by Jill Jonnes
At the St.-Rémy asylum, Vincent van Gogh had endured a wrenching summer, suffering more of his attacks. By August he was painting feverishly again, and in early September he wrote Theo: “I am working like one actually possessed. . . . And I think that this will help cure me. . . . [M]y distressing illness makes me work with a dumb fury—very slowly—but from morning til night without slackening—and—the secret is probably this—work long and slowly. How can I tell, but I think I have one or two canvases going that are not so bad, first the reaper in the yellow wheat and the portrait against a light background. . . . I will go on working very hard and then we shall see if the attack returns about Christmas, and that over, I can see nothing to stop my telling the management here to go to blazes, and returning to the North for a longer or shorter time. . . . It is six weeks since I put a foot outside, even in the garden; next week, however, when I have finished the canvases I’m on, I’m going to try.”
Theo, who was deeply impressed with his brother’s recent work, sought to cheer him by praising the two paintings—The Irises and Starry Night—that Theo had submitted to the open-to-all Paris exhibition of Artistes Indépendants. Theo wasn’t happy with the way the first painting had been hung, but Starry Night “makes an extremely good showing.” Far more exciting, the avant-garde Vingtistes had invited Vincent to show at their annual Brussels exhibit, which was quite an honor. And artist and writer Joseph Isäacson had singled Vincent out for highest praise in an article: “Who is it who interprets for us, through form and color, that greatness of life, that power of life, of which the 19th century is increasingly aware? I know of one, a solitary pioneer; he struggles alone in the deep night, and his name, Vincent, is destined to go down in the succeeding generations. There will be more to say in time about this remarkable hero—a Dutchman.”
Among Edison’s excursions outside Paris was one to the southwest suburb of Meudon, to spend a day with Pierre-Jules-César Janssen, a venerable physicist and astronomer renowned for his devotion to documenting solar eclipses. In 1870 Janssen had made a daring balloon escape from Paris, besieged by the Prussians, so he could travel to Oran, Algeria, in time for an important eclipse. (Nature being indifferent to human ambition, it was, of course, too cloudy in Oran to view the event.) In 1876 the government had given Janssen an old palace in Meudon, where he ran the National Observatory. As Edison related, “He occupied three rooms, and there were 300. He had the grand dining-room for his laboratory. He showed me a gyroscope he had got up which made the incredible number of 4000 revolutions in a second. A modification of this was afterward used on the French Atlantic lines for making an artificial horizon to take observations for position at sea.” Janssen had advanced his studies of the sun and endeared himself to Gustave Eiffel by using the Eiffel Tower “with its powerful electric lamp . . . to prove that the oxygen rays of the solar spectrum are purely terrestrial.”
Another day, Sir John Pender, whom Edison described as “the master of the cable system of the world at that time” came round to the Hôtel du Rhin to meet the great inventor. This was the same Pender who only four years earlier had threatened legal action against Edison over telegraph patents. But all that was in the past, and the two men sallied forth to enjoy some fresh air. “I think [Pender] must have lived among a lot of people who were very solemn,” said Edison, “because I went out riding with him in the Bois de Boulogne and started in to tell him American stories. Although he was a Scotsman he laughed immoderately. He had the faculty of understanding and quickly seeing the point of the stories; and for three days after I could not get rid of him. Finally I made him a promise that I would go to his country house at Foot’s Cray, near London.”
After his visits to the Eiffel Tower, Edison most enjoyed the time he spent with Louis Pasteur, another genius with a bent for the practical. Edison had invented revolutionary technologies and devised entire new corporate models to capitalize them. Pasteur, sixty-seven, was a brilliant chemist and researcher who had used his revolutionary germ theory to create pasteurization, save the French silkworm industry, and develop vaccines for anthrax and chicken cholera. And now he had also created a new kind of medical enterprise: a private institute with applied scientific medical research, a clinic to treat rabies, and a school to train young scientists and doctors in laboratory work. Pasteur had personally led the fund-raising, and the previous November the Pasteur Institute had opened in two handsome Louis XIII-style brick-and-stone buildings in the Paris suburb of Vaugirard.
Though Pasteur had many great accomplishments, it was rabies that had catapulted him to worldwide fame. In the mid-1880s he had already successfully treated forty rabid dogs, but he felt far from ready to apply his experimental results to humans. Then, on July 6, 1886, a mother had appeared at his small Paris laboratory pleading for help for her young son, who had been savagely attacked two days earlier by a rabid dog. Pasteur reluctantly agreed, and the boy—otherwise doomed—recovered and lived. A few months later, a young shepherd bitten by a mad dog sought the same treatment and also survived in fine health. This second cure set off a storm of acclaim for Pasteur, who found his laboratory overwhelmed with rabies victims from near and far. As the cures mounted, the newspaper coverage of these miraculous medical feats turned Pasteur into a hero and legend. He then parlayed his unsought fame into the new institute, where he could finally pursue science under ideal conditions, train new researchers, and provide proper facilities for the steady stream of desperate rabies victims.
As Edison later told a colleague, “Pasteur invited me to come down to the institute, and I went and had quite a chat with him. I saw a large number of persons being inoculated, and also the whole modus operandi, which was very interesting. I saw one beautiful boy about ten, the son of an English lord. His father was with him. He had been bitten in the face, and was taking the treatment. I said to Pasteur, ‘Will he live?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘the boy will be dead in six days. He was bitten too near the top of the spinal column, and came too late!’ ” The Paris Herald reported that during that month of August, 145 people came to the Pasteur Institute to be treated for rabies, 136 being bitten by dogs, eight by mad cats, and one by a rabid donkey. The little English boy was mentioned as the only death recorded that month.
Pasteur himself was not in good health, having suffered numerous small strokes that left him with a limp and diminished speaking ability. While the two great men, Pasteur and Edison, had much in common, when it came to commercial gain, they parted ways. Edison viewed profits and large sums of money as absolutely essential to underwrite his “invention factory,” while Pasteur believed that such pecuniary pursuits “would complicate his life and risk paralyzing his inventive faculties.” But Pasteur certainly appreciated the importance of private funding in establishing an institute that would carry on his work.
Thomas Edison’s only real complaint during this delightful roundelay of honors, sightseeing, and hobnobbing with fascinating personages was the surfeit of rich food. Sherard, the British journalist, had taken to dropping in at the Hôtel du Rhin from time to time to chat, and one morning he found Edison looking quite pale. Edison explained, “At first it was my head that worried me in Paris. I was quite dazed; but now the worry is lower down—the effect of all these dinners. Another banquet, or whatever you call it, last night upset me dreadfully. And,” he added with a groan, “I have a whole lot more banquets to attend before I leave for Berlin.”
It was just such an event in his final week in Paris that enabled Thomas Edison to finally meet Gustave Eiffel, creator of the tower he so admired. On September 7, Prime Minister Tirard held another banquet to honor Edison and he had invited Eiffel, who had finally returned from the spa in Évian. Edison, always forthright and full of opinions, later said to Sherard, “I think Eiffel is the nicest fellow I have met since I came to France. He is so simple and modest.” Despite Eiffel’s having just taken the waters, Edison confided, “he is not looking well. I dare say that his work and all the worries attending it have w
orn him out. I was sorry to see him looking so bad, for he is a splendid fellow.” Like everyone else of importance in Paris, Eiffel wanted to celebrate Edison, who was genuinely delighted with this latest invitation. Edison told Sherard, “He is going to give a lunch in my honour on the very top of the Tower before I go to Germany.”
Thomas Edison, Buffalo Bill, and Gustave Eiffel were three celebrities who had taken advantage of the World’s Fair to burnish their glory, but even average citizens were determined to use it to achieve momentary fame. There were all manner of attention-getting gimmicks: On a bet, two handsome young men, dressed in matching striped sailor shirts, took turns pushing each other in a wheelbarrow the 750 miles from the city of Vienna to Paris in thirty days. Even more astonishing was a Russian dragoon, Lieutenant Michel Assiev, who rode 1,600 miles on his two horses, Diana and Vlaga, from his garrison in Poltava in the Ukraine to Paris, also in thirty days.
The champagne maker Monsieur Mercier of Épernay (capital of the Champagne district) commissioned the construction of Le Tonneau Monstre, the world’s largest oaken wine cask, which boasted a gilded, carved head and held enough wine to fill two hundred thousand bottles. Carting it to the fair required ten pair of oxen laboriously hauling it along a ninety-mile route, and it quickly became one of the astonishing sights at the Palace of Food Products on the Quai d’Orsay. Parisian jeweler Martin Posno devised a far more glamorous attraction: a three-foot-tall diamond-encrusted Eiffel Tower sparkling with forty thousand precious stones. Crowds mobbed the Galerie Georges Petit on rue de Sèze to see this miniature Tour en diamants dazzling under brilliant electric spotlights. Its price? Almost half a million dollars.
On the morning of Monday, September 9, the Eiffel Tower’s Le Figaro staff was charmed to encounter Armand-Sylvain Dorgnon, a baker and onetime shepherd from Les Landes, a remote region where all the shepherds used stilts to get quickly about and tend far-flung herds. Dorgnon had already caused a sensation stalking about the Exhibition on his towering wooden legs, and was now determined to make his mark at the Eiffel Tower, ascending on stilts up the stairs all the way to the second floor. “In our little pavilion,” wrote Le Figaro, “he mounted his stilts. . . . Dressed in traditional sheepskin, he walked gravely about our print shop and around the [second] platform, to the great astonishment of the onlookers, who tried to understand why, 115 meters up, one would need to wear stilts.
“Our man was a huge success.” Dorgnon consequently offered his services to any interested theater.
The great tightrope walker Blondin, who thirty years earlier had stunned Americans by crossing the chasm of Niagara Falls with his manager on his back, had accepted a £4,000 wager “to walk on a cable stretched from the Eiffel Tower to the dome of the main exhibition building in less than five minutes.” Sadly, this thrilling prospect came to naught.
On the same morning that Dorgnon was ascending the lower reaches of the Eiffel Tower steps on his stilts, atop the tower’s third-floor pinnacle a new telegraph office was opening; its eight employees would soon find themselves besieged. Of course, the first telegram was sent to Monsieur Eiffel, while the second was the work of London Times Paris correspondent Monsieur de Blowitz, a man with an uncanny knack for being in the right place at the right time. Just the day before, the staff of Le Figaro had inaugurated yet another diversion: throwing little balloons to the wind off their second-floor pavilion with postcards attached requesting those who found the balloons to be in touch.
Had the stilt-walking baker come to the tower but a day later, he might well have crossed paths with Thomas Edison. On the morning of Tuesday, September 10, the weather was cool and breezy, and larger-than-usual crowds lined up at the foot of the Eiffel Tower. By noon Gustave Eiffel, who had welcomed princes and politicians of every rank to his creation, was waiting expectantly for the man he viewed as his most important visitor yet, the great American inventor. Edison, attired in a dark Prince Albert- vested suit, overcoat, and black derby, was maneuvering Mina and Dot through the throngs of eager tourists and toward the reserved elevator. The Edisons stepped out onto the tower’s first platform and into the now-familiar Café Brébant, where Eiffel, president of the French Society of Civil Engineers, had gathered threescore eminent colleagues for a formal lunch to honor the American inventor. Eiffel’s older sister was also a guest, as was his daughter, Claire, and her husband, Adolphe Salles.
The Eiffel Tower and the 1889 World’s Fair grounds
After introductions were made, the engineers and ladies settled in for a pleasant meal. The golden afternoon and multiple courses glided past, desserts were cleared away, and Eiffel rose to offer a heartfelt toast on behalf of his fellow French engineers. Addressing Edison as “Our dear and illustrious master,” he expressed the veneration he felt for one who personified “in everyone’s eyes modern progress. . . . Today all of us here are engineers who represent private initiative and applied individual effort, whether for industry or great public works. Among us are many who are devoted to the beautiful branch of the art of electricity for which you have made so many discoveries. We feel very sincere admiration for you.”
With this, Eiffel held aloft his glass of champagne. “I drink, dear and illustrious master, to your precious health and the continuation of your beautiful work, work so important to the progress of human science.” And so Thomas Edison, who was quite deaf and spoke no French, and Gustave Eiffel, who spoke but little English, celebrated their meeting in best French fashion by drinking champagne upon the world’s tallest structure. Eiffel continued: “Since the intimacy of this event allows Madame and Mademoiselle Edison to be at our table, let me also make two toasts to those who are precious to you.”
As the convivial luncheon wound down and the gilded domes and church spires of Paris glowed in the afternoon light, Eiffel invited the Edisons and the other guests to ascend to his private apartment for coffee and aperitifs. At that moment Eiffel spied at a nearby table composer Charles Gounod, one of the artists who had infamously signed the Le Temps diatribe against the tower, and he now graciously included him in his invitation. Soon the engineers were admiring the view from the third platform. Edison posed for a photograph with Monsieur Salles, which was quickly printed so he could autograph it “To my good friend.”
The Edisons now made their second visit to Eiffel’s private aerie. “Seventy-five of us did not fill the room,” Edison later said. The guests settled in on the dark velvet settees trimmed in fringe. The walls, a warm yellow, were already covered with framed artistic mementos: photographs, drawings, paintings. “Eiffel has a piano there,” said Edison. “Gounod, the composer of ‘Faust,’ played and sang, and he did it splendidly, too, despite his more than eighty years.” High above Paris, Gounod’s music wafted forth as the guests smoked cigars, drank brandy, talked, and even sang, a magical late-summer interlude. Working quietly in the background was American artist A. A. Anderson, best known for his oil portraits, but invited by Eiffel to try to capture Edison’s likeness as best he could in a sculpted bust that would commemorate this occasion of genius honoring genius.
Eiffel asked Edison to inscribe his Livre d’Or, and Edison noted the date and wrote in his careful script: “To M. Eiffel the Engineer, the brave builder of so gigantic and original a specimen of modern Engineering, from one who has the greatest respect and admiration for all Engineers including the Great Engineer, the Bon Dieu.”
Gustave Eiffel had created for his sister some large souvenir fans (decorated, of course, with images of the Eiffel Tower) for such occasions. On one fold, Eiffel had written, proud Frenchman that he was, “The French flag is the only one to have a staff a thousand feet tall.” Next to that, Gounod graciously conceded, “The man who could put an army of workers a thousand feet in the air deserves at least a pyramid,” as well as the notes for a tune to sing these words. Perhaps this was a “capitulation” fan, for it also held the signature of another converted Eiffel critic, France’s most acclaimed painter, the very rich Ernest Meissonier, seventy
-six. He had inscribed these admiring mots for Eiffel: “an engineer who speaks like an artist.” Edison now added his own praise to one of the folds: “The Eiffel Tower is one of the gravest things done in modern engineering.”
Edison had enjoyed himself immensely, but inhibited by his deafness and lack of French, he had done so very quietly—so much so that when Sherard later mentioned to Gustave Eiffel how much Edison had admired Eiffel and his daring tower, the French engineer said, “I am glad to hear it for when Edison lunched with me . . . he hardly spoke, and I must say I should have liked to hear his opinion.” Sherard then relayed all of Edison’s many compliments about Eiffel—what a splendid fellow he was and how Eiffel’s one-thousand-foot tower was one of the boldest of engineering ideas and feats. Eiffel replied, “If Monsieur Edison had said that to me, I should respectfully have pointed out to him that the Forth Bridge is a much greater conception, and that it needed very much more nerve in its execution than my tower. But, all the same, I am much pleased to hear that Edison thought so highly of my experiment.”
Sherard could not resist quoting Edison’s further remarks: “But he added that New York was going to build a tower of two thousand feet in height. ‘We’ll go Eiffel 100 per cent better, without discount.’
“ ‘Eh, bien!” said Eiffel very quietly; “nous verrons cela.’ ” (We’ll see about that.)
Edison had scarcely returned to the Hôtel du Rhin from his wonderful afternoon with Eiffel when he had to change into formal evening wear for yet another banquet. The next morning he, Mina, Dot, and aide William Hammer were off to Berlin, so the Paris City Council had planned one final dinner to honor Le Grand Edison. The venue was fitting: the palatial, gilded Hôtel de Ville, illuminated inside and out by the radiant electrical handiwork of Edison’s French subsidiary.