Long after he had settled in Philadelphia, his fellow townsmen regarded Stephen Girard as a very strange fellow. He was a Frenchmana squat, swarthy ex-sea captain with one blind eye, an insane wife, and a taste for gold lace and velvet breeches. He smuggled opium and traded in rum, but he named his ships after the Philosophes. Though he became one of the richest Americans of his time, he boasted that he could still eat on 20¢ a day. Philadelphians called him, among other things, a miser.
An odd sort of miser, Stephen Girard spent...
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