The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (19 page)

He has had the misfortune to lose two of his ships, all loaded, which were seized by Napoleon and held at the Port of Bayonne—for which he has never been reimbursed.

His kindness of heart and his directness in business have made him known and loved throughout the United States. He has frequently been offered very honorable and lucrative positions, which he has always refused, saying he still hoped again to see his own country.

What a joyous day for him when he got the news of the return of the Bourbons. Immediately he made haste to sell his ships and his stocks and to leave his temporary home, which was for him a sort of exile, since it was so far away from his dear country.

We came to Paris, and he, seeing a great deal of misfortune, was moved by his kindness of heart to set up several manufacturers, who today are prosperous. At the same time he himself has met with nothing but losses. His lofty nature will not allow him to ask for a place at Court for himself, as he thinks he has not yet done enough for his country to deserve such a favor.

But, accustomed to being received as persons of high position, and our fortune admitting of our living in excellent style, and having
also the good fortune—since our stay in Paris—of knowing many ladies of the Court, I often find myself embarrassed. When I see that I have no title and my husband no cross [i.e., the cross of an officer of the Legion of Honor]—in spite of all he has done for his country and of his devotion to the King—I feel utterly discouraged, and beg him to go back to his adopted country. But knowing your Majesty's extreme kindness, I am anew inspired with the hope that you will not ignore a subject so worthy as Stephen Jumel. Whatever post your Majesty might deign to offer—even without remuneration—it would be his greatest delight to fill it, and your Majesty would find in Stephen Jumel a faithful subject and one wholly devoted to his King, and in his wife, eternal gratitude.
¹⁶

The letter is revealing. It seems that nothing could fill the void left by the poverty and exclusion of Eliza's youth: not a thoughtful husband, not a loving niece become daughter, not an elegant home, not a carriage and pair, not even a bow of recognition from a king. Whatever she craved, once acquired it was not enough, and again she would feel “embarrassed” and “utterly discouraged.”

In pursuit of the fashionable life, the Jumels summered in Dieppe in 1824. A port on the English Channel, the city had begun to attract attention as a seaside resort in the last years of the First Empire, thanks to visits by Napoleon's stepdaughter, Hortense Beauharnais, whom he married to his second-youngest brother, Louis. Once peace arrived, proximity to England turned Dieppe into a popular vacation destination for visitors from across the channel. “You see nothing but Englishmen in this city,” Stephen commented.
¹⁷
Throughout the summer, a steamboat from Brighton arrived daily, carrying “from fifty to sixty passengers, carriages, and horses.”
¹⁸

In 1824 a three-week visit by Marie-Caroline, duchesse de Berry—a member of France's royal family—prompted French aristocrats to join the English tourists. Eliza, Stephen, and Mary followed in their wake. “We spent a most delightful summer in Dieppe,” Mary
wrote to her birth mother, Maria Jones. “The sea bathing was very agreeable, the balls and parties were charming, and the Princesse De Berry [
sic
] with all her attendance aded [
sic
] to the gaiety and brilliance of the place.”
¹⁹

Stephen was equally enthusiastic. “People enjoy themselves very much; everybody bathes,” he wrote to his nephew-in-law Lesparre. “As for me, I took sixty baths this year,” during a stay of “more than two months.”
²⁰
Stephen decided to purchase a summer home in Dieppe on the modish place des Bains. The three-story structure had a central block with ten windows on the façade, flanked with two wings, each sixty-eight feet in length. Stephen, Eliza, and Mary would inhabit one of the wings. The center section could be rented out; it was big enough “for three families, with their cooks, stables, etc., etc., with a place for two horses for each family, and a carriage house.”
²¹
In addition to Stephen's two horses (used to pull Eliza's carriage), “there will be room enough for ten or twelve others,” he told Lesparre. “In the yard it will be possible to put thirty carriages, which can be brought in and taken out.”
²²
Offering storage for vehicles would be a useful source of revenue.

By late October he had already spent twenty to twenty-five thousand francs (four to five thousand dollars) on wallpaper and furniture for the house. If Lesparre visited, he would find all the amenities: “a nice pleasant room, soft water in the yard, excellent water which comes from four leagues across the mountains, through which a canal has been dug to Dieppe.” In clear weather, the coast of England was visible from a belvedere at the top of the house, and “the vicinity [was] all beautiful.” The land was well cultivated, there were “excellent fish,” and Rouen, with its cloth mills, was only twelve leagues away.
²³

Despite these assets, Stephen showed caution in making the purchase, knowing how easily Eliza became dissatisfied. “I have two years to cancel the contract,” he told Lesparre. “If Mrs. Jumel is not comfortable in it, I will be able to relinquish it.”
²⁴

That Eliza was uncomfortable about something was certain. The evidence comes from a curious note in the diary of American writer
Washington Irving, living at the time in Paris. On November 27 Irving paid a visit to a fellow expatriate, a wine merchant from New York named Dominick Lynch. While Irving was there, another visitor arrived: “Mrs. Jumel called to see Bremner”—probably Benjamin Bremner, also a New York merchant—and “told a long story of Stephen Jumels [
sic
] being deranged.”
²⁵

The fact that Eliza was consulting a merchant suggests that she was concerned about financial decisions Stephen was making. In September he had mortgaged the Broadway and Liberty Street buildings for six thousand dollars, probably to fund the Dieppe acquisition.
²⁶
Eliza had counted on the income from the downtown properties—their most valuable real-estate investment in America—to support them comfortably when Stephen retired. Now the nest egg was encumbered with debt—all to purchase a home in France, when she preferred life in the United States.

In retrospect, late 1824 was not the moment to tie up capital, although Stephen could not have known it at the time. Within a year the European economy would crumble. Stephen Jumel's finances would collapse with it.

19

I
n 1825 Europe's financial systems failed. The London stock market peaked early in the year and then share prices dropped precipitously.
¹
Investors who had purchased stock in a host of risky ventures—mines, water companies, canals, and bridges—turned out, too often, to have been poorly informed and ill-advised.
²

The effects of bursting speculative bubbles were apparent on both sides of the Atlantic. As the editor of
Niles' Weekly Register
, an American financial paper, wrote in early September, “those who had [money], did not know how to employ it, and so they made mighty investments in the wildest and most visionary projects that ever had their day. These, in general, have returned little or nothing, and money has become ‘scarce,' the prices of stocks have considerably fallen in both countries [i.e., Great Britain and United States], and no small pressure begins to be felt, which will probably increase and become very onerous on traders and dealers of all classes.”
³

The collapse of the cotton markets added to the turmoil, as oversupply replaced fears of a shortage. “During the quarter which ended on the 30th June, nearly twenty-five millions of pounds of cotton were exported from New York,” reported the
Weekly Register
on September 24.

But it would have been better for New York, if none of her merchants had touched cotton at all. The fifty thousand, and hundred thousand dollars, that speculators in the article made in a day, while the bubble was floating, are dissolved—leaving behind only wrecks of fortune and bankruptcy, with the ruin of innocent persons … John Bull has got the cotton, the American merchants have lost a large part of the value of it, and the planters have been seduced into an extended cultivation to reduce the price, and bring themselves into trouble: and so endeth this chapter of iniquity.
⁴

But it wasn't the end. On December 3, the
Weekly Register
noted that the business climate continued to worsen:

The recent wild speculations in cotton, superadded to the various gambling projects of stock-jobbers, which built up various monied institutions without any money at all, the whole being puff and paper, has produced a very unpleasant state of things in several parts of the United States, and the demand for money far exceeds the usual supply, in several of our chief cities … And there is a shaking of
confidence
which is more injurious than the losses actually sustained … banks that are fully able to meet all their engagements in a regular way, merchants that can surely pay all their debts, if aided by their usual facilities, and mechanics that are ‘as good as old gold' with the accustomed order of business—neither of these may be competent to meet a sudden derangement, and one goes on to break down another, until the ruin becomes general.
⁵

In the second week in December, the collapse of the Plymouth Bank in Devon and two of the largest London banks spurred a run on banking institutions across England.
⁶
Depositors demanded to withdraw their funds, and currency reserves were soon exhausted:

Expresses were hourly arriving at London to obtain gold. The people … lost confidence in paper, and assembled in great numbers about the banks to obtain money for it. At Plymouth, the uproar was
dreadful. There was literally a whole population, with food in abundance staring them in the face, and yet without means of obtaining it, for … gold alone would the sellers take, and gold was not to be had. By break of day, all the banks were surrounded by mobs, and the civil power was mustered in front of them.
⁷

By early 1826 nearly 10 percent of England's banks had failed.
⁸

Like other businessmen who depended on the London financial markets, Stephen felt the shortage of cash and credit, and had difficulty collecting money owed him by fellow merchants. On February 16, 1826, he wrote to his nephew-in-law Lesparre, “I am more than sorry not to be able to give to my sister what I used to give her.”
⁹

Although the English banks were beginning to recover by early spring, ripples from the crisis spread across the channel and even across the Atlantic. France went into a recession.
¹⁰
“The great merchants and bankers in Germany, Prussia, the Netherlands, &c. were giving way, and for enormous amounts. The like, perhaps, was never heard of before.”
¹¹
Bankruptcies of British merchants continued—1,827 for the half year ending June 1826, compared with 489 for the same period of 1825.
¹²