The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (5 page)

I
n eighteenth-century France, rivers were destiny. Mont-de-Marsan, where Stephen Jumel was born in 1765, owed its prosperity to three of them. On a map, the city looked like a westward-pointing thumb. The river Douze ran west along the north border of the thumb; then doubled back on itself, encircling the outer edge of the thumbnail. The southern border of the thumb was formed by the westward-flowing Midou. On the southern edge of the digit, just where the fleshy part of the thumb ended and the nail began, the Midou joined the Douze to form the Midouze.

As rivers go, the Midouze was modest. Shallow and sandy, it was nearly unnavigable during the driest weeks of summer. But most of the year, flat-bottomed barges floated southwestward down the Midouze to its junction with the Adour River, then continued southwest on the Adour to bustling Bayonne, an Atlantic seaport near France's border with Spain.
¹

The riverine highway made Mont-de-Marsan a transit hub. Goods from the surrounding regions of southwest France were assembled and shipped onward to the coast. Wool came from sheep
that grazed the heather-covered moors to the northwest. Pine plantations supplied pitch, tar, turpentine, and wood. Bags of grain were loaded onto the barges too: millet, barley, sorghum, rye, and corn—crops tolerant of the poor, dry soil. The southeast supplied brandy, especially the prized Armagnac that bore the name of the area from whence it came. From even farther east, the broadcloth of Toulouse was sent to Mont-de-Marsan and passed down the Midouze to Bayonne.
²
Little favored by nature, barren of industry, Mont-de-Marsan was dependent on trade.

From the time Stephen Jumel was old enough to explore his hometown, he would have made a beeline for the hum of activity near the docks. There a young boy could immerse himself in the hubbub of commerce—dart among sweating porters hauling barrels and sacks, beg a ride from one of the boatmen poling barges and rafts, or eavesdrop on prosperous merchants supervising the arrival of cargoes.

The port was only about a ten-minute walk from home, an easy adventure for an active child. Stephen's family lived at 16, rue du Bourg, the main street of the commercial quarter of Mont-de-Marsan.
³
Located south of the so-called old city, which was nestled inside the thumb formed by the Douze and Midou, the rapidly growing
bourg
, or commercial sector, contained shops, craftsmen's workshops, and the lively port. There were also warehouses, merchant's houses, and humbler residences—the homes of artisans, boatmen, and tradesmen.

Stephen's family had deep roots in this mercantile economy. His paternal grandfather kept an inn, invested in land, and traded in salt, cereal grains, and cloth—activities continued by Stephen's paternal uncle.
⁴
His maternal grandfather was a tailor who had his own shop.
⁵

Stephen's parents, also shopkeepers, owned and operated a
droguerie
.
⁶
Literally, the word means “drugstore”—but there is no exact modern equivalent of an eighteenth-century
droguerie
. It was a store that carried a broad range of imported products that fell into two basic categories: drugs (the raw ingredients for medications prepared by pharmacists or doctors) and chemicals (organic and
inorganic products used in the craft industries, especially by dyers and furniture makers).
⁷

The Jumels'
droguerie
would have been a treasury of products from around the world: exotic items that were funneled into Bayonne, hauled up the Midouze on barges tugged by oxen and men, and tucked into every nook and cranny. Carpenters could have found isinglass (fish gelatin used to make glue) and lac (secreted by insects in India) to dissolve in alcohol to produce shellac. For dyers the Jumels would have stocked a range of West Indian woods: brazilwood for rich reds; fustic for a gamut of yellows; logwood for purples, grays, and blacks.
⁸

The selection of drugs would have been even more extensive. Since eighteenth-century doctors could do little but try to expel disease, the range of purgatives was staggering. From China came gnarled, yellow pieces of rhubarb. From the West Indies, castor beans, mottled and striped. From Mexico, jalap root, riddled with resinous veins. From Lebanon, senna leaves, pointed like a lance. If a purgative didn't work, there were always expectorants—most important, ipecac from the Americas, its varieties distinguished by the color and striations of their roots.

The rich and pungent scent of the shop would have been among Stephen's earliest memories. His family lived in the building that housed the store.
⁹
Stephen's father, Dominique Jumel, and his mother, Jeanne Sonier, married on November 22, 1759.
¹⁰
Dominique was thirty and Jeanne, twenty-two. Their first child, François, was born a year later, on November 26, 1760. A daughter, Madelaine, arrived a year and a half after François, on May 13, 1762. Stephen, the last born, joined the family three years later, on May 7, 1765.
¹¹
Named Étienne after his father's brother, he adopted the name Stephen—the English equivalent—after moving to the United States.
¹²

Stephen's first language would have been Gascon, a dialect that was the spoken language of southwest France. Soon he would have absorbed French as well—the written language and the tongue spoken in school.
¹³
Charity schools offered poor children the bare rudiments of literacy, but as shopkeepers, several steps up the social
ladder, Stephen's parents could have afforded to send him to a schoolmaster, beginning around the age of six. Together with his brother and sister, and probably neighbors' children as well, he would have learned his catechism and how “to read, write, and count.”
¹⁴

He would have spent happy hours running about the countryside, too. A year before Stephen's birth, Dominique Jumel had inherited a farm from his father, François.
¹⁵
Located in the parish of Parentis, about four miles north of Mont-de-Marsan, it would have been operated by tenants. However, Stephen must have paid frequent visits. As an adult he proved expert at managing a country estate—planting a vineyard, raising sheep, even preparing poultry feathers to make a mattress—surely skills he absorbed in his youth.
¹⁶

He received another education while helping out in the shop. By the time Stephen reached his teens, he would have come to recognize the products sold in the store—their colors, shapes, sizes, textures, and smells. His parents would have taught him to keep daily journals of sales and inventory, assess the quality of products and avoid fraudulent merchandise, build relationships with customers, and display stock to boost sales.
¹⁷

While the young Stephen was assisting his parents, his older brother François was launched on the world. At sixteen François journeyed to Bordeaux, about ninety miles northwest of Mont-de-Marsan. There he embarked on the ship
Le Triton
for Saint-Domingue, France's richest colony.
¹⁸
The world's largest producer of sugar and coffee, thanks to the backbreaking labor of four hunded thousand slaves, Saint-Domingue (today's Haiti) was the promised land for ambitious young Frenchmen who hoped to acquire property and riches.
¹⁹

Yet much of the best land was already in private hands by the third quarter of the eighteenth century. Increasingly, new arrivals became and remained struggling
petits blancs
(little whites), as the slaves termed poor and landless white Europeans.
²⁰
François, however, had a leg up on the competition. He would be joining relatives already established on the island. His maternal uncle, Jacques Sonier, had married into the Sterlin family, whose members owned
land in Saint-Domingue. As a result of his union with Angelique-Geneviève Sterlin, Sonier possessed five coffee plantations in the island's Northern Province.
²¹

The Jumels' oldest son would help his childless uncle and aunt manage their properties. Their plantations were small, but if François were hardworking and kept an eye out for opportunities, he would be able to acquire additional land of his own.
²²

Having settled their eldest son on the path to a livelihood, Dominique and Jeanne Jumel turned their attention to their youngest child. They would send Stephen, like François, to busy Bordeaux, but unlike his brother, not onward to the West Indies. Instead, Stephen would be prepared for a mercantile career in Bordeaux itself, a city whose lifeblood was commerce.

In all likelihood Stephen set out for the city around 1781, when he was sixteen years old, a typical age for apprenticeship as a merchant and the same age at which his brother began his career.
²³
By then the “port of the moon”—as Bordeaux was called, after the crescent-shaped bend in the Garonne River that formed its harbor—already deserved the title of “the most beautiful city in France” bestowed on it by the novelist Stendhal a half century later.
²⁴
Along the curving right bank of the Garonne, grand stone buildings with unified façades overlooked the busy quays. In the center of the arc, two commanding edifices flanking the Place Royale reflected the city's priorities: on one side, the stock exchange; on the other, the Hôtel des Fermes, where taxes and customs duties were collected.

The river in front of them was “so crowded with vessels of different nations” that it looked like a forest in perpetual motion. Small boats darted here and there, and flags snapped in the breeze—Russian, Prussian, and Swedish; Spanish, English, and American. On the quays, teams of enormous oxen dragged sledges piled with wine barrels.
²⁵
The casks would be loaded onto waiting ships.

Stephen's life was centered on the commercial quarter known as the Chartreux, named after the local convent of the Chartreux (in English, Carthusians). The neighborhood's wealthiest merchants lived in tall mansions fronting on the Garonne, while the port's
supporting players—boatmen, coopers, carpenters, and stevedores—resided in the medieval streets behind.
²⁶
Regardless of who lived aboveground, vaults beneath every house were stacked with wine casks, the buried treasure from which Bordeaux fortunes were made.

By the summer of 1789, Stephen was working for d'Egmont frères, a firm of merchants headquartered on the prestigious Quai des Chartrons, at the corner of the rue Denise. A pocket-sized, leather-bound notebook survives, in which he recorded the number of wine barrels removed from wine cellars and the clients to whom they were delivered.
²⁷
Surnames that can be identified suggest that the firm had contacts at the highest levels. “Texié” was probably Pierre Texier, an immensely successful French Protestant ship owner; “Laffargue,” the merchant Pierre Laffargue; and “Brun,” the merchant Mathias-Basile Brun—all epitomizing the most elevated echelons of mercantile Bordeaux. The aristocracy is represented with “de Pontac”—probably the marquis de Pontac—and the army with references to the cavalry, artillery, and engineers. A list of churches suggests that clerical Bordeaux also did business with d'Egmont frères.

Stephen may have been in business for himself already, aside from his work for the d'Egmont firm. “Remov[ed] eight barrels from my wine cellar,” he noted after a client's name on July 30, 1789. In other words, the vintage belonging to this client of d'Egmont frères had been stored in a cellar that Stephen owned.

Although it seemed that Stephen was safely on track to a successful career in Bordeaux, the city would soon grow less hospitable to merchants. In 1789 France was a pressure cooker, bubbling with political turmoil and social unrest. The crown was all but bankrupt after endless dynastic wars and costly support for the American Revolution. The peasantry was sinking ever deeper beneath catastrophically high taxes, while the nobility, lightly taxed, refused to pay more. Unable to achieve fiscal reform, Louis XVI resorted to desperate measures. He summoned the Estates General, a consultative body that hadn't met since the seventeenth century, in the hope that it would rubberstamp, and thus legitimize, the financial restructuring he had been unable to accomplish.

The Estates General turned out to have a mind of its own. Although the three estates were supposed to meet separately, some nobles (members of the First Estate) and clergymen (belonging to the Second Estate) broke ranks and joined the Third (representing everyone else). After being banished from their meeting room for the breach of protocol, the renegade representatives gathered beneath the high roof of the cavernous indoor tennis court at Versailles. There, on June 20, 1789, they vowed not to disband before establishing a constitution for France. The French Revolution had begun.

A partially illegible line, faded with age and abrasion, is written on the last page of Stephen's notebook. In the brief memorandum, the young businessman recorded that a display of lights took place at Bordeaux on July 1, 2, and 3, in honor of the royal audience that Louis XVI gave (grudgingly) to the rebellious Estates General on June 23. The presence of this notation, in an otherwise businesslike notebook, testifies that Stephen recognized the momentous nature of the event.