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

seems to me to carry with him the seed of a man with a strong and resolved character. Sometimes, at this age, one would call that character trait stubbornness, so it will be a matter of shaping that character without crushing it.”
    That she could see such nuances of personality in her sons at so early an age speaks to Charlotte’s intelligence and emotional understanding. Her assessment of Charles and, in particular, Auguste, at less than three years of age, would hold true the rest of their days. As Auguste grew up, he tried to appease Charlotte by proving that her investment in his future, the investment of her whole life, was worthwhile.
    Shaping the character of her boys came to mean focusing intensely on their education in the arts. Charlotte arranged cello lessons for Charles and violin lessons for Auguste. She enrolled them in the new school that had been established by King Louis-Philippe’s government for boys in their village. They took drawing lessons from Martin Rossbach, a Colmar resident who had known their father well enough to paint his portrait before he died.
    The town offered a respectable future for her boys, but the options for them there would be somewhat parochial. They could enjoy a pleasant life, but they would not be likely to make a great mark on the world. In Paris, Jacques-Frédéric Bartholdi enjoyed great prestige as the founder of a bank and fire insurance business. His son was married to Countess Louise-Catherine Walther, an aristocrat well connected in Protestant circles. The beau monde they occupied would have seemed extremely enticing to a widowed mother of two.
    Paris offered dreams, but also danger. The French revolution had ended just before Charlotte was born, leaving behind the memory of half a million French citizens slaughtered across the country, including the guillotining of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. The First Republic oversaw France’s governance for more than a half dozen tumultuous years, until Napoléon Bonaparte rose to power. Charlotte would have spent her youth hearing about the unfolding events of his imperial wars across Europe, Russia, Egypt, and the Caribbean, and his eventual downfall. The year of her son Charles’s birth, Louis-Philippe came to power. In the first years, the working classes revolted and Republicans tried to rise up against his regime. His forces slaughtered eight hundred at the barricades and he continued with his rule. The idea of revolutionary bloodshed in an unstable city was very real. Yet for a boy like Auguste, the child she considered destined for greatness, Paris afforded the greatest possibilities for achievement.
    The family left for the capital in 1843, when Auguste was nine. Upon their arrival, the Bartholdis would have marveled at the immense, state-of-the-art Gare Saint-Lazare, and the Arc de Triomphe in its pristine splendor. Each landmark was less than a decade old. On Sundays, the Louvre was open to the general public. King Louis-Philippe had ordered improvements to the Palais des Tuileries and its garden, as well as construction of new bridges throughout the city. The Hôtel de Ville—Paris’s city hall—had swelled to four times its previous size.
    Charlotte found a home for herself and her boys on rue d’Enfer, Hell Street, where in 1777 a house had been swallowed as the excavations of urban miners gave way. Rue d’Enfer stretched through Montparnasse, just down from rue du Fouarre, described in a guidebook as “one of the most miserable streets in Paris.” Nearby stood the Observatory, a building with a line painted across the floor to mark the terrestrial meridian between the north and south poles. On the roof, an anemometer read the wind and a pluviometer the rain.
    Near the Bartholdi home was the Hospital of Found Children and Orphans. A little farther, across the Barrière d’Enfer, was St.-Jacques, the square where the guillotine had been erected. “Persons curious of inspecting the guillotine, without