Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (11 page)

In 1815 William effectively expressed his anger at his daughter by withdrawing financial support for her. This surprised and shocked even James McIlhiny, who told William so. William fired back, saying that it was improper for his daughter to live abroad without the protection of her family. He could only hope that she would
“satisfy[y] her curiosity” and come home. McIlhiny readily agreed with William that in Europe Betsy was an “unprotected female” and that she ought to go home, but he could not condone William’s refusal to send funds. He warned Betsy that her income from her investments was not enough to survive on in London or Paris. If she remained in Europe, she would have to take the drastic step of drawing down her capital.

Unlike McIlhiny, Betsy was not surprised by her father’s refusal to send support. But she thought William’s decision was based less on her disobedience than on his own flawed character. To her, her father’s greatest sin was all too obvious: he abused his patriarchal authority. He had demanded loyalty and devotion from his wife as his due but had shown her little respect in return. And in exchange for paternal protection, he had required that his children always acknowledge that he knew best. Over the years, she believed her father had proven himself a miser and a philanderer, a man without honor. While she was in her darkest moments of disappointment and humiliation, he had thought not of her but of the money he had lost when Jérôme abandoned her. Without hesitation, he had confiscated most of the property and possessions from her marriage. In 1867 her annotation to this letter from McIlhiny wove together seamlessly these two aspects of his selfishness:
“Mr Patterson’s
objection to my residence abroad was an Excuse for never giving me a cent from 1805 to 1835—his Mistress Nancy Todd was in his house when his wife was on her death bed—& when expelled by Edward Patterson was succeeded in the same capacity by Somers by whom he had in old age a bastard daughter.”

All Betsy now asked of William was that he stop his public criticism of her behavior. Thinking that perhaps he would be happy if she remarried, she told him his blunt attacks were certain to doom her chances of making a suitable second marriage.
“Everyone who knows me has heard that your wealth is enormous, and consequently they think I shall have a large fortune from you. In Europe,” she informed him, “a handsome woman who is likely to have a fortune may marry well,” but not even a Venus could make a good match if she was poor.

Friends and family in America doubted that either William’s parsimony or his criticism could prevent their American Venus from finding a husband. She would turn heads and win hearts in Europe just as she had done in Baltimore. Eliza Anderson, now Eliza Godefroy, wrote to Betsy that March congratulating her on her popularity, especially with the Duke of Wellington, “
the Conquerer of Conquerors of the Earth,” who Eliza was convinced was “already a victim of your charms.”

Betsy was not really interested in finding a husband. More was at stake for her than the loss of that independence that she had embraced so fiercely in Baltimore. It was pride, and her intense concern for her son’s future, that made her loath to marry again and thus give up the name Bonaparte. Despite Napoleon’s failure to regain his empire, and despite her former
husband’s less-than-noble character, she believed her son shared an illustrious bloodline. She was convinced that someday a member of the Bonaparte family would rule France once again, and she did not think it farfetched that Bo might be that man. At the very least, he might join the inner circle of a new Bonaparte empire. As long as this was possible, she was determined to do nothing to cloud his claim to legitimacy with the Bonaparte family. In the meantime, she felt certain that the family name alone would make Bo welcome in the aristocratic society of Europe and ensure his marriage into the nobility. Bo was still just a child, but it was his marital future that concerned Betsy, not her own.

Betsy’s most pressing problem was neither husband hunting nor her eleven-year-old son’s destiny but her immediate financial straits. She could not really afford to travel in the social circles that welcomed her in England. But the thought of returning to Baltimore was unbearable; the mere possibility left her ill and filled her with misery. “
In my dreams,” she confessed to her sister-in-law, “I am transported to the populous desert of Baltimore and awake shuddering.… If I could only know that I should never return to my wretchedness in the United States, I am sure I should get well.”

Over the winter and spring, Betsy followed her investments anxiously. In January she received the bad news that the American stock market was depressed and the economy stagnant; her insurance stock had produced no dividends. But by May 1816, better news arrived: Betsy’s stocks were booming. On May 30 she was relieved to learn that a remittance for 500 pounds sterling
was on its way. This transaction had been arranged “with much difficulty” through her father, who demanded the full going rate of 20 percent for his assistance. Although a compromise was reached, Betsy would not forget her father’s cold calculations in all his financial exchanges with her. On the back of the letter that detailed the negotiations over the money, Betsy later wrote that her father was “
the Plague sore of my life.”

By the time she received this much-needed money, Betsy had left England and made her way to Paris. She had received a passport to France and felt that, no matter what the consequences, she could not end her trip without visiting the French capital. She arrived that spring—and took the city by storm.

All Paris did indeed seem to be at the feet of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. The triumphant Duke of Wellington included her in the many dinner parties and balls he held at the British embassy. And a revitalized French aristocratic society, newly freed from its long suppression by the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, warmly welcomed the beautiful victim of Bonaparte tyranny. The king himself announced he would like to meet the belle of Baltimore, but Betsy declined his invitation; it was unseemly, she surely felt, to accept the hospitality of her benefactor’s successor. Everyone, even those at home who disapproved of Betsy, seemed completely fascinated by her social success. In a letter written in the spring of 1816, John Spear Smith gushed, “
It is now generally reported that you set the fashion in Paris! How do you stand the torrent of admiration?”

Most of Betsy’s American correspondents focused on the possibility for remarriage that her popularity promised. They could not abandon the conviction that a contented domestic life was every woman’s true goal. Her spinster aunt, Nancy Spear, was certain that Betsy had immediately fallen in love—she chided her niece for sending her a Paris dress and shoes that were far too small: “
You must certainly be distractedly in love before you could so entirely have forgotten my gigantic shape.” It was
common knowledge back in Baltimore that Betsy’s doors and stairs were thronged with “dukes. Counts. Marquis. Yourself a little Queen—giving and receiving the most supreme happiness,” and thus Betsy’s friends and relatives were confident that, even without a dowry from William, she would find a suitable husband. “How can you pretend to tell me that there is no love in Europe,” one relative wrote, who clearly did not think Betsy’s unorthodox past would be a hindrance to finding a man who loved her enough to propose marriage. “Don’t we here [
sic
] every day of English noblemen marrying actresses & that is what we would call love indeed.”

It was true that lovesick men pursued Betsy in Paris just as they had in Baltimore, but she found them more annoying and troublesome than appealing. When, for example, the young Chevalier de Saint-Cricq, ten years her junior, declared that should she return home without accepting his proposal, he would follow her to Baltimore, Betsy must have been reminded of her English suitor Samuel Graves. Like Graves’s father, Saint-Cricq’s father intervened, not to plead his son’s case but to beg Betsy to send the young man home should he actually cross the Atlantic in pursuit.

Betsy knew that her beauty and her tragic past had opened many doors wide for her, and she wrote home about her social success in great detail. In August 1816 she recounted to her cousin John Spear Smith that “
for some weeks I have been immersed in Balls, Soirees, Dinners which have not left me a single moment.” Yet she was also proud that her popularity did not rest alone on her lovely face or her sad history. For Paris was
a city with a vibrant intellectual tradition, and it was Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s wit and brilliance that brought her many of her most cherished invitations.

Those invitations came from the resurgent salon society of Paris. Now that Napoleon was gone, French intellectuals had returned to the city from their forced or self-imposed exile and had revived the salon life that the emperor had so despised. This renewal of intellectual and artistic life acted as a magnet to poets and novelists from neighboring countries as well. The grandes dames of these salons, where “wit counted for everything,” found Betsy worthy of a place at their gatherings.

Betsy was first introduced into this charmed salon circle by one of Albert Gallatin’s embassy staff, David Bailie Warden, an Irish revolutionary and American citizen who would remain her good friend over the ensuing years. It was through him that she first met Madame de Staël, the extraordinary woman of letters and champion of women’s rights who was as famous for her love affairs with the French political leader Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand and the writer Benjamin Constant as for her essays and her novels. Brilliant and charming, Germaine de Staël was admired by women as much as by men. “
If I were a queen,” one admirer declared, “I would order Mme De Stael to talk to me always.” De Staël had dominated salon culture until the Reign of Terror forced her to flee Paris. She returned briefly in 1794, but Napoleon exiled her the following year. After Waterloo, she, like many other intellectuals, returned to Paris to campaign for liberal causes. She remained a central figure in the city’s intellectual community until her death in 1817.

Warden also introduced Betsy to the always hospitable Juliette Récamier, whose charm and beauty attracted men and women of greater intellectual and artistic achievement than her own to her salon. Like De Staël, Madame Récamier had returned from her exile when Napoleon began his. And like Betsy, she would remain sought after by men well into her old age. Perhaps Betsy’s closest friend among these remarkable Frenchwomen was Voltaire’s adopted daughter, the kindly Reine Philiberte Rouph de Varicourt, Marquise de Villette, who wrote under the sobriquet her famous guardian had given her, Belle et Bonne (Beautiful and Warmhearted).

Betsy often went to the opera with Madame de Villette, and she went on outings with David Bailie Warden, shopping for books and for gifts for friends at home. But she formed her deepest friendship with another outsider, Lady Sydney Morgan, who, like Betsy, had been welcomed into salon culture. This Irish novelist and travel writer was already a celebrity in Paris when she and Betsy met. And although Sydney’s happy marriage and her literary reputation set her apart from Betsy, the two formed a friendship that lasted for decades.

Sydney’s literary talents had emerged quite early. By the time she was fourteen, this daughter of an impoverished actor had produced a volume of poems. In the same year that Betsy became a mother, Sydney published her first novel. Two years later her second book,
The Wild Irish Girl,
established her reputation as one of Ireland’s leading authors. In 1812 she married a physician, Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, who Betsy once declared was the only man who ever understood her. After her marriage, Sydney
alienated many readers by making her liberal views on politics and religion public. Betsy did not share her friend’s politics, but she admired her stubborn independence. Sydney admired Betsy’s independent spirit as well, but she sensed the bitterness and disappointment that underlay her friend’s hostility to America and to marriage.

Over her lifetime, Betsy had few true female confidantes. Although she exchanged friendly letters with Dolley Madison and Eliza Godefroy, she did not share her most deeply felt emotions with them. But Betsy would share her moods of both despair and satisfaction with Sydney, who she confessed she admired and loved more than anyone else. With Sydney, she did not feel it necessary to be always charming and obliging or witty, as she did with most of the wealthy aristocrats and impoverished intellectuals whose favor she had won. Nor did she feel compelled to fill her letters to Sydney exclusively with accounts of her triumphs, as she did in correspondence with her father, family, and friends. In her many letters to Sydney, she could be herself, admitting she was “very tired of suffering,” whether it was from illnesses or from bitter memories. If the confidences she shared in this correspondence over the years often bore the mark of nineteenth-century romanticism, with its emphasis on ennui, sadness, and tragic experiences, still they revealed a Betsy that few others ever saw.

With the exception of Warden and the Gallatins, Betsy had few contacts with Americans in Paris. She preferred to ignore overtures by the American tourists who had begun to fill the streets of the city. She found “
their whining … at the corruption
of European morals” tedious and believed that they sought introductions to the Parisian literati and nobility from her solely so that they could confirm the superiority of their “primitive simplicity & republican opinions.” She assured her cousin John Spear Smith that she did not care if these American visitors were angry at her icy rejection of their company: “I shall survive all their criticism as long as I can associate with those persons whom they rail against.” She had found the French “quite as good as Americans,” indeed better, for they were less hypocritical, no more selfish, and definitely more amiable. In fact, France was altogether superior to the United States, for “there is quite as much natural affection, more friendship, at least as much disinterestedness as in our Country, where are found such lofty pretentions & sentimental acting.”