Bound: Paris in Its Spring
Time-Traveling with Some Exemplary Americans
Returning home from Paris, no matter where home happens to be, is never an easy thing. It’s especially difficult to do after a hundred year trip. So it was with some discomfort — and deep reluctance — that, after more than a century away, I came back to Miami last week. Yes, it was the same hometown that I’d left. But it wasn’t Paris, of the 19th century or otherwise. And as much as I admire this Magic City of ours, it never will be either.
Reading David McCullough’s The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris (Simon and Schuster $37.50) I find that this condition is not unique to me, nor even to my time. In fact, my fellow Americans have been bemoaning leaving Paris since even before there was an America to come home to. And while those who alighted in the French capital either during our Revolution (Franklin, Jefferson, et al) or between the World Wars (Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, ad infinitum) may have been the most famously covered (if not the most famous), those that swept through and stayed in between the aforementioned periods are equally colorful. In McCullough’s masterful hands, they’re rendered just as vivid too.
Among the illustrious class of characters chronicled in this Journey are Samuel F. B. Morse (long before his telegraph, let alone his eponymous Code) and James Fenimore Cooper (at the height of his popularity), John Singer Sargent (who “astonished” an avant garde atelier on the boulevard Montparnasse) and Augustus Saint-Gaudens (whose heroic sculptures would go on to wow the world). Harriet Beecher Stowe shows up, seeking some solace from her infamy, as does Mary Cassat (the only woman — and American — accepted by La Société Anonyme des Artistes aka the Impressionists), and Elizabeth Blackwell (who’d go home and become the first female doctor in the United States). Future Senator Charles Sumner studied art (and would form the anti-slavery position which would lead to his senate floor near murder), and Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. studied medicine (and he’d use all the various new tricks of the trade as dean of Harvard Medical School).
But as great as each of the above would become, perhaps the most compelling star of McCullough’s sweeping saga is Ambassador Elihu Washburne, whose time in Paris stretched from the futile Franco-Prussian War (and its attendant Siege) through the devastating days of the crackpot Commune (which almost destroyed the city, something even its enemies were loathe to do).
Washburne, a former Illinois congressman who was pals with presidents Lincoln (for whom he wrote a campaign biography) and Grant (who he “discovered,” and who in turn appointed him Minister to France), was the antithesis of the standard diplomat, and as such would prove perfectly suited to handle all manner of difficulties. Born to a “very, very poor” Maine farm family and “hired out” as a hand at 12 because there wasn’t food enough to feed everyone, his hardscrabble upbringing left him built of sterner things. So did his mother, who was a veritable force of nature, and “never had a doubt that he [or his brothers] could do anything [they] set out to do.” (All four sons would “be elected — and re-elected — to Congress, from four different states.”) As McCullough notes, Washburn was one of the few ambassadors of major powers in Paris who didn’t “r[u]n away” during the Siege, and he was the only one who took it upon himself to look after the Germans caught behind the lines as well as his American countrymen. Drawing from Washburn’s eloquent diaries, which he faithfully attended to each evening no matter how trying had been his day, McCullough summons a most robust man, a man who managed himself with courage and aplomb.
Of course it is Paris that is the real star of this show, and even in print it is Paris which readily causes one to swoon. As Henry James would write of his protagonist Christopher Newman in The American: “I want the biggest kind of entertainment a man can get. People, places, art, nature, everything.” Like those before, during and since — including McCullough — he wants to be awed by the all of this great city. In The Greater Journey, everyone gets it too. Oh, what a wonderful trip!
