CHAPTER SIX

CHANGE AT HAND

How then can strangers hope to look into the veiled future of France?

—RICHARD RUSH

I

The new American minister had no sooner landed at Le Havre than he began hearing how unpopular the king and his government were. It was not what he had expected, and at Paris expressions of discontent and accusations “increased a hundred fold,” as he reported. The papers poured “daily fire” on nearly every public measure, their hostility coupled always with distrust of Louis-Philippe. He was accused of being selfish, crafty, senile, of breaking promises, of neglecting his duties to the nation. And all this seemed completely at odds with what the previous American minister, Lewis Cass, had had to say, and, for that matter, the impression one received from nearly every American who had spent any time with Louis-Philippe.

The post of minister to France was one Richard Rush had neither expected nor sought, but for which he was eminently qualified. In a long career in public service he had distinguished himself as attorney general of Pennsylvania (at age thirty-one), attorney general of the United States (at thirty-three), secretary of state, and then minister to the Court of St. James’s, where, facing a variety of critical disputes, he proved firm and candid while creating no ill will. In four years as secretary of the treasury under President John Quincy Adams, he had never missed a day on the job. When, as Adams’s running mate in the election of 1828, they went down to defeat against Andrew Jackson, he quietly retired to private life. Yet even then he continued to serve, settling boundary disputes and securing the bequest from the Englishman James Smithson that made possible the establishment of the Smithsonian Institution.

Minister Rush had as well the advantage of a distinguished name. His father, Dr. Benjamin Rush, a Philadelphia physician, had been a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Like his father, he was a man of wide intellectual interests, and at sixty-seven he was still impressively handsome, with penetrating blue eyes and a high, broad forehead. In all, he was as well suited to his new assignment as any American envoy since Jefferson. His one obvious deficiency was that he did not speak French.

Rush reached Paris in mid-July 1847, accompanied by two of his ten children, daughters Anna Marie and Sarah Catherine, who were both in their twenties. Their mother, suffering from poor health, had remained behind in Philadelphia. Rooms had been arranged at the Hôtel Windsor on the rue de Rivoli until a suitable residence could be found at a rent he could afford. Unlike his predecessor Cass, Rush was not a wealthy man.

On the afternoon of July 31 he made his first official call on the king, to present a “Letter of Credence” from President James K. Polk and deliver a brief statement about the honor of representing his country to France. The king responded in kind and in perfect English. The ceremony over, the king asked him to return for an informal dinner that evening.

By September, Rush had found a “sufficiently grand” house on the rue de Lille in the Faubourg Saint-Germain. He felt obliged to hire a carriage and a few servants as well, but only, he wrote, because they were essential to the role he must play.

I am representing a great nation at a great court. I cannot live like a curmudgeon or mechanic, but must live like a gentleman and foreign minister. … Still, I hope to meet it all if possible with the seven thousand dollars … the struggle will be severe. …

In a short time he was on cordial terms with both Louis-Philippe and the formidable foreign minister, François Guizot, careful always to take no sides in discussions concerning French politics. He saw the king often and conversed on a range of topics. He called frequently on Guizot and attended the requisite diplomatic receptions and dinners, where he kept seeing Baron von Humboldt, who, at nearly eighty and gregarious as always, happily recalled dining at the Rush home in Philadelphia when Richard was a boy. All in all, to judge by his diary, Rush was having a grand time, his deficiency in French and financial concerns notwithstanding.

Last night we were at Mr. Walsh’s [Robert Walsh, the American consul in Paris]. The party was large. Among those present were the venerable Humboldt … M. de Tocqueville … some of the DeKalb family whose French ancestors rendered gallant services in our Revolution, and others of note in French society. Many of our own country, including ladies, were there. … There was much intellectual conversation, and much that was sprightly, with music at intervals.

Yet he was troubled, as so many were, by the growing political unrest. Reform banquets, as they were called, had become the unofficial gathering places for those most vociferously critical of the king. At one such event held at the Château Rouge outside the city, more than a thousand people turned out, including members of the Chamber of Deputies. The old “Marseillaise” was sung and nearly every act of government since 1830 vigorously denounced.

Were the grievances real, Rush wondered. To judge by “the appearance of things,” France was full of prosperity and contentment, he wrote to Secretary of State James Buchanan on September 24, 1847. “Production is everywhere increasing. Tranquility everywhere prevails.” Were Napoleon to come back again, “he would hardly know the Paris he left, so much has it advanced in size, commerce, beauty, and above all, cleanliness.”

Taxes were high, to be sure, but no higher proportionately than any other European power. For a king, Louis-Philippe lived quite modestly. To be both a king and a republican on the same throne was difficult, Rush acknowledged. The only explanation he had for such simmering hostility and unrest was the French themselves. They were always excitable. “They will find fault with their rulers when there is cause and when there is not.”

These were “loose thoughts” only, Rush cautioned. “They are thrown out with the distrust which my short residence and limited opportunities of authentic information and observation up to this date ought to inspire.”

As for Louis-Philippe, he seemed as active and involved as ever, but looked tired and was often irritable. The death of a beloved sister, Adélaïde, had hit him hard. Further, and as Rush did not mention, predictions of the king’s downfall had been voiced for years and from many quarters. James Fenimore Cooper had long thought the king would be forced to “decamp.” Writing from Cooperstown only that fall, Cooper told a friend that all Europe was on the verge of “serious troubles,” and Louis-Philippe could well be on the way out.

In response to such forewarnings as he heard, the king himself observed that the people of Paris were not given to revolutions in winter.

With the new year under way, the Paris papers were calling the discontentment in the country “profound and universal.” Still, Rush sensed nothing to be alarmed about. “Notwithstanding all the reform banquets, I see no present prospect of a change,” he reported to Washington on January 22, 1848.

A week later, Alexis de Tocqueville warned his fellow members of the Chamber of Deputies, “We are sleeping on a volcano.”

On February 20, in fear of a revolt, the deputies and the government canceled a reform banquet scheduled for two days later. At once a great public clamor erupted. The whole issue had become “formidable,” Rush wrote privately to his family.

What followed happened with a speed no one foresaw.

On February 22, crowds marched and barricades went up in the streets to stall the advance of troops. The day after, still larger crowds turned angry, looting shops and throwing up more barricades. That night, full-scale riots broke out. When confronted by a line of troops stationed outside the residence of Foreign Secretary Guizot, the mob kept coming. A sergeant fired a shot. Then the rest of the soldiers opened fire, killing or wounding 50 people.

An American student named Richard Morris Hunt, who had been swept along with the crowd near Guizot’s house, wrote afterward of how people kept pressing the soldiers from all sides.

We were too near to be pleasant, we saw the flash and we heard the noise of guns. For a moment we thought it was fireworks. We were pushed on by the crowd … and on and on, stopped from time to time by soldiers who will not let us advance. We cannot believe that they have drawn on the people.

Hundreds of the National Guard joined the insurgents and through the night church bells tolled across the city. At the Palace of the Tuileries an exhausted Louis-Philippe kept saying over and over, “I have seen enough blood.”

The following morning, Thursday, February 24, shaken by all that had happened and refusing to order further bloodshed, Louis-Philippe abdicated.

He and his wife fled out a side door and through the Garden of the Tuileries to a waiting carriage. After a breakneck ride out of Paris to Le Havre, and a day or two in hiding, Louis-Philippe and Marie-Amélie— “Mr. and Mrs. William Smith”—crossed the Channel to refuge in England.

Thus ended the eighteen-year reign of the last king of the French. Shortly after his arrival in England, Queen Victoria wrote in a letter to old Lord Melbourne:

The poor King and his government made many mistakes within the last two years, and were obstinate and totally blind at the last till flight was inevitable. But for sixteen years he did a great deal to maintain peace and made France prosperous, which should not be forgotten. …

Louis-Philippe would die in exile at Claremont, Surrey, two years later in 1850, at age seventy-seven.

On the fateful morning of Thursday the twenty-fourth, at his desk on the rue de Lille, Richard Rush had dashed off a letter to Secretary Buchanan reporting all he then knew of the riots and the lives lost the day before, and to say “general confusion [and] uncertainty” still prevailed. “Even now … cavalry are hastily passing through streets within my hearing, and my servants bring in rumors that the King has abdicated. …”

What he did not yet know was that the mobs, delirious with success, had marched on the Palace of the Tuileries, broken in, and gutted it. Furniture and clothing were thrown down from the windows and burned in the garden. The king’s throne was carried off to be paraded through the streets as the ultimate symbol of triumph before it, too, was burned.

A week later Rush had more to report. On the evening the king made his escape, a new government had sprung into being as suddenly as the old monarchy had fallen, the provisional government of a republic characterized so far by “moderation and magnanimity.” But “foremost of all” in what he had to report was that he, as the American minister, “acting under a sense of independent duty in the emergency,” had taken it upon himself to recognize the new government without delay.

It was a momentous step. “I shall remain inexpressibly anxious until I know it will be officially received at home,” he wrote. “The responsibilities of my public station were upon me. What would my country expect from me? And what did I owe to my country under this emergency?”

He had never viewed Louis-Philippe and his government as did the French opposition, and he prided himself in having remained aloof from political conflicts. To have done otherwise would have been improper. “But the French people were themselves the arbiters of the conduct of their government, and the sole judges of what form of government they would have.”

Paris had quickly returned to life as usual. It was hard to believe. Shops and theaters reopened. People were out and about their business, as though nothing had happened. The new government seemed to be exercising its power appropriately, and no one was moving against it. Two months might pass before news of the abdication reached Washington and Rush received his instructions in response. What was he to do? “Was it for me to be backward when France appeared to be looking to us?”

At two o’clock in the afternoon on Monday, February 28, in formal diplomatic attire, he appeared at the Hôtel de Ville, headquarters of the new government. A great crowd was gathered outside. Once inside, having been formally presented, he delivered his address, saying:

As representative of the United States, and charged with the interests and rights of my country, and my fellow citizens residing in France, and too far off to wait for instructions, I seize on the first opportunity to offer you my felicitations, persuaded that my government will sanction the course I thus adopt. Nor can I either fail to state to you that the remembrance of the alliance and ancient friendship which have joined together France and the United States is still living and in full force among us.

Cries of “Vive la République des États-Unis” went up among those gathered inside and out.

None of the European diplomatic corps had made such a move. The United States was first and alone in recognizing the new republic. The rest were awaiting instructions.

In Washington, Rush’s decisive role was roundly approved. President Polk assured Congress that the American minister to France had his “full and unqualified approbation.”

Paris continued “wonderfully, miraculously tranquil.” Elections to the National Assembly went ahead in perfect order. Visitors were returning to the city. The weather in late April and early May was as lovely as ever at that time of year. Back for another visit, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote of the timeless beauty of scenes along the Seine, the “very civil and good tempered, polite and joyous” people of Paris.

Americans had long since read in Galignani’s Guide that the volatile populace of the city was easily led into “criminal excesses,” but also quick to recover, ever eager in the pursuit of pleasure. “Living entirely for the present, the Parisian soon forgets his afflictions, consoles himself with the amusements of the day, and is too gay to think of the future.” The one disturbing note to Emerson was the great number of trees that had been cut down during the February uprising to build barricades.

But, appearances and guidebooks to the contrary, all was not well. A government program of national workshops to provide bread and work for the unemployed had problems from the start. As Rush explained in a long report:

They did not and could not employ everybody. … The work was ill-done into the bargain, whilst the accumulating over-surplus of workmen who could not be employed at all were thrown as a charity upon the government. … This made up a heavy aggregate of expense to the government without satisfying the workmen. The consequence was discontent among the whole of them.

Unemployment grew steadily worse. Tens of thousands had no jobs and were suffering dreadfully, many starving. Children were starving. In the meantime, revolutionary fervor and violence were spreading rapidly across Europe, in Germany, Italy, and Poland.

Emerson departed on June 3. On June 23, riots in Paris flared into a full-scale, raging insurrection.

By decree the National Assembly conferred supreme authority— unlimited power—on the minister of war, General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac. Paris was declared in a state of siege and an additional 30,000 troops were rushed in from outside the city. The fighting turned savage, and General Cavaignac responded with brutal force, ordering the use of cannon and bayonet, and refusing to give the least quarter to the insurgents.

The archbishop of Paris, Denis Affre, asked permission to go himself to the scene of the worst of the fighting, to try to mediate. “On his way he passed my door in his full clerical robes,” wrote Rush. When the archbishop climbed a barricade in clear view, the firing stopped for an instant on both sides, and then he was shot. He died the next day.

The “June Days of 1848,” as they were to be known, numbered four. “So vast and horrible a desolation wrought in the heart of a city by the hands of her own citizens the world has not witnessed,” reported the New York and London papers. Possibly as many as 5,000 were killed, including some 1,200 soldiers. Another 11,000 were arrested and thousands of these would be shipped off to Algeria. It made what happened in February seem only a minor disturbance.

(A young German writer and professed communist, Karl Marx, who had been living in Paris until ordered to leave a few years before, wrote that the February revolution was the “beautiful revolution,” the one in June, the “ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution.”)

With the fighting ended, Rush, like thousands of others, set off to view the “battlefield,” to find that, the battlefield being Paris, the dead and wounded had been taken away as they fell. Only the barricades and houses shattered by cannonballs or riddled by musket fire stood as evidence of the havoc and slaughter. The great boulevards looked like abandoned encampments. “Scattered wisps of hay and the litter of cavalry, horses tied to iron palisades, detachments of infantry, their arms stacked, the men lying down on straw, looking jaded, some asleep … such is the picture of these streets now,” wrote Rush.

What would come of it all was impossible for him to predict, knowing how much he had failed to foresee since his arrival.

None can understand a country or have full claim to speak of its future, but those who belong to it, or live in it long enough to catch its whole genius and characteristics. … How then can strangers hope to look into the veiled future of France?

Though the official state of siege would not be lifted until October, and thousands of troops remained a conspicuous presence, daily life resumed again and at a quickening pace. The National Assembly opened, and Rush found himself back playing his part at diplomatic receptions or dining in splendor with the president of the assembly and members of the cabinet.

In November the first snow fell, whitening all of Paris. On December 10, the election for the first president of the Republic took place, and the winner by an enormous margin was Prince Louis Napoleon, who was hardly more than a name to most of the country, but the name was quite enough. He was opposed by General Cavaignac and the poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine. Of the more than seven million votes cast, Louis Napoleon won over 5 million.

On New Year’s Day, 1849, the new president moved into the Palais de l’Élysée on the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Though more modest than the Palace of the Tuileries, and a bit shabby, the Élysée, as everyone knew, had been a favorite residence of the Emperor Napoleon. At a first grand ball at the Élysée in February, it was taken as no small matter that the servants were wearing the green and gold livery of the emperor.

II

The flow of Americans into Paris continued all the while, their numbers including the usual range in age, vocation, interests, social standing, purpose, and wherewithal—students, journalists, writers, social reformers, salesmen, merchants, tourists, the young, the old, the ambitious, the in-disposed, the idle rich. But there was a notable change to be seen in the increasing number of American women. One of these, a New York literary critic and ardent feminist named Margaret Fuller, decided all who came to Paris from her country could be classified in three distinct “species.”

The first she called the “servile” American, whom she considered “utterly shallow,” all but worthless.

He comes abroad to spend his money and indulge his tastes. His object in Europe is to have fashionable clothes, good foreign cookery, to know some titled persons, and furnish himself with coffee house gossip. …

Then there was the conceited American, “instinctively bustling and proud of he knows not what” and “profoundly ignorant.” Still, she thought this a creature not without hope.

And third was the artist, the “thinking American,” the one she approved of and with whom she felt a common bond.

[He] recognized the immense advantage of being born to a new world … yet does not wish the seed from the past to be lost. He is anxious to gather and carry back with him every plant that will bear a new climate and a new culture. …

But plainly there were new arrivals distinctively different from any who preceded them and who would make way for others like them to follow. And Margaret Fuller was herself of this different variety, in that she was the first American woman of great talent as a professional writer to visit and describe Paris. A Bostonian by birth and upbringing, she had begun her career working with Ralph Waldo Emerson, editing the Transcendentalist publication the Dial, before joining the staff of the NewYork Tribune. At age thirty-six, she was at last seeing Europe, a desire of long standing, and filing “letters” to the Tribune, a number of which were carried on the front page. Much, though not all, about Paris charmed her. She wrote of “passably pretty ladies with excessively pretty bonnets, announcing in their hues of light green, peach blossom and primrose the approach of spring.” But the men “sauntering arm-in-arm” were another matter.

The air, half military, half dandy, of self-esteem and savoirfaire, is not particularly interesting, nor are the glassy stare and fumes of bad cigars, exactly what one most desires to encounter when the heart is opened by the breath of spring. …

Hearing Chopin perform at the piano was to hear his music for the first time, she wrote. In the Library of the Chamber of Deputies, she feasted her eyes on the original manuscripts of Rousseau.

I saw them and touched them—those manuscripts, just as he has celebrated them, written on the fine white paper, tied with ribbon—yellow and faded age has made them, yet at their touch I seemed to feel the fire of youth, immortally glowing, more and more expansive with which his soul has pervaded this century.

She met and conversed with George Sand, whom she greatly admired. She “takes rank in society like a man, for the weight of her thoughts,” and had “every reason to leave her husband—a stupid, brutal man.” The “brilliant shows” of Paris days and nights were entrancing, but of the French overall, she was not so sure. “French people I find slippery,” she confided in a letter to Emerson, though she knew that with her limited command of the language it was difficult to “meet them in their way.”

“It is too plain that you should conquer their speech first, which is to unlock such jeweled cabinets for you,” Emerson responded.

When a French tutor told her she spoke and acted like an Italian, it suited her fine, since she was on her way to Italy and thus might find herself more at home there.

Margaret Fuller would meet and marry a penniless Italian aristocrat, Angelo Ossoli. On a voyage to New York in 1850, she, her husband, and their small son would die when the ship went down in a storm off Long Island, within sight of land.

Another American who amply qualified for Margaret Fuller’s third category was Richard Morris Hunt, the student who had found himself carried along with the mob on the day of the February bloodshed. Hunt was the first American to be admitted to the school of architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts—the finest school of architecture in the world—and the subsequent importance of his influence on the architecture of his own country can hardly be overstated.

He was, in addition, one of the earliest of the American children brought to Paris by wealthy parents to improve their education, specifically in the arts. Richard, who grew up in Brattleboro, Vermont, had arrived in Paris first in 1843, at sixteen, with his four brothers and sister and widowed mother. The family fortune had come from land speculation in New England. His father, a member of Congress, had died of cholera in Washington during the epidemic of 1832.

Ambitious to become an architect, Richard had prepared for the famously difficult entrance examination at the École des Beaux-Arts under the guidance of a noted French architect, Hector-Martin Lefuel. When he failed the exam, he resolved to try harder. The second time, he passed.

Meanwhile, his brother, William Morris Hunt, who had thought he wanted to be a sculptor, switched to painting after seeing a picture in the window of an art store. It was a portrait called The Falconer by George Healy’s friend Thomas Couture. “If that is a painting, I am a painter,” William is said to have exclaimed. He became Couture’s first American student, and his favorite.

The two Hunt brothers were both slim, dark-haired, good-looking, and socially at ease. William, the older by three years, was the more witty and theatrical, but also short-tempered. Each was genuinely fond of the other. They enjoyed each other’s company and for some years shared a bright, fifth-floor apartment at 1 rue Jacob, a short walk from the École des Beaux-Arts.

Richard began his studies at the École and William started painting under Couture in 1846, and for brief periods, Richard, too, enrolled in Couture’s atelier to study painting and drawing. William was also among the first Americans attracted to the work of those French artists—and particularly the influential painter of peasants, Jean-François Millet—who had settled in the picturesque hamlet of Barbizon thirty miles southeast of Paris.

From the training and inspiration each of the brothers was to experience in the next several years in France would come great strides for each in his work. “Mr. William Hunt is our most promising artist here,” reported Thomas Appleton to his father.

In the spring of 1849, Elizabeth Blackwell, “with a very slender purse and few introductions of any value,” found herself in the “unknown world” of Paris. What made her situation different from that of other American visitors was her profession. She was a doctor—the first American woman to have become a doctor. Like her male counterparts from the United States, she had come to Paris to further her training in medicine and surgery. (Given that medicine was still understood to be an art, she, too, belonged in the third of Margaret Fuller’s categories.)

English by birth, she had moved to America as a child, settling eventually with her family in Cincinnati. As a young woman, she taught school, before declaring her ambition to become a doctor, and preferably a surgeon, at a time when any woman who entertained such ideas was commonly considered “either mad or bad.” A physician writing in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal categorically declared that women were “not constituted” for the profession, they being of such “nervous or excitable” temperament. “Let woman not assume the prerogatives of man by entering the arena and noisy business of life, for which she has not the faculties in common with man.”

The idea of winning a doctor’s degree, Elizabeth would write, gradually assumed “the aspect of a great moral struggle, and the moral fight possessed immense attraction for me.” When she mentioned what was on her mind to a well-known Cincinnati doctor, he was horrified by the very thought. However, Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was then living in Cincinnati and a neighbor, told her the idea, though impractical, if carried out might prove highly useful.

Refused by medical schools in Philadelphia and New York, Elizabeth finally gained admission to the Geneva Medical School in upstate New York. In 1849, after little more than a year of study, she was granted a medical degree.

Yet she felt still the need to know more, and as she later wrote, her teachers and friends urged her to go to Paris. She was twenty-eight, a tiny woman only five feet one, according to her passport application, with a round face, light grey eyes, and sandy hair.

One after another the Paris physicians she saw showed no interest in her or any inclination to help, until she met Pierre Louis, who advised her to enter La Maternité, the world’s leading maternity hospital.

On the last day of June, Elizabeth Blackwell stepped through a small door in a high grey wall on the rue Saint-Jacques, into the cloistered life of La Maternité, where young women trained to become midwives under the famous “sage-femme-in-chief,” Madame Madeleine-Edmée-Clémentine Charrier. “So send a welcome greeting to the Voluntary Prisoner,” Elizabeth wrote the next day to her family.

Imagine a large square of old buildings, formerly a convent, set down in the center of a great court with a wood and garden behind, and many little separate buildings all around, the whole enclosed by very high walls, over the tops of which, shining out beautifully against the clear sky, may be seen the dome of the Panthéon [or] the Hôtel des Invalides. … The inner court is surrounded by les cloîtres, a most convenient arched passage which gives covered communication to the whole building, and which I suppose was formerly traversed by shaven monks on their way to the church. …

She lived in a long dormitory, or dortoir, with twenty girls, all French, most of whom were ten years younger than she, and “all pretty and pleasant, of no education except their studies in the institution.” Each was provided a narrow bed with an iron bedstead, one chair, and a small lamp. The brick floors were so highly polished she had difficulty walking on them. She should be pictured trying to get about in a great white apron, she wrote to her mother. “And how French girls do chatter!”

From the time the morning began at five-thirty, their whole day was occupied with lectures and work in the wards and clinics. There was scarcely a pause. No distractions were permitted, no newspapers, no books unless medical works. A bell at noon announced the first meal of the day, which consisted of a loaf of bread, a small bottle of wine, soup, boiled meat and vegetables, all “eaten in haste.”

Madame Charrier, by Elizabeth’s description, was “a little deformed woman, elderly, but with a fresh color still and kind blue eyes,” and generally loved by her students. In consideration of Elizabeth’s foreignness, Madame insisted she sit beside her during lectures, so she would thoroughly understand.

Several days out of the week were “en service,” when each student spent the day (or night) serving in the wards. Every morning three students went before Madame Charrier for a one-hour oral examination of what they had learned, and in her volatile Gallic responses to the answers, Madame Charrier seemed to mimic the extremes of mood of Paris itself. “If they answer promptly and well … her face grows beautiful, and her ‘Bien! très bien!’ really does me good, it is so hearty,” Elizabeth wrote. But if the student hesitated, or answered in too low a voice, or seemed not to know what she should, then followed a terrific scolding.

Alternately satirical and furious, she becomes perfectly on fire, rises upon her chair, claps her hands, looks up to heaven, and the next moment if a good answer has redeemed the fault, all is forgotten, her satisfaction is as great as her anger. … At first I was a little shocked at this stormy instruction, but really it seems almost necessary now, and produces wonderful results.

It was a routine and life, a world within the medical world of Paris, entirely separate from and very unlike that of the male “medicals,” but as one of the French physicians stressed to Elizabeth, it offered the opportunity of “seeing all that was remarkable” in the deliveries of more babies in a shorter space of time—four months—than anywhere else in the world, indeed, as many as in the entire practice of some doctors.

With her time at La Maternité nearing its end, Elizabeth contracted a serious eye infection that confined her to bed for weeks and ultimately cost her her sight in one eye, thus ending whatever aspirations she may still have had for a career in surgery.

“How kind everybody was!” she wrote of the care she received.

The training at La Maternité had been a trying time, she conceded, with no privacy, poor air, poor food, hard work, and little sleep. “Yet the medical experience was invaluable at that period of pioneer effort. It enabled me later to enter upon practice with a confidence in one important branch of medicine that no other period of study afforded.”

Within a few years, she would found the New York Infirmary and College for Women, a hospital run entirely by women.

The same summer of 1849, while Elizabeth Blackwell was confined to her study of obstetrics, yet another American pioneer was making his presence felt in a different way and in the altogether different setting of an international peace conference presided over by Victor Hugo at the Salle Sainte-Cécile on the rue Saint-Lazare. William Wells Brown, one of the eight hundred delegates, was a lecturer and writer, an ardent abolitionist, and a fugitive slave.

Born in Kentucky, he had told his story in Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, a book published in 1847. His mother was a slave, his father a slave master. At age ten he had heard the cries of his mother as she was being flogged by an overseer. Several times he tried to escape to freedom before succeeding at last, at age eighteen, by getting away to Ohio, where he found shelter with a Quaker named Wells Brown, whose name he took for his own. In the years since, he had worked on steamships on Lake Erie, acquired an education, and made a name for himself as a speaker for abolitionist societies in Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts. He was handsome and articulate, and audiences invariably found his story extremely compelling.

When Brown first applied for a passport earlier that summer, in a letter to Secretary of State John M. Clayton, saying “I am a native of the state of Kentucky and I am a colored man,” he never received a direct answer but was later informed that passports were not granted to “persons of color.” Only through the government of Massachusetts was he able to obtain a certificate permitting him to get as far as England. Once there, he succeeded in arranging for a passport through the American embassy in London.

Nor had he been given financial help by any antislavery society or by friends to cover the cost of his trip. He went, as he said, entirely at his own expense.

On the final day of the Paris conference, August 24, at the request of Victor Hugo, Brown spoke for peace and against slavery in a speech quoted at length in the Paris papers. With the abolition of war, he proclaimed, “we shall break … in pieces every yoke of bondage and let all the oppressed go free,” to which the audience broke into sustained cheers. He had been a slave for nearly twenty years. He knew whereof he spoke. Here in Paris he could utter his sentiments “freely.” To do so in the United States, he reminded them, would be to risk his life.

He was tremendously pleased by the response of the audience, and even more by the welcome he received later at a lavish reception given by the French foreign minister, Alexis de Tocqueville. At home he could have been present at such a reception only as a servant. Curious to know more about him, Madame de Tocqueville asked him to sit beside her on the sofa. The only disapproving look he saw among the many watching was from the American consul, Robert Walsh.

Before his stay in Paris ended, Brown covered much of the city on foot, setting off from the Hôtel Bedford at first light before the sessions of the conference began. He saw most of the major sights on both sides of the Seine, and though unable to speak French, he enjoyed it all. Never once, under any circumstance, was he made to feel anything but welcome.

William Wells Brown was to become a prolific author, historian, and the first black American novelist and playwright, with his novel titled Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter (1853) and a play, The Escape; or, A Leap for Freedom (1863). Having come to Paris while in his early thirties, he would continue writing for another thirty years.

That summer of 1849 also marked the return to Paris of George Healy and his family from their time in the United States, and the start of preparations for the departure for home by Richard Rush and his daughters.

There had been a change in the administration in Washington and, to his regret, Rush was recalled. He felt he had done his job well, never abandoning his duties for a single day since he arrived. Alexis de Tocqueville sent a note that touched him deeply. “It is with great concern that I see you leaving the position you have occupied here and have filled with so much usefulness to the interests of your country and our own.” Rush and his daughters would sail in October.

Healy established himself in an enormous studio on the rue de l’Arcade and set to work on the largest, most ambitious painting of his career, his Webster’s Reply to Hayne, which measured a colossal fifteen by twenty-seven feet. (Samuel Morse’s Gallery of the Louvre, at six by nine feet, was small by comparison.)

The scene was the United States Senate on January 26, 1830, the culminating moment of the historic debate over whether the states that had created the Constitution had the right to withdraw support from the policies of the federal government. An ardent “nationalist,” Webster championed the position that all of the states had created the Constitution and the federal government, and that no state or states could nullify that government. “Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,” was the ringing declaration of the speech so long remembered and quoted.

Healy positioned Webster in the foreground, standing foursquare in the classic orator’s manner—back arched, left hand on the corner of a desk—addressing the packed chamber. Webster wears a white cravat, a buff-colored vest, and a blue dress coat with brass buttons. A play of light on him, like a sunbeam, adds to his dramatic presence.

In addition to Webster, Healy rendered no fewer than 120 other identifiable faces, including those of Senators Joseph Y. Hayne, James K. Polk, John C. Calhoun, and General Lewis Cass. John Quincy Adams, who can be seen looking on from the visitors’ gallery, was not actually present for Webster’s great moment. Nor were several others whom Healy chose to make part of the scene, such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Healy even included two of his favorite Frenchmen, Alexis de Tocqueville and Thomas Couture, seating them near Adams.

According to a pamphlet testifying to the authenticity of the painting, 111 likenesses were “carefully executed” from life. But it also appears Healy relied in part on daguerreotype portraits. Such details of the Senate chamber as the great carved eagle over the Senate president’s chair and the spindled storage space of the desks crammed with papers were presented quite as they were.

Healy labored at what he called “my big picture” for two years, and with no guarantee of compensation. Further, in 1850, he and his wife, Louisa, suffered the tragic loss of two children, when their youngest son, George, Jr., succumbed to scarlet fever and the eldest, Arthur, at age ten, fell down some stone steps during play hour at school and died soon afterward.

Healy put the final touches to Webster’s Reply to Hayne in his Paris studio in the summer of 1851 and in a matter of weeks was on his way with the painting to Boston, where in September it was shown for the first time at the Boston Athenaeum on Beacon Hill. People came by the hundreds to pay a 25-cent admission fee. One Saturday, escorted by Healy, Webster himself came, and as reported, “It was a proud moment that, for our young American artist. …”

“Receive my sincerest compliments on your great picture,” wrote Henry Longfellow. “You have done wonders with a subject of extreme difficulty, and I am rejoiced to see your labors crowned with such complete success.”

The painting later went on display in New York at the National Academy of Design, and as in Boston, the public response was enthusiastic, while mixed among the critics. Much the fullest praise was for Healy’s portrayal of Webster, the strongest part of the painting.

The countenance—an admirable likeness of the statesman— is kindled with the inspiration of eloquence [said the New York Times]. The person … is drawn up with a majestic self-reliance, expressive of strong inner consciousness of adequacy for the remarkable occasion which prompted the effort. The eyes are glowing with animation, the shaggy brows, rather raised, show the exultant, triumphant gaze of the orator. …

Does the painting have artistic greatness? asked the New York Evening Post. “We must answer decidedly that it does not.” A man making a speech, said the reviewer, was no fit subject for the realm of Art, whatever the painter’s skill.

As a commercial enterprise, at 25 cents a ticket, the painting proved a disappointment as it continued on tour. Before long it was back in Boston, on display at no charge in Faneuil Hall, one of the nation’s most historic sites. Eventually, following Webster’s death in 1852, it was purchased by the city of Boston for $2,500, less than half what Healy had hoped to receive, to hang permanently in the Hall.

Healy would never regret the time he had devoted to the painting. “However onerous to an artist such undertakings usually are, and this one proved particularly so to me,” he said it had been an honor to paint so many of his illustrious countrymen and Webster most especially.

On September 14, 1851, James Fenimore Cooper died at his home in Cooperstown, one day from his sixty-second birthday. His death was the first of an American writer of international reputation.

Old friends who had seen him in New York not long before had thought he looked in fine health, “a very castle of a man,” as Washington Irving said, but in fact he had been suffering from diseases of the intestines and kidneys for some time.

Irving was one of those notables who spoke at a memorial tribute in New York, and a published Memorial included letters from Emerson, Longfellow, Charles Sumner, Samuel Morse, and Richard Rush. Morse chose to keep his remarks short, recalling simply the “eventful time” he and Cooper had spent in Paris together twenty years past. “I never met with a more sincere, warm-hearted, constant friend.”

They were words that would have touched Cooper more than any, unless it was the tribute from Richard Rush, who said—and perhaps with Morse in mind as well—that the nation’s enduring fame would rest above all on the great American names in literature and science.