Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

by Berkin, Carol

  This Is a Borzoi Book

  Published by Alfred A. Knopf

  Copyright © 2014 by Carol Berkin

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC, New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto, Penguin Random House Companies.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Berkin, Carol.

  Wondrous beauty : the life and adventures of Elizabeth Patterson

  Bonaparte / Carol Berkin.—First edition.

  pages cm

  ISBN 978-0-307-59278-1 (hardcover : alk. paper)

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-385-35162-1

  1. Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson, 1785–1879. 2. Jérôme Bonaparte, King of Westphalia, 1784–1860. 3. Napoleon I, Emperor of the French, 1769–1821—Family. 4. Women—Maryland—Baltimore—Biography. 5. Baltimore (Md.)—Biography. I. Title.

  DC216.95.B629B47 2014 943’.5506092—dc23 [B] 2013015270

  Jacket image: Portrait of Elizabeth Patterson with her son, Jérôme Patterson-Bonaparte (detail). 1806–1810. Attributed to François-Joseph Kinson bpk, Berlin / Neue Galerie, Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel / Art Resource, NY

  Jacket design by Kelly Blair

  v3.1

  To Eamon Joyce and Jessica Kumins Berkin

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Introduction

  1 “She Is a Most Extraordinary Girl”

  2 “I Would Rather Be the Wife of Jérôme Bonaparte for an Hour”

  3 “An Almost Naked Woman”

  4 “Have Confidence in Your Husband”

  5 “Madame Bonaparte Is Ambitious”

  6 “I Intend to Be Governed by My Own Rules”

  7 “I Shall Resume the Name of My Own Family”

  8 “The Purposes of Life Are All Fulfilled”

  9 “Your Ideas Soar’d Too High”

  10 “For This Life There Is Nothing but Disappointment”

  11 “That Was My American Wife”

  12 “He Has Neither My Pride, My Ambition, nor My Love of Good Company”

  13 “Disgusted with the Past, Despairing of a Future”

  14 “My Birth Is Legitimate”

  15 “I Will Never Be Dupe Enough Ever to Try Justice in France”

  16 “Once I Had Everything but Money; Now I Have Nothing but Money”

  Conclusion: “I Have Lived Alone and I Will Die Alone”

  Epilogue: The American Bonapartes

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Bibliography

  A Note About the Author

  Photo Insert

  Other Books by This Author

  Introduction

  She was a Baltimore legend, a curiosity, walking slowly down the streets of the city in the 1870s, her trademark red parasol high above her head to protect her from sun or rain or, in winter weather, draped carefully over one arm. On the other arm, she carried an ornate, elaborately embellished bag that, it was rumored, held all her jewels. Her dress was no longer fashionable, perhaps made in that bygone era when Napoleon dominated Europe and America was little more than a fledgling nation. No matter; it was clear she had once been a great beauty, and even in her old age, she conveyed an elegance and a sense of superiority that captured admiration as well as curiosity. As she stopped at one building and then the next, rapping on doors and demanding the rent owed to her by tenants, passersby might have recognized her as their city’s first celebrity, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte.

  Had those same passersby followed her home after her business was completed, they would have once again marveled at her eccentricity. Despite all the property she owned, both in the city and in surrounding areas, she abhorred the idea of setting up a household and had chosen to live in a rented room on the top floor of a stranger’s home. The small room was crowded with ornate furniture, every surface covered with souvenirs, the single closet bulging with faded ball gowns that had been worn in the heady days after France’s emperor was sent into exile. And there, in an atmosphere heavy with memory and nostalgia, they would have found her, poised to tell her story with the same wit and sense of irony and the same sharp powers of observation that had always been as much a part of her as her beauty and her ambition. She had lived a long and remarkable life—and she knew she had a remarkable story to tell.

  Wondrous Beauty tells that story. It begins like a fairy tale of old: he was a dashing French naval officer who was the youngest brother of the great Napoleon Bonaparte; she was Baltimore’s most beautiful belle, a seventeen-year-old eager to escape both the humdrum society of her native city and an overbearing father. They met. They fell in love as perhaps only teenagers then and now can do. Despite her father’s serious misgivings and the French consul’s blunt warning that Napoleon would not approve, Elizabeth Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte married on Christmas Eve 1803. “We are not meant to be separate,” Jérôme had declared—and yet they soon were. For there was no happily-ever-after to this romantic tale. In 1805, Napoleon annulled the marriage and sent the weak-willed Jérôme off to marry a German princess. Betsy, now the mother of an infant son, returned to America, an abandoned woman.

  But if the fairy tale ended here, Betsy’s story was just beginning. Her abandonment transformed her from a naïve girl into a fiercely independent woman. She refused to play the penitent, eager to make amends for poor judgment and youthful rebellion. Instead, when Napoleon was languishing on Elba, and his ban on her entering Europe was at last lifted, she crossed the Atlantic once again. She spent much of the next four decades in London, Geneva, Rome, and Paris. The celebrity she had once acquired in America because of her marriage was equaled by her celebrity in the ballrooms and salons of Europe; her tragic tale of betrayal, her beauty, her intelligence, and her wit proved as powerful a passport into the aristocratic society of the Old World as a wedding ring from Jérôme Bonaparte might have done. The belle of Baltimore became the belle of Europe.

  Betsy never criticized the emperor who had destroyed her marriage. But she did not spare American society as she did Napoleon. Her stinging critiques of American mores and morals filled the pages of her letters home. She missed no opportunity to contrast the glamour and elegance of aristocratic European life with the pedestrian world of American shopkeepers and their wives. She condemned America as gauche and boring, its men too preoccupied with moneymaking to appreciate wit and good conversation, too democratic in their values to acknowledge the superiority of birth and breeding. Most of all, she condemned a gender ideal that demanded a woman’s devotion to her husband and family, that confined her world to the parlor and the nursery, and that denied her the public space enjoyed by the women of the French salons. Even in her old age, when she had returned to her native city, Betsy continued to convey a certainty that she, no less than Henry Adams, was fated to remain a stranger in a familiar land.

  Despite her efforts, Betsy could not instill in her son or his sons the same alienation from America and the same intense pride in carrying the Bonaparte name. For them, being the American Bonapartes proved as much a burden as a blessing. They embraced American culture and married American women—choices that Betsy read as betrayals as wounding as her husband’s abandonment. As the Bonaparte fortunes fell and rose again in France, Betsy continued to cling to her dream that one day the American Bonap
artes would take their place in that family’s reviving power and privilege. This delusion was the burden she could not escape.

  Perhaps Betsy’s son and grandsons saw the ironic contradictions between her ideology and her behavior that she could not see. For despite her avowed distaste for American culture, she embodied many of its central values. She condemned her country’s obsession with moneymaking, yet she proved to be a shrewd investor, carefully monitoring her assets, following interest rates and economic trends. She built a fortune based on government bonds and real estate that led to her emerging as a self-made woman in a world of self-made men. And although she exhorted her son to marry into the European nobility, she provided him with a Harvard education to ensure that he could make his way in the American meritocracy. Like expatriates in later generations, she carried American values with her no matter where she fled to escape them.

  In the end, Betsy’s story is a woman’s story, for it captures the difficulty women of the early nineteenth century faced in constructing independent lives within a country that lauded self-interest and self-fulfillment for its men but confinement and sacrifice for their wives. What prompted her to cross the Atlantic Ocean was the promise of opportunities that an American woman could not hope to enjoy if she remained in her native land: intellectual freedom, the chance to establish an individual identity, and the right to exist not as a bundle of female duties or behaviors but as a unique person. She wished to be more than “female”; she wished to be Elizabeth.

  Chapter One

  “She Is a Most Extraordinary Girl”

  Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s story began, as so many American stories still do, with an immigrant’s arrival. The man who would become Elizabeth’s father, William Patterson, was a perfect example of the economic opportunities the new republic promised and sometimes delivered. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1766, a penniless fourteen-year-old, a Scots-Irish castaway from that poorest of British possessions, Ireland. But what he lacked in education or family wealth, he made up for in raw ambition and keen business sense. As an apprentice in a countinghouse, he did not waste time, as many of his peers did, drinking or playing cards after hours; instead, he sought the company of older men, established merchants who could add to his knowledge of the buying, shipping, and selling of goods. He kept a keen eye out for the main chance, scrimping and saving while he waited for fortune to smile on him. His first good luck came in the form of the American Revolution.

  William had no interest in enlisting in the army as many young men would soon do. Indeed, throughout his life he boasted that he had none of the civic pride that drove poor men to military service or rich men to philanthropy. As war approached, he wanted neither glory nor adventure. He wanted wealth and respectability. And he reckoned that a man who invested his money in the purchase and sale of European arms and ammunition could acquire both. At twenty-two, William Patterson risked his entire savings on shares in two vessels headed to France to purchase the weapons that the American army so desperately needed. Where his money went, William was determined to go as well, and thus the budding entrepreneur took passage in one of the ships.

  On the return voyage, which carried the ships first to the West Indies, fortune smiled on William once again. Here, on foreign-owned islands like the Dutch St. Eustatius, military supplies could be warehoused before final sale and shipment to the American forces. A fine profit could be made for the middlemen in this process, and William meant to make it. His two ships sailed home, but Patterson remained in the Caribbean for eighteen months. With remarkable speed, his fortune grew, and so did his rejection of the risk-taking attitude that had begun his climb up the economic ladder.

  In truth, by the age of twenty-five, Patterson had become that oxymoron, a cautious entrepreneur. He had worked hard to acquire his fortune, and he intended to keep it all. A strong fatalist streak ran through his philosophy: men could fall as quickly as they could rise, and the man who owned a mansion was only one foolish or impetuous step away from the beggar outside its doors. He did not plan to wind up on the outside looking in ever again.

  By July 1778, William was ready to go home. But he did not head for Philadelphia; instead he made his way to the growing city of Baltimore, Maryland. Here, where he would live for the rest of his life, William began a pursuit of respectability and social status with the same steely ambition that had formerly marked his pursuit of wealth. Although his own parents had been Church of England, he joined the local Presbyterian church, for its pews were filled with the merchant elite of Baltimore. He built a fine brick home, and beside it he constructed his countinghouse. He took a final step to the gentility he craved—and believed he had earned—by marrying Dorcas Spear, a beautiful young woman with impeccable family credentials.

  In choosing Dorcas as his wife, William had not allowed sentiment or affection to cloud his judgment. Despite the romantic revolution swirling around him that led genteel young men and women to seek a marriage built on affection and companionship, he saw wedlock as a simple matter of enhancing or consolidating economic or social advantage. What Dorcas thought of her new husband is unknown, for she left no record of her courtship or of her own motives for the marriage. But it is clear that she was many things William was not: cultured, well educated, socially secure. Through blood and marriage, she was related to elite families in Virginia and Maryland, to revolutionary war officers and capital city political figures. And in temperament, she must surely have been patient and forgiving, for William proved a difficult man to live with and a faithless one at that.

  By the time William and Dorcas said their vows, the bridegroom was numbered among the leading merchants and shippers not simply of Baltimore but of the new nation. He was intensely proud of his success, and it was a badge of honor that he was a self-made man. “What I possess,” he declared, “is solely the product of my own labor. I inherited nothing of my forefathers, nor have I benefitted anything from public favors or appointments.” His journey from rags to riches had come with a price, however. William’s ambition, perseverance, and capacity for delayed gratification in everything but sexuality had calcified into a near obsession with security, a rigidity of thought, and a brittle sense of moral superiority. He valued practicality above sentimentality and found it easier to express disapproval than affection.

  As a husband and a parent, William Patterson settled firmly into the role of patriarch. He expected not only obedience from all members of his family but also their confirmation of his wisdom in any situation. He was, in his own way, devoted to that family, but he could comprehend no other way to demonstrate his love than to control the lives of all who bore his name. He ruled his household with an iron fist that he believed to be a velvet glove.

  William had strong, and unshakable, convictions about appropriate male and female roles in his family and in the larger society. For him, these roles were fixed and immutable. Men belonged in the broader public world of business and politics; women belonged in the home, where their lives were to revolve around the wishes and needs of husband or father. Other men might accept some latitude in the actual day-to-day compliance by their wives and daughters. Some might even delight in spirited or competent daughters as well as sons. But William was an absolutist. In this respect, he bore more resemblance to a fellow self-made man, a Frenchman named Napoleon, than to his American peers. “We treat women too well,” the Corsican soldier would observe when he became emperor, “and in this way we have spoiled everything. We have done wrong in raising them to our level. Truly the Oriental nations have more mind and sense than we in declaring the wife to be the actual property of the husband.”

  Dorcas Spear Patterson would surely have disagreed with Napoleon that women were treated too well. Hers could not have been a happy life, for of her thirteen children, several died in childhood. And despite her submission to a domineering husband, she did not have the satisfaction of knowing that he honored his marriage vows. A string of mistresses, often drawn from the housekeeping st
aff, reflected his cavalier attitude toward marital fidelity; in 1814, as Dorcas lay dying, William would bring his current mistress into the household, no doubt to console him for the loss of a dutiful wife.

  Dorcas’s first daughter, Elizabeth Spear Patterson, was born on February 6, 1785. Elizabeth, or Betsy, and her country would grow up together, but from her earliest years, this child of the young republic would steadfastly refuse to embrace America’s cultural and social trajectory. In part, this was the legacy of her mother’s marital experience. The unhappiness that Betsy saw in the Patterson home seared into her consciousness the high cost of the social assumption that, in a proper household, a wife’s duty was to please her husband and to spend a life confined to the parlor and the nursery. Betsy’s devotion to her mother did not blind her to Dorcas’s passive acceptance of her fate. She would carry a lock of Dorcas’s hair with her all her life, but she would also carry her childhood memory of a woman bullied and scorned by her husband.

  Dorcas had, however, played a second, more positive role in forging Betsy’s rejection of American culture. For in her one rebellion against William Patterson, Dorcas Spear Patterson imparted to her daughter a deep appreciation of the arts, literature, and social refinement—an appreciation entirely foreign to her husband. Thus while others might find the vitality and expansiveness of the young republic exciting or satisfying, while they might praise the energy of its moneymaking or the fecundity of its women, Betsy came to see only a country that was raw and crass, devoid of any appreciation of high culture, its leading lights as dull-witted as its dock workers.

  Betsy dreamed of an alternative, an escape from the culture into which she had been born. She found it, at least in her young imagination, across the ocean in the aristocratic world of Europe. Friends and neighbors, politicians and public opinion makers might condemn the Old World as stagnant and decadent, but in Betsy’s vision, it was sophisticated and glamorous. Her romantic notions of the charms of Europe may have been fostered by the presence in Baltimore of a number of French émigrés and refugees, for the city’s Catholic tradition acted as a magnet to Royalists fleeing the Terror, to displaced Acadians, and to the many white families uprooted by St. Dominique’s slave revolts in the 1790s. The arrival of these French immigrants swelled the population of this Maryland port city and increased its prosperity. It also gave Betsy a glimpse of a culture very different from her own.