Free The Greater Journey: Americans in Paris by David McCullough Page A

language can describe her motion,” wrote Nathaniel Willis after seeing her in the role of the dancing girl in
Le Dieu et la Bayadère
, the part that had made her famous. “She swims in your eye like a curl of smoke, or a flake of down. Her difficulty seems to be to keep to the floor.”
Her figure is small, but rounded to the very last degree of perfection; not a muscle swelled beyond the exquisite outline; not an angle, not a fault. … Her face is most strangely interesting, not quite beautiful, but of that half-appealing, half-retiring sweetness that you sometimes see blended with the secluded reserve and unconscious refinement of young girls just “out” in a circle of high fashion.
     
    John Sanderson felt utter joy watching her. He had never seen anything to compare. “Mercy! How deficient we are in our country in these elegant accomplishments. In many things we are still in our infancy, in dancing we are not yet born.”
    Nathaniel Willis wondered to what degree the response of an audience enhanced the quality of a performance on stage. Taglioni’s performance was a triumph of art, and she was applauded as an artist, but then the “overwhelming tumult of acclamation” she received for her most brilliant moments came from “the hearts of the audience, and as such must have been both a lesson and the highest compliment for Taglioni.” Here, he thought, was the great contrast with the theater at home. “We shall never have a high-toned drama in America, while, as at present, applause is won only by physical exertion, and the nice touches of genius and nature pass undetected and unfelt.”
    What Willis appreciated most about the French theater was that the actors did not look like actors, or play their parts as if acting. He liked their naturalness, their “unstudied” facial expressions. “And when they come upon stage, it is singularly without affectation, and as the character they represent would appear.”
    Wendell Holmes and his fellow medical students, for all the pressures on them in their studies, took time to attend both the opera and the theater. Even James Jackson, Jr., the most intense of students, went along. By “indulging” himself this way, he was better able to study and maintain his health, he assured his father, knowing his father’s own love of music.
Indeed, while at the opera, I long for your company almost as much as while at the hospital, as I feel in both places how strongly you would sympathize with me—for I did not know what music was in America and I assure you I will not allow myself to neglect it altogether here. …
     
    Like others, Holmes and Jackson wrote dutifully to their parents every week, sometimes comparing notes with one another in the process. “James Jackson has just come up to my room to write home a letter, and reminded me that I must have one ready for the next packet,” Holmes began one letter. “Well, here we are, Jackson at my desk and I at my table, both of us in a little hurry, but not willing to let the day pass without our weekly tribute.”
    Of the many theaters in Paris, the famous old Théâtre Français, adjacent to the Palais Royal, was foremost and immensely popular largely because of Mademoiselle Mars, who was to French drama of the time what Taglioni was to dance. Here were performed the great classical French works—the plays of Corneille, Racine, and Molière—and in the finest style and according to strict rules. For the Americans intent on learning French, it was common practice to bring along a copy of the play to follow what was being said. Such theater was indispensable to the intelligent foreigner, Holmes explained to his parents, both as a guide to French manners and as “the best standard” of the language. In consideration of his parents’ views on such matters, he added, “There is no need of cutting or tearing off this last page about theaters—where society is far advanced they must exist and are a