Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (6 page)

Bartholdi had been gone for six months when his mother begged him by letter to return to Paris. The Rapp statue he had exhibited at the 1855 exhibition was ready to be unveiled in its permanent home in Colmar. She had helped organize a town-wide celebration and was continuing her campaign for Auguste to receive the Legion of Honor medal. Unbeknownst to Charlotte, Bartholdi had met on the bridge of the
Osiris
an explorer of the Orient who had regaled him with tales of adventure. He was still drawn to the exotic; at one point in Egypt he had dined on elephant head in tomato sauce, although with unpleasant results. Bartholdi was determined to test his expertise in navigating the Arab world.

When his group returned to Cairo, Bartholdi journeyed to Yemen on his own. Bartholdi would later produce paintings from his days in Egypt and Yemen and used a pseudonym, Amilcar Hasenfratz, and also, occasionally, the name Auguste Sonnetag. In catalogs, he would list Hasenfratz’s birthplace as Colmar and his address as “Chez M. Bartholdi.” He wanted to keep the less prestigious Oriental paintings separate from the great statuary he knew he was destined to create.

When Bartholdi returned from his trip, he apparently told a friend, “When I discover a subject grand enough, I will honor that subject by building the tallest statue in the world.”

3
The Khedive Refuses

Bartholdi returned to Paris in the summer of 1856. The blackened oil lamps along the center of the roads had been replaced with bright gas lamps. There were new cafés with three-hundred-item menus where patrons would watch the passersby in the cool evening, or sit inside, where they would see themselves reflected by mirrors “remarkable for their size and number,” marveled the primary guidebook of the time. “You find yourself bewildered with the blaze of light, amidst the confused glitter of gilding, painting, and glass.” The Seine was crossed by twenty-five bridges. Homeowners were required to scrape and whitewash every ten years, keeping houses along the boulevards bright and clean. Every property owner could be seen out in the morning sweeping his half of the road and, in summer, wetting it down.

Under the hand of Emperor Napoléon III’s civic planner, Georges-Eugène Haussmann, Paris had changed so quickly and so extensively that visitors who hadn’t been back in a few years could barely recognize it. “The northern boulevards are now the pride of Paris. Once its bulwark, they have become its ornament. Their great extent, the dazzling beauty, the luxury of the shops, the restaurants, the cafés, on or near them; the glancing of light among the trees; the sounds of music; the incessant roll of carriages, all this forms a medley of sights and sounds anything but unpleasing to the visitor who walks the boulevards for the first time on a fine evening.”

Near Bartholdi’s studio, marble statues on elevated terraces now overlooked the octagonal pool and flower beds of the Luxembourg Gardens. Strollers could pause in the garden’s cafés or at the kiosks to read the newspapers or stop to hear a lecture on gardening or beekeeping.

Surrounding this glamorous Paris was a thirty-nine-foot rampart protected by a ditch that was, in places, 164 feet wide. This rampart had been built between 1841 and 1844 under the guidance of French prime minister Adolphe Thiers. “The military tendencies of the French nation are peculiarly conspicuous in the capital,” the guidebook of the time acknowledged. “The visitor cannot fail to be struck with the vastness and solidity of the Fortifications which encircle Paris.”

For Bartholdi, this was a fruitful time. In the evening he would visit salons, where long conversations were met with a frown, and wit and charm were rewarded. After being welcomed by the host and introduced at the door, a visitor could drift in and hopefully—before long—out, with the aim of visiting several salons in one evening.

Bartholdi had returned from his Egyptian trip to an extravaganza in Colmar, arranged in part by his ever-energetic mother, to celebrate the unveiling of his statue of General Rapp with three days of speeches, performances, and fireworks. Musicians, bakers, and hairdressers marched in a parade; gardeners threw handfuls of flowers. Tanners in white-skin aprons, butchers with their axes on their shoulders, all turned out in a great procession to honor the twenty-three-year-old artist.

Bartholdi was growing into a rather striking man at this point; one reporter noted he could be considered
spirituel,
meaning possessing a healthy interest in women. His brother Charles, meanwhile, had become
spirituel
in the extreme. Though he was registered to study law during the day, Charles vanished into the backstreets of Paris at night and spent money so rapidly that his mother, Charlotte, could not guess where it went. She subsequently discovered Charles had gone in debt to a diamond merchant for approximately the equivalent of $45,500, presumably buying gifts for various women. She decided to move him back to Colmar, leaving Auguste alone in Paris. Charlotte hoped Charles might regain his stability and perhaps even win his father’s old post as a counselor to the prefect in Colmar.

Returning to his birthplace settled Charles for a bit, but on a brief visit back to Paris, he relapsed. Auguste reported to his mother that his brother was ravaged by extreme shifts of mood. Back in Colmar, he calmed down again, and oddly considered running for political office, but anxiety once again took its toll.

To occupy himself, Charles decided he would start
Curiosités d’Alsace,
a periodical that gathered historical documents from the Alsace region. Auguste helped him find contributors among his journalist friends. In the introduction to the first volume, Charles wrote that he would prioritize primary source material over synthesized texts. “No detail is irrelevant,” he wrote. “Any object used, having belonged to men, offers huge interest. A scrap of cookware or weapon, a slip of parchment, the gem of a barbarian . . . often have more value in our eyes, and more authority than entire volumes.”

Charles was able to publish two issues of the journal. He headed to Saverne for a short holiday. On his return he suffered a fit of madness on the train. He never regained his sanity.

It turned out that Charles had not been traveling alone. During his late nights in Paris, he had apparently fallen for a woman separated from her husband. She was named Fanny Spire, and had since come to Colmar to live with her parents. She adored jewels, or so it seemed. In fact, she demanded so many jewels over the three years Charles had been secretly seeing her that her father had loaned Charles the equivalent of approximately $120,000.

When the debt had come due in August 1862, Charles could not pay the bill. Charlotte and Auguste became legally responsible for the money.

Auguste and his mother endured a brutal legal hearing to try to prove that Charles had not been of sound mind when he signed for the loans. But on May 19, 1867, the court ruled against them and Charlotte was held responsible for not only the loans, but also the interest and legal fees.

It was decided Charles should be committed to a mental hospital. Auguste himself brought Charles to Vanves, three miles from his Paris home. At the hearing where he was committed, Charles was asked:
What is your name?

“I have no name. I am the great God, creator of sky and earth.”

Your profession?

“To annoy people.”

“I make works,” he added later. “I am a vaudevillian. I pimp girls. I am the chief of all the bordellos of Paris.”

A survey of sanatoriums of the time described the tranquillity of this facility run by the famous Dr. Jean-Pierre Falret: “The Maison de Falret, as it is called, in Vanves, in the suburbs of Paris, consists of a large park full of magnificent trees and shrubbery, divided in two by a group of farmstead buildings, thus making practically two parks, one for each sex, and there are twenty-seven such bungalows for the isolation of one or more patients. Paris has grown up around it, but wandering in this estate one can scarcely conceive a vast city to be so near. A patient brought here is not only isolated from his friends which is usually a distinct advantage, but he is isolated from the insane which is an even greater gain.”

Auguste visited Charles often, trying to engage his brother with such amusements as a cello, a ball, and a small dog. Nothing worked. Auguste brought Charles the printed editions of
Curiosités,
but Charles would not look at them. Sometimes Auguste would find Charles calm to the point of silence. At other times Charles would be frantic, calling out his former lover’s name again and again, playing with torn bits of paper, or writing gibberish in French, German, and Latin. Charlotte asked if she could see Charles, but Auguste told her she risked being attacked by him. Charlotte warned Auguste that, not being able to see her son, she was becoming indifferent to him. She placed Charles’s written rantings in a box along with legal documents breaking her and Auguste’s ties to him. She wrote on the box: “To burn. Sad things.”

In the end all she burned were Charles’s and Fanny Spire’s love letters. Auguste kept the remainder of Charles’s papers in his archives for the rest of his life.

Between visits to his brother, Bartholdi tried to focus on his burgeoning career but it was difficult for him not to collapse under the weight of his troubles. Pursuing commissions required constant attention to multiple projects, and an incessant forging of connections to people with money or political power. He had little energy for such things. At this time, he was feuding with the city of Marseilles over a commission for a fountain; he believed the city authorities had used his plans but credited the project to another artist.

Demonstrating his constant need to hustle up commissions, on his way home from Marseilles in 1865 he stopped in Figeac to meet with the mayor to propose a statue of Champollion, the Egyptologist who was born there. The mayor agreed, so Bartholdi organized a committee to raise the money. The group of fundraisers included himself, Ferdinand de Lesseps, and, oddly enough, Dr. Falret, the head of the sanatorium where Charles was a patient.

The same year, Bartholdi was invited to make a bust of Édouard René Lefèbvre de Laboulaye, a famous French jurist and writer with whom he was acquainted. This was a small job, but eventually it would be the project that would put Bartholdi in position to find a “subject” grand enough to merit a colossal statue.

As Bartholdi fashioned the bust, he visited Laboulaye’s homes to try to capture the essence of the placid man. Laboulaye tended to wear a black frock coat buttoned to his chin, making him look “clerical,” as the American ambassador John Bigelow noted. But this outward calm belied a rather chaotic career, plagued by the complications an intellectual faced navigating the turmoil in French governance.

As a scholar and historian, Laboulaye adored America and its ideals, almost to the point of fetishism. He studied its laws, its constitution, its military history, its rules of governance. He collected its historical miscellanea and iconography. Yet loving America, with Napoléon III on the throne, was not a safe passion.

Back in the spring of 1849, after King Louis-Philippe was overthrown, Laboulaye had begun lecturing on American law and government as a professor of comparative law. In the new republic, such analysis was welcome. When Napoléon III pronounced himself emperor later that year, he started instituting strict censorship edicts. Laboulaye switched his focus to Roman history, since imperial rule was not controversial.

When Napoléon III relaxed censorship laws in 1860, Laboulaye once again espoused the virtues of American democracy that he felt demonstrated the possibility for a similar governance in France. The two nations had common values, even if France demonstrated the dangerous side of constitutional government, having gone through fourteen constitutions and ten revolutionary changes in the past seventy years. Laboulaye praised the orderly debate he saw in America. When Laboulaye was scheduled to speak on American democracy, students, foreigners, workers, and activists lined up outside his lecture hall.

There was one issue, though, that could not be overlooked: slavery. When America’s Civil War began, Laboulaye conceded that constitutional democracy might not be a workable system. Not only had a nation founded on the principles of equality allowed slavery to continue, but half the country considered it more dear than peace. On that issue, France was far ahead of America. France had first abolished slavery in 1794. Napoleon revived it in 1802, but it was gone for good by 1848. Yet America seemed addicted to the institution.

“Why is it that this friendship [between France and America] has eroded?” Laboulaye lectured his students at the Collège de France in 1863, “Why is it that the face of America is not so dear to us as it was in those days [of the Marquis de Lafayette and George Washington]? It is due to slavery; we had always hoped that something would be done to put an end to an institution which was regarded by the founders of the Constitution as fraught with peril to the country; but instead of this, the partisans of slavery, having obtained the ascendant, have continually been engaged in efforts to perpetuate it and extend its limits, so that we have ceased to feel the same interest in Americans.”

In the summer of 1865, after a spring that had included both the end of the American Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination, Laboulaye invited the thirty-one-year-old Bartholdi to a dinner party at Glatigny, Laboulaye’s home near Versailles. Bartholdi would later claim that this single event inspired him to create the largest statue in the world.