The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (22 page)

Finalizing a sale proved problematic, however. In fall 1821 Stephen had transferred the stock to his nephew-in-law Lesparre.
³⁴
The timing, only a few months after he had made a generous marriage settlement on his niece Felicie, suggests that he wanted to make a comparable gesture to Felicie's sister—Lesparre's wife, Rose.

The transfer stalled any potential sale. “Mr. Brunel absolutely refused to sell the Hartford Bridge stock,” Eliza wrote, “without a letter of authorization from Mr. Lesparre, specifying that the money from the sale be delivered to Stephen Jumel as belonging to him.”
³⁵
She requested repeatedly that her husband obtain such a document. “You say nothing to me of Mr. Lesparre,” she complained on December 1, 1826. Have him “send an order to sell or dispose of the Hartford Bridge shares as you would like, otherwise be sure we will lose them in the same way that we lost the house in Mont-de-Marsan. Don't trust anyone because we need everything that remains to us for ourselves.”
³⁶
The implication was clear: generosity to Stephen's family should not outweigh their own needs. She returned to the subject on New Year's Day: “Again I repeat to you to send the power of attorney and orders from Mr. Lesparre as soon as possible, because Mr. Lathrop, I believe, will buy or take the shares as mentioned above.”
³⁷

Stephen left these demands from Eliza unanswered. Given how badly he needed money by 1827, his failure to facilitate a sale suggests that he intended the stock to be Lesparre and Rose's inheritance and would not go back on that decision. Rose's husband had become Stephen's confidant, a relative he treated in many ways like a son.

In February 1827 François Jumel's son Étienne (called Ulysses in the family), a hardworking young man who had a close relationship with his uncle Stephen, wrote to his father about the latter's troubles:

My uncle is just now at Dieppe, where living is better
and cheaper than at Paris
. I know also that it is very necessary for him to economize, for when Mrs. Jumel sailed for the United States, like a good and confiding husband, he gave her full and complete power of attorney to collect all the income of his property. Since his chaste wife left, and it is nearly one year since she sailed, my poor uncle has not received one cent from her; on the contrary, after she had received all the back rents due by tenants, she obtained advances from them. She is spending the whole, leaving her husband in France in quite a critical position. Thus you perceive that want may be felt even with a large fortune.
³⁸

Ulysses and Eliza did not get along well, so any reading of this paragraph must take his biases into account.
³⁹
Moreover, there is contemporary evidence that Eliza had not exaggerated the difficulty of wringing money from the Jumel farmlands in central New York. In February 1827 Morse had notified Eliza that most of her and Stephen's tenants were in arrears, and he had been unable to unload any of the property: “I have been to Albany, and have tried also to negotiate a sale with people here; but I find it impossible to sell the bonds and mortgages at the discount you propose or even at any other discount. People in the
city
will not at present advance money on bonds or mortgages in the
country
, and there is no one in the country that I can find has money at present to invest in this way.”
⁴⁰

But with rental income coming in from the downtown houses, it seems that Eliza could have managed to send Stephen something. Instead she sent excuses: “I offered my diamonds for sale, but no one wanted to give me virtually anything for them.”
⁴¹
She stressed her frugality: “I have neither horses nor cook, [we are] doing all the work ourselves [she and Mary]. Mr. Phillipon tells me that it is truly shameful to come into town on the diligence and run about on foot and offered to loan me enough to buy some horses, but I refused him, not wanting to be in debt to anyone.”
⁴²
She pressed again for the sale of the Hartford Bridge Company stock: “That will be a sacrifice but there is no other way to have the sum that you request.”
⁴³

By fall Stephen had become frustrated with her evasions. Instead of one of his usual detailed letters, addressed to “my dear Eliza” and including a thoughtful inquiry about her health, a half-page letter dated October 14 opens with the unadorned salutation “Madame Jumel.” To Stephen's displeasure, she had told Philippon that she was not able to supply the money her husband had requested. Stephen disagreed: “if you are economical, you don't need anyone's help to remit to me the sum that I need, of which I have received the larger part. I count on your economies to supply it and to remit me as promptly as possible four to five thousand francs [i.e., eight hundred to one thousand dollars], having the greatest need of it.”
⁴⁴

If Eliza supplied the funds requested, there is no indication of it. On December 23 Stephen wrote her again, once more addressing her frigidly as Madame Jumel. He had just signed a note for four hundred dollars and required her help: “For the moment, I beg you, [if] you can, to send me double that amount. It would be to pull me out of a very great embarrassment, because I expected a decision from Havana a long time ago, in order to receive some funds. I count on your exactitude to remit the two thousand francs …”
⁴⁵

Their surviving correspondence from the period ends with this letter.

21

S
tephen spent the fall and winter of 1827 in the apartment in the place Vendôme. He shared it with his nephew Ulysses, who was working in a solicitor's office to gain legal experience after being admitted to the bar. Stephen's future plans were uncertain. “I pledged myself to Ulysses to keep him at my home until the fifteenth of April next when my lease expires,” he told Lesparre in September. “After that I don't know what place I shall select, New York or the neighborhood of Toulouse. First without keeping house for the sake of my tranquility: a good table board, a little horse, a pointer, a country full of game. But I have not made up my mind about it. If I do go to New York, six thousand francs a year is enough to spend in the country.”
¹

Eliza had continued to encourage her husband to return to the United States. “My dear Stephen,” she wrote on May 1, in her last surviving letter from 1827, “come back and with economy we will live very well; there is absolutely nothing that can prevent you from returning.”

Capt. Skiddy's vessel is very excellent. He is the best captain and [has] the best packet that there is, so I beg of you, don't miss the earliest opportunity …

Think, my dear Stephen, you are no longer young. You need care that I will be able to give you as your wife. I will do all that depends on me to make you happy. The past will be forever forgotten and we will live one for the other.

The vines are in flower and it appears that we will have many grapes. Moreover we have six hundred vines. I have carefully cleaned and arranged them. You will have great pleasure in seeing them, and as for the garden, you will not be able to imagine how beautiful it is. The avenue and area around the house is so well kept that it seems a true paradise.
²

Stephen was unconvinced. During Eliza's first visit to the United States, his loneliness and longing for her were clear. But during their second separation, there were no pleas for her return; no indications that he found life empty without her. Their relationship had grown colder. “The past will be forgotten,” Eliza wrote; the implication was that there was something to regret.

Eliza had lived independently in New York between 1817 and 1821. She had been lady of the manor and made her own decisions. It would not have been surprising if she had found it difficult to subordinate her will to Stephen's afterward. Now that they were separated again, Stephen and even she may have found life more tranquil without each other.

In spring 1828 Stephen's lease had nearly expired, and he had yet to decide on his destination. “We are going to leave the place Vendôme, both I and your son,” he wrote to François on April 10. “As for me, I do not know where I shall go.”
³
Lesparre advised him to remain in France, but by the beginning of May, Stephen had concluded that he could not. “I will tell you that my inclination would lead me to do so,” he wrote Lesparre, “but I must take another course. I gave my general power of attorney for the State of New York, where all my flowers are; that is the motive of my journey. It was to Mrs. Jumel. Revoke it and send it to anyone else in the country is what I shall not do … Men in the United States have changed very much; there is no longer this frankness as of old.”
⁴
Stephen did
not trust his fellow merchants to act for him anymore—and he suspected that he could not count on Eliza either.

Eliza Jumel betrayed her husband's confidence “by resorting to sham and fraudulent conveyances.”
⁵
She perpetrated “gross frauds … upon him and his heirs.”
⁶
That is how Stephen's relatives described her actions. If we might quarrel with the words they used, one fact was undeniable: between July 1827 and May 1828, Eliza transferred most of Stephen's property into her own hands.

The prospect of financial insecurity must have been terrifying to her. Indelibly marked by the poverty of her youth, she could not shrug off the periodic reversals of fortune that were part and parcel of a merchant's career. If we can imagine the specters that must have haunted her—cold, hunger, servitude, and the workhouse—it is easier to sympathize with her actions.

What she did was described by a lawyer named James Case, who investigated the matter in 1833 for François and Madelaine. According to Case, when Eliza arrived from France in 1826, “she represent[ed] with some show of reason that the industrious Jumel, the builder of a large fortune, the saving man, etc., etc., etc., ha[d] been the reverse of what he ha[d] been known to be in this country and that he [was] rushing headlong to the destruction of his wealth …”
⁷
This picture is not inconsistent with Washington Irving's 1824 statement that Eliza spoke about “Stephen Jumels [
sic
] being deranged.”
⁸
From her perspective, Stephen was risking their future with unwise investments abroad.