He may have wished for a few distracted minutes that the firm and able mother of his childhood could calm his frenzied household now. For Louis was in real trouble with Desor, his assistant for ten years. The man, in fact, seemed at odds with almost everybody, and Louis with no head for law or wish for altercation, was plunged into the distractions of suits and quarrels. Papa Christinat took a solid stand: your mother will never allow you to see your children while Desor remains in your household, he told him, and Desor moved out with loud recriminations.
For now, through sad cause, Louis was likely to have a chance to see his children again. In the old town of Freiburg, Cecile Agassiz lay under a little gravestone marked C. A. To his brother Alexander Braun wrote in July, 1848, “Our sister, who has had so many afflictions, has found today her rest after her stormy life.” Rest in peace, Cily, for your little family already has its feet set on a safe and pleasant road.
For the present Rose Agassiz took charge of the young daughters at Cudrefin where their father, so short a time before, had picked the purple grapes of harvest, and cajoled his grandfather to the way of his desires. It was almost like having again her own fresh-faced little daughters, Cecile and Olympe, and Rose Agassiz tried to give them the same start. The boy, Alexander, was to stay with the Brauns a year longer when he would be old enough to join his father in America.
Over there in America, the safe and pleasant road of the children and their father was leading to the door of a Cambridge home where Agassiz was always welcome. Professor Felton and his wife found Louis a dear and unwise friend who needed constantly their affection and advice. Mrs. Felton mothered him, and when her sister, Elizabeth Cary, came out from Boston to see her, turned her charge over to the girl. Elizabeth admired the great Agassiz, but she saw him so gentled by her sister’s hand that he had no terrors for her. The magic of his voice and smile made her heart turn over, and when he told her his great need of her, she had no resistance against him. She loved him, and she knew how to manage him. And what man could ask for more?
Louis had chosen so wisely for himself this time that it almost seemed as if the governing power of his genius behind him must have had a hand in it. Elizabeth Cary was strong, and would not waver when he led her into difficult ways. She was intelligent so that his work was her work in all its details. She was wise in the ways of a woman and learned quickly how to make those ways count with her problems. She was of a proud and influential family who welcomed her man and made him one of themselves. For his every weakness she had a strength, and for every strength she had recognition which quickened him to greater deeds. She loved him for all of the qualities which made him the man he was, and built up a strong and living happiness which lasted through both of their lives.
But now it was only spring in Cambridge of the year 1849 and the engagement was scarcely announced. Louis was in a position where for the first time success raced at his heels and assured him of his future. The lectures at Harvard continued to be crowded with undergraduates, law students, faculty, anyone who could furnish himself with a bill of rights.
In the three months between the spring and fall terms at Harvard, Agassiz gave a course of lectures at the University of Pennsylvania which resulted in an urgent invitation to join their staff. Louis liked Philadelphia and had many warm friends there, but he belonged in Cambridge and there he would stay. In his old wooden shanty on the Charles River he had nailed shelves for cases, gathered a few rough tables for dissection, and knew, as only he would know, that he had under way one of the greatest museums of the world. He could work and wait for ten years, but there he would stay until he had it.
The second set of Lowell Institute lectures took in all the rest of Boston and Cambridge, and appeared for the stay-at-homes in the Evening Traveller along with accounts of politics and shipwrecks. The outlying towns, even as far as Worcester, invited him for special lectures and made special rates of payment for so great a visitor. Yet as ever, the man was spending twice what he had on his expensive household. It was time that someone of sense took charge of it!
More than ever a necessity when in June, 1849, his young son, Alexander, joined his household. The boy walked down the gangplank of the boat and into the arms of a father who shook with excitement and joy. His father held him off and looked at him, tall, grave-eyed, controlled, with something of the remote quality of Cily. Not yet fourteen and with the poise and beautiful manners of a foreign adult. Louis felt the pride in his son swell and rise until his heart was a bright bubble ready to burst.
A strange experience it must have been for an adolescent boy straight from the quiet home where he had seen his mother die. This man so full of rich laughter and strange speech was his father with whom he would now live. These hurrying high-pitched people were to be his people. This household of assorted inmates and guests was to be his home. But there he had a familiar pattern to help him; the Neuchâtel dining room with men wandering in and out, smoking interminably, talking endlessly, worrying his mother, he could remember those days. And their talk had always interested him and made him curious to try their experiments, though when he felt the ideas stirring about in his head he wanted only to go away by himself to think about them. He had had his fill of talking.
Perhaps Louis suddenly saw the house at Oxford Street through the eyes of his quiet son, and realized vaguely that it was not the best place in the world for a boy of this quality. Perhaps he was tired, himself, of irregular meals and endless discussions. He was forty-three and it was time for him to settle down, though in truth, he was about as likely as a comet to settle down. But his Elizabeth had won his boy with her gentle wisdom, and now he could not wait to give her his young daughters.
Nor to settle into a home with his family about him. For Oxford Street had gone completely mad! Papa Christinat had quietly disappeared and left it to take care of itself, which was quite out of its line. The old man did not approve of Elizabeth Cabot Cary, and he did not care who knew it. His boy, Louis, should have married a rich woman; and who knew better than Christinat how much he needed money? Moreover, though of this he could not speak, his jealous old heart ached because his care was no longer needed. There seemed no dissuading Louis from marrying this girl; so while he was away on a lecture tour, Papa Christinat gathered his few belongings together, and with no word to anybody slipped quietly away. Not until more than a year had passed did Louis find out that he was pastor of a Swiss church in New Orleans. But nothing that he could do or say would bring the old man back to his home. Yet his end was not so sad, for he won back his old parish in the Canton de Vaud, and there closed his days, reconciled as the old are to the inevitable.
Now in the early spring of 1850, all the relatives and connections of the Cary family, well-bred, established people, gathered in King’s Chapel where strange looking scientists sat beside them in the pews, and the boy, Alexander, watched with unrevealing eyes, while Louis Agassiz and Elizabeth Cary promised truthfully to abide with each other until death did them part.
The house at Oxford Street now became a home. Louis’ guardian genius must have done a busy bit of management. Pourtalès received a Coast Survey appointment which demanded his residence in Washington. One by one the other men drifted into good jobs away from Cambridge, and though the house was always open to Louis’ friends, it was now his home in truth.
So much his home that after a few months of adjustment, he knew that he was free to bring his little daughters to a place where they would receive the love and wise care for which his mother, Rose Agassiz, would be willing to exchange her own stewardship. In August, 1850, Louis and Elizabeth and young Alexander stood on the dock to greet there a girl of thirteen, Ida, who held by the hand her nine-year-old sister, Pauline. They drove off together, Louis with an arm around each girl, and his eyes filled with tears. His family was complete, and with the help of Elizabeth he meant to keep it so. Life took on a kind of serenity which he had not known it could offer.
16. HIS GOLDEN ANNIVERSARY
The golden years were upon Agassiz. Years while he was still filled with inexhaustible hunger for new work even as he reaped rewards for work already done. Not for him the recognition that comes so late that a man can do nothing with it except hold it in tired hands and ache for more life to go on. Louis could still run swiftly on the mountain tops.
If Louis had been offered three wishes, either now or in the days of his youth, he might have asked first for a chance at a long voyage where he could explore untouched life in its own environment. He always remembered the sea voyage which poverty and a canny father had prevented him from taking. Now Dr. Bache said to him: the Coast Survey needs your help. We must know more about the reefs and keys of Florida if we are to place our signals and lighthouses wisely. I can put a vessel at your disposal for six weeks with not a mooring line tied to it except that you cruise along this one hundred fifty miles of peninsula, and bring back your observations. Eight hundred dollars goes with it for expenses, and my conviction that you will confer upon the country a priceless favor. “What about that?” remarked his genius, sitting back for a long breath at last.
Louis took the vessel and cruised for ten winter weeks through blue southern waters. Coral was his concern now, the coral of those unpredictable reefs which shifted under the very markers of the government, and the coral specimens which he accumulated with Agassiz profusion for the museum which existed only in his brain. He examined coral, speculated about coral, sailed over coral formations, and walked on them; he turned the illumination of his brain upon the problems of coral and came away with satisfactory results for everyone concerned.
For the government he worked out the relations of the reefs to each other, to the Gulf Stream and its currents, to the probabilities of shifting, in such a practical fashion that the Coast Survey at once procured an appropriation from Congress to incorporate the results in new charts. And Agassiz on the side developed a fine set of new lectures about his theories.
For himself, too, and most important to him, he had filled the vessel to the rails with all varieties of corals in all stages of growth. Enormous heads of gray brain coral, huge branches of carefully packed fan coral, all kinds of coral down to the smallest specimen taken alive and preserved in its perfection in alcohol. And drawings and drawings of the living corals which were to be struck off into beautiful plates at the expense of the government. Though as far as Louis was concerned, he became so engrossed in the problem of finding something more adequate than a bathhouse in which to store his specimens that he had no further time for the report which never made its connection with the plates until his son Alexander managed a reprint after his father’s death.
Louis had been granted his first wish for a long and stimulating voyage, and he had made characteristic use of that wish.
The second wish of Agassiz, with which all of his relatives and friends would probably have concurred, would have been for a place where he could adequately house his specimens. A place where under one roof, a man might examine, and compare, and relate, all life as far as he could gather it. Now he could begin to see the outlines of that structure sharpen into shape. For the old Charles River bathhouse could not hold another tank or jar, his wife, Elizabeth, was firm about giving up any more of her bedrooms for specimens, and the shipful of Florida treasures could not lie on the docks forever.
Harvard built him a temporary museum near Hemenway Gymnasium, a firetrap of wood with its alcohol enclosures which fortunately never burned up. And which for the inner eye of Louis Agassiz had the beauty and significance of the first tangible evidence of a greater structure. Harvard voted him four hundred dollars a year for the preservation of his collections, and looked favorably upon a large subscription to buy them. The second wish was well on the way to fulfilment.
The third wish must always be the hardest to decide. The others are gone, and this last one must be final. Who of us but would like to feel that our work may be carried on by eager young hands which would at the same time serve and honor our memory? Young Alexander Agassiz, still in his teens, quiet, a little remote from his father’s exuberance, was becoming more and more absorbed in sea life. He had, thanks to his uncle Alexander Braun, a sound foundation for work in natural history. But the boy was Cily’s child as well as his father’s, and she had endowed him with a temperament as unlike his father’s as was her own. Louis with his hot impatience might have given his son a sorry time if it had not been for the woman who took his mother’s place.
It is, perhaps, as final a tribute as a boy could pay his stepmother to turn over to her the devotion to his own mother. Alexander was not likely to forget that small apartment in Freiburg where he had been dragged through the agony which only a child can suffer when his mother has to leave him. He was not likely to forget the poverty, and the cares which made him a responsible person while most boys were having their right at irresponsibility. He had kept the scanty accounts, done the marketing so that not one penny could be charged to waste, kept an eye on his two younger sisters, and, most poignant task of all, made his mother as comfortable as he knew how. He was not likely to forget the golden days when she felt better and they could have picnics under the trees while she sketched her children around her, etching sharp memories of them to take away with her. The boy knew what was going to happen soon, and he was as sensitive as his mother. When he came to America, a pattern was already set which not all of his father’s charm, or tumult, or real affection could change. Storms might easily have brewed between the two if Elizabeth Agassiz had not understood and loved them both. Or if the young Agassiz had denied her. But from that first bewildered moment at the Felton house where Louis had rushed his boy while he still swayed from the motion of the hard voyage, from the moment when his dark suffering eyes looked up into Elizabeth Cary’s face, despair left them. Years afterward he said that then he knew that she belonged to him and he to her. And the lad needed that knowledge.
But Alexander had no mind to follow his father’s torch which went out so frequently and left them all in the dark. He had had enough of poverty and strain. If they were part of a naturalist’s equipment, he would have none of it. He expected and wanted to be a naturalist, but he definitely would not enter that career until he had enough money so that it could not get him down. Louis Agassiz would have his third wish granted, but not without qualifications which now and then gave him cause for concern.
Not yet, however. Now Alexander was to his father “un charmant garçon.” Now he was absorbed in the Cambridge High School, and strange boys with whom he had only one tongue in common, Latin, a language of some restrictions. But he learned their speech, and on the solid foundation which his uncle had laid, made short work of college entrance examinations which he passed at fifteen. He entered Harvard as undaunted by college work as his father had been at the same age. Louis must have felt that his son was running true to form. As indeed he was, but his own form, not his father’s.
Part of Alexander’s interest in marine life may have been due to the determination of the South to keep his father with them as much as possible. Charleston could not hold Louis with its social life but it could offer him a professorship in its medical college. Here he could spend the three winter months between his fall and spring courses at Harvard, and here he could earn money enough to release him from the long lecture tours which even his vitality found exhausting. Louis accepted and moved his family, including Alexander, to Charleston. Everybody was satisfied. Agassiz had a laboratory over on Sullivan’s Island where he could gather and work on marine specimens, rare and exciting enough to capture any boy in his teens, or older.
The whole arrangement is reminiscent of that summer with the de Charpentiers at Bex which Cily had so enjoyed with her baby who was now as fine a boy as even she could wish. Here, at the Hollow Tree, the Holbrook home, the Agassiz family was as welcome as it had been in Bex. Here, too, there were holidays and long evenings for the kind of discussions which Elizabeth enjoyed, the little girls endured, an
d young Alexander turned over in his mind, watching and weighing all things from his quiet corner. And beginning to feel that strange excitement which only the research student can know.
Louis again had what he had experienced for the first time at Bex, a contented family and the stimulus of his science. This time with no sense that it was but a temporary affair. While here, he was notified of the award of the Prix Cuvier for the Poissons Fossiles, given for the first time, an honor which touched his mother, Rose Agassiz, deeply. Only she could understand the years of struggle and impassioned effort which earned that prize. “This has given me such happiness, dear Louis,” she writes, “that the tears are in my eyes as I write it to you.”
Agassiz hoped to establish a permanent marine station at Charleston, but after a few winters, malaria, then prevalent in the South, attacked him and brought him so low that he regretfully resigned his professorship. It might seem from his resignation that Agassiz had discovered that a man of forty-five had to take a rest now and then, but on his way home he managed to explore the Mississippi and to deliver such interesting lectures at the Smithsonian Institution that he was made a consulting member, and finally one of the regents.
Now that he had no further need of Europe, it begged him to return. Zurich wanted him for her University, and called upon his patriotism, fortified with a sufficient endowment, and the promise of a museum. But Louis Agassiz knew where there was going to be a museum better than anything Zurich could offer. A few years more and the French government finally got around to offering him a post, which, it must be admitted, was uncommonly good when it came. A chair of paleontology, directorship of the Museum of Natural History where the lad had struggled and hoped years before, a senatorship, and salaries around fifteen thousand dollars. But the government had to accept his refusal and get what satisfaction it could out of presenting him with various and sundry medals and honors which Louis doubtless enjoyed and did not overvalue. Nothing that anybody could offer would take him away from his home in America.
The Young Adult Award-Winners Megapack Page 25