Born in Dublin, Ireland, 1848
Died in Cornish, New Hampshire, 1907
In a little house in Dublin, Ireland, on March 1, 1848, was born Augustus Saint-Gaudens. There was nothing in the humble surroundings which first greeted his eyes to mark the baby as in any way different from the many other babies who may have been born on the same first day of March in the ancient Irish city.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens, however, inherited from his father and mother something far greater than wealth or name, for in their sturdy, honest blood he found that indefinable thing called “character,” which, throughout his life, led him steadily forward along the straight path to fame and honor. From his parents he also inherited the qualities which are inherent in a romantic people; for his father was born in France, in the little village of Aspet at the foot of the Pyrenees, and his mother, whose maiden name was Mary McGuiness, gave him the love of the beautiful which belongs to Ireland. But perhaps, after all, his parents gave him a like inheritance, for Ireland is an old nation into which in centuries past has been infused the blood of the proudest families of France—Irish by birth and French by inheritance, he might be called.
The elder Saint-Gaudens was a shoemaker, and he had met the mother of the future Augustus in the shoe store for which he made shoes and where she did the binding of slippers. When Augustus was but a few months old his parents emigrated to the United States and in the month of September in the year of his birth he landed in the city of Boston, a place which in later years became deeply identified with his activities.
From Boston the little family proceeded to New York, where Bernard Saint-Gaudens, the father, set up his small business and secured humble lodging nearby for his family. And here the young Augustus made the beginning of his conscious life, in which, of early memories, most vivid were the “delightful reminiscences of the smell of cake in the bakery at the corner of the street, and of the stewed peaches of the German family in the same house.”
Above the door of the shop hung the sign “French Ladies’ Boots and Shoes”; and within, the shoemaker, with his “wonderfully complex mixture of French accent and Irish brogue,” varied his occupation of making shoes with endless duties which he undertook as the organizer and leading figure in several societies which flourished in the French colony of the city. Customers came readily to the little shop, for its proprietor was an able workman, despite certain agreeable eccentricities, and the business, growing steadily, provided an adequate, if simple, upbringing for Augustus and his two brothers.
Copyright, 1915, by de W. C. Ward
Augustus Saint-Gaudens (Signature)
Many are the memories of those early days, memories of a wholesome and normal boyhood. There are memories of fires, of street-fights with boys of other neighborhoods, of school-days, of a never-to-be-forgotten excursion to the country, of the delight of his first reading of “Robinson Crusoe,” and of the famous actress Rachel playing “Virginia” in Niblo’s Garden. And there are memories of boyhood loves, memories all that “pass across the field of my vision like ships that appear through the mist for a moment and disappear.”