Bonfire of the Vanderbilts

2. The Challenge

Chapter Two

The Challenge

Sunday, May 5, 1889, Paris

“Publicly humiliating Cornelius Vanderbilt would be the crowning achievement of my shamelessly unprincipled career,” the older man said.

“And why would you want to do that?” Jules asked.

“Because he’s not only the richest but also the most insufferably self-righteous man in the world.” Jim gulped his liquor and smacked his lips. “Whereas I am an unrepentant sinner who just happens to own Europe’s most notorious scandal sheet. My readers want the high and the mighty knocked down to their level and preferably into the stinking muck. What’s that Balzac novel? A Harlot High and Low! I never read it, but I’m sure it’s my kind of story.”

Just a few hours earlier, getting drunk was far from Julius Stewart’s plan. In fact, before his friend suggested dinner, he’d intended going to bed early because he expected tomorrow to be the most momentous day of his career.

The great and grand Paris Universal Exposition of 1889 would open in the morning, and Jules had done all he could to prepare himself. While the lamplighters were tending the gaslights along the Champs Elysées this evening, workers at the hall would be unpacking the last of the crates containing six of his most stunning works. At least one of his paintings, probably The Hunt Ball, was sure to garner a Grand Award, the prestigious show’s highest honor. For an American who had lived most of his adult life here among the greatest living artists on Earth, that would be a stellar accomplishment, a coup.

Generations of art historians would classify Stewart as an American painter. He would not have approved. He preferred the French “Jules” to his given “Julius.” He was a French gentleman in all other respects, wasn’t he?

There was absolutely no cause for worry about how the next day would go, but a digestif does tend to relax a man after a sumptuous dinner. One drink led to another, and now he was in serious danger of not greeting the auspicious morning with a clear head.

His vision was beginning to blur. With difficulty, Jules studied his drinking companion across the table. James Gordon Bennett, Jr. looked old, animated, and positively rosy all at once. He pulled himself up a bit, as if sitting straighter would impart dignity to his lofty subject. “Dear boy,” Bennett began in a tone the younger man detested, “could you paint something you’d never seen?”

Despite his irritation at Bennett’s addressing him as the junior man, Jules perceived it as a professional question and made an effort to reply as seriously as if they were having afternoon tea. “From imagination, do you mean? That’s a schoolboy’s trick — lacking in richness, lacking in any art at all, really. Art is in the details, you understand. One would need a model of some kind because details do not exist in the abstract, I assure you. Besides, it’s been done.”

“You don’t say!” Bennett exclaimed. Jules suspected he was being mocked.

Undeterred, Jules lectured, “Alonzo Chappel’s The Last Hours of Lincoln. Must be twenty years ago — 1868, if I have it right. The artist wasn’t present at the deathbed, of course. He reconstructed the scene from Matthew Brady photographs of the ungodly number who came to pay their respects, almost fifty of them. Gérôme has an engraving of the thing,” said Jules, referring to the famous painter, his mentor at the École des Beaux-Arts. “A bit stiff and contrived, if you ask me, but a technical achievement, nonetheless. My colleague Jean Béraud did much the same thing. His was called The Editorial Room of the Journal des Débats. He liked to brag that it included forty likenesses. All stiff as a board! The problem is not so much the likenesses, but getting realistic poses, making the thing breathe.”

They had been drinking absinthe for well onto four hours now, having started in the early evening after dinner at a decorous little sidewalk café on the Boulevard Saint-Germain. A dwindling inventory of Bennett’s favorite drug-laced liquor, Stewart’s short supply of coins, and Bennett’s habit of bellowing at odd moments had forced them to change venue to a smoky little caveau on Avenue Kléber. The the proprietor knew Jules and was only too happy to let them drink on the cuff. For these two sodden playboys, it was a wise choice, situated within walking distance of Stewart’s small but comfortable house on rue Copernic. When Bennett either decided he’d finally had enough or swooned, they’d be able to stumble eventually to the painter’s home. There his housekeeper Violette could be roused and induced to turn down fresh linen in the guest room for his illustrious friend.

A supreme advantage of carousing with Bennett was, if you didn’t want your name in the papers, your anonymity was assured. He owned The New York Herald, which published all the gossip from both sides of the Atlantic that was fit to print — and quite a bit more that wasn’t. Having inherited the prestigious scandal sheet from his father, he was a veteran of the trade and an unashamed pragmatist. Bennett unerringly knew, not so much the facts other people should know, but the rumors and slanders they would feel compelled to know — and repeat. Years later, Albert Crockett, one of Bennett’s veteran reporters, would observe, “The Paris Herald is run on the theory that most society people, and Americans generally, would much rather see their names in print and those of their friends than read any amount of news.”

Bennett didn’t often play the managing editor, though. His chief editorial directive to his reporters, it seemed, was to keep his own name out of the paper. But tonight he acted like an editor assigning a dirty-linen story to a man on the society beat.

“This painting of yours,” Bennett finally got around to saying as he waved a professorial finger in the air, “it wouldn’t be just any subject matter. You don’t get to choose some vivid fantasy of yours.” He paused for a wicked chuckle, suggesting that the younger man’s fantasies were naughtier than they were, then knocked back another shot. (Stewart had indeed dabbled in plein-air nudes, and he would do more in later years.) “Rather,” Bennett continued with a cough and a wheeze, “it’s to be a specific event. A significant event. One you could not have witnessed personally. And I don’t mean anything so trifling as the assassination of Garfield. Something private, but big.”

“I’d need reference materials, of course…,” Jules said, not quite agreeing. He didn’t want to dodge the challenge, but he wondered whether the old fox might be setting a trap for him.

Bennett leaned forward confidentially, cleared his throat of a rummy’s phlegm, and said in a lowered, sober voice, “You’d have to do it so well, so brilliantly, your subjects would never admit — and no one else would dare to guess — that you didn’t observe it firsthand.” He sat up again, his eyes growing wide with a new thought: “You know, you might even put your own likeness in it. Good God, that would be a stroke.” (Stewart had done as much before, in The Hunt Ball, as Bennett knew.)

“Why would I attempt such a thing?” asked Jules.

“To prove that you can, of course. Alone of all the skilled portraitists in the world. Nothing stiff, casual as you please. Show the stuck-up portrait photographers they can still learn a thing or two from a true artist.”

“But if I succeed, if my execution is as masterful as you demand, and if the illogical objective you set is indeed met — I won’t be able to tell a soul!”

Bennett sighed, sinking into his chair with a smile. “That’s the beauty of it, dear boy. To achieve an impossible thing just for its own sake!”

Jules thought the idea over for a moment. Jim Bennett evaluated all transactions in terms of money or pleasure or some other form of useful social currency. He was not a man of ideals, nor was he prone to conceive of intellectual challenges that brought no profit. He would take a bet if he were certain of winning — particularly on an embarrassing piece of gossip he could print in his newspaper to subvert and infuriate one of his many and powerful enemies.

Jules took a brave gulp of the absinthe. “I know you better than that,” he said. “If the result is to bring me no benefit, except in my own mind, there must be another, more immediate benefit. Perhaps to you personally?”

“I have my reasons,” Bennett said.

“So, how does this stratagem of yours humiliate Vanderbilt?”

“Oh, his brother Willie is an all-right sort. Married to that hellion from wherever in the deep South they breed her kind. You have to respect a man who can tie himself to a demanding woman and not lose his good sense in the bargain.”

“Everything I’ve ever heard of Cornelius Vanderbilt says he’s honest to a fault,” said Jules. “The Vanderbilts bought a painting of mine, in fact — my Lune de Miel.”

“So, you’ve met him, then?”

“Oh, I never met him. Avery handled the transaction. I was told C. V. was in Paris at the time — that’s what Avery always called him — but he never brought him around.” Jules’ father, William Hood Stewart, had made a fortune in Cuban sugar cane and was one of the most respected art collectors in Paris. The American dealer Samuel P. Avery, Sr. was of the same generation. When he visited Paris, he called on William — his friend, customer, and talent scout — and was an honored guest at the Stewart family table. Even after Jules had established himself as a painter of some repute, he resented Avery’s continuing to treat him as if he were a boy still in knickers. “You know,” Jules said as he poured himself a shot, “I’m not sure Vanderbilt even laid eyes on the work before he paid.”

“Betrays a distinct lack of taste, if you ask me,” said Bennett, visibly pleased to find another flaw in the man’s character.

“Still, I have no reason to judge Vanderbilt harshly.”

“I have a corker of a story,” Bennett chuckled. “You’ll see. This man’s monstrous vanity craves laceration.”