Money went like water in the upkeep of the queenly establishment. The once-boundless Jumel wealth that she had helped to amass began to shrink under the strain. Yet so great was that fortune that more than a million dollars of it was left after she died.
New York was kind. Men who had loved Betty, women who had been envied because of her friendship for them, rallied about her now, in her dotage, and helped her keep up the pitiable farce of queenship.
And in the mansion on the hill, on July 16, 1865, she fell asleep. A score of New York's foremost men were her honorary pallbearers. And all society made, for the last time, the long journey to Harlem to honor her memory.
So died Betty Bowen--Betty Jumel--Betty Burr--whatever you prefer to call her. She was New York's first and greatest official heart breaker. She was doubly fortunate, too, in missing the average old-super-woman's realization of having outgrown her wonder-charm. For when her life book of beauty and power and magnetism closed, Delusion tenderly took up the tale. And through a fairyland of imagined admiration and regal rank, Betty tottered happily to the very end.
She was an ex-laundress, and the daughter of a hatter.
He was an ideal dime-novel hero, and the son of a king. She was all spirit. He was all body. And their love story is, perhaps, the strangest of its sort in the sad annals of hearts.
(Their great-great-granddaughter, by the way, was George Sand--a four-generation throwback of the nameless super-woman trait.)
Having thus rhapsodied with the hope of catching the reader's attention, one may bring up the curtain on a romance whose compelling interest cannot be spoiled by the most bungling writing.
She was Adrienne Lecouvreur; and like the bulk of history's super-women, she sprang from the masses. Her childhood was spent in beating against the bars behind which her eagle spirit was locked. At fourteen she joined a road company; and within a few years she was acclaimed as the greatest actress the world had thus far known.
As a comedienne she was a failure. It was in tragedy that she soared to untouched heights. And her life, from cradle to unmarked grave, was one long, sustained tragedy of love. Or, rather, of loves. For she had divers harsh experiences before the last great love flashed upon her.