The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (13 page)

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

W
hile 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

T
he 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.

From Madame de Cubières: Would Madame and Monsieur Jumel dine with them
en famille
, if Madame Jumel's health permits?
⁸

From twenty-six-year-old Adèle, on a Sunday evening: If Madame Jumel hasn't gone to the theater, would she and her family spend an hour or two at the Cubières home?
⁹

From eighteen-year-old Henriette to her “
chère
Mary”: Would “Madame your aunt” be kind enough to permit Henriette and Adèle to dine with the Jumels? “Maman being in the country, we are free to be able to spend part of the day with your family.”
¹⁰