Ill-starred Polly Lumm! Unhappy Girard! She
accepted his offer; and in July, 1777, the incongruous two, being
united in matrimony, attempted to become one.

The war interrupted their brief felicity. Philadelphia, often
threatened, fell into the hands of Lord Howe in September, 1777; and
among the thousands who needlessly fled at his approach were "old
Girard" and his pretty young wife. 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. 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.