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EIGHTEEN

Visions of Receding Glory

(1866–1872)

IT REFRESHED MORSE to be once again in France. Lafayette, Arago, and other notables had always received him warmly; the nation had formally adopted his telegraph system; the Emperor himself had arranged his indemnity from the other European states. His appearance marked him for attention, a fact recorded in the bearded bemedaled image of himself he referred to as the “family photograph portrait.” * His family had prodded him to have it taken, he often said. Some justification was needed. As a much younger man he had said he despised the “artificial distinctions” of the Old World, the “ribbons, and garters and crosses and other gewgaws that please the great babies of Europe.” Now, however, when sending out copies of the picture he explained in detail the decorations on his chest, sometimes listing the many other honors he had received as well, as if relishing to simply name them all.

The Abrahamic beard was a recent growth—a breastbone-length frizzy white cloud declaring settled strength, wisdom, and, of course, old age. He felt close to the end of his journey, “daily more weaned from earth, and have my nightly & daily thoughts more & more fixed upon him alone who is my trust, my Savior, my Life.” Neuralgia sometimes ached his face and head, but his five-foot-ten frame was still erect, his voice strong. His handwriting was tremorless, having retained for fifty years its crisp, steel-plate elegance.

Morse had always particularly loved Paris, now a city of nearly two million inhabitants, “the great centre of the world,” he called it. He found the place dramatically transformed since his last visit. Baron Georges Eugène Haussmann, the prefect of Paris, had overseen the destruction of the crowded medieval slums and open sewers, replacing them with handsome public spaces and sweeping tree-lined boulevards. “I used to think it the dirtiest city in Europe; now it is the cleanest.” And very grand. There were luxurious hotels, the nearly completed Théâtre de l’Opéra, the airy pavilions of Les Halles—everywhere “magnificent improvements in the multitude and beauty of the avenues and buildings.”

Morse lent himself to the style of the new Metropolis. He rented the entire third floor of a six-story house at no. 10 avenue du Roi de Rome, an expensive neighborhood of embassies and fine private homes near the Arc de Triomphe. The cream-colored stone building, only a year old, was exquisitely ornamented with wrought-iron balconies, classical columns, and sculpted figures. Morse’s apartment, elegantly furnished, provided him and his family a living room, two parlors, four bedrooms, and a dining room capable of seating twelve. There were three additional rooms for servants, which he presumably filled after engaging a valet, cook, chambermaid, and seamstress. And the rental entitled him to store his wine in the building’s cellar. “So far as material comfort is concerned,” he decided, “there is no place in the world that can equal Paris.”

Morse enjoyed playing the part of an haut bourgeois. With Sarah and the children he often drove to the Bois de Boulogne in a two-horse barouche. They circled the lake, greeting friends and ogling the celebrities whose afternoon rides made the tour du lac a great public spectacle. They spent a “quite gay” winter attending Baron Haussmann’s fete at the Hôtel de Ville and court balls at the Tuileries, mingling with princes and princesses, ex-queens, ambassadors, “the highest Society in the world.” As he did in similar circumstances, he reasoned away the moral and political distance he had traveled from being the son of a Calvinist minister, born in the shadow of Bunker’s Hill, to being a grandee in the flamboyant Paris of the Second Empire. “The evil does not lie in assembling in splendid rooms, and in wearing rich apparel,” he reflected, “but in so setting the heart upon such scenes as to have no room there for the more substantial pleasures of ordinary