The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (14 page)

Simon and Marie-Françoise Cubières were an extraordinary couple. Simon, in his youth, served the French crown, first as a page at Versailles, then in a cavalry regiment. He was appointed one of the king's masters of the horse, a largely honorary post involving the management of the royal stables, a position to which he was reinstated at the Restoration. But the way he spent the hours not occupied by his official duties made it clear that he was far more than a mere courtier. Gifted with a wide-ranging intellect, Cubières delved into literature and the arts, physics, chemistry, and above all, natural science. He built a noteworthy collection of rocks and minerals, including lava he retrieved from the crater of Vesuvius. He made an ascent in a balloon—and then tried to devise better methods for steering it. He visited England to investigate modern industrial methods, and at the same time explored the art of landscaping that British gardeners had pioneered. Returning to France, he brought rare seeds with him, cultivating them in a nursery he owned at Versailles.
¹¹

An habitué of artists and antiquaries, Cubières turned his expertise in the fine arts to good account in the years following the deposition of Louis XVI. After Napoleon I conquered Italy, Cubières was one of the commissioners assigned to follow the French armies, selecting paintings and sculptures to ship back to Paris. During the First Empire he served as curator of the statuary in the gardens of Versailles and the Trianon, a position he retained after the restoration of Louis XVIII, in conjunction with his renewed responsibility for supervising the stables at the Tuileries Palace in Paris. In spare moments Cubières found time to write prolifically: a treatise on shells; a history of the tulip tree; a memoir on bees; another on the Louisiana cypress; an examination of “the services rendered to agriculture by women.”
¹²

Cubières's wife, Marie-Françoise Olive, née Marchal, was his match. Described by the marquise de Gouvernet as “a beautiful Raphael Madonna, so good, so gracious!” she shared her second
husband's avid interest in botany.
¹³
Her first husband, Nicholas Olive, left a loving description of her, dating to their days in exile in New York. The couple had gone on a party of pleasure to the bucolic, northernmost tip of Manhattan Island, exploring the region occupied today by Inwood Hill Park. In a letter, Olive informed his daughters, then little girls at school, that their “chère maman” was “the only one who turned this little voyage to profit.”

You have seen her running through the woods with an ardor that cannot exist without a passionate interest—that of finding a bush, a tree, a plant she does not know in order to search out the seed to carry it off to France, wishing to bring back only those not there already. Thus she knows how to make use even of her leisure—a touching example of a virtuous ambition that she was enjoying in climbing the east bank of the beautiful Hudson River!
¹⁴

The marquis and his family had an apartment in the écuries du Roi—the king's stables—which were located at the Tuileries, a 368-room palace facing the Louvre. Although the Tuileries burned in 1870 and only its gardens survive today, during the Restoration the palace housed the royal family, including the elderly Louis XVIII; his younger brother, the comte d'Artois (the future Charles X), and the latter's sons, the duc d'Angoulême and duc de Berry, and their families.
¹⁵

Friendship with the Cubières family brought the Jumels in contact with other members of the French court. They became close to the family of comte Joseph d'Abzac de Falgueyrac, who had been, like Cubières, a military officer under the ancien régime and was related to one of Cubières's colleagues at the
écuries du Roi
.
¹⁶
The comte and comtesse Tascher de la Pagerie were acquaintances too, a connection that inspired a long-standing legend that Eliza and Stephen moved in Bonapartist circles.
¹⁷
The count was a cousin of Napoleon's first wife, Empress Josephine, and had fought briefly for the empire. But by early 1814, he had adopted the royalist cause, receiving the rank of field marshal in Louis XVIII's army.
¹⁸

Mary's education opened other social doors to Eliza. Monsieur Noël, secretary general of the administration of the forests of the Crown, solicited her help in picking up his daughter from school: “You will do me a great service, Madame, if you will be so kind as to send for my daughter with your own. I shall have the honor, Madame, of calling to thank you Sunday morning, that being my first venture out of the house.”
¹⁹
Eliza's possession of a carriage gave her status in Paris, just as it had in New York.

Aside from her friendship with the Cubières family, Eliza's most important means of entrée into French high society was religion.
²⁰
Once in France she considered converting to Catholicism, the religion of the aristocracy and the court. She appears to have attended Sunday mass at the Royal Chapel of the Tuileries at least occasionally.
²¹
There the master of ceremonies, in full court dress, would have escorted her to a seat from which she could stand, sit, and kneel, following the example of the Royal Family.
²²
She may also have enjoyed ethereal sacred music at the church of St. Sulpice, and evening sermons at the church of the Madeleine in the aristocratic rue Saint-Honoré.
²³

A highborn friend, the marquise de la Suze, made it her mission to bring Eliza into the arms of the mother church. She arranged an introduction for her to the abbé Fraysinnous, one of the greatest preachers of the day. Be sure to arrive by noon “because his time is precious,” she told Eliza in October 1816, “and he will receive you with the great interest you must always inspire. Be assured: that which you have made me feel is sincere indeed.”
²⁴

On the feast of Epiphany, January 6, the marquise concerned herself with Eliza's spiritual health. “Here is a little prayer that all the faithful are saying right now,” she wrote. “As I have no doubt that all those you have addressed to him are very acceptable to him at present, I beg you and engage you to begin immediately and say it exactly for nine days with this fervor that surely will bring you grace, if you are always faithful to your good inspirations.” The
writer's ardent spirit shines through the next lines: “Ah, madame, how happy and grateful I am for what God has done for me in having led you to the happiness that you will soon feel and that will be the consolation of my life as well. To bring a soul back to this merciful God, what pleasure! Hasten, madame, this moment so joyous for you and for me, who is so tenderly attached to you by all the repeated proofs that you give me of your friendship.”
²⁵

The marquise de la Suze had an apartment in the Abbaye-aux-Bois, a deconsecrated abbey in southern Paris. The complex of buildings housed secular residents as well as a church where the abbé Fraysinnous preached and two communities of nuns. One was a nursing order, but the other, a community of Augustinian sisters, ran a convent school on-site.
²⁶
This “boarding school for young ladies”—which included a garden where the girls took their recreation—was probably the institution Mary attended.
²⁷
She and a young English pupil, Anna Selena Hooke, used to run around the garden of their school each morning.
²⁸

Although it may seem strange that she was a live-in student when Eliza and Stephen resided in the same city, the two-mile trip from 40, rue de Cléry, to 16, rue de Sèvres, south of the Seine, was not the eight-minute car ride it is today. It must have involved closer to an hour in a carriage, bumping over the cobblestones of narrow, crowded streets. Eliza and Stephen visited the school for special events and took their adoptive daughter out for excursions, as a letter from Mary to Eliza makes clear. The students were giving a concert next Thursday, she wrote to her “dear Mama” on December 8, 1816,

and the mistress told me to ask you to come, but I told her I thought you would not, because you do not like evening rides especially so far; but as Wednesday will be a recreation day, it would give me great pleasure if you would come and see me, and to bring me my gauze frock with my shoes and gloves, and my lace vandyck [a detachable collar with sawtooth edging] and my little vandyck of muslin, because I have none to put on; do not forget to send them as soon as possible. Give my love to my dear papa, and tell him not
to forget his promise in sending for me the first time that the piece [i.e., play] of Abraham is to be played, and that I wait with impatience for that day, for it looks so dreary in this place that the last three English young lady [
sic
] are always crying and have at last run away from the school, but it does not look so very dreary, they have only cut the tops of the trees in our garden, which makes it look as if they wanted petticoats. As it will be very cold when we have to stay upstairs changing our dress, if you would ask Miss Laurou to let us have a fire in my room, because these [
sic
] two or three young ladies that have permission to have fire in their rooms. My dear Mama, I embrace you with a thousand kisses. Believe me to be your fond and dutiful daughter.
²⁹

She signed herself “Mary Eliza Jumel,” adding her adoptive mother's first name to her own.
³⁰

15

W
ithin a year after her arrival in Paris, Eliza was so busy that even her closest friends had trouble keeping in touch with her. Adèle de Cubières called without success to let her know that there would be English horse races on the plain of Sablons. Ultimately she wrote a note instead: “We have been so unfortunate in never finding you at home that I thought the best way of making sure you have a thing you seemed fond of was to write to you.”
¹

In June 1816, on Pentecost Sunday, Adèle scolded Eliza for her neglect. She wrote humorously but her bruised feelings are evident:

You have forgotten us so completely, madame, that I really don't know whether I would do better to go see you or just write you. Perhaps it would be appropriate to abandon you in turn, but I would get little return for my friendship in that. Besides, good faith demands that we keep the promise we made to you to arrange for you to see the trousseau of Her Royal Highness Madame the Duchess of Berry, which is, people say, beautiful
Beyond
[
sic
]
description
.

Adèle wrote the last two words in English and emphasized them to make her point. Then she stressed the time and date:

The present is therefore to alert you that tomorrow,
Monday, June 3
, the
last day
of the exhibition, we will come get you between
two
and
three o'clock
in the afternoon. We will have admission tickets for you and Monsieur Jumel, and we are going to Paris [from their country residence] just for this, because Maman's plan was not to go there until Monday evening or Tuesday morning.