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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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