Madame Jumel, New York's First Official Heart Breaker
BY
ALBERT PAYSON TERHUNE
An excerpt from
SUPERWOMEN
1916
Introduction
Madame Jumel, also known as Eliza Jumel or sometimes Mary Jumel, was a fascinating figure whose life spanned the late 18th and early 19th centuries in America. Born Eliza Bowen in 1775 in Rhode Island, she would later become one of the most intriguing and controversial socialites of her time. Madame Jumel's life story is a captivating blend of wealth, ambition, romance, and scandal, punctuated by her rise from humble beginnings to the upper echelons of New York City society.
Throughout her life, Madame Jumel was known for her sharp wit, business acumen, and resilience in the face of adversity. Her first marriage to French wine merchant Stephen Jumel catapulted her into the highest circles of society, but it was her subsequent marriage to Aaron Burr, the infamous former Vice President of the United States, that would secure her a place in the annals of history.
Beyond her marriages, Madame Jumel was a prominent figure in New York City, known for her lavish entertainments and her keen interest in real estate. Her opulent mansion, the Morris-Jumel Mansion in Harlem, stands as a testament to her enduring legacy.
However, Madame Jumel's life was not without its controversies. Her relationships, particularly with Aaron Burr, sparked gossip and speculation among the elite of New York society, and her legal battles over her vast fortune added further drama to her already colorful biography.
Madame Jumel, New York's First Official Heart Breaker
Far to the north, on New York City's westerly side—on One Hundred and Sixtieth Street, near St. Nicholas Avenue—stands almost the sole American memorial to a super-woman. It takes the shape of a colonial dwelling, two and a half stories high, white, crowned by a railed gazebo, and with rear extensions and columns and the rest of the architectural fantasies wherein our new-world ancestors rejoiced.
It is called the Jumel mansion, after Madame Jumel, although it originally belonged to Mary Morris, an earlier and more beautiful man-slayer, at whose dainty feet George Washington, with solemn, but futile, protestations, deposited his heart; and although the woman whose name it bears ended her days there, not as Madame Jumel, but as Mrs. Burr.
The house once stood far in the silent country. But the thin, throbbing island's life crawled northward inch by inch, until to-day the mansion crouches, miscast and bewildered, amid a forest of new and top-heavy flat houses—happy hunting ground for none-too-rich homeseekers—and is shaken by the jar of "L" and New York Central trains.
Poor old house! Bewigged and small-clothed Great-gran'ther Peregrine, from Pompton, caught in the screaming eddy of a subway rush-hour crowd at the Grand Central!
So much for rhapsody. The Jumel place is worth it. For there ghosts walk—the stately, lavender-scented old villains and villainettes who made up New York's smart set a century and a quarter ago, when flats were called "rookeries" and polite folk would scarce mention such things.
In those days, when any theme was too darkly disreputable or indelicate for discussion—and a few things still were, in that ante-white-slave era—people were prone to refer to such doubtful topics as "shrouded in mystery," and to let it go at that. There was more than one event in the cradle-to-grave career of Madame Jumel that called for and received the kindly mystery shroud. As far as coherence will allow, let us leave the shroud snugly tucked around those events. I mention it, at the outset, only because more than one chronicler has used it to account for hiati—(or is it hiatuses? The former sounds more cultured, somehow—) in the lady's career. Whereas, nearly all, if not quite all, these gaps can be bridged quite easily by well-authenticated facts. Some of them too well authenticated for complete comfort.
And so to the story.
Aboard a ship bound north from the West Indies, one day in 1769, a woman died, a few hours after the birth of her baby daughter. It was not necessary to remove any wedding ring from the dead mother's finger before burying her at sea. One story says that her orphaned daughter's father had been a French sailor named Capet. Another and wholly diverse tale says that the baby was not born at sea at all, but in the Providence, Rhode Island, poorhouse, and of unknown parentage. You see the shroud of mystery was pressed into service very early in the biography.
In any event, soon after the ship touched at Providence, a Rhode Island tradesman's wife was so attracted by the prettiness of the solitary girl baby as to adopt her. At the subsequent christening, the rather uninspiring name of Eliza Bowen was bestowed on the child. No one seems to know why. More mystery, and not a particularly thrilling one at that.
In strait-laced ways and to all demure modesty, Eliza was reared. And at fifteen she was not only the prettiest girl in Rhode Island, but one of the cleverest and—so declared the pious—one of the very worst. In those days and in New England, it was delightfully easy to acquire a reputation for wickedness by merely failing to conform to all the ideas of the blue-law devotees. Shan't we give Betty Bowen—her commonly used name—the benefit of the doubt?
We know she was not only blessed with unwonted beauty, but with an exceptional mind. She had, in full measure, even in girlhood, the nameless and irresistible charm of the super-woman. She was reckless, high of spirit, impatient of restraint; inclined to listen over-kindly, perhaps, to the pleadings of her countless rural admirers.
Then, when she was only seventeen, Colonel Peter Croix came into her life. Croix was a former officer in the British army and lived in New York. He had plenty of money, and was more or less what, a century later, would have been called a "rounder."
How this middle-aged Lothario chanced to meet the Rhode Island belle, no one knows. But meet her he did. He was the first man of the world who had come into Betty's rustic life. By contrast with the local swains, he was irresistible. Or so she found him. At all events, she did not resist. She eloped with him, and Rhode Island knew her no more. Her real career as a heart breaker had set in.
To New York, Colonel Croix brought his inamorata. There he installed her in a stately country house at Thirty-fourth Street and Fifth Avenue, on the spot where, afterward, A. T. Stewart's white marble domicile used to excite the out-of-towners' awe, and where now a trust company's building stands.
Betty wore amazingly costly clothes, paying for a single dress far more than for her year's wardrobe in Rhode Island. Croix festooned jewelry, Christmas-tree-like, over her neck, hair, and hands. She blossomed like the rose. Croix, inordinately proud of his conquest, also brought shoals of his friends to call, which was a mistake; for Betty had no leanings toward monopolies.
Like the hackneyed, but ever-useful, meteor, Betty flashed upon stark young eighteenth-century New York. The city—so far as its male population was concerned—threw up both hands in blissful surrender.
Croix's friends—some of them rounders like himself, some of them fat, solid, but beauty-loving financiers—formed a court of beauty around the fair newcomer. Betty's consummate charm drew to this court other and loftier men, too.
For example, one of her foremost adorers was a brilliant, magnetic young statesman whose birth was perhaps as unblest as her own, but whose self-made name was already beginning to ring through America. He was Alexander Hamilton. He had a high-born and attractive wife of his own, and an adoring nestful of children. But Hamilton believed in monopolies no more than did Betty, and he became her adorer.
Another of the higher type of men who came a-courting Betty was a statesman of almost equal fame—a little fellow, scarce five feet four inches tall and slight of build, whose strikingly handsome face was lighted by enormous black eyes almost snake-like in their mesmeric power—particularly over women. He was Aaron Burr.
Burr was a lady-killer of the first order. He was not a man of bad morals. He was simply a man of no morals at all. But he was also a man of no fear, and a genius withal. He knelt, not in submission, but in ironic admiration before Betty. And she, like fifty other women, was swayed by his hypnotic eyes and his wondrous love eloquence.
At the house of which Croix had made Betty the chatelaine, Burr and Hamilton often met, but never at the wish of either. For they hated every bone in each other's bodies.
They had been at loggerheads as mere lads, when together they had served on General Washington's staff during the Revolutionary War. Afterward, in social and political life, they had clashed, and clashed fiercely. Now, as rivals for the interest of the volatile Betty, their smoldering hate flamed forth lurid and deathless.
And thenceforth, fanned by new political and other causes, that death hate grew. It came to a head seven years later, when, in the gray of a chilly morning, the lifelong rivals faced each other, pistol in hand, in the fields beyond Weehawken Heights; and when, at the first volley, Hamilton sprang high in air, then crashed to the earth, mortally wounded.
Yes, in her time Betty had—directly or indirectly—much to answer for.
George Washington Bowen, in after years, swore that he was the son of Betty and of the Father of his Country. This the Jumels have fiercely denied.
Among the business-men guests Croix brought to see Betty was an enormously rich old French wine merchant, Stephen Jumel by name. This was in 1804—the year of Hamilton's death. Jumel was fifty; Betty was thirty-five. Jumel was passing rich; Betty had shrewdness enough to realize that her own fortunes, under her present circumstances, depended solely on her looks and her charm. As beauty is not eternal and as charm sometimes fails to outlive it, the super-woman deemed it wise to accept the infatuated wine merchant's offer of marriage.
Indeed, she is said to have angled with Napoleonic strategy for that same offer, and to have won it only after a sharp struggle of wits. Jumel was no fit opponent for her, then or ever after. From the first, they appear to have had but a single will between them—and that was hers.
On April 17, 1804, Betty and Jumel were married in St. Peter's Church in Barclay Street. The wedding's record still stands in the parish archives. So does the statement made on that occasion by Betty—a statement charmingly at variance with all other records of her origin. 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 amusement 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 demigod, 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 advertisements. 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 acumen, 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 vassals 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 cumbrous 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 massive, 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 titled foreigner who touched our shores 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 prone 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 title 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 space 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 title 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 Nassau 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.
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 assortment 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 space 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 assumed 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 amass 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.