The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (17 page)

The exhibition remained open until November 12, a run of just over two months.
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Afterward, at Eliza's request, the paintings she had contributed to the exhibit stayed on display in the galleries until April 1818, when they were removed so that the annual summer
show could be mounted.
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That the officers of the academy felt they were worth retaining was a vote of confidence in Eliza's taste.

In late 1817 Eliza had intimated to Stephen that she planned to return to France. Then he had received no letters for several months, and he was unsure if she had changed her mind. “In your last,” he wrote, “you indicate that your desire would be to come to France. I desire that as well … But consider whether in coming to France to stay, you will find what you want. We will need to buy a property here in order to spend the summer in the country.” They would also need to think about what Mary's future would be.
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She was reaching marriageable age.

Stephen was right to question whether Eliza had thought through her decision. When he received three long-delayed letters from her in late May or early June, he was upset to learn that she had already reconsidered:

I see by your letter of [April 24, 1818,] that it is no longer your intention to return to France to stay. Nevertheless, when a wife loves her husband, she must be where her husband is. But if you think differently, that [illegible] me. You knew that if my intention was to finish my days in France, you would have to stay here with me too. [If you disagree] I will be sorry for the rest of my life, having always done everything in my power, up to this moment, to make you happy.”
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Rather than rejoining Stephen, Eliza asked him to move back to the United States or at least send Mary to her. Perhaps she had intended from the beginning to use her absence to persuade her husband to leave France. If so, the tactic was unsuccessful. “You must know the reason, what the sea does to me,” Stephen wrote. “You witnessed it.” Seasickness isn't “a life-threatening illness,” he acknowledged, “but what suffering! And everyone [illegible] laughs.”
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Beside the discomfort that an ocean crossing would entail, Stephen, fifty-three, was beginning to feel his own mortality: “I do not
have long to work,” he wrote, “and from one moment to the next, I might leave for Père Lachaise” (a reference to the famous Parisian cemetery). As he struggled to support Eliza and their dependents (“I am overloaded with work. I am always busy in the factories and I need more patience than ever”), she remained at a distance and was spending more and more money. She had even kept several laborers employed over the winter when there was little work to be done on the land. “I don't know what you were thinking,” Stephen wrote. “You tell me you aren't spending any money at all,” but Benjamin Desobry and James Durand had informed him of her expenses, and they were higher than she had acknowledged. “To do everything a property demands, you would need a fountain of money,” he cautioned her. He would allow her to spend one-half of their income, but that was the most he could afford: “M
^r
Desobry will be able to tell you nearly to the dollar” how much that would be. In the meantime, he would send Mary to her, as Eliza had requested. He had arranged for her to travel with a close friend of his who was leaving for the United States with “his wife, who is very respectable.”
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Stephen closed the letter with a cry from the heart: “Adieu. I think night and day of seeing you again. I am sending you a thousand kisses and kissing Mary for you.” Sadly he signed himself “your faithful husband, Stephen Jumel.”
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17

M
ary reached New York on August 21, 1818, a tedious sixty days after leaving Le Havre.
¹
If Eliza had hoped that her husband would accompany their daughter, she was disappointed. Stephen, having received no recent letters from his wife, wrote from Paris on July 16, “I assume that you think that I am en route.” But he was staying in France, he told her. It was up to her to return. He was having their lodgings at 40, rue de Cléry furnished to receive her when she was ready to join him. There were two bedrooms, a “beautiful dining room,” an antechamber, “a handsomely furnished reception room,” an indoor lavatory (a luxury introduced from England), three bedrooms for servants, a kitchen, a coach house, a stable, and two cellars—one for firewood and the other for wine.
²

A letter Eliza mailed in July left him unsure of her plans. “I still don't know your intention—if you are going to decide to cross over again to France,” Stephen wrote on November 9. “These are not voyages to make every year.” But he would leave her free to make her own decision:

My intention is to finish my days in France. I don't want to set down the law and say you must come back. But consider that separating
like this isn't right at all. Think now about what you have to do. I don't want to tell you to sell the country house either, in case once [it is] sold, you are not able to have a similar property. Think about everything. I leave you mistress to do as you wish.

My love to Mary, and ask her to write me often. I know the trouble you have had with her mother. I know everything, even the loss of your horse, of the carriage. But all that is nothing. Think only of him who says to you that he is your faithful spouse for life.
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Stephen's last paragraph suggests that Eliza's life in New York was not without its trials—her relationship with her sister was sometimes rocky and she suffered frequently from migraine headaches.
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But she remained unwilling to return to France. In a letter of December 8, Eliza asked Stephen to obtain a forte piano and a harp for Mary. The request, carrying as it did an assumption that his wife and Mary would be staying in New York, prompted a rare expression of frustration from him: “Bed very uncomfortable for certain persons and for others it is nothing.”
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But he would look for two instruments and send them to New York: “You will be able to teach the birds that are outside the house.”
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Eliza should not, however, purchase a seven-hundred-dollar piano that she had mentioned to him. “Neither you nor Mary is famous for your playing. And you know how weak poor Mary is. It is not my fault. She has spent enough money, and I still pay in patience.”
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For the first time, Stephen's kindness and tolerance gave way to open criticism.

“Think of all I have purchased,” he continued, “the crates, the packing, the carriage from Paris to Le Havre … the freight from Le Havre to New York. The storage in New York. The carriage from there to the country. The loss of the broken mirrors. You cannot imagine all of the expenditures … You must remember to economize.” For the first time, his closing—“I remain your faithful spouse”—feels almost perfunctory.
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By late March Stephen had regained some measure of composure. In response to a letter Eliza had written him on February 6, he acknowledged, “I don't doubt that you think about me … You must.
There isn't a moment that I don't think about it [i.e., their situation]. But my resolution is to stay in France, if we are at peace, as we are now. I think, as you do, that if your health is not good in France, I would not like to force you to come here.”
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But it was more than just her health, Stephen recognized: “You love the United States, and I, I don't love crossing the ocean because all countries are agreeable to me.”
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At Mount Stephen Eliza kept a carriage, coachman, and housemaid.
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She took pleasure in planning improvements to the property. This year she wanted to plant peach trees and additional grapevines.
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But her husband was increasingly worried about her expenditures. America was experiencing its first full-scale financial crisis, the Panic of 1819. Excellent harvests in Europe had reduced demand for American commodities. Grain imports by Great Britain had decreased 75 percent between 1818 and 1819.
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The fiscal situation was worsened by a shortage of specie. U.S. and European banks were buying up gold and silver in response to demands by their respective governments that notes be exchangeable for hard currency.
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Merchants were affected by the currency shortage, tight credit, and falling prices. Deflation, unemployment, and falling wages reduced demand for, and affordability of, imported goods.
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Customs duties collected in the United States plunged from $36 to $13 million between 1816 and 1821.
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“I preach economy,” Stephen wrote, “and truly it is something that must be done, because I have not earned a
sol
[a small French coin] from my investments in the United States since my departure. I have even lost money on some, because the business crisis has been so bad. There have only been losses on top of losses … Do what is necessary, but no luxuries as in the past, because, truly, it is completely impossible for me to make any expenditures.”
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Stephen put his foot down on Eliza's plans to move into their house at 150 Broadway, which his friend and fellow merchant James Durand was renting. Mary had told him in a letter of June 7 that “maman had been to New York to ask Mr. Desobry to give preference to her for the house Mr. Durand occupies. But the latter has
orders from me to rent the house, and the rent must serve to cover the expenses of Madame Jumel. Voilà the orders given to Mr. Desobry.” Stephen encouraged Eliza to be happy where she was: “You can live tranquilly at Mount Stephen, because I know you love [to live in] retirement. God knows you have everything you need in the country house.” Her daily life must have felt increasingly remote to Stephen. “Tell Mary to continue to write to me in French,” he asked Eliza in July 1819. “She is absolutely right when she tells me I have forgotten English, because truly I have hardly spoken it for two years.”
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All of Stephen's letters to Eliza were written in his native tongue.

The financial situation in the United States continued to deteriorate over the course of 1819. The Pery firm in Bordeaux, in which Stephen had a heavy investment, was owed one hundred thousand francs (twenty thousand dollars) in New York. The debtor was Stephen's longtime business associate and tenant, Durand, and there was no certainty whether the money would be repaid.
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A business in Martinique owed the firm nearly as much.
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“It's a plague,” Stephen wrote. “I will be obliged to go stay with my family in Mont-de-Marsan in order to not spend a thousand dollars a year. Imagine the business situation. We will have to wait on events with patience to know what I will lose.”
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He could no longer afford to keep young William Jones in France.
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This missive of September 1, 1819, is the last of Stephen's surviving letters to his wife from the time period.