FOR A YEAR, Jones wandered. He drifted to Poland, Austria, Amsterdam, and London. He toyed with the idea of joining the Swedish navy, if only to get a crack at Nassau-Siegen, who had been made commander of Russia’s Baltic Fleet. At the same time, he continued to write fawning letters to Catherine, hoping to climb back into her good graces. He sent the Empress a long journal of his battles in the Liman, so that she would better understand the “mortifications” he had endured. He proposed new schemes, like sending a small squadron around the Cape of Good Hope to attack the Ottoman Empire’s southern flank. Just give him “two ships of 50 guns, a couple of frigates, and carte blanche,” he implored, and he would put all of Arabia “under contribution” to the Tsarina.
He had not forgotten America. He continued to send his bust to statesmen like John Adams, and he wrote the new nation’s new President, George Washington, to explain how he had fallen victim to “dark Asiatic intrigue.” He contemplated, in several letters, buying a “small farm” in Pennsylvania. But he could not bring himself to retire, as long as there was a chance of returning to active service, somewhere, anywhere. His health was not robust, but he was still only forty-two years old, and his ambition was undimmed. He still longed to command a blue-water fleet in an ocean battle, preferably against a worthy foe, like the Royal Navy. The memory of his depredations was still fresh in Britain. When he arrived in England, at the port of Harwich in April 1790, wearing the uniform of a Russian naval officer, he was nearly killed by a mob out to get the “Pirate Paul Jones.” (He had traveled to England to try to settle a debt with Edward Bancroft; the ex-spy had lured him into a dubious investment in experimental dyes.) No longer a rake, he was spry enough for a certain kind of courtship. He wrote a friend in Hamburg to say that he might come in spring to “pay court to some of your rich, kind old ladies.”
By May, he was back in Paris. The gardens were flowering, just as they had a decade earlier, in May of 1780 when he had passed from one fete in his honor to the next. But Jones’s Paris, the convivial society of the ancien régime, had been swept away by revolution. Many of the nobles and courtiers had fled into exile (including Madame Townsend, along with her child). Jones wrote that he was “alarmed” by the “disturbances” in the capital. Louis XVI and his Queen were living under a kind of gilded house arrest; the French Revolution was more vengeful than America’s, though it had not yet begun to devour its own. Jones’s aristocratic former comrade-in-arms, the Marquis de Lafayette, was a great favorite of the crowd. Jones sent him some Russian furs and offered to stop by, but Lafayette apparently had no time for Jones. Salons that once vied for the brave Paul Jones were now shuttered. On one of his first nights in Paris, Jones dressed to attend a midnight masquerade. But when he arrived at the ball, he was told that “the house was full.”
Jones tried to maintain a social life. At one dinner party, he chanced to meet the heir of the Earl of Selkirk, Basil Lord Daer, who had been fifteen years old at the time Jones’s men raided his home and appropriated his family’s silver plate. Lord Daer thanked Jones for returning the plate and chatted amiably with his father’s would-be kidnapper for an hour or two. Later, he wrote his father that Jones “seems a sensible little fellow. He is not as dark as I had heard.” Daer had expected to meet the scowling blackguard of the chapbooks. He was surprised to find a soft-spoken, hazel-eyed man whose brown hair was turning gray and whose manner was benign, even delicate.
Jones took a fine apartment near the gardens of the Palais du Luxembourg, right around the corner from St. Sulpice and the Lodge of the Nine Sisters. He wore his decorations and left his calling card, but his cough was hacking and his visage gray and fatigued. The English writer Thomas Carlyle, in Paris to observe the Revolution, painted a forlorn figure:
In faded naval uniform, Paul Jones lingers visible here; like a wine skin from which the wine is drawn. Like the ghost of himself! Low is his once loud bruit, scarcely audible, save with extreme tedium, in ministerial ante-chambers; in this or that charitable dining room, mindful of the past.
To Gouverneur Morris, the American minister in Paris, Jones was a burden and a bore. Morris, a lawyer and financier who had lived in New York and Philadelphia, was an aristocratic snob, and his disdain drips through his diary entries:
November 14, 1790: Paul Jones calls on me. He has nothing to say but is so kind as to bestow on me the hours which hang heavy on his hands.
November 16: Paul Jones calls. He has nothing to say.
November 18: Paul Jones calls and gives me his time but I cannot lend him mine.
December 19, 1791: Paul Jones comes in but I neglect him perforce so that he goes away.
And yet, Morris’s diary also shows that Jones was dreaming on, still agitating for a war to fight. On February 1, 1791, Morris wrote: “Jones calls me and wishes to have my sentiments on a plan for carrying on war against Britain in India should she commence hostilities against Russia.”
Jones missed the quarterdeck. Command in battle had afforded him his one true joy, and he would do almost anything to recapture it.
Incredibly, and a bit pathetically, Jones continued to court Catherine and Potemkin. “I await the orders of your majesty,” he wrote the Tsarina in March 1791, almost two years after she put him “on leave.” He proposed leading an expedition against the English in India and tried to sell the Empress on the improbable design for a newfangled warship that could sail close to the wind without any ballast in its keel. Catherine sniffed at Jones’s strategic advice, “India is a long way off,” the Tsarina wrote to her German friend, Baron Grimm, “and before we reach it, peace would be made.” As for the miracle boat, “Let him propose it to England.” Catherine wearied of Jones’s dogged flattery. “I think I have nothing more to say of Jones,” she wrote Grimm. “I have already emptied my bag regarding him.”
Jones could hardly be blamed for indulging in self-pity as he waited, day after day, for orders that never came from Catherine—or Lafayette—or President Washington. Jones lived in deepening gloom, lit with flickers of self-awareness. When a lady acquaintance gently chastised him for preferring “love to friendship,” Jones did not argue. Romantic love, however fleeting, helps mortals “digest the nauseous draft of life,” Jones wrote. Feelings of betrayal reinforced his isolation. “Sad experience generally shows,” he wrote, “that where we expect to find a friend, we have only been treacherously deluded by false appearances.” He was generalizing, but he meant his own experience. Jones had enjoyed some genuine friendships with fellow sea captains like Hector McNeill, and he had played the faithful protégé to the great and good like Ben Franklin, but he had been financially burned by his “dear friend” Edward Bancroft and other seedy pretenders. In drawing rooms and houses of ill-repute, he had had many lovers, but no true love, with the possible exception of Mme. Townsend, now fled.
One hopes that Jones remembered his exultation in combat, his “hairbreadth scapes” and defiance of the odds at sea. More likely, he brooded. He blamed everyone for his misfortunes and unrealized potential—corrupt and self-interested politicians, narrow-minded commanders, balky crews, insubordinate officers. But he undoubtedly faulted himself as well, if not in his self-serving memoirs, then in the recesses of his own mind. All through his life, Jones struggled to put forth his more virtuous, Addisonian self, his capacity for self-sacrifice and noble-mindedness. But his anger and insecurity eventually showed through. He would have had faster and better ships to sail in harm’s way if he had followed Franklin’s advice and shared credit more generously and if he had been less prickly and pushy with his superiors. Jones was sufficiently self-aware to know what to do, but tragically incapable of doing it.
His ambition rendered him both gullible and self-absorbed. His sarcastic asides and demanding perfectionism often defeated his efforts to show “cheerful ardor” and reach out to colleagues. And yet, his pride masked sensitivity and a longing to be loved and forgiven. Jones’s gentler side showed in some touching letters to his sister Janet Taylor, with whom he had stayed in touch over the years. Jones took an interest in the careers of his nephews, desiring that they should have what he had sorely missed on his upward climb: a university education. (His nieces, he said with his era’s sensibility, “require an education suited to the delicacy of character that is becoming in their sex.”) He wrote his sister, “I wish I had a fortune to offer to each of them; but though this is not the case, I may yet be useful to them.” It pained Jones that his two sisters had fallen out. He had learned, by his own trying experience, that nursing a prideful grudge brought only more bitterness. He urged his sisters to read Pope’s Universal Prayer:
Teach me to feel another’s woe,
To hide the fault I see;
That mercy I to others show,
Such mercy show to me!
If only Jones had been able to take his own advice and hide his contempt toward others, they might have forgiven him. But he could not, and they did not.
Jones was sick. He was worn by care and the exposure of too many years, staying awake for days at a time, standing alert on the quarterdeck of troubled ships in troubled seas. His lungs were weakened by “dropsy,” frequent bouts of pneumonia, and his kidneys were failing. In the brutally hot summer of 1792, as the French Revolution rushed toward chaos and terror on the cobblestones outside, Jones withered and shrank in his apartment at 52 rue de Tournon. He began to lose his appetite and his skin yellowed. Jaundice swelled his legs, then his belly, until he could no longer button his waistcoat. He could breathe only with difficulty.
On July 18, 1792, less than two weeks after Jones’s forty-fifth birthday, Gouverneur Morris laconically noted in his diary, “A Message from Paul Jones that he is dying. I go thither and make his will.” He found Jones sitting up, gasping for breath but able to give instructions to leave his estate—some shares in the Bank of North America, worth about $6,000, some land in Vermont and shares in the Ohio and Indiana Companies, some uncollected debts and unpaid back wages—to his two sisters. Morris finished with this lugubrious business, came home to “dine en famille,” went to an official meeting at the Louvre, and stopped in to visit his mistress. When he returned to Jones’s apartment later that evening, he found a corpse. Jones was facedown on the bed, with his feet on the floor. Had he been kneeling? This disciple of Mars and Neptune had never gone to church, or, despite the occasional plea to the Almighty, showed much interest in faith or religion, but, judging from the position of his body, he may have been praying at the end.
A few days after he died, a packet arrived in Paris bestowing the kind of recognition that Jones so craved during his life. For years, Jones had been corresponding with Thomas Jefferson about the fate of “our poor countrymen” imprisoned by the Dey of Algiers. Jones had been all for raising a fleet to put down the Barbary Coast pirates (hearing of Jones’s agitation and employment with the Russian infidels, the Dey had put a price on Jones’s head). Lacking the will or funds, Congress had dawdled. But now some thirteen American prisoners, sailors seized from merchantmen and thrown in the grim cells of Algiers, were writing pleading letters, saying they would have to convert to Islam if help did not come soon. In the late spring of 1792 Congress was at last moved to create a delegation to negotiate with the Dey. Remembering Jones and his deep concern for the fate of prisoners, Jefferson, the first American Secretary of State, appointed Jones to lead the American delegation. But Jones was dead by the time his commission and instructions reached Paris at the end of July.
The American minister, Gouverneur Morris, did not wish to waste public funds on a grand or even decent burial for the tiresome Jones. But the French National Assembly rescued the Chevalier from a pauper’s grave. The French government placed Jones’s body, pickled in alcohol, in a lead-lined coffin, should more enlightened American governments seek to reclaim and properly honor their hero’s remains. On the sultry evening of July 20, 1792, a motley funeral cortege formed outside Jones’s apartment near the Palais du Luxembourg. There were delegates from the National Assembly in their Republican finery, some gendarmes shouldering muskets, a smattering of Masons from the Nine Sisters, and a small gaggle of friends and common folk. Minister Morris could not attend. He had a dinner engagement.
Through the steamy, fretful streets of Paris they trudged, to a Protestant cemetery at the outskirts of the city. The gendarmes’ drums beat a slow, mournful cadence; thunder rumbled in the distance; lightning flashed. (Morris, a bit guilty perhaps, reported that a bolt struck nearby as he went to dinner.) An official made a windy political speech about popular will and religious tolerance. Jones’s plain coffin was lowered into a grave. Not a month later, the bodies of Swiss Guards who had been slaughtered trying to protect Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, after they were wrested from their palace in the Tuileries by the mob, would be tossed into graves nearby.
Europe’s royalists sneered at Jones’s demise. “This Paul Jones was a wrongheaded fellow; very worthy to be celebrated by a rabble of detestable creatures,” wrote the Empress Catherine. The London Times dismissed the annoying corsair: “The man possessed the mind of a modern French Jacobin. He rebelled against his lawful King, and raised his arm against the nation that gave him birth, and nursed him to his years of maturity…. He was a man of mean birth, and without education; naturally ferocious in his mind, and when possessed of power, savage and cruel.”
Morris was amused that Jones had been honored by the ever more radical National Assembly, since, Morris wrote, Jones had “detested the French Revolution” and been “much vexed by its democracy.” It is true that Jones had no great love of democracy. He remembered too well the surly officers and hands of the Ranger, insisting on taking a vote before going into battle. Jones loved hierarchies, as long as he could climb them. But Jones did cherish freedom. He did not much philosophize about it, save for his ritual devotions to “the universal rights of mankind.” But he was willing to fight to the death for freedom from despotism. He had seen enough of tryanny, in the fate of American seamen left to die in British prison hulks, and in his own surreally twisted treatment by Catherine and her henchmen. Russia under the Tsars made Jones appreciate America all the more. Before coming to Russia, Jones wrote, he had spent the past “fifteen years among an enlightened people, where the press is free, and where the conduct of every man is open to discussion, and subjected to the judgment of his fellow citizens.”
Jones cherished above all the freedom that had allowed him to create himself as he pleased. Though he had many models, from philosophers like Franklin to stoic soldiers like Washington to dashing nobles like Lafayette, Jones was essentially self-made. From the name he chose to the style of uniform he wore, he was a product of his own creation. While he often felt wronged or badly used, and tiresomely complained about it, he also knew the exhilaration of making his own destiny, of standing on a ship he alone commanded, for a cause that perfectly squared with his own ambition. His War of Independence was personal. He came of age at a time when the old social strictures were beginning to slip, when the Great Chain of Being was showing cracks, and he broke free of his place as a servant’s son to be his own master. He used his wit, his sword, his Masonic connections, any tool of advancement he could grasp, but he was also bound by honor.
John Paul Jones may not have said, “I have not yet begun to fight,” but on that night, and on all days before and after, he never stopped fighting. He was a lonely man, but not unique in his single-minded determination. The same refusal to quit was true of Washington and Adams and other Founding Fathers, who complained, bitterly at times, about the lassitude and incompetence of their comrades, but who never flagged in their devotion to a cause. Jones’s true cause, one might argue, was his own advancement. But he was never narrow-minded or purely materialistic. He passed by many chances for profit and easy pleasure. He fought for a world in which men might advance by their merits and drive, and not be pegged by their birth or place. His pride would not allow him to see that, as most men measure success, he won.