Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

by Berkin, Carol

  The developments in Europe prompted the resurgence of Betsy’s old hatred of life in Baltimore. When Sydney wrote to her that she and her husband had moved to London, Betsy decided to pack her bags once again. She had no desire, she said, to go to France, for her former husband and his family had joined other Bonapartes in Paris. But she would gladly go to London. When the sad news arrived that Sydney Morgan’s husband had suddenly died, Betsy knew she must hurry to console her friend. Although she was nearing her sixty-fifth birthday, Betsy once again crossed the Atlantic. Before the year was out, she was in England.

  While Betsy and Sydney passed their days taking drives and talking over dinner, Louis-Napoleon was busy proving that his ambition was equal to that of his famous uncle. The “prince-president,” as he liked to call himself, faced one major hurdle in his plans to establish a regime reminiscent of Napoleon’s: the new constitution did not allow a president to run for reelection. To get around this, he staged a coup d’état, and with the aid of the army and the mass arrests of his opponents, he succeeded in extending his authority beyond the end of his presidential term. By December 1852, he was powerful enough to establish the Second Empire. No longer simply “prince-president,” he was now known as the emperor Napoleon III. His dreams—and Betsy’s hopes—had come true.

  Betsy’s hopes no longer centered on her son but on her grandson. After she returned to Baltimore in 1850, she followed events in France carefully. She was convinced, by the spring of 1852, even before Louis-Napoleon became emperor, that Junior ought to cast his lot with his father’s cousin. Writing to James Gallatin that May, she lamented, “I only wish that my Grand Son could be at Paris.” By November of that year, she was still expressing regret that Junior had not made his way to the French capital. “My Grand Son remains in this Country, which is not my fault you may very certainly believe.” But by now she was accustomed to him ignoring her advice; all she could do was remind her friends that it was not her fault if her family members were less ambitious, less politically astute than their aging mother and grandmother.

  Betsy made no effort to hide her ambition for Junior from her friends and family. But when strangers like the editors of The New American Cyclopaedia publicly alleged that she had prophesied that her grandson would become the third to rule as a French emperor, she quickly wrote a rebuttal. “I have never coveted for one I so much love as I do my Grand Son a crown,” she declared, adding, “Had I been capable of such folly, I, at least, possess sufficient American acuteness never to have by prophecies given verbal utterance to it. The inference to be drawn from what you have published on this subject, is that I am either demented or imbecile; of this I do not complain, but I do of an unfounded assertion which might prove injurious to my grandson.” Betsy’s motive was obvious: she did not want the emperor to think she was plotting his replacement or challenging his abilities to rule. She demanded that the editors “nullify what you have erroneously, & not, I am willing to believe, from the malignant suggestion of others, stated in the paragraph respecting prophecies.”

  Less quickly than Betsy might have wished, Bo sent his cousin a letter of congratulations. He was genuinely fond of Louis-Napoleon, whom he had met in Rome when they were both young. The friendship had been renewed, briefly, when Louis visited in Baltimore in 1837. King Louis-Philippe had sent the troublemaking Louis away from France that year, but Louis-Napoleon wasted little time getting a fake passport so that he could return to Europe to plot and plan once more. Now in 1853 the new emperor replied to his cousin in America that he had “received with great pleasure the letter which conveys to me your congratulations and good wishes,” adding, “When circumstances permit, believe me, I shall be very happy to see you again.”

  Bo took the emperor’s words as an invitation. The following year he and his son, now a graduate of West Point, traveled to Paris. Susan Bonaparte remained at home with a new son, born twenty years after Junior, named Charles. The emperor greeted his American relatives warmly, inviting them to dinner at his palace at Saint-Cloud. Here he presented Bo with a paper on which the minister of justice, the president of the French Senate, and the president of the Council of State recorded their opinion that the marriage of Prince Jérôme and Elizabeth Patterson was legitimate—and thus that Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte of Baltimore, Maryland, was a legitimate child of France. A decree by the emperor could restore French citizenship to Bo, if Bo wished. And as the offer might have financial benefits, Bo did.

  More signs of favor followed. Empress Eugénie was so impressed by Junior that her husband urged the West Point graduate to consider a career in the French army. By the summer of 1854, Junior had resigned his commission in the U.S. Army and begun his career as a second lieutenant in the Seventh Regiment of Dragoons. Soon afterward he headed to the Crimea to join the allied armies of Turkey, Great Britain, and France in their war with Russia. Here his bravery on the battlefield won the admiration of French officers and earned him several citations for bravery and a promotion to first lieutenant.

  At first this reunion of the American and French branches of the Bonaparte family seemed to please all the family members. But tensions soon developed between Bo and his father’s family, who were firmly ensconced in Paris. Jérôme, now the former king of Westphalia, had settled here as Louis-Napoleon’s star had risen. The emperor had generously provided his uncle with a government post that required him to do little and paid well. He also invited Jérôme and his family—which now consisted of a mistress Jérôme had elevated to wife after Catherine’s death, his daughter Princess Mathilde, and his one surviving son with Catherine, Prince Napoleon—to take up residence at the Palais Royale. Prince Napoleon had quickly established himself in French politics, taking an active role in the General Assembly. To the emperor’s dismay, the young politician was known for his criticism of Louis-Napoleon’s policies. The prince was ambitious and competitive—and far from likable. A Parisian who knew him well described him as “the most prodigiously intelligent and prodigiously vicious man that ever lived.”

  This vicious prince quickly grew jealous of Junior’s battlefield successes. His own military career had been less than stellar. He had been appointed to a generalship in the French army but saw little action during the Crimean War. In fact, he withdrew from active service, claiming illness. The soldiers serving under him told a very different story about his withdrawal from the battlefield. They said he was so frightened by the plomb plomb of the cannons that he fled to the safety of Paris. Their nickname for the erstwhile general reflected their contempt: to them, he was not Napoleon but “Plon Plon.” If Plon Plon chafed at his nephew’s medals and commendations, he was even more disturbed by the emperor’s generosity toward Bo. Louis-Napoleon had offered Bo an impressive pension of 70,000 francs a year and announced his intention to make him the Duke of Sartène and Junior the Count of Sartène.

  At issue was far more than a competition for the emperor’s affections. In 1852 the then-childless emperor had established an order of succession that greatly favored Plon Plon. “In the event that we should leave no direct heir of legitimate birth or adopted,” Napoleon III had written, “our well-beloved uncle, Jérôme Napoleon Bonaparte, and his direct legitimate descendants resulting from his marriage with the Princess Catherine of Württemberg, from male to male, in the order of primogeniture, and to the exclusion of females, shall be called upon to succeed us.” Napoleon III then had a son, born in March 1856, but Plon Plon was eager to ensure that no American Bonaparte challenged his place in the line of succession. Soon enough Betsy’s ex-husband was enlisted to pressure Napoleon III to reconsider his generosity toward his American wife and her family. “Your decrees,” he wrote the emperor, “dispose of my name without my consent. They introduce into my family, without my having ever been consulted, persons who have never formed any part of it.” Jérôme went so far as to declare the recognition of his son Bo as “an attack upon my honor.”

  Bo soon realized that he was caught up in the byzant
ine politics so common to the Bonaparte family. He began to suspect that the emperor might be using him as a pawn to pressure Plon Plon to soften his criticism of imperial policy. He grew even more suspicious of his role in this family drama when Louis-Napoleon made it a quid pro quo that he give up the name Bonaparte in exchange for the title of Duke of Sartène.

  Bo’s pride made such an exchange impossible. His resentment increased when his son was offered a knighthood in the French Legion of Honor, but the notification was addressed to “Lt. Jerome Bonaparte-Patterson.” Junior returned the letter, noting that it was “addressed to him under a name which was not his own.”

  Soon enough, the core issue emerged fully: Was Bo a legitimate candidate for the throne? Plon Plon and his grandfather, the former king of Württemberg, were determined to establish that he was not. They demanded that the emperor call a Council of the Family to decide whether Jerome Patterson of Maryland and his descendants were entitled to bear the Bonaparte name.

  In the decision they handed down on July 4, 1856, the council finessed the question. Its members—the emperor, a prince of the family, the minister of state, the minister of justice, the president of the Senate and of the Assembly, a member of the Council of State, a marshal of France, and a member of the nation’s highest court—ruled that while Betsy’s marriage to Jérôme had been nullified under Napoleon I, the surname Bonaparte could not be taken away from Bo or his descendants. The larger victory, however, went to Plon Plon: the council also ruled that Bo had no rights under Articles 201 and 202 of the Civil Code to inherit from his father. In other words, Bo was a bastard child. As the emperor put it in a note he attached to the council decree, Bo and his descendants were not to be considered “as belonging to his famille civile.” With that, the American branch of the Bonaparte family was excluded from the succession.

  Bo responded to the decision with dignity. Writing to the emperor on July 28, he again declined the titles and honors that had been offered to him and to his son and declared: “Since no man creates himself, there is no dishonor to be born a bastard and to accept the consequences. Had I been in that category, I would have long ago accepted, and with gratitude, the offers which Your Majesty has deigned to make me. But, since my birth is legitimate and has always been so recognized by my family, by the laws of all countries and by the whole world, it would be the height of cowardice and of dishonor to accept a warrant of bastardy.” With that, Bo requested the emperor’s permission to “go with his son into exile and await there the justice that, I am sure, heaven will reserve for me, sooner or later.”

  Bo had retreated, but he had not surrendered entirely. He knew that, with his father’s death, an opportunity to reassert his membership in the famille civile would arise.

  Before leaving France, therefore, he contacted one of that nation’s most famous lawyers, Pierre-Antoine Berryer, the very man who had defended Louis-Napoleon against King Louis-Philippe’s charge of high treason in the 1830s. He gave Berryer power of attorney and provided him with documents relevant to the case. He promised to send more supporting materials when he arrived in America. Clearly, the battle over Bo’s legitimacy was not over.

  Betsy was cruelly disappointed by the rise and sudden fall of the American Bonapartes in Paris. She followed the unfolding of events in the newspapers, for coverage of the warm reception and then the rejection of Bo and his son appeared in papers from New York to Savannah to Newark, Ohio. Her only consolation was that her grandson did not return to Baltimore with his father but remained an officer in the French army. Whatever her hopes were for him now, she wanted to ensure that he would cut an appropriately aristocratic figure in European society. Over the next several years, she sent him large sums of money for his horses, his military uniforms, and his housing in Paris.

  Despite the seeming finality of the council’s ruling, Betsy, like Bo, believed the battle with Plon Plon and his father was not over. In 1858 she began sending the lawyer Berryer documents she thought might be useful, including those relating to her Maryland divorce. And like Bo, she gave Berryer power of attorney to act on her behalf. She intended, she told the lawyer, “to ascertain, vindicate, and enforce my rights.” Over the next few years, she rehearsed her past again and again, in letters to Berryer and in letters to friends, like those both sent and unsent to Prince Gorchakov.

  Then on June 24, 1860, Betsy’s former husband, Jérôme Bonaparte, died at the age of seventy-six. Newspapers across America carried the news, sometimes reviewing the history of the European Bonaparte family, but more often retelling the story of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s ill-fated marriage. In this manner, Betsy’s celebrity was revived. Sympathy for Jérôme was scarce in the columns of American newspapers. “His death creates no vacuum in public affairs,” noted the Milwaukee Daily Sentinel, “for his life has never been the hinge of great events.” But the story of a beautiful American woman, abandoned by a weak-willed husband and sacrificed to the ambitions of a foreign emperor, inspired the newspaper reporters. “His first wife,” a typical article noted, “still resides in Baltimore, and through a life that is now long, has remained faithful to her first and only marriage vows, whose annulment she would never acknowledge, while her faithless and weak husband … has forgotten both his first and last, and dying, bears no nobler title than the last of the family of the Corsican.”

  Only a month before Americans learned of Jérôme’s death, the Republican Party had nominated Abraham Lincoln to be president, and the United States moved closer to a civil war. The American Bonapartes, too, began to prepare for a war, not over slavery or secession but over legitimacy and succession. This struggle would be followed closely in newspapers at home and abroad.

  Chapter Fifteen

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

  Fort Sumter had been fired on; an American civil war had indeed begun. But Harper’s Weekly found room on its pages in early 1861 for a picture of Betsy and an article about her life and marriage. The impending court case in France, like news of Jérôme’s death, had revived national interest in Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte and her son’s claim to legitimacy. In newspapers across the country, the story of the Patterson-Bonaparte marriage was again retold.

  By the time the Harper’s Weekly story appeared, both Betsy and Bo were in Paris, and their second round of battles with Plon Plon had begun. They had come fully prepared for their own private war. In fact, they had been gathering documents to support their claims for over three years. “My time,” Betsy had written to John White in February 1861, “has been fully employed examining papers relative to our lawsuit.” The process had clearly stirred many of her old resentments, for as she collected the letters and documents that told her story, the past imposed itself painfully on the present. Her letter to White focused as much on her father’s unkind treatment and his humiliation of her in his will as it did on Plon Plon’s machinations or the family council’s injustices. And as she read Jérôme’s letters once again, she saw “egotism and low meanness of character” where once she had seen only moral weakness.

  Bo was meticulous in gathering his evidence for Berryer, providing letters dating back to 1803 between his mother, her husband, and others. He had translated the correspondence written in English into French for the lawyer. Along with these, he was prepared to provide all his own correspondence with the Bonaparte family, including a letter from Plon Plon, written before rivalry drove the two half brothers into enemy camps. “I am for life your devoted brother and friend,” Plon Plon had declared—but it was no longer so.

  Just as the battle over William Patterson’s will had once reunited mother and son, now Betsy and Bo again found a cause that joined them. Together they busied themselves poring over the evidence they were readying for Berryer. As they worked, France seemed to buzz with excitement over the controversy produced by Jérôme’s will. The distribution of Jérôme’s worldly possessions was not dwelled upon in the press, for the king of Westphalia had lived h
is entire life far beyond his means. That life had ended, as it had begun, in dependence on support from relatives. His bequests did reveal, if only tangentially, his disregard for marital fidelity, for he provided a pension for his third and last wife, who had begun her relationship with him as his mistress while Catherine was alive. His daughter Princess Mathilde had received her share of her father’s estate at the time of her marriage. A second son had died years before. As there was no mention in the will of Jérôme’s first marriage or the family it had produced, Plon Plon emerged as his father’s primary heir.

  Although his father’s estate might be small, Bo was determined to have his share of it. With Betsy, he filed a suit demanding an accounting, liquidation, and distribution of the deceased’s estate. But money was not the issue that sparked the controversy in the minds of other Bonapartes. Jérôme’s death led one of Lucien Bonaparte’s sons to reopen the question: Who would succeed Louis-Napoleon? He requested a family council to sort out where members of his generation of Bonapartes stood in the line of succession. While this request was troublesome, it was not what concerned the family most. What sent Bonapartes scurrying to head off a confrontation was the possibility of a second challenge by Betsy and Bo.