Liberty's Torch by Elizabeth Mitchell

Author:Elizabeth Mitchell [Mitchell, Elizabeth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2014-05-14T16:00:00+00:00

In 1884, one could walk down rue de Vigny toward boulevard de Courcelles and hear hammers ringing in the street. In Parc Monceau, children chased pigeons beside the flower beds. Only a few blocks away a gargantuan copper figure towered over the six-story houses, looking as if she might step out to stomp the flowers, flatten the pigeons, and loft the children to her shoulders. Liberty could now fully stand on her own.

If it was between noon and five Monday through Thursday, you could pay for a ticket to see her. If you were a subscriber, or a student of the École des Beaux-Arts, you could visit free on Thursdays and Sundays.

You entered the statue through the back foot, which was tilted up in the act of stepping forward. A temporary wooden staircase would carry you up to her chest, where you then either climbed to the head, or made an intrepid journey up the high staircase branching into the arm and the torch’s balcony.

With the arm moving slightly in the breeze, you would walk through the doorway into the clear air and see all of Paris below. Its roofs appeared “as if they had been mown like grass with the scythe, and rising out of them, sharp and clear, the Panthéon, the Invalides, St. Clothilde, St. Sulpice, Notre Dame, L’Etoile and the Trocadero towers; then still further beyond, to bound the view, blue sky and the light cirrus clouds that in the distance seem to be distinctly lower than the spectator’s standpoint.”

This was the highest anyone had ever stood in Paris, save in the basket of a balloon.

If a visitor tired of touring the statue, he or she might simply gaze upon the other people who had flocked there, a motley crew, including the workmen in caps and blouses, art students, and politicians. Every now and again, a Frenchman would find himself moved to speechify about America. In some cases, Americans overhearing the oratory might be glad that their country did not exist as described. “But the impressionable hearers drink in the praises of the ideal republic with eagerness,” wrote a reporter, “and reward the speaker with cries of ‘Vive la Liberté!’ ‘Vive la Republique Américaine!’”

On your descent, you could buy a souvenir—a fragment of metal, or an engraving (of nearly any size or quality) depicting the statue.

People went in droves to visit, particularly on Sunday, which a reporter pointed out “is the Parisian holiday for all sorts of diversions from sightseeing to a revolution.” Bartholdi estimated that about three hundred thousand people visited the Gaget studio while the statue was being worked on, or later, as Liberty waited for America to receive her. Bartholdi kept her standing whole in the courtyard, her bright orangey copper turning a slightly darker brownish red with the weather. He used the income from the ticket purchases to finance the statue’s completion. Liberty was now ready for her passage to America.

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