The Admiral and the Ambassador (27 page)

Porter had the Catacombs records searched for clues that bodies from the Saint Louis cemetery might have been part of the relocation drive. Unspecified city files (perhaps Read's copies) included a reference to the exhumation of a woman identified as Lady Alexander Grant and the return of her remains to London in 1803, as well as receipts at the Catacombs for the bones of dead paupers who had been exhumed from graves outside the cemetery walls. There were no records of transfers from the cemetery itself. He took omission as proof.

Porter still feared misdirection. He had Ricaudy and Bailly-Blanchard run down and dispel other stories of Jones's whereabouts. Dumas's novel said that Jones had been buried in Père Lachaise. Even though that cemetery opened more than a decade after Jones's death, Porter had the records searched anyway “to be sure that his body had not been transferred there in later years.” They found five listings for people named Jones, but none were John Paul, and none of the burial dates matched that of the commodore. “There was another fanciful story that he had been interred in Picpus cemetery, where Lafayette was buried,” something Porter discounted since Protestants would not have been allowed in that consecrated Catholic ground. “Still a search was made, and it disproved the rumor.”

Porter checked with the minister of the Jones's family church in Dumfries, Scotland, to ensure the seaman wasn't buried there, as one rumor had it. The minister, D. W. McKenzie, reported back that his graveyard held but one John Paul, “the tomb of the father,” with the headstone inscription I
N
M
EMORY OF
J
OHN
P
AUL
S
ENIOR,
W
HO
D
IED AT
A
BIGLAND THE
2
4TH OF
O
CTOBER
1767 U
NIVERSALLY
E
STEEMED
. Beneath it was inscribed, E
RECTED BY
J
OHN
P
AUL,
J
UNIOR
. So the commodore's name—but not his body—was in the cemetery.

Another story to debunk arose from the French Revolution itself. Lead bullets were in short supply, and legend had it that the cemeteries were scavenged for lead coffins, which were then melted down for bullets, the bodies tossed back into the ground to rot. Porter pursued the legend
through old records and “talks with the ‘oldest inhabitants,' to whom traditions of a former age are handed down.” He concluded that the French cultural reverence for the dead and “the sacredness of places of burial” made it unlikely they would, even in the midst of revolution, dig up old coffins for their metal. This was an especially sensible line of reasoning since easier targets such as statues and “extensive lead piping to carry the water from the Seine to Versailles” had survived the revolution. So it seemed unlikely the graves would have been disturbed. “Moreover, the metal contained in the few leaden coffins to be found at that date in a Paris cemetery would not have paid the digging or furnished bullets for a single battalion.”

Ultimately Porter concluded that “local traditions or printed documents suggest nothing at variance with the accepted opinion that he died in Paris and was buried in the Protestant cemetery there.” Consulting old maps and Read's work, Porter, Bailly-Blanchard, and the others pieced together more details about the burial ground and its history. “The surface of the garden was about eight feet lower than that of the courtyard, the descent to which was made by a flight of steps. Thirty years later the grade of the street had been changed and the garden had been leveled up even with the courtyard, and the fact seemed to have been lost sight of that there had ever been a cemetery beneath…. The whole property was surrounded by a wall between six and nine feet high. There was a house in the courtyard and a shed, but no buildings in the garden.”

Ricaudy visited the site and found nothing like the low garden with fruit trees described in the early records. The cemetery had closed some six months after Jones's death and just weeks after the bodies of some of the six hundred Swiss Guards killed defending Louis XVI had been unceremoniously dumped in a mass grave. After the cemetery was officially closed, the caretakers continued to accept the occasional body until the government sold the land in 1796 to a developer named Phalipaux.

In addition to raising the ground level eight feet to near street level by moving in loads of earth and fill, occupants had erected cheap buildings around a courtyard and garden. The property changed hands over the decades, and the land was used as a dumping ground for night soil—a charming euphemism for human waste collected from homes by special
cartmen—for rendering the carcasses of dead animals, and as a laundry, among other things. The filth and runoff of all those uses percolated down to mix with countless decaying bodies, nearly all of which had been buried in degradable wooden coffins or simply rolled in sheets and dropped in graves.

Shortly before Ricaudy visited the site, the owner of the laundry that occupied part of the space had dug down more than eight feet “to increase the depth of the pit where his boiler was placed.” He struck a layer of corpse loam, “a viscous black substance containing fragments of human bones.” Other ditches and holes over the years had uncovered shinbones and shoulder blades. A man seeking to bury his dead dog unearthed two skulls.

Porter was taken aback by what he saw as the desecration of the dead—particularly of Jones. “One could not help feeling pained beyond expression and overcome by a sense of profound mortification,” Porter wrote later. “Here was presented the spectacle of a hero whose fame once covered two continents and whose name is still an inspiration to a world-famed navy, lying for more than a century in a forgotten grave like an obscure outcast, relegated to oblivion in a squalid quarter of a distant foreign city, buried in ground once consecrated, but since desecrated.”
¹⁶

In an interesting and hard-to-assess side note, Johnson, the lawyer from rural western New York, cropped up again in August with another letter to McKinley. The embassy in Paris had responded to Johnson's first letter, informing him that while it seemed likely Jones's body was in the Catacombs or otherwise beyond retrieval, they could say with certainty that he was not buried in the same cemetery as Lafayette. In early August, Johnson replied that if the embassy didn't know where to find the body, his research might provide some insight. He sent along details from Read's article. The records don't indicate where Johnson had encountered the article, but it's clear that the information was neither obscure nor limited to Parisian Protestants and historians.
¹⁷

Ricaudy sent his report to Porter on October 29, 1899, the day after he printed a short article about his findings in his own newspaper,
L'Echo du Public.
He concluded that Jones's remains could not be anywhere but
beneath the buildings and courtyard off Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, a property of some thirty thousand square feet. The land was owned by one Mme Crignier, a widow, but it held five buildings under the control of tenants with long-term leases. A man named Bassigny operated a two-story granary with a large paved courtyard partially ringed by storage sheds. The laundry next door was built without a foundation but had a cement floor with drains that led to the street. Along with a three-story hotel sat yet another single-story building “of cheap construction … and in dilapidated condition.”

Since Jones had died six months before the cemetery was closed, Ricaudy speculated that he would have been buried near the main entry off Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, the last part of the property to be used for graves. Whether Jones's body could be found beneath the buildings was the big question. Ricaudy advised Porter that if Jones had been buried in a wooden coffin, the remains would likely be unrecognizable. A leaden coffin would improve the chances. “In any event, even if his bones cannot be identified it is nevertheless absolutely certain that he is there, and that the acquisition of the site could be made under advantageous circumstances,” Ricaudy wrote, suggesting the Americans buy the land and turn it into a park with a memorial to Jones “without prejudice to any excavations that might be hereafter deemed advisable.”

Porter sent Ricaudy's report, attached to his own, to Secretary Hay in Washington, referring to the June reply by Vignaud that Jones's body was most likely beyond recovery. “I am now in a position to inform you that the place where he was buried has been found and that I have also procured a copy of the burial” record, Porter wrote. He credited Ricaudy for the research and added that Ricaudy “believes that he could locate within eight or ten yards the spot where the body was interred.” Porter also oddly passed along Ricaudy's suggestion that a committee be formed to raise the funds for the project, an idea Porter didn't support. And Porter also seemed to miss the point that Jones had been buried in a lead coffin, telling Hay that it “was in all probability [made] of wood, and unless there was a metal plate bearing the name of the deceased, or a sword or some article, not perishable, it might be difficult to identify whatever may be left of the body.” Porter then tossed the decision on how to proceed to Hay, saying he would
“cheerfully cooperate in any action having to do with the removal to the United States of the body of Paul Jones.”
¹⁸

By the time Hay received Porter's letter, newspapers in France, England, and the United States had reported that the former war hero's remains were within potential reach. In Paris, proposals were made to persuade the French government to turn the spot into a park in time for the Exposition the next year, which would offer another draw for American tourists. Others urged the site be excavated, despite the buildings, so Jones's body could be found and transferred to the United States.
New York Tribune
correspondent Charles Inman Barnard had followed the search—he wrote later that he joined Ricaudy in his visit to Père Lachaise and on other research jaunts—and his reports were the most detailed in the American papers.
¹⁹
They fanned significant public interest in recovering the body if possible. Members of the US Congress introduced a joint resolution to pay the costs of digging up Jones and reburying him in Arlington National Cemetery, one of several locales that began lobbying for the privilege of hosting Jones's permanent grave. (The measure died after being referred to the House Committee on Naval Affairs.)

Porter was among those who thought Jones's body should be exhumed and moved to the United States. Though he had hoped to work outside of the public spotlight, it was too late for that as photographers took pictures of the site and news columns were filled with speculation about what would happen. Porter decided to approach Mme Crignier, who owned the property, and the tenants to see if they were interested in selling or would at least let the Americans buy access to the site to try to unearth Jones's coffin. He soon discovered, though, that there was a very good reason why Ricaudy knew the terms for purchase could be “advantageous.” During his visits to the site, Ricaudy had secured options on the land himself.

Porter found himself negotiating with the man he had hired to find the burial spot.
²⁰
The talks went nowhere. Porter was angry and wounded by the duplicity but, ever the diplomat, blamed public exposure of the project “through the indiscretion of persons who had been consulted on the subject. Self-constituted agents immediately began to busy themselves with circulating fantastic stories regarding the fabulous prices that were to be paid for the property, the whole of which it was said was going to be bought
by a rich government.” He didn't identify Ricaudy publicly as the person behind the “indiscretion” in his reports on the search. He was more direct a few years later in a private letter when Ricaudy was pressing a claim against the US government over payments for his research work. In a letter to Bailly-Blanchard written after Porter had retired from his post, the ambassador wrote that Ricaudy had delivered a “garbled” account of the burial and initially omitted the key detail about Jones having been buried in the Protestant cemetery. “He got this from Charles Read's assertion, no doubt, and we knew of this ourselves—you, I think, ascertained that fact before Ricaudy's report.” Porter said Vignaud had told Ricaudy at the time that he would be paid nothing for his work because of his duplicity, and Porter now urged Bailly-Blanchard to ensure Ricaudy received no money other than possible expenses.
²¹

But in November 1899, with the body within potential reach after more than a century, Porter decided that “there was but one course to pursue, however reluctantly, which was to drop the matter entirely for a couple of years, in order to let the excitement subside…. This was altogether the most discouraging episode in the history of the undertaking.” Once again, though, Porter dissembled. The public excitement had little to do with his decision to postpone the project. Ricaudy's options on the property were for two years. Jones's body wasn't going anywhere. And neither was Porter.