The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (35 page)

The reading of Eliza as a woman who had made a living on her back was made explicit in the second paragraph of the story in the
Bellows Falls Gazette
, in which she was described as “the widow of the notorious Aaron Burr.” The author claimed that she

married Jumel, after living with him in a state of concubinage; but a quarrel arising between them, they separated, dividing Jumel's large fortune between them. She afterwards went through the same course of profligacy with Aaron Burr, and at his decease was the wife of that vicious but talented man. Jumel lost his property in France, and returned to this country penniless. He sought out his former wife, who took him into her family, and supported him through life, as a sort of ‘upper servant.' At the decease of Burr, she assumed the name of Jumel, and is now living upon the fortune acquired by her first marriage.
³⁰

Factually, there is little to praise in this summary. The chronology is jumbled; Eliza's relationship with Stephen is distorted; and she is turned into Burr's mistress, his reputation tainting hers. But it gives a sense for what must have been whispered salaciously behind her back. The only bright spot was that the writer swallowed Eliza's ongoing fib of being Burr's widow rather than his divorced wife.

Eliza's four-horse carriage and servants in livery would have been a flashpoint even if her character had not been in question. The gulf between the rich and the poor was widening in the mid-nineteenth century, and increasingly the lower classes resented the elite.
³¹
In 1849 the
Home Journal
cautioned readers that “wealth, in a republic, should be mindful where its luxuries offend.”
³²
Although most middle-class families had a young servant or two to help with the manual labor of running a home in an era before the advent of
modern appliances, liveried black servants were employed rarely by the 1840s.
³³
In New York they were utilized only by wealthy residents or visiting plantation owners from the South.
³⁴
Their purpose was to “emphasize the social position of employers.”
³⁵

With her use of a liveried footman and postilions rather than a simply dressed coachman, Eliza was aping the modes of a class to which she was not born—a class that was facing mounting hostility for its excesses. Many appreciated her comeuppance. At one and the same time, she had infuriated the elites who disdained social climbers and the disadvantaged who hated the affectations of the elite.

Eliza stood up to her hecklers. She rode out again the next day, “drawn by her four greys with their mounted postilions” and “provide[d] … with a six-barreled revolving pistol.”
³⁶
Or so said the
Alexandria Gazette
. But undoubtedly the firearm was a journalistic flourish. Eliza outfaced her critics through strength of character, refusing to be driven away by detractors.

Over the years, she continued to embellish her image through canny self-presentation, adjusting facts as necessary. In 1850 she or a family member slipped a writer for the
Saratoga Whig
a scintillating description of a costume she planned to wear to a ball at the United States Hotel:

Mad[ame] Jumel will, on this occasion, personate the Duchess of Orléans—dress white lace—diadem of diamonds—headdress of diamonds, the same owned and used by Josephine, the wife of Napoleon Bonaparte, bequeathed to her niece, and sold to Mons[ieur] Jumel for $25,000. Her watch is the same that was purchased after the Duchess de Berry had offered $2,000 for it. Besides these, her dress will be spangled with diamonds to the amount of upward of $3,000.
³⁷

Eliza being Eliza, she had inflated the value of the jewels—her diamonds were valued at $5,500 dollars, not $25,000, in 1872.
³⁸
Almost certainly she had invented their distinguished provenance as well.
³⁹

A pleasing puff piece, also focused on her attendance at the ball, gives us a sense for how she presented herself to others at the age of
seventy-five. After signaling out Madame Jumel among “the distinguished individuals arrived for the Fancy Dress Ball,” the anonymous author commenced with compliments:

A fashionable acquaintance of good authority and most familiar with the history of this distinguished lady, informs us that neither lapse of time, nor a multiplicity of cares attended upon administering her immense estate, impairs in the least her strong mental vigor and extraordinary [
sic
] charming conversational powers … For nine years she was the only lady admitted at the Court of France, except the nobility, and none in France except these, during that time, could excel her in the value and magnificence of her apparel.
⁴⁰

“As much as ever determined not to be outshone,” she would be costumed in white lace in her personification of the Duchess of Orléans, while “Miss Eliza, her niece,” remarked last season “as a pretty, happy, sprightly, and fawnlike lass,” would dress as a flower girl “in plain white muslin, with tucks—ornamented with roses—a gypsy hat with roses—apron decorated with pink—a little basket of flowers upon her arm.”
⁴¹

“Duchess” and “flower girl” attended the event, but Eliza could never escape malicious tongues entirely. In early October, nearly two months after the masquerade, an agricultural journal in Massachusetts noted briefly: “At the late Saratoga Ball, Madame Jumel, in the character of the Duchess d'Orléans, wore $25,000 worth of diamonds, it is stated. ‘This,' says a croaker, ‘rendered the lady the biggest toad in the puddle!'”
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33

I
n Europe, where few knew her, Eliza could reinvent herself more fully. After Stephen's death, she returned to France three or four times, traveling as Mrs. Eliza Burr. She reveled in the prestige of being the “widow” of a vice president. According to Eliza Chase, she said often, “You know I can take that name if I choose.”
¹
With a new identity to give her status, “that horrible country”—as she had once called France—felt more welcoming.

Her first overseas voyage as a widow may have taken place in 1841. On October 9 she applied for a passport, “being about to proceed to Europe.” The document, duly granted two days later to “Mrs. Eliza Burr,” informs us that she was still a brunette at sixty-six—perhaps she had recourse to the dye pot—and looked young enough that her age was given as fifty years.
²
Whether she utilized the passport is unknown, but in early October she was staying at Astor House, New York's most luxurious hotel, possibly in preparation for departure.
³
There she achieved an introduction to the prince de Joinville, third son of King Louis-Philippe, France's reigning monarch.
⁴

In the winter of 1850, she was surely abroad, although the surviving documentation is meager. A two-page letter from her that surfaced in 1922 contained the following lines: “You would take me
to be a scarecrow. I long to return to America to find tranquility. My life is almost worn out.”
⁵
The dealer offering the document provided no other details of its contents, but the little information provided is consistent with Eliza's habits. She traveled when she was ill, whether physically or emotionally, returning home refreshed in spirit.

Eliza took great enjoyment in an eight-month trip to England, France, Italy, and Scotland in the winter of 1851 to '52, in spite of a “severe illness” that marred part of the journey.
⁶
Her fifteen-year-old great-niece accompanied her. “Alas!” she informed Nelson in a letter, “I shall have to spend money very freely for Eliza—court dresses will be very costly.” But she did not truly regret the expense: they expected to enjoy themselves more in Paris “than in all the other cities” they planned to visit, including Naples, Venice, and Rome.
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Indeed, in Paris “Prince Louis”—probably Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, France's elected “Prince-President,” who would soon mount the throne as Napoleon III—obtained tickets for them to attend the splendid ceremony of the Distribution of the Eagles to the Army.
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The event attracted tens of thousands of spectators to the Champs de Mars, as Eliza Chase reported to her father.
⁹
Also in Paris, Mrs. Burr sat for a portrait drawing.
¹⁰
She had it lithographed, adding a suitable caption: “
MADAM WIDOW OF THE LATE
A
ARON
B
URR, VICE PRESIDENT OF THE
U
NITED
S
TATES, FORMERLY
M
ADAM
J
UMEL
.”
¹¹
Her name was given typographical parity with Burr's.
¹²
Other highlights of the trip included, in Italy, attendance at the balls of Prince Alessandro Torlonia, the so-called Roman Rothschild; and in Edinburgh, visits to Holyrood Palace and the monument to Sir Walter Scott.
¹³

Eliza took pleasure in smaller matters as well. She told Nelson proudly of a stratagem she had employed to secure a comfortable journey from southern France to Nice:

When we arrived in Marseilles, we went to take our passage before the steamship sailed, when to my great surprise, they informed me that all the berths were taken, and not another person could be accommodated, but that we could wait till the next day and get a
berth to ourselves. I told them I must go in this steamer, if I have [
sic
] to sleep on the planks; his answer was, “Do as you please, for we have no accommodation.” Eliza strove to dissuade me, but to no purpose. I paid my money and on board we went. The first thing I did was to call on the captain, and in a very low tone I addressed him: “Sir, I have been looking for a berth; you would permit a President's wife to sleep on the planks?”
¹⁴

Eliza's self-elevation in rank served its purpose. “O[h], no, my good lady,” the captain replied, “I will go down and procure you a good berth.” Then “he descended and ordered the best, telling the ladies they were taken. So the poor ladies had to go into the gentlemen's room, and we enjoyed the good things with the rest.”
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Eliza's manipulations may have saved her life. “I have no doubt that you have read in the papers of the disastrous event which took place in the steamer the day after,” she wrote to Nelson, “and I have no doubt we should have been lost had we waited.”
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Probably they had escaped one of the boiler explosions that were tragically common in the early days of steam.
¹⁷

Eliza closed her letter with kind words for eleven-year-old William, too young to join his sister on the European venture: “Give my love to Will, and tell him I often think of him, and was pleased to learn so good an account of him.” Then with “grateful thanks” to Nelson for the “affectionate letter” she had received from him, she signed herself “your true friend, Eliza Burr.”
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