Superwomen Part 11

At all events, down Broadway in her France-built coach rolled Betty Jumel--tall, blond, statuesque as in the Betty Bowen days when Peter Croix had "bought a book for his friends to read." She called on Burr, ostensibly to consult him about a legal matter involving a real-estate deal. But Burr understood. Burr always understood.

He saw, too, that Betty was still fair to look upon and that she had lost little of her charm. By common report he knew she was egregiously rich. He himself was wizened, white of hair, and seventy-eight years old. Poverty, griefs, bitter disappointments had sadly broken him.

Save for his eyes and voice and brain, there was little about him to remind Betty of the all-conquering and dapper little Lothario of forty years back. Yet, as he listened and looked, she loved him. Yes, there is a goodly a.s.sortment of hornets' nests wherein a fool may run his head without visiting the same nest twice.

A few days after her call at his office, Betty gave one of her renowned dinner parties. It was "in honor of Colonel Burr." The guest of honor carried all before him that evening. The people who had come to stare at him as an escaped arch-criminal went home wholly enslaved by his magnetic charm. Aaron Burr had come to his own again.

In saying good night to his hostess, Burr lingered after the other guests had trundled off cityward in their carriages. Then, taking his leave with bared head, there in the moonlight on the steps of the Jumel mansion, he dropped lightly to one knee and raised Betty's hand to his lips.

"Madam," he breathed, the merciful moonlight making him for the moment his young and irresistible self again, "madam, I give you my hand. My heart has long been yours."

It was a pretty, old-world speech. Betty thought--or affected to think--it meant nothing. But it was the opening gun of a swift campaign. Day after day thereafter, Burr neglected his fast-growing law business to drive out to the house above the river. Every day he drew the siege lines closer to the citadel.

At length he asked Betty to marry him. With a final glimmer of common sense, she refused. He went away. Betty feared he would not come back.

But he did. He came back the very next day--July 1, 1833. And with him in the carriage was another old man--the Reverend Doctor Bogart, who had performed the marriage ceremony for Burr and the latter's first wife.

To the butler who admitted them, Burr gave a curt message for Madame Jumel, asking that she come down to them at once in the drawing-room.

Wondering, she obeyed.

"Madam," said Burr, by way of salutation, "I have come here to-day to marry you. Pray get ready at once!"

Betty indignantly refused, and all but ordered her suitor and the clergyman from the house. Then Burr began to talk. The consummate eloquence that had swayed prejudiced juries to his will, the love pleas that no woman had been able to hear unmoved, the matchless skill at argument that had made him master of men and women alike--all were brought into play.

An aged, discredited, half-impoverished failure was asking a beautiful and enormously rich woman to be his wife. Those were the cold facts.

But cold facts had a way of vanishing before Aaron Burr's personality.

Perhaps the greatest lingual triumph of his seventy-eight years was won when this feeble old man broke down within half an hour all Betty's defenses of coquetry and of sanity as well.

At last she ran from the room, murmuring that she would "decide and let him know." Burr sank back wearily in his chair. The victory was won. He knew it.

A little later Betty reappeared at the head of the stairs. She was resplendent in a gown of thick, stiff, dove-colored satin, and she glittered with a thousand jewels. Burr, lightly as a boy, ran up the stairs to meet her. Without a word she took his proffered arm.

Together they walked to where the clergyman, stationed by Burr, awaited them. And they were married--super-woman and super-man. I know of no other instance in the History of Love where two such consummate heart breakers became man and wife.

It would be pleasant to record that the magnetic old couple walked hand and hand into the sunset; that their last years were spent together in the light of the afterglow. Here was a husband after Betty's own heart. Here was a wife to excite the envy of all Burr's friends, to rehabilitate him socially and financially. It seemed an ideal union.

But the new-wed pair did none of the things that any optimist would predict, that any astute student of human nature would set down in a novel about them. Before the honeymoon was over, they were quarreling like cat and dog. About money, of course. Burr sold some stock for his wife, and neglected to turn over the proceeds to her. She asked for the money. He curtly replied:

"Madam, this time you are married to a ~man~. A man who will henceforth take charge of all your business affairs."

Betty's temper had never, at best, threatened to rob the patient Griselda of her laurels. Men had been her slaves, not her masters. She had no fancy for changing the lifelong conditions. So, in a blaze of anger, she not only demanded her money, but hinted very strongly that Colonel Burr was little better than a common fortune hunter.

Burr ordered her to go to her room and stay there until she could remember the respect due from a wife to her husband. She made a hot retort to the effect that the house was hers, and that, but for her wealth, Burr was a mere outcast and beggar.

Burr, without a word, turned and left the house. This was just ten days after the wedding. He went to New York and took up his abode in his former Duane Street lodgings. Betty, scared and penitent, went after him. There was a reconciliation, and he came back.

But soon there was another squabble about money. And Betty, in another tantrum, went to a lawyer and brought suit to take the control of her fortune out of her husband's hands. Again Burr left his new home, vowing he would never return.

The poor old fellow, once more cast upon his own resources, and self-deprived of the luxuries his wife's money had brought him, fell ill. When Betty, in another contrite fit, went to plead with him to come back, she found him delirious. She had him carried out to the mansion, and for weeks nursed him right tenderly.

But when he came again to his senses, Burr would not speak to his wife. The moment he was able to get out of bed, he left the house.

Betty never saw him again. Not very long afterward he died, in a Staten Island hotel--alone, unmourned, he who had been the darling of women.

Did Betty mourn her husband emeritus? Not noticeably. She was not of the type that mourns. Before Burr was fairly under the sod, she was flirting gayly and was demanding and receiving the same admiration that had always been hers. She sought to make people forget that she had ever been Mrs. Burr, and she asked them to call her, once more, "Madame Jumel." She dazzled New York with a mammoth flower fete in the summer of 1837; and once more, heedless of people's opinions, ruled as queen of New York's little social realm.

And so the years sped on, until the super-woman of other days could no longer fight off that incurable disease, old age. American men no longer vied for her favors. She decided that American men's taste for beauty had been swallowed up by commercialism. And she went again to Paris, where, she remembered, men had never ceased to sue for her love.

This was in 1853. Louis Napoleon had just made himself "Napoleon III., Emperor of the French." He had a way, in the days of his power, of forgetting those who had befriended him when he was down-at-the-heel exile, and of snubbing former friends who were so foolish as to claim present notice on the ground of past favors.

But he made a notable exception in the case of Madame Jumel. He received her with open arms, gave a court ball in honor of her return to Paris, and in every way treated her almost as if she had been a visiting sovereign. One likes to think his overworked recording angel put all this down in large letters on the credit side of Napoleon the Little's celestial ledger page. Heaven knows there was plenty of blank s.p.a.ce on that side of the page for any such entries.

But on Betty herself the effect of all this adoration was decidedly startling. Treated like a queen, she grew to believe she was a queen.

The razor-keen wits that had stood by her so gallantly for three-quarters of a century or more were dulling. Her mind began wandering helplessly in the realms of fancy. An odd phase of her mental decay was that she took to babbling incessantly of Aaron Burr--whose name she had not spoken in years--and she seemed to forget that she had ever met a man named Jumel.

She came back to the old house on the hill, overlooking the Harlem.

The stream was no longer as pastoral and deserted as in earlier days, and houses and cottages had begun to spring up all around the confines of the mansion's grounds. New York was slowly creeping northward.

But it is to be doubted that Betty realized the change. She was a queen; no less a queen because she ruled an imaginary kingdom.

She declared that her position as a sovereign demanded a body of household troops. So she hired a bodyguard of twenty soldiers, dressed them in gay uniforms, and placed them on duty around the house. She increased her staff of servants to an amazing degree. She a.s.sumed regal airs. Every visitor was announced as if entering the presence of royalty. Betty no longer "received callers." Instead, she "held audiences." Yearly she journeyed in state to Saratoga, with a retinue of fifty servants and "officers of the household."

Money went like water in the upkeep of the queenly establishment. The once-boundless Jumel wealth that she had helped to ama.s.s began to shrink under the strain. Yet so great was that fortune that more than a million dollars of it was left after she died.

New York was kind. Men who had loved Betty, women who had been envied because of her friendship for them, rallied about her now, in her dotage, and helped her keep up the pitiable farce of queenship.

And in the mansion on the hill, on July 16, 1865, she fell asleep. A score of New York's foremost men were her honorary pallbearers. And all society made, for the last time, the long journey to Harlem to honor her memory.

So died Betty Bowen--Betty Jumel--Betty Burr--whatever you prefer to call her. She was New York's first and greatest official heart breaker. She was doubly fortunate, too, in missing the average old-super-woman's realization of having outgrown her wonder-charm. For when her life book of beauty and power and magnetism closed, Delusion tenderly took up the tale. And through a fairyland of imagined admiration and regal rank, Betty tottered happily to the very end.

CHAPTER SIX

ADRIENNE LECOUVREUR

THE "ACTRESS HEART QUEEN"

She was an ex-laundress, and the daughter of a hatter.

He was an ideal dime-novel hero, and the son of a king. She was all spirit. He was all body. And their love story is, perhaps, the strangest of its sort in the sad annals of hearts.

(Their great-great-granddaughter, by the way, was George Sand--a four-generation throwback of the nameless super-woman trait.)

Having thus rhapsodied with the hope of catching the reader's attention, one may bring up the curtain on a romance whose compelling interest cannot be spoiled by the most bungling writing.

She was Adrienne Lecouvreur; and like the bulk of history's super-women, she sprang from the ma.s.ses. Her childhood was spent in beating against the bars behind which her eagle spirit was locked. At fourteen she joined a road company; and within a few years she was acclaimed as the greatest actress the world had thus far known.

As a comedienne she was a failure. It was in tragedy that she soared to untouched heights. And her life, from cradle to unmarked grave, was one long, sustained tragedy of love. Or, rather, of loves. For she had divers harsh experiences before the last great love flashed upon her.

It was at Lille, while she was still in her apprenticeship as an actress, that Adrienne met a young baron; a captain in the local garrison. He loved her, and he was her first love. It was not the custom of the early eighteenth century for a French n.o.ble to propose marriage to a former laundress who was playing utility parts in a third-rate road show. Probably there was no precedent for it. And such a proposal would have been a waste of windy words, at best. For neither the king nor the man's parents would have allowed it to lead to marriage.