Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

by Berkin, Carol

  Perhaps it was the emperor himself who tried to avert the crisis that everyone knew was brewing. Perhaps it was his wife. But Junior, who had remained in France when his father departed in 1857, was soon contacted by a gentleman who asked, in effect, what it would take to dissuade Bo from going to court over his legitimacy. The Bonapartes were willing to offer Betsy’s son one-third of his father’s estate if he would abandon his plans to press his claims of legitimacy.

  There was an implicit threat in the letter Junior received. “I am confident,” this intermediary wrote, “that the E. will do all in his power to prevent the suit, as it will produce much scandal.” Junior declined to play any part in a scheme to silence his father. But he was astute enough to see that the emperor hoped to placate Plon Plon. It was a clear signal that Bo’s half brother would have the upper hand in the events that would follow.

  Despite the politics involved, Pierre Berryer believed he could make a good legal case for the legality of Betsy’s marriage and thus the legitimacy of her son. He was able to present to the court 139 pages of evidence, including proof of Betsy and Jérôme’s marriage, the birth and baptism of their son, some sixty letters from members of the Bonaparte family recognizing Bo as a “dear son,” “a nephew,” or in Plon Plon’s own case, “a cousin.” The hearing began in January 1861, with both Betsy and Bo present in the courtroom.

  Berryer’s argument was, by all accounts, brilliant, moving, and convincing. He challenged Napoleon I’s power to annul the marriage; he placed into evidence letters from Bonaparte family members, including Madame Mère, that demonstrated their acknowledgment of the legitimacy of the marriage; he cited Jérôme’s letters to his young wife, assuring her of his faithfulness to her; he presented proof that the pope considered the marriage valid; and he reminded the court that the Civil Code forbade “the children of a second marriage to ask the nullity of the first during the lifetime of the parties to that marriage.” He painted Betsy in the most sympathetic terms, telling the story of the romance and marriage between a young, naïve, and beautiful Baltimore girl and a handsome French naval officer, and of that husband’s cruel abandonment of both wife and infant son. Although “Mademoiselle Patterson found herself repudiated—abandoned,” she faced her betrayal with dignity, and for fifty-five years, she had led “a life without a stain.” She never remarried but devoted herself, with “brave maternal love,” to the child she had borne to her faithless husband. Now an elderly woman of seventy-five, “she comes from her distant home beyond the Atlantic; she appears before this august court asking for the declaration of her rights and demands the vindication of her honour and the establishment of her child in the position due to his birth.”

  Prince Napoleon’s lawyer painted a far different story. The Patterson family knew from the beginning, he insisted, that Jérôme was a minor and could not marry without his family’s permission. But they had entrapped this young, inexperienced boy, who had been so unfortunate as to visit Baltimore, a city known for vice and a “Sodom of impurities.” Betsy must surely have been amazed to hear her native Baltimore, which she had always described as staid, boring, and utterly bourgeois, compared to the biblical city of immorality. She might have conceded, however, that her own father’s “impurities” were many and that the memory of his infidelities still stung her. But Plon Plon’s lawyer did not use William Patterson’s mistresses as an example of Baltimore’s sinfulness.

  Instead, the lawyer moved to an attack on Betsy’s character, a strategy designed to counter Berryer’s image of an innocent and betrayed wife with a portrait of a conniving, selfish woman. He used the condemnation in William’s will to paint her as a willful and disobedient daughter, inclined to foolish acts of misconduct. In the heat of oratory, perhaps the logical flaw in his argument slipped by the court: if the Patterson family had indeed conspired to entrap Jérôme Bonaparte in an invalid marriage, Betsy’s role in the plot made her an obedient daughter rather than a rebellious child. This inconsistency in his argument passed without notice.

  Betsy, he continued, was not simply willful or disobedient; she was greedy and a schemer. Proof could be found in her willingness to accept a pension from the first emperor Napoleon, a bald admission, he added, that her marriage to Jérôme was invalid. And he reminded the court that she had filed for and won a divorce in Maryland in 1812 for the sole reason, he insisted, that she wished to protect her growing personal wealth. The woman who emerged from his account was neither loyal nor devoted; she had burned with ambition in 1803—and she burned with it still. He begged the court to put an end to her dreams of power: uphold the family council’s 1856 decision, he pleaded, and rule against the American Bonapartes.

  As the trial progressed, Betsy had few friends with whom she could share her feelings of frustration, anger, and weariness. But chance brought her an opportunity to pour out her emotions to her old love, Alexander Gorchakov. Gorchakov had followed the trial in the papers and contacted Betsy. In a long letter, she vented her anger at her ex-husband. Perhaps, on reflection, she considered this too vicious and cold, for she later annotated it as “unsent.” But perhaps her memory did not serve her well, for Gorchakov replied to her on the same day, February 19, that she penned a second letter in which her contempt for Jérôme was more muted. Still, she could not restrain herself from describing her former husband as a “personage, whose poverty of intellect … was exceeded by the littleness, baseness & meanness of his ignoble character.” And as she noted sadly, his death had not ended her suffering at his hand, for Catherine’s son continued to persecute her.

  Gorchakov’s reply offered sympathy and respect for Betsy’s capacity for endurance and survival: “This drop in eternity that we call life has no greater value than the one that teaches us never to forsake our selves. This conviction was always embodied by you in every situation.” His fondness for Betsy had endured, and he wrote feelingly of his regret that he no longer had “in my reach the fine and remarkable insights which I enjoyed there on the bank of the Arno, when public life did not yet have any thorns for me.” His diplomatic duties weighed as heavily on him as her legal battles did on her; all he could do was recommend resignation to both their “desperately tried souls.”

  In the end, political considerations would once again desperately try Betsy’s soul. The court’s decision would rest not on Berryer’s brilliant defense, or on the mountains of evidence presented by Betsy and her son, but on the complications that Bo’s legitimacy would pose to the succession to the throne. Should anything befall Napoleon III’s own son, the prince imperial, then Plon Plon was designated to wear the crown. Neither sympathy for an aging American woman nor the legality of her son’s birth could outweigh the importance of ensuring a smooth transition of power. Thus, on February 15, 1861, the court handed down its decision against the American Bonapartes. But if anyone thought the Bonaparte family peace would not be disturbed again, they were wrong. Betsy and Bo remained confident that they had the better legal argument, and Berryer agreed. It was decided to appeal the case.

  Throughout the spring and early summer, Betsy retained a slim hope of achieving justice. But on July 1, 1861, the appeals court handed down its decision against the appellants. It found that the annulment of the marriage of Elizabeth Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte was “in order and … unquestionably justified” and thus the case was “inadmissible.” Betsy and Bo were ordered to pay a fine and to cover all the expenses incurred by the appeal. Thousands of dollars had been wasted, and their cause was lost.

  Betsy’s bitterness and disappointment were palpable. Once again political considerations had trumped legality. Almost six decades before, Napoleon had sacrificed her to his ambitions, and now the emperor and his nephew Plon Plon had sacrificed her to theirs. She could not respond with the resignation Prince Gorchakov had urged, for it did not suit her character. As she had once written to an English friend, she had never met fate “with Philosophy, resignation, or forgiveness, but … I did ever combat it with unb
ending courage.” Yet she was realist enough to know that further efforts to establish Bo’s legitimacy would be fruitless.

  That summer Betsy sent her French lawyer a brief letter, in which her acceptance of defeat did not negate her fury. She advised him that she had urged her son “to follow my example of abstention from all further pursuit of that which is unattainable, justice from any court in France.” The failure of her cause, she assured Berryer, could not be laid at his feet. “After the eminent talent, sir, which distinguishes yourself had failed before two courts to have our rights recognized, we ought to rest convinced that the Court of Cassation, equally servile, and curbed under the same pressure, would give the same illegal and unjust decision.” And, writing to Bo, she declared, “I will never be dupe enough ever to try Justice in France under this Dynasty.” She urged her son to take solace in their moral victory, for it was clear to her that “we have the Sympathies, from the Cottage to the palace of all France; & the opinion is universal that I, Mme P, have been most shamefully treated by the Bonaparte family from the First to this last advent of mine to France.” With that, she packed her bags and returned to America. By August her ship had docked at New York—and she would not cross the ocean again.

  Betsy’s confidence that she and Bo had won in the court of public opinion, if not in the courts of France, was well founded. From the beginning, the series of trials and appeals had stirred strong responses, especially in the American and English press. Articles in the English papers found little to favor in the emperor or in Plon Plon or in the defense lawyer’s arguments. Even before the final ruling on the case, an article in London’s Daily News had criticized both Plon Plon and the man Betsy called “the Royal Bigamist.” Articles like this one gave her confidence that the English press would “render me justice.” And so it did: on the whole, the public expressed little sympathy for the late king of Westphalia or his second family.

  Despite their victory in the trial, Prince Napoleon and Princess Mathilde were so embarrassed by the negative coverage in the press that they arranged for a highly favorable memoir of their father to be written and published shortly after the trial ended. But the Memoirs and Correspondence of King Jérôme and Queen Catherine did little to stem the tide of criticism against Jérôme or his second family.

  Betsy might have taken some satisfaction in reading the review of the memoir published that August in The Athenaeum. The review did not mince words when it came to Jérôme’s character: he had, they wrote, “an unlimited faculty for spending money, [and] getting into debt and disgrace.” He had begun life as a “spoiled, noisy, troublesome boy,” and age did not improve him. Despite his title as king of Westphalia, Jérôme, it continued, hated responsibility and was never more than “a parvenu to the backbone, and his vulgarity was engrained. To appear in a state carriage, to receive attentions from high personages, to be flattered, to spend unlimited pocket-money, to have nothing to do but to go to fetes and public amusements, these were his notions of royal felicity.”

  But if the review dismissed Jérôme as a “fool and a poltroon” rather than a true villain, Betsy did not emerge as an innocent victim of love and betrayal. She was, the article conceded, “extremely beautiful … agreeable, witty, clever,” but she was also ambitious. Indeed, “her character was not unlike Jerome’s, in her love for all the vanities of life.” She craved attention and admiration and “desired to shine in a wider horizon” than Baltimore, Maryland. True, she was young and might be forgiven her “female susceptibility” to a man to whom her own native country and the citizens of her native city were so eager to offer admiration and homage. But it was Betsy’s desire to be envied by other women that banished any chance that good sense would prevail. And thus the marriage had taken place—and the betrayal had soon followed. In the end, the author of the review granted Betsy a measure of dignity; in the face of abandonment and humiliation, she had refused to be crushed. She had proved, as the years went by, “equal to her situation.”

  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.

  Chapter Sixteen

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

  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 c
ompanion—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.