The Admiral and the Ambassador (26 page)

Vignaud, too, had been making some inquiries of his own. In February 1899, the Parisian papers were full of articles about the successful effort by Alfred de Ricaudy, editor of the conservative weekly
L'cho du Public,
to find the grave of eighteenth-century French laissez-faire economist Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot. The economist died in 1781, and, like Jones, over the ensuing decades his burial spot was forgotten. Ricaudy decided to see what he could find by diving deeply into Parisian and French records. He discovered that Turgot had been buried in a lead coffin at the Hôpital Laennec in Paris, and not in Bons, Normandy, as legend had it. With Turbot's descendants standing around, the crypt was opened, and the mystery solved.

Vignaud wrote to Ricaudy congratulating him on the discovery, and as a long shot asked the French editor whether he had seen during his research
any hints of where Jones's grave might be.
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The embassy records don't include a response from Ricaudy, but if he had written back to Vignaud, the answer apparently was no, he didn't know where Jones's body was buried. In late June, Vignaud wrote back to Secretary Hay that “I have had more than one occasion to look into this matter and all inquiries made of the city authorities or persons to be informed failed. One thing however is certain. Paul Jones was not buried in the cemetery where the remains of Lafayette lie. At the instance of a gentleman from Boston, who wrote me on the subject, I am making another effort in that direction and if successful I will inform you at once.”
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The “gentleman from Boston” was most likely a woman by the name of Marion H. Brazier, an activist in the Daughters of the American Revolution. Vignaud had mischaracterized Brazier as a man “who takes particular interest in all matters pertaining to Paul Jones” in an earlier letter—dated November 15, 1898—to a woman in France who was also seeking information on Jones.
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And the other effort Vignaud mentioned was a bit of a whim. The same day he responded to Secretary Hay, Vignaud wrote to the prefect of the Seine and president of the Commission of Old Paris. When Jones was buried, the funeral cortege had wound through the old Parisian streets. Might the prefect have some records of that long-ago event that would suggest where the funeral procession had ended? It was a good instinct, but apparently fruitless.
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The range of inquiries into Jones's fate from fellow American citizens, not to mention the secretary of state, struck Ambassador Porter as deserving more than a simple rehash of what had become the adopted US position in the matter: that Jones's bones were beyond retrieval. Porter would write later that he was moved not only by a sense of patriotism but also by empathy for the war hero. As the force behind construction of Grant's Tomb, Porter knew the power a public monument had in preserving public memory. “I felt a deep sense of humiliation as an American citizen in realizing that our first and most fascinating naval hero had been lying for more than a century in an unknown and forgotten grave and that no successful attempt had ever been made to recover his remains and give them appropriate sepulture in the land upon whose history he had shed so much luster,” Porter wrote. “Knowing that he had been buried in Paris,
I resolved to undertake personally a systematic and exhaustive search for the body.”

Porter was uncertain about the extent of the earlier searches, and by nature a methodical man, he thought that a more diligent effort would either turn up the body or confirm that it was, indeed, beyond finding. At the very least, a spot might be found in Paris to erect a memorial to the dead war hero.

The timing was ripe. Public interest in Jones was growing back home, fanned by the publication of a historical novel about a young American during the pre-Revolution years that featured several chapters on the naval hero. The novel, by Winston Churchill—not to be confused with the future British prime minister—was called
Richard Carvel,
and after its publication in June 1899, it went on to become the bestselling book in American history to that point, cementing Churchill as one of the top American writers of the day. Churchill's portrayal of Jones “presenting him for the first time as an actual man” infused public interest in Porter's quest, once details of the search began surfacing.
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Porter turned the search over to the embassy's second secretary, Arthur Bailly-Blanchard, who, like Vignaud, was a native of New Orleans and spoke fluent French. Bailly-Blanchard effectively started from scratch, seeking new sources of information even as the embassy was reporting back to Washington that the body likely was irretrievable. There were leads to follow. The Taylor edition of Jones's letters contained an August 9, 1792, letter from Samuel Blackden, the Revolutionary War veteran and friend of Jones, to Jones's sister, detailing the commodore's last days. Blackden, who had been in London at the time, began his letter with a reference to the query from Taylor dated August 3, in which she apparently had asked Blackden if he knew details of what had happened to her brother. Jones, Blackden replied, had been ill for about a year, “but had not been so unwell” that he couldn't maintain his apartment. Two months before his death, Jones's color began to yellow and he lost his appetite; he began taking unspecified medicines that seemed to help. “But about ten days before his death his legs began to swell, which increased upwards, so that two days before his exit he could not button his waistcoat, and had great difficulty breathing.” He died on July 18 and was buried two days later in
“a leaden coffin … in case the United States, whom he had so essentially served, and with so much honor to himself, should claim his remains, they would be more easily removed.” That was all, he wrote, “that I can say concerning his illness and death”
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The lead coffin would prove to be the most significant detail for Porter in his search. How deeply involved Porter became in the physical work of reviewing records and chasing down slivers of information remains a question, given that he directed Bailly-Blanchard to steer the investigation. But his commitment was inarguable. He paid for the search on his own and conducted it quietly, trying to keep it out of the newspapers (he was unsuccessful on that front) and initially without informing his superiors in Washington what he was up to.

It quickly became clear the Americans would need some French help. Bailly-Blanchard might have been fluent in French, but he was not intimately familiar with the workings of Parisian municipal bureaucracy and various public and private archives. What they needed was a French historical detective. With Paris history buffs still buzzing over the discovery of Turgot's grave, Sims, the naval attaché, suggested that Ricaudy was the obvious man for the job of finding John Paul Jones's body.
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Vignaud approached the editor, who agreed to help undertake a painstaking review of records in hopes of picking up the threads of history and unwinding fact from legend. It took several months, but they pieced the story together.

The search began in earnest in late June 1899, with a series of letters and inquiries to various French political figures and bureaucrats. Vignaud, a voracious reader of the Parisian press, had seen an article in the
Bulletin Municipal
by municipal councilor Alfred Leroux that mentioned Paul Jones and an old cemetery for foreign Protestants on Rue de l'Hôpital Saint-Louis. Vignaud wrote to Leroux asking for more information about that cemetery, including whether it still existed, but there is no mention of a response.
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By the end of the summer, Ricaudy had been enlisted, and his first step was to verify exactly when Jones had died, a date that was still in dispute among historians.
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The logical place to find that detail was in the Hôtel de
Ville, but once again, Paris's revolutionary history got in the way. Those records had been destroyed during the Paris Commune.

Charles Read, the Protestant researcher and historian who had copied Jones's death information from the city records, died in 1898, the year before Porter began his search. Read's personal and research papers were donated to the Bibliothèque de Rue des Saints-Pères, a library. Both Bailly-Blanchard and Ricaudy soon found Read's 1887 article on the history of Protestant cemeteries and Jones's likely burial spot. Ricaudy took the additional step of consulting Read's personal archive at the library.

In his early reports to Porter, Ricaudy held back one key detail from the ambassador: that Jones had been buried “in a cemetery for foreign Protestants.” The significance of that withheld fact didn't become clear until later, even though it wasn't withheld for very long.
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Bailly-Blanchard had the same material from Read's article, and he and Porter were becoming convinced they were on the right trail. Porter, whose skepticism of Ricaudy was growing, directed Bailly-Blanchard to undertake a process of elimination of other potential burial sites.

Over the next few weeks, Bailly-Blanchard reviewed more than one hundred publications for hints that their assumption—that Paris was home to only one Protestant cemetery at the time—was correct, and for other clues. They found records that identified Simonneau as the man who had paid for the burial, an act of charity that galled Porter. “This brought to light for the first time the mortifying fact that the hero who had once been the idol of the American people had been buried by charity, and that the payment of his funeral expenses was the timely and generous act of a foreign admirer.” Simonneau was also the king's commissar overseeing the burial of Protestants, which further cemented Porter's belief that he was on the right track. And they found that Marron, the minister who had overseen the graveside service, had at that time buried all the dead from his church in Saint Louis cemetery. “I found the book containing the minutes of the meetings of the consistory of M. Marron's church, but just at the date of Paul Jones's death, four pages had been torn out,” Porter wrote. He sent Bailly-Blanchard to try to find them, tracking down the heirs of one M. Coquerel, a former pastor of the church, who “was mentioned in a publication as an enthusiastic collector of papers relating to Protestantism
in Paris.” Bailly-Blanchard also dropped in at junk and antiquarian shops whose owners “revealed the fact that M. Coquerel's heirs had sold some old papers which had afterward been purchased by the Society of the History of Protestantism, and in its library were finally found the four lost pages. I now ascertained positively that M. Marron buried his parishioners in the Saint Louis cemetery, and the fact that he had delivered the funeral oration of Paul Jones would be some indication that he had also buried him there.”

Other details seemed to cement the conclusion that they had found the right cemetery. One old map showed that a now-missing street that ended at the cemetery gate was called Rue des Mortes—Street of the Dead—which Porter took as confirmation. Another still existing street that entered the intersection from the other corner was called Rue Vicq d'Azir, named after the doctor who had attended Marie Antoinette and who had been summoned to Jones's apartment the night of his death. “When a person's name is given to a street in Paris, it is generally in a quarter connected with events in his career,” Porter wrote later. “It is possible that the distinguished physician's name was given to the street because of its leading to the place which held the remains of his illustrious friend and patient.”

The cemetery site ascertained, Porter faced a second, even more vexing question: was the body still there? Over the decades, as Paris grew outward, older cemeteries were routinely closed down, the bodies exhumed and moved, most often to the Catacombs in the vast network of the city's subterranean passageways, mines, and quarries. The process began in the 1780s with the closure of the centuries-old Cemetery of the Innocents near the heart of Paris, a burial ground so overcrowded that the dead were heaved into mass graves kept open for six months so they could be more easily filled. The stench—as it mixed with human excrement, kitchen offal, and other household wastes tossed to the streets from homes—was legendary. It reached the crisis point in late 1779 when people entering their basements in nearby neighborhoods were overcome by fumes; candles and lanterns would go out in the fetid air; wine stored against walls closest to the cemetery turned bad in their vessels. The final straw came on May 30, 1780, when a house's foundation wall collapsed inward and stacks of moldering corpses tumbled into the basement. City health officials were called in and tried venting and other potential solutions but ultimately admitted failure.
The Cemetery of the Innocents was closed, and five years later night shifts of workers began exhuming the grave pits and moving the bodies to the Catacombs. Bodies from other cemeteries followed over the years in a morbid forced exodus of the dead.
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