CHAPTER FIVE

AMERICAN SENSATIONS

We were met on the steps by half a dozen huge and splendid looking porters, in flaming scarlet livery and powdered wigs, who conducted us in, and being met by one of the King’s aides-de-camp, we were conducted by him into His Majesty’s presence.…

—George Catlin

I

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”—“The more things change, the more they remain the same”—was the oft-quoted observation of a French writer, Alphonse Karr. But while much about life would assuredly go on as usual, very much was to be profoundly, irretrievably different.

Change was coming—dramatic, unprecedented change: scheduled Atlantic crossings by steamship in half the time; communication between far-distant points at the speed of lightning; a surprise discovery by a Parisian artist named Louis Daguerre that Samuel Morse, seeing it for the first time, called “the most beautiful” of the age; centuries-old European monarchies brought down by tumultuous political upheaval that began in Paris; and Paris itself transformed on a scale no one could have imagined—and all within less than twenty years.

The year 1838 marked the beginning, when in April the paddle steamer Sirius crossed from Cork to New York, followed closely by another steamship from Bristol, the Great Western. Although both ships had a full complement of sails, both had the “unceasing aid” of steam engines the entire way.

Under steam a ship could now cut a straight furrow at sea, from point to point, with no more, or very little, tacking this way and that at the will of the winds. As never before, there could now be scheduled departures, no more waiting for wind when there was none, causing delays that could drag on for days.

On Tuesday, May 1, the Sirius departed New York on her return voyage. It was the first time a steamship ever set off from America for Europe, and thousands of people crowded the wharf to witness the historic event. Among those on board was James Gordon Bennett, publisher of the New York Herald, who on reaching England would declare, “We are positively in the beginning of a new age.”

It had been a rough crossing, with gale winds and heavy seas, still it had taken only seventeen days. Samuel Morse, who left New York by sailing ship shortly after, did not reach London until mid-June, a full month later.

As they were to discover, Morse and Bennett were both on their way to Paris.

Of those Americans who had braved the Atlantic to come to Paris earlier in the 1830s, only two would return for reasons other than a pleasurable or nostalgic visit, and Samuel Morse was one. The other, Charles Sumner, would not arrive until 1856, and as it was with Morse, Sumner’s purpose this time was entirely different from what it had been at first.

There was, however, one of the original adventurers who had never gone home, nor diverged in the slightest from his original objective. George Peter Alexander Healy, “Little Healy” from Boston, was still happily, industriously pursuing what he had come to Paris for in the first place, to make himself a master in the art of portraiture.

Arriving in Paris at age twenty-one, knowing no one and speaking no French, he had gone to the Louvre for his first look at the works of the old masters, and, to his surprise, found himself thinking they were overrated. “Perhaps many a young and audacious ignoramus has thought and even said as much before and since,” he would later write. It was the experience of trying his hand at a copy of a Correggio that opened his eyes to the genius of the masters and to an appreciation of the long way he had still to go with his work.

Yet the fact that he was accepted as a student at the atelier of Baron Antoine-Jean Gros, to begin his first serious training, suggests his efforts at the Louvre were hardly lacking.

He “went to work with a will,” trying all the while to catch up enough in French to make his way. The only American among the students, he was well received from the start, which was unusual. In the world of the Paris atelier, rigorous hazing was an established tradition for any newcomer, let alone an étranger.

Proficiency in drawing came first and foremost. Drawing was the foundation of everything, it was preached, and most of every day was devoted to drawing a live model, the students packed at their easels elbow-to-elbow. Once, during an early session, while the model was taking a break and Healy concentrated on looking over his efforts, another student, short, rough-mannered, and older than the rest, suddenly stepped in and shoved him aside, saying “Donne-moi ta place, Petit.”

He coolly turned over my sheet of grey paper [Healy would remember] and sketched the model, who resting, had fallen into a far better attitude than that which we had copied. The outline drawing was so strong, so full of life, so easily done, that I never had a better lesson.

The rough-mannered student, Thomas Couture, was to become one of the celebrated French painters of the day, and as a teacher have great influence on many more Americans to follow. He and Healy became fast friends. “There was in Couture’s talent such vigor, such frankness, and so much of life and truth that my admiration for the artist equaled my liking for the man.”

Genial by nature, always well-disposed to others, Healy made friends easily, a quality that was to serve him to great advantage in his career. He loved good conversation, and the more his French improved, the more he caught on with the others in the studio, one of whom, a particularly affable young man named Savinien Edme Dubourjal, who painted miniature portraits, became another favorite.

Healy openly revered the master, Antoine Gros, who had studied under the great Jacques-Louis David and won acclaim for paintings glorifying Napoleon. Gros was still widely respected, but he had become, in his sixties, “a saddened and almost despairing man,” brooding constantly over the fact that he was no longer in fashion. In some quarters he was often the subject of outright dismissal. “Gros est un homme mort!” one critic had exclaimed. “He had outlived his popularity, and his heart was broken,” wrote Healy.

On June 25, 1835, Antoine Gros drowned himself in the Seine. Shaken by the loss, his studies in the atelier at an end, Healy refused to despair.

My life at this time was a life of extreme sobriety and very hard work. I was full of respect for the dollars I had brought with me, and my noonday meal often consisted of a small loaf with fruit, or cheese when there was no fruit. But I had good health, high spirits, and immense pleasure in the progress I felt I was making day by day.

His physical appearance was also in his favor. He stood about five feet eight and had by this time, in the Paris mode, succeeded in growing a small mustache. He parted his full head of dark brown hair down the middle and the beginnings of a frown, a vertical crease between the eyebrows of the kind that comes from much close concentration with the eyes, gave what might have been simply a handsome face an appealing degree of intensity. All this he captured quite well in his early self-portraits. In time he would wear eyeglasses and add a small goatee. In self-portraits done some years afterward, he looks very much like Eugène Delacroix.

His energy was phenomenal. He was seldom still. In 1837 he accepted an invitation to London to do portraits there. A year later, with two young French artists, he set off from Paris on a painting tour of France and Switzerland on foot, often covering twenty or thirty miles a day. Then he was back again in London filling more canvases with the faces of English gentry.

Word of his talent spread. In Paris in 1838, the American minister to France, General Lewis Cass, asked Healy to paint his portrait, then another of Mrs. Cass, for which Healy would later win his first medal at the Paris Salon. The general was exceedingly proud of his gifted young countryman and spread the word further still.

In June of 1838, Healy was back in London in time to witness the coronation of Queen Victoria, and later decided to introduce himself to John James Audubon, much as he had once gone to see the beautiful Mrs. Otis on Beacon Hill, knowing that Audubon, too, in his youth had made ends meet painting portraits. Audubon was in London to supervise production of the fourth and final volume of his monumental work The Birds of America and was living with his wife on Wimpole Street. After protesting he was too busy to take time to sit for a portrait, Audubon said yes. Lewis Cass had been Healy’s first chance to paint an American notable. Audubon was the second, but also a hero to Healy and considerably more picturesque than the buff, well-fed general. He painted Audubon in the garb of a backwoodsman with his bird gun in hand.

Life for Healy was advancing rapidly, for by now he had met a shy young English woman, Louisa Phipps, one glimpse of whom, he said, was “enough to fix my destinies.” Fond of talking as he worked, Healy told Audubon he was in love. Audubon, who had been married for thirty years, immediately became more animated, assuring the young man the only real happiness in life was a good marriage.

In the spring of 1839, Healy received word from General Cass of an important commission awaiting him in Paris. He at once proposed to Miss Phipps. They were married in a quiet ceremony at St. Pancras Parish Church in London. Louisa wore her traveling dress, and as soon as the ceremony was over, they started for Paris. Healy had a hundred dollars; Louisa, “not a penny.” Nor could she speak a word of French.

General Cass, who was on excellent terms with King Louis-Philippe, had told His Majesty he wanted very much to have a portrait of the king for his Paris residence and that he wished to commission young Healy to do it. Cass, who had fought bravely in the War of 1812, and afterward served as the territorial governor of Michigan and as secretary of war under President Andrew Jackson, was a man of considerable charm, as well as ample means, and lived on the avenue Matignon in as grand a manner as any American in Paris. After being shown the large, assured portrait Healy had done of Cass, the king agreed to sit.

The first session at the Tuileries Palace commenced with a moment of unanticipated drama.

Before beginning the portrait [Healy wrote], I advanced toward the King, so as to take the measure of his face, using a compass for that purpose. One of the courtiers, seeing the gleam of steel in my hand, rushed upon me and pushed me aside. With a smile, Louis-Philippe said, “Mr. Healy is a republican, it is true, but he is an American. I am quite safe with him.”

Like other Americans, Healy found Louis-Philippe easy to talk to and particularly happy to recall his own years in the United States. As the painting progressed, and the king grew increasingly interested in it, he recounted for Healy how once he had watched Gilbert Stuart at work on a full-length portrait of George Washington.

Healy had never been happier. He was delighted with his work, blissful in his new married life. He and Louisa had moved into tiny quarters on the Left Bank, on the rue d’Assas near the Luxembourg Gardens. The larger of two rooms served as a studio, the other as their bedroom.

The concierge kept the place clean, and we went out for our meals. It was not a complicated way of living, but it never struck us that we were not the happiest mortals under the sun.

They began entertaining. To compensate for a complete lack of silverware, their friend Dubourjal, the miniaturist, would arrive at the door with his coat pocket full of knives and forks, and bearing several bottles of wine, which he loved to uncork and pour with due ceremony. Thomas Couture came also, though his loud voice and idea of humor did not sit well with shy Louisa. Where Dubourjal offered silverware from his pocket, Couture would pull out a live lizard and delighted in provoking disgust by showing raw oysters still alive at the moment they were swallowed.

King Louis-Philippe had chosen not to present himself in the portrait as the bourgeois gentleman frequently seen in the Garden of the Tuileries with his black suit and green umbrella. Instead he posed with his head held high by a stiff, gold-embroidered military collar, and wearing a chest full of decorations, heavy gold epaulettes, and a bright red sash over his right shoulder. Healy included the jowls, but the lift of the chin helped to compensate, and there was no suggestion that the head of black hair was a wig. In the completed work the overall look was of a vigorous man of military bearing clearly fit for his royal role. It was a long way from the pear-shaped Louis-Philippe of the political cartoons, yet a strong likeness nonetheless, and with life in it. All were pleased.

Healy rose early every morning and worked all day. On the rare occasions when he took time off, it was usually to go to the Louvre to stand for an hour or more studying a Rembrandt or Titian.

A larger, more commanding full-length portrait of Foreign Minister François Guizot followed that of Louis-Philippe. Guizot was the king’s chief advisor, and if not the real ruler of France, as many contended, he was possibly the greatest parliamentary manager of the age. A brilliant intellectual and former professor of history, he, like the king, spoke English fluently and preferred to converse in English while Healy worked. As a young man, he told Healy, he had translated Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, and more recently had published a biography of George Washington. The conversation between painter and sitter never flagged, Healy would remember. He found Guizot courteous and “perfectly charming,” but beneath it all, “cold.”

On a canvas measuring nearly 8 by 41/2 feet, Guizot was shown standing at a table covered with official documents, his right hand clasping one of them. He was in a black coat, straight of spine, and he stared straight at the viewer with the unmistakable look of a man of keen mind and substance, with no time for fools or views contrary to his own. “Inflexible” was another word Healy used to describe Guizot. It was one of Healy’s finest portraits yet, not just a deft likeness, but delineating character as well.

Thomas Appleton, who had known Healy and admired his work since Healy painted his sister Fanny in Boston, was in Paris again in the summer of 1841 and saw Healy at about the time the Guizot portrait was finished. “Healy is an excellent fellow,” Appleton wrote, adding prophetically, “and, if he perseveres [he] will come back to us someday with the best reputation for portraits of any American of his time.”

To what extent Healy’s fees may have been increasing all the while is not known, but he and Louisa moved from their two rooms on the Left Bank to “a rather better place” on the other side of the river, on the rue Saint-Lazare, with a studio “more fitted to receive distinguished sitters,” and more space for their expanding family. Louisa by now had given birth to two children, a boy and a girl, Arthur and Agnes.

In 1842, at the request of the king, Healy departed for America for the first time in eight years to make a copy of the Gilbert Stuart full-length portrait of Washington, which was hanging in the White House. Before the year was out, he was back in Paris with the Washington copy, as well as portraits he had done of President John Tyler and Senator Daniel Webster. When the king and others at the palace gathered for a first look, it is said, the portrait of Webster, “a magnificent-looking man,” attracted the most attention.

In the spring of 1845, Louis-Philippe asked Healy to go again to the United States and as soon as possible. Word had reached Paris that former president Andrew Jackson was seriously ill and the king wanted a portrait done from life while there was yet time. Further, he wished Healy to paint for him a whole series of portraits of living American statesmen to hang in his private gallery at Versailles. It was a commission such as no American artist had ever received until then, not Stuart or Copley, not Charles Willson Peale or Trumbull or Sully.

It was late May by the time Healy reached the Hermitage, Jackson’s home near Nashville, Tennessee, and the gaunt old president, propped up with pillows in a big armchair (as Healy would remember), told him he was too late.

“Can’t sit, sir—can’t sit!” Jackson said.

“But, General, the King of France …” Healy began.

“Can’t sit, sir, not for all the kings in Christendom!”

Nashville was a world apart from Paris, as Healy knew from the time and effort it had taken him to get there. Yet he was pleased to find the plantation home of the supposedly rough-hewn Jackson decorated with fine French wallpaper and French mirrors. The dining room table was heavy with French china, the cellar stocked with French wine. The visitor from Paris was made to feel immediately at home and with the urging of young Mrs. Jackson, the general’s adored daughter-in-law, the old president changed his mind and agreed to sit. As it turned out, Healy painted two portraits, one for the king, the other, at Jackson’s request, for the daughter-in-law. When Jackson died on June 8, Healy was among those at the bedside.

From Tennessee, Healy traveled on to Kentucky to paint Henry Clay, then to Massachusetts, where he did the aged John Quincy Adams, who was still serving as a member of Congress. In their conversation over several days, Healy found him as fascinating as anyone he had ever met, and particularly when Adams began reminiscing about his boyhood years in France with his father.

It seemed odd [Healy would recall] to talk to one who had been in France before the [French] Revolution, whose father had spoken to him familiarly of Voltaire, of Buffon, of the Encyclopédistes, of the French court; who had been at school near Paris with Franklin’s grandson … the sensation was a strange one.

Adams openly enjoyed sitting for his portrait, and this, Healy said, was not always the way with celebrated people. Webster, as he told Adams, likened artists to horseflies on a hot day. “Brush them off on one side, they settle on another,” Webster exclaimed.

Adams disagreed and talked of sitting for Gilbert Stuart and of the time he had spent at the Louvre looking at paintings. He talked of Lafayette and Lafayette’s beautiful wife. “I was but a small boy then, but I still remember what a deep impression the lovely Marquise made on my youthful imagination.” Talking about books and his favorite classical authors, Adams went on with such fervor that he visibly trembled with emotion. As Healy would observe years later, “In those far-away days cold indifference was not yet in fashion.”

II

“Having been delayed seven weeks in England, endeavoring to obtain a patent,” Samuel Morse wrote to his daughter Susan from Le Havre on July 26, 1838, “[we] are now on our way to Paris, to try what we can do with the French government.”

I confess I am not sanguine as to any favorable pecuniary result in Europe, but we shall try, and at any rate we have seen enough to know that the matter is viewed with great interest here. … I am in excellent health and spirits. …

Morse was traveling with James Gordon Bennett. The weather was ideal, the sky blue, and the Seine just as blue the whole way to Paris. “The beauty of the Seine is exquisite,” Bennett reported for his readers in the New York Herald. “The natural scenery along its placid winding banks, reminded me of the Mohawk above Albany. …”

Morse thought their hotel on the rue de Rivoli and the view from his window of the Garden of the Tuileries as delightful as any in Paris. It was a grand time to be back. Summer crowds filled the boulevards. The colossal Arc de Triomphe, the largest triumphal arch ever built, now completed at long last, offered from its summit yet another breathtaking panorama of the city.

In the six years since Morse left Paris, he had known seemingly endless struggles and disappointments, and then, just that February, a vivid triumph. He was now forty-seven, his hair turning grey. He remained a widower and still felt the loss of his wife, Lucretia. “You cannot know the depth of the wound that was inflicted, when I was deprived of your dear mother,” he wrote to Susan, “nor in how many ways that wound has kept open.” He welcomed the prospect of marrying again, but a few halfhearted attempts at courtship had come to nothing. Moreover, to his extreme embarrassment, he was living on the edge of poverty. His time in Europe thus far had already cost him most of what little money he had.

A new position as professor of art at New York University provided some financial help, as well as studio space in the tower of the university’s new building on Washington Square, where Morse worked, slept, and ate his meals, carrying in his groceries after dark so no one would suspect the straits he was in. His two boys, meanwhile, were being cared for by his brother Sidney. Susan, the oldest child, was in school in New England.

For a long time Morse had hoped to be chosen to paint a historic scene for the Rotunda of the Capitol in Washington. It would be the fulfillment of all his aspirations as a history painter, and would bring him a fee of $10,000. He openly applied for the honor in letters to members of Congress, including Daniel Webster and John Quincy Adams. Four large panels had been set aside in the Rotunda for such works, but as yet no decisions had been made. In 1834, in remarks on the floor of the House he later regretted, Adams had questioned whether American artists were equal to the task. James Fenimore Cooper, responding in a letter to the New York Evening Post, insisted the new Capitol was destined to be an “historical edifice” and must therefore be a showplace for American art. With the question left unresolved, Morse could only wait and hope.

That same year, 1834, to the dismay of many, Morse had joined in the Nativist movement, the anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic outcry sharply on the rise in New York and in much of the country. Like others, he saw the American way of life threatened with ruination by the hordes of immigrant poor from Ireland, Germany, and Italy flooding into the country, bringing with them their ignorance and their “Romish” religion. In Morse’s own birthplace, Charlestown, Massachusetts, an angry mob had sacked and burned an Ursuline convent.

Writing under a pen name, “Brutus,” Morse began a series of articles for his brothers’ newspaper, the New York Observer. “The serpent has already commenced to coil about our limbs, and the lethargy of his poison is creeping over us,” he warned darkly. The articles, published as a book, carried the title Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Monarchy and Catholicism were inseparable and unacceptable, if democracy was to survive, Morse argued. All the old fears and dire warnings he had been raised on, plus the memory of the soldier in Rome knocking off his hat, came rushing back. Asked to run as the Nativist candidate for mayor of New York in 1836, Morse accepted. To friends and admirers he seemed to have departed his senses. An editorial in the New York Commercial Advertiser expressed what many felt:

Mr. Morse is a scholar and a gentleman—an able man—an accomplished artist—and we should like on ninety-nine accounts to support him. But the hundredth forbids it. Somehow or other he has got warped in his politics. …

On election day, he went down to a crushing defeat, finishing last in a field of four.

He kept on with his teaching at the university and his involvement with the National Academy of Design. And he kept painting. A portrait of the Reverend Thomas Harvey Skinner was as deft as any he had ever painted, and a large, especially beautiful portrait of his daughter Susan received abundant praise.

But when word reached Morse from Washington that he had not been chosen to paint one of the historic panels at the Capitol, his world collapsed. Friends and fellow artists wrote to express their disappointment and sympathy, and if possible to lift his spirits. “Dismiss it then from your mind, and determine to paint all the better for it,” wrote his former teacher, Washington Allston.

Morse felt sure that John Quincy Adams had done him in. But there is no evidence of this. More likely, Morse himself had inflicted the damage with the unvarnished intolerance of his anti-Catholic newspaper essays and ill-advised dabble in politics.

He “staggered under the blow,” in his words. It was the ultimate defeat of his life as an artist. Sick at heart, he took to bed. Morse was “quite ill,” reported James Cooper, greatly concerned. Nathaniel Willis would recall later that Morse told him he was so tired of his life that had he “divine authorization,” he would end it.

Morse gave up painting entirely. He abandoned for good all his dreams of accomplishment and recognition as an artist, the whole career he had set his heart on since college days. No one could dissuade him.

“Painting has been a smiling mistress to many, but she has been cruel to me,” he would write bitterly to Cooper. “I did not abandon her, she abandoned me.”

He must attend to one thing at a time, his father had preached. The “one thing” henceforth would be his telegraph, the crude apparatus for which was also to be found in his New York University studio apartment. Later it would be surmised that had he not stopped painting when he did, no successful electromagnetic telegraph would have happened when it did, or at least not a Morse electromagnetic telegraph.

Essential to his idea, as he had set forth earlier in notes written in 1832, were that signals would be sent by the opening and closing of an electrical circuit, that the receiving apparatus would, by electromagnet, record signals as dots and dashes on paper, and that there would be a code whereby the dots and dashes would be translated into numbers and letters.

The apparatus he had devised was a strange, almost ludicrous-looking assembly of wooden clock wheels, wooden drums, levers, cranks, paper rolled on cylinders, a triangular-shaped wooden pendulum, an electromagnet, a battery, a variety of copper wires, and a wooden frame of the kind used to stretch canvas for paintings (and for which he had no more use)—all “so rude,” so like some child’s wild invention, he was reluctant to have it seen.

His chief problem was that the magnet had insufficient voltage to send a message more than about forty feet. But with help from a colleague, a professor of geology at New York University, Leonard Gale, the problem was overcome. By increasing the power of the battery and magnet, they were able to send messages a third of a mile on electrical wire strung back and forth in Gale’s lecture hall. Morse then devised a system of electromagnetic relays, and this was the key element, in that it put no limit to the distance a message could be sent.

A physician from Boston, Charles Jackson, charged Morse with stealing his idea. Jackson—who was no relation to James Jackson, Jr.—had been a fellow passenger on Morse’s return voyage from France in 1832. He now claimed they had worked together on the ship, and that the telegraph, as he said in a letter to Morse, was their “mutual discovery.” Morse was outraged, and answering Jackson, setting him straight, as well as responding to other charges that would come out of Jackson’s claim, were to consume hours upon hours of Morse’s time and play havoc with his nervous system. “I cannot conceive of such infatuation as has possessed this man,” he wrote privately. And for this reason Cooper and Richard Habersham spoke out unequivocally in Morse’s defense, attesting to the fact that he had talked frequently with them of his telegraph in Paris well before ever sailing for home.

Morse sent a preliminary request for a patent to Henry L. Ellsworth, the nation’s first commissioner of patents, who had been a classmate at Yale, and in 1837, with the country in one of the worst financial depressions to date, Morse took on another partner, young Alfred Vail, who was in a position to invest some of his father’s money. Additional financial help came from Morse’s brothers. Most important, Morse worked out his own system for transmitting the alphabet in dots and dashes, in what was to be known as the Morse code.

In a larger space in which to string their wires, a vacant factory in New Jersey, he and Vail were soon sending messages over a distance of ten miles. Demonstrations were staged successfully elsewhere in New Jersey and Philadelphia.

There were continuing reports of others at work on a similar invention both in the United States and abroad, but by mid-February 1838, Morse and Vail were at the Capitol in Washington ready to demonstrate the machine that could “write at a distance.” They set up their apparatus and strung ten miles of wire on big spools around a room reserved for the House Committee on Commerce. For several days members of the House and Senate crowded into the room to watch “the Professor” put on his show. On February 21, President Martin Van Buren and his cabinet came to see.

The wonder of Morse’s invention was thus established almost overnight in Washington. The Committee on Commerce moved quickly to recommend an appropriation for a fifty-mile test of the telegraph.

Yet Morse felt he must have government support in Europe as well, and thus was soon on his way over the Atlantic, only to confront in official London the antithesis of the response at Washington. His request for a British patent was subjected to one aggravating delay after another. When finally, after seven weeks, he was granted a hearing, the request was denied.

“The ground of objection,” he reported to Susan, “was not that my invention was not original, and better than others, but that it had been published in England from the American journals, and therefore belonged to the public.”

Paris was to treat him better, up to a point. The response of scientists, scholars, engineers, indeed the whole of academic Paris as well as the press, was to be expansive and highly flattering. Recognition of the kind he had so long craved for his painting came now in Paris in resounding fashion and in the most appropriate setting possible. The French knew how such occasions should be orchestrated.

For the sake of economy Morse had moved from the rue de Rivoli to modest quarters on the rue Neuve des Mathurins, which he shared with a new acquaintance, an American clergyman of equally limited means named Edward Kirk. Morse’s French had never been anything but barely passable, nothing close to what he knew was needed to present his invention before any serious gathering. But the Reverend Kirk, who was proficient in French, volunteered to serve as his spokesman and, in addition, tried to rally Morse’s frequently sagging spirits by reminding him of the “great inventors who are generally permitted to starve when living, and are canonized after death.”

They arranged Morse’s wires and apparatus in their cramped quarters and made every Tuesday “levee day” for anyone who wished to climb the stairs to witness a demonstration. Kirk, who knew little of science or inventions, caught on quickly enough to serve as “the grand exhibitor.” Distinguished visitors and complete strangers alike came in increasing numbers to see the show.

I explained the principles and operation of the telegraph [Kirk would recall]. The visitors would agree upon a word themselves, which I was not to hear. Then the Professor would receive it at the writing end of the wires, while it devolved upon me to interpret the characters which recorded it at the other end. As I explained hieroglyphics, the announcement of the word, which they saw could have come to me only through the wire, would often create a deep sensation of delighted wonder.

Kirk would regret in later years that he had failed to keep notes on what was said. “Yet I never heard a remark which indicated that the result obtained by Mr. Morse was not NEW, wonderful, and promising immense practical results.”

Between times Morse went off on long walks through the city, and at least once, perhaps more often, he took the old route across the river to the rue Saint-Dominique where Cooper had lived.

One wonders, too, if during this time in Paris, or later, Morse ever crossed paths with George Healy. He had to have known about Healy’s success—Healy was to be made an honorary member of the National Academy of Design. And one wonders what Morse, who had given up painting, may have felt about such success achieved at so young an age.

Back when Morse was resettling in New York, after his work at the Louvre, Healy had been just setting off on his first venture to Paris. On reaching New York, and finding the departure of his ship delayed, he had gone to call on Morse.

“So you want to be an artist?” Morse had said. “You won’t make your salt!” Healy’s grandmother had earlier told him the same thing in almost the same words.

“Then, sir,” Healy replied, “I must take my food without salt.”

In the first week of September, one of the luminaries of French science, the astronomer and physicist Dominique-François-Jean Arago, arrived at the house on the rue Neuve des Mathurins for a private showing of the “wonderful discovery.” “He gave it a thorough examination, questioned the inventor with great minuteness,” wrote Edward Kirk, “and declared himself satisfied with the results and its capacity to do all that was claimed for it.”

Arago offered at once to introduce Morse and his invention to the Académie des Sciences at their next meeting to be held in just six days on September 10. To prepare himself, Morse began jotting down notes on what should be said: “My present instrument is very imperfect in its mechanism, and only designed to illustrate the principle of my invention. …”

The savants of the Académie convened in the great hall of the Institut de France, the magnificent seventeenth-century landmark on the Left Bank facing the Seine and the Pont des Arts. Just over the river stood the Louvre, where, six years earlier, Morse the painter had nearly worked himself to death. Now he stood “in the midst of the most celebrated scientific men of the world,” as he wrote to his brother Sidney. There was not a familiar face to be seen, except for Professor Arago and one other, Alexander von Humboldt, who in those other days at the Louvre had come to watch him at his labors.

At Morse’s request Arago explained to the audience how the invention worked, and what made it different and superior to other such devices, while Morse stood by to operate the instrument. Everything worked to perfection.

It was, as would be said, the proudest triumph of Morse’s career thus far. “A buzz of admiration and approbation filled the whole hall,” he wrote to Alfred Vail, “and the exclamations, ‘Extraordinaire!’ ‘Très bien!’ ‘Très admirable!’ I heard on all sides.”

The event was acclaimed in the Paris and London papers and in the Academy’s own weekly bulletin, the Comptes Rendus. In a long, prescient letter written two days later, the American patent commissioner, Morse’s friend Henry Ellsworth, who happened to be in Paris at the time, said the occasion had shown Morse’s telegraph “transcends all yet made known,” and that clearly “another revolution is at hand.”

I do not doubt that within the next ten years, you will see electric power adopted between all commercial points of magnitude on both sides of the Atlantic, for purposes of correspondence, and men enabled to send their orders or news of events from one point to another with the speed of lightning itself. … The extremities of nations will be literally wired together. … In the United States, for instance, you may expect to find at no very distant day the Executive messages, and the daily votes of each House of Congress made known at Philadelphia, New York, Boston, and Portland—at New Orleans, Cincinnati, etc.—as soon as they can be known in Baltimore or even the opposite extremity of Pennsylvania Avenue! … Abstract imagination is no longer a match for reality in the race that science has instituted on both sides of the Atlantic.

That he was in Paris made him feel greater pride than ever, Ellsworth conceded. “In being abroad, among strangers and foreigners, one’s nationality of feeling may be somewhat more excusable than at home.”

Acclaim from the savants and the press was one thing, progress with the French government was another. Minister Lewis Cass provided Morse with a “most flattering” letter of introduction to carry on his rounds, but to no effect. After his eighth or ninth call at the office of the Ministre de l’Intérieur, Morse was still able to speak to no one above the level of a secretary, who asked only that he leave his card.

“Everything moves at a snail’s pace here,” he lamented a full two months after his day of glory at the Academy. “Dilatoriness” was to be expected, Lewis Cass told him, and little could be done about it.

Morse, who had intended at midsummer to stay no more than a month in Paris, was still there at the start of the new year, 1839, and with Edward Kirk’s help, still holding his Tuesday levees upstairs on the rue Neuve des Mathurins. That there was no decline in interest in his invention made the “dilatoriness” even more maddening.

It would be at home in America that his invention would have much the best chance, Morse decided. “There is more of the ‘go-ahead’ character with us. … Here there are old systems long established to interfere, and at least to make them cautious before adapting a new project, however promising. Their railroad operations are a proof in point.” (Railroad-building in France had been later starting than in the United States and was moving ahead at a much slower pace.)

By March, fed up with the French bureaucracy, embarrassed by the months wasted in waiting and by his worsening financial straits, Morse decided it was time to go home. But before leaving, he paid a visit to Monsieur Louis Daguerre, a theatrical scenery painter. “I am told every hour,” wrote Morse with a bit of hyperbole, “that the two great wonders of Paris just now, about which everyone is conversing, are Daguerre’s wonderful results in fixing permanently the image of the camera obscura and Morse’s electro-magnetic telegraph.” And so, for a second time, Samuel Morse would bring home to America an idea from France of consequences far beyond what he or anyone could then have foreseen.

Morse and Daguerre were of about the same age, but where Morse could be somewhat circumspect, Daguerre was bursting with joie de vivre. Neither spoke the other’s language with any proficiency, but they got on at once—two painters who had turned their hands to invention.

Skilled in theatrical lighting and scenic effects from years in the theater, Daguerre had devised his own secret technique for painting scenes on huge, transparent theater drops, or scrims, as large as seventy-one by forty-five feet—a view of a Swiss valley or the interior of an English cathedral—which when lit from behind and set off by a few well-placed props, had a reality beyond anything seen before. He had built his own large theater, the Diorama, in which to put on his show, and from its opening day, in 1822, Parisians had come “flocking.”

Daguerre had proven himself a master illusionist with light. The audience sat on a revolving platform, so it was as if the scenes were passing before them, and they found it almost impossible to believe what they were seeing was not real. The Diorama, proclaimed a reviewer in the Journal de Paris, marked an “epoch in the history of painting.” “We cannot sufficiently urge Parisians who like pleasure without fatigue to make the journey to Switzerland and to England without leaving the capital.”

Seeing the results of Daguerre’s latest invention, Morse was struck with amazement. Years before he had tried to see if it were possible to fix the image produced with a camera obscura, by using paper dipped in a solution of nitrate of silver, but had given it up as hopeless.

Daguerre had been experimenting with the idea of reproducing visual images for a long time, working with an older colleague named Joseph-Nicéphore Niépce, who had since died. What Daguerre finally accomplished with his little daguerreotypes was clearly, Morse saw—and reported without delay in a letter to his brothers—“one of the most beautiful discoveries of the age.”

They are produced on a metallic silver-coated [copper] surface, the principal pieces about 7 inches by 5 [inches], and they resemble aquatint engravings, for they are in simple chiaroscuro, and not in colors. But the exquisite minuteness of the delineation cannot be conceived. No painting or engraving ever approached it. For example: In a view up the street, a distant sign would be perceived, and the eye could just discern that there were lines of letters upon it, but so minute as not to be read with the naked eye. By the assistance of a powerful lens, which magnified fifty times, applied to the delineation, every letter was clearly and distinctly legible, and so also were the minutest breaks and lines in the walls of the buildings and the pavements of the streets. The effect of the lens upon the picture was in a great degree like that of a telescope in nature.

The daguerreotype marked the birth of photography, but other artists seeing Daguerre’s accomplishment were not so enthusiastic as Morse. To Delacroix it marked the death of art.

Morse stayed more than an hour and came away overjoyed. But a return visit by Daguerre to Morse’s rooms on the rue Neuve des Mathurins, to see Morse’s telegraph, was cut short when word came that the Diorama had caught fire and burned to the ground, those in the audience barely escaping with their lives.

Morse’s account of his visit with Daguerre, published by his brothers in the New York Observer on April 20, 1839, was the first news of the daguerreotype to appear in the United States and was quickly picked up by newspapers all over the country. Once Morse arrived back in New York, having crossed by steamship for the first time, aboard the Great Western, he wrote immediately to Daguerre to assure him that “throughout the United States your name alone will be associated with the brilliant discovery which justly bears your name.” He also saw to it that Daguerre was made an honorary member of the National Academy, the first honor Daguerre received outside of France.

With help from a professor of chemistry at New York University, John William Draper, Morse experimented with making daguerreotype portraits, something Daguerre himself had not bothered with, deciding it was impractical, since the subject would have to remain motionless for as long as fifteen or twenty minutes. By 1840, Morse and Draper were sufficiently satisfied with their results to open a daguerreotype portrait studio on the top floor of the university building. Thus, Samuel Morse, the painter of portraits, had proudly become a portrait photographer.

Still he kept plugging away with work on the telegraph, his old longing “to shine” by no means dormant.

Four years later, in July of 1844, news reached Paris and the rest of Europe that Professor Morse had opened a telegraph line, built with Congressional appropriation, between Washington and Baltimore, and that the telegraph was in full operation between the two cities, a distance of thirty-four miles. From a committee room at the Capitol, Morse had tapped out a message from the Bible to his partner Alfred Vail in Baltimore: “What hath God wrought!” Afterward others were given a chance to send their own greetings.

A few days later, interest in Morse’s device became greater by far at both ends when the Democratic National Convention being held at Baltimore became deadlocked and hundreds gathered about the telegraph in Washington for instantaneous news from the floor of the convention itself. Martin Van Buren was tied for the nomination with the former minister to France, Lewis Cass. Ultimately, on the eighth ballot, the convention chose a compromise candidate, a little-known senator from Tennessee, James K. Polk.

In Paris, Galignani’s Messenger reported that newspapers in Baltimore were now able to provide their readers with the latest information from Washington up to the very hour of going to press. “This is indeed the annihilation of space.”

III

The spring of 1845, just a year following Morse’s triumph at Washington, marked the appearance in Paris of a decidedly different variety of American, the first wave of American curiosities or exotics—“les sensations américaines”—who were the cause of great popular commotion.

It began with P. T. Barnum—Phineas Taylor Barnum—the flamboyant New York showman, and his tiny protégé Tom Thumb, and not even Barnum, for all his extravagant claims, foresaw the sensation they caused.

Almost immediately afterward came the American painter of Plains Indians, George Catlin, bringing an entire gallery of his pictures, more than five hundred in total, as well as a party of painted and feathered real-life “Ioways.” It was the most memorable visit of an American painter to Paris of all time.

Coinciding with all this excitement, a virtuoso American pianist, Louis Moreau Gottschalk from New Orleans, gave his first concert in Paris at the Salle Pleyel on the rue de Rochechouart, which appears to have been the first solo performance ever by an American on a Paris stage. What made it particularly notable was that Gottschalk was fifteen years old.

With a genius for publicity and humbug, P. T. Barnum had made himself famous a few years earlier when he opened his American Museum on Broadway. In no time it became the most popular attraction in New York. “The people like to be humbugged,” he would explain. By chance, Barnum had also discovered a child from Bridgeport, Connecticut, named Charles Stratton, a midget who stood not quite two feet high and weighed sixteen pounds. The boy was five. Barnum renamed him Tom Thumb, or General Tom Thumb, fitted him out in a miniature uniform something like that of Napoleon, and said his age was eleven.

He was a perfectly formed, bright-eyed little fellow with light hair and ruddy cheeks [Barnum later wrote] and … I took the greatest pains to educate and train [him] … devoting many hours to the task by day and by night, and I was very successful, for he was an apt pupil. …

Barnum had opened his museum, he was frank to say, “for the opportunity it afforded for rapidly making money.” In the tiny “General” he had found a gold mine. He paid the boy’s parents $3 a week and put him on display in the museum, where he became such an instant favorite that Barnum raised the weekly salary to $20. Then “to test the curiosity of men and women on the other side of the Atlantic,” Barnum took Tom, his parents, a tutor, and three or four others on a trip to Europe, first to London, then Paris. Under a new agreement, Tom was to receive a weekly $50.

In London the Lilliputian Wonder was a “decided hit” on stage in Piccadilly and, later, resplendent in his uniform, at a command performance before Her Majesty Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace. But London was not Paris. “The French are exceedingly impressionable,” wrote Barnum, “and what in London is only excitement, in Paris becomes a furor.”

He settled Tom and his entourage in the Hôtel Bedford on the rue de Rivoli and swung into action. He hired a brand-new auditorium with a seating capacity of 3,000, the Salle de Concert on the rue Vivienne, hired an orchestra, and made the rounds of the Paris newspapers to drum up publicity.

The winter in Paris had been unusually severe and signs of spring were late in coming. The branches of a well-known chestnut tree in the Garden of the Tuileries, normally mint-green by early March, were still as bare as in the middle of winter. Then, suddenly, on the first official day of spring, March 21, the sun shone brilliantly and the boulevards were at once fully “animated” in the spirit of the season. Crowds thronged the ChampsÉlysées. Tout Paris paraded by in their elegant equipages, providing a first glimpse of the new spring fashions.

Yet Tom Thumb stole the show, sporting a top hat, riding in a no-less-fancy miniature carriage with four grey ponies and four tiny liveried coachmen. The crowd along the avenue broke into cheers for “General Tom Pouce.”

Because of the reception given “the General” at Buckingham Palace, Barnum had no trouble arranging for a comparable appearance before King Louis-Philippe and his royal court at the Tuileries Palace on the evening of March 23. Tom came attired this time as the perfect upper-bourgeois gentleman in a well-fitting black coat, white vest, and a glittering diamond shirt pin, and was at once the center of attention and delight. Barnum had coached his “apt pupil” well.

When a lady (who undoubtedly had also been coached) asked Tom in English if he planned to marry, he replied, “Certainly.”

“And how many have you engaged to marry?”

“Eight, all told.”

“But they tell me you are fickle and faithless.”

“It is true.”

“In England the ladies ran after you a great deal, and you let them kiss you.”

“That was to avoid hurting their feelings.”

“How many times have you been kissed?”

“A million.”

The king asked the General if he spoke French.

“A little,” he replied.

“What can you say in French?” asked the king.

“Vive le Roi!”

Tom performed an original dance, posed in imitation of such well-known statues as David and Goliath, Samson, and Hercules. Resuming his role as perfect gentleman, he consulted a tiny pocket watch and offered a pinch of snuff from a tiny box sparkling with faux jewels. For his last act he danced a Highland fling in Scottish bonnet and kilts.

Reportedly the wardrobe he brought to Paris could be packed in a hat box, and while on tour he slept in a bureau drawer.

The following day the Paris papers announced drolly the public levees, “FOR A SHORT TIME ONLY,” for “The American Man in Miniature” at the Salle de Concert:

He is smaller than any infant that ever walked! He is lively, intelligent, and symmetrical in his proportions. He will relate his history, sing a variety of songs, DANCE …

Admission for the best seats in the hall was 3 francs; second-best, 2 francs.

As reported three days after the opening, the levees were “crowded to excess.”

The grace, readiness, and address of this wonderful little fellow are, in truth, scarcely less extraordinary than his miniature size, and have already rendered him the reigning favorite of the fashionable world, particularly among the ladies.

Shop windows were by now displaying miniature statues of Tom Pouce in plaster and chocolate. There were songs about him. One café even changed its name to Tom Pouce.

So great was the attendance at his two daily performances at the Salle de Concert as the weeks went on that Barnum had to hire a cab each night to haul his bag of silver back to the hotel.

The pale, slender young American who walked on stage at the Salle Pleyel and seated himself at the piano on the evening of Wednesday, April 2, 1845, knew how much was expected of him. Moreau, as he was called, had been studying music in Paris for four years, and in musical circles there was much talk about him. In the audience waited his mother and five younger brothers and sisters, as well as his teacher, Camille Stamaty, who had studied under Mendelssohn. There, too, waiting attentively, were two of the most adored pianists of the time, Sigmund Thalberg and Frédéric Chopin, who had had his own first performance in Paris at the Salle Pleyel. Paris devotees of music had turned out in force, every seat was full, in response to a printed invitation to hear the debut of “Young Moreau Gottschalk of New Orleans.”

The boy had been born in 1829. His mother, Aimee Brusle Gottschalk, was a Roman Catholic Creole whose first language was French. Moreau was raised as a Catholic, but educated in English. His father, Edward Gottschalk, Jewish by birth, made his living trading in land and slaves. Moreau was said to have shown his first interest in the piano at age three and at age twelve, with strong encouragement from one of his piano teachers in New Orleans, he had been sent off on a sailing ship to France under the care of the captain.

With all its historic and old family ties with France, its French-speaking population, its French food, and French ways, New Orleans had a natural affinity with Paris. Many in New Orleans felt a far closer kinship to Paris than to any city other than their own. Well-to-do Creole families frequently sent their children to be educated there. Or they themselves took an extended turn at la vie parisienne. One immensely wealthy young woman from New Orleans, Micaela Almonaster y Rojas, had moved to Paris following her marriage to her cousin Celestin de Pontalba, and wound up at the center of a sensational incident that would be gossiped about in Paris and New Orleans for generations. In 1834 in Paris, her father-in-law had tried to kill her—apparently in the hope of inheriting her money—by shooting her point-blank with dueling pistols. Two balls lodged in her breast; another destroyed part of her left hand. When she managed to escape to another room, he turned and killed himself. Miraculously she survived, and not long afterward, to let there be no doubt about her financial position, or her intention to stay in Paris, she built one of the city’s most glorious mansions, on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which would one day, in another era, become the official residence of American ambassadors to France.

Young Moreau was enrolled in a private boarding school run by a couple named Dussert in their apartment. Already fluent in French and eager to learn, the boy did well in all the usual studies, but so excelled at the piano as to draw attention almost at once. The Dusserts arranged for him to meet Sigmund Thalberg, who, after hearing Moreau play, took him by the hand saying, “This child is surprising.” Meanwhile, Moreau’s father, who had endless troubles staying solvent, assured him he could meet all the expenses of Paris, which were not inconsiderable, given that the boy liked fine clothes and had already, at age thirteen, arranged to have his portrait painted. The work, by an artist named J. Berville, showed a long-haired youth with wide-set, wistful dark eyes, holding a quill pen and a sheet of music and looking lost in thought.

Moreau had been in Paris three years when, in the fall of 1844, his mother and her five younger children arrived for an extended stay. Aimee Gottschalk was all of thirty-one, fond of society and elegant comforts, and ready to make the most of Paris. In a way, the evening of April 2 was to be her debut as well.

For a piano prodigy especially, Paris just then was the ideal place and time to be heard. It had supplanted Vienna as the musical capital of Europe, and never had the piano, or any musical instrument, been so popular. According to one study there were as many as 60,000 pianos in the city and some 100,000 people who could play them. If this was so, then approximately a third of the youth in Paris were playing, or attempting to play, the piano. Virtuoso pianists and composers like Thalberg, Chopin, Franz Liszt, and Hector Berlioz were at the height of their popularity, as brilliant as any stars in the Paris firmament. Chopin in particular, with his music and his celebrated love affair with George Sand, had become the very embodiment of artistic genius and the romantic spirit. To young Moreau, Chopin outshone them all.

Musical prodigies were not uncommon in Paris—they were even something of a tradition—but Moreau was an American prodigy, and that was new.

His debut at the Salle Pleyel was with full orchestra and he opened the program with Chopin’s Concerto in E Minor. Then followed compositions by both Thalberg and Liszt, and the burst of applause at the end left no doubt that he had more than lived up to expectations.

Chopin himself came backstage afterward. Greeting Moreau, according to one account, he exclaimed in French, “Good, my child, good, very good. Let me shake your hand once more.” But Moreau’s sister Clara would later say Chopin had placed his hands on the boy’s head, as though conferring a benediction, and said, “I predict that you will become the king of pianists.”

La Revue Musicale praised the young American for “the neatness and elegance of his playing,” and predicted that in time to come his fame would equal that of any pianist. Back home the New Orleans Courier reported on the front page that 1,200 people belonging “chiefly to the upper ranks of society” had been in attendance and that a “glorious future” was in store for “this young and interesting child of Louisiana.” A brilliant career had been launched in memorable fashion.

Midway into April, three weeks or so after the premiere appearance of General Tom Thumb at the Salle de Concert, and two weeks following the Gottschalk debut, George Catlin and his party of Iowa Indians took up residence at the Victoria Hotel on the rue Chauveau-Lagarde, just behind the Church of the Madeleine. Besides the more than five hundred paintings of his Indian Gallery, Catlin had brought with him an enormous collection of Indian artifacts—tomahawks, scalping knives, rattles, drums, skulls, cooking utensils, and four complete wigwams—making altogether eight tons of paintings and artifacts packed in giant crates.

Catlin’s story was like that of no other American artist. A sturdy, clean-shaven, rather stern-looking man of medium height and with a granite set to his jaw, he was part painter, part scholar, part explorer, dreamer, entrepreneur, and showman. He had been born in Pennsylvania, started out to be a lawyer, then quit to paint, specializing at first in miniature portraits. Still, like Samuel Morse, he had longed to be a history painter. When in Philadelphia he saw a visiting delegation of western Indians in full regalia, it was, as he said, enough to inspire “a whole lifetime of enthusiasm.”

In 1832, as cholera raged in Paris and Morse was laboring on his Gallery of the Louvre, James Fenimore Cooper faithfully keeping him company, George Catlin, at age thirty-six, had been on his way up the Missouri River. His courageous mission, to record “a vast country of green fields, where men are all red,” had been influenced almost certainly by Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, and The Prairie especially. Over a stretch of nearly eight years, traveling by steamboat, canoe, and horseback, and often alone, Catlin studied and lived with and painted forty-five of the tribes of the Great Plains. He had gone up the Missouri as far north as Fort Union and down the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans. No artist had attempted the subject on such a scale or kept at it so long or with such intense commitment. He painted portraits, landscapes, scenes of buffalo hunts, violent Indian games, and religious ceremonies— “the proud and heroic elegance of savage society, in a state of pure and original nature, beyond the reach of civilization,” as he put it. He knew there was little time left before a whole way of life would vanish, corrupted or altogether destroyed, and which he was determined to “rescue from oblivion” with his brush and pen. He also hoped to make himself famous and earn a living sufficient to support his wife, Clara, and their children.

At no point had Catlin benefited from government or private support for his mission. In 1839 he offered his entire collection for purchase by the United States government, but to no avail. So he sailed for England, taking the collection with him, hoping for better luck. Clara and the children would follow later.

The paintings went on display at London’s Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly. Catlin gave lectures, and for added effect often dressed as an Indian. He took the paintings on tour to other cities, all the while going deeper in debt. When two or three delegations of Ojibwas and Iowas showed up in London of their own accord, intending to exhibit themselves, Catlin invited them to join him and strongly resented—then and later—those who denounced him for exploiting the Indians.

The “real” Indians added greatly to the show. Their translator, Jeffrey Doraway, also became part of the company, and Catlin enlarged the gallery by doing portraits and drawings of each of the Iowas. When the Ojibwas announced they had had enough of London and sailed for home, Catlin, who had been in England for years, decided it was time to move the whole enterprise to Paris. His family, meanwhile, had also become part of the entourage. What kind of reception he expected to receive in Paris is not known.

It was well after dark when they reached their hotel. Not until the next morning did the Iowas, leaning from their windows as far as they dared, get a first real look at the city, and the spectacle of so many red painted and crested heads on high, greeting the start of the day, quickly drew an excited crowd in the street below.

The servants in the house were at first alarmed [Catlin wrote], and the good landlady smiled at their unexpected appearance, and she roared with laughter when she was informed that the beds were removed from their rooms, that they spread their own robes and, in preference, slept upon the floor. All in the house, however, got attached to them in a few days.

Climbing aboard an omnibus, they toured the city, rolled by the Tuileries Palace, the Louvre, crossed over the Seine and back on the Pont Neuf, and wound up at the Hôtel de Ville—City Hall—where several thousand people were waiting for a glimpse. “There was a great outcry when they landed and entered the hall, and the crowd was sure not to diminish whilst they were within,” wrote Catlin, thrilled by the reception. Inside, champagne was uncorked and the préfet de police presented the chief of the Iowa delegation, Mew-hew-she-kaw—White Cloud—with a silver medal.

“My father,” responded White Cloud in a brief speech, “we were astonished at what we saw in London, where we have been, but we think your village is much the most beautiful.”

Others in the delegation included Ruton-ye-we-ma—Strutting Pigeon—the wife of White Cloud; Se-non-ty-yah—Little Wolf—a warrior; his wife, O-kee-wee-me—Female Bear that Walks on the Back of Another—and their infant daughter, wrapped in a papoose. In all there were seven men and a boy, four women and two infant girls. Their daily itinerary, their names and appearance, were news everywhere.

The Iowas, reported Galignani’s Messenger, were “of fine stature, pleasing features, and mild manners,” inferring that no one need be afraid.

Phrenologically they have all the indications of superior faculties. They are a deep copper color inclining to red, but with features many Europeans might envy. Their costumes are picturesque and even elegant. They appear devotedly attached to their chief, and are in their own way exceedingly religious, never partaking of food without praying for the blessings of the great spirit, and returning thanks for the benefits they receive.

While the Indians continued their sightseeing, drawing crowds at every stop, Catlin moved his exhibition into the cavernous Salle Valentino on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. The paintings were put up side by side, filling every foot of wall space. One of the strongest, most vivid of the portraits was that of Little Wolf, his face painted bright red, his eyes, nose, and mouth encircled by a band of orange and green, his shoulders all but concealed under a heavy necklace of giant grizzly bear claws, beside which the presidential gold medal he wore looked all but lost. In another portrait a Mandan chief, Four Bears, stood proudly in full regalia, a magnificent headdress of eagle feathers reaching to the ground, his long deer-skin shirt decorated with accounts of his bravery in war. Describing Four Bears arriving the day of his first sitting for the painting, Catlin had said, “No tragedian ever trod the stage, nor gladiator ever entered the Roman Forum, with more grace and manly dignity. …”

There was a portrait of a handsome Cheyenne woman, She Who Bathes Her Knees, wearing a dress of mountain sheepskins embroidered with beautiful blue quillwork, but also scenes of gruesome self-torture ceremonies, war dances, scalp dances, a dying buffalo in its agony, bright red blood spurting from its wounds, and a tallgrass prairie ablaze, the swirling black sky above brushed on by Catlin with fitting fury.

At the center of the gallery, to help set the scene, he had placed a huge Crow wigwam. When he said later that Paris had never seen an exhibition remotely like it, he was by no means exaggerating.

Of the many notables of the day—members of the king’s inner circle, eminent scientists, writers, painters, newspaper publishers—who were captivated by Catlin’s paintings and the contingent of Iowas, none responded with such spontaneous interest or obvious pleasure as the king himself. Louis-Philippe, Queen Marie-Amélie, and the royal family received the Americans at the Tuileries Palace on the afternoon of April 22, 1845, the Iowas, as Catlin noted proudly, “in a full blaze of color …

all with their wampum and medals on, with their necklaces of grizzly bear claws, their shields and bows and quivers, their lances and war clubs, and tomahawks and scalping knives … their painted buffalo robes wrapped around them. …

Louis-Philippe, “in the most free and familiar manner,” launched at once into conversation in English—with Jeffrey Doraway translating— about his own experiences in America, only this time with even greater enthusiasm than usual and to the delight of his guests from the Great Plains.

“Tell these good fellows I am glad to see them,” he said by way of greeting, “that I have been in many of the wigwams of Indians of America when I was a young man, and they treated me everywhere kindly, and I love them for it.”

He talked of his adventures in the American wilderness half a century before as though it had been only the other day. “Tell them I was amongst the Senecas near Buffalo … in the wigwams of the chiefs—that I was amongst the Shawnees and Delawares on the Ohio.”

In the winter of 1797–98, Louis-Philippe and his two younger brothers, on their own, starting from Pittsburgh, had descended the length of the Ohio River to the Mississippi in a small boat, then continued down the Mississippi all the way to New Orleans, just as Catlin had. He, too, had been the guest of Cherokees, Chickasaws, and Choctaws, smoked a friendly pipe, and learned some of their language.

“This,” wrote Catlin, “made the Indians stare, and the women, by a custom of their country, placed their hands over their mouths, as they issued groans of surprise.”

“Tell them also, Jeffrey, that I am pleased to see their wives and children they have with them here, and glad also to show them my family, who are now nearly all around me,” said Louis-Philippe, who then introduced, one by one, his wife, sister, two sons and their wives, and two grandsons.

With ceremony befitting a head of state, the king then presented a gold medal to Chief White Cloud, and silver medals to each of the warriors. Then everyone moved to the grand ballroom, where the Indians, seating themselves in the center of the floor, began singing and beating drums, then broke into an eagle dance, flailing their weapons.

The dance ended with resounding applause, and the Iowas resumed their sitting positions. Then the drums beat again, and louder now and with increased tempo. Little Wolf, throwing aside his buffalo robe, sprang from the floor with his tomahawk and shield, “and sounding the frightful war-whoop, which called his warriors around him,” as Catlin wrote.

Nothing could have been more thrilling or picturesque than the scene at the moment presented of this huge and terrible-looking warrior, frowning death and destruction on his brow, as he brandished the very weapons he had used in deadly combat, and in his jumps and sudden starts, seemed threatening with instant use again! The floors and ceilings of the Palace shook with the weight of their steps, and its long halls echoed and vibrated the shrill-sounding notes of the war-whoop.

Suddenly Little Wolf stopped, and shaking the tomahawk overhead, ordered the others to stop. He advanced toward the king.

My Great Father [he said], I present to you my tomahawk with which I killed one of my enemies … and you see the blood remaining on its blade. … My Father, since we came among the white people, we have been convinced that peace is better than war, and I place the tomahawk in your hands—I fight no more.

As he watched from the side, Catlin kept thinking of how this king in his life, in his journey down the Ohio and Mississippi, had seen more of the great western regions of America, and the ways of its people, than all but one in a thousand Americans ever had or would. (Alexis de Tocqueville, as recently as 1835, in the first volume of his Democracy in America, had described the Mississippi as “the most magnificent place God ever prepared for men to dwell in,” but reminded his readers it was still “a vast wilderness.”)

Catlin admired, even revered, the king, in a way few other Americans could have, knowing as he did what such adventures demanded in “energy of character and skill.” And here he was, the king of the French, “taking the poor Indians of the forest by the hand in his palace, and expressing to them the gratitude he had never lost sight of. …”

Such thoughts were rapid, Catlin wrote, but often recurring during his solitary walks in Paris.

In the midst of such reflections I often strolled along in a contemplative mood through the wilderness throngs of boulevards, the central avenue and crossing-place—the aorta of all the circulating world—to gaze upon the endless throng of human beings sweeping by me, bent upon their peculiar avocations of business or pleasure, of virtue or of vice, contrasting the glittering views about me with the quiet and humble scenes I had witnessed in various parts of my roaming life.

In the midst of this sweeping throng, knowing none and unknown, I found I could almost imagine myself in the desert wilderness, with as little to disturb the current of contemplative thoughts as if I were floating down the gliding current of the Missouri in my bark canoe. …

Long descriptive accounts of the Iowas at the Tuileries Palace appeared in the Paris papers, but when Catlin opened his Indian Gallery, or Museum, at the Salle Valentino a few days later, the exhibition was not as well attended as hoped, nothing like the continuing clamor over Tom Thumb, who by this time was appearing nightly at the Théâtre du Vaudeville. Soon, though, as noted in Galignani’s Messenger, the exhibition was attracting “crowds of savants and others,” and by late May the paintings and the dances of the Iowas were “drawing full and fashionable audiences,” both in the afternoons and evenings.

It was not only the subject matter of Catlin’s paintings that appealed, but the direct strength of his work, the raw color and a simplicity of form verging on naïve. The paintings had much the same fascination for the French as the Indian tales by James Fenimore Cooper. This was the America they imagined, “wild America,” and that they found almost irresistible. The Iowas themselves, said the Journal des Débats, seemed to have come to Paris “for the very purpose of serving as living commentary to the well-known novels of the famous Cooper.”

The old yearning among the French intelligentsia for the primitive and exotic, the Romantic idolization of the unspoiled “natural man” that began with Rousseau, had much to do with the response, particularly among writers and artists. In the early 1830s, at the time Catlin was out on the Great Plains, Eugène Delacroix had been in Morocco sketching and painting Arab chieftains and lion hunts, and Delacroix was among those who now spoke in praise of Catlin, le peintre américain. George Sand described how the whole combination of the paintings, the artifacts, and then the dances had gripped her as nothing in her experience.

At first, I felt the most violent and unpleasant emotion that any show has ever given me. I had just seen all the frightening objects of the Catlin Museum, primitive tomahawks … flattened and deformed skulls spread on a table, of which several showed the mark of a scalp, bloody spoils of war, repulsive masks, paintings showing hideous scenes of the initiation to mysteries, extreme corporal punishments, tortures, great hunts, murderous fights. … When the noise of sleigh bells which seemed to be announcing the coming of a herd of cattle told me to run for my seat, I was ready to be frightened, and when I saw appear in the flesh these painted faces, some blood red as if they were seen through a flame … these half nude bodies, magnificent models of statuary, but also painted in many colors … these bear claw necklaces which seem to tear the torso of those wearing them … I admit that I started being afraid and my imagination took me to the most lugubrious scenes of The Last of the Mohicans. It was even worse when the savage music gave the signal for the war dance.

With the roar and commotion, the “delirious rage” of the dance under way, she became utterly terrified. “I was in a cold sweat, I thought I was going to witness a real scalping of some vanquished enemy or a scene of torture which would be even more horrible.”

The carefree Parisian audience, who has fun being surprised, laughed around me, and this laughter seemed to me that of the spirit of darkness. I came to my senses only when the dance stopped and the Indians were again, as if by miracle, showing this expression of simple good-heartedness and cordiality which makes them look like better men than us.

So moved was she by the whole show, she went back the next day, bringing several others. She was sure Catlin’s paintings were far more important than the public realized, and Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire were of like mind.

Baudelaire, as important as any French critic, loved especially Catlin’s portrait of Little Wolf and another of a Blackfoot chief, Buffalo Bull’s Back Fat, for the way Catlin had captured “the proud, free character and noble expression of these splendid fellows.” As for Catlin’s color, something of the mysterious about it delighted him. Red, “the color of blood, the color of life,” abounded and the green of wooded mountains and immense grass plains. “I find them again singing their melodic antiphon of the very faces of these two heroes.”

The Catlin Indian Gallery, said a review in the Constitutionnel, was “one of the most curious collections that has ever been seen in Paris, as much because of the naïve character of the painting style as because of the originality of what it represents.” Still, the American painter’s lack of skill and finesse, the review continued, made it especially arresting.

Mr. Catlin paints quietly from the start, by placing one color which is right and pure next to the other, and it doesn’t seem he goes back over his work either through glazing or impasting. But his feeling is so deep and in some ways so sincere, his execution so naïve and so spontaneous, that the effect, rightly seen, is rightly expressed.

Seeing the collection, said another journal, the Observateur, one found it hard to believe it was all the work of just one man. Catlin was compared to Herodotus in his journeys to chronicle remote peoples, praised for his “remarkable power” as a lecturer. Knowing little French, he spoke in English only and his manner was described as “coldly polite, his face severe and thoughtful, like the face of a man who has seen many things.”

The approval was far more glowing and emphatic than what Catlin received in London, and further, the time in Britain had been cast in shadow toward the end by a death among the Iowas. The infant daughter of Little Wolf and Female Bear that Walks on the Back of Another had died during a visit by the whole company to Scotland. And so the responses of Paris meant that much more.

But just as all seemed to be going so right in Paris, Little Wolf’s wife herself suddenly and unexpectedly died of tuberculosis. She was buried in the cemetery of Montmartre and Little Wolf, shattered, “heartbroken,” went every day to sit by her grave. The story was in all the papers and talked about everywhere. Chopin mentioned her in a letter to his family that summer.

Having had enough, the Iowas were soon packed and on their way home.

Catlin and his family had only just moved to new quarters on the avenue Lord Byron when Clara Catlin took ill with what at first seemed no more than the usual sore throat. But rapidly “her feeble form wasted away,” as Catlin wrote, and on July 28, 1845, Clara died of pneumonia.

In the midst of his grief Catlin arranged for her remains to be shipped home for burial and did all he could to console the children. He and Clara had talked of leaving Paris, and Catlin was inclined now to go as soon as his lease on the Salle Valentino expired. His expenses were high, his debts increasing. But when a party of Canadian Ojibwas turned up, having heard of the Paris success of the Iowas, and were ready to take their place, Catlin decided to stay.

Still more acclaim followed. Louis-Philippe conferred what to some was the ultimate recognition by having Catlin’s entire collection temporarily installed in a gallery at the Louvre, so that he and his family might enjoy it privately. This would have been a rare honor for any artist, let alone one from America. Moreover, Louis-Philippe asked Catlin to copy fifteen of the works for his gallery at Versailles.

Neither P. T. Barnum nor Tom Thumb, nor Moreau Gottschalk, nor George Catlin, was in any hurry to leave Paris and return home that fall of 1845. Ever the showman, Barnum felt he had been born to play the part of a Paris bon vivant. He relished French cuisine, the theater, the opera, and strolling the boulevards. Barnum would speak later of his extended stay in Paris as the happiest time in his life.

Moreau Gottschalk, who grew increasingly handsome and was always the perfect young gentleman, continued to be embraced by the monde musical. He became something of a fashion plate and began performing his own compositions, based on Creole melodies he had heard in childhood. Two in particular, “Bamboula” and “La Savane,” first performed in Paris a few years later, were to make him famous and beloved on both sides of the Atlantic. In one three-year period he would give 1,100 concerts in the United States and Canada. He toured California and Central America. Then, on tour in Brazil in 1869, he suddenly took ill and died at age forty.

George Catlin, still in mourning over the loss of his wife, “retired” to his Paris apartment to concentrate on his work and look after his children, three girls and a boy ranging in age from three to ten. “I thus painted on,” he wrote, “dividing my time between my easel and my little children … resolving and re-resolving to devote the remainder of my life to my art. …”

Catlin’s Indian exhibition, which had been moved from the Louvre to the Galerie des Beaux-Arts on the boulevard Bonne-Nouvelle, closed at last at the end of June. Catlin kept at his easel, turning out one Indian portrait or scene after another. Before leaving Paris he would produce more than fifty such pictures, largely out of economic necessity. If ever he considered other subjects for a change, a Paris view perhaps, or considered doing a copy at the Louvre, there is no sign of it.

In the summer of 1846, tragedy struck again. All four of Catlin’s children were stricken by typhoid fever. “My occupation was changed to their bedsides, where they were all together writhing in the agonies of the disease.” The three little girls survived, but the youngest, his son, George, did not. Still, Catlin stayed on in Paris nearly a year longer and with no letup in his work.

The ever-persistent Samuel Morse, now known as “the Lightning Man,” was also in Paris once more, having arrived in the fall of 1845, still in quest of a patent from the French. Yet again he faced disappointment. His friend and still ardent supporter Dominique Arago presented him to the Chamber of Deputies, where, after demonstrating his telegraph, Morse was generously acclaimed. But as would be said, he came away loaded with honor and nothing more.

George Healy did not return to Paris until the following year, 1846, and in less than six months he was on his way back to the United States. Expecting to stay longer this time, he took his wife, Louisa, with him. The children, who now included another daughter, Mary, were left in the care of Louisa’s mother. His mission was to gather material for a major painting he was determined to undertake portraying Daniel Webster at the summit of his oratorical powers, delivering his famous reply to Robert Y. Hayne in the Senate in 1830. By the time Healy returned to Paris, his generous client, the king of France, would be gone and prospects quite uncertain.