Eiffel's Tower

by Jill Jonnes

Most of those present in the stifling Sedelmeyer Gallery recognized Andrew Carnegie, the Steel King, moving about restlessly, while it was whispered that Monsieur Durand-Ruel was attending on behalf of the Have-meyers of the Sugar Trust, and that Monsieur Bague would bid for the Vanderbilts. Mr. Sutton of the American Art Association sat with the dealer Monsieur Montagnac, engaged to conduct the AAA’s actual bidding, while nearby were buyers from the Corcoran Gallery. All present already knew “the thrilling story of [Mr. Sutton and associates’] late landing at Queens-town, their catching of the Irish mail, their hiring at Chester of a special train for $400, which carried them to London at the rate of sixty-four miles an hour, and then of their further timely advance upon Paris,” arriving just in time for this very sale. Even now Mr. Sutton was said to have a train waiting in Gare St.-Lazare to return him to Le Havre so he could catch the steamship home the instant he had bagged The Angelus.

  The French stared with ill-disguised loathing at the Americans, philistines who presumed to spirit off French patrimony. The Yankees, in contrast, confided one American writer present, experienced “a moment of intense satisfaction . . . to see so young a nation as our own . . . coming breast to breast with old Europe for the acknowledgment and purchase of a work of art.”

  More and more newly wealthy Americans savored the joys of owning rare, expensive things, and despite the 30 percent tariff imposed on art in recent years, the pace of voracious collecting was escalating. While some of these Yankee art patrons, such as New York financier J. P. Morgan and his uptown neighbors, the Vanderbilts, were by now familiar, others were not as well known to the French—men such as New York architect Stanford White, who had just arrived in Paris intent on snapping up antique furnishings, tapestries, sculptures, and other art to furnish traction millionaire William Whitney’s gigantic country villa. American George Lukas, a permanent Paris resident who was very French in his ways (complete with a longtime mistress), did nothing but locate and sell art to rich Americans such as railroad magnate Henry Walters. Painter Mary Cassatt was always urging American millionaires, especially her friend Louisine Havemeyer of Sugar Trust wealth, to buy the work of her Impressionist friends. Claude Monet had started a subscription to purchase Manet’s incomparable L’Olympie, now hanging in the fair’s official French painting pavilion, to guarantee that it stayed in France, preferably in the Louvre. John Singer Sargent had contributed a thousand francs to that fund. Given American rapaciousness, it was not surprising that the French were so adamant that Millet’s much-admired The Angelus—of all paintings—not disappear across the Atlantic.

  At about one o’clock the auction began, personally conducted by Messieurs Sedelmeyer and Boussod. They worked steadily through the vanished Monsieur Secrétan’s watercolors and drawings before bringing on major paintings by Eugène Delacroix and Ernest Meissonier, for which fabulous prices were paid. Then, after a brief pause, a gallery man carried out The Angelus and reverently set it on the easel. The picture had a wonderful story behind it. Millet, an artist of the Barbizon school who lived in the country, was walking home one day when he heard the tolling of the local church bells even as he “saw across the wide stretch of autumn fields, against the crimson sky of sunset, two peasants, a man and a woman, stop instantly from their potato digging at the sound of the Angelus and devoutly fall to prayer.” Millet rushed to his studio and painted the scene, selling the work to a dealer for $500, who in turn sold it for $10,000.

  With the appearance of the coveted painting, Monsieur Proust stood up and strode forward to bid personally against Monsieur Montagnac, who represented Mr. Sutton. The French seemed in agony as the price rapidly soared. When Monsieur Montagnac faltered, an American stood up and said, “If you haven’t money enough, I’ll stand by you.” The French, in a frenzy, made the offer to Monsieur Proust, now ashen and tremulous with emotion. Monsieur Montagnac bid again, and when Monsieur Sedelmeyer crashed the hammer, the French leapt up in an uproar, women breaking their fans in anger. The bidding was reopened and this time Monsieur Proust prevailed, the hammer coming down at 553,000 francs. Monsieur Proust had just paid the highest price on record for a modern painting, $110,000. The French rushed forward and surrounded him like a conquering hero. As calm returned, Monsieur Sedelmeyer asked for the next lot of paintings to be brought out, and the auction continued. Many French in the audience that day and the next observed unhappily how often the American millionaires prevailed, bagging other prized paintings to carry away across the Atlantic.

  Like every other person at the Secrétan sale, the New York Times reporter knew the final funding of Millet’s masterpiece was politically controversial. In a France where conservatives were actively machinating to resurrect the monarchy, the right was as hostile to Millet, an artist they considered a communist, as it was to his painting, which depicted poor peasants. “They thought,” said the Times man, “the Louvre needed many other painters more than Millet.” But the proud Monsieur Proust assumed that his fellow Frenchmen, whatever their political stripe, would not tolerate Americans making off with such a high-profile Barbizon piece. As soon as the auction ended, he submitted his request to the Chamber of Deputies. For two weeks, as the matter was debated, much was rightly made of the impoverished state of Millet’s widow even as his paintings sold for fabulous prices. The days passed, and still the conservative deputies blocked the credit needed to complete The Angelus sale, leaving Monsieur Proust to agonize once again over the impending loss of this painting to the Americans.

  Commissioner Hawkins watched all this with his usual bilious eye, later expressing his displeasure through the words of the painter Couture, who dismissed Millet thus: “Today we see a canvas upon which is uncouthly painted a rough peasant standing before a log of wood; three months later we see upon another canvas, the same peasant with the same log of wood upon his shoulder; three months after, upon a third canvas, there appears the same log, but this time upon a fire, and our friend, the peasant, as badly painted as in number one, is standing in front of it and looking at it burning, and so ends, in three chapters, Millet’s great story of the peasant and the log of wood.” To Hawkins, and many others, Millet’s work expressed “only the grossest, most unpicturesque, and most uninteresting realism. His subjects, as a rule, were unworthy of a great master; his human types nearly express idiots or monsters, who could not have existed out of asylums, and [their] portrayal . . . neither elevates nor refines.”

  Like every denizen of the art world, Vincent van Gogh followed the fracas and wrote to Theo: “What a business, that Secrétan sale! I am always pleased that the Millets hold their own. But I should very much like to see more good reproductions of Millet, so as to reach the people.

  “His work is sublime, especially considered as a whole, and it will become more and more difficult to get an idea of it when the pictures are dispersed.”

  By midsummer most of the writers and artists who had denounced the tower in Le Temps had expressed their mea culpas, with the notable exception of Guy de Maupassant. In his travel memoir, La Vie Errante, the writer claimed, “I left Paris and even France, because the Eiffel Tower just annoyed me too much. Not only did you see it from everywhere; you found it everywhere made out of every known material, displayed in all the shop windows, an unavoidable and horrible nightmare.” De Maupassant wondered what posterity would think of his generation “if, in some future riot, we do not unbolt this tall, skinny pyramid of iron ladders, this giant and disgraceful skeleton with a base that seems made to support a formidable monument of Cyclops and which aborts into the thin, ridiculous profile of a factory chimney.”

  But de Maupassant and his sour opinions were by now very much in the minority. Most days, even during bad weather, eleven thousand or twelve thousand people swarmed about the tower. Eiffel hoped that he and his shareholders would see almost two million persons pay admission, thus recouping the entire cost of the tower by the end of the fair. The Eiffel Tower was proving to be not only a technological milestone, a potent po
litical symbol, and a great popular and artistic success but also a financial triumph.

  It was not just the hoi polloi who had become smitten with the tower. Sarah Bernhardt, the most famous woman in Paris, the greatest and most consequential actress of her time, made an ascent. Auguste Bartholdi, sculptor of the Statue of Liberty, would pay a visit, signing Eiffel’s elegant Livre d’Or, “Homage to M. Eiffel with many memories of the Statue of Liberty whose bones of iron he built.” The most chic Parisians and the city’s intellectuals all flocked to its restaurants. Even Guy de Maupassant, before he fled, found that he had no choice but to visit the tower if he wished to socialize. “Friends no longer dine at home or accept a dinner invitation at your home,” he complained. “When invited, they accept only on condition that it is for a banquet on the Eiffel Tower—they think it gayer that way. As if obeying a general order, they invite you there every day of the week for either lunch or dinner.”

  On the evening of Tuesday, July 2, the splenetic literary lion Edmond de Goncourt, sixty-seven, dined with his eminent protégé Émile Zola and other writers on the Eiffel Tower. Beginning in 1848, the brothers Edmond and Jules de Goncourt had together published a prodigious number of documentary novels, plays, social histories, and biographies, all dedicated to a certain grim social realism. Independently wealthy, self-conscious aesthetes and snobs, they collected rarified objets and experiences.

  All the while, looking to posterity, they carefully recorded their impressions and certain minutiae of Parisian literary life in a private diary. In 1870 Edmond even chronicled his brother’s slow descent into dementia and death from tertiary syphilis. What little joie de vivre Edmond had ever possessed had long been exhausted by 1889, but he was still a diligent diarist. About the time the fair opened, the ever-dour de Goncourt reported that his dear friend Daudet had passed along this juicy tidbit about a conservative editor: “The madame of a whorehouse told Daudet that Charles Buloz comes regularly to her, has himself surrounded by four or five half-naked women who whirl around him while lifting up their skirts, and that during this spectacle the serious editor of Revue des Deux Mondes egotistically masturbates.” Too impatient to wait for the judgment of posterity, Edmond had already published excerpts of the early diaries and predictably irritated quite a few of his contemporaries.

  After his evening at the Eiffel Tower, de Goncourt wrote: “The ascent on the elevator: the sensation of a vessel putting out to sea, but not dizzying. Up on the platform, a perception, far beyond one’s thinking at ground level, of the grandeur, the size, the Babylonian immensity of Paris, a city of blocks of buildings on which the sun was setting, with the hill of Montmartre a picturesque indentation bursting up among the great flat lines of the horizon and taking on, in the dusk, the appearance of a great ruin that had been illuminated.

  Entrance to one of the Otis elevators

  “A somewhat dreamy dinner . . . then the very special impression of a walk down, like a head diving into infinity, the impression of a descent on these open ladder rungs into the night, with here and there semblances of plunges into boundless space, where you feel as if you are an ant descending the rigging of a warship on which the ropes are made of iron.”

  The Paris Herald’s “Roving American,” himself no aesthete or philosopher, dined three evenings later up on the Eiffel Tower and recorded his impressions. He and his wife enjoyed watching the sunset from the top of the structure and found that “the bracing air up there” stimulated “an excellent appetite.” They descended to the first platform to dine at Café Brébant. Too late for a prime spot on the open-air verandah, they were seated at a table inside with “a very fair view.” The soup course was a disappointment—watery, lukewarm. The sardines they ordered were undercooked, “and these little fish had a painful expression about their eyes as if they had been suffering slow torture while being cooked. They were quite fresh, however, and they soon disappeared.”

  While the couple waited at length for their saddle of lamb with asparagus points, they admired “the profusion of pretty women, all in very smart dresses and hats. They were nearly all Parisiennes. . . . There were also several mères de familles present with their sons and daughters and provincial cousins.” Then there were “the luminous fountains and the fairylike view from our little perch.” At one point, the waiters fanned out through the restaurant delivering to all the ladies not the long-awaited food but roses left over from a banquet, an amusingly transparent bid for bigger tips. When eventually the lamb came “it was not bad,” though the dessert course of “parfaits au café” was “unevenly frozen.” The bill come to thirty-five francs. “Altogether, the Restaurant Brébant, on the Eiffel Tower, is vastly inferior in every way, except altitude, to the Restaurant Brébant at the corner of rue du Faubourg Montmartre and the boulevard. . . . The waiters are inattentive, dilatory, and noisy. The cooking is done by steam . . . [making for] pale, anemic appearance and taste.”

  This last culinary field report on “the art (not very difficult in Paris) of squandering money on high-priced dinners” provoked a letter two days later from a “Sensible American.” The writer proposed to explain to readers of the Paris Herald “how to dine comfortably at a moderate outlay.” It was true that their party of three always ate a substantial breakfast. Still, when “Sensible” and party needed lunch “about noon in the avenue Rapp just near the main entrance to the Exhibition,” they found a small café where they ordered “bread and butter for the party, a glass of lemonade for each and some Swiss cheese. These, with the fruit, gave us an ample lunch for which our entire outlay was 6 francs. . . . Average cost of lunch for each person, 2 fr.”

  On the fairgrounds, Edyth Kirkwood recommended the Duval restaurants, “where refreshments are well served and cheap,” while noting that at noon each day at the fair, “a little cannon from the Tour Eiffel gives the signal for the closing of the galleries, and then follows a very amusing and picturesque phase of French middle-class life. While the rich and well-to-do throng to the restaurants, families and couples in moderate or poor circumstances sit calmly down anywhere, on benches, chairs, or the ground, what does it matter? unpack their baskets of provisions and enjoy their dinner; while those who have come unprovided crowd around the booths, or buy great slices of bread and cheese and smoked sausage from men and women who stand on the outside of the grounds and offer their wares across the fence.”

  The Fourth of July dawned blue and warm out at the Wild West camp, where everyone was up early to hang French and American flags. Buffalo Bill decorated his tent with the Stars and Stripes and the tricolor, flowers, ferns and portraits of Generals Washington and Lafayette and Presidents Harrison and Carnot. All the Wild West troupers gathered while the Cowboy Band played sprightly versions of “Yankee Doodle” and “Hail, Columbia.”

  Then Nate Salsbury, ever the well-dressed gentleman amid all the buckskins and beads, stepped forward and signaled that he was ready to read, according to custom, the Declaration of Independence. When Salsbury, who had once strode the theatrical boards, delivered the document’s final line—“And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor”—the assembled Americans began to holler and applaud. Buffalo Bill came forward to deliver a few patriotic remarks, punctuated by celebratory gunfire.

  With that, Cody, the Salsburys, and a visiting sister hastened to a waiting horse and carriage, for their next patriotic event was in the far reaches of the twelfth arrondissement, in southeast Paris. An hour later, just before 10:00 a.m., they pulled into the tiny rue de Picpus and joined U.S. minister Reid, a contingent of thirty U.S. Marines, and several hundred Americans as they filed into the high-walled cemetery attached to the Convent of the Sacred Heart. The group threaded past the many tombs of guillotined aristocrats to gather round the simple grave of General Lafayette, French hero of the American Revolution. By the time the Americans had bestowed all their bouquets
and wreaths, Lafayette’s tomb had disappeared under a floral mound. Minister Reid said a few words and placed his wreath, whereupon the general’s grandson, Senator Edmond de Lafayette, eloquently thanked the Americans (in English) for honoring his ancestor. The marines concluded by shooting several volleys and mournfully sounding the bugle.

  Some hours later, after lunch, Minister Reid and the American colony, now swelled to almost a thousand strong, reassembled by the Seine on the Pont de Grenelle at the Île des Cygnes. As the river shimmered in the summer light and barges passed, President Sadi Carnot and hundreds of uniformed French officials soon joined them, while Major Burke, Chief Rocky Bear, and Buffalo Bill squeezed onto the quay to watch. The Americans resident in Paris were bestowing upon the Third Republic a bronze statue cast from the original model for Bartholdi’s statue, Liberty Enlightening the World, one fifth the size of its New York sister. All chose to ignore rude comments by French anarchists that Lady Liberty’s statue required further embellishments to show American slums and the evils of child labor in American factories.

  As the New York World correspondent observed, “Altogether, Paris and America are on exceedingly good terms with one another.” After more speechifying (Minister Reid essaying his remarks in French) and music, most of the crowd boarded seven flag-bedecked steamboats and floated pleasantly to the Hôtel de Ville to drink champagne vin d’honneur in the ornate salles. The Wild West trio departed to attend their own Fourth of July festivities at the camp before the three o’clock show. U.S. minister Whitelaw Reid was delighted to see that the Exposition Universelle was a roaring success, for the fair and its roundelay of fêtes, dinners, and socializing were cementing ever-warmer diplomatic relations between France and America.

  As Cody and the others rode their carriage out to Neuilly, they could see the rare sight of the American flag flying atop the Eiffel Tower, where it had been hoisted at 2:00 p.m. and remained till 5:00 p.m. That night a special Fourth of July fireworks display would be held at the Exposition Universelle to honor the American republic. But first, a crush of Yankees jammed the avenue Hoche off the Place de l’Étoile as they turned out for Minister Reid’s Fourth of July evening open house and celebration. The Reids had moved into the hôtel of the Duc de Grammont, one of the city’s legendary private mansions, and the American colony was avid to have a look. Carriages clogged the cobblestone porte cochère entry, while Mrs. Reid, her large diamond necklace glistening on a black-and-white-striped silk gown, greeted the throng. The Hôtel Grammont did not disappoint with its four mirrored Louis XV drawing rooms and a crimson-brocade dining room (seating twenty-four). Unfortunately the rented mansion’s “vast collection of Egyptian curiosities,” including numerous mummies and basalt statues of Isis and Osiris, had been consigned to storage, leaving only two sphinxes on the marble staircase.