IV. BANQUET AT THE WALDORF-ASTORIA HOTEL, NEW YORK CITY, MAY 1, 1912, AND PRESENTATION OF RODIN BUST “LA FRANCE”
All the members of the delegation returned to New York in the afternoon to attend the principal State banquet tendered to them under the auspices of the Lake Champlain Association and the Tercentenary Commissions of New York and Vermont at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in the evening of May 1, 1912. The Astor gallery of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel where the dinner was served, was beautifully decorated with flowers and the flags of the two nations, intertwined, emblematic of the intimate friendship existing between France and the United States. Elaborate and beautifully designed menu cards with photographs of the Champlain memorials and with the names of the French delegation were provided and all other ante-prandial arrangements had been carefully looked after by the Hon. Frank S. Witherbee and Percival Wilds, the president and secretary of the Lake Champlain Association, and by Hon. Howland Pell of the New York Tercentenary Commission, to all of whom much credit is due for the success of the banquet.
* * * * * Just in time to banquet
The illustrious company assembled here. * * *
On the dais were seated thirty-one of the distinguished guests, including President John H. Finley of the College of the City of New York, the Toastmaster, Ambassador Jusserand, Attorney-General George W. Wickersham, representing the President of the United States, General Horace Porter, former Ambassador to France, Hon. Robert Bacon, former Ambassador to France, Lieutenant-Governor Thomas F. Conway, Mayor William J. Gaynor, Hon. A. Barton Hepburn, members of the French delegation, some members of the Lake Champlain Tercentenary Commissions and others. The other members of the Tercentenary Commissions and the other guests were grouped around thirty-two separate tables, and among them were General Stewart L. Woodford, former Ambassador to Spain, Governor John A. Mead of Vermont, Hon. Francis Lynde Stetson, General Charles Davis, Adjutant-General William Verbeck, Hon. J. G. McCullough, Hon. Frank S. Witherbee, Hon. Henry W. Taft, Hon. Charles B. Alexander, Hon. McDougall Hawkes, Hon. William A. Clark, Stephen H. P. Pell, Esq., Philip Livingston, T. J. Oakley Rhinelander, Hon. Peter Barlow, Hon. Francis K. Pendleton, Hon. Rhinelander Waldo, Hon. Bird S. Coler, A. Eugene Gallatin, Hon. Edward W. Hatch, Hon. Chester B. McLaughlin, Bashford A. Dean, Esq., Hon. John F. O’Brien, Hon. Darwin P. Kingsley, Hon. Frederic R. Coudert, Dr. Lewis Francis, Viscount de Jean, Count Jacques de Portales, Count Henri de Saint Seine, Count de La Fayette, M. Étienne Marie Louis Lanel, Hon. Edward H. Butler, William P. Northrup and others.
The three hundred guests represented many of the historic families of France and America, which had played an important part in the history of the two countries. It was a notable assemblage and thoroughly representative of the official life, culture and best citizenship of the two nations.
After toasts to the President of the United States and to the President of France, the band played The Star Spangled Banner and La Marseillaise. Other national airs of France and the United States interspersed the speeches and were productive of convivial feeling.
President Finley had before him on the table the keystone taken from over the door of the birthplace of Samuel Champlain in Brouage. It was encircled by the French flags on the table. His illuminating and charming articles on “The French in the Heart of America,” commencing in Scribner’s Magazine for September, 1912, and continuing in succeeding numbers of that periodical, show the wide extent of the French settlements in America and something of America’s indebtedness to France.
Address of President John H. Finley
My selection (by those representing the two Champlain Tercentenary Commissions and by the Champlain Association, to whose officers the success of this great occasion is to be credited)—my selection for this office to-night is due to no fitness except the degree of my devotion to Champlain and the degree of my personal debt to France. So far as I know, I am the only man in New York, if not in the United States, who has ever made a pilgrimage to Champlain’s birthplace. And no man in America is more grateful to France for his own birthplace. It is not permitted me to speak my devotion to Champlain and my gratitude to France. I will let this silent stone speak for me—this fragment of rock from the coast of France, which was once a keystone in the arch over the doorway of the home in Brouage in which, by tradition, Champlain was born. I have brought it across the sea, in a French vessel, to rebuild it in some monument here or in Canada, or between the two countries. To-night it is garlanded by flowers grown in America—in tribute to that Brouage boy who has made American wildernesses blossom as the rose. And I pour upon its face a libation in the wine of the land for whose glory he dared, as a man, all perils of sea and land and died an exile beneath the gray rock of Quebec, Champlain!