Segur quotes Jones as saying. “I advised her not to enter on so vile a career, gave her some money and dismissed her.” As soon as she left his front door, the girl ripped her dress, screamed “Rape!” and threw herself into the arms of her mother, who, conveniently, was standing nearby.
Two weeks later, Jones wrote to Potemkin that he had learned that the mother had admitted that a gentleman with decorations had given her money to tell a damaging story about the American. She confessed that her daughter was twelve, not ten, and had been seduced by Jones’s manservant three months before she visited the admiral. Further, Jones said that immediately after the alleged rape, rather than rushing home to her mother, the girl had continued peddling butter. “The charge against me is an unworthy imposture,” Jones continued to Potemkin. “Shall it be said that in Russia, a wretched woman who abandoned her husband, stole away her daughter, lives in a house of ill repute and leads a debauched, lecherous life, has found credit enough on a simple complaint unsupported by any proof to affect the honor of a general officer of reputation who has merited and received the decorations of America, France and this empire? I love women, I confess, and the pleasures that one only obtains from that sex, but to get such things by force is horrible to me. I cannot even contemplate gratifying my passions without their consent, and I give you my word as a soldier and an honest man, that if the girl in question has not passed through hands other than mine, she is still a virgin.”
There was, however, a third version. Before talking to Segur or writing Potemkin, Jones had informed the chief of police: “The accusation against me is false. It was invented by the mother of a depraved girl who came to my house several times and with whom I have often
In any case, if not a crime, this encounter between a restless, lonely, middle-aged man and an underage girl was tawdry. Nobody knew exactly what had happened, but Jones was ostracized by St. Petersburg society. Segur believed that Jones had been duped and that the prince of Nassau-Siegen was responsible. “Paul Jones is no more guilty than I,” the ambassador declared, “and a man of his rank has never suffered such humiliation through the accusation of a woman whose husband certifies that she is a pimp and whose daughter solicits the inns.” Criminal charges against Jones were dropped, but the offer of a command in the Baltic Fleet also evaporated. (This command went to Nassau-Siegen, who promptly lost a naval battle to Sweden.) In lieu of outright dismissal, Catherine granted Jones a two-year leave of absence. On June 26, she gave him her hand to kiss in a public farewell and nodded a cool “Bon voyage.”
What remained of his life was brief and anticlimactic. Never again did he command a ship, much less a fleet. Still in his early forties, he lived alone in Paris during the first years of the French Revolution; neither Gouverneur Morris, the American minister, nor Lafayette found time to see him. He died on July 18, 1792, two weeks after his forty-fifth birthday, of nephritis and bronchial pneumonia. After his death, Gouverneur Morris refused to allot public funds for a funeral or to save Jones from a pauper’s grave. Instead, the French National Assembly, which remembered him as a hero, paid for what little was done.
A century passed. In 1899, the American ambassador to France, Horace Porter, used his own money to search for Jones’s body. It was found in a lead coffin, under a pavement, in an obscure cemetery outside Paris. When Theodore Roosevelt was president and creating a great American navy became one of his passions, he sent four American armored cruisers to Cherbourg to carry Jones back across the Atlantic to his adopted country. In 1913, 121 years after his death, the body of John Paul Jones, proclaimed to be the father of the United States Navy, was placed in a marble sarcophagus in the crypt of the U.S. Naval Academy chapel. Since then, every midshipman has been taught Jones’s words, whether they were exactly his words or not: “I have not yet begun to fight.”
By the summer of 1791, the Russian army had forced the Turks to the peace table. In the treaty concluded at Jassy in Moldavia in December 1791, Catherine’s greatest goals were not achieved: the Turks kept Constantinople, and the crescent remained atop the Haigia Sophia; there was no Greek empire for Grand Duke Constantine. Still, Catherine gained much. The Turks formally ceded the Crimea, the mouth of the Dnieper with Ochakov, and the territory between the Bug and the Dniester rivers, making the Dniester Russia’s western frontier. Formal acquisition by treaty of the naval base at Sebastopol and Turkish acceptance of the fleet based there provided Russia with a permanent naval presence on the Black Sea. The subsequent development of the commercial port of Odessa provided an outlet for the export of large quantities of Russian wheat.
The second Turkish war had been Potemkin’s war; he had borne responsibility for strategy, command, and logistics. Catherine had sustained him. She was the more stable, avoiding his alternating moods of optimism and pessimism, his doubts, fears, and occasional despair. Neither could have achieved victory without the other. When military operations were over, Potemkin turned the negotiations at Jassy over to others and headed back to St. Petersburg, where Catherine was preparing a conqueror’s welcome. Even as he traveled north, however, Potemkin was worried. For the first time in seventeen years, Catherine had acquired a new favorite of whom he vehemently disapproved: a handsome young man named Platon Zubov. Poorly educated, he was vain and greedy for wealth, estates, honors, and titles, not only for himself but also for his father and his three brothers; all soon became counts. The most prominent men of the court and the empire began lining up to humble themselves at his morning levee. When the doors to his reception room opened, they were likely to reveal Zubov stretched out in a lounge chair before his mirror, having his hair dressed and powdered. He could be wearing a silk colored frock coat sewn with jewels, white satin trousers, and green ankle-length boots. Conspicuously ignoring the ministers, generals, courtiers, foreigners, and petitioners who stood motionless and silent before him, he paid attention only to his pet monkey. When, with a gesture, the master cued the creature’s performance, it leaped across the furniture, hung from the chandeliers, and finally jumped onto a visitor’s shoulder to pull off his wig or muss his hair. When Zubov laughed, everyone laughed.
Potemkin knew that he and Zubov would now be competing for the empress’s confidence. So far, he had remained foremost; Catherine consulted him on everything; she told him that if war were to break out in Poland, he was to take supreme command of the Russian army. Nevertheless, he was uneasy.
Arriving in St. Petersburg on February 28, 1791, Potemkin quickly demonstrated that his character had not changed. When Kyril Razumovsky called to tell him that he was giving a ball in Potemkin’s honor, Potemkin met his visitor wearing a tattered dressing gown and nothing underneath. Razumovsky good-naturedly retaliated a few days later by publicly receiving the prince wearing a nightgown with a nightcap on his head. Potemkin laughed and embraced his host.
He turned to the problem of Zubov, which, he believed, had to be solved as much to shield Catherine as for his own reasons. He saw that he could no longer use his political power as he had done with Yermolov; if this young man were to be displaced, it must be done more subtly. The best approach, he concluded, would be to re-create the aura of their old romance. Surprisingly, he partially succeeded. In a letter to Grimm on May 21, Catherine spoke of Potemkin with the same enthusiasm that she had years before.
When one looks at the Prince-Marshal Potemkin, one must say that his victories, his successes, beautify him. He has returned to us from the army as handsome as the day, as gay as a lark, as brilliant as a star, more witty than ever, no longer biting his nails, giving feasts every day, and behaving as a host with a polish and courtesy by which everybody is enchanted.
