Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (20 page)

The commentary on her own desire for admiration and her delight at being envied would certainly have stung Betsy. And yet if she read this article, she could not have denied the truth of it. The vanity and ambition that had plunged a young girl into a disastrous marriage still lingered in an aging woman in the eighth decade of life.

Betsy’s war with the Bonapartes was over, but she had returned to a nation at war with itself. She quickly discovered that her native state and city were as divided as the country, for Maryland’s loyalties were fractured between Union and Confederacy. Betsy’s own family reflected this division: while she, Bo, and her brother Edward cast their lot with the Union, her only other surviving brother, George, remained a proud slave owner.

Betsy opposed “this vile Rebellion,” but it did not spark in her the same passions that events in France had always roused. When she spoke of it at all, it was to remark upon its foolishness. Writing to a friend in France, she could only lament the poor judgment that had brought the country to devastation and bloodshed.
“I can tell you nothing of the Politics of this unhappy Country,” she confessed. “I can only sigh over the fatality which impelled my blind fellow Citizens to annihilate the prosperity of their once promising greatness … by cutting the throats of Each other.” It was true that all around her she saw evidence of the destruction of that prosperity: business in Baltimore was at a standstill, tenants could not pay their rent, and buildings had fallen into disrepair. By August 1861, the
entire state of Maryland was under martial law, and neighbors who were open sympathizers with the Confederacy were fearful of imprisonment.

Betsy was determined that her own throat would not be one of those slashed by the Civil War. If her real estate was losing value, if many of the houses she owned in Baltimore were falling apart, she would find a new source of income to compensate for her losses. She had always been a shrewd if cautious investor, and now, setting aside her anger at the French courts, she turned her attention to her finances. She decided to purchase federal government securities. The war might be foolish, but the profits to be made from these government bonds might well make her fortune.

Betsy’s investment strategy paid off; by war’s end, she was close to being a millionaire. Where once, in 1849, she had received only $10,000 a year, now her investments spun off $100,000 each year. The irony of this circumstance was not lost on her:
“Once I had everything but money,” she was reported to have said; “now I have nothing but money.”

The comment was smart and clever but far from accurate. The now-lost “everything” that she spoke of undoubtedly referred to her youth, her beauty, and her ambitions, both for herself and for her son, Bo. But she surely had not forgotten the periods of loneliness, ennui, anxiety, and anger at her father and her former husband; the memories haunted her as much as the need to manage her meager finances. No amount of money could have altered the humiliation of her father’s will, the heartbreak of a hopeless romance with Prince Gorchakov, or the betrayal she felt when Bo married Susan Williams.

Her present condition was far from perfect—she had grown old, her hopes of vindication had been cruelly dashed, and she had accepted the fact that she would live out the remainder of her life where it had begun, in Baltimore. But wealth was not all she could point to in her current life. Age had certainly been kind to her; in 1870, when Betsy was eighty-five, the local newspaper reported that she
“retains TRACES OF A ONCE WONDROUS BEAUTY. Her complexion is still smooth and comparatively fair, while her peculiarly beautiful blue eyes are as yet undimmed.” Men, like John Perkergrue, still wrote love poems to her. Others, including the persistent John R. Prichard, proposed marriage. Prichard’s affections were thoroughly unwelcome; on his many letters, Betsy wrote comments such as
“an unknown Madman and idiot.” Perhaps, of course, these suitors were drawn to her for her wealth as much as for her
beautiful blue eyes. No matter; she had at last found a perfect companion—and someone to dote on: her second grandchild, Charles Bonaparte.

Charley, now in his twenties, was a study in contrast with his older brother, Junior. As a young man, Junior had been dashing, handsome, and virile, a soldier and a war hero; Charles was rather stocky, serious, and studious, cut out for the law office rather than the battlefield. But Betsy discovered that she and this grandson shared in common a caustic wit, and this surely pleased and amused her. As he grew up and she grew older, she came to rely upon him to manage her finances and her legal affairs. Later he would enter President Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet as attorney general and establish the precursor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

But blows came in the 1870s that deepened Betsy’s bitterness and robbed her of any focus on the future. In 1870 she became a parent who outlived her own child, for in that year her only son, Bo, died. The following year Junior dealt her a crushing blow when he, like his father before him, chose to marry an American woman. The shock Betsy felt was great. For despite her defeat in the French courts, despite Plon Plon’s influence over Napoleon III, and despite all evidence that her ambition had been permanently thwarted, Betsy could not entirely abandon the dreams that had for so long defined her life. Against all logic, she still harbored a hope that a member of her family might someday, somehow, enter the ranks of European aristocracy or sit in a seat of European power. For over a decade, that hope had been pinned on Junior. Over the years, she had showered upon this grandson the money needed to maintain a suitable aristocratic lifestyle. She had paid for horses, carriages, elegant dwellings, and well-tailored uniforms. But in 1871, after Prussia defeated France in the 1870 war and as the Second French Empire crumbled around him, the younger Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte returned to the United States and took an American wife.

Betsy’s anger and despair at the news blinded her to any consideration of Junior’s happiness. She saw his decision, as she had seen his father’s, as an affront, a blow to her, struck thoughtlessly and without justification.
“The humiliating Shame & Mortification heaped on myself by Relations,” she wrote to the bridegroom, “amount to Fatality, from which there is no escape.” His future, she assured him, would forever be bleak: “I
pity you because the remainder of your disgraced position will be a lingering remorseful agony.” And among the consequences of the marriage, perhaps the most dire was “an eternal separation from the Best friend, Myself, whom you ever possessed. I will never admit Mrs. Edgar or yourself to my presence.” To this threat of banishment, she added another: she would cut off the generous allowance she had sent him in the past. In her anger, she spoke in a voice that ought to have been familiar to her—the voice of her father.

Junior’s wife, a widow with three children, came from a distinguished American family, for she was the granddaughter of Daniel Webster. This mattered little to Betsy. She could not forget that she and her grandchildren were Bonapartes. She was
“filled with astonishment & regret” that her grandson had so quickly forgotten his heritage. He had made a marriage, she wrote him, “entirely beneath your position in the world & your name.” Decades before, when Betsy had left Baltimore for Britain, William had declared that action proof that she was mentally unbalanced. Now his disobedient daughter passed the same judgment on her grandson. Only madness, she concluded, could explain this tragic turn of events.

Betsy’s anger burned brightly, but it soon abated. Her threats were largely forgotten, and she made her peace with her grandson just as she had made her peace with her son. Yet the loss of her dreams, foolish though they had been for many years, cast a pall over her remaining years. She grew more eccentric, more bitter, and she seemed to live more in the past than in the present, except where her money was concerned.
She engaged
in battles with ghosts, writing a
Dialogue of the Dead; or, Dialogues Between Jerome and My Father in Hell,
in which the souls of her father and her husband sparred with each other, and she continued her quarrels with her father, Nancy Spear, and others by annotating the letters she had received from them or sent to them over her lifetime.

The newspaper reporter who had praised Betsy’s continuing beauty in 1870 had also commented astutely on the wariness and defensiveness that enveloped her in old age.
“Her nature is suspicious and warped by many injuries,” he observed. “She seems in constant dread of some indefinable injury.… [She] is always on the watch for some fancied insult.” This wariness and dread had, it was true, been earned over her lifetime, yet as she entered her eighties and nineties, it seemed to define her too fully.

Betsy knew that she had outlived both friends and enemies. William was dead. Her husband and her son and all her brothers were dead. Her closest confidante, Sydney Morgan, had died in 1859, in the midst of Betsy’s legal battles in France. History had passed her by. The young and brash republic she had grown up in was taking its place on the world stage as an industrial giant. The domesticity that she had feared would smother her was giving way to a surprising array of public roles for women and to an organized demand for full citizenship for her sex. The name Bonaparte, which had once prompted fear and admiration, was rarely heard in the halls of power. And for a young generation of Europeans as well as Americans, wealth rather than bloodline or breeding had become the measure of a man.

Betsy had also outlived her own celebrity. Her marriage and her divorce had once been the subject of political debate inside and outside Congress. Her story had been told over and over again, in the early decades of the century and again in the 1850s and 1860s, when the succession to the French throne had been in question. When Jérôme died, newspapers had filled their columns with accounts of the fairy-tale marriage that had ended so tragically, and when Bo died, the story had been told once again. But many of the people who saw Betsy in the streets of Baltimore in her final years, walking with her red parasol and her embroidered bag on her arm, as she collected her rents and visited her brokers’ offices, viewed her as a curiosity, a relic of a past they did not have time to give much thought to.

As she entered her nineties, Betsy’s health at last began to fail. Her digestive tract could tolerate little but brandy and milk. On Christmas Day 1878, she made her last trip down the stairs of her boardinghouse. Five days later she was bedridden. As the doctor readied his diagnosis, her wit once again flared; she knew what was wrong with her, she told him: my illness is old age. Both Junior and Charles came to her bedside and were with her when, at midday on April 4, 1879, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte died. Her death prompted a last, fleeting moment of celebrity, as newspapers across the country carried brief notices of her passing. Perhaps the local Baltimore paper captured the moment best:
“She passed away quietly this afternoon. Close of a long and Strangely Interesting Career.”

Betsy had taken steps to ensure that she would have the last word in her long battle with her father and her brothers.
She left instructions not to bury her in the family cemetery at Coldstream; instead, she had chosen a plot in the Greenmount Cemetery. “I have been alone in life,” she wrote as her own epitaph, “and I wish to be alone in death.” But well-meaning relatives robbed her of even this small victory over William and Jérôme and all those who had criticized or betrayed her, for on her tombstone they carved only a platitude: “After life’s fitful fever she sleeps well.”

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte was an American celebrity, perhaps the first of her era. That celebrity rested on her connection to the family of one of the nineteenth century’s most powerful and charismatic figures, Napoleon Bonaparte. The press, both in America and Europe, told and retold the story of her marriage to Jérôme Bonaparte each time a link could be found between this American beauty and the family that dominated Europe for decades. The whirlwind romance was news when her husband abandoned her, and again when he died, when she sued in the French courts for the acknowledgment of her son’s legitimacy, and yet again when she died at the age of ninety-four. As the narrative became one of innocence betrayed and rejected, Betsy’s life became emblematic of the dangers of the New World’s continuing romance with the Old.

It is not surprising that Betsy’s story captured the attention of Americans. For in the beginning, it was indeed the stuff that fairy tales are made of. Its heroine was remarkably beautiful, and she won the attention of a suitor who seemed, on the surface, to be a prince charming. Jérôme was dashing, worldly—and the opposition to the marriage mounted by her father and by French officials in America added to the romance of their courtship. Betsy was too young and too headstrong to see that
Jérôme was egotistical, irresponsible, and a womanizer. Had the marriage not been annulled by Napoleon, it might have dissolved under the weight of her realization that sometimes a prince is only a frog in a velvet coat. But it was not Jérôme’s character flaws that captured the public’s attention; it was the sacrifice of the marriage at the altar of Napoleon’s ambition that ensured the lasting celebrity of Jérôme’s “American wife.” It was the tragedy of being Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte that her nation chose to remember until her death.

This narrow focus on the relationship between Elizabeth Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte is a different sort of tragedy. For lost in the tale of a woman seduced and abandoned is the story of a woman who created a remarkable life for herself. In an era that was beginning to laud the self-made man, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte stood as that rarity, a self-made woman. Denied a fortune by her father and by Napoleon, she made one for herself, amassing well over a million and a half dollars through a lifetime of careful budgeting and clever investment in real estate and government bonds. Denied entrée into Europe’s most elite society on the arm of a husband, she won admission to this closed circle of privilege and bloodline by dazzling the aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals of the continent with her wit and intelligence as well as her beauty. As much as Napoleon, she might have boasted that she was the fabricator of her own destiny.