THE REMINISCENCES OF AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS, ONE OF THE FIRST MEMBERS OF THE SOCIETY, EDITED BY HIS SON, HOMER SAINT-GAUDENS, AND PUBLISHED THROUGH THE COURTESY OF THE CENTURY MAGAZINE.
My father began his reminiscences in the early spring of 1906, while recovering from a surgical operation in the Corey Hill Hospital of Brookline, Massachusetts. As he had spent a most active life, he chafed at that confinement until this scheme was devised to pass his hours; whereupon, to his great amusement, he dictated the first quarter of the work. Later, after his return to Windsor, when, to his bitter disappointment, he found that he could not for any length of time remain on his feet to model, he continued to write at odd moments up to the middle of the summer.
The contents of my father’s text itself I have left intact, save where exceptionally rough; but the order of thought and anecdote, which was badly tangled, owing to the lack of revision, I have shifted back and forth into a semblance of methodical progression.
My father begins:
“Reminiscences are more likely to be tiresome than otherwise to the readers of later generations; but among the consoling pleasures that appear over the horizon as years advance is that of rambling away about one’s past....
“I was born March 1, 1848, in Dublin, Ireland, near 37 Charlemount Street. If that is not the house, no doubt the record in the nearest Catholic church would give the number.”
My uncle, Mr. Louis Saint-Gaudens, who visited Dublin in the summer of 1890, found the building at number 35, near the head of Charlemount Street and not far from a bridge built over the canal which runs by the southeastern part of the city. There, under the trees that line the banks and in sight of the Wicklow Hills, my father as a baby must have been carried by my grandmother.
The reminiscences continue:
“My mother’s maiden name was Mary McGuiness. Of her ancestry I know nothing except that her mother was married twice, the second time to a veteran of the Napoleonic wars.”
My father’s maternal grandmother’s name was Daly. She married Arthur McGuiness, of whom it is only recalled that he worked in the Dublin plaster mills and that he was a Freemason. Neither of the couple lived to be old. Their daughter Mary McGuiness was born to them at Bally Mahon, County Longford.
To return to the autobiography:
“Of my mother’s family the only member of which I have had a glimpse was her brother George McGuiness, whom I saw in Forsyth Street. I have a daguerreotype of his delightfully kind and extremely homely face—a face like a benediction, as I have heard some one describe it. He, of all men, became the owner of two slaves in the South, and, judging from a daguerreotype, married an equally homely and kindly-looking woman. He was in some way connected with the navy yard at Pensacola. The war cut off all further communication with him.
“Of my father’s birth and ancestry I am as ignorant as of my mother’s, knowing only that his father was a soldier under Napoleon, who died comparatively young and suddenly after what I suspect was a gorgeous spree.”
My father’s paternal grandfather was called André Saint-Gaudens. His wife’s maiden name was Boy. Tradition has it that she sold butter and eggs in the market-place at Aspet, and that she became a miser, leaving under her bed upon her death the conventional box crammed with gold pieces.
The reminiscences continue:
“My father’s full name was Bernard Paul Ernest Saint-Gaudens; Bernard Paul ‘Honeste,’ if you please, he called it later in life; it sounded nicer. He was born in the little village of Aspet, about fifty miles from Toulouse, at the foot of the Pyrenees, five miles south of the town of Saint-Gaudens, in the arrondissement of Saint-Gaudens, in the department of the Haute-Garonne, a most beautiful country, as the many searchers for health at the baths of Bagnères-de-Luchon know.”...
Three years my grandfather passed in London and, later, seven years in Dublin before he met his future wife in the shoe store for which he made shoes and where she did the binding of slippers. There, previous to my father’s birth, two sons, George and Louis, died, George at the age of six, and Louis in infancy. But when my father was six months old, “red-headed, whopper-jawed, and hopeful,” as he would repeat, the famine in Ireland compelled his parents to go with him to America, setting out from Liverpool, England, in the sailing-ship Desdemona.
The autobiography goes on:
“Father told me that an overcrowded passenger-list prevented his leaving Dublin with my mother, with me at her breast, in a ship named the Star of the West that burned at sea during the trip. But because he told me this does not mean that it was so. His Gascon imagination could give character or make beauty wherever these qualities were necessary to add interest to what he was saying.
“They landed at Boston town probably in September, 1848, he a short, stocky, bullet-headed, enthusiastic young man of about thirty, with dark hair cf reddish tendencies and a light red mustache, she of his height, with the typical long, generous, loving Irish face, with wavy black hair, a few years his junior, and ‘the most beautiful girl in the world,’ as he used to say.
“Leaving mother in Boston,—where, by the way, I am beginning this account in the hospital fifty-six years afterward,—he started to find work in New York. In six weeks he sent for her. He said we first lived in Duane Street. Of this I knew nothing.
“From there we went to a house on the west side of Forsyth Street, probably near Houston Street, where now is the bronze foundry in which the statue of Peter Cooper which I modeled was cast forty-five years later. There my brother Andrew was born on Hallowe’en in 1850 or 1851, and there I made the beginning of my conscious life.
FRANCIS I. McCANNA, ESQ.,
of Providence, R. I.
A Valued Member of the Society.
“The beginnings of my father’s business were peculiar, since what interested him infinitely more than his store were the two or three societies to which he belonged and of which he was generally the ‘Grand Panjandrum.’ There were constant meetings of committees and sub-committees when there were not general ones. The principal society was the ‘Union Fraternelle Française,’ a mutual-benefit affair of which he was one of the founders and for many years the leading figure.”
My grandfather enjoyed as well the making of speeches at Irish festivals, where he would round off his conclusions with spirited perorations in the Gaelic tongue. Also he became an abolitionist, a “Black Republican,” during the Civil War; while, to involve matters still further, he was a Freemason who insisted on associating with the Negro Freemasons, and presiding at their initiations. The white Freemasons thereupon blacklisted him.
The reminiscences say of him:
“In the daytime, notwithstanding mother’s gentle pleadings, instead of preparing work, he was constantly writing letters about these societies, all naturally to the serious detriment of his affairs.
“Nevertheless, for so small an establishment, father had an extraordinary clientèle, embracing the names of most of the principal families in New York—Governor Morgan, General Dix, some of the Astors, Belmonts and the wife of General Daniel E. Sickles.”
Horace Greeley also was a steady purchaser, for he delighted to wrangle with this argumentative shoemaker upon the philosophy of footwear.
The reminiscences continue:
“No doubt those who came were attracted by my father’s picturesque personality, as well as by the fact that at that time everything French was the fashion, and by the steadiness of his assurance as to the superiority and beauty of his productions. His sign, ‘French Ladies’ Boots and Shoes,’ must have been irresistible when taken together with the wonderfully complex mixture of his fierce French accent and Irish brogue. This bewildering language was just as bad at the end of fifty years as when he first landed. In the family he spoke English to mother and French to the three boys; we spoke English to mother and French to him; mother spoke English to all of us.”
Moreover, further to adorn his discourse, my grandfather constantly embroidered his remarks with fantastic proverbs of uncertain and international origin. “As much use as a mustard plaster on a wooden leg,” he would say; or, “Sorry as a dog at his father’s funeral”; or “As handy with his hands as a pig with his tail”; or “A cross before a dead man”; or (and this my father repeated after him through all his life) “What you are saying and nothing at all is the same thing.”
“In addition, close to that time my mother’s cousin, John Daly, a marine on one of the United States government ships, paid us a visit, when he read to us in papers brought from Honolulu and showed us great walrus teeth that had come from the Pacific. And finally I can see myself among the other children who attended the Sunday school of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Elizabeth Street.”