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

witnessing an execution,” a guidebook of the time advised, “must write to M. Heidenreich, 5 Boulevard St. Martin.”
    For several weeks every other year, citizens of all classes crowded the Salon, an exhibition hosted by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the illustrious school for male artists (women were forbidden). The widely distributed catalogs from the exhibit would essentially ordain which artists were notable at that moment, and the event itself became a spectacle. Vernissage —varnishing—came to mean an art opening because painters at the Salon would be shellacking their canvases, hung floor to ceiling in alphabetical order, up to the last moment.
    In the Place de la Concorde an exotic, mysterious pillar had recently been installed, having journeyed from Luxor—a gift from Egypt. On its sides were depicted the fantastic machines that had been used in ancient times to create it. This obelisk reminded artists and explorers of what monumental creation man was capable of achieving. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi would eventually feel its exotic pull, too.
    In January 1844, Charlotte enrolled her boys in the city’s most prestigious secondary school, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a massive temple of learning founded in the Latin Quarter in 1563. The expansive building was the alma mater of such luminaries as Molière, Voltaire, and none other than the most important cultural figure of the period, Victor Hugo.
    Hugo was in his early forties but thought of as a “sublime infant,” as his writing mentor François-René de Chateaubriand had dubbed him—emotional, volatile, almost insane, but charming for his fervor. He was just twenty years old when in recognition of his first volume of poetry he received a donative from King Louis XVIII. He was granted a regular government-bestowed salary after the publication of his first novel and a parade of poetry and prose followed, capped with the monumental success of his Hunchback of Notre Dame in 1831. King Louis-Philippe granted him a peerage, the nation’s highest honor, allowing him to sit with the nation’s lords and decide the country’s fate.
    Hugo could be readily recognized on the boulevards, with his pale, round face and thin, long hair parted to one side. He often wore a look of intense turbulence suggesting he would be quick to get into a brawl, should the need arise. He maintained a complicated stable of mistresses, including one who ended up going to prison for her adultery with him, while he managed to escape charges since peers enjoyed immunity. Hugo was seen as the ideal artist: committed to his craft and wedded to the epic of human life.
    Here, at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one might dream of becoming such a man. Auguste and Charles Bartholdi could meet other boys who would, either through their fathers or on their own, provide professional relationships that would last a lifetime. Auguste and Charles promptly distinguished themselves with their failings.
    “To avoid punishing him too frequently, I am forced to isolate him often,” wrote one teacher about Auguste in his first year, “because he is always disturbing his classmates. . . . He pays no attention to the class exercises.”
    Another instructor complained, “He is weak and unaccustomed to work. His memory needs to be exercised.” The teacher at least offered one consolation. “Other than that, there is no lack of good will or judgment.”
    Auguste sketched exquisite cartoons of his teachers, who wondered if he might fare better living at the school, as most students did, instead of attending as a day student. Yet if he had gone to board at the lycée, he would have missed the extraordinary additional instruction Charlotte arranged in their home or in the nearby ateliers, the workshops, of Paris’s artists.
    There Auguste received lessons from the same artists who exhibited at the Salon or whose work hung in the Louvre. The musician Auguste Franchomme—a friend of Mendelssohn, and the most famous cellist