There really ends the career of Madame Jumel. But she lived through the Mexican and the Civil wars. Here and there in the city, now at Saratoga, once in Europe, she “lived around” with relatives of sorts, but most of the time she spent in the great house. Its corners grew less and less neat as age crept over her. Still, however, the active physique her sea-faring father and her tomboy mother had given little Betsy Bowen held on grimly to life and activity, and the social mania which had consumed her thoughts lighted up her memory with fantasies, as a sputtering lantern creates half-authentic figures among the shadows of a dusty, neglected stage. Outside the house she had no friends except those who wanted her money or stole her firewood and livestock, indoors life was a perpetual pageant. For twenty years a feast table, fully set, with dust in the crystal wine glasses, and mould on the petrifying candies, stood in a closed room: this, she related, was the table at which she had entertained Joseph Bonaparte when he came over to marry her and her riches and had to climb over the back wall to gain entrance. She took pity on him then, she said, for it didn’t look just right to have the King of Spain in the kitchen. The truth is that she never entertained Joseph Bonaparte (though she offered him the estate in 1820); nor did the Duke of Palermo offer to marry the “Vice-Queen of America” as she styled herself (although she inspected the ducal palace in Palermo); she was in Paris when Lafayette visited America in 1825, but she honestly believed that she had been his hostess on the Heights. Some recollection of a name, a face, a romantic anecdote out of her vivid past popped up, or she ran across one of the dingy, pathetic dance favors or trinkets or ribbons of a dead affair, and presto!—her feverish mind whirled away in a jumbled drama, unlimited in its romantic action, and delicious in its inaccuracy.
If the public saw her it was under circumstances that magnified all the erratic tales that were—and still are—current about her history. One winter she took a group of penniless Frenchmen under her wing, quartered them in the barn, which had once held American prisoners, armed them from the arsenal she kept in the house, organized them into a military outfit, and would ride proudly at their head over her estate. From France she brought home green livery for her postilions—though she had no postilions, and when taunting reached her ears she dressed the gardener and his boy in the livery and rode to town with them. Her face to the world was as haughty and as tinctured with rouge as if she were Eliza Brown of Whitehall Street, her dress as shabby-genteel as she fancied it was fashionable, her intellect as tragically aflame with the mad dance of Might-Have-Been as it was fixed, cold, and shrewd in financial matters. Grande dame she had set out to be, grande dame she had become, and mercifully to the poor little shrunken creature with the powdered cheeks and the soiled finery who was finally carried upstairs to the Washington room to die, grande dame in her mind she died.
It was a signal for the jackals. No less than twenty law-suits sprang up to break the will and seize the property. Some of the claims seem just, others less so, and all of them, in the course of fifty years, have gone through the mill of the courts and been ground exceeding fine. Of them all, the most interesting fragment is the attempt made by George Washington Bowen, Betsy’s deserted baby in Providence, to own his mother’s home. For thirteen years the old man pursued his case, even to the Supreme Court, lost it, and died, though the claim is still cherished by his own connections. The estate could not hold out long against the march of the city, and parcel by parcel it was split up, until in 1894 the house and its dooryard came into the hands of General F. P. Earle.
The city owns it now, and four capable chapters of the Daughters of the American Revolution have formed the Washington Headquarters Association, and have brought the mansion out of neglect and oblivion. They opened the windows Madame Jumel kept sealed and let in air and sunlight; they consigned the Eastlake-and-gimcrack whatnottery of its most recent tenants to the exceedingly efficient ash-removal department of the City of New York, which is equipped to handle just such situations, and from the four corners of our country they assembled and installed in the house as much of its historic equipment as they could find. There is much of it, of course, which has no special significance, and there is so great a quantity of relics there that the house is in no sense a home, but rather an interesting and valuable museum. Next best of all, they opened the doors to the public in a city where sorely-needed Americanization may well begin at home. And best of all, they installed as curator William Henry Shelton, as gracious a story-teller as the humble history-seeker may ply with questions. It is to him largely that the excellent administration of the house is due. It is he who can bid you close your eyes, make a few passes, and translate you into the presence of Mary Philipse, or bring you to attention before George Washington, or open a secret panel that you may peep at Madame Jumel. In his book, “The Jumel Mansion,” he has done just this, and it is from that source with his permission that the greater part of this story is drawn, and so, gratefully acknowledged.
Mount Vernon
© D.McK
MOUNT VERNON
Here on a hill in Fairfax County, Virginia, we may catch glimpses of the man George Washington liked to be.