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.  These points of difference would alone have sufficed to endanger their domestic peace; but time developed something that was fatal to it.  Their abode was the scene of contention for eight years; at the expiration of which period Mrs. Girard showed such symptoms of insanity that her husband was obliged to place her in the Pennsylvania Hospital.  In these distressing circumstances, he appears to have spared no pains for her restoration.  He removed her to a place in the country, but without effect.  She returned to his house only to render life insupportable to him.  He resumed his old calling as a mariner, and made a voyage to the Mediterranean; but on his return he found his wife not less unmanageable than before.  In 1790, thirteen years after their marriage, and five after the first exhibition of insanity, Mrs. Girard was placed permanently in the hospital; where, nine months after, she gave birth to a female child.  The child soon died; the mother never recovered her reason.  For twenty-five years she lived in the hospital, and, dying in 1815, was buried in the hospital grounds after the manner of the Quakers.  The coffin was brought to the grave, followed by the husband and the managers of the institution, who remained standing about it in silence for several minutes.  It was then lowered to its final resting-place, and again the company remained motionless and silent for a while.  Girard looked at the coffin once more, then turned to an acquaintance and said, as he walked away, “It is very well.”  A green mound, without headstone or monument, still marks the spot where the remains of this unhappy woman repose.  Girard, both during his lifetime and after his death, was a liberal, though not lavish, benefactor of the institution which had so long sheltered his wife.

Fortunes were not made rapidly in the olden time.  After the Revolution, Girard engaged in commerce with the West Indies, in partnership with his brother John; and he is described in an official paper of the time as one who “carried on an extensive business as a merchant, and is a considerable owner of real estate.”  But on the dissolution of the partnership in 1790, when he had been in business, as mariner and merchant, for sixteen years, his estate was valued at only thirty thousand dollars.  The times were troubled.  The French Revolution, the massacre at St. Domingo, our disturbed relations with England, and afterwards with France, the violence of our party contests, all tended to make merchants timid, and to limit their operations.  Girard, as his papers indicate, and as he used to relate in conversation, took more than a merchant’s interest in the events of the time.  From the first, he had formally cast in his lot with the struggling Colonists, as we learn from a yellow and faded document left among his papers:—­