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.