The Admiral and the Ambassador (2 page)

In that, it is at heart an American story. And America's story. But it begins more than 220 years ago in France, with a lonely and ailing man in the midst of another country's revolution.

Paris, July 18, 1792

John Paul Jones was gravely ill. He had always been a slender man, but over the last few months his body had slowly swelled, first the feet and legs, now the hands and abdomen. He was lethargic and had trouble walking around his Paris neighborhood. Slight exertions left him struggling for breath, and coughing fits punctuated his conversations. In recent days, his white skin had begun yellowing, and Jones was entertaining no delusions about how this precipitous decline in health was going to play out. Less than two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, Jones was, he believed, dying.

Jones had spent a fair amount of time in Paris over the years, yet in his final days he only had a small circle of friends he could rely on. One of them, Samuel Blackden, an American businessman, had been quietly pressing the Scottish-born hero of the American Revolution to get his affairs in order. And that morning, Jones was finally ready. He sent word to Blackden and another friend, Gouverneur Morris, the US envoy to France, that he wanted to dictate his will and he wanted them to witness it.

The men arrived around five o'clock at Jones's third-floor apartment overlooking the Rue de Tournon, a block-long street on the Left Bank that ran north from the Palais de Luxembourg, once the home of art collections and royalty but now standing unused as the French Revolution gathered steam. Blackden arrived with Jean-Baptiste Beaupoil, a former aide to Jones's friend the Marquis de Lafayette, the French soldier and aristocrat who had helped the Americans during their revolution. Morris, the official face of the young United States, brought two French notaries to handle the legal requirements of recording the dying hero's last will and testament.
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The men found Jones “sitting in an easy chair, sick in body but of sound mind, memory, judgment, and understanding”—the prerequisites for writing a will. Despite his success as a sea warrior and his reputation as a captain to be feared by enemies and crewmen alike, Jones wasn't physically imposing. He was about five feet seven inches tall, with long dark hair rusted to gray at the temples. At sea, he often exploded in violent anger, but ashore he was usually courteous, gratingly so at times. But now he was all business, as though not wanting to waste breath on the inconsequential.

Amid his coughing fits, Jones itemized his possessions and told the men that he wanted his estate—including assorted debts that were owed him, property in the United States, some business investments and bank accounts—to go to his two sisters in Scotland and to their children. As Jones dictated, his cough worsened; the meeting was wearing him out. The notaries completed their work and left together with Morris. Blackden and Beaupoil lingered a few minutes, but then they left too, and Jones retired to his bedroom.

Paris at the time was filled with revolutionary fervor, and tension was building rapidly on the streets and in the salons. It was this, not Jones's failing health, that preoccupied Morris. He went from Jones's apartment to dine with the British ambassador to France, Lord Granville Leveson-Gower, and the ambassador's wife, Lady Susannah Stewart Sutherland, where they traded news of the day. It was not good. A month earlier, a mob had invaded the royal palace at the Tuileries and humiliated Louis XVI and his queen, Marie Antoinette, by, among other things, forcing the king to don a red hat—a symbol of the revolution—and drink a toast to the health of his subjects.

As word of the king's humiliation spread, royalists from around France converged on Paris to defend the realm. Supporters of the revolutionaries
also made their way to the capital, drawn by the scent of radical change. The future of France, and of the rights of man, were being fought over by the ancien régime and those seeking to create a new society, one in which the people, rather than birthright and a kiss from God, would determine who ruled.

Sensing the looming violence, members of the Legislative Assembly, where royalist Feuillants were locked in raucous debate with the revolutionary Jacobins, began drifting away, not wanting to be caught up if the tensions broke into riots and bloodshed, arrests and guillotines. The struggle was changing Paris at its roots. The sprawling, three-story Palais de Luxembourg would soon become a prison, and in a few months' time, Louis XVI would lose his head at the freshly renamed la Place de la Révolution with thousands of Parisians cheering the executioner instead of their king. So there was much to concern the diplomats of the United States and England, much to discuss over their meal.
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Morris made a short evening of it. After dinner, he took his carriage to the home of his married mistress, Adélaïde-Emilie de Flahaut, and went with her to the nearby home of Dr. Félix Vicq d'Azyr, a member of the Académie française whose patients included the queen. The trio moved on to Jones's apartment. The commodore's valet let them in, telling them that Jones was in his bedroom. They opened the door to find a corpse. Jones was flopped face-first over the edge of the mattress, his booted feet still on the floor, as though life had left him a step short of his bed, or in the midst of a final prayer.

Jones died on his own time—a rare event in those guillotine-hungry days in Paris—but he did not die on his own terms. It was the last in a series of events over which Jones had lost all control, a poignant turn for a man accustomed to altering not only the course of a battle but the course of history as well.

Jones had arrived in Paris in May 1790 after a year of wandering Europe's capitals, hoping to resurrect a military career that had foundered badly in the service of Russia's Catherine the Great. Jones was a proven leader of men, or at least of sailors, and an accomplished naval strategist. During the American Revolution, he took the fight to England itself, raiding coastal villages and capturing British warships. The British, noting Jones's Scottish birth, branded him a pirate and a traitor.

Yet for all of Jones's cunning at sea, he was a failure at politics and the intrigues of royal courts. He had left Saint Petersburg in disgrace, the
whispers of a tawdry sexual dalliance with a young girl rippling ahead of him. Once in Paris, he found the city remarkably changed from his previous visits, when he had been welcomed at the king's court. Now he was barely welcomed anywhere, in part because Paris itself was different. The American Revolution had been a fight for separation, a struggle for independence by colonies lying an ocean away from their ruler. In the end, governance had changed, but the social order had remained the same. The French Revolution was something altogether different, a vicious and unforgiving uprising of the masses, a true upending of the social order. Much of the aristocracy among whom Jones felt most comfortable had fled the city, some even the country, and others were in hiding. Even the king and his queen were at the mercy of their subjects, forced to live under house arrest at the Tuileries.

Against that backdrop, there was no room and little patience for Jones, an ego-driven man selling doomed schemes aimed at his naval resurrection. He had become a boor to his friends, and his failing health gave him a cadaverous look, like “a wine skin from which the wine has been drawn,” as Thomas Carlyle later described him. The former commodore suffered from a nagging pneumonia, and his lungs were weakened. For months, Jones's ailing kidneys had been developing lesions and small fibrous masses, and scarring over, which interfered with their crucial biological functions. Slowly, they stopped working. The doctor who examined the body ruled the death natural, due to dropsy of the lungs. Jones the sailor had, in effect, drowned in his own fluids.

The mortician and his assistants did their work with practiced efficiency. Two days after Jones's death, they placed the body on a table, stripped it, and then dressed it in a long linen shirt decorated with plaits and ruffles. They twisted the hair, more than two feet long, into a ball and tucked it inside a small linen cap at the nape. In the custom of the era, they covered Jones's hands and feet with foil and then wrapped the whole body in a long burial cloth with, inexplicably, the numeral
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stenciled on the top.

When they were done, they carefully placed the body in an expensive lead-lined coffin and secured it in place with wads of straw in case the
Americans might someday send for the body. Or maybe Jones's family in Scotland would claim him. The orders were to prepare the body for days of jouncing and bouncing over roads to the coast and then over the seas to its final resting place, even though the coffin was scheduled to be dropped in the Parisian ground in a matter of hours.
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Once the body was secured, the rim of the lower half of the coffin was coated with solder; the top was slipped carefully into place and then sealed shut. Someone had drilled a hole in the lid near the head of the coffin, and now the mortician slowly poured in tiny streams of alcohol until the lead box was filled. A metal screw was twisted tightly into the hole and sealed with drops of molten lead, leaving a bumpy scar above the dead man's head.

A few hours later, as evening came on, the coffin was taken from Jones's apartment and slowly wheeled northward in a small funeral parade through the streets of Paris, across the Seine, and on out of the walled city. It continued on until it reached the only place around Catholic Paris in which a Protestant could be lawfully buried, the cemetery of Saint Louis, outside the l'Hôpital Saint-Louis. The distinguished but small crowd of about sixty mourners entered through the gate at Rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin and passed through a fruit garden, the leafy branches beginning to swell with apples and pears, and then another gate at the top of stairs that led eight feet down to the cemetery.

The mourners included Jones's friend François Pierre Simonneau, a royal bureaucrat who had covered the 462-franc cost of the burial out of his own pocket rather than see Jones's body heaved into a pauper's grave. It was Simonneau who thought that maybe someday the Americans might send for their war hero and so arranged for the lead coffin and the gallons of alcohol to preserve the body. And it was no small expense. Simonneau had paid more than triple the going rate for a traditional burial with a wooden coffin and contemporary embalming methods. (For the poor, whose unprotected bodies were dumped into the ground, the cost of a funeral was even less.) It wasn't that Jones didn't have money. He had left an estate of some $30,000, but nearly all of it was tied up in investments and debts owed him from elsewhere in Europe and in the United States. Gouverneur Morris, as the American representative in Paris, declined to front the cost of the funeral on behalf of the government or to assume the burial debts on behalf of Jones's estate. “Some people here who like rare shows wished him to
have a pompous funeral,” Morris wrote to a friend years later. “As I had no right to spend on such follies either the money of his heirs or that of the United States, I desired that he might be buried in a private and economical manner.”

Simonneau was joined by a delegation of twelve members of the Legislative Assembly, which the day before—amid crucial debates over the future of France—had marked Jones's passing with a formal vote recognizing his life and long friendship with France. Other faces familiar about Paris at the time were at the graveside as well, including Jean-Baptiste Beaupoil, who had seen Jones on the day he died, and Louis-Nicolas Villeminot, who led a detachment of grenadiers to accompany the cortege. There were some Americans, too, who had crossed paths with Jones in Paris: Jones's friend Blackden; Reverdy Ghiselin of Maryland, who had recently arrived from Le Havre, where he was trying to establish business; and Thomas Waters Griffith, an American merchant who also became witness to the excesses of the French Revolution as he sought his own fortune.