The Remarkable Rise of Eliza Jumel (9 page)

Both Eliza and William Ballou were baptized at Manhattan's Trinity Church.
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When she attended services, Eliza could worship near the pew that George Washington had occupied and walk in the cemetery that boasted Alexander Hamilton's grave.
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The church was only a few blocks north of the Jumels' rented house at 5 Beaver Street. It remained within walking distance when they moved south to 28 Whitehall, another rental, in 1808. A niece of Eliza's recalled visiting the couple at the second of the two houses when she was three or four years old. One of the treasures it contained remained vivid in her memory sixty years later: “I remember going there and turning the handle of an organ or musical instrument that, if the crank was simply turned, played tunes.”
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Stephen, who would prove to be a generous and warmhearted man, took William Ballou into his household and made a place for him in
his business. From 1805 onward, William's signature appears occasionally in Stephen's receipt books or letter book, marking occasions when the young man witnessed a transaction or hand-delivered a letter.
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By 1810, aged nineteen or twenty, William was importing a small amount of “silk goods” himself.
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Stephen helped others connected to his wife as well. Eliza's sister, Polly, was living in New York by the turn of the century. Like Eliza, she had updated her name, calling herself Maria Bowne. On September 6, 1801, she had given birth to an illegitimate daughter, Mary Ann Walter Bowne.
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The inclusion of Walter and the altered spelling of Bowen were significant. Although no one spoke of it publicly until after Mary's death, her father was the merchant Walter Bowne.
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Born in 1770 of a prominent Quaker family in Flushing (part of New York City's borough of Queens today), he would one day be mayor of New York.
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His relationship with Maria probably terminated before his 1803 marriage.
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In late 1805 Maria was pregnant again, with a child fathered by a man named William Jones. She married Jones on December 19, 1805; their first child, William Ballou Jones, was born four months later.
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Although his first name was the same as that of his father, his full name suggests a tribute to William Ballou as well. A second child, born January 28, 1808, was named Eliza Jumel Jones, honoring both Eliza and her husband.
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Stephen and Eliza assisted the Joneses financially. In May 1809 Stephen paid school tuition for “Mary Jones,” Maria's illegitimate child, who was using her stepfather's surname.
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Mary's half siblings, William and Eliza Jones, and their younger sister, Louisa, born in 1809, were baptized at Trinity Church in September 1810, possibly at their aunt Eliza's prompting.
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In another indication of the ties between Eliza and her sister's family, William Jones opened a short-lived boardinghouse at 24 Pearl Street in 1812, immediately across the street from Stephen's business premises at 23 Pearl.
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Seeing the Jones family growing up around them, Eliza and Stephen may have felt a private sorrow. The years passed, but they had
no children. The youngest member of their household, William Ballou, moved into rented lodgings, paid for by Stephen, in 1810.
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Later that year he married a dressmaker's assistant.
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It was probably around this time that Eliza and Stephen took her oldest niece, Mary Jones, into their home. By spring 1813 Mary had become “Miss Jumel.”
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They would raise her as their daughter.

9

T
he Jumels' shared life as a couple remains hazy. According to a narrative written in 1908 by historian Hopper Striker Mott, they socialized with a community of French émigrés established in Bloomingdale. Mott painted a romantic picture of the habitués of this pretty, rural suburb that has since become the Upper West Side of Manhattan. The social center of the community was Chevilly, a house occupied by “Mme. d'Auliffe,
dame d'honneur
to Marie Antoinette,” who lived there with her three little daughters.

Among its constant visitors was the marquis de Cubières, a gallant of the vanished court, who was a fine type of the gentleman of the ancient
régime
, though, perhaps, never quite reconciling himself to the institutions of republican America. He named his horse “Monarque,” and, mounted thereon, he might have been seen making frequent pilgrimages out into the country from his home in Broad Street, to visit his friends at Chevilly. Another welcome guest was Col. August de Singeron who had commanded the Cuirassiers of the Guard at the Tuileries on the fatal Tenth of August.
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Diplomats, too, entered the drawing room of Chevilly:

The great Talleyrand was always a welcome arrival. Another Frenchman who at this time made New York his home was the famous General Moreau, the rival of Napoleon in popular favor and the victim of that eminent man's jealousy. The Moreaus lived at 119 Pearl Street … We can well imagine he was also a guest at Chevilly, for he had property interests nearby.
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Even royal princes frequented this Paris in exile. “When the young duc d'Orléans”—who became in 1830 King Louis-Philippe of France—“and his brothers, the duc de Montpensier and the prince de Beaujolais, came to New York, they soon found their way to Chevilly, where madame and her little circle made the fugitives feel less poignantly the loss of country, rank, home, and kindred, surrounding them with an atmosphere that reminded them of Versailles.” The future king “was often actually in need, as were the young princes who accompanied him, and to gain a livelihood taught school during his stay in Bloomingdale.”
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In these lofty if sometimes purse-pinched circles, “M. Jumel, although not to the manor born, was well received because of his kindliness and the popularity of his famous wife. He owned land in Bloomingdale, on which they lived, the house being located between 77th and 78th Streets on the east side of present Amsterdam Avenue.”
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This charming picture of aristocratic life in the early republic turns out to be a muddle of epic proportions. The most noble Simon-Louis-Pierre, marquis de Cubières, said to have trotted out into the country from his home on Broad Street, never visited the United States at all.
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Equally incredibly, Colonel August de Singeron, that brave French officer, was plucked from an 1829 article in a New York literary magazine and set down at Chevilly, which was not mentioned in the original source. In the article, delusively titled “Reminiscences of New-York,” he is described improbably as having “turned pastry cook and confectioner” after arriving in the United States,
fashioning gilt gingerbread figures of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, and marzipan stamped with the façade of the Tuileries Palace.
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Yet no one named Singeron appears in New York's city directories, as a confectioner or otherwise, during the French Revolutionary or Napoleonic periods. Although an officer named Lavaur, who was a member of Louis XVI's guard, fled to the United States after the August 10, 1792, attack on the Tuileries, he returned to Europe in 1796 and there is no evidence that he worked as a confectioner or visited Chevilly.
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Possibly his story inspired the creation of the fictional Singeron, whose name may have been a play on the French word for monkey (
singe
), matching his description (or rather, caricature) as a short, red-haired man whose “broad shoulders overshadowed a pair of legs under the common size” and whose “voice was an exaggeration of the usual sharp tones of his nation.”
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Of the other supposed visitors to Chevilly, only Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who lived in the United States between April 1794 and June 1796, can be proved to have set foot there.
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Although he spent much of his time in Philadelphia, he was in New York from June through November 1795 and stayed at Chevilly for several weeks in late April and early May 1796, before he sailed for Europe.
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Eliza and Stephen couldn't have socialized with him as a couple, however, since they were not married until 1804—nor is there any record of him having met Stephen. Similarly, the visit of the duc d'Orléans and his two brothers to the United States lasted well under two years and occurred long before the Jumels' marriage. Orléans arrived in North America on October 24, 1796, and his brothers, the duc de Montpensier and the comte (not “prince”) de Beaujolais, joined him in early February 1797. They used Philadelphia as their base for trips into the American interior, spending only three weeks in New York City.
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Although they could have stopped in at Chevilly then, there is no proof one way or the other. As for the story of the future king teaching school in New York, it was not recorded until 1875 and proves to be purely imaginary.
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Louis-Philippe did teach school for eight months to support himself in exile, but that was in Richenau, Switzerland.
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Chevilly's hostess, “Mme. d'Auliffe,
dame d'honneur
to Marie Antoinette,” was the victim of perhaps the greatest misunderstanding of all. The major French biographical dictionaries, including Michaud's
Biographie universelle
and the
Nouvelle biographie générale
published by Firmen Didot frères, reveal no family bearing the name Auliffe. This is not surprising, since the French refugees settled at Chevilly turn out to have been not the Auliffes but the Olives. The origin of the error must have been a misunderstanding of the name as heard by an American, Olive (pronounced oh-leev in French) being written down incorrectly as Auliffe (oh-leef ).

Letters written by Nicholas Olive, a wealthy merchant, to his three daughters from Chevilly in 1800 and 1801 make clear that he and his wife, and not the mythical madame d'Auliffe, were living on the property.
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Although they welcomed visits from other French émigrés after arriving in the United States in 1793—Olive was a shareholder in Castorland, a settlement in northern New York State founded as a refuge for royalists fleeing the French Revolution—they returned to France in 1802 and could not have been the center of New York's French community during the Jumels' married years.
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Nor could they have hosted General Jean-Victor-Marie Moreau, who was only in the United States between 1805 and 1813, and didn't settle in New York City until 1808. At least their true identity helps to explain the appearance in the story of the marquis de Cubières, despite his never having visited New York. Olive died shortly after he and his wife returned to their homeland in 1802, and his widow married Cubières in 1805.
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As the chronology became garbled with the passing of years, he and not she was transplanted to the United States.