He bought a house at Mount Holly,
near Burlington, in New Jersey, for five hundred dollars, to which he
removed, and there continued to bottle claret and sell it to the
British officers, until the departure of Lord Howe, in June, 1778,
permitted his return to Philadelphia. The gay young officers, it is
said, who came to his house at Mount Holly to drink his claret, were
far from being insensible to the charms of Mrs. Girard; and tradition
further reports that on one occasion a dashing colonel snatched a
kiss, which the sailor resented, and compelled the officer to
apologize for.
Of all miserable marriages this was one of the most miserable. Here
was a young, beautiful, and ignorant girl united to a close,
ungracious, eager man of business, devoid of sentiment, with a violent
temper and an unyielding will. She was an American, he a Frenchman;
and that alone was an immense incompatibility. She was seventeen, he
twenty-seven. She was a woman; he was a man without imagination,
intolerant of foibles. She was a beauty, with the natural vanities of
a beauty; he not merely had no taste for decoration, he disapproved it
on principle.
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