“But he is dead—not yet cold.”
And this is all that Gouverneur Morris’s Diary records of Paul Jones’s death, until the indignation aroused in America by his shocking lack of attention to the dying hero had thrown him upon the defensive.
Who paid the burial expenses of Paul Jones?
A Frenchman claims that he did it.
Morris, in his Diary, certainly seeks to make the impression that he paid them out of Jones’s estate.
The hero left sufficient property for the purpose, as can easily be shown. Further than that we are left in doubt.
But Morris was requested to authorize a public funeral, in which fitting honors should be paid to the dead. Morris refused. He states that he (Morris) desired “a private and economical funeral.”
He got it. The funeral was so economical and so private that neither the tongue of repute, identifying the grave from generation to generation, nor the more unerring evidence of shaft or vault guides the footsteps of those who come so late, so late! to repair the neglect of a hundred years.