The house that stood amidst the woods and fields would become Eliza’s pride and joy. Although in need of repair when the Jumels purchased it, the mansion would have looked graceful and welcoming, much as it was described in a 1792 advertisement (and still appears today):
It has … a large hall thro’ the center; a spacious dining room on the right, with an alcove, closets, and a convenient pantry and storeroom adjoining, and beyond these, a light, easy mahogany staircase. On the left is a handsome parlour, and a large back room, particularly adapted and fitted for a nursery. A passage from the rear of the hall leads to an oblong octagon room, about 32 feet by 22, with six sash windows, marble chimney pieces, and a lofty airy ceiling. On the second floor are eleven bed chambers, four with fireplaces and marble hearths; and a large hall communicating with a gallery under the portico, and from which there is a most inviting prospect. On the upper floor are five lodging rooms, three of which have fireplaces; and at the top of the house is affixed an electrical conductor. Underneath the building are a large commodious kitchen and laundry, a wine cellar, storeroom, kitchen pantry, sleeping apartments for servants, and the most complete dairy room, the floor a solid flat rock, and which, with common attention to cleanliness, cannot fail to render the place constantly cool and sweet.12
Outbuildings included “a large barn, and most excellent coach house and stables.” Spectacular views stretched from the New Jersey Palisades to the Long Island Sound and from Westchester to Staten Island. All in all, the property was, as advertised, “an eligible retreat for a gentleman fond of rural amusements and employments … who wishes to pass the summer months with pleasure and comfort.”13
Working from this promising raw material, Eliza and Stephen turned the estate into a showpiece.14 A handful of purchases that seem to relate to the property appear in Stephen’s receipt books: 1,500 asparagus roots, purchased in January 1813; 350 boards to be delivered by the ferry boat to Manhattanville (in today’s Harlem) in November 1813; a flock of merino sheep, purchased in November as well.15 The Jumels planted a vineyard of French grapes and improved the ornamental gardens around the house.16 They enjoyed homegrown fruit—peaches, pears, apricots, cherries, and plums—and savored oysters, clams, and fish from the Harlem River.17 An advertisement for a brindle cow gone astray in October 1810 suggests that fresh milk and butter appeared on their table as well.18
Walking their lands, Eliza and Stephen could admire a thriving expanse of timber, including chestnut, hickory, cedar, and oak. Fields of clover nourished sheep and soil. By 1814, the property produced fifty tons of hay per year. A smokehouse and ice house made it possible to preserve food grown or raised on the property.19
Eliza renamed this arcadia Mount Stephen, in honor of her husband.
12
FRANCE BECKONS
There was no greater contrast to the rural tranquility of Harlem Heights than the bustle of Broadway in lower Manhattan. For more than two miles, the avenue was lined with retail stores and booksellers, which occupied “the lower stories of most of the houses.” Large display windows overflowed “with china and glassware, plate, millinery, fruit, confectionary; in short, everything.” Even more astounding were the crowds that filled the thoroughfare: “the throng resemble[d] the dense multitude issuing from the door of a church.” Broadway was the lounge of “the fashionable, the gay, and the idle”—especially women distinguished by the “richness and variety” of their dress. The “superb buildings with their marble fronts [were] completely eclipsed by the teeming fair ones, from morning till ten o’clock at night.”1
In 1812 Eliza and Stephen secured a foothold on this fashionable avenue. Their acquisition, a parcel at the northeast corner of Broadway and Liberty Street, was twenty-six feet wide on the valuable Broadway frontage and extended one hundred and ten feet down Liberty Street. Stephen purchased the property, located three blocks north of Wall Street, for $14,700 at auction.2 Generating generous rents for years to come, it would be his and Eliza’s most valuable possession.
They began maximizing the value of the land immediately. By May 150 Broadway was under construction.3 The three-story brick building had a storefront on the Broadway façade and a separate entrance to living spaces above.4 Storage vaults extended beneath the Liberty Street frontage. A three-story brick house at 69½ Liberty Street (later renumbered 71), was either built or upgraded concurrently.5
James B. Durand, a dry-goods merchant and close associate of Stephen’s, would lodge in the 150 building for many years.6 He rented the storefront more briefly, until 1817; the location was “one of the best in this city for business.”7
As for the Liberty Street house, Stephen, Eliza, and Mary may have occupied it, but only for a short time.8 In April 1814, on the opposite side of the Atlantic, Napoleon was overthrown and banished to Elba. By fall the Jumels had decided to relocate to France.9
Eliza’s opinions about the move are not recorded. But the books she read during a period of several months preceding their departure are revealing. Documented in a rare, surviving circulation ledger from the New York Society Library, an institution she joined in 1807, her selections—many written in French—hint at an eagerness to embark on life in a foreign country.10 Of equal interest, her reading patterns reveal that this child of an illiterate mother had become a woman of considerable intellectual attainments. She polished off complex titles—in a second language, no less—in as little as three or four days.
On November 28, 1814, Eliza checked out the first volume of a collection of plays in French—by whom is not recorded. On returning it two days later, she borrowed an English translation of Alf von Dülmen, a Gothic novel by the German writer Benedikte Naubert.11 The two-volume work of historical fiction, featuring a secret tribunal and crumbling castle, represented a rare excursion into light reading for Eliza.12 After returning it, she read four volumes of Molière plays—some, if not all, in the original language—between December 3 and December 19. Then, as Christmas approached, she went home with yet another foreign-language title, a French translation of Pliny the Elder’s Natural History. This tome she returned the same day, possibly having confused the author with Pliny the Younger, whose letters, in English, she borrowed instead. She spent two weeks studying the translation from the Latin by John Boyle, fifth earl of Orrery and Cork; then exchanged it for William Melmoth’s equally fine translation, which occupied her for another seven days.13
Biography, history, and the writings of ancient Greek and Roman authors were favored at this time period, so Eliza’s choice of Pliny was not atypical for her era.14 But the number of plays she read and, above all, the quantity of books in French, were striking. In the new year, she polished off a volume of plays by Racine—again in the original language—between January 14 and January 17.15 Also that month she read one of the most popular French novels of the eighteenth century, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. The timing of the latter selection is suggestive. The Park Theatre had performed an English-language adaptation of Paul et Virginie on New Year’s Eve, as part of a triple bill that included a comedy and a melodrama.16 It is tempting to speculate that Eliza attended the performance with her husband and daughter, prompting her to read the novel.
She ended the month with an excursion into religious matters, checking out an English edition of The Christian’s Defense Against the Fears of Death, the best-known work of the French Protestant theologian Charles Drelincourt.17 Although on February 8 she exchanged it for the first volume of a popular French miscellany—filled with fables, bon mots, and anecdotes about famous men—Drelincourt’s words must have spoken to her.18 She borrowed the Christian’s Defense a second time between February 13 and February 24. Years later a relative said that she found attending funerals difficult; she may have struggled to accept the finality of death.19
The last book Eliza took home in February was a dense volume of theology: George Anderson’s An Estimate of the Profit and Loss of Religion.20 Far more than her reading of the accessible Drelincourt, her cho
ice of Anderson’s polemic reveals her as a woman willing to grapple with the rigors of religious philosophy. But once she had returned the volume on March 3, the cycle of checkouts and returns ended. Probably the weather had warmed enough to lure her into the countryside, and she had gone to spend the spring at Mount Stephen. Where she obtained books while in rural seclusion is unknown.
Stephen wound up his commercial affairs as he, Eliza, and Mary prepared for departure. He and Benjamin Desobry had dissolved their partnership at the beginning of 1811 in the increasingly difficult trading environment, but Stephen had stayed in business independently.21 He would remain active as a merchant in France, selecting goods for shipment to New York and Havana (the gateway to the South American market).22 Although he would supply Desobry with carefully chosen French fabrics and accessories, he would no longer own ships and would not form another partnership.23
Before the Jumels left New York, Stephen set up a trust for Eliza. If he predeceased his wife, she would receive a life interest in the mansion at Mount Stephen and the thirty-six-acre homestead lot. The property would revert to his heirs after her death.24 This precaution ensured that if Stephen died during the voyage, Eliza would have a permanent home. For the time being, the mansion and its acreage would be leased.25 The couple’s other properties were offered for sale but failed to attract buyers, so they were retained and left to the care of an agent.26
At the end of May, Eliza, Stephen, and Mary began the final preparations for their journey. Stephen’s passport survives and provides, with one later exception, the only physical description we have of him. True to his ancestry in southwest France, he had a “dark” complexion and “dark” hair. His height was given as 5 feet, 5 inches, making him an inch taller than Eliza.27
The Jumels would sail for Bordeaux on the ship Maria Theresa, captained and part-owned by the faithful John Skiddy.28 On May 31 Stephen advertised for a woman “desirous to go to France” to take care of Eliza during the voyage. “The preference will be given to one not subject to seasickness,” Stephen added optimistically.29 Often servants were too sick to be of assistance during the first weeks of a voyage.30
Once the ship sailed, on June 3 or 4, 1815, it was clear that Stephen and not Eliza was the one who needed an attendant. Seasick throughout the voyage, he stayed in the fresh air on the bridge even at meal times, “wishing that a wave would carry [him] away.”31 In contrast, Eliza appears to have been an excellent traveler. There is no record of her having suffered from seasickness during this or any future voyage.
13
AN IMPERIAL INTERLUDE
While Eliza, Stephen, and Mary were crossing the Atlantic, the armies of Europe were fighting a great battle. In early 1815 Napoleon I of France escaped from Elba and attempted to return to power. After an anxious period known as the Hundred Days, when it seemed as if the empire might rise again, he was defeated definitively on July 18 near the Belgian village of Waterloo.
Afterward the fallen emperor fled to the Tuileries Palace in Paris. At that critical moment the Jumels reached France—or so it was said. Eliza’s great-niece would tell and retell a dramatic tale years later. It went like this:
The ship docked. Stephen, being “an ardent Bonapartist,” immediately “sought out an interview with the fallen emperor.” Merchant and ex-monarch met in Paris. Stephen offered Napoleon his own ship. He “proffered him safe conduct to America and an asylum there.”1
The grand gesture was made in vain. Napoleon expressed “his heartfelt thanks” to “M. and Madame Jumel,” but “declined to attempt an escape.”2 Nevertheless, “in recognition of such an offer,” he “gave his traveling carriage to the Jumels.” They tried “to drive out of Paris,” but were “arrested at the barrière, the carriage taken from them by the new government, and they themselves held as prisoners until the American Minister came to their rescue.”3 The emperor gave his army chest to Eliza before his departure for Saint Helena, a relic she brought back with her later to the United States.4
What are we to make of this narrative? At a minimum, the chronology is garbled. The Jumels sailed into Bordeaux, rather than one of France’s more northerly ports, and didn’t arrive until July 8.5 They could not have met with Napoleon in the Parisian region, which he left for good on June 30.6 In addition, the ship they sailed in no longer belonged to Stephen, but rather to Captain John Skiddy and two New York merchants.7 If Stephen was involved, it would have been as an intermediary, offering Napoleon passage on the Maria Theresa in Skiddy’s name, probably for a cut of the potential charter fees.
However, the strangest-sounding element of the Jumel family story—the idea of offering Napoleon a safe harbor in America—is less incredible than it sounds. After Waterloo the emperor planned to seek refuge in the United States. Originally he, his family, and his staff hoped to make the crossing on the French frigates Saale and Méduse, stationed on the Atlantic coast near Roquefort, just north of Bordeaux. An alternative scheme envisioned the use of the corvettes Indéfatigable and Bayadère. A group of French officers even floated the possibility of helping Napoleon escape on a whaleboat, from which he could flag down and charter a merchant ship to carry him to the United States.8
To facilitate a retreat by sea, Bonaparte traveled southwest from Paris to the Atlantic coast. He arrived in Rochefort on July 3, five days before the Maria Theresa approached nearby Bordeaux.9 But by the time the vessel, with the Jumels aboard, entered the Garonne (the waterway leading to Bordeaux), several British frigates and three sloops of war had been patrolling the mouth of the river for several days. Their object was “to prevent Napoleon Bonaparte quitting France in any American ship or vessel.”10
It is not impossible that Stephen and Captain John Skiddy saw an opportunity for profit in carrying the ex-emperor and his suite to the United States. They could have reached out to the dethroned sovereign as soon as the Maria Theresa entered Bordeaux on July 8. But it is highly unlikely that they did. By the second week of July, the British blockade was too tight. When an American brig, the Pike, exited the Garonne on July 12, she was forced to heave to under cannon fire from the British and submit to a search for the fallen emperor.11
The story makes an improbable assumption about Stephen’s political sympathies also—especially in the light of the other family legends that had him and Eliza socializing with French royalist refugees in New York. It is hard to envision him as a fervent supporter of the Bonapartist regime given that he left France before the emperor took power and did not make plans to return to his homeland until Napoleon’s initial defeat in 1814. His former ship, the Maria Theresa, even bore the name of the daughter of Louis XVI, famed for her fervent loyalty to the Bourbon monarchy. If Stephen approached the former emperor at all, the motivation would have been strictly business.
In any case, the idea of a flight to America was soon moot. Having vacillated so long that an escape by sea became impractical, Bonaparte boarded the British ship of war Bellerophon on July 15, 1815, placing himself, as he put it, under the protection of British law.12 The First Empire was gone for good.
14
PARIS
The Jumels’ documented actions after arriving in France were more personal than political. Stephen’s brother François came to dine with them in Bordeaux when they first arrived.1 They may have visited Stephen’s hometown of Mont-de-Marsan next, or first traveled to Paris, where Mary was placed in a girls’ school run by nuns. Then, to escape the hottest days of summer, Eliza and Stephen went to take the waters in the foothills of the Pyrenees.
“We received your dear letter with great pleasure,” Stephen wrote to Mary in French from the resort town of Bagnères de Bigorre on August 19, 1815. He and Eliza were happy to learn that she was staying busy: “right now that is as it should be, as your time is very precious.” He passed on a little news he thought might please her. Reverend Fenwick (a priest at the Church of Saint Peter the Apostle in New York) had written him and asked if Mary was still charming and good. “I told him
you were in a convent school,” Stephen wrote, “and there was no question but that you were doing your duty.”2
In the fall Eliza and Stephen settled in Paris. As they passed in a carriage through narrow streets lined with tall, stone hôtels, so different from New York’s three-story wood or brick houses, Eliza would have seen every conceivable trade or occupation “carried on along the causeways of the bridges and quays, at the corners of the streets, or on its pavements, under the archways and passageways, through every quarter of the city.” Lemonade sellers served “thirsty tradesman or wearied messengers.” Vendors, crouched “over little stoves,” offered bubbling soup and newly baked cakes. Dog groomers clipped poodles in the middle of the sidewalk, while flower sellers offered bouquets for human adornment. “Learned monkeys, popular orators, humorous storytellers, excellent fiddle players, and tolerable ballad singers” entertained passersby.3
After fifteen years of Napoleonic building campaigns, the city presented dramatic contrasts of old and new. Broad avenues cut through medieval streets, and handsome monuments, some only half-completed, rose near mansions already old when the Sun King, Louis XIV, cast his beams over France. Boulevards, “forming a splendid girdle round” the city, were lined with veranda-fronted cafés and double rows of trees.4 Families strolled in spacious “public walks and gardens,” during “the fine evenings of summer, on Sundays and holidays.”5 Soon Eliza would join them, riding in her carriage along the wood-lined Champs-Élysées (Elysian Fields), where she could imagine herself once more in the countryside near Mount Stephen. When she was ill or out of sorts, the trees and fresh air of the famed promenade comforted her.6
After several short stints in furnished lodgings, the Jumels were established at 40, rue de Cléry by late summer 1816.7 Their closest friends were the Cubières family: the former Marie-Françoise Olive, whom Stephen had probably known in New York when she was married to Nicolas Olive; her adult daughters Adèle and Henriette; and her second husband, Simon, marquis de Cubières. A handful of surviving letters hint at the intimacy between the two families.
The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel Page 7