PORTER’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.
The work would be done by Weiss’s government crews, but Porter would reimburse the cost, which he estimated wouldn’t exceed 130,000 francs, or $25,300, “supposing that the body should be found only at the last stroke of the pick.” Another 10,000 francs would be set aside in case the buildings needed to be repaired or if a worker became injured. With other incidentals, Porter predicted the project would cost at most $35,000 and probably less. It seemed unlikely, Porter believed, that Jones would have been tucked in among the older bodies. “As the search would begin at the opposite extremities the chances are that the body would be found without having to run the excavation under the entire property and that the expense would be reduced accordingly.”10
Porter had put a lot of thought into the likelihood of success. Even after he had received Ricaudy’s report and been persuaded that Jones had been buried in the Saint Louis cemetery and never disinterred, he continued to track down leads of skepticism that came in letters from people who had read newspaper stories about the search. And he challenged his own logic and conclusions too. One of the questions was how many coffins might be found. Most of the dead, Porter reasoned, had been poor and not likely buried in coffins, let alone expensive lead coffins, as Jones had been. “It is highly probable that there are not a dozen such coffins there,” Porter said. Further, it seemed likely, given the expense, that the lead coffins would have nameplates. “If the name is not on the coffin, the identification might be verified by its location in the cemetery among the last buried there” or by matching the measurements of the body inside with what was known about Jones. There had been medals made of Jones’s likeness during his life and well after his death, and Porter approached one of the mints that had made them and ordered some new copies. These he tucked away in case a body was found and the likenesses could be matched.11
Porter put most of those details in a letter to Hay, the secretary of state, as a precursor to a request that Congress be asked to appropriate $35,000 to pay for the project. He told Hay that Crignier and the tenants would not agree in writing to a set time to start the project but that he felt he had a few weeks of leeway and hoped that Congress would act quickly.
The bigger issue was the weather. The general sense among all involved was that the dig should occur “before the approach of warm weather as there is objection here to turning up cemetery earth at that season for fear of creating sickness.” Porter reminded Hay that he had underwritten the cost of the search himself, not wanting to use public funds for a speculative project. “I now feel justified in recommending an appeal to Congress…. Even if the whole of the collected evidence should prove deceptive and for some unaccountable reason the body after all should not be found, it seems to me that it would be well worth this small expenditure and all the trouble taken to settle once and forever the question of the possibility of discovering this historic grave.”12
Porter wrote separately to Roosevelt, appealing to the president’s always simmering sense of patriotism. “It is humiliating to feel that this famous character in American history was buried by charity and has lain for more than a century in a squalid quarter of a foreign city in a forgotten grave. Knowing the interest you have taken in this matter I feel that you will be glad to send a message to Congress asking for the appropriation I have recommended for the recovery of the body. The finding of his remains, bringing them home in a war vessel, and giving them decent sepulture, say at Arlington, in the land upon whose history he shed such luster, would, I am sure, form one of the most notable historic events of your administration.” Porter suggested the country’s “patriotic societies” would likely respond warmly to the project and could be counted on to rally widespread public support. “You remember how indignant you and I and all our citizens became thirteen years ago regarding the neglected grave of General Grant.” And Roosevelt himself had played a significant role in the modern rebirth of the American navy; bringing Jones’s body to America would help burnish the navy’s public image.13
Shortly after Porter sent those letters, Crignier and the tenants informed him that they wouldn’t consider the agreement valid without some cash up front—the equivalent of $3,000. Rather than see the deal unravel, Porter shelled out the money from his own pocket, then sent off a note to Hay in Washington that he had done so. “If the government, by rejecting the appropriation, decides to abandon the opportunity now offered to make the search for the body, I shall gladly pocket the loss and feel that I have done everything in my power to consummate this much desired undertaking.” Then, as a nudge, he reminded Hay that the $35,000 estimate “is a maximum. It may not require the expenditure of more than half that sum.”14
The truth was, while Porter hoped the US government would pay for the project, he was forging ahead regardless. And he was in a bit of a hurry. In December, he had told Hay that he wanted to resign his ambassadorship and return to the United States. Roosevelt had won election to a full term in the White House that November, and he would be inaugurated in March. Porter had gone to Paris as McKinley’s emissary, and while he and Roosevelt were friends and politically sympathetic, Porter felt a duty to resign and let Roosevelt appoint a new ambassador of his own choosing. He also wanted to do some writing, though his letters were unspecific regarding just what he wanted to write about.
There were personal reasons too. Elsie was spending most of her time in Switzerland with her young beau Edwin Mende, the son of her late mother’s doctor, and the two were making plans to announce an engagement. They intended to settle in New York, where Porter’s son and daughter-in-law already lived. With Sophie dead, Porter was longing for the contact of family and old friends. He would soon be sixty-eight years old, and, including his Civil War service, he had worked steadily for forty-four years. It was time to slow down.
On February 3, Porter sent a telegram to Hay as his official notice that he intended to resign, effective on a date to be determined by the president, and asked that Hay pass along the formal notification. Porter also sent a personal letter to Roosevelt updating the president on the status of various diplomatic projects and on French legislation that could affect American trade. Porter informed the president that he was quitting and wanted to be back home by summertime. “I cannot hope to make my sojourn here immortal by making it eternal and if I remain out of the country too long, I may find myself labeled like the liniment we buy in the drugstores: ‘For external use only.’”
Porter had no intention, though, of abandoning the quest for Jones’s body, he told Roosevelt. “If Congress is unpatriotic enough to reject the requested appropriation, I shall bear the expense myself, having already advanced the preliminary payments necessary to bind the options I had secured from the property owners. I have arranged to make the excavations in three sections so that I can complete the work in three or four months by giving it constant personal attention.”15
Roosevelt replied to Porter briefly on February 6, thanking him for the Jones update and informing him that “I shall send in a message to Congress at once.” In separate telegrams over the next few weeks, he and Porter set the effective date of the resignation for April 30. Roosevelt also replied to Hay on February 6 saying that he would respond directly to Porter about the resignation and asking Hay to prepare a statement the White House could send to Congress seeking the $35,000 appropriation to recover the body and to erect “suitable monuments” in Washington to Jones and to John Barry, a Jones contemporary in the Continental navy and a rival among historians regarding the question of who should receive credit for laying the groundwork for the American navy.
Roosevelt forwarded the Hay-crafted request to Congress on February 13, along with Porter’s report on why he believed he could find the body. Roosevelt, who shared Porter’s interest in memorializing military greatness, urged Congress to “take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to do proper honor to the memory of John Paul Jones.” He also appealed to Congressional leaders’ sense of patriotic pride, noting that he was moved to make the request in part due to a “sentiment of mingled distress and regret felt because the body of one of our greatest heroes lies forgotten and unmarked in foreign soil.” Roosevelt’s request withered and died without action, something he anticipated in a letter to Porter. “I have sent in an urgent request for Congress to act on the John Paul Jones matter, but of course I have not the slightest idea whether they will or not.”
Congress might not have felt a sense of urgency, but Porter certainly did. He expected to leave France by early summer, and he desperately wanted to bring Jones’s body home with him. And he wasn’t waiting for Congress to act. In fact, he had already given Weiss the go-ahead to start digging—even before sending his letters and telegrams to Roosevelt and Hay. After all that time, effort, and expense in trying to figure out where Jones might be buried, Porter was about to find out whether he was right.
On the morning of Friday, February 3, Weiss and his men showed up at Mme Crignier’s property and cleared out space in one of Bassigny’s granary sheds to give them room to work on the first of the planned five vertical shafts. The locations of the shafts had been carefully thought out, and Porter was having Weiss play the odds. The old entry to the cemetery had been along Rue des Écluses-Saint-Martin, around the corner from the entrances to the hotel, the secondhand shop, and the granary. Visitors to the walled cemetery would have entered through a gate leading from the street into a garden holding several fruit trees, with the caretaker’s cottage to the left, anchoring the street corner. The cemetery was beyond the garden’s back wall, and visitors would have passed through the gate at the top of the stairs to the ground, about eight feet below the garden level. The land, sloped roughly southward, was in effect terraced. Over the years, the bodies had been methodically buried in a pattern that meant the last bodies to be interred—including Jones’s—were likely buried either near the entrance or near the back wall. Porter and Weiss overlaid the old maps with the present layout of buildings on the land and concluded that the old line between the garden and the cemetery aligned roughly with the wall of the laundry building, adjacent to the hotel building. So Porter had Weiss sink the first shaft through the floor of one of the granary sheds, in a place where workers could, once they had dug deep enough, excavate horizontally beneath the laundry.
The workers, using picks and shovels, began digging through the packed earth at the surface. After the hole reached a depth of a few feet, the workers erected a hand-cranked winch to haul up buckets full of dirt, rocks, and whatever other material they might find as they gouged their way deeper. They used wheelbarrows to ferry the excavated dirt and rocks to rapidly growing piles, first in the courtyard and then in the street. The project meant the removal of tons of material, but there was no place on the property to store it until it was time to refill the holes. So Weiss and Porter rented a vacant lot two miles away and the earth was carted off on horse-drawn wagons.
It was a poor site for construction, Weiss quickly concluded. The eight feet or so of earth that had been brought in decades ago to level the cemetery with the original fruit garden had never been compacted or otherwise prepared to hold the foundations of buildings. Thus, below the surface compaction, the earth was loose and crumbled easily, and the workers had to use timbers and rocks to stabilize the shaft walls. Weiss discovered that the building foundations themselves were shallow and “did not rest upon the natural soil consisting largely of gypsum, which forms the substratum of the region, but upon made earth.”16
The street outside Mme Crignier’s property, with a pulley (right) hauling earth from one of the vertical shafts dug to explore the abandoned cemetery.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Horace Porter Collection, Manuscript Division
Anxious to proceed quickly, Porter authorized Weiss to have men work the site from early morning until late into the evening, employing two shifts of diggers. Porter was confident that the research was correct, that he had found the old Saint Louis cemetery, but he was still waiting for proof. It came quickly. At a depth of about eight feet, right where they expected, the nature of the earth changed. The loose fill gave way to a denser, more compact mix of dirt, gypsum, and rock, the natural soil makeup of the region. They kept digging, ever deeper, slowed now by the firmness of the earth itself. And soon the pickaxes were striking not rocks but bones. Countless human bones. “Nowhere were any vaults of masonry, analogous to those in cemeteries of the present, discovered,” Weiss later reported. “All the bodies had been interred directly in the earth.” The discovery affirmed an observation Porter had found in his research: an 1804 inspection of the site reported that there were no headstones and that most of the dead had been buried in trenches rather than individual graves.
Porter felt vindicated by the lack of evidence that the cemetery might have been disturbed over the years and the bodies hauled away with others from cemeteries around Paris to join the subterranean city of the dead in the Catacombs. The first shaft, he reported to Hay, “proved that the dead had never been disturbed. Their skeletons were lying close together in two layers, one above the other, and in some places there were three. But there were few vestiges left of the wooden coffins.”17
The men kept digging until they ran out of bones, at a depth of about sixteen feet. Then, like moles, they turned northward and “a gallery was run penetrating beneath the laundry and carried as far as the old wall of separation” between the cemetery and the garden. Everything, Porter noted, was right where the research had suggested it would be. Porter had indeed found the cemetery.
Now he had to find the right body.