by Jill Jonnes
Having cooled his heels for quite some time, the Times reporter was pleased to see his royal Persian quarry finally exiting the Café Brébant. What would happen next? “The Shah walked bravely to the elevator to rise to the second platform. He actually got inside the square box.” Apparently Monsieur Berger had persuaded the Shah to tour the rest of the tower. But then, apparently, the Shah reconsidered, once again reluctant to entrust his life to these machines. “[He] looked imploringly round, and made a bee line for the stairs, disappearing downward and onward, as fast as his legs could carry him, and unassisted by any native dignity or borrowed decorum. His suite followed, forgetting the elevator’s rapidity, and when the distinguished crowd reached the Shah, he was as unconcerned and composed once more as if nothing extraordinary had happened.” And thus ended the Shah’s extempore visit to the Eiffel Tower, leaving in his wake many disappointed salespeople, for the Persian monarch had purchased but two dozen tiny towers and a walking stick with a tower handle before disappearing swiftly down the staircase.
It was surprising that the Shah had balked at riding the Eiffel Tower elevators, because in his own nation he had been an apostle of modernity. After visiting France in both 1867 and 1873, he had subsequently introduced up-to-date postal and banking systems, trains, and newspapers. Unfortunately, he “lacked application and tenacity of purpose where reform, social justice, and good government were concerned. His absorbing passions were eating, drinking, sex, hunting, riding, and money.” And also, oddly, photography, a fascination that dated back to boyhood. In 1858, Nasir al-Din had invited French photographer Francis Carlhian to set up a studio in the Tehran palace, and royal life there was regularly photographed and memorialized in albums filled with pictures of his vast harem and his many children. The Shah ordered provincial governors to send in photos documenting their official reports, while foreign archeologists maintained similar records.
By now it had become de rigueur for every celebrity and royal visiting the Paris World’s Fair also to make the pilgrimage to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. When word came that Nasir al-Din would attend, the mayor of Neuilly, Gen. Henrion Berthier, implored Nate Salsbury to allow him, the mayor, to receive the Shah when he arrived at the campground. The Wild West camp was in a great lather preparing the grounds and making the loge of honor suitably sumptuous for this exotic potentate. Major Burke and Nate Salsbury made certain that luxurious chairs had been arranged just so, abundant flowers and greenery properly arrayed, and an elegant refreshment table made ready with iced drinks and plates of fruit. The flags of Persia, France, and the United States were draped over the box.
Salsbury was happy to let the mayor of Neuilly do the honors for the Shah. “I readily assented,” he said, “and in return he said he would take much pleasure in presenting Cody and myself to the Shah.” As the momentous hour approached that hot summer afternoon, “Cody got into his buckskins and I pushed myself into a spike-tailed coat, and soon the mayor appeared. Covered with decorations, spattered with medals and resplendent in the uniform of a Major General of the French Army, [the Mayor of Neuilly] was calculated to make the most extravagant picture of Solomon look like a spoiled deuce in a new pack.”
Cody, Salsbury, and the mayor waited nervously in the rising heat, when “the equerries of the Republic dashed into the grounds followed by a state carriage in which was seated the most unimpressive man I ever saw,” recounted Salsbury. “The postilions stopped the horses, the footmen flung the carriage doors open, and the Shah descended to the ground, where he was met by the Mayor, who addressed him. . . . The Shah [wearing a gigantic diamond] never stopped to hear the finish of the speech but waved him away with petulant disdain and passed into the grand stand. . . . The Mayor, strutting and fuming, strode away.”
The whole Wild West camp had gone all out for the Shah, starting with the boss. “Cody had on all his war paint,” reported the Paris Herald with bemusement. “Soft black leather boots covered three-fourths of his legs, the spurs clanking at the feet. Over a shirt of crimson satin, heavy with embroidered flowers, he wore a buckskin jacket covered with Indian bead work, and fringed with thongs of deerskin. Then on his breast were medals, badges, and ribbons ad libitum. Taking him all in all, costume, hair, figure, the Colonel looked every inch the genuine Buffalo Bill and the Shah was duly impressed.”
In the stands “the silks and ribbons flashed bright from hundreds of summer gowns worn by bright eyed Parisiennes, bearers of bright hued parasols.” The lemonade vendors were doing a brisk trade as the sold-out crowd craned for a glimpse of the Shah as three o’clock came and went. When the Persian monarch walked in by the side entrance at three thirty, a roar went up and the crowd rose in a standing ovation. Escorted by many French ministers, Nasir al-Din stepped into the box of honor. Some of the city’s most famous courtesans had secured ringside boxes where they could not be missed by His Majesty, and fanned themselves coquettishly and smiled alluringly at the famous sovereign. Le Gil Blas sniffed that the courtesans’ goal was “obvious. . . . And we can safely say it was a sheer waste of time, for the Shah did not pay an iota of attention to these mice.”
These ladies of the demimonde were certainly unaware that the Shah, unwilling to bring along any of his veiled harem on his trip abroad, had ordered his ambassador to Istanbul to buy two Circassian concubines, dress them as men, and send them to Paris for his enjoyment during his sojourn at the fair. The French cocottes might also have reconsidered their pursuit of the Shah if they’d known the fate of some of their Persian sisters. The Shah, incensed to learn that Persian women in Tehran were consorting with foreigners, had issued this order: “When you learn that a woman has relations with the Westerners, and when she leaves the house of a Westerner, have her seized the next day under some other pretext, order her to be thrown into a sack. . . . Two or three of them should be strangled and killed right in the sacks; others are to be severely punished, fined, and banished from the city once and for all.”
Once the crowd had settled down, the Cowboy Band struck up the Persian national anthem, followed by those of the United States and France. Out came Richmond the orator, and in moments the cowboys and Indians were racing by at terrifying speeds. All eyes remained upon the Shah, who proved to be a lively spectator. Again, the Paris Herald: “[The Shah watched the show] with an intense, almost childish, interest.” He beamed with smiles “and clapped his hands heartily enough to split his immaculate white gloves.” Like any other member of the audience, he was astonished when Annie Oakley performed her amazing new stunt of shooting a hole through the ace of spades at ten yards and then splitting the card sideways. All the while the Shah was sipping glasses of ice water and nibbling fruit.
The Herald reporter, having seen all the Wild West acts many times by now, directed his attention completely to the guest of honor: “He must be a very nervous man . . . for he was hardly still for two consecutive moments. He was for ever crossing and recrossing his legs, tapping his patent leather boots—very small, by the way—against the railing, rubbing his august thumbs together like a nutmeg grater, or pulling at his short black moustache. His excitement reached a climax when the bucking horses appeared, and if they had kept it up much longer, he would probably have decorated some of the riders with the order of the Persian Sun, Moon or Stars.” A French reporter, meanwhile, noted the Shah’s wild laughter over the bronco riding.
After the show, American minister Whitelaw Reid, along with visiting presidential son Russell Harrison, came forward to have a few words with the potentate. At a dinner the previous night, hosted by carriage magnate P. E. Studebaker at the Hôtel Meurice, Reid had “made an amusing speech . . . [saying] how busy he was . . . with wandering Americans whose curiosity prompted them to pry into the Sewers, Catacombs and all sorts of queer places. He also described his sensations yesterday at finding himself, for the first time in his life, clad in evening dress in broad daylight. As he stood before the Shah among some eighty other Ambassadors, he had been struck by
the modesty of his plain black attire compared with the rainbow-like costumes of his colleagues. He had consoled himself, however, by reflecting that in many cases those Governments which put the most gold on their uniforms have the least of it in their treasuries. Mr. Russell Harrison made a speech in which he expatiated on the ‘red hot’ time he was having in Paris, where he had come to enjoy ‘perfect rest.’ ”
As the Shah of Shahs, Nasir al-Din, departed his box, the audience in the Wild West grandstands again rose up in a roar of approval. The Shah followed custom and set off to stroll the Wild West campground. Escorted by Buffalo Bill, he inspected the tents and teepees. “One little Indian boy about five years old seemed to strike his fancy. His name is Billy Irving, and he stood at dress parade as the monarch passed. Billy had nothing much on, except paint, but he had plenty of that, and most artistically applied. His face was yellow, his body striped, his knees red and the rest of him green. The Shah ‘took him in’ silently for a minute and then shook his head and passed on. One of these days he may take it into his head to buy Billy, and make him Grand Visier.” At five thirty the Shah had to depart, but before entering the imperial landau, he upheld his reputation for munificence by bestowing a large sum upon all the company. A baby buffalo born that day, the first such in Europe, was named Shah in His Majesty’s honor. The King of Kings was also rumored to have presented Cody with a large diamond star pin.
As the summer waned Paul Gauguin and a new disciple, painter Paul Sérusier, had retreated from what they saw as the cloying tourism of Pont-Aven to the tiny, bleak Atlantic Coast farm village of Le Pouldu. Many locals collected seaweed for iodine, hard but picturesque work that Gauguin captured in his paintings. By August, Sérusier had departed for military service, and Dutch painter Jacob Meyer de Haan, at the urging of Theo van Gogh, had joined Gauguin. Gauguin and his dealer had largely put behind them their differences over the Volpini show still hanging at the Exposition. The artist had acquired numerous souvenirs from the Paris fair, but his most prized object was a piece of plaster Khmer sculpture.
Wild West Indians—mainly Sioux—pose at the Neuilly camp.
With his love of the exotic, Gauguin had been thrilled to find at the fair a Khmer temple compound dominated by a towering life-size plaster replica of three ancient Angkor Wat stupas, all covered with fantastic statuary of gods and goddesses in sinuous poses, with many more statues displayed around the grounds. Gauguin made numerous sketches of these deities, and when one day he spied a part of a statue that had broken off and fallen to the ground, he took it and secreted it in his clothes.
On the Esplanade des Invalides, the Paris Exposition also hosted a genuine Buddhist temple, known as the Great Tranquility, constructed with massive bronze-like lim wood columns from the royal forests of Thanh-Hóa. Fifteen gilded wooden Buddhas were arrayed upon altars in the temple’s serene interior, its air sweet with incense. This temple was not intended for tourists, but for the two hundred North Vietnamese who had come to Paris to work in the fair. Nine bonzes, or priests, oversaw the temporary pagoda. “Their religious services consisted, apparently,” said one writer, “in presenting before the fifteen idols in gilded wood, ranged in their hieratic rank on the five degrees of the high altar, flowers, fruits, and rice cakes, and then, squatting in a semi-circle facing their gods, abandoning themselves to the chanting of interminable psalms, accented, from time to time, by the striking together of bronze gongs and wooden plates.”
In early July, Gauguin had written to Theo, who had just sold one of his Martinique paintings, Négresses: “Thank you for your kind letter. Please find enclosed with mine the receipt for 225 francs. Although it is cheap, you did well to strike a bargain at that price with Lerolle, an artist.” Gauguin could not resist adding a few words about his show at Volpini’s Café des Beaux-Arts. “Do you think this exhibition is of little use to me? On the surface yes! In reality, no. Seeing that my real purpose is to demonstrate to Pissarro etc. that I can function without them, that all their talk about artistic fraternity is not reflected in their actions. . . . The thing that pleases me most in your letter (is your brother’s good health). Keep the picture available for me! And when you judge it’s the right time for me to write to him write to me and send his address.”
Vincent van Gogh was still at the sanitarium in St.-Rémy. While he felt he was in good medical hands there with Dr. Peyron, the nuns were another matter. “What annoys me is constantly seeing these good women who believe in the Virgin of Lourdes, and make up things like that: and to think I am a prisoner under an administration of that sort.” While Vincent had been painting at a great pace, he still found the religious atmosphere oppressive. “I am astonished that with the modern ideas that I have,” he explained in a letter to Theo, “and being so ardent an admirer of Zola and de Goncourt and caring for things of art as I do, that I have attacks such as a superstitious man might have and that I get perverted and frightened ideas about religion such as never came into my head in the North.” He had been doing well until mid-July, when he was stricken with another attack and, by early August, was so unwell that he had stopped painting.
The major news in the van Gogh family was not Vincent’s relapse into illness and melancholy, however, but Theo and Jo’s announcement that they were expecting a baby early in 1890. Jo wrote to Vincent and admitted that she had not been happy to find herself pregnant. “When I think how neither Theo nor I are in very good health, I am greatly afraid that we are going to have a weak child.” Theo wrote his brother, “I look like a corpse.”
After so much success and adulation Annie Oakley was thoroughly vexed to find herself—of all things—embroiled in a French lawsuit. Two years earlier, in 1887, she had signed a contract to come over from London for “a five week Paris engagement. I was to appear in November. But an hour after the contract was mailed my doctor told me I must take a rest. I immediately canceled the contract by enclosing two certificates signed by the best doctors in London and then I sailed for New York.” Those French theater managers had joined their countrymen in the Wild West grandstands, observed Annie Oakley’s popularity, and had come away feeling cheated long after the fact. They “waited for three weeks after our opening in Paris to see how I went. My contract with them had called for $3000. They then entered suit and received a verdict for $2000 damage on the grounds that my performance with the Wild West would take all novelty from any shooting act they might thereafter engage. That showed French justice for shooting too well! I appealed and the case hung. All in all, it finally cost me $1500, all because I was too good a shot!”
Oakley’s legal predicament was nothing compared to that suddenly confronting the Sioux Indians. In recent weeks U.S. minister Whitelaw Reid had come repeatedly to the Wild West camp at the behest of Secretary of State James G. Blaine, who had instructed Reid to secure signatures from the Sioux on a new U.S. treaty that would take half of their Dakota reservation (eleven million acres) near the gold-rich Black Hills, reluctantly ceded in 1877. As Reid explained repeatedly to the impassive Indian chiefs, the federal government was making an offer of $14 million for this huge territory—an offer, it was clear, that could not be refused. The Paris Sioux, who were illiterate, had no way of knowing how their leaders at home were responding to this latest land grab, and were therefore unwilling to be party to any such agreement.
Back in the United States, a New York Herald reporter out on the Dakota reservation wrote, “The Indians are very bitter in spirit. Since they first ceded land to white men in the Big Sioux Valley, about 1851, they have seen the white race gradually elbow them out of their country. They lost the Black Hills in 1877 and now they have yielded one-half of their whole possessions. The great chiefs admit that they simply bow to a superior force. If they could fight they probably would. Sitting Bull, that malignant and restless old politician, is outvoted. To a Herald correspondent he expressed his feelings tersely, ‘Don’t talk to me about Indians. . . . Those still wearing the clothes of warriors are only squaws.�
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The United States government and the Bureau of Indian Affairs wanted only for the Indians to forsake their nomadic, warlike ways, move aside for whites, and settle down quietly to farming. Buffalo Bill knew full well that the bureaucrats disapproved of the Wild West show for its showcasing Indians as warriors, and he did his best not to provoke the government agency. Even as Cody was swanning about at Parisian parties and receptions, he “told his Indians that they must not go out at night or go with the gay frivolous young women who see Paris by gaslight.” Various chiefs were entrusted with enforcing these rules. “ ‘When I tried to do so,’ said No Neck, ‘the braves had no ears and paid no attention.’ ” Some paid for their dissipations with “various forms of debility which are the inevitable results of fashionable life.” Chief Rocky Bear became a “rake himself doing considerable mashing among the continental belles.”
Not long after the Shah of Persia’s visit to the Wild West show, the legendary actress Lillie Langtry, thirty-six, made her pilgrimage. She had first captured attention at twenty-three as the rich, violet-eyed society beauty who captivated the ever-randy “Bertie,” Prince of Wales, serving as his very public mistress for several years. Later she overcame divorce and hard times by becoming a star of the stage. Now an American citizen of just two years’ duration, Miss Langtry rode in the famous Deadwood Stage with numerous other ladies. In this “bouquet of beauty,” swooned one reporter, “the center flower [was] Mrs. ‘Lillie’ Langtry.” She was in town, among other things, to be fitted at the House of Worth for the wardrobe for her next play.