Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty Read Free

earlier, Jean-Charles had fallen ill with a disturbing but unnamed malady, and in a state of worry drafted a will. Should he die, he stated, he expected that Charlotte would not remarry; she would put her children’s welfare above all else. He half-scolded himself on those pages for expecting that outcome. But the illness had passed, and with it, discussions of wills or death.
    That’s why it must have seemed strange that, without preamble, Jean-Charles asked Charlotte: “Since you like it so much here, don’t you want to try to walk alone? In this old world, you must be prepared and expect everything. Learn, I pray you, to be self-sufficient.”
    The words chilled her, she would later report in a letter. Charlotte had thought her dear husband had gotten over his illness. This mysterious statement seemed a warning that he might vanish and she would have to continue on by herself.
    Four days later, Jean-Charles fell ill. “This was the last of the most beautiful nights of my life,” Charlotte wrote.
    Charlotte summoned doctors—first, a regular physician, and then a homeopath—to help her husband. Nothing worked, and she blamed the homeopathic treatments for worsening Jean-Charles’s condition and ruining his sleep, not allowing him even one full night of rest in the end.
    On August 16, 1836, Jean-Charles died. Over a six-year period, Charlotte had lost two children and her one true love. Charlotte’s home was now empty but for her two children—ages seven and two, the “two marmosets,” as their parents had affectionately called them.
    Jean-Charles’s revised will, which had been made out four months before his death, reconsidered the idea of Charlotte’s finding another husband after he was gone. He had decided that she might think it best to marry another in the pursuit of happiness, though if she did so, his fortune would pass to the children. If the second marriage were unhappy, his children were asked to welcome Charlotte and any children from her second marriage into their homes “even if she desires to take care of them, but especially not to let their mother want for anything, to give her an annual pension of three thousand francs, besides what she already owns, and to surround her and respect her with love. . . . I beg them, out of the love I have for them and the love they owe me, and if my prayers and orders in this regard would be ignored, they know that they will incur my fatherly curse.”
    Charlotte threw herself with vigor into the raising of her sons. In a letter to Jacques-Frédéric Bartholdi, her late husband’s uncle in Paris, she outlined the differences between her two sons, characteristics that would flourish in their future selves. “They are very different both physically and mentally,” she explained, “and one cannot recognize them as brothers except for the mutual affection they have for each other. The ‘eldest’ [Charles] will be six the first of November, next Tuesday. He is not very big for his age, but for the past two years he has been in very good health. He has blond hair and blue eyes, and his light complexion makes him seem rather delicate. His figure is very sweet and open . . . this makes his instruction and education easy to navigate.
    “He is excessively sensitive, and we will have to prepare him to know a lot of disappointment in the world. The good child cannot bear the weight of any idea of evil. One day we told him about a fable, the character and the habits of wolves. He finished by crying, ‘Mother, aren’t there also good wolves?’”
    About Auguste, she wrote: “I will discuss the second child, who is two and a half years and three months old. His body is very strong and robust, and his eyes and complexion and hair are all black. He is a very good child, very talkative. His faculties are fairly developed for his age, but his character needs to be guided a little differently from that of the older child, it will be a little more difficult. This child