Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

  Given his gregarious and charming nature, it was not surprising that Colonel Cody was more than happy to join the Parisian social whirl, sweeping from one triumph to another. The Vicomtesse de Chandon, best known as Miss Minnie Gardner before her marriage six years earlier into the champagne fortune, hosted a breakfast for Buffalo Bill so the local royalists could mingle with the celebrity of the moment. Unlike many Americans in Paris, Buffalo Bill was proud of his rambunctious young nation, and made no embarrassing efforts to emulate the French at all, thus endearing himself to both French and American camps.

  It had been the custom of the American colony in Paris to maintain a strict pecking order, with expatriates long resident scorning the mere American tourist and snobbishly lamenting the gaucheries of their newly arrived brethren: “The American traveller . . . does not know his place. . . . In his ignorance of custom and etiquette he will thrust himself even upon royalty. . . . A distinguished New York politician, who misses, no doubt, in Paris his home constituency of ragamuffins, used to address the servants of his hotel, urging them to go to America, where all men were equal and labor respected. . . . The Boulevard is not like Lake Avenue, and at the cafes you cannot get pork and beans or fried ham.” Buffalo Bill demolished such pretension because he was so completely at ease—as so few Americans overseas were—in his own buckskins. In him, Paris recognized that rare item: an aristocratic common man.

  Nor was this a stance he adopted for the occasion. Annie Oakley, who spent years working for him, testified to Cody’s bona fides as a genuine democrat. “During our travels I have had opportunity of seeing his sterling qualities put to every test. Fearlessness and independence were not a pose with him. I never saw him in any situation that changed his natural attitude a scintilla. None could possibly tell the difference between the reception of a band of cowboys and the train of an emperor. Dinner at camp was the same informal hearty humorous story telling affair when we were alone, and when the Duchess of Holstein came visiting in all her glory. He was probably the guest of more people in diverse circumstances than any man alive. But teepee and palace were all the same to him. And so were their inhabitants. He never in his life bowed lower to a king than the king bowed to him. He had hundreds of imitators, but was quite inimitable. One cannot pretend to be the peer of any company he may be in. He has to be. And Buffalo Bill was.”

  Bill Cody inevitably became something of an American goodwill ambassador among the French. He engaged a luxurious apartment, where, reported The Chicago Tribune, “he entertains handsomely. He has been purchasing some fine paintings, and is really looked upon as an esthete of high standing. He is still pursued by women who have matrimonial aspirations. In one week recently he received fourteen written proposals from women, some of whom are wealthy and in good social positions.” The popular colonel (a title bestowed by the Nebraska National Guard in time for his London debut) did not always bother to make clear that he was not at liberty to marry, that he had a very bad-tempered wife back in North Platte. Americans, wrote one journalist, basked in “the halo of glory that now envelops Buffalo Bill. Of course, the American minister is casually mentioned in the official gazettes, and if you get into trouble you must apply to him, but for real distinction you must proclaim yourself a countryman of Buffalo Bill.”

  Buffalo Bill in a studio portrait taken in Paris during the 1889 fair

  The real American minister (as the ambassador was then called) was New York Tribune publisher Whitelaw Reid, who arrived in Paris the day after Buffalo Bill. An Ohio native, Reid had made a name for himself as a journalist covering the Civil War, before joining the Tribune in 1868 when it was still run by the great eminence Horace Greeley (of “Go West, young man!” fame). Upon Greeley’s death in 1872, Reid purchased the newspaper, the nation’s preeminent Republican journal. Resolutely high-toned and proudly literary, the Tribune had once hired as its Paris correspondent Henry James. While the paper’s circulation was never more than sixty thousand, its Republican readers were influential. In 1882, Reid had married Elizabeth Mills, only daughter of gold rush millionaire Darius Ogden Mills, an alliance that elevated Reid into the ranks of the very rich. In the last election, Reid, fifty, had successfully marshaled and cajoled Republicans to drive Grover Cleveland from the White House. He had hoped to be made ambassador to England but had settled reluctantly for France.

  On May 22, Reid, a slender man with a thick beard chiseled to an elegant point, had presented his credentials at the Élysée Palace to President Sadi Carnot, who was generally considered honest, capable, and dull. Jibed one politician: “The fact that a man, if you ask him to dinner, will not put your spoons into his pocket, is not a sufficient reason for making him President of a republic.” (Carnot had risen to power in the wake of Prime Minister Jules Ferry’s resignation, which was prompted by revelations that Ferry’s son-in-law was selling government honors.) Sadi Carnot, Minister Reid wrote to the new Republican U.S. president Benjamin Harrison, had “a kindly feeling because of our attitude towards their exposition while Europe was boycotting it;—and on their success with the exposition their official lives depend.”

  At his first official meeting, Reid graciously told the French: “We do not forget that you helped in the success of our Revolution.” It was true that the French monarchy had once saved the infant American republic by steady rounds of financing, but as Alexander Hamilton pointed out, the French motive was “to enfeeble a hated and powerful rival by breaking in pieces the British Empire. . . . He must be a fool who can be credulous enough to believe that a despotic [French] court aided a popular [American] revolution from regard to liberty or friendship to the principles of such a revolution.” Nonetheless, such was now the official myth, and so it was only fitting that a great wave of the American citizenry would now return the favor and fortify the fragile French republic with an ample infusion of dollars. A prosperous Paris was unlikely to support a revived monarchy.

  Reid saw no sign of the World’s Fair failing, however, writing, “Americans have been swarming here as if Paris were another Oklahoma.” After settling into their hotels, many of these Americans headed to the rue de l’Opéra and the business offices of The New York Herald, where James Gordon Bennett had succeeded in making his Paris newspaper the signing-in place for traveling Yankees. Not only was there the Herald registry book, and the prospect of seeing their names in the paper, but “serried files containing almost every paper published in the United States. . . . A homesick-looking man pounces upon the Pawtucket Chronicle. . . . Around the register [book] of American arrivals . . . [are] a moving mass of new gowns, summer suits, smart parasols, and straw hats . . . [and a] permanent hum of conversation which is broken at intervals by the ever-recurring, sharp, staccato cry, ‘Why, when did you come?’ ”

  With Americans arriving en masse for the fair, the Paris Herald was flourishing. James Gordon Bennett had been adamant from the start that this new operation was more a public service than a business, stating on the third day of the paper’s existence, “We do not intend to permit the European Edition of the Herald to make any money. In fact, we expect to furnish so good a paper that it will cost us a trifle of 300,000 or 400,000 fr. per year, above receipts, to give Paris what it has needed so long, namely, a first-class Anglo-American daily newspaper.”

  And yet, even as the French had finally found in Buffalo Bill some facet of American civilization to admire (perhaps because he confirmed that Americans really were savages), it was clear that James Gordon Bennett and his Paris Herald still had much educating to do. Not long after the Wild West show opened, eight incensed Paris municipal officials proposed it be shut down because “Les exhibitions d’Indiens and de nègres esclaves sont odieuses.” Not one member of the Paris council seemed to be aware that there had been no slaves in America since the Civil War. (One French reporter had believed briefly that the Indians in the Wild West show were Cody’s prisoners of war!) However, another French politician rejoined wisely that there was really no need to depr
ive Parisians of their favorite pageant, since these poor Wild West slaves naturally became free the minute they debarked on good republican French soil. The Herald could only sputter editorially, “This is simply excruciating. It quite paralyzes us, and renders comment impossible.” Such ignorance about America was trying to Bennett, who was an ardent, if idiosyncratic, patriot. As he explained to a Paris editor, “I love America, but I hate most Americans.”

  The phenomenal success of Buffalo Bill’s Wild West should not have been a complete surprise, for he and his troupe had conquered London in similar fashion just two summers earlier. Of course, it was not good show-business politics to remind French republicans too often that the British queen Victoria had discovered Guillaume Buffalo first. But thanks to Major Burke, the colonel’s longtime partner and master of promotion, many Americans knew that the Prince of Wales had persuaded Queen Victoria that she had to see the Wild West and its amazing exhibitions.

  As her son expected, the queen, head of a vast British Empire at the apogee of its power, had been as delighted and mesmerized by the whoop-it-up performance as any child. Afterward, she stunned her courtiers by insisting on personally greeting Buffalo Bill and Sioux chief Red Shirt, and telling Annie Oakley, “You are a very, very clever girl.” A second royal performance was ordered. England was electrified. This time Buffalo Bill himself drove the Deadwood Coach, assigning the Prince of Wales to ride shotgun, while royals from Denmark, Greece, Belgium, and Saxony held on for dear life inside as they careened about, escaping the marauding Indians. This episode gave rise to Buffalo Bill’s most famous quip: “I’ve held four kings, but four kings and the Prince of Wales makes a royal flush, and that’s unprecedented.”

  All in all, U.S. minister Reid, who had come to serve in Paris only out of a sense of duty to the Republican Party, found the French friendly. Nonetheless, he quickly learned how low on the diplomatic totem pole the American minister ranked. Just before his arrival several young American ladies visiting Nice had become embroiled in a dispute with a dressmaker. On May 3 they had been set to depart the Hôtel Cosmopolitan in that resort city when a box appeared with the new clothes they had ordered. However, the package yielded up only a shirt, and not the two dresses and jacket. Angry at such a fraud, the ladies sent the box back and declined to pay. They departed for Menton, where that night they found themselves detained, arrested, and imprisoned.

  The ladies paid off the fraudulent debt but were determined to have justice. Reid’s first attempt to discuss the matter with the French minister came to naught as he explained to the secretary of state in a long letter, “The Russian, the German, the Turkish, the Austrian and the Italian Ambassadors came in successively and had to be received before me. I left when it became evident that I had not a chance of seeing the Minister before dark. Had I remained, the Nuncio and the Spanish Ambassador, who came in later, would also have had precedence over the Representative of the United States.”

  And so, Minister Reid found the American colony in fine humor, puffed up and patriotic over the Edison Company’s and Buffalo Bill’s triumphant debuts, and all anticipating a summer of pleasant diversions at the World’s Fair. Then, in the third week of the U.S. minister’s new position, the calamity of the Johnstown Flood in Pennsylvania cast a momentary pall over the Americans in Paris. A dam at the South Fork Club, a private fishing retreat owned by Pittsburgh industrialists, had given way, unleashing a solid wall of roaring water and deadly debris that destroyed the little factory towns of the Conemaugh Valley. More than two thousand people, many of them women and children, died terrible deaths. Reid immediately called a meeting of the American community in Paris to raise money for the relief fund. Hundreds of expatriates and tourists jammed into the Legation and quickly subscribed forty thousand francs. Buffalo Bill scheduled a special fund-raising show. Andrew Carnegie, in Paris for the fair, lent his support, never mentioning that he was one of the South Fork Club’s negligent owners.

  By early June, Paul Gauguin had returned to Le Pouldu in Brittany to paint, disappointed that, thus far, the Volpini exhibit had attracted little attention. One of the few reviewers (for a minor publication) complained that the Café des Beaux-Arts was far from an ideal art venue, noting “it is not easy to approach these canvases on account of the sideboards, beer pumps, the bosom of M. Volpini’s cashier, and an orchestra of young Moscovites whose bows unleash in the large room a music that has no relation to these polychromatic works.”

  Understandably, Gauguin was not in good spirits when he wrote his wife, Mette, after finally hearing from her. “You want my news? I am by the sea in a little fishing village with 150 people, I live like a peasant or savage. . . . I spend one franc each day for my food and tobacco. So you cannot reproach me with living it up. I speak to no one and I receive no news of my children. Alone—all alone—I show my work at Goupil’s in Paris, and they make a big sensation but they’re difficult to sell. . . . I’m thinking of asking some influential friends to get me a [government] appointment in Tonkin where I hope I might live for a while and await better times.”

  Then, hearing that Theo van Gogh was less than pleased with the Volpini show, Gauguin took up his pen to defend the enterprise, writing, “Schuff has written to say you think my exhibition is to be regretted. I’m very surprised. . . . I organized this little show at the Universal Exhibition to show what we had to do as a group . . . what harm can it do me? None, seeing that I’m unknown and that nobody is showing my work to the public. If my paintings are bad it will change nothing, and if they are good, which is probable, I will get myself known. . . . There remains the question of the venue! This seems to me infantile, and I don’t think (knowing your ideas) that you will find anything wrong in that respect.

  “Our friends the well-known Impressionists are capable at any time of believing that other artists should be ignored, and it is not in their interests that Bernard and I, and the others, should seek to put on an exhibition. . . . I was anxious to give you a frank explanation of all my reasons. There you are.” A modern artist in revolt against the ancien régime had no choice but to make his own way.

  Eiffel drawn as his tower in the June 29, 1889, issue of Punch

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Gustave Eiffel Holds Court amid the Art Wars

  By the second week of June, high upon his tower’s third floor, Gustave Eiffel had the immense satisfaction of finally watching the public debark from the completed elevator. The event was front-page news in the Paris Herald, whose man reported on his own journey: “From the second floor runs a large car, holding sixty people. . . . [The elevator] is simply a square box, with the upper part of two sides glazed. . . . In two minutes and a half, the car arrives at a platform, which may be called floor number two and a half. . . . Here the guard calls out ‘All change here,’ and the passengers walk across a narrow bridge into a similar elevator which takes them as high as they are allowed to go. ‘Mind the step as you go out, ladies,’ says the thoughtful guard. Everybody, of course, looks at the step, and between a rather dangerously wide crack in the boards, sees the grounds of the Exhibition gardens, two hundred and seventy-five metres below. . . . The sensation upon going up can scarcely be described as pleasant, especially as from time to time the elevator gives strange little jerks.”

  The reporter from Pulitzer’s New York World patriotically lauded the Otis lifts and their “great triumph of American skill” before describing how “975 feet above the world people become pigmies. . . . At this height the Arc de Triomphe has become a little toy and the churches are like those in the Dutch boxes of villages. It was all map-like and indefinite; the people were crawling ants; all that looked large had disappeared, excepting a balloon, which was our contemporary.”

  Other visitors had to contend with their newly discovered fear of heights, such as an Englishman from Manchester who said: “Though the hand rail is high enough, still there are thoughts of going over which are anything but pleasant. However, perseverance is repaid when one steps o
ut on the top platform . . . there is no comparison between 1,000 feet of mountain and 1,000 feet of Eiffel. The absence of any ground falling away from one’s feet, or of any surrounding mountains, gives us a sense of isolation and unnaturalness new to any but a balloonist or steeplejack. It takes a few moments before one can muster nerve to walk on the edge of the platform and look over. You must have a strong head to do that. . . . [I]t takes some time before one can realize that the winding rivulet is the silver Seine. . . . The only distinguishable moving objects are small clouds of white smoke traveling slowly along—the railways. . . . Above all, an almighty silence, which is most oppressive.”

  In Gustave Eiffel’s own elegantly appointed aerie, furnished with comfortable black velvet fringed divans, and handsome works of art, he lived with the weather as no man ever had. The dawn was superb, unfolding rosily, while the thunderstorms with their bolts of lightning crashing all about were entirely magnificent and terrifying. In the little adjacent laboratories, scientists came to study high in the heavens “the violence of atmospheric currents, the chemical composition of the air, its electricity, its humidity . . . the oscillations of the pendulum, certain laws of electricity, and the compression of gases by air.” The nighttime, when all the gay lights of Paris twinkled like reflections of the starry sky, was especially enchanting. The great Eiffel Tower spotlight overhead in the campanile arced through the dark, illuminating whatever it swept past. Far down below, the fountains, too, were illuminated three times each evening with a rainbow of artistically changing colors, a sight that delighted night after night.