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.”
Conclusion
“I Have Lived Alone and I Will Die Alone”
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 intellectu
als 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.
Lost too is the complexity of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s personality and character. In her letters to family and friends, she laid waste to American culture and to America’s gender ideals. She decried the narrowness and emptiness of a society whose men focused on moneymaking to the exclusion of all else and whose women were emotionally confined to the parlor and the nursery, to accommodating their husbands and raising their children. She embraced European aristocratic society, with its leadership built upon bloodlines, its appreciation for artistic and intellectual achievement, and its validation of a public, social role for women. Again and again she declared the superiority of this European culture over the narrow, humdrum, confining, and unsophisticated society of her native land. And yet Betsy’s own behavior often belied her rejection of all things American. In the same letters that carried her contempt for the American man, imprisoned in his countinghouse and obsessed with gains and losses, she often revealed her own meticulous and focused attention to money and moneymaking. She issued careful and detailed instructions to financial agents to buy or sell real estate, stocks, and bonds; she considered exchange rates and interest rates in her transactions; and she adjusted her investment strategy in the light of political and economic developments on both continents. Her fortune grew and, with it, an obsession with wealth and its acquisition that would have won the admiration of any American man.
Betsy never saw the contradiction in her simultaneous condemnation and embrace of the American entrepreneurial and mercantile spirit. Nor did she see the contradiction in her contempt for the maternal sacrifices required of domesticity and her own devotion to and sacrifice for her son and grandsons. She also remained unaware of the contradictions in the values she hoped to impart to her son. She preached the importance of his bloodline in determining his destiny and took pains to provide him with aristocratic manners and attitudes, yet at the same time she prepared him for life in the American meritocracy, confident that a good education and the professional opportunities it could provide were the path to his economic independence. Bo reconciled these mixed signals by marrying wealth rather than earning it, by taking an aristocratic attitude toward work and its rewards in a decidedly American setting.
Perhaps the most tragic unacknowledged contradiction lay in Betsy’s relationship with her father. Their contest of wills, their overt condemnation of each other’s life choices and personal behavior, ironically attested to their intense emotional connection. Betsy consistently tried to win her father’s approval; William consistently tried to win her respect. Neither succeeded, and the final bond between them was forged from anger, bitterness, and contempt.
Although Betsy enjoyed no formal political rights and wielded no formal political power, she was nevertheless influential in the political and diplomatic decision making of the early republic. Her connection to the most powerful man in Europe, the emperor of France, made her personal life not simply grist for the popular press but a matter of concern in the halls of Congress and a factor in the diplomacy of American presidents and ambassadors. In the imperial struggles of the 1790s and the early decades of the nineteenth century, both France and England employed the carrot and the stick to move the United States away from its policy of neutrality. The American public and its government were ambivalent, shifting support from one side to the other in the face of real and perceived insults to the nation’s sovereignty. British ambassadors and French consuls eagerly looked for signs of support or opposition, not simply in proclaimed policies but in such small matters as the seating at a dinner party or an invitation to a ball. In such a fraught environment, many of the most personal events in Betsy’s life—her marriage to a Bonaparte, Napoleon’s rejection of its legitimacy, the rumors of her remarriage to an Englishman, and the pension granted to her by Napoleon—each became a potential diplomatic crisis. Decades after Napoleon’s death, her actions caused concern and anxiety within the halls of power in France. By demanding that her son be recognized as legitimate, she threatened to disrupt the Bonaparte family’s agreed-upon line of succession during the reign of Napoleon III. Betsy’s story thus reminds us that policies are often formed at the nexus of the private and the public spheres.
By the time of her death, many of the once-unique aspects of Betsy’s life had become commonplace. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, American writers from Henry James to Edith Wharton built novels around characters who were easily recognizable within post–Civil War society: eligible young women like Conchita Closson, Nan St. George, and Lizzy Elmsworth in Wharton’s The Buccaneers, who sought to acquire a European husband and, with him, a title; or the tragic Isabel Archer of James’s Portrait of a Lady, who, like Betsy, was willing to “confront her destiny” in a European setting. Even before the war, Americans of both sexes found their way in droves to the delights and wonders of Europe’s cities and countryside, making the “Grand Tour” de rigueur for all well-bred citizens. Beginning in the 1830s, the nation came to tolerate, if not entirely accept, middle-class women who chose not to marry but to devote themselves to causes and sometimes even to careers. These women, like Betsy, managed the money on which they lived and by which they brought about social change. And in the factories and mills and servants’ quarters, single women who depended on their own incomes understood—as Betsy had—the connection between money and a measure of independence. If Betsy had once shocked matrons and gentlemen alike by appearing in public in the new French Empire–style gown that allowed only the wispiest of undergarments, by the 1850s the bloomer costume defied notions of female modesty even further by placing women in pants. And by the 1840s, articulate groups of women challenged the tenets of domesticity that confined married women to their duties in the home. From the Seneca Falls Convention in 1848, to the founding of national suffrage associations in the wake of the Fourteenth Amendment, to the concerted push for suffrage that began in Betsy’s last years, she could see emerging around her, had she wished to look, a critique of domesticity that was social and legal rather than simply personal.
The fact that American society, and American women in particular, were catching up with Betsy does not diminish the power of her story. All alone she challenged the life her father and her society had expected her to follow. She rebounded from the disillusionment and humiliation that followed her one act of folly—marriage to Jérôme Bonaparte—and she refused to put her future into the hands of a man ever again. In an age when proper women did not venture far from home without an escort or a husband, she crossed the Atlantic several times and traveled through Europe by herself. And in those early decades of the nineteenth century, when women’s names rarely appeared in newspapers, she gloried in her celebrity. She never suppressed her wit or her intelligence and was as proud of her independence and ability to provide for herself as any self-made man. And she remained tenacious in her demands for justice from the Bonapartes, challenging them in public, in a court of law, to acknowledge the legitimacy of her marriage and of her son.
Betsy paid dearly for her choices in life, of course. The disillusionment she suffered as a young woman began as a source of wisdom and sophistication, but in her later years, it became deeply tinged by jealousy at the good fortune of others. Her habit of economy, the product of a desire to be independent, showed overtones as she aged of mere miserliness. Bitterness never marked her face, but it had begun in the 1850s to mar her spirit, and she wrote her own history not as a triumph over adversity but as a chain of endless disappointments and betrayals. Perhaps saddest of all, her obsession with her son’s and grandsons’ destinies blinded her to considerations of their happiness or their satisfactions. Her life was defined by the fact that she was an American Bonaparte, and this proved to be a burden that neither she nor her son and grandsons could escape. She took little pride in the respect that the Baltimore community showed t
o her son or in the financial success of her grandson Junior. Junior’s marriage to the granddaughter of one of the nation’s most prominent political figures, Daniel Webster, failed to satisfy Betsy’s ambition for her family. By her rigid social yardstick, neither Daniel Webster’s fame as an orator nor his influence as a Massachusetts senator during the decades before the Civil War could measure up to the achievements of the European noblemen she had known. Her insistence on the special destiny of her family would have also deprived her of satisfaction in the career of her seaside companion, Charley. Charley would lift the Bonaparte name to national political prominence in the twentieth century, but for Betsy, the only political landscape suitable for a Bonaparte lay across the ocean in Europe. It would have pleased her more to learn that Junior’s daughter, Louise Eugenie, gained a title when she married a Danish count.
Shortly before her death, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, the most beautiful woman in America, summed up her life: “I have lived alone and I will die alone.” Surely the combination of pride and bitterness captured by this comment cannot be lost upon those of us who know her story.
Epilogue
The American Bonapartes
For almost a quarter century after Betsy Bonaparte’s death, her family faded from the public eye. By 1879 the Bonaparte sun had been eclipsed in Europe as well, and a president rather than an emperor was in place in France. In America, public attention turned to the rise of millionaire industrialists, labor unrest, the flood of immigrants from southern Europe, and the return of white southerners to power after the abandonment of Reconstruction—and American newspapers were filled with muckraking articles decrying political bosses, unsanitary food processing, and the plight of the men and women in the slums. The battlefield heroics of Betsy’s grandson Junior, which had won him medals and honors during the Crimean War, were little remembered by a society busily commissioning statues and plaques to commemorate their Civil War dead.
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