid and the valet each had one, making, altogether, quite a formidable pile of luggage.

Transportation was provided by a special train marked IMPéRIAL.

There was increasing talk in Paris financial circles of the great railroad under construction across the North American continent and what it could mean to world trade, especially in combination with the new sea-level ship canal being dug at Suez with French financing and under the leadership of the French diplomat Ferdinand de Lesseps. The future had never looked so large with possibilities.

“The American flag is freely displayed all over Paris, as if our countrymen were welcome,” wrote a Philadelphia physician, Dr. FitzWilliam Sargent, who for some years had been coming to Paris to study French medical practices, but was now, with his wife and children, living full-time in Europe.

“Lincoln’s portrait is often seen in shop windows with other notabilities. In short the United States are ‘looking up.’ …” Dr. Sargent’s twelve-year-old son, “Johnnie,” was also a source of much pride to him. “He sketches quite nicely and has a remarkably quick and correct eye.”

III

When a formal notification arrived at last, informing Augustus Saint-Gaudens he had been admitted to the École des Beaux-Arts after a wait of nine months, he enrolled immediately in the atelier of François Jouffroy. As students in painting at the École, like Thomas Eakins, aspired to study under Jean-Léon Gérôme, master of the classical mode, who put great stress on drawing the human figure, so for those who would be sculptors, Jouffroy’s atelier was, as Saint-Gaudens said, “the triumphant one.”

Jouffroy was sixty-two, the son of a baker, tall, dark, and spare, “with little, intelligent black eyes,” as Saint-Gaudens remembered. When making his critique of a student’s work, he spoke in a low, nasal voice and while customarily gazing off the whole time in some other direction from the model and the student’s efforts.

As he acknowledged, Saint-Gaudens had not yet shown himself to be a brilliant student. But Jouffroy’s compliments consoled him. He was not the least discouraged, nor did he suffer any doubts about himself, such was his youthful vanity, as he also acknowledged years afterward. The doubts came later.

At a student party soon after he joined the class, the others asked him to sing the “Marseillaise,” which, under the Second Empire, was forbidden in public places. He sang it in English, as he had with his friends at home in New York, and his performance brought a roar of approval. They urged him to sing it again. They praised his voice, told him how beautiful it was, and he believed them. In the days to follow he sang the song many times over, only to realize they were making fun of him.

“I was finally admitted to full membership and teased no more, becoming in my turn one of the most boisterous of the students.”

He made friends—friends for life, in several cases—and mostly with those from southern France, who spoke with a southern accent just as he did, because of his father.

Reminiscing later, he recalled nothing in the way of “amorous adventure.” When a girl he liked in New York wrote to ask whether he still meant to “keep company” with her, he never replied. How truly chaste he remained is impossible to know, so extremely circumspect was he always about what he considered private matters. Friends and working associates, however, would talk a good deal later of his fondness for women.

His afternoons cutting cameos provided only the barest living. Long afterward, walking with friends in the narrow back streets of the Latin Quarter, he would point out the miserable little cafés where he had been forced to eat dreadful food as a student in order to survive. But so “soaring” was his ambition, as he later said, and so “tremendously austere” was he, he felt a kind of “Spartan-like superiority.”

A close friend, Alfred Garnier, would describe him as “possessing so strongly the qualities of a man who was bound to succeed,” yet he remained as well “the most joyous creature.” For exercise he, Garnier, and others went regularly to a gymnasium. (Gus was “crazy about wrestling.”) On holiday hiking expeditions, they would sometimes cover thirty miles, with Gus setting the pace. On one such venture they set off for Saint-Valéry-en-Caux on the coast of Normandy. “Five minutes after we reached the seashore,” Garnier remembered, “we were in the water in spite of the heavy waves, for as soon as he saw the water Gus had to enter. …” On another trek, in Switzerland, when they climbed a cathedral spire, none exclaimed over the view with such enthusiasm as Gus. “Nobody got his money’s worth so well as he. Everything seemed enchanting, everything beautiful!”

For more than a year he remained the only American among Jouffroy’s students, until 1869 when Olin Warner joined the class. Older than Gus by four years, Warner came from Vermont and was a former telegraph operator. In a stream of letters to his “Dear Ones at Home,” he expressed with appealing clarity the feelings of many American students of every kind:

Paris is the most splendid city I ever saw. …

Wine is cheaper than milk. …

I could not have gone to a better part of the world to study. …

I am entirely out of money. …

The further I go the harder it looks to me and the more

difficulties I encounter, but I am determined to succeed. …

In Jouffroy’s atelier Gus led all in determination, and in making noise, “singing and whistling to split the ears.” He would happily recall how he loved to “bawl” the andante of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, or the serenade from Mozart’s Don Giovanni. Yet for all the joie de vivre, the carryings-on with friends, he remained oddly shy with people he did not know. He cared nothing about what he wore, or what was in or out of fashion, and greatly disliked any and all affectations, as he would through life.

Concentrated effort at modeling and drawing day after day for three years produced clear progress. Jouffroy, while not a sculptor of the highest rank, was an exceptional teacher, and his atelier a center for what was the new movement in sculpture in France, which took its inspiration from the Italian Renaissance. In this regard, Saint-Gaudens had come to his studies in Paris at a highly advantageous time.

It was then, too, in his student years in Paris that he reached certain conclusions about work that were to stand as his guiding principles, and that he was one day, in turn, to stress again and again to students of his own.

Conceive an idea. Then stick to it. Those who hang on are the only ones who amount to anything.

You can do anything you please. It’s the way it’s done that makes the difference.

A good thing is no better for being done quickly.

In November 1869, with all appropriate pageantry, the Suez Canal was opened, joining the Mediterranean with the Red Sea. The Empress Eugénie, present for the ceremony, stood on the deck of the imperial yacht wearing a big straw hat and waving a white handkerchief. “There was a real Egyptian sky,” she would remember, “a light of enchantment, a dreamlike resplendence. …” The canal was a triumph. It brought France la gloire. Its builder, Ferdinand de Lesseps, was Europe’s reigning hero. The timing seemed perfect. In America, earlier that summer, the transcontinental railroad had been completed. As the popular French novelist Jules Verne would postulate, it was now theoretically possible to go around the world in just eighty days. Those in France who had invested in the de Lesseps project—and there were thousands—would profit handsomely.

All the while “the resplendence” and pageantry of the Second Empire and its capital city continued. The exposition had come and gone, but the show of Paris never closed. The lights burned bright. Such arrays of the newest, most fashionable merchandise displayed in countless shops and grand department stores tantalized no less than ever. The music of Gounod and Offenbach, the can-can, the opening of the new Folies Bergère music hall, restaurants that stayed open through the night, the daytime spectacle of top-hatted and bonneted gentry at their leisure in the dappled sunshine of public gardens all continued, as did the steady incoming flow of affluent Americans.

Of the prominent, well-to-do American families in Paris in 1869, two from New York are particularly of note, and chiefly because of their children: the Theodore Roosevelts, the frail, asthmatic oldest son of whom, young Theodore, or “Teedie,” was eleven; and the George Frederick Joneses (whose way of life was said to have inspired the expression “keeping up with the Joneses”), and whose studious, red-haired daughter Edith, the future Edith Wharton, had her first portrait painted in Paris at age eleven, during what turned out to be a family stay of two years.

But all this was worlds apart from the life of the impoverished young New Yorker trying to become a sculptor. So desperately poor was Saint-Gaudens still that out of pride as much as necessity he had assumed an attitude of “deepest scorn” for all “ordinary amusements.” His one indulgence was the opera. He had come to adore the music of the opera, and with orders for cameos increasing somewhat, was inclined to treat himself now and then.

As it happened, Saint-Gaudens and several friends were at the opera the night of July 15, 1870, the night no one in Paris would ever forget, when news came that France had declared war on Prussia.

It was near the end of a performance of Daniel-François Auber’s La Muette de Portici. One of the leads, Madame Marie Sasse, came onstage carrying a tricolor flag and asked the audience to join in singing the “Marseillaise.” “Then,” remembered Alfred Garnier, “everyone went crazy.”

The audience poured out onto the boulevard des Italiens, where crowds were shouting “À Berlin”—“On to Berlin!” To Gus and Garnier, it seemed utter madness. They found themselves hammering with fists and canes at some of those shouting the loudest.

To Gus the empire was nothing but “nonsense” and “rottenness.” He and his friends were ardent republicans and saw the war as the emperor’s doing. None of it made sense, any more than singing the “Marseillaise,” the hymn of the French Revolution, had any connection with any of the Napoleons—yet now it was the emperor’s war song!

The madness grew worse by the day. Paris rang with the “Marseillaise.” More crowds marched shouting for war. The government-controlled press unanimously called for war.

“No language can measure the probable consequences and results,” wrote the American minister Elihu Washburne in a dispatch to President Ulysses S. Grant. “Everything is brought to a standstill and ordinary people stand aghast with amazement. But the great crowd[s] are mad with excitement and things are rushed as in a giddy whirl.” The French minister of war assured the people that any conflict with Prussia would be “a mere stroll, walking stick in hand.”

The emperor, who was ill and suddenly aged, privately opposed the war. He knew France to be unprepared, the same conclusion Otto von Bismarck had reached during his visit to Paris in 1867. The fact was, the Germans had more than 400,000 well-trained, well-equipped troops, whereas the French soldiers numbered only 250,000 and were poorly equipped. The issue supposedly at stake, the succession of the Spanish throne, was ridiculous. But that seemed of little interest, and the emperor let himself be swayed by those close around him whose hubris greatly exceeded their judgment.

On July 28, pale and tired and dressed in the full uniform of a general, he departed for the front from Saint-Cloud by private train, looking anything but confident, the pain of a bladder stone too great for him to have appeared on horseback. He was entering the campaign in command of the army having never been a general, or even a colonel. On reaching the front, at Metz, he reported to the Empress Eugénie that nothing was prepared. “I regard us as already lost.”

In the first weeks of August one humiliating French defeat followed another in rapid succession, at Wissembourg, Forbach, and Wörth. An American observer with the German army, General Philip Sheridan, called the German infantry “as fine as I ever saw.” The Krupp guns had twice the range of the French pieces.

The news, when it reached Paris, was devastating. Many refused to believe it. “No person not in Paris at the time could have any adequate idea of the state of feeling which the extraordinary news from the battlefield had created,” wrote the American minister, Washburne.

(Telegraph dispatches from American newspaper correspondents in France had also stirred great popular interest in the war in the United States. Papers in New York or Boston or Cincinnati now carried on-the-scene descriptions of battles only days after they happened. To enable a correspondent for the Cincinnati Commercial to follow the French army, Washburne had devised a special passport and “covered it all over with big seals.”)

On September 2 came the ultimate, overwhelming French defeat at the small border fortress of Sedan, where Napoleon III insisted, despite the pain he was in, on riding into battle, as if preferring to be killed rather than face the disgrace to come.

Sedan was the most sudden, catastrophic defeat in French history. More than 104,000 of the emperor’s troops surrendered and the emperor was taken prisoner.

Paris learned what had happened late the afternoon of September 3 and the Second Empire instantly collapsed. It had been all of seven weeks since the night in July when war was declared and jubilant crowds swarmed through Paris shouting “À Berlin!”

On September 4, a beautiful sunny Sunday, in the midst of disaster and with the certain prospect of the Germans marching on Paris, the new minister of the interior, the flamboyant Léon Gambetta, climbed onto the sill of an enormous open window at the Hôtel de Ville to proclaim to the crowd below the birth of the Third Republic.

“Louis Napoleon Bonaparte and his dynasty have forever ceased to reign in France,” he shouted. Suddenly it had become a day for rejoicing. And for Elihu Washburne no less than any other “étranger” in Paris. “I am rejoiced beyond expression at the downfall of this miserable dynasty and the establishment of the Republic,” he wrote privately.

“So perishes a harlequin, and all his paraphernalia of Empire collapses as suddenly as a windbag pricked with a pin,” wrote an American medical student named Mary Putnam, equally overjoyed.

France, or at least Paris, gives itself up not to panic, but to a perfect outburst of joy, to the jubilation of a fête day. It crowns the statue of Strasbourg with flowers, it promenades on the Place de la Concorde, the rue de Rivoli, before the Hôtel de Ville, as if to salute the return of a triumphant army. It forgets Prussia, it forgets even the Emperor, it is wild with delight crying, “Vive la République, à toi citoyen! Nous avons la République!”

Augustus Saint-Gaudens knew nothing of what had happened, however. Early that same Sunday he had left Paris by train for Limoges, to visit his brother Andrew, who had found work in a porcelain factory there. He had felt a need to get away and think about what he ought to do.

On the fateful afternoon the Republic was proclaimed, with the clamor growing louder and more threatening outside the Palace of the Tuileries, the Empress Eugénie decided it was time to attempt an escape. She never believed this could happen to her, that she would exit in disgrace like King Louis-Philippe and Queen Marie-Amélie. For days, looking pale and worn, she had stayed on courageously. Others urged her to leave while she could. Now servants were departing, throwing aside their livery on the way out the doors.

“I yield to force,” she said calmly at last. Leaving everything behind— money, jewelry—she went by way of rooms that connected the palace to the Louvre. She was accompanied only by the ambassadors of Austria and Italy and a few loyal attendants. There was no prearranged plan. No attempt was made at disguise. She left wearing the same simple black cashmere dress she had been wearing for days, plus a dark shawl and a black derby hat with a veil.

She hurried down the long Grande Galerie of the Louvre and through the Salon Carré into the Salle des Sept-Cheminées, where, for an instant, Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa caught her eye. How strange, she later said, that this painting of ill omen should be the last she ever saw of the Louvre.

Once outside, on the rue de Rivoli, she and a lady-in-waiting, Madame Adélaïde-Charlotte Lebreton, went off by a common, one-horse cab as fast as possible up the Champs-Élysées to the avenue de l’Impératrice, on an impulse that Dr. Evans might help her.

They arrived at about five o’clock to find Evans not at home. When he returned an hour or so later, accompanied by a long-time American colleague, Dr. Edward Crane, he was told two unidentified ladies “very anxious” to see him were waiting in the library.

Thomas Evans had been well established in Paris professionally and socially for nearly twenty years. He had come to France knowing no one, speaking no French, and with little in savings. He now resided on the avenue de l’Impératrice, where, as said in the Paris Guide of 1867, one saw “smiles everywhere, people dressed to the nines … elegance, too, and what splendors!” The house he and his wife, Agnes, called Bella Rosa had, in addition to a fine library, a white and gold ballroom, stained-glass windows, and a grand staircase of Pyrénées marble designed by Charles Garnier, the architect for the new Opéra. There were extensive grounds, a fountain, a stable with stalls for twenty horses. Evans knew all the prominent and well-to-do Americans in Paris, as well as Minister Washburne, who lived farther down the avenue. He and Agnes entertained in lavish style and customarily spent holidays at the most fashionable seaside resorts. Agnes was at the moment on holiday at Deauville on the Normandy coast.

He was charming and handsome, if a bit too well fed, and had every reason to be pleased with himself, having received the highest professional honors, including the French Legion of Honor. Such heights were unimaginable for a dentist at home in the United States or in France. In Paris, when he first arrived, he had found those who specialized in treating diseases of the teeth ranked with barbers. Physicians looked down on dentistry, considering it hardly comparable to their own profession. Dentists sent for by well-to-do patients were expected to enter the house by the back door, like ordinary tradesmen.

For all that he had adapted to life in Paris, Evans never lost his strong allegiance to his own country. Most obvious had been his open support of the North throughout the Civil War, lobbying the emperor on the subject at every chance, despite the Southern sympathies of much of his clientele, not to say the emperor himself.

Further, from the time France went to war that summer, Evans had taken a lead in preparing for the medical emergency to be faced. He wasted no time establishing what he called the American International Sanitary Committee, paid for by him and a circle of American friends in Paris.

On a flat stretch of open land across the avenue from Bella Rosa, tents went up for a field hospital, or “field ambulance,” over which he flew an American flag. Supplies of canned beef, biscuits, candles, ether, bedding, and clothing were stocked—all under the direction of Evans and his colleague Crane. The sick and wounded to be cared for would be more than the Paris hospitals could handle, and a well-supplied, well-staffed facility in the open air would be far preferable to crowding them into airless churches and public buildings, as was the usual way. No one with any realistic sense of the gravity of the crisis to come failed to appreciate the value of how much Dr. Evans had already accomplished.

As soon as he stepped into the library and saw who was waiting, Evans knew what was expected of him. Without hesitation, he offered the empress his help, despite all he stood to lose if things went wrong, as they both knew without saying. “We were thoroughly impressed with the idea that we were about to engage in an undertaking attended with many risks,” he would write, “and that it would require great discretion on our parts if it was to be successfully executed.”

They agreed to wait until morning before leaving the house. The empress had had little or no sleep for days. Evans made up a bed for her himself, in his wife’s bedroom, because he dared not trust the servants.

At five o’clock he knocked at her door and they were on their way before daybreak, both dressed as they had been the night before. They were a party of four—Evans and Crane, the empress and her lady-in-waiting— traveling in Evans’s own enclosed landau, a trusted coachman driving. They headed straight for Deauville and, with Evans doing the talking at checkpoints and a change of horses, they sailed through. No one recognized the empress, not even at Deauville.

Evans appealed to an English yachtsman, Sir John Burgoyne, and his wife to take the empress across the Channel to asylum in England. Lady Burgoyne responded, “Well, why not?”

After an extremely rough crossing, the empress and Evans were landed safely on the other side.

In Paris, meantime, no one knew anything about this. There were only rumors, the most common of which was that the empress had managed to get away to Belgium. Later the same day as her escape from the city with Evans, September 5, Victor Hugo, after years in exile, returned to Paris to wild acclaim.

Augustus Saint-Gaudens learned the news of a new republic only after arriving at Limoges. “I am heart and soul in the French cause,” he declared, and departed for Paris again on the next available train.

But on the train with him on all sides were women weeping for husbands and sons at the front. At Paris he saw volunteers from Brittany marching into the city with no uniforms other than simple white blouses. Crowded with them, “in utter confusion and dust,” as he wrote, were droves of sheep and cattle being led to the Jardin des Plantes in preparation for the coming siege. “They seemed to me like so many innocent men condemned to death marching to their doom,” he wrote to an American in Connecticut named Elmira Whittlesey, who, during a stay in Paris, had commissioned some of his cameos. To judge by the length and candor of the letter, she was someone in whom he placed considerable trust. “I could not restrain my feelings and I kissed some of the poor fellows as they marched along. I feel sure now that most of them are already dead, a sacrifice to the ambition of a couple of scoundrels.”

He had received an eight-page letter from his mother “in terrible grief,” begging him to stay out of French political affairs and come home, whatever the cost. He had never felt so low, so seized by the “triste undertone” of his nature. He may have been heart and soul in the French cause, but he was not French. He was an American.

Earlier that summer there had been an estimated 13,000 Americans in Paris, mostly tourists. Since the declaration of war in July, they had been leaving by the thousands. The American colony in Paris that numbered over 4,500 would all but disappear. Other American artists and art students had already gone. Thomas Eakins had left in July. Mary Cassatt, another Philadelphian, had departed. Gus’s French relations in Paris all urged him to go. Even his brother Andrew intended to leave. By September it seemed anyone with an American passport was getting out while it was still possible. The crush of the crowds at the railroad stations was “awful,” recorded one American who had seen his family off. Trains for Le Havre, or the south of France, as Gus knew, were jammed to capacity.

His French friends, however, were going off to fight. Alfred Garnier had not hesitated to enlist. Olin Warner, though an American, had signed up to serve with a corps of friends of France, organized as a supplement to the regular forces.

Back in Limoges again, Gus wrote plaintively to Garnier, “Je suis persuadé, et je ne t’en blâme pas, que tu dois te dire: Voilà un lâche!”—“I feel persuaded you think me a coward, and I don’t blame you!”

If only his parents were there in France, it would make such a difference. He would not hesitate to enlist. “But they are getting old, and love me. They have worked hard all their lives, are poor, and are still working. What would happen if they should lose me now?”

He made up his mind. He would stick to the pursuit he had come for. He would keep going in his mission to become a sculptor. He had not yet reached the point in his work where he was ready to go home. If unable to continue his studies in Paris, then he would go to the next-best place. For the time being, he would go to Rome.