The Admiral and the Ambassador

by Scott Martelle

  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.7 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.8

  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.9

  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”10

  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.11 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.12

  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.13 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.14 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 be
en 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.15

  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 IN MEMORY OF JOHN PAUL SENIOR, WHO DIED AT ABIGLAND THE 24TH OF OCTOBER 1767 UNIVERSALLY ESTEEMED. Beneath it was inscribed, ERECTED BY JOHN PAUL, JUNIOR. 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 a
nd 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.”