Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (9 page)

At the Ismailia harbor, the astounding, Verne-like enterprise of the canal construction chugged along with mules and men shoveling, steam excavators, twenty-two-ton bricks of loam and sand drying in the sun. The natives dozed on the beach, flies buzzing around their lips. Jugglers looking to earn a coin here or there wandered through the exhausted bodies. The dirt that had been scooped out of that channel from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea could have made a pile one yard high and one yard thick that could twine around the earth twice.

It was difficult to imagine a moment when, having completed this extraordinary feat, the laborers would toil anew to construct Bartholdi’s colossus. Would a colossus even look extraordinary against this wonder?

On the train back to Cairo, de Lesseps joined Bartholdi in his car but slept the entire way. Bartholdi watched de Lesseps’s bobbing head, interpreting his choice to sleep as a vote of no confidence. In fact, de Lesseps was known for his extraordinary powers of dozing. A journalist later marveled: “He has taught himself to sleep at any time, and it is said that he can sleep a whole day and a night at a stretch. He sleeps during his railroad journeys. He sleeps all the time he is on shipboard, and when necessity demands it he can go for a long time without sleep.”

Despite de Lesseps’s lukewarm response, Bartholdi would not or could not give up. “It is unfortunate that with modern ideas, art and poetry seem superfluities,” Bartholdi wrote to his mother from this trip, “because truly I believe that few works of art presented in these conditions are more striking than this one. We will see; one need not despair about it yet.”

It took seven months for Bartholdi to despair. He, along with most of the important French artists of the day, had been invited to the opening of the Suez Canal in November, but he chose to stay in France, not even remarking on the event to his mother in his regular correspondence. He might have worried that, if he left for Egypt again, she would try once more to find him a wife. During his last trip, she had arranged a marriage for him and even sent out invitations before he could stop her. It was Bartholdi who had been put in the awkward position of breaking off the whole thing, an engagement where there was a wedding planned but never a proposal.

Little did Bartholdi know that the very year he had visited Egypt, Gustave Eiffel, the thirty-six-year-old engineer famous for building bridges, suffered the catastrophic failure of a series of Egyptian lighthouse deals. Although Eiffel managed to construct two bridges for Egypt, the lighthouse project, which had been crucial to his bank account, had failed because of “influence and bribery.” The disappointment ruined him for years to come.

Instead, in Port Said, at the inaugural of the Suez Canal, a 180-foot-tall white cement tower greeted visitors, its light visible for eighteen miles. Next to this concrete pillar, Bartholdi’s statue would have looked like an antiquity to the khedive. This lighthouse displayed true modern ingenuity. Concrete had only just come into use and the lighthouse boasted state-of-the-art technology: “There are two Alliance magneto-electric machines, and two steam engines, each of 5 HP. The optical apparatus for the light (white, flashing at intervals of three seconds) is dioptric of the sixth order, of 150mm focal distance in the central plane.”

The Suez Canal’s opening surpassed all extravagances seen in modern history. There were six thousand guests in attendance, all expenses paid, along with hundreds of thousands more who covered their own travel costs. “People from Asia Minor, Ukrainians, men of Bokhara, Turks, Tartars, men in caftans, sheiks with green turbans, women, children, old men, the sick, the paralysed. Bashi-bazouks with their high hats and cummerbunds swathed from chin to crutch, their weapons within the folds, their leggings partly covering down-at-heel shoes,” wrote de Lesseps’s biographer.

Princess Eugénie came without her husband, Emperor Napoléon III, to celebrate the achievement of her dear cousin, Ferdinand de Lesseps. She visited the Pyramids on a road that had been built in six weeks purely to allow her to make her journey by carriage. “Perhaps she would have been less comfortable had she realized that all the labour had been
corvée,
and that the remarkable speed had been due in part to the lash,” commented Charles Beatty, de Lesseps’s biographer.

Verdi wrote
Aïda
for the new Cairo opera house. Ismail imported five hundred cooks and a thousand waiters to serve feasts. Army tents became extra dining halls. Wrote Beatty: “Everywhere there was a sense of tremendous importance, an emotional tension as though before an earthquake.”

On board the
Aigle,
surrounded by eighty vessels, many of them warships firing their cannons in celebration, Eugénie exclaimed, “Never in my life have I seen anything so beautiful.”

De Lesseps too surveyed the scene from this pinnacle of elation. In recognition of his work on the canal, he received the Grand Cross of the Legion of Honor, the highest tribute possible, as well as the khedive’s Grand Cordon of the Order of Osmanie. Austria and Italy also bestowed crosses and cordons on him. As soon as this many-day celebration ended, he would leave to meet a twenty-year-old woman, a beauty forty-four years his junior, to whom he had been writing love letters. They would marry and have twelve children together.

More important than the honors on this day, de Lesseps had won a position in history, a claim to immortality that all ambitious men and women of the time coveted.

As one of the speakers proclaimed: “The history of the world has reached one of its most glorious stages. As in the past chronology was divided between the centuries before and after the discovery of America, so the chronology of the future will say: ‘This was before or after the Orient and Occident met across the half-open flank of Egypt; this was before or after the 16th of November, 1869; this was before or after the opening of the Suez Canal. . . .’

“Let us declare the name of this man who belongs to History. . . . Let us declare to all the world that France, which is far off but by no means absent, is proud and content in her son. . . . In this nineteenth century will this name pass, which I am about to utter to the four winds of heaven, the name of Ferdinand de Lesseps.”

In that moment, the gauntlet lay at Bartholdi’s feet. What was the use of a man’s life if he did not craft such marvels in the world? What was the purpose of life if not to astound?

That December, in the dark sky between 3 a.m. and 4 a.m., a full mirage of Paris floated above the city in a confluence of warm and cold air, which made it appear that perfect gardens and boulevards drifted just above the Seine, just above Notre Dame.

Later, in the spring, the northern lights bloomed so vividly, in rays of pink and blue and green, that they appeared like spikes in an immense luminous crown.

4
War and Garibaldi

In 1870, Prince Leopold, cousin of King William I of Prussia, decided he wished to fill the vacant throne of Spain. The post had essentially been unoccupied since the revolution of 1868, which overthrew Queen Isabella II. The Spanish leaders in government were searching for a monarch who would abide by the constitution. Napoléon III of France did not care for the idea of Leopold on the throne and pressured him to drop his bid. He had no desire to see Prussian power flanking France on two sides.

Prince Leopold acquiesced in Napoléon III’s request. Napoléon took his demands one step further. He sent his ambassador to visit King William, who was on vacation in the German spa town of Ems.

As the king strolled through the park one July morning, the French ambassador lingered at a point that the king would assuredly pass, then stopped him and, “in a very importunate manner,” according to the king, demanded he authorize a telegram in which he promised for perpetuity that no member of his family would ever attempt to fill the Spanish kingship.

The king dismissed the request as silly. No one could promise something like this. He had heard nothing about another family member wanting to fill the post, but could not make empty promises about the future.

After the two men parted, King William, on the advice of his ministers, sent an officer to inform the relevant parties that he would have no further communication with the French ambassador.

At this point, the diplomats of both countries entered into a game of international “telephone” with extraordinarily high stakes. Bismarck released to the press a version of the exchange in the park leaving off the Prussian king’s explanation for why such a promise would be foolish, allowing readers no insight into his (reasonable) objections. A French translation made the exchange look still more unwarranted, casting the French ambassador in a gentler light—he “asked” rather than “demanded”—and making the king sound more dismissive.

The account appeared in newspapers on July 14. Five days later, Napoléon III declared war on Prussia. France insisted it had been provoked, but even the American ambassador John Bigelow thought France had lost its head. “The old King of Prussia shed tears when, on his return from Ems, the dispatch announcing the declaration of war by France was handed to him. And I myself witnessed the unaffected and tearful emotion with which the helmeted old warrior read his address at the opening of his parliament.”

Napoléon III assumed he had enough forces to defeat the Prussians, who had gained considerable might in recent years, including the mutual defense agreements forged with greater Germany; not only Prussia but those territories would join the fight. Parisians, caught up in the same delusion, roamed the streets, shouting, “To Berlin! To Berlin!” and applauded the city’s parading troops, the nation’s best soldiers. Even Édouard Laboulaye endorsed the aggression. Beyond the city walls, though, were the stock of France’s army, men from small towns who might occasionally shoot a pheasant or fire a hearth, but were untrained and unequipped to fight.

Bartholdi knew rural France well and mistrusted the preparations beyond Paris. Since 1852, all Frenchmen ages twenty-five to fifty knew they could be summoned to service for the National Guard, so able bodies were not the problem. Bartholdi, at age thirty-six, would be one of them. Certainly he had seen Ary Scheffer set aside paintbrush and chisel to fight when called upon. Rather than skirt the threat of bloodshed, artists rallied to such heroics. Edgar Degas, who exhibited regularly in the Salon, and Édouard Manet, who had already exhibited his
Dejeuner sur l’Herbe
and
Olympia,
joined now to defend the capital. Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the restorer of Notre Dame, and one of Bartholdi’s former instructors, served as a military engineer to the emperor.

Bartholdi would have preferred to defend Paris, along with his friends, but “Abou-Portant,” Mister Close Range, had his poor mother to worry over. In Colmar, sixty-nine-year-old Charlotte lived only a few miles from the Prussian border. She was still suffering the pain of Charles’s debts and internment and would not be likely to weather the stress of a war without Auguste.

Bartholdi also had practical reasons for wanting to serve in Colmar. His paltry finances meant he couldn’t endure a long period without work, particularly if there were to be a siege of Paris, which everyone expected if the Prussians were not defeated first.

When news reached Paris on August 2 that the French had made their first attack on the Prussians at Saarbrücken, just across the border, Bartholdi applied to go to the front. On August 13 he received an appointment to serve as captain to the major general of the Seine, obtaining a special charge to organize the national guard at Colmar. He did not leave for Colmar right away, however. He appeared to think the war would unfold slowly.

Unfortunately, Napoléon III was inexperienced in military strategy and decided to lead his troops to Sedan. He met with prompt capture.

On September 2, he sent a telegram to Eugénie: “My dear Eugénie, I cannot tell you what I have suffered and am suffering. We made a march contrary to all rules and to common sense: it was bound to lead to a catastrophe and that is complete.” Seventeen thousand Frenchmen had been killed, twenty-one thousand captured. “I would rather have died than witness such a disastrous capitulation,” he went on, “and yet, things being as they are, it was the only way of avoiding the slaughter of 60,000 men. . . . I have just seen the King [of Prussia]. There were tears in his eyes when he spoke of the sorrow I must be feeling. He has put at my disposal one of his chateaux near Hesse-Cassel. But what does it matter where I go? Adieu: I embrace you tenderly.”

Observers assumed such a defeat would require France to capitulate. The French were not so willing to surrender. On September 4, the Government of National Defense announced its new authority as rulers of France. With one stroke, this new government simply made the emperor meaningless; his captivity changed nothing about the war since he no longer could be considered ruler of France. In other words, by changing leaders, the French had left the Prussians in the awkward position of guarding a man with no formal role. Parisian mobs rejoiced and descended on the palace where Eugénie and her cousin, de Lesseps, intended to share a luncheon. The empress escaped through a secret passage in the adjoining Louvre and hid for a night at her American dentist’s house before rushing to safety in London.

Traditionally, early September in Colmar is the time of the grape harvest, when all able bodies head to the fields before the sharp cold of the region sets in. Bartholdi returned to his storybook village of nearly twenty-four thousand with the mission of transforming it into an iron defense against the ferocious Badois, the natives of Baden, and Prussians, who were fighting together owing to their mutual defense agreements.