The Admiral and the Ambassador (33 page)

But yes, Porter told Roosevelt, he was certain that they had narrowed the search to the right abandoned cemetery and that, if Jones had indeed been buried in a lead coffin, the remains could be found. There would be political and diplomatic hurdles to clear, though. “Cemeteries are held here to be very sacred and the idea of digging up and scattering around a great number of human bones might call forth protests from living descendants of those buried there and bring criticism upon the authorities,” Porter wrote. “All this, however, could be managed quietly if done at the official request of our government.”

Porter ended the letter with a note of optimism—rare for him since the death of Sophie—that he was “trusting that I may be able to find more positive proof of the location of the grave.”

The ambassador had a final mission.

P
ORTER'S FIRST STEP WAS
to affirm what he thought he already knew: that Jones had been buried in the old Saint Louis cemetery in northeast Paris. So he and his cluster of researchers began retracing their earlier steps to make sure they hadn't missed any obvious clues that they might be on the wrong track. In October, Vignaud wrote back to the woman in Pau, in southwestern France, who had inquired a few years earlier about Jones and whom Vignaud had referred to Marion H. Brazier in Boston. Vignaud wondered whether the letter-writer had ever found out anything and might know where Jones was buried.

Porter himself sent off letters to local government officials and the national archives asking permission for Bailly-Blanchard to access their files to try to run down whatever information could be found. He also asked the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which dealt with foreign embassies in France, whether it had any records about the establishment of the Saint Louis cemetery, which archival sources suggested had been prompted in 1762 to
replace an earlier cemetery opened by the French at the request of Dutch diplomats seeking a place to bury their expatriate—and Protestant—dead.
¹

They worked through the spring, writing letters to anyone they thought might be able to shed some light—or offer contrary evidence—on what they believed they knew. A series of letters went out to people whom records indicated might be descendants of Simonneau, the Parisian official who had paid extra to have Jones buried in the alcohol-filled lead coffin. They tried to track down records through descendants of the man who served as the caretaker of the Saint Louis cemetery. No contrary information surfaced. The more they worked, the more they became convinced that they had the right cemetery and the right location.

If they were right, the body, if it could be found, would not be easy to get to. The former Saint Louis cemetery was buried deep beneath an array of buildings at the corner of Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles and Rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin “in an uninviting section of the northeastern quarter of Paris … covered with buildings principally of an inferior class” and several miles from the mansion-heavy sixteenth arrondissement neighborhood where Porter maintained the ambassador's residence.
²

The property was still owned by the widow Mme Crignier, and it held three separate addresses on Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, numbers 43, 45, and 47. The buildings had a range of uses. The largest, No. 47, was a four-story corner structure that held small shops on the street level, including a narrow grocery with a sidewalk display of wares, and in the corner space a small photography studio. The other three floors held hotel rooms owned by another widow named Mme Faidherbe. The building surrounded a rectangular courtyard accessible only through the main building. Next door, at No. 45, was a two-story building with a street-level secondhand shop and a laundry that advertised a
chambres chaudes
—a facility for drying clothes. The third building was the two-story granary owned by a man named Bassigny. It included a passageway from the street to a courtyard and large storage sheds at the back of the property.
³
From above, Crignier's property looked like a reverse image of a squared-off numeral 9, with buildings enclosing one courtyard and the other opening to the street. The street itself descended a slight slope, so from the corner, pedestrians walked downhill past the photography studio, grocery, and entrance to the upstairs hotel,
then the secondhand shop and the laundry, and finally the granary, beyond which were more small buildings and shops, each attached to the other, and, a few blocks away, the Canal Saint-Martin. The Rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin side of the property held a small tobacco and wine shop and a property management office in rickety buildings off the end of the hotel.

It would not be an easy negotiation to gain permission for the search. Crignier owned the property, but the tenants had significant control over the buildings and spaces they were renting, some under long-term leases. So Porter had a committee of people with whom to negotiate for access to the cemetery. Each had specific interests and concerns—and, apparently, some delusions inflated by Ricaudy. At first, Porter thought the best approach would be to buy the property from Crignier, evict the tenants, raze the buildings, unearth the cemetery, and then, after the search was over, sell the lot off to recoup some of the costs. No record exists to indicate what Crignier thought about selling her property; she could well have rejected the overture. Porter noted that the idea generated “so many objections” that, added to the cost, made it unfeasible.
⁴
Another plan slowly emerged in talks with Parisian excavation experts and with Crignier and the tenants. Rather than buy and raze the buildings, Porter began to think he could obtain short-term agreements to tunnel beneath the buildings, a much cheaper project.

Porter tried to work quietly and managed to handle the negotiations without notice from either the Parisian papers or the American foreign correspondents based in the French capital. Gowdy didn't share his discretion, though. The consul general told reporters on October 17—as Porter was working on his response to Roosevelt's inquiry—that he had been looking for the body himself, and offered a $1,000 reward to anyone who could find it. He reiterated that the likely burial place had been narrowed down to the site near l'Hôpital Saint-Louis. “Jones was buried in a lead coffin and his remains can be identified by his wounds,” Gowdy told reporters, adding that the remains “can also be identified by certain portions of his admiral's outfit.”

Those details revealed how little Gowdy knew about Jones or the report that Ricaudy had put together. Jones had famously never been wounded and so had no scars that could be used to verify the corpse—the absence of
scars could be telling but not conclusive; the presence of scars could rule out a corpse as that of Jones. At the time Jones was buried, the custom was to inter soldiers of distinction in linens, saving the uniforms for public displays, which meant there likely would be no hints to be found in whatever clothing a corpse might be wearing. Still, Gowdy hoped the cash reward “would be an inducement to men of research to go to work on the question.”
⁵

Interest in the project was bubbling in Washington too. Congressman Bois Penrose had earlier pushed legislation to return Jones's body to the United States for burial at Arlington. Now freshman congressman Henry T. Rainey introduced a law on November 19, 1903, that would pay for a search aimed at returning the body for burial at a monument to be built at Annapolis. Three weeks later, Congressman Morris Sheppard of Texas put forward a similar bill directing the secretary of state to “ascertain the costs and submit a plan for marking the grave of John Paul Jones” in Paris.
⁶
Both newly proposed bills, duly reported in the press, were referred to committees, where they died. A separate movement to erect a statue of Jones in Washington faced a similar fate. Congress, it seemed, was looking more closely at the money involved than the purpose.

A few days after Sheppard introduced his bill, a correspondent for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
visited the Crignier property and talked with Mme Dunap, who with her husband had opened the photography studio a number of years earlier. Dunap had continued to operate the business after the recent death of her husband—making her another widow tied to the property. Dunap was well aware of the Jones legacy. A Jones portrait was hung on one wall of the shop, and she talked of the certainty that Jones was buried beneath her rented floor. In fact, she told the reporter as she tapped with one foot, “several times the floor has caved in at this spot, proving positively that a deeper excavation” had been made in the past. She also cited a rumor that Jones's head was twice the size of a normal one, which “should surely reveal the identity” if the recovered body had decayed beyond recognition. All in all, the reporter wrote, word that the US Congress might pay to dig up Jones “creates vast interest in the neighborhood.”
⁷
It was just the kind of interest Porter had been hoping to avoid.

In fact, the sporadic news accounts made his negotiations much more difficult and dragged them out. Some of the tenants “became wildly excited
as to the fabulous sums of money they hoped to receive,” Porter wrote later to Secretary of State Hay, adding a presumed joke, “One tenant went crazy in brooding on the subject and is in an asylum. The demands were utterly fantastic and the negotiations … were so head-splitting that I came near following his example.”
⁸

It took months for Porter's plan to come together, even with the local prefect of the police acting as a go-between with Crignier. Porter later wrote that he persuaded Crignier that there were no riches to be made because he was paying for the project himself. Yet letters kept by the embassy indicate he presumed the US Congress would underwrite the costs. Regardless, he was able to finally persuade Crignier and her tenants—with the pressure of French officials behind him—that the goal was to disinter the forgotten body of a naval hero and rebury him with proper honors under a memorial in the United States. Surely the Parisians could understand why it was not proper to leave the historic remains mixed in obscurity with the bodies of the unknown, the leachate from the laundry, and the bones of dogs, horses, and other animals. It was to be a mission to acknowledge history and to bestow a too-long-delayed military and national honor. Slowly, the tenants came around.

While the negotiations continued, Porter sought and received the help of Parisian officials in scoping out the project. They loaned Porter the expertise of Paul Weiss, who was the governmental mine engineer and quarry inspector overseeing excavation projects for the Département de Seine, essentially the state-level government that covered Paris and its near suburbs. Porter had settled on a plan to, in effect, go mining for the body by sinking vertical shafts in open spaces and then tunneling horizontally beneath the buildings. It would be a challenge, but much cheaper than a more traditional excavation and likely to cause less damage to the neighborhood. The other option—razing the buildings and digging an open pit to expose the long dead—wasn't likely to win favor with neighbors or French officials.

In late December 1904, Crignier finally signed a contract granting Porter three months' access to the property in return for 15,000 francs. Of that, Crignier would pay 10,000 francs to Bassigny, whose granary was expected to be the most affected. Crignier would use another 4,500 francs
to offset a reduction in Bassigny's rent in a new, discounted six-year lease. The remaining 500 francs would be spread among the other tenants to compensate them for anticipated inconveniences. The deal also included Porter, at his own expense, hiring the Parisian architecture firm Judin and Gravereaux to monitor the buildings for damage on Crignier's behalf.

Other than the stipend to offset Bassigny's rent reduction, Crignier kept none of the money for herself, apparently bowing to pressure from French officials. “At the instance of the French Government, she sought only to be agreeable to the American government by inducing her tenants to accept the indemnities proposed,” Porter wrote. No one involved anticipated significant property damages or that the project would last beyond the spring, both of which turned out to be severe miscalculations and would lead to more than twenty years of legal disputes and claims.
⁹

Weiss, the engineer, mapped out a plan to dig five vertical shafts, two of them in the street outside the property, and the rest in the courtyard or in Bassigny's sheds. The shafts would be used as access points to horizontal “galleries,” excavations like those used to mine coal. To expand the search, men would poke long metal poles deep into the gallery walls, hoping to strike a solid mass that might indicate a lead coffin. Additionally, surface trenches would be dug in the dirt cellar of the corner hotel building. Weiss and Porter decided to conduct the search in three stages. The first, and most exhaustive, would be to look near the front of the old cemetery—primarily below the laundry and back to the end of the lot. It was there, Porter felt, that the odds were best, since the historical record suggested Jones's body likely was buried near the entrance or at the farthest reach of the cemetery. Those had been the last unused spaces at the time Jones died, and the cemetery was closed just a few months later, after the mass burial of the Swiss Guards killed by the mob that had attacked the Tuileries in August 1792, leading to the execution of Louis XVI six months later. The second stage of excavations would be near Rue de la Grange-aux-Belles, roughly where the southeastern wall of the cemetery had stood. The third would be along what would have been the cemetery's back wall, beneath the granary. In each case, they would begin at the outer edges of the former cemetery and then work methodically deeper, they believed, into the past.