The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (38 page)

The photograph, faded from exposure to light, is tantalizing but unsatisfying. The tiny faces, examined through a loupe, fade into the background instead of moving into sharper focus. The expression on Eliza's face cannot be read. Cannily she retains her secrets.

In spite of her frailty—she stopped sallying out to Sunday church services in 1859—Eliza remained active as a businesswoman into her mid-eighties.
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In late 1859 she filed suit against a man who had leased her troublesome ninety-six-acre lot and then defaulted on the three-hundred-dollar rent. The proceeding became a family affair. Nelson acted as her attorney, as he typically did, and William served the summons on the defendant. Eliza's signature on the complaint is tremulous, but clearly legible. She won her case.
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A year and a half later, persons interested in purchasing or leasing her “two very valuable farms” in the village of Saratoga Springs were advised to call on Nelson Chase at his office, 46 Exchange Place, or on Eliza B. Jumel, at Washington Heights (as Harlem Heights had been renamed in honor of the first president).
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As late as 1863, when she was eighty-eight years old, Eliza's attention to her property remained keen. Concerned “that an adjoining owner [in upper Manhattan] had encroached upon her premises, so as to take from her two acres of land on the northern bounds,” she hired a surveyor to map her farm and then refused to pay him when he did a negligent job. He attempted to collect his $375 fee in court, but abandoned the case after the quality of his work was questioned by experts.
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While Eliza remained alert to what was going on around her, there are hints that she became more difficult to live with in the late 1850s and early '60s. The Perys resided with her at the mansion after moving to New York from France in 1856, but either at the end of 1857 or in the spring of 1858, they relocated to a house purchased by Eliza at Seventh Avenue and Forty-First Street.
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A year later, they were on West Forty-Fifth Street near Fifth Avenue, and by fall 1862, at 143 East Sixty-Fifth Street.
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William, now twenty, was living with them by the summer of 1860.
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Nelson remained with Eliza most of the time, commuting downtown to his law practice. However, in September 1862 he left the mansion, lodging with his son, daughter, and son-in-law on Sixty-Fifth Street; then returned uptown in May.
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The reason for his temporary departure remains unexplained, but Eliza appears to have become distrustful of the members of her family. In the summer of 1862, she was in contact with Rev. John Howard Smith, rector of the Church of the Intercession (the Episcopal church in Washington Heights that she had attended in her later years).
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By 1864 or early 1865 she had given her bank book into his charge, but subsequently her suspicions extended to him as well.
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She insisted that six thousand dollars was missing from her account and asked Smith to account for the discrepancy. He did so twice in Nelson Chase's presence.
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Although Eliza remained rational on many subjects, her fictions became increasingly real to her as she aged, shifting from creative exaggerations to near delusions. In December 1861 she addressed a letter to the prince de Joinville—then visiting the United States—whom she had met at Astor House twenty years before. Would he call on her at the mansion, she asked? They could converse about “his noble father,” the late King Louis-Philippe of France, whom she had known at the court of Charles X when Louis-Philippe was still the duc d'Orléans. “It was because of me or my encouragement that he much later mounted the throne,” she claimed in her letter.
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It was at a grand ball of the court; the ladies-in-waiting and the gentlemen of the king's house surrounded the throne, waiting for
the arrival of his Majesty. Although foreign, I had the honor to be with the ladies-in-waiting of the duchesse de Berry. The king arrived, saluting and smiling with his usual grace, but when he mounted his throne, his hat fell; that is when your noble father, the duc d'Orléans, approached, caught it, mounted several steps of the throne and presented it to the king. As if inspired, like one who sees everything and knows the future, I cried: “Good Omen, Good Omen, the duc d'Orléans will be king.” They came forward to lead me out and perhaps throw me in prison, when the good King Charles made a sign and seemed to say to me with regret, “It is true.”
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Eliza concluded her tale on a modest note: “The events that followed have proven your humble servant was right [Charles X was forced to abdicate in 1830], but I don't like to flatter myself; I was only an instrument of a Superior Being that made me interpret and encourage your father to hasten the execution of his plans.”
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What the prince made of this implausible story remains a mystery. Sadly there is no indication that he paid Eliza a visit.

Eliza put off one crucial duty as she advanced in age. From 1859 onward, she spoke several times to her family lawyer, William Wet-more, about drawing up a will, but could never make up her mind to do so.
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Instead, Wetmore said, “She generally, when I went to see her conversed about Mr. Jumel, and how she got the property, and about her friends in Europe, and about her visiting the various courts of Europe … My visits to her most always were four or five hours long.”
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In the summer and early fall of 1862, she consulted Rev. Smith instead. According to his description of their meetings, she asked him to call on her. When he did, she broached the possibility of bequeathing money to construct a new building for the Church of the Intercession. In addition, she asked him to draw up a list of charities that would be suitable objects of her bounty (she had requested
and received a similar list from Wetmore). She suggested leaving Smith a personal legacy also. But again she failed to act.
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The turning point came in March 1863. While suffering from a severe illness, Eliza agreed to the rector's suggestion to ask an architect, Mr. Mold, to bring some church designs for her to consider. She went over the plans with Smith and Eliza Pery, expressing a preference for a structure with “a very beautiful façade” that Mold estimated could be built for sixty thousand dollars.
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Then, again at Smith's prompting, she called in Wetmore to prepare a will. Although the lawyer could not persuade her to finalize anything, he left a draft containing the provisions he had discussed with her.
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A few weeks later, Smith modified the draft under Eliza's direction. On April 15, she signed the document at last.
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The details of Eliza's last years are hazy. The Civil War roiling the country barely touched her life. Its only recorded impact on her was financial. She, Nelson, and Paul were subject to the first federal income tax, imposed to cover the costs of the conflict. In 1865 Eliza reported $7,739 in income in addition to a watch and three carriages.
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By 1863 she is said to have been afflicted with gastric trouble and kidney disease.
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Then in June or early July 1865, she suffered a fall.
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The accident marked the beginning of the end. Eliza, born two weeks before the Revolutionary War began, died two months after the Civil War ended. She took her last breath on Sunday morning, July 16, at home in the Jumel mansion.
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She was ninety years old.

By the end of her life, Eliza had become, in the eyes of many, a survival of the grand old years when the republic was young. In an impressively inaccurate obituary, the
New York Times
identified her as the daughter of an Englishwoman, Mrs. Capet (the surname of the French royal family before the Revolution), and placed her at the 1774 opening of Congress in Philadelphia and the 1789 inauguration of George Washington in New York.
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The
World
, reporting on her funeral, commented that her passing made “one less to the now small number of those who lived in those memorable days.”
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As a serial
weaver of romances herself, Eliza would have appreciated not only these inventive tributes but also a small and unwitting fiction: on her death certificate, attending physician Dr. Alonzo Clarke gave her place of birth as France. The disease causing her passing was identified as “old age.”
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During the first forty-eight hours after Eliza's death, her body lay in a “splendid rosewood coffin” in one of the parlors of her mansion.
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At one o'clock Tuesday afternoon, the casket was closed and removed to the Church of the Intercession.
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As it rested on trestles in front of the chancel, Rev. Smith read the Episcopal burial service and the lesson from I Corinthians: “But now is Christ risen from the dead.”
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Then the choir chanted the anthem from the thirty-ninth Psalm: “Lord, make me to know mine end, and the measure of my days.”
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Finally, six prominent men from the neighborhood—among them Sheriff James Lynch; John E. Develin, Corporation Counsel of the City of New York; and Richard F. Carman, a large landowner in Washington Heights—served as pallbearers as the body was returned to the hearse.
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Eliza's last journey, to Trinity Church's tranquil uptown cemetery, was short. Her body was laid to rest in a stone mausoleum set into a hillside overlooking the Hudson River.
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Today birds chirp in the trees shading the crypt and flashes of sunlight play over the sloping lawn. But if Eliza's bones were at peace, her legacy was not. A line of the psalm sung at the church proved prophetic: “He heapeth up riches, and knoweth not who shall gather them.” The Jumel fortune would have many claimants. They would keep Eliza's name alive, but indelibly smear her legacy.

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