The Admiral and the Ambassador (37 page)

John Paul Jones's lead coffin, with, from left, an unidentified man; M. Géninet, a public works foreman; Paul Weiss, who led the excavation project; Arthur Bailly-Blanchard, second secretary at the US embassy; and ambassador Horace Porter.

Courtesy of the Library of Congress, Horace Porter Collection, Manuscript Division
seen as a good sign, since Blackden's letter to Jones's sister had mentioned that the admiral's body had been interred in such a way that it could be exhumed and shipped to the United States. Excitement built.

One of the men measured the body at five feet, seven inches long, the recorded height of Jones. They placed a half dozen lit candles on the dirt pile around the top of the coffin and carefully began unraveling the linen sheets from the head and upper torso of the body, revealing the face. “To our intense surprise, the body was marvelously well preserved, all the flesh remaining intact, very slightly shrunken, and of a grayish brown or tan color,” Porter said. The skin was pliable and moist, as was the linen wrap, and “the face presented quite a natural appearance” except for the nose. The cartilage at the tip had been bent sharply to the side, as though the nose had been crushed by the lid.

Porter and several of the other men had with them the Jones medallions Porter had ordered from the mint while he was conducting the records search. One was pulled out and placed next to the head. Both had the same broad forehead, similar-shaped brows, the same cheekbone structure, “prominently arched eye orbits,” and long, flowing hair. “Paul Jones!” some of the men shouted. Porter was ecstatic. “All those who were gathered about the coffin removed their hats, feeling that they were standing in the presence of the illustrious dead—the object of the long search.”

They had found John Paul Jones. But for now, it would be a secret.

Porter knew he needed more proof than his gut feeling and the well-preserved corpse's resemblance to a face on a medal. Before the dig began, Porter had arranged with several Parisian-based experts in forensics to look over the body should it be found. One of them was Louis Capitan, a doctor and highly respected archeologist and anthropologist. Word was sent to the École d'Anthropologie, where Capitan worked and taught, to let him know a body had been found and that Porter thought it was likely Jones. Capitan replied via messenger that he was busy that day and Porter should reseal the coffin with plaster until he could get there. The linen was replaced around
the head, the coffin lid set into a bead of plaster along the bottom lip, and the body sealed away.

Capitan arrived the next day and descended the ladder to the subterranean gallery. Despite his confidence that he had the right body, Porter was too meticulous to suspend the search. So workers scurried by, and the voices and sounds of digging echoed through the candle-lit tunnels. In fact, over the next week or so the men would find two more lead coffins, one with a nameplate identifying it as someone other than Jones, and the second without a name tag but holding a corpse well over six feet in height and clearly not that of the diminutive Jones. And with Porter trying to keep the discovery out of the newspapers for the time being, it was important that the daily gathering of the curious see the site consistently busy.

Capitan looked around the gallery. It was a close, ill-lit space with no room for a proper examination table. He decided conditions were too primitive and too busy for a proper examination. He conferred with Weiss and they decided to move the coffin to the École de Médecine. Capitan went first to the local police prefecture and explained the plan, asking for discretion, and then to the medical school, where he enlisted the aid and cooperation of the key figures there. That night, after the small crowd of curious Parisians had faded away, the coffin was carefully lifted to the surface, secretly loaded onto a cart, and hauled off to the medical school.

The next morning, an august gathering of medical experts surrounded the coffin, which had been placed on a glistening steel table. Capitan was there, as were Dr. Georges Papillault, an anthropologist who would study the anatomical details of the body; Dr. Georges Herve, who oversaw the work; Dr. A. Javal, a government physician; and J. Pray, a police official. Weiss and Porter were there too, along with Bailly-Blanchard, Gowdy, and several other men. In all, a dozen men would take part in or witness different aspects of the examination and autopsy, which would stretch over nearly a week.

The plaster seal was knocked loose and the lid carefully lifted away. The first issue was how to remove the corpse from its tight packing without risk of damage. They decided the safest approach would be to cut away the lead coffin. The metal was split at the head and the feet and then pulled apart, releasing the pressure and loosening the compacted hay. Then, very
delicately, the body was picked up and moved to a dissecting table, where the linen was carefully unwrapped to reveal a man clad only in a long linen shirt decorated with plaits and ruffles. Exposure to the air two days earlier had already begun to affect it. Facial skin that had been moist and soft was now sunken and leathery, with the lips pulling back from the teeth in a grimace. Capitan noted that the body was so well preserved that the ligaments and muscles still kept the skeleton intact—they were able to move the body as a whole, without it falling apart, despite the more than 110 years that had elapsed since the man's death.

The hands, feet, and legs were wrapped loosely in foil, a common burial practice in the late 1700s, when the Saint Louis cemetery was accepting bodies. The arms were folded across the chest, and the doctor straightened them to make it easier to examine the body. Porter reached out and gently picked up the right hand, as though to shake it in greeting. The knuckle joints bent easily, and the skin was soft to the touch. The face bore the stubble of a man who hadn't shaved for a few days. The right eye was closed and the left slightly open, and lines had been creased into the skin from the linen wrap. The near-black hair had gone gray at the temples, and the bulk of it, some thirty inches long, was collected at the nape, rolled into a bun and wrapped in a linen cap with an odd bit of stitching that looked like the letter “J” from one view, but like the letter “P” when turned upside down.

They removed the linen shirt, along with the remnants of the foil, and positioned the corpse in a sitting position for a series of photographs. They then carefully examined the exterior of the body and found no scars or malformations. The skin was dark in tone, and the torso was flecked with small white crystals, part of what the doctors called the “autolytic process”—the conversion of enzymes after death but before the alcohol bath could begin to preserve the flesh.

Papillault carefully measured the body, now lying flat on the table. Consistent with the initial measurement at the cemetery site, he recorded it as five feet, seven inches long. Papillault then took a series of measurements of different elements of the corpse, creating an exhaustive collection of human topography. He focused particularly on the face, taking down its length and width, the dimension of the lips, and the chin. The plan was to match those measurements against the bust of Jones created by Jean
Antoine Houdon when Jones was alive, a bust that Jones's contemporaries had described as a near-perfect likeness. Paris's Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro had a copy, and Porter used his connections to gain permission to use it for comparison purposes.

It was not a perfect method, Papillault acknowledged. Allowances had to be made for artistic distortion, and a century-old corpse lacks the full-fleshed look of a living man modeling for his sculptor. “We had nothing to compare therewith but a skeleton covered with a tanned skin and shrunken tissues,” Papillault wrote later. Still, any sculptor of skill and repute would deliver a bust that resembled the subject in close details, he believed, or the sculptor wouldn't have much in the way of commissions. Not perfect, no, but it would be good enough for their purposes. Especially since the bust and the corpse had an identical malformation of the earlobe—not the kind of tweak an artist would likely make for the sake of his art.

It took a couple of days for all of the measurements to be taken, checked, and double-checked. The corpse was photographed in several details, though by now the air had dried out the flesh until it looked like an ancient mummy. A hair sample was washed clean and its color noted as dark brown to black, which matched contemporary descriptions of Jones as being a dark-complexioned Scotsman, with dark hair and eyes. Capitan and Papillault also reviewed the paper trail that Porter and his deputies had amassed, including the contemporary descriptions of Jones's burial. There was nothing in their first examination of the body to suggest another conclusion, Papillault reported. The body was Jones, he felt.

Yet they pressed on, seeking certitude.

The doctors went to work on the internal organs. Not wanting to disfigure the corpse in a way that would be visible, Capitan turned the body face down and then carefully cut deeply into the back of the torso. A small amount of discolored alcohol leaked out onto the table, and Capitan “was greatly astonished” to find the internal organs contracted but preserved, like a lab specimen. He began with the lungs, which held small whitish crystals, but also “small rounded masses, hard and at times calcified,” scars caused by pneumonia, from which Jones had suffered while in the service of Catherine the Great. The heart was “the color of dead leaves” yet remained
soft and flexible, and had been healthy at the time of death. The spleen was larger than it should have been, but the rest of the major organs were healthy and unscarred. Except for the kidneys. They were “small, hard, and contracted,” much more so than would be accounted for by the general changes in the corpse after death. Capitan concluded they were diseased, affected by interstitial nephritis, and that the damage to the lungs suggested “a patient rather pronouncedly consumptive.” Capitan took small samples of each of the organs and set them aside, then carefully placed the organs back in the thoracic cavity and sewed the skin shut.

Another doctor, Cornil, reviewed the tissue samples, including a microscopic examination, and added to Capitan's conclusions. The body on the table had suffered from pneumonia (there was no evidence of tuberculosis) and severe kidney failure. The afflictions accounted for the symptoms Jones had exhibited as he neared death—the difficulty breathing, the swelling of the lower limbs and abdomen. And the kidney disease was doubtless the cause of death.

Altogether, it was a persuasive array of evidence, some direct, some inferred. There was the research trail unearthed by Porter and his deputies. The details of Jones's physical condition in his last days. The twentieth-century autopsy of the eighteenth-century corpse. All fed into the same conclusion. “Given this convergence of exceedingly numerous, very diversified, and always agreeing facts,” Capitan wrote, “it would be necessary to have a concurrence of circumstances absolutely exceptional and improbable in order that the corpse … be not that of Paul Jones.”

A week after the coffin had been found deep beneath Mme Crignier's Parisian properties, Porter prepared a lengthy telegram to Washington. It was understated, and choppily written, but unequivocal. “My six years search for remains Paul Jones has resulted in success,” Porter began. He skated through the research that led him to the site, the details of the discovery of the coffin, its removal to the École de Médecine, the measurements, and the autopsy that “showed distinct proofs of disease of which the Admiral is known to have died.” Porter promised to mail copies of all the reports once they were completed, but felt compelled to wire Hay with the good news: he had found the right body. “Will have remains put
in suitable casket and deposited in receiving vault of American Church till decision reached as to most appropriate means of transportation to America.”
¹⁰

Porter received a congratulatory reply, and the exchange was remarkably muted given the time, effort, and expense that Porter, particularly, had put into the search. The elation came through in subtle ways. On the top of Porter's initial telegram received at the State Department, someone scrawled an undated note: “Copies made for
press
!”