"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.