Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

by Berkin, Carol

  Whatever Bo thought of his mother’s social life, Betsy found it a tonic. Her renewed popularity seemed to dispel her melancholy and restore her health. The contrast with her dreary life in Baltimore was obvious to her: now thirty-five, she was considered old in America; but in Europe’s aristocratic circles, where wit and charm were valued in a woman, she knew she could remain a belle well into her fifties or sixties. Here, in the company of Demidov and his friends, she could feel the suffocating constraints of America’s emerging cult of domesticity fall away; among these aristocrats, she could indulge in sociability elevated to an art form. She could act, in short, upon a public stage rather than be confined to the private world of parlor and nursery. Bo conveyed her delight in a letter to William: “She says she looks full ten years younger than she is, and if she had not so large a son she could pass for five and twenty years old.”

  Betsy ignored her own countrymen and -women living in Geneva, just as she had avoided them during her earlier sojourns in London and Paris. Her contempt for American tourists remained intense; she believed their sole purpose in coming to Europe was to affirm their belief that American culture was morally superior to that of a decadent Old World. And yet as contemptuous as she was of her fellow Americans, she refused to allow Europeans to criticize or mock them. One of the most widely recounted anecdotes of Betsy’s brilliant wit involved a dinner table exchange with an Englishman who spoke ill of American manners. He asked her if she was surprised by the judgment of a British travel writer who had concluded that Americans were vulgarians. It was a view Betsy herself had often expressed. But she replied, “I was not surprised. Were the Americans descendants of the Indians and Esquimaux, I should have been. But being direct descendants of the English, nothing is more natural than that they be vulgarians.” Clearly, like expatriates in every century, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte believed that only she enjoyed the privilege of criticizing the country she had fled.

  The only American Betsy did befriend was the German American fur trader John Jacob Astor, a man whose rags-to-riches story was different only in scale from that of her father, William Patterson. Like Betsy, Astor had come to Switzerland to place one of his children, a daughter, in school. Betsy sensed that Astor and her father shared more in common than an immigrant past and a prosperous present: their great wealth had brought them little happiness. Betsy might have been talking about William Patterson as much as Astor when she wrote: “He seems, poor man, afflicted with possession of a fortune which he had greater pleasure in amassing than he can ever find in spending.” But Astor’s friendship had important consequences for both her and her son, for it was Astor who brought Betsy to the attention of the Bonaparte family in Italy.

  In the autumn of 1819, John Jacob Astor made a trip to Rome, where members of Napoleon’s family had found sanctuary after the emperor’s exile. Here he met the family matriarch, Letizia, as well as her brother, Cardinal Fesch, and Jérôme’s notorious sister Pauline, now the Princess Borghese, whose beauty and sexual infidelities were legendary in Europe. When Astor told Pauline and her mother that Betsy and Bo were in Geneva, the strong-willed Madame Mère and her profligate daughter grew excited. They were eager, they told him, to meet Jérôme’s American wife and her son.

  In March 1820, Astor dutifully reported their interest to Betsy, but he warned her not to trust any member of the family. Soon afterward Betsy’s good friend Lady Sydney Morgan and her husband stopped by to see her in Geneva, on their way back to Dublin from Rome. Sydney confirmed the fur merchant’s judgment. She told Betsy frankly that it would be madness to take the child on a visit to Italy. The Bonapartes were quixotic and self-centered, Sydney observed; they were simply not to be trusted. In fact, Sydney was certain that Pauline had ulterior motives for inviting them to visit: she hated both her brother Jérôme and his wife, Catherine, and any contact with Betsy and her son would be a slap in their faces. It was best, Betsy’s friends agreed, to avoid contact with the Bonaparte family.

  Betsy was uncertain what course of action to take. She had sound reasons to ignore the Bonapartes’ invitation, chief among them the expense of a trip to Rome and the need to take Bo out of school. She was especially hesitant to disrupt her son’s education on the vague chance that the family, as Pauline broadly hinted, intended to provide an inheritance, or at least an allowance, for him. Knowing Bo’s tendency toward extravagance, she also worried about the impact of Pauline’s lifestyle on her son. Writing to her father in April 1820, Betsy sounded decidedly like one of those practical, conscientious Americans whom she so often held up to contempt. “If I took my son to live in a palace,” she wrote, “he would naturally prefer pleasure to study.”

  Her concern revealed a slowly emerging ambivalence about the relative merits of aristocratic idleness and the middle-class work ethic. She was willing to sacrifice, to live a Spartan existence, in order to provide Bo the best education possible, but in turn she expected him to work hard and to excel in all his subjects. She did not hesitate to remind him of the “necessity of application to his studies,” and she regularly asked his instructors for reports on his progress. As his mother, she would take all necessary steps to protect him from exposure to the style of life that his father and Pauline embraced, but in the end, the responsibility for mastering Latin, mathematics, chemistry, physics, history, and geography, as well as the cultured arts of fencing, dancing, and drawing, was his own. “If he should prove ignorant and insignificant,” she told William, “the fault will not be mine.”

  Betsy’s motives for providing Bo an elite education were, on the surface, contradictory. She wanted her son to acquire the cultured manners and the sophistication that she thought were necessary for him to marry into the European nobility. But at the same time she wanted his school years to equip him for a profession such as law or medicine. She fervently believed that he must be ready to make his way in the world if fortune did not smile on him. As she told William, “without an education he would find himself condemned to dependence on the caprice of others.” But Betsy saw no contradiction in putting forward these two competing goals. Her own experience as a young woman had taught her to be cautious, to expect little good fortune in life, and to develop self-reliance. If fortune—in the form of a brilliant marriage—did not provide for her son, then he must be prepared to provide for himself. Such an alternative would have been unthinkable to the European aristocrats she admired. But Betsy had grown up in a country that embraced meritocracy and promised opportunity to men of ability, training, and ambition. Thousands of miles from Baltimore, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte was thinking like an American.

  For the moment, she decided not to accept the Bonaparte invitation to bring Bo to Rome. In a letter to Pauline, she explained that her decision rested on a reluctance to interrupt his schooling. She signed this letter “Elizabeth Patterson.” In the meantime, however, she decided to assess the fortunes of the Bonaparte family—and the likelihood that she and Bo could benefit from their wealth. She had long ago abandoned any expectations that her former husband would provide for his son. Jérôme had contributed little if anything to Bo’s education or maintenance, and as she and everyone else knew, the king of Westphalia remained as recklessly extravagant as he had been in his youth. As Betsy put it, he “spends everything he can get hold of, and will keep up kingly state until his expended means leave him a beggar.” She stopped short of accusing Jérôme of having a cruel nature. He did not use money as a weapon the way her father did. “I believe he is not as bad-hearted as many people think,” she wrote, “and that many of his faults and much of his bad conduct proceed from extravagance and folly.” Jérôme’s sin was not his abuse of power; it was simply the weakness of his character.

  Betsy also doubted that any support would come from the Bonaparte family living in Rome. True, Madame Mère seemed to be “a woman of sense and great fortitude,” but much of her wealth had gone to pay her irresponsible children’s many bills. Little of her fortune remained, and Betsy assumed it w
ould go to her remaining adult children. The Princess Borghese had a great fortune, but her past promises to provide generously for a family member or friend had proven unreliable. Betsy knew less about the finances or temperaments of the remaining Bonaparte brothers, Lucien, Louis, and Joseph. She did know that she and Lucien shared one thing in common: Napoleon’s fury at what he deemed an inappropriate marriage. And she knew that Joseph was now residing in America on an elegant estate built with the gold and silver he had buried for safekeeping when the empire collapsed. But she could not imagine a role that any of these men would play in her son’s future.

  Betsy had weighed the benefits of a trip to Rome—and found they were few. Still, she could not lay the notion of a trip south entirely to rest. Her desire to show her son off to the Bonapartes was strong. She was confident Bo would make a good impression on his father’s family, for he spoke excellent French, had fine manners, and was, as a friend of Nancy Spear put it, “amiable & remarkably Sensible.” And his resemblance to Napoleon, which had so troubled the French monarchy’s officials, was certain to win him their affection. By the fall of 1821, Betsy had set aside her doubts and misgivings and decided to take the trip after all.

  In Rome, Betsy and Bo were greeted with enthusiasm. Madame Mère showered her grandson with gifts and money, and Cardinal Fesch announced that he had amended his will to include the young man. But it was the beautiful Pauline, whose second marriage to Prince Camillo Borghese had provided her with the means to live and entertain lavishly, who offered the most dazzling welcome. She doted on Bo, giving him great sums of money for new clothes and promising him a sizable annual allowance when he married.

  Pauline seemed equally charmed by Betsy, showering her with gifts of jewelry and an elaborate ball gown. Betsy was momentarily overcome by these acts of generosity, which seemed so in keeping with Pauline’s oversize personality. Indeed, everything about the Princess Borghese was larger than life, from her palatial villa, so opulent that Sydney Morgan referred to its style as “beyond beyond,” to the life-size sculpture of herself reclining in the nude, created by the Italian artist Antonio Canova, that greeted guests as they entered her home. The nude sculpture suggested that modesty was not one of Pauline’s virtues, and her idiosyncratic behavior left no doubt in anyone’s mind that she preferred to shock her guests rather than put them at ease. She was known to receive guests wearing a demi-negligee. A German visitor recorded having a conversation with Pauline while a young page, kneeling at the hostess’s feet, pulled down her stockings and garter to wash and dry her feet. If Betsy had once disturbed the peace of American matrons by appearing in a dress that revealed her “bubbies,” Pauline’s daily behavior made Betsy’s brief flaunting of convention seem a timid endeavor.

  Betsy may have been disturbed by Pauline’s impropriety. But she was euphoric at the welcome she and Bo received. Still, the warnings given by Astor and her good friend Sydney, that the Bonapartes were both sly and mercurial in their affections, remained in the corner of her mind. Were they sincere? Would they keep their promises? All her nagging doubts seemed to dissolve when the family suggested a marriage between Bo and his uncle Joseph Bonaparte’s daughter Charlotte.

  Joseph Bonaparte was the oldest of Letizia and Carlo Buonaparte’s sons. In 1808 Napoleon named him king of Naples, and later he became king of Spain. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo, however, Joseph fled with his family to Switzerland, managing to take with him a sizable treasure in Spanish gold and jewels, much of which he buried near his Swiss château. Joseph then made his way, without his family, to America, where he purchased a large estate in Bordentown, New Jersey, known as Point Breeze. He soon sent his trusted friend and secretary, Louis Mailliard, back to Europe to retrieve the remaining treasure. Mailliard returned to America with the treasure and Joseph’s two daughters, Zénaïde and Charlotte. Joseph’s wife, Julie, remained in Europe because of poor health. By the time the Bonapartes of Rome proposed the marriage, Joseph, now calling himself the Comte de Survilliers, and his daughters were comfortably settled in a beautiful home at Point Breeze.

  The proposed marriage of her son to one of the comte’s daughters was more than Betsy had ever hoped for: an alliance that would secure Bo’s place in the Bonaparte family and tacitly confirm the legitimacy of her own marriage to Jérôme. And, because the family knew Jérôme could not be counted on to do a father’s duty, Madame Mère and Pauline pledged to provide Bo with the funds needed to support a wife. Jérôme might be “entirely ruined, his fortune, capital, income, everything spent,” but his son’s future seemed suddenly rosy.

  At the age of sixteen, Bo probably did not have marriage on his mind. But the fact that his intended bride-to-be lived in America pleased him greatly. He was eager to get home any way he could. Writing to his grandfather William, he made his preference for American society plain: “Since I have been in Europe I have dined with princes and princesses and all the great people of Europe, but I have never tasted a dish as much to my taste as the roast beef and beef-steaks I ate on South Street.” Betsy’s fear that Bo would succumb to the aristocratic life of luxury—and in Pauline’s case, decadence—that now surrounded him had not proved entirely groundless; her son did indeed love a life of ease, but he wanted to live it in America.

  To Bo’s delight, it was decided that he should travel home to confer with his uncle Joseph and make the acquaintance of the young girl who would be his wife. While she waited to learn the outcome of the marriage plan, Betsy filled her letters to William with her thoughts on the most practical of matters: the financial settlement Joseph should grant his daughter and her husband-to-be. She wanted a prenuptial agreement that ensured Bo an ample share of Charlotte’s wealth should she die before him. She also meant to insist that half of the hundred-thousand-dollar marriage gift that Joseph was said to be offering his daughter be settled directly on Bo. She did not think this demand was outrageous, for she now knew that Joseph’s daughter stood to inherit far more than this wedding gift. She estimated that Charlotte would receive half a million dollars from her father’s estate and a considerable sum from her mother’s as well. Although she might be willing to compromise on some of the prenuptial terms, Betsy was determined to see an ironclad legal agreement reached. “There is no knowing how marriages may turn out,” she wrote her father—a sad truth that no one knew better than Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte.

  Bo’s marriage to Charlotte would satisfy all the wishes for her son that Betsy had harbored for so long. It would not only ensure Bo’s place within the Bonaparte family and provide him with an ample income; it would also bring him a social position unequaled in America. As for love, she expressed nothing but contempt for those who believed such a transient emotion was the proper basis for marriage. Her own history had proven such an idea absurd. She asked William, whom Bo respected and looked up to, to “discourage all that tendency to romance and absurd falling in love which has been the ruin of your own family.”

  As the weeks and months dragged on, however, no news of an engagement arrived in Rome. Betsy found herself preparing for the worst. She had to admit that even before Bo left for America, her relationship with the Bonapartes had begun to sour. And in the months of waiting that followed, the tensions had increased. Pauline’s behavior became erratic: first she demanded the return of the ball gown she had given Betsy; then she pressed Betsy to accept it as a gift once more. Worse was to come: Pauline’s promises to provide for Bo simply evaporated. The only consolation Betsy could take was that the childless Pauline had treated Bo “exactly as she has done all her other nephews—that is, promised, and then retracted.” When Jérôme, who maintained a villa in Florence, made it clear that he resented the family opening its arms to his former wife, Pauline staunchly denied that she had invited Betsy to Rome and loudly announced that she wished her unwelcome visitor would return to Geneva. In the end, Betsy concluded that “all that has been said of her is not half what she deserves—neither hopes of legacies, nor any expectatio
n can make any one support her whims, which are so extraordinary as to make it impossible not to believe her mad.”

  The situation had become intolerable for Betsy, and she returned to Switzerland, where she began to steel herself for the end to all her dreams. The bitterness she felt at her own past misfortune rose to the surface, coloring her judgment of her son’s future and her own. It was clear: there were to be no happy endings. In a letter to her father on December 21, 1821, she had declared that the happiest people “are those who support misfortune best.” In 1822 she was resigned to numbering herself among those unhappy happiest people.

  In October 1821, before the Roman debacle, Betsy had written a long letter to her father about her finances. “It is generally my luck to be cheated in every way,” she noted with heavy resignation. She was referring to the exorbitant charges she suffered when drawing on funds through bankers in Amsterdam. But she might just as well have been talking about her experiences with the Bonaparte family. The only one who had ever dealt honestly with her, she knew, was Napoleon.

  Chapter Eleven

  “That Was My American Wife”

  While the debacle of Bo’s proposed marriage played itself out, Betsy began a peripatetic life in Europe, dividing her time between Geneva, Florence, the coast of France, and Paris. Although the Russian-Polish contingent had relocated to Florence, Geneva still boasted a number of interesting friends. She could spend evenings with the famous economist and historian Jean-Charles-Leonard de Sismondi and his family and enjoy the sparkling conversation, and the admiration, of the elderly philosopher Karl Viktor von Bonstetten. Although he was married and nearing eighty, Bonstetten enjoyed a flirtation with Betsy. “You may not have reigned in Westphalia,” he is said to have told her, “but then you are the Queen of all hearts, which is much better!” But Demidov and his circle were a magnet, and Betsy found herself spending more of her time in Florence. Here she could lose herself in the seemingly endless rounds of parties and theatrical productions that Demidov hosted.