The Champlain tercentenary

by New York . Lake Champlain Tercentenary Commission; Henry Wayland Hill

II. THE ALLEGORICAL BUST, “LA FRANCE,” AND THE PERSONNEL AND MISSION OF THE FRENCH DELEGATION

As the memorials neared completion, it was learned through His Excellency, Jean Adrien Antoine Jules Jusserand, the French Ambassador, that His Excellency, Clément Armand Fallières, President of the Republic of France, and the French people were raising funds to purchase and present to the Lake Champlain Tercentenary Commissions, which was to become a part of the Champlain memorial at Crown Point Forts, an allegorical bust by one of their noted sculptors. The cordial relations existing between the people of France and the people of America, as a result of the Champlain Tercentenary Celebration, awakened in the two peoples something of that friendship, which naturally springs from the pursuit of common purposes, similar ideals and like humanitarian impulses. The Tercentenary tributes to the God-fearing Champlain, whose noble qualities of mind and heart and whose unrequited services to mankind afford the occasion for the intermingling of the two races and the interchange of expressions of good will and cordial greetings, touched the hearts of the French people as nothing else had done, since the time when the people of this country bestowed their tributes on that other distinguished Frenchman and patriot, Marquis de Lafayette, whose services to this nation have ever since provoked the praises of our countrymen. This appears from what followed.

Through the columns of Le Figaro of December 22, 1911, His Excellency, Albert Auguste Gabriel Hanotaux, of the French Academy and President of the Franco-American Committee, which assumed the undertaking of procuring the Rodin allegorical bust, “La France,” appealed to the people of France to support the Committee in its undertaking. In the course of this appeal (rendered into English), he said:

Of the three names (Champlain, Jacques de Liniers and F. de Lesseps), perhaps the greatest is that of Champlain. He was at once both founder and originator. Canada owes its existence to him. Quebec celebrated three years ago the memory of the man who having full consciousness of what he did placed the first stone of the French metropolis in America. He had also “great plans and vast thoughts.” A man of action, he was a man of imagination. He dreamed of the establishment for the benefit of France, of an immense dominion covering the American continent from Canada to Louisiana and Florida, through the valley of the Mississippi. This was neither more nor less than the idea of the future Republic of the United States, but in Champlain’s thought it was a matter of a French America. On the very first page of his book (now so rare and so much sought for by book-lovers), a book which he dedicated to the Cardinal Richelieu, the only one capable of comprehending him, Champlain explains his thought in terms of thrilling clearness. “It is necessary,” he wrote in 1632, “that under the reign of King Louis the Just, France beholds herself enriched with a country, the extent of which exceeds sixteen hundred leagues in length and more than five hundred in width, and that in a continent which leaves nothing to be desired in the bounty of its lands and in the profit which can be drawn from them, both for foreign commerce and for the delights of life therein. The communication of the great rivers and lakes, which are like seas stretching across these countries, affords so great facility for all discoverers in the remote regions that one can go to the seas of the west, of the east, of the far north, or even to the south.” When I cited this same page in 1898, I added: “Sixteen hundred leagues by five hundred! These are proportions over which one can now labor only in Africa.”

No doubt the great cities which will one day grow up on the banks of the Sangha, of the Oubanghi, and of the Congo, will celebrate Brazza, even as the United States prepare to glorify Champlain.

Some months ago our Ambassador at Washington, M. J. J. Jusserand, called the attention of the Minister of Foreign Affairs to the frequency of French commemorations in the United States. He mentioned especially the approaching erection on the borders of Lake Champlain of a monument consecrated to the memory of our compatriot and he asked the Government to act so that France would not be “absent” from these exercises so honorable to her. The Minister of Foreign Affairs laid the matter before the Franco-American Committee, who in turn makes its appeal to the public.

It is not desirable, indeed it is not proper that France absolutely ignore what is being done for her. Can she forget past services? Nations have the right to be ungrateful, but they cannot neglect courtesies—that would be inexcusable. A lack of good manners is worse than a fault. Since North America, or, to speak more exactly, the states of New York and Vermont, wish to remember, would we not be obstinate to forget?

The monument under construction is admirably adapted to the place and to the claims of the man, which it is designed to celebrate. There is at the extremity of the lake discovered by Champlain, and which bears his name, a lighthouse, throwing its rays over the waters of which, he, first of Europeans, contemplated the immense extent, empty and wild, and which are now traversed by the fleet of great steamboats, the region peopled by a swarm of men. A solid mass of masonry, a crown of columns bearing a terrace, and above all the lantern of the lighthouse, these are from base to summit the members of this powerful architecture. From the mass of masonry rises a rostrum, beneath which Champlain stands like a pilot.

What can France do? What should she do? What stone worthy of her can she bring to the monument? There is but one solution. It is that this stone must be precious.... We are at the house of Rodin. It is known how popular his name is in America. The great sculptor whose renown extends over the world has nowhere more ardent admirers. We hasten through the great rooms of the Hotel Biron. These great bare halls, full of the genius from which administrative barbarism is undertaking to shut out the glory, and among so many masterpieces where admiration exhausts itself, we discover (that is the true word, for the remarkable modesty of the master scarcely pointed it out to us) a bronze bust: France. Imagine the emotion of this finding! We sought an image, a symbol, I may say a signature of our country, to send out there and we find France herself, a darling France, full of grace, of spirit and of courage; a young French woman to the sensitive nostrils, to the full cheeks; to the chin, delicate and obstinate, to the glance, loyal, headstrong and brave; a young woman in whom are summed up our Clotilde, our Blanche, our Henriette and our Jeanne, crowned with her tresses as with a helmet, armed with her attire as with a cuirass. We sought for a French conception and we find the very image of France. It is this figure we wish to send out there, that it may be placed near the monument of Champlain. In front of the mass of masonry, a light construction, an “edicule,” which will be like a stone shrine sheltering and isolating the bust. And thus French art will carry its offering simply and beautifully, associating it with the powerful American commemoration.