Lightning Man_ The Accursed Life of Samuel F. B. Morse - Kenneth Silverman [56]
Morse’s journey to Paris, in mid-September, turned out to be even more harrowing than his flight from Rome. Moving north through Switzerland and Germany, sketching mountains along the way, he learned that he would not be allowed to enter France. The French government had established a cordon sanitaire at the German border, hoping to protect the country from a cholera epidemic advancing from Asia through eastern Europe. A fellow passenger on Morse’s diligence, a young French-speaking German officer, offered to get him into France by sharing the expense of a well-placed tip (douceur) at the blockade.
Morse went along with the plan, which to his understanding involved little more than a routine bribe. One dark cloudy daybreak he found himself descending from the coach and following the officer and a guide through plowed fields wet with rain, while the diligence sped on with his luggage. He asked where they were going, but received in reply only the caution to go softly. “It then for the first time,” he wrote later, “flashed across my mind that we had undertaken an unlawful and very hazardous enterprize that of running by the cordon.”
Terrified of being arrested or shot, Morse managed to sneak across the frontier. He was rejoined by the diligence, which had gone through customs without him.
Two trials remained, however, the more difficult one a psychological trial. When the diligence stopped at a small village to change horses, some gendarmes asked Morse for his papers. He realized that his passport contained no signature verifying that he had officially been granted entry into France. He presented it, fearful that the omission would be discovered. But the much-traveled document contained the signatures of so many guards and customs officers that the puzzled policeman let it through.
Further on toward Paris, at Metz, Morse’s passport was demanded again. This time it was taken to the station-house for examination. Guiltily recalling the douceur, the guide, the slinking around at daybreak, he felt doomed. “The more I reflect the more I regret the step I have been ignorantly led to take,” he wrote, “and shall be much surprized if I am not yet a sufferer for it.” Instead, the police gave him a provisional passport to Paris. Just in time. His conscience had been telling him to confess that he had crossed the border illegally.
Paris at the time Morse returned was in some ways still a medieval city, a maze of narrow winding streets, wet and smelly from open sewers that ran in the gutters. Many of its three-quarters of a million inhabitants lived in crowded tenements, fetched their water from public fountains, endured the droppings of the city’s tens of thousands of horses. Yet the Napoleonic triumphal arches proclaimed the recent past and there were signs of the future as well—department stores, an elegant new Bourse, experiments in street lighting by gas.
During his year in Paris, Morse enjoyed the company of a politically engaged artistic and social circle. He took rooms at 29 rue de Turenne, a house owned by a comtesse, whose distinguished friends he met. Caustic Horatio Greenough lived there for two months, sculpting a bust of the Marquis de Lafayette although disdainful of the “frippery” of Paris and unimpressed by French taste: “They are in Art but the slaves of fashion.” Morse spent time with him, “now talking seriously,” as Greenough put it, “and now letting ding anyhow.” Ding as they would, Morse was miffed when Greenough sent home a statue for exhibition at Trumbull’s American Academy.
Settled only a few doors from Lafayette’s Paris mansion, Morse got to know the General more intimately than before. Now seventy-five, Lafayette greeted him warmly, the complexion of his massive face that of a vigorous young man. Morse had preserved with “religious care” letters to Jedediah from George Washington; he locked away letters from Lafayette to himself with similar reverence for their “high moral