Superwomen Part 10

For in the church register she wrote that she was born in 1777 and was the daughter of Phoebe and John Bowen--the latter a drowned sea captain.

New York, having a somewhat tenacious memory, eyed the bride askance--or so she fancied. And, like many a later American, she sought to cover any possible reputation scars by a European veneer.

She persuaded her husband to sell out some of his New York interest and to take her to Paris to live. Which, ever obedient, he did.

Napoleon I. was at the heyday of his glory. About him was a court circle that did not look overclosely into peoples' antecedents.

Napoleon's brother-in-law, Murat, had started life as a tavern waiter; Napoleon himself was the son of a poor Corsican lawyer and had never been able to learn to speak French without a barbarous accent. As for his sister, Pauline, if "a virtuous woman is a crown to her husband,"

Pauline's spouse, Prince Borghese, had not a ghost of a chance of skipping into the king row. Nor was Napoleon's first wife, Josephine, of flawless repute. Altogether, it was a coterie unlikely to ask many questions about Betty's early history.

The fascinations of Madame Jumel and the vast wealth of Monsieur Jumel were not to be withstood. Speedily the husband and wife were in the turgid center of things; part and parcel of imperial court life.

As Betty had charmed level-headed New York, there is no need to describe in windy detail what she did to Paris. Her conquests there--like the stars of the Milky Way--shine indistinct and blurred because of their sheer numbers. But through the silvery blur gleams forth the name of Lafayette. The old marquis was delighted, at sight, with the lovely young American; and he eagerly offered to act as her sponsor at court. Which he did, to the amus.e.m.e.nt of many and to the indefinite advancement of Betty's social hopes.

The great Napoleon glanced in no slightest disfavor on Lafayette's social protegee. He willingly set the seal of imperial approval on the court's verdict. The emperor was Stephen Jumel's idol. Himself a self-made man, the old merchant worshiped this self-made demiG.o.d, the model and unattainable example of every self-making man since his day.

Jumel's hero-worship took a practical form. He placed his resources at the emperor's service, and once tactlessly, but generously, offered his own wealth and his New York home as solace and refuge in the increasingly probable event of the emperor's mislaying his crown. To which Napoleon replied--speaking, as ever, to the gallery:

"Whatever reverses Fortune may inflict on me, Duty will chain me to France. It would be unworthy my greatness and an insult to my empire for me to seek asylum across the seas."

Yet, when the inevitable Day dawned, the fugitive emperor made plans to do that very thing. And Jumel met him more than halfway by crossing from New York to Havre on his own yacht--the Elizabeth, named for his wife--and seeking to bear away his fallen idol to safety. The plan, of course, fell through, and Napoleon in consequence was almost the only Bonaparte who did not sooner or later come to New York.

Imperial friendship and a gloriously extravagant--and extravagantly glorious--wife are things to brag of. They are splendid advertis.e.m.e.nts. But they are not on the free list. In fact, they rip hideous breaches in the solidest wall of wealth. They played havoc with Papa Jumel's supposedly boundless fortune. One morning in Paris, the Jumels awoke to find themselves nastily close to bankruptcy.

The French court was emphatically no fitting place wherein to go bankrupt. The scared Jumels realized this. Back they scurried to New York; in that bourne of fast-made and faster-lost fortunes to face what the future might bring.

And now, all praise to Betty Jumel, erstwhile queen of money wasters!

Instead of repining, or blaming her husband for letting her break him, or flitting to some wooer whose wealth was still intact, she did the very last thing her past would have led any one to expect.

She became, in effect, her husband's business partner. She displayed a genius for finance. It must have been stark genius, for her personal experience in the credit side of the money ledger was nil. More through his wife's aid than through his own sound business ac.u.men, Papa Jumel began to win back the ground Betty had so industriously helped him to lose.

One daring and lucky venture followed another. In an incredibly short time the Jumels were again numbered among the very richest people in America. Once more Betty launched on a career of luxury; but now and ever after she kept just within her abundant resources. Bankruptcy was a peril forever banished.

Betty, you see, did not belong to the type of fool who runs his head twice into the same hornet's nest. There really was no need for such monotony. There were plenty of hornets' nests.

The first expenditure, to celebrate the new fortune, was the buying of the big white house far away on the hillock above the Harlem River; a long, long coach drive, up the Broad Way, from the city's fashionable residence district to the south of Duane Street. Remember, this was a full twenty years before the Southern merchant made his historic speech: "When I come to New York on business, I never think of stopping at the Astor House. It's much too far uptown for a busy man."

The house Betty made her husband buy had been built years earlier by Colonel Roger Morris, after he married Mary Phillipse, the colonial belle, whose father owned most of Westchester County and lived in a manor house there among his va.s.sals like a feudal lord.

To this abode moved the Jumels. Thither they brought a retinue of servants whose numbers amazed the thrifty New Yorkers. Here, too, were deposited such furniture as New York had seldom seen--a marvelously hideous marble-top table given to Papa Jumel by the Sultan of Turkey; a set of chairs that had been Napoleon's; a truly gaudy and c.u.mbrous gold clock, which had been one of the emperor's gifts to Betty; tapestry and pictures that had once belonged to the Empress Josephine; dining-room furniture that had graced the ~salle a manger~ of King Charles X. of France; a ma.s.sive, glittering chandelier, the gift of General Moreau, who had vied with the emperor for Betty's smiles.

Above all these and the rest of her home's rich furnishings, Betty treasured two other gifts from Napoleon--odd ~gages d'amour~ for such a man to have given such a woman. They were the battered army chest and army cot used by him throughout the wonderful Italian campaign that had first established his fame.

The world was scoured by Jumel's merchant ships to secure rare plants and trees for the hundred-and-fifty-acre park surrounding the mansion.

Cedars from Mount Lebanon, cypresses from Greece, exotic flowers from South America, roses from Provence--these were but a few of the innumerable exotics that filled the grounds. (The "park," to-day, is a wilderness of dingy, apartment-lined streets).

Once established in their new home, the Jumels began to entertain on a scale that dwarfed even the much-vaunted hospitality of the ante-bellum South. And the people who, of yore, had looked obliquely and frostily on Betty Bowen, now clamored and schemed and besought for invitations to her dinners. Well they might; for not only America's great folk delighted to honor the mansion by their presence, but every t.i.tled foreigner who touched our sh.o.r.es became a guest there.

Hither came Joseph Bonaparte--kicked off the ready-made throne to which his emperor brother had vainly sought to fit the incompetent meager form and more meager intellect--and here he was entertained with royal honor, as if he had been still a sovereign instead of merely a crownless puppet no longer upheld by the mightiest of human hands. Here he was "Your Majesty," and people backed out of the room in which he chanced to be, stood until he gave them gracious leave to sit, and otherwise showered upon him the adoring servility that the freeborn are p.r.o.ne to lavish upon the representatives of monarchy.

Bonaparte after Bonaparte visited the Jumels. The name, "Bonaparte,"

was still one wherewith to conjure, and that fact by itself made its thick-headed and impecunious bearers welcome in almost every land they might choose to visit. They graciously accepted the Jumel house's hospitality and the veneration of their fellow guests; still more graciously they borrowed money--which they never returned--of Papa Jumel; and most graciously of all they made ardent and heavy love to Betty.

To the Jumel mansion came finally the last and least esteemed of the Bonaparte visitors; a squat, puffy-eyed princeling--pallid, crafty shadow of the Austerlitz Man--who had left France and jail one jump ahead of the police, had served as special constable in London to pick up enough money for food, and now for similar reason was teaching school in Bordentown, New Jersey.

He was Louis Napoleon, alleged nephew of Napoleon I. I say "alleged"

on the authority of Victor Hugo's famous sneer that Louis was "neither the nephew of his uncle, the son of his father, nor the father of his son." It was Hugo, too, who, when Louis became emperor of the French, under the t.i.tle of Napoleon III., dubbed him "Napoleon the Little."

For which witticism, Monsieur Hugo was promptly banished from France.

Louis was the son of Napoleon's younger brother of the same name and of his wife--and step-niece--Hortense Beauharnais. The son had not a single Bonapartist feature nor trait. He strongly resembled, however, a certain dashing Dutch admiral, one Flahaut, on whom Hortense had been credited with bestowing a more than neighborly interest. It is not libelous, in view of many proven facts--indeed, it is scarce gossip--to say that Hortense, like her mother, the Empress Josephine, had had the foible of loving not wisely, but too often.

In any event, whoever may have been his father, Louis Napoleon was kindly received by the Jumels; not as a prince, but as a guest of honor. And Papa Jumel lent him much hard-earned American money. Among all the Bonapartes, Louis was the least promising of the Jumels'

beneficiaries. And of them all, he alone was to make any return for their goodness to him.

The Prince de Joinville--here to investigate, and if necessary buy off, Eleazer Williams' claim to be the "lost Dauphin"--stayed at the mansion and paid charming attentions to Betty. So did the polished old scoundrel, Talleyrand, whom Napoleon had daintily described as "a silk stocking filled with muck."

Less lofty of birth, but worth all the Bonapartes put together in point of genius, was a young American poet who vastly admired Betty, and who, on her invitation, spent weeks at a time at the mansion. He was Fitz-Greene Halleck; and, seated on the porch of the Jumel house, he wrote a poem that a million schoolboys were soon to spout--"Marco Bozzaris."

One morning in 1830, Papa Jumel set out for New York on a business call to his bankers. He rode forth from the long, winding driveway--several flat houses and stores and streets cut across that driveway's course to-day--in the lumbering and costly family coach.

An hour later he was brought home dying. The coach had upset on the frost-rutted road a few miles to the south. Jumel had fallen out--on his head.

Papa Jumel was in the late seventies at the time of his death. His widow was either fifty-three or sixty-one--all depending on whether you believe her own statement or the homely Rhode Island facts. What does it matter? She was one of the super-women who do not grow old.

Scarce was her worthy spouse stretched comfortably in his last sleep, when suitors thronged the house. And it was not alone because the Widow Jumel was one of the richest women in America. She still held her ancient sway over men's hearts; still made sentimental mush of men's brains.

Gossip, silenced of late years, sprang eagerly and happily to life.

Once more did New York ring with Betty's daring flirtations. But she cared little for people's talk. She was rich enough, famous enough, clever enough, still beautiful enough to be a law unto herself. The very folk who gossiped so scandalously about her were most eager to catch her eye in public or to secure an invitation to the great mansion on the Harlem.

As to men, she had never yet in all her fifty-three--or was it sixty-one?--years, met her match at heart smashing. But she was to meet him. And soon.

Will you let me go back for a s.p.a.ce and sketch, in a mere mouthful of words, the haps and mishaps of one of Betty's earlier admirers?

Aaron Burr was vice president of the United States when he shot Hamilton. The bullet that killed Hamilton rebounded and killed Burr's political future; for Hamilton was a national favorite and Burr was not.

Burr served out his term as vice president amid a whirlwind of national hatred. Then he went West, a bitterly disappointed and vengeful man, and embarked on an incredibly audacious scheme whereby he was to wrench free the great West and Southwest from the rest of the Union and install himself as emperor of that vast region, under the t.i.tle of "Aaron I."

The scheme failed, and Burr was hauled before the bar of justice on charges of high treason. Through some lucky fate or other, he was acquitted, but he was secretly advised to leave America. He followed the advice. And when he wanted to come back to the United States, he found every port closed against him. So he starved for a time in obscure European lodging.

His heart had been broken, years earlier, by the death of the only woman he ever truly loved. She was not one of the hundreds who made fools of themselves over him. She was not his wife, who had died so long before. She was his only daughter, Theodosia; the only holy influence in his tempestuous life.

And Theodosia had been lost at sea. No authentic word of her, or of the ship that carried her, has ever been received. Burr had spent every day for months pacing the Battery sea wall, straining those uncanny black eyes of his for glimpses of her ship. He had spent every dollar he could lay hands on in sending for news of her. And then he had given up hope. This had been long before.

His daughter dead, his political hopes blasted, his country's gates barred against him, he dragged out a miserable life in Europe. Then, after years of absence, he slipped into the United States in disguise.

The first news of his return came in a New York newspaper announcement that "Colonel Aaron Burr has opened law offices on the second floor of 23 Na.s.sau Street." The government made no move to deport him. Clients by the dozen flocked to take advantage of his brilliant legal intellect. Poverty, in a breath, gave place to prosperity.

This was in the spring of 1833, a scant three years after Papa Jumel's sudden demise. Tidings came to Betty that her old adorer, after so long a lapse of time, was back in New York. And across the gap of years came memories of his mesmeric eyes, his wonderful voice--the eyes and voice no woman could resist--the inspired manner of his love-making. And Betty went to him.

Throughout his love-starred life it was Burr's solemn declaration that never once did he take a single step out of his path to win any woman; that all his myriad conquests came to him unsought. Probably this was true. There are worse ways of bagging any form of game than by "still hunting." Perhaps there are few better.