CHAPTER FOURTEEN

AU REVOIR, PARIS!

But coming here has been a wonderful experience, surprising in many respects, one of them being to find how much of an American I am.

—AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS

I

No particular notice was taken of the small elderly gentleman strolling with the younger woman on the rue de la Paix and in the garden of the Palais Royal. No heads turned, no one responded to his characteristic smile with a sign of recognition.

At home in Boston everybody knew who he was. In London in recent weeks, he had been a center of attention at grand dinners, warmly greeted by the prime minister, dukes and earls and literary notables like Robert Browning and Oscar Wilde. He had been given a party by the Royal College of Surgeons and received honorary degrees from all three of Britain’s greatest centers of learning: Oxford, Cambridge, and Edinburgh.

But in the Paris he so loved, he knew “not a soul” and no one knew him. As he would write, “Our most intimate relations were with the people of the hotel,” and given his amiable outlook, this was perfectly acceptable.

At the peak of summer 1886, seventy-seven-year-old Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., had returned to Europe accompanied by his widowed daughter, Amelia, on what he called a “Rip Van Winkle experiment,” a trip he had long promised himself. Fifty years earlier, he had left the France of Louis-Philippe and François Guizot. Now nearly all his Boston comrades from those earlier Paris days, his fellow “medicals,” fellow poets and authors, were gone. Mason Warren, Charles Sumner, Ralph Waldo Emerson, even Thomas Appleton and Henry Longfellow, were all dead. Of those close companions who had sat with him through lectures by Dupuytren or followed the legendary Dr. Louis on his hospital rounds, only Henry Bowditch remained.

The only familiar faces to be seen now in Paris were in paintings at the Louvre, though at first nothing was to be found where he looked for it, so extensively had things been rearranged. “But when I found them, they greeted me, so I fancied, like old acquaintances. The meek-looking ‘Belle Jardinière’ was as lamb-like as ever. … Titian’s young man with the glove was the calm, self-contained gentleman I used to admire.”

He and Amelia were in Paris for a week only. While she did some shopping, he walked the old neighborhood of the École de Médecine, pleased to find the house where he lived on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince unchanged except for a shop on the street level. Tempted to go inside and make inquiries, he decided against it. “What would the shopkeeper know about M. Bertrand, my landlord of half a century ago; or his first wife, to whose funeral I went; or his second, to whose bridal I was bidden?”

From the rue Monsieur-le-Prince, Holmes made the short walk to the Panthéon, not, he explained, to pay homage to it as a “sacred edifice” or the final resting place of great men, but to see León Foucault’s famous pendulum. “I was thinking much more of Foucault’s grand experiment, one of the most sublime visible demonstrations of a great physical fact in the records of science.” And there it was, a heavy weight swinging slowly back and forth from a wire reaching nearly three hundred feet to the dome overhead, proving, as its direction appeared to change, the rotation of the earth.

Only one man did Dr. Holmes hope to meet while in Paris, and this he resolved by going on his own initiative to the office of Louis Pasteur at 14 rue Vauquelin to pay an unannounced call.

“I sent my card in … and presently he came out and greeted me. I told him I was an American physician who wished to look in his face and take his hand—nothing more.”

Reflecting later on the great changes he had seen as a result of French strides in science since he was a student in Paris, Holmes wrote that the stethoscope was almost a novelty in those days, the microscope never even mentioned by any clinical instructor he had had.

It was not just that the world of his student days was long past, or that he and his American contemporaries had all but disappeared, but that American medical students in Paris now numbered relatively few. Due in good part to what he and others had brought back from Paris, medical education in the United States had so greatly advanced that study in Paris was not necessarily an advantage any longer. Those who were ambitious to excel in clinical medicine or surgery could get superb training at home.

It being summer, much of Paris was characteristically quiet, and at night Holmes found himself too tired to go to the theater or the opera.

But there was joy still in seeing the beautiful bridges on the Seine. “Nothing looked more nearly the same as of old than the bridges,” he wrote. The Pont Neuf looked not the least different to him and evoked all the good feelings of old.

Stopping at the Café Procope, once his favorite for breakfast, he thought it much improved in appearance. He sat contentedly over a cup of coffee, daydreaming of Voltaire and the other luminaries of the far past who had gathered there.

“But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my early friends and companions that came up before me in all the freshness of their young manhood?” He need never chase off to Florida in search of Ponce de León’s fountain of youth, Holmes decided. It was here. In Paris.

Three years after Holmes’s visit—at the time of the 1889 exposition— Augustus Saint-Gaudens, too, returned to Paris, and his stay was also short. Apparently he came alone, and he wrote nothing of a wish to see the fair or anyone in particular, only that he was “desirous of returning in what measure I could to my student life and environment.”

He appears to have kept largely to himself, staying not at a hotel, but in “a little box of a room” on the Left Bank, in the studio apartment of a friend and former assistant, sculptor Frederick MacMonnies. Of his impressions of Paris, he mentioned no more than its “monumental largeness.” As for his opinions on the fair, he said only that they were “too complex and result in so much vanity that I’ll modestly refrain. …”

What seems to have made the most lasting impression was a scene he observed the first morning in the small garden below his window in the “box.” From the door of a studio opening onto the garden came a man of about his own age, “an old chap,” in dressing gown and slippers and smoking a pipe.

He trudged along in among the paths over to one particular flowerbed which was evidently his little property, and with great care watered the flowers with a diminutive watering pot. Soon after another codger appeared in another door, in trousers and slippers. He also fussed and shuffled in his little plot.

Such “codgers” could well be the very comrades of his youth at the Beaux-Arts, he thought, and here they were in the midst of crowded, bustling Paris so contentedly cultivating their flower gardens, “the blue smoke from their pipes of peace rising philosophically among the greenery, in harmony with it all.” He envied that harmony and their contentment.

It would be said in the family that Saint-Gaudens had made the trip in 1889 out of a “deeply felt need” to see what was being done in Paris, “thereby widening his artistic horizon.” This may have been true. But there was more to the explanation. He had his own private reasons, as would come to light later.

Great numbers of aspiring American artists, sculptors, and architects kept arriving in the city all the while, and among them several who, in the future, were to figure prominently in the arts at home.

Maurice Prendergast, the son of a Boston grocer, had crossed the Atlantic in a cattle boat to enroll in the Académie Julian in 1891. John White Alexander was in his thirties when he and his wife settled in Paris the same year. In very little time his large, strikingly composed paintings of beautiful young women in elegant settings were to have wide recognition.

James Earle Fraser had spent most of his boyhood on a ranch in South Dakota. His father was a railroad engineer. The talented young man had come to study sculpture at the École des Beaux-Arts, where he would later be “discovered” by Saint-Gaudens.

Henry O. Tanner was tall, cultivated, and the only African-American at the Académie Julian. The son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he had been born in Pittsburgh. At the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, where he studied under Thomas Eakins, he had been the lone black student. He, too, sailed from America in 1891, but intended only to stop briefly in Paris before going on to study in Rome. As he wrote, “Strange that after having been in Paris a week, I should find conditions so to my liking that I completely forgot … my plans to study in Rome. …”

In a café on the Left Bank, on one of his first mornings in Paris, Tanner met Robert Henri for the first time. They found they had the Pennsylvania Academy in common and a friendship began. “He’s modest … not in the opinion that he is a big man, so he will get on,” wrote Henri, who helped give Tanner “a start” at the Académie Julian.

Tanner’s expenses were being covered by patrons at home, a white American minister and his wife named Hartzwell, and by a $75 commission he had received before setting sail. His total expenses the first year in Paris would come to $365, as he carefully recorded. In addition to having little money, he spoke no French.

Never had he seen or heard such bedlam as at the Académie, Tanner was to write in a lively chronicle of his student experiences. Nor had he ever tried to see or breathe in such a smoke-shrouded room.

Never were windows opened. They were nailed fast at the beginning of the cold season. Fifty or sixty men smoking in such a room for two or three hours would make it so that those in the back rows could hardly see the model.

At no time was he made to feel unwanted or inferior because of his color, which had not always been so in Philadelphia. Only in some restaurants did he know he was unwelcome, but that, he knew, was because he did not drink wine. “In the cheap restaurants to which I went, they did not care to serve one unless one took wine—they made little or no profit on the food. … I was thus an undesirable customer and several times forced to change my restaurant.”

The occasional appearance of students’ parents in Paris was not uncommon. The chance to see the new life their offspring were leading, and enjoy a bit of Paris themselves, was all but irresistible if one could afford it, and the effect of the experience could be profound.

William Dean Howells, the novelist and former editor of the Atlantic Monthly, whose son John was studying architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts, had been enjoying himself thoroughly, buoyed by the spirit of Paris and the chance to catch up with old friends like James McNeill Whistler, whose part-time residence on the rue du Bac had become something of a rendezvous for visiting Americans of like mind and interests. But then at a gathering in Whistler’s garden, Howells was seen standing alone, uncharacteristically downcast. He had just received word that he must return home. His father was dying.

Sensing something was wrong, a younger American came over to speak with him. Suddenly, Howells turned and put his hand on the young man’s shoulder and said, “Oh, you are young, you are young—be glad of it and live.”

Live all you can. It’s a mistake not to. It doesn’t matter what you do—but live. This place makes it all come over me. I see it now. I haven’t done so—and now I’m old. It’s too late. It has gone past me—I’ve lost it. You have time. You are young. Live!

Some years later the young man, Jonathan Sturges, told the story to Henry James, stressing the intensity with which Howells had spoken. It became the germ of another James novel set in Paris, The Ambassadors, in which the main character, in an outburst, delivers the same message in almost exactly the same words.

In the spacious comforts of the home that he and Louisa had established on the rue de la Rochefoucauld twenty years before, George Healy had begun slowing down. He still went out to his studio part of every day, still walked down to the Church of the Holy Trinity to hear daily mass, though on the uphill walk home he moved considerably more slowly than he once had.

His large family was Healy’s delight. A note in his diary at Christmas-time, 1891, reads:

My grandson, Georges De Mare, came to the studio to say they are waiting for me. The Christmas tree was all lighted up; about fifty children crowded around it, joy reflected in their faces; the parlors filled with people. Indeed, it was the loveliest picture one could see.

Healy was the last one left in Paris of those aspiring young Americans who had sailed to France filled with such high hopes in the 1830s. It had been nearly fifty-seven years since he set off from Boston with scarcely any money, knowing no French and knowing no one in Paris.

His love for the city was greater than ever. But for all the years he had lived there, he never thought of himself as anything other than an American. “His love of France and the French never changed him from an out-and-out American,” a granddaughter, Marie De Mare, would write.

In 1892, Healy decided it was time to go. In March he and Louisa sailed for home, to spend their remaining years in Chicago.

II

The Augustus Saint-Gaudens who arrived in Paris again in October of 1897 for an indefinite stay was by almost any measure a stunning example not only of success, but of persistent hard work and great talent justly recognized and rewarded. At age fifty-one, he was America’s preeminent sculptor, honored, revered by colleagues, repeatedly in demand for projects of national importance. Consequently, too, he had become wealthy. His finest work, it seemed certain, would stand down the years as some of the highest achievements of American art.

Since the unveiling of his Farragut in New York in 1880, he had never been without work. For a public park in Springfield, Massachusetts, he had done The Puritan, a striding, heroic figure in bronze that seemed to embody all the courage and purpose of seventeenth-century New England Protestant fervor.

A pensive, standing Lincoln unveiled in 1887 in Chicago’s Lincoln Park captured as no work of sculpture yet had the depth of mind of the Great Emancipator.

In Rock Creek Cemetery in Washington sat the hooded figure of the Adams Memorial, Saint-Gaudens’s most enigmatic, mysterious creation, and the subject of never-ending speculation about its meaning.

In contrast were the Amor Caritas, a magnificent winged angel for a funerary monument raising a tablet over her head, and his beautiful Diana, the archer, the only nude he ever rendered, which stood thirteen feet high atop the tower of New York’s new thirty-two-story Madison Square Garden, designed by Stanford White.

Greatest of all, many felt, was another Civil War monument, this at Boston, which for the first time portrayed African-Americans as heroes. The Shaw Memorial, a giant bronze frieze, set at the edge of the Boston Common opposite the Massachusetts State House, commemorated the bravery and sacrifice of the Fifty-Fourth Massachusetts Regiment, the first black unit in the Union Army, most of whose members, including Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, were killed in a frontal attack on Fort Wagner in Charleston Harbor in 1863.

The positioning of Shaw on horseback moving forward with his marching men, the unflinching look in their faces and distinct individuality of each face, had a total effect beyond that of any memorial in the nation.

Saint-Gaudens had never taken such infinite pains with a work. It preoccupied him over a span of fourteen years before he was satisfied. Commissioned in 1884, it was not unveiled until May 31, 1897.

Presenting him with an honorary degree that spring, the president of Harvard, Charles Eliot, had said: “Augustus Saint-Gaudens—a sculptor whose art follows and ennobles nature, enforces fame and lasting remembrance, and does not count the mortal years it takes to mold immortal fame.”

Between times, he had produced numerous relief portraits of Robert Louis Stevenson, Cornelius Vanderbilt, the artists William Merritt Chase and Kenyon Cox, his son Homer Saint-Gaudens, and John Singer Sargent’s sister Violet, one of the loveliest of all his reliefs, in which she sits strumming a guitar and for which Sargent, in return, painted a portrait of young Homer with his mother.

For a while, Saint-Gaudens taught at the Art Students League in New York. He served as an advisor on sculpture for the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, and along with Sargent and Edwin Abbey, he agreed to help with the sculpture and murals for a magnificent new Boston Public Library to be located opposite Trinity Church on Copley Plaza. Charles McKim was the architect. His inspiration for the building had been the Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève in Paris.

More recently, as a kind of capstone to Saint-Gaudens’s major contributions to the memory of the Civil War, New York City had commissioned an equestrian statue of General William Tecumseh Sherman to stand at Fifth Avenue and 59th Street by the entrance to Central Park, and work on it was under way.

By the late 1890s Saint-Gaudens was operating four studios in New York. He and Gussie were living in considerable style at a new address on West 45th Street and had purchased a country home in Cornish, New Hampshire.

So it came as a shock when suddenly, with so much going on, he announced they were moving to Paris, and that work on the Sherman would continue there.

“I suppose through overwork I had become nervous and completely disaffected with America,” he would later offer in explanation. Nothing would “right things” but “getting away from the infernal noise, dirt, and confusion” of New York. Worst on his nerves was the unending din outside his main studio at 36th and Broadway:

… with the elevated road discharging oil on the persons beneath, the maddening electric cars adding their music, the ambulance wagons tearing by, jangling their diabolic gongs in order that the moribund inside may die in the spirit of the surroundings, and the occasional frantic fire engine racing through it all with bells clanging, fire, smoke, hell, and cinders.

More besides his own troubles beset him. Gussie had suffered a miscarriage in 1885. His father had died after a prolonged struggle. And so had his friend Robert Louis Stevenson, of tuberculosis, at age forty-four.

The Scottish writer had come to matter greatly to Saint-Gaudens. Stevenson’s books, beginning with New Arabian Nights, had set him “aflame,” and during five sittings for a relief portrait, as the ailing Stevenson lay propped in bed in a hotel room in New York, writing and smoking a cigarette, they had talked steadily on all manner of subjects. Saint-Gaudens brought young Homer to meet the famous author, and would eventually do numerous reliefs and medallions of him.

Brother Louis Saint-Gaudens, still a mainstay for Gus, suffered a nervous breakdown as a result, Louis said, of “the high pressure tension” at the studio. “So Augustus went [on] to more and greater glories, and Louis went to a sanitarium,” Louis would write. But then Augustus, too, said Louis, began to “show the strain of his heroic labors. …”

That he had, indeed, become seriously depressed, Saint-Gaudens acknowledged. “But I was sick,” in a “deplorable mental condition,” “miserably blue,” he would write. And Gussie had been suffering in the same way.

The medical term in fashion was “neurasthenia,” its symptoms described as “mental irritability” and “morbid fear” often experienced by “gentlemen of middle life,” insomnia, “dyspepsia”—all brought on by nervous exhaustion.

A Feeling of Profound Exhaustion [reads a contemporary medical text] … Attacks of a sensation of absolute exhaustion, as though the body had not strength to hold together. … This feeling of exhaustion, though not exactly pain in the usual sense of the word, is yet, in many cases, far worse than pain. These attacks may come on suddenly without warning. … The going-to-die feeling is quite common in these cases. …

The definition given a century later would be “a syndrome marked by ready fatigability of body and mind usually by worrying and depression. …”

In photographs taken about the time he returned to Paris, Saint-Gaudens appears truly exhausted. He looks almost haunted, and older than his age. Always thin, he had become gaunt. There was more gray in his thick head of hair and the short beard had turned nearly white. William Dean Howells was to describe him as having the face of “a weary lion.”

His son Homer would later say that New York had taken its toll, that his father had been “crippled for the remainder of his life by the ardor of his work.” But, Homer insisted, his father’s sickness was not what had taken him back to Paris.

Quite on the contrary, it was his knowledge that his art had reached its strength … [and] in Paris alone he could measure himself with his contemporaries, place his work before the world’s most critical audience, and learn, once for all, wherein it was good and wherein bad.

Doubtless all this was valid, and from much he said later, there is no question that Saint-Gaudens agreed. But it would appear, too, that the burden of the very success he had achieved, and the added complications and responsibilities such success brought with it, had become too much for him.

At some point early in the 1880s—it may have been after the triumph of the Farragut monument—Saint-Gaudens began having an affair with the stunning young Swedish model who had posed for the nude Diana and probably for the Amor Caritas as well. She was Albertina Hulgren but went by the name Davida Clark.

Relatively little is known about her, but in the summer of 1889, she had a baby, a boy, whom she named Louis, and this, it would seem, had something to do with Saint-Gaudens heading off to Paris that same summer. After his return, he established a separate ménage for her and the child in Noroton, Connecticut, and it is believed he provided support for the child thereafter.

It has been speculated that Gussie found out soon afterward, but no one knows. The only supposed details of the affair came nearly fifty years after Saint-Gaudens’s death, from a woman in New Hampshire named Frances Grimes, who was then ninety-two. She had been an assistant to and reputed confidante of the sculptor late in his life and told a local newspaperman that Saint-Gaudens had had “many affairs,” but that in the case of Davida he was “madly in love.” How much of what she said was valid, how much the imaginings of a very old woman, is impossible to know. It is clear, however, that her claim that Gus and Gussie no longer lived together after Gussie learned of the affair is wholly mistaken.

With age Gussie’s deafness and the sense of isolation it brought became an increasing handicap. Her battles with poor health and depression were equal, if not greater, than his own. She suffered back pains and, with her deafness, an almost constant ringing in her ears. Some people found her difficult to like, as Stanford White had in Paris years before, and attributed her ailments to hypochondria. But Saint-Gaudens is not known ever to have written or said a critical word about her.

She began spending much of her time away from home, traveling to health spas in places like Nova Scotia and Bermuda, whether for her health only or for relief from the strains of their marriage is again not clear. Probably it was both.

Long adamant about keeping personal matters private, Saint-Gaudens became even more so. His infidelity was not a subject about which he was proud. That some of his circle, like Frederick MacMonnies and Stanford White, both of whom were married, were known as “ladies’ men” and seemed to enjoy talk of their philandering, Saint-Gaudens found repellent.

His and Gussie’s marriage was badly shaken. Assuredly she felt a dreadful sense of betrayal and loss. And he suffered as well, from regret and self-reproach over his failings and the hurt he had inflicted on her. He loved her still, as he told her in an undated, heartfelt note. It is the only surviving, authentic evidence of what they were going through.

Sweetness and kindness in women is what appeals mostly to men and a blessed charity for human failings makes one well loved. The quiet dignity of Mrs. MacMonnies and Mrs. White for the gross action of their husbands is far finer and commands a deeper respect than any other attitude they could possibly have taken, and way down their husbands respect them all the more. Although my action is a mere peccadillo in comparison to others, it has caused me a misery of mind you do not dream of.

You are a noble woman, Gussie, and I love, admire, and respect you more than you have any conception of. We are both sick and for our mutual peace of mind on this earth I beg you not to come down from the high place you hold in my heart.

Gus

Love and courage were “the great things” in life, he felt. That he saw both in her there is no doubt.

In October of 1897, a memorial fund in Chicago agreed to pay Saint-Gaudens $100,000 for another Lincoln statue and provided a substantial advance. That same month he, Gussie, and Homer left for Paris.

They found a suitable apartment off the Champs-Élysées. Homer was enrolled in a Paris lycée, to prepare for Harvard, and, after a “maddening” search up and down the Left Bank, Gus found the studio he wanted at 3 rue de Bagneux near the Luxembourg Gardens and his old studio on the rue Notre-Dame-des-Champs. He called it one of those “out-of-the-way corners of Paris the mere existence of which makes life worth living.”

Any thought he may have entertained of finding peace of mind in Paris, or in such tranquil pleasures as watering flowers—as once he imagined while watching the old “codgers” in their gardens—was not to be. It was not in him. He had much work to do on his Sherman, assistants to hire, equipment to assemble.

It was to be a colossal statue representing Sherman on horseback at the head of his army and led by a winged goddess of Victory, holding a palm branch. Sherman would be bareheaded and wearing a cloak. Horse, rider, and goddess would all be gilded and stand thirteen feet tall.

On Sherman’s march “from Atlanta to the sea,” in late 1864, more than 60,000 Union troops crossed Georgia destroying towns, plantations, railroads, factories, virtually everything in their path for three hundred miles. Twenty-four years later, Sherman, who by then was living in New York and with only a few years left, agreed to more than a dozen sittings as Saint-Gaudens sculpted a bust to serve as a study for the larger work.

Seen up close, the finished head was not easy to look at. Grim, whiskered, and pockmarked, it seemed the very image of the horrors of war. It could have been the face of a madman.

Saint-Gaudens hated war, despised what it did to people. Sherman agreed. “I am tired and sick of war. Its glory is all moonshine. … War is hell,” Sherman had said in a widely publicized speech.

Several busts and studies of Victory had also been done in New York prior to Saint-Gaudens’s departure for Paris. The young woman who posed for him was a twenty-four-year-old model named Hettie Anderson from South Carolina, whom he described as “the handsomest model I have ever seen. …” Few were to know that she was an African-American, but for Saint-Gaudens and the others who did, it must have seemed especially fitting that she be the one to lead the triumphant Union commander on his way.

Her youth and beauty, as Saint-Gaudens sculpted her, are unmistakable, and particularly in contrast to the face of Sherman. But there is no joy, no gleam of triumph or glory in her expression. Her eyes are wide, her mouth open, as if she were under a spell.

For the horse Saint-Gaudens had chosen as his model a famous, powerful, high-jumper of the day named Ontario. To give power to the work, he knew, he must embody the power of the horse.

In Paris he began the full-size group, and for sufficient space for a work of such scale, he had taken over not one but three adjoining ateliers at 3 rue de Bagneux, knocked out the walls between two of them for the main studio, leaving the third for himself. Eventually he would have a crew of fifteen on the job.

Good fortune came with the addition of a highly gifted Beaux-Arts student in sculpture, James Earle Fraser, the young man who had grown up on a South Dakota ranch. He had come to Paris with a small statue of his own called End of the Trail of a “spent Indian brave” slumped on his pony. Seeing it, Saint-Gaudens told him, “You haven’t done a man. You’ve done a race,” and immediately offered him a job.

Homer Saint-Gaudens would later write that the “state of turmoil” at the studio became “only too like” what it had been in New York, and “constant.”

In addition to the Sherman, Saint-Gaudens was working on another version of the Amor Caritas, which stood against one wall. He had no aversion to doing the same subject many times over, striving always for something stronger. “I make seventeen models for each statue I create,” he once said.

Friends kept coming by for visits, and just as in New York and in former days in Paris, he would feel obliged to stop what he was doing. The new assistant, Fraser, would remember tiny James Whistler appearing at the door in top hat and long coat, and how “being a dominating little character,” he made it impossible for Saint-Gaudens to work just when work was most needed.

John Singer Sargent stopped to talk about the murals for the Boston Public Library that he was painting in London. “He is a big fellow,” Saint-Gaudens wrote of Sargent, “and what is, I’m inclined to think, a great deal more, a good fellow.”

Gussie seems to have come and gone often, as she had at home, traveling to health spas at St. Moritz, Aix-les-Bains, and elsewhere. From the relatively few surviving letters between them, it is difficult to know where she was or how extended were her absences. But write they did, continuously, and nearly always assuring one another of their affection. (As Homer Saint-Gaudens would explain, “the entire collection of the most vital letters” between his mother and father was lost in a studio fire in New Hampshire in 1904.)

Gus continued to suffer spells of severe gloom, his “blue fits,” and especially in winter. But they would pass. “I am feeling very well now,” and the Sherman was progressing “very well,” he reported to her early in 1898. “Lovingly, Gus,” he closed the letter, “for I love you more than you think or than I ever express.”

With the arrival of spring he felt better than ever, and the work went better. Paris was having exactly the effect he had hoped for.

“This Paris experience, as far as my art goes, has been a great thing for me,” he wrote to a favorite niece, Rose Nichols, the daughter of Gussie’s sister Eugenie. “All blindness seems to have washed away. I see my place clearly now.” Great was his longing to “achieve high things.”

As progress on the full-size statue went forward in the large studio, Saint-Gaudens concentrated on small studies and other details in his own adjoining space. He could hear through the wall the clamor of the crew at work, and they, on his good days, could hear him singing as in his student years. He still had a “magnificent voice,” James Fraser would remember. “I believe he could have gone on to the Metropolitan in the baritone or bass parts of Faust and given a very good account of himself.”

Late that summer, in a long letter addressed to “Dear old Fellow,” Saint-Gaudens told Will Low that coming back to Paris had been a “wonderful experience,” and surprising in many respects, one of which was “to find how much of an American I am.”

“I belong in America,” he continued, “that is my home. …” So much that he had found unbearable about New York was exactly what he longed for now. He was unabashedly homesick.

… the elevated road dropping oil and ashes on the idiot below, the cable cars, the telegraph poles, the skyline, and all that have become dear to me, to say nothing of attractive friends, the scenery, the smell of the earth, the peculiar smell of America. …

“Up to my visit here I felt as if I was working in a fog. I knew not ‘where I was at.’ This is dispelled, and I see now my ground clearly.”

I have acquired a strange feeling of confidence that I never have felt before (and which, oh, irony, may mean that I am losing ground), and together with a respect for what we are doing at home. In fact, I shall return a burning hot-headed patriot.

But then he added, “What a place this is over here, though, seductive as a beautiful woman with her smile. I suppose when I get back, I shall want to return again!”

The letter was dated September 2, 1898. Just ten days later he was writing again to Rose Nichols, but this time about “a feeling of weariness at this life of work,” and again on September 23, after working “late in the gloom,” he said it was “too sad in this big studio with the lamp flinging great shadows on the walls.”

Life went on to the full, he reported to Gussie at the start of the new year, although he had had, he admitted, “another of those fearful depressions … so much that I felt I would cry at any moment.” Another day he claimed to be feeling “like a fighting cock.”

Next he became convinced he was seriously ill, until a physician assured him he had had only a light attack of neurasthenia, and that there was nothing the matter with his heart. His gloom faded still more with the passing of winter and the coming of spring.

“I had come to appreciate Paris in a way I never dreamed of in the heyday of my youth,” he would remember. “Paris in the spring is wonderful. There are two or three weeks when the pride and joy of life is at its full there as it is nowhere else. The people appreciate life more than we do.”

The pressure of the work increased steadily. A plaster cast of the horse and rider was to be exhibited at the Salon, and the turmoil inside the studio on the rue de Bagneux was no less than in former days in New York.

Seeing the giant horse and its rider emerge in full size gave the sculptor cause for reconsidering one thing after another. Nothing satisfied. He needed to change first this, then that. Months earlier Sherman’s cloak had been the issue. “Your father … is beginning the Sherman cloak all over again and I have been making lots of little cloaks,” Gussie had written to Homer. The cloak was still troubling him, and the fact that others said it was perfectly fine as it was mattered not at all.

Once Farragut’s leg had been his bête noire. Now the left hind leg on the plaster horse was broken by accident. Saint-Gaudens sent a man to New York to make a duplicate from the clay original and bring it back as quickly as possible. The man returned with the wrong leg.

In a letter to Homer, he later described the “insane asylum” atmosphere at 3 rue de Bagneux in the days leading up to the Salon. “Eleven moulders, some of them working all night with the boss lunatic, your illustrious father, at their head. Whew!!! Sometimes I’d cry, then I’d laugh, then I’d do both together, then I’d rush out into the street and howl and so on.”

By late April the statue was ready and in position at the Salon on the Champ de Mars. Its placement was more than Saint-Gaudens could have hoped for, at the very center of the garden. “The Sherman is in the place of honor,” he told Gussie. “I am so tickled that I am ready to dance a jig at any time of the day or night.”

Feeling a need to get away, he and Gussie went off on a trip to Spain.

Among those expressing approval of the Sherman and Victory was the renowned American historian Henry Adams, who was so taken by it that he stopped nearly every day for another look. But then Adams’s feelings about the sculptor were like those of no one else, because of what Saint-Gaudens had achieved with the Adams Memorial.

It had been their mutual friend John La Farge who had urged Adams to commission Saint-Gaudens to make the statue in memory of Adams’s wife, Clover, following her suicide in Washington in 1885. Suffering from depression, she had swallowed potassium cyanide, the chemical she used for retouching photographs.

At a meeting with Saint-Gaudens in New York, Adams had given the sculptor a general idea of what he had in mind for the monument, whereupon Saint-Gaudens is said to have seated a young assistant on a stand and thrown an Indian rug over his head.

Adams requested that the figure be neither conspicuously male or female. He wanted it to convey complete repose and he wanted no name or anything inscribed on it. Lastly, he had no wish to see it until it was finished. He then left on extended tours of Japan and the Pacific Islands, taking La Farge with him as a companion.

Upon seeing the monument for the first time, after its installation at Rock Creek Cemetery, Adams was entirely satisfied. “The whole meaning and feeling of the figure is in its universality and anonymity,” he wrote. His name for it was The Peace of God.

Adams had been coming to Paris much of his life and professed to dislike it. Yet one way and another he managed to return often. This time, staying at the Hotel Brighton on the rue de Rivoli, he found Paris surprisingly to his liking. Several American friends were in town, and most days were taken up with buying books, reading, and making notes for a new project on medieval cathedrals. Not even the heat of summer appeared to bother him.

“Paris delights me,” he wrote to his friend John Hay, the American ambassador to the Court of St. James’s, “but not for its supposed delights. It is the calm of its seclusion that charms … the cloister-like peace that it brings on in the closing years of life. I reflect on the goodness of all things. …”

Pleased to learn Saint-Gaudens was in Paris, Adams invited him to dine, even “risked” going to Saint-Gaudens’s studio “to draw him out for a stroll” in the Bois de Boulogne.

Adams was ten years older than Saint-Gaudens and, at five feet four, a good six inches shorter. Where Saint-Gaudens’s thick head of hair remained a distinguishing feature, Adams was, as he said, “very—very bald.” They made a distinctive pair when seen together, quite apart from the fact that one was the descendant of American presidents and diplomats, the other the son of an immigrant shoemaker.

That the sculptor was, for all his great talent, “most inarticulate” when discussing his work utterly fascinated Adams, and especially when he considered the other artists with whom Saint-Gaudens consorted.

All the others—the Hunts, Richardson, John La Farge, Stanford White—were exuberant [Adams wrote]; only Saint-Gaudens could never discuss or debate on an emotion, or suggest artistic arguments for giving to his work the forms that he felt.

Such simplicity of thought was “excessive,” Adams decided, though he did recognize that the sculptor’s health was poor, his spirits low that summer, and that he, Adams, who suffered his own spells of ennui, may not have been the ideal companion for him.

That Saint-Gaudens sensed what Adams found wanting in him is suggested in a letter he wrote to Gussie, who had gone home to Boston to be with her dying mother.

He had been tearing up his old letters, he told her, so “inane” did they seem. The only “readable” parts he found were in her handwriting. “Evidently I must content myself with expression in bronze. That makes me mad for we always wish for what is around the corner out of reach.”

But in a letter to Will Low he showed no hesitation about expressing his feelings, going on at length about his love of France, but also said he intended to remain in Paris only until the 1900 exposition.

He confided, too, that he had been “very sick” and knew now the meaning of nervous prostration. “It is fearful, and I pity from the bottom of my heart many whom I had looked upon before as possessing a maladie imaginaire.”

From a surviving note in his hand to his brother Louis, it is also known that his mistress, Davida Clark, had come to Paris with their son, Louis, and that she did not like France and wanted to go home. But how long she had been there, whether she had come of her own accord or at his request, where she was staying, or when she and the boy left, there is no telling.

Gussie arrived back in Paris on November 12.

Your father is about the same, perhaps less nervous than when I went away, and he is still poking about on the Victory [she wrote to Homer], so that even the studio is very little changed. … I have been here four days and have been three times to the bronze founders at Mont Rouge, so you can see I have little time for anything else. …

“Your father has been made a member of the Institut de France,” she reported again to Homer two weeks later. “It is a very great honor, higher than the Legion of Honor … a much greater honor.

“Your father sends a great [deal] of love and hopes you are getting [on] well in every way. He only signs his letters now. I write even to White, McKim … and the like. …”

The main concentration at 3 rue de Bagneux was on the fine points of the “big” Sherman. Inevitably, there was further trouble with the horse’s upraised left hind leg, which kept sagging, even as Saint-Gaudens’s assistants kept plugging the cracks. When he said it looked as if it might be out of proportion, they assured him everything was as it should be. He insisted he was right. A measurement was taken and the leg was found to be three inches too long. So more work was required.

Between times he had begun studies for a group of figures for the entrance to the Boston Public Library, a project for which his brother Louis had also been recruited.

Louis was to create two large marble lions to stand guard on a grand marble stairway inside the main entrance. He had been working off and on for Gus in Paris, still battling depression and alcoholism. But his talents were great, as no one appreciated more than Gus, who counted on him and continued to stand by him.

His own principal preoccupation at the studio had become the finishing touches on the figure of Victory, upon which, he felt, the effect of the entire work depended. And at long last, as he wrote to Gussie, he was “on the homestretch with Victory.”

Late in October, feeling the need again for a break, Saint-Gaudens invited two French friends to go with him on a visit to the famous cathedral at Amiens, north of Paris on the Somme River. He wanted especially to see the statues on the doorways of the west front, which were considered among the greatest of all Gothic sculpture.

Knowing Henry Adams’s interest in the subject, he invited him to join them. He had come to quite like Adams for all his prickly manner and obvious disdain for a large portion of humanity. Adams openly disliked much about his own country, just at the time when Saint-Gaudens was feeling more of a patriot than ever. Adams loathed bankers, robber barons, and the crass, boorish politicians he observed all about him in Washington. He was anti-Semitic, though he would get over that with time. But those who knew him knew how much heart and kindness were beneath the surface, and the brilliance of mind. Later, in a caricature relief, Saint-Gaudens would portray Adams as a porcupine—“Porcupine Poeticus”— to illustrate the “outward gruffness and inner gentleness” of the man.

More than a hundred years earlier, alone at a desk in Paris, Adams’s great-grandfather, John Adams, had written for those at home a statement of his purpose in life that had come down in the family as a kind of summons:

I must study politics and war that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study paintings, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.

For his part Henry Adams had produced a monumental, multivolume History of the United States, covering the administrations of Jefferson and Madison, that many then and later considered the finest American history ever written. Now he had ventured into the Middle Ages.

French cathedrals had had the same powerful effect on Adams as on Charles Sumner and others years before, when seeing the cathedral at Rouen for the first time. His travels and studies for his book had already made him an authority on the subject, while to Saint-Gaudens it was all still new.

Adams had chosen to concentrate on Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, and had come to see architecture as an expression of the energy of a given age. The energy of the Middle Ages, he surmised, was the power of the image of the Virgin Mary, while at the center of his own time was the power of the electric dynamo.

As between the twelfth century and the approaching twentieth century, he had no difficulty recognizing which he preferred. “Every day opens new horizons and the rate we are going gets faster and faster till my twelfth century head spins, and I hang on to the straps and shut my eyes,” he would write to his friend Elizabeth Cameron.

(The automobile, considered a curiosity or toy only ten years earlier, could now be seen and heard all through Paris. A bicycle maker, Armand Peugeot, had introduced a French-built car in 1891. By 1895 there were more than two hundred Peugeot automobiles on the road, as well as others made by Louis Renault. On a single day in Paris in the spring of 1900, fifty “automobilists” were arrested for speeding.)

For Adams his day at Amiens with Saint-Gaudens would serve as part of what he would later call his “education,” but not because of the cathedral. As he was to write in his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams:

Not until they found themselves actually studying the sculpture of the western portal, did it dawn on Adams’s mind that, for his purposes, Saint-Gaudens on the spot had more interest to him than the cathedral itself.

As for Saint-Gaudens’s two French friends, they were far too bourgeois for Adams, “conventional as death” and of no matter whatever.

Saint-Gaudens, Adams concluded, was a man of the Renaissance, the natural child of Benvenuto Cellini, the Italian sculptor who had worked under Michelangelo, in contrast to Adams himself, “a quintessence of Boston,” who through curiosity, not heredity, had come to think like Cellini.

Standing before the Virgin at Amiens, Adams felt her become for him “more than ever a channel of force,” while for Saint-Gaudens she remained only “a channel of taste.” The sculptor, Adams wrote, did not feel her as a power, “only as reflected emotion, human expression, beauty, purity. …”

Adams would later conclude that for a symbol of power, Saint-Gaudens “instinctively preferred the horse,” as was “plain” in the horse of his Sherman monument. “Doubtless Sherman also felt it so.” But at the time, in a letter to Elizabeth Cameron, Adams said that the cathedral at Amiens was “a new life” for Saint-Gaudens, that it “overpowered him.”

III

As expected, the Exposition Universelle of 1900 offered just about everything for everyone. The largest world’s fair yet, it covered nearly 250 acres on two sides of the Seine and included an American rolling sidewalk, a trottoir roulant, on which to get about, something never seen before. A glorious new Pont Alexandre III, as beautiful as any bridge in Paris, now spanned the river with a single arch to link the two sides of the fair-grounds. The first part of a new Paris metro system had been opened, and there was a Big Wheel to ride, a copy of the one built by George Ferris that had caused a sensation at the Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. And there was still, of course, the ever-popular Eiffel Tower, which had not been taken down for the very reason of its popularity.

Tickets for general admission to the fair were cheap, the equivalent of eleven cents. Attendance far exceeded even the record numbers set in 1889. Fifty million people would crowd through the gates this time.

The public response was overwhelmingly favorable. Newspapers and magazines on both sides of the Atlantic were filled with praise. American papers described the “number of smart, well-dressed persons” in attendance and Paris aglow with electric illumination. Scientific American magazine called the new Pont Alexandre III one of the most beautiful ever built.

Some people were disappointed; others disapproved. “It is too big, and there are too many things to do,” some visitors said. Among a certain number of intellectuals the whole affair was dismissed as an “odious bazaar,” no more than a vulgar display of nationalism. And inevitably some who had traveled a long way to be there felt let down. Two representatives of the American Midwest were overheard expressing their views as follows:

FIRST CHICAGOAN: “It don’t compare with the World’s Fair of Chicago.”

SECOND CHICAGOAN: “Of course not. I knew that before I left Chicago.”

Henry Adams’s great objection was the number of Americans everywhere. “All Americans are in Paris,” he wrote. “I pass my time hiding from them.”

More than forty countries participated, again a record. American products and inventions drew much attention, and grand prizes and gold medals went to American machinery, farm equipment, cameras, even a California wine—a higher total in awards than any other country except France.

Adams, who could not stay away, toured the Galerie des Machines one day with a friend from Washington whom he greatly admired, Samuel Pierpont Langley, the head of the Smithsonian Institution. For more than ten years Langley had been experimenting with flights of his own heavier-than-air machines, a field much ridiculed at the time, and using lightweight steam engines he had had great success. His experimental “air-ships” looked like gigantic, four-winged dragonflies. In 1896, one flew under its own power 3,000 feet over the Potomac River, another more than 4,000 feet—the first free flights of heavier-than-air machines in history.

Langley was to be yet another part of Adams’s “education” in France. Ignoring most of the industrial exhibits, he led Adams straight to see the “forces” of power. “His chief interest was the new motors to make his airship feasible, and he taught Adams the astonishing complexities of the new Daimler motor and of the automobile,” which to Adams had become a “a nightmare.”

From the internal combustion engine they moved on to the great hall, where Adams “began to feel the forty-foot dynamo as a moral force, much as the early Christians felt the cross.”

The exhibition of American art (which Adams and Langley took no time for) brought many of those young Americans who had been studying in Paris their first international recognition. Paintings by Cecilia Beaux, Robert Henri, Henry O. Tanner, and others of their generation were to be seen alongside those of such established American masters as Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins, and James Whistler. Mary Cassatt had entered one of her mother-and-child paintings. John Singer Sargent had several of his recent portraits.

One American whose work was not to be seen this time was George P. A. Healy, who had died in Chicago in 1894. Healy had shown his work at every Paris exposition since 1855, when he had fourteen of his paintings hanging.

Among the French and other European artists on display, along with Carolus-Duran and Edgar Degas, was a nineteen-year-old Spaniard, Pablo Picasso.

The paintings and sculpture were all to be seen in the exposition’s Grand Palais, built especially for the fair, an enormous wedding cake of a building entirely in the spirit of the Belle Époque, which stood between the new Pont Alexandre III and the Champs-Élysées. And for all who entered, the first spectacle—indeed, one of the most memorable spectacles of the fair—was a vast ground-floor space flooded with light from a giant glass-and-iron dome overhead and crowded from end to end with sculptures of all shapes and sizes.

For Saint-Gaudens it was the setting for a public display of his work such as he had never experienced. Though it annoyed him that so many pieces had been placed together “pell-mell,” he knew such a collection had never been seen all in one place, nor was such an exhibit likely to occur again. And while patience was required getting about the maze of “arms, legs, faces and torsos in every conceivable posture,” there were many “very remarkable” works to be seen.

Four of his own major works were on display—plaster casts of General Sherman and Victory, the Shaw Memorial, The Puritan, and Amor Caritas—and Sherman and his horse rode highest among them. In addition, fourteen reproductions of his relief portraits were on exhibit, including those of William Dean Howells and Robert Louis Stevenson.

For his work overall Saint-Gaudens received the Grand Prize and the Amor Caritas would be purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Museum.

But it was an incident witnessed by only a few apparently that had to have meant worlds to him. Auguste Rodin was seen to stop before the Shaw Memorial and take off his hat and stand silently bareheaded in respect.

Saint-Gaudens had mixed feelings about Rodin. He liked much of his early work, but Homer Saint-Gaudens would remember standing with his father in front of Rodin’s famous Balzac and hearing his father say the statue gave him “too much the effect of a guttering candle.”

Still, Rodin was France’s greatest living sculptor, and here he was paying public tribute to an American. For Saint-Gaudens it was one of life’s choice moments.

Just as Saint-Gaudens was riding so high, everything turned black as night. Gussie had left for the United States to make arrangements for their return home. In late June of 1900, struck by severe stomach pains, Gus went to three leading Paris physicians, all of whom told him he had a tumor of the lower intestine and that an operation must be performed without delay.

Almost at once he was overcome by a terrifying suicidal depression. If the end were near, let it be at his own time and choosing. Life was no longer bearable.

Of those still with him in Paris, none was closer on a day-to-day basis, or more devoted to him or aware of his changing moods than James Fraser, who knew nothing of Saint-Gaudens’s cancer but worried increasingly about his worsening state of mind.

Years later Fraser put down on paper, as best he could remember, what happened and what Saint-Gaudens had said.

Fraser had come to work at 3 rue de Bagneux early one morning that June and was in the large studio alone when suddenly Saint-Gaudens burst through the door and went straight into his own studio. Then Fraser heard the outer door of Saint-Gaudens’s studio open and slam shut, after which all was silent.

An hour or so later, Saint-Gaudens returned and asked Fraser to come into his office. He had something he must tell him.

“I went in,” Fraser wrote, “and I noticed that his look was unusual and very excited. …”

“I have just had the most extraordinary experience [Saint-Gaudens began] … it now appears that I am seriously ill and must go home for an operation. I am greatly worried and have been sleepless for many nights.

“Suddenly, this morning, I decided that I would end it all, and when I came here this morning I had definitely made up my mind to jump in the Seine. As I left here I practically ran down the rue de Rennes toward the Seine, and when I looked up at the buildings they all seemed to have written across the top a huge word in black letters—‘Death—Death—Death.’ This on all the buildings …

“I ran—I was in so much of a hurry! I reached the river and went up on the bridge and as I looked over the water, I saw the Louvre in the bright sunlight and suddenly everything was beautiful to me, the Louvre was wonderful—more remarkable than I had ever seen it before.

“Whether the running and the hurrying had changed my mental attitude, I can’t say—possibly it might have been the beauty of the Louvre’s architecture or the sparkling water of the Seine—whatever it was, suddenly the weight and blackness lifted from my mind and I was happy and found myself whistling.”

“And he still seemed excited and happy and I felt he had passed a dreadful crisis and was safe for the time,” Fraser wrote. Saint-Gaudens had said it was Paris—the morning light of Paris, the sparkle of the Seine from the Pont des Arts, the architecture of Paris—that had saved him.

Saint-Gaudens left in mid-July 1900, but not before stopping at 3 rue de Bagneux to give a few final instructions on Sherman and Victory, which he insisted be cast in bronze in Paris.

At the very time many thousands of Americans were arriving by ship for the exposition, Saint-Gaudens sailed for home so ill he had to be accompanied by a physician. Gussie met the ship at New York, and they went directly to Boston, where he was admitted to Massachusetts General Hospital for the first of two operations. The second followed that November.

Afterward, having settled to stay at their home in Cornish, New Hampshire, Gussie did everything possible to see to his care and well-being. He established another studio and kept on working, though at an easier pace.

The arrival of the new year, 1901, marked the start of the twentieth century, and by spring—with both the exposition and winter behind—Paris was Paris once again, all its particular magic in abundant evidence.

As reported in the press, the Champs-Élysées and the Bois de Boulogne were “in the most charming phase of delicate spring foliage.” With skies clear above, the temperature ideal, the white blossoms of the horse chestnut trees at their peak, “the whole world” was out strolling the avenues and public gardens, or just sitting in the outdoor cafés contentedly “indulging in that refined kind of loafing at which the nation excels.”

And daylight stayed longer, making evening promenades all the more pleasurable.

At the Opera, Gounod’s Faust and Wagner’s Tannhäuser were being warmly received. At the École des Beaux-Arts, a first-ever retrospective show of the drawings and paintings of Honoré Daumier had become one of the most successful attractions of the season, and was “daily thronged” by American art students only just discovering Daumier.

Notice appeared also of a young American “making her mark” with a performance of Greek and Florentine dances at a studio on the avenue de Villiers. Isadora Duncan was twenty-three. She had arrived in Europe with her mother, brother, and sister the year before. So great was their excitement at being in Paris that she and her brother, an artist, would get up at five in the morning and begin the day by dancing in the Luxembourg Gardens.

“We had no money … but we wanted nothing,” she would remember.

What the new century might hold for them and their generation, there was no telling. For now it was enough just being in Paris.