Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

by Berkin, Carol

  By the time she received this much-needed money, Betsy had left England and made her way to Paris. She had received a passport to France and felt that, no matter what the consequences, she could not end her trip without visiting the French capital. She arrived that spring—and took the city by storm.

  Chapter Nine

  “Your Ideas Soar’d Too High”

  All Paris did indeed seem to be at the feet of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. The triumphant Duke of Wellington included her in the many dinner parties and balls he held at the British embassy. And a revitalized French aristocratic society, newly freed from its long suppression by the emperor Napoleon Bonaparte, warmly welcomed the beautiful victim of Bonaparte tyranny. The king himself announced he would like to meet the belle of Baltimore, but Betsy declined his invitation; it was unseemly, she surely felt, to accept the hospitality of her benefactor’s successor. Everyone, even those at home who disapproved of Betsy, seemed completely fascinated by her social success. In a letter written in the spring of 1816, John Spear Smith gushed, “It is now generally reported that you set the fashion in Paris! How do you stand the torrent of admiration?”

  Most of Betsy’s American correspondents focused on the possibility for remarriage that her popularity promised. They could not abandon the conviction that a contented domestic life was every woman’s true goal. Her spinster aunt, Nancy Spear, was certain that Betsy had immediately fallen in love—she chided her niece for sending her a Paris dress and shoes that were far too small: “You must certainly be distractedly in love before you could so entirely have forgotten my gigantic shape.” It was common knowledge back in Baltimore that Betsy’s doors and stairs were thronged with “dukes. Counts. Marquis. Yourself a little Queen—giving and receiving the most supreme happiness,” and thus Betsy’s friends and relatives were confident that, even without a dowry from William, she would find a suitable husband. “How can you pretend to tell me that there is no love in Europe,” one relative wrote, who clearly did not think Betsy’s unorthodox past would be a hindrance to finding a man who loved her enough to propose marriage. “Don’t we here [sic] every day of English noblemen marrying actresses & that is what we would call love indeed.”

  It was true that lovesick men pursued Betsy in Paris just as they had in Baltimore, but she found them more annoying and troublesome than appealing. When, for example, the young Chevalier de Saint-Cricq, ten years her junior, declared that should she return home without accepting his proposal, he would follow her to Baltimore, Betsy must have been reminded of her English suitor Samuel Graves. Like Graves’s father, Saint-Cricq’s father intervened, not to plead his son’s case but to beg Betsy to send the young man home should he actually cross the Atlantic in pursuit.

  Betsy knew that her beauty and her tragic past had opened many doors wide for her, and she wrote home about her social success in great detail. In August 1816 she recounted to her cousin John Spear Smith that “for some weeks I have been immersed in Balls, Soirees, Dinners which have not left me a single moment.” Yet she was also proud that her popularity did not rest alone on her lovely face or her sad history. For Paris was a city with a vibrant intellectual tradition, and it was Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s wit and brilliance that brought her many of her most cherished invitations.

  Those invitations came from the resurgent salon society of Paris. Now that Napoleon was gone, French intellectuals had returned to the city from their forced or self-imposed exile and had revived the salon life that the emperor had so despised. This renewal of intellectual and artistic life acted as a magnet to poets and novelists from neighboring countries as well. The grandes dames of these salons, where “wit counted for everything,” found Betsy worthy of a place at their gatherings.

  Betsy was first introduced into this charmed salon circle by one of Albert Gallatin’s embassy staff, David Bailie Warden, an Irish revolutionary and American citizen who would remain her good friend over the ensuing years. It was through him that she first met Madame de Staël, the extraordinary woman of letters and champion of women’s rights who was as famous for her love affairs with the French political leader Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand and the writer Benjamin Constant as for her essays and her novels. Brilliant and charming, Germaine de Staël was admired by women as much as by men. “If I were a queen,” one admirer declared, “I would order Mme De Stael to talk to me always.” De Staël had dominated salon culture until the Reign of Terror forced her to flee Paris. She returned briefly in 1794, but Napoleon exiled her the following year. After Waterloo, she, like many other intellectuals, returned to Paris to campaign for liberal causes. She remained a central figure in the city’s intellectual community until her death in 1817.

  Warden also introduced Betsy to the always hospitable Juliette Récamier, whose charm and beauty attracted men and women of greater intellectual and artistic achievement than her own to her salon. Like De Staël, Madame Récamier had returned from her exile when Napoleon began his. And like Betsy, she would remain sought after by men well into her old age. Perhaps Betsy’s closest friend among these remarkable Frenchwomen was Voltaire’s adopted daughter, the kindly Reine Philiberte Rouph de Varicourt, Marquise de Villette, who wrote under the sobriquet her famous guardian had given her, Belle et Bonne (Beautiful and Warmhearted).

  Betsy often went to the opera with Madame de Villette, and she went on outings with David Bailie Warden, shopping for books and for gifts for friends at home. But she formed her deepest friendship with another outsider, Lady Sydney Morgan, who, like Betsy, had been welcomed into salon culture. This Irish novelist and travel writer was already a celebrity in Paris when she and Betsy met. And although Sydney’s happy marriage and her literary reputation set her apart from Betsy, the two formed a friendship that lasted for decades.

  Sydney’s literary talents had emerged quite early. By the time she was fourteen, this daughter of an impoverished actor had produced a volume of poems. In the same year that Betsy became a mother, Sydney published her first novel. Two years later her second book, The Wild Irish Girl, established her reputation as one of Ireland’s leading authors. In 1812 she married a physician, Sir Thomas Charles Morgan, who Betsy once declared was the only man who ever understood her. After her marriage, Sydney alienated many readers by making her liberal views on politics and religion public. Betsy did not share her friend’s politics, but she admired her stubborn independence. Sydney admired Betsy’s independent spirit as well, but she sensed the bitterness and disappointment that underlay her friend’s hostility to America and to marriage.

  Over her lifetime, Betsy had few true female confidantes. Although she exchanged friendly letters with Dolley Madison and Eliza Godefroy, she did not share her most deeply felt emotions with them. But Betsy would share her moods of both despair and satisfaction with Sydney, who she confessed she admired and loved more than anyone else. With Sydney, she did not feel it necessary to be always charming and obliging or witty, as she did with most of the wealthy aristocrats and impoverished intellectuals whose favor she had won. Nor did she feel compelled to fill her letters to Sydney exclusively with accounts of her triumphs, as she did in correspondence with her father, family, and friends. In her many letters to Sydney, she could be herself, admitting she was “very tired of suffering,” whether it was from illnesses or from bitter memories. If the confidences she shared in this correspondence over the years often bore the mark of nineteenth-century romanticism, with its emphasis on ennui, sadness, and tragic experiences, still they revealed a Betsy that few others ever saw.

  With the exception of Warden and the Gallatins, Betsy had few contacts with Americans in Paris. She preferred to ignore overtures by the American tourists who had begun to fill the streets of the city. She found “their whining … at the corruption of European morals” tedious and believed that they sought introductions to the Parisian literati and nobility from her solely so that they could confirm the superiority of their “primitive simplicity & republican opinions.” She assured he
r cousin John Spear Smith that she did not care if these American visitors were angry at her icy rejection of their company: “I shall survive all their criticism as long as I can associate with those persons whom they rail against.” She had found the French “quite as good as Americans,” indeed better, for they were less hypocritical, no more selfish, and definitely more amiable. In fact, France was altogether superior to the United States, for “there is quite as much natural affection, more friendship, at least as much disinterestedness as in our Country, where are found such lofty pretentions & sentimental acting.”

  Betsy’s success in Paris made her even more loath to return to America, “where no pleasures no hopes await me.” In Paris she could forget her husband’s desertion, her father’s rejection, and the dreariness of Baltimore. Here in the City of Light, “the weight of existence is lightened by intercourse with the world & one’s unhappy recollections are suspended—there is no time here to reflect on a future which has no hopes to enliven it, or to deplore an experience of life which has stripped it of all illusion.” She knew her income was too meager to remain in France, and yet few cords bound her to America: “Ah! That Country can claim no gratitude from me for I never experienced its favors. Bitter are its recollections—deplorable the anticipation of returning to it.”

  When she spoke of America, Betsy could conjure up only her deadening image of “those long wearisome winter Evenings varied only by the entrance of tea Equipage minding the Fire & handing round Apples & nuts.” The tedium was unbearable, for “imagination, feeling, taste intelligence are not only superfluous to such a situation, they irritate a mind without amusement & render the load of existence as insupportable [and] as disgusting.” She knew there were “dull persons” able to support this stagnation of life with patience, but it promised nothing but “the most acute of all pains to one of an animated disposition.” After only a few months in Paris, she believed that for her it was “the only habitable place on earth.” The only question was, How long could she really remain there?

  Increasingly, this realization that she must return to the “waste of life” that defined existence in America depressed Betsy. She dreaded returning to a world in which men and women were “shut up in our melancholy country houses where we vegetate for months alone.” In truth, the thought of the long wearisome winter evenings that awaited her made her physically ill. By the spring of 1817, she suffered from congested lungs. Her doctor warned that her liver was also affected. Back home in Dublin by this time, Sydney Morgan worried about her friend’s “tone of tristesse and suffering” and urged Betsy to come to Ireland. She wished she could magically transport her American friend to her home, where she could “nurse you out of your illness & laugh you out of your ennui.” But Betsy knew such a trip would further drain her resources and only briefly delay the inevitable.

  On September 12, 1817, the inevitable came. Betsy sailed from Le Havre for New York on the Maria Theresa. Only a few days after her departure, James McIlhiny sent her a letter that was typically judgmental in tone. She suffered, he wrote, because she had clung to “an Eroneous [sic] notion of things as Respected yourself … your ideas soar’d too high for anything in your own Country which of course must have given offence to all around you & consequently must have been Disagreeable to your own Family.” If Betsy would only adjust her expectations to fit the realities of life in Baltimore, she could find a measure of contentment. “How happy would Millions of Millions be,” he reminded her, “if they had the same Means that you have in your Power.”

  Chapter Ten

  “For This Life There Is Nothing but Disappointment”

  Betsy took no consolation from the thought that “Millions of Millions” might envy her situation. True, she had sufficient means to live comfortably in Baltimore, but could she find a way to accumulate enough to return to Europe? It seemed unlikely. Betsy had returned to an America that was in the throes of a financial crisis as severe as her own. Agricultural prices had fallen dramatically, especially in the cotton states, and this had a ripple effect: credit grew tight, and foreclosures on farms across the country began. Soon banks began to fail. In 1819 a full-fledged panic would grip the nation, but already in 1817 fortunes were being lost, and Betsy’s uncle, Samuel Smith, was among those who were ruined in the first wave of the crisis. Although her own cautious investment habits ensured that she was not wiped out, her resources seemed inadequate to fulfill her desires.

  Betsy understood both her own and the nation’s economic situation far better than many middle-class or elite women. For whether her fortunes rose or fell, she had played an active role in managing her own finances ever since her pension from Napoleon began in 1808. She had followed the economic upswings and downturns both at home and abroad with a concentration that matched her father’s. In her careful husbanding of her wealth, in her active study of the relative worth of stocks and bonds and real estate investments, she would reveal time after time how deeply she had become implicated in the very moneymaking American culture that she criticized. Her letters to her father, brothers, and the family members managing her investments at home were regularly filled with sharp questions about the relative merits of stocks, real estate properties, and government bonds. She kept detailed records of her expenditures, weighing the cost of repairs to her rental properties and measuring the returns on treasury bonds. She followed political developments with a watchful eye and often commented on their impact on economic conditions. An ungenerous father and a faithless husband had forced financial independence upon her, and her survival required her to be as clever about wealth as any of the men whose brains she declared were clogged with thoughts of commerce.

  Betsy was probably unaware of the inherent contradiction between her behavior and her ideology, but she was all too painfully aware of her misery in Baltimore. Despite the danger that she would have to deplete her capital, she was determined to return to Europe as soon as possible. A second trip abroad was necessary, she decided, not simply for her sanity but for Bo’s future. In 1818 he was a young man of fourteen and in need of a proper education. When her good friend the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin suggested she consider educating Bo in Geneva, she saw a chance to justify an escape from the tedium of her native city. She and Bo would go to Europe, where she would enroll him in one of Switzerland’s excellent schools. The decision was a bit reckless, given her financial situation, but the ennui and despair that had settled over her made her bold.

  By May 1819, as the economic depression deepened across the United States, Betsy and Bo were on their way to Europe. The most convenient route for mother and son would have been to travel through France to Geneva. But to Betsy’s surprise, the French government refused to grant Bo a passport. Unlike his mother, Bo carried Bonaparte blood in his veins, and this was enough to disturb the officials of the restored monarchy. The fact that Bo bore a striking resemblance to his notorious uncle, Napoleon, hardened the government’s resolve. A roundabout route—and for added security, false identities—was necessary. Thus in June 1819 a “Mrs. Patterson” and her son “Edward Patterson” arrived in Amsterdam. From there they made their way through Germany to Switzerland.

  Arriving in Geneva, Betsy was immediately convinced of the wisdom of Gallatin’s advice. She wasted no time enrolling her son in a school and finding accommodations for herself. She settled into a small but pleasant apartment in town, big enough for Bo to spend weekends with her.

  Betsy was enthusiastic about her son’s new situation, but Bo was far less satisfied. Unlike his mother, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte had a strong and conflict-free attachment to his grandfather William Patterson. William, in turn, had come to dote on his grandson, so much so that he had made the unusually generous gesture of paying for Bo’s schooling in Maryland during Betsy’s first trip abroad. Despite the novelty of his own first trip to Europe, Bo was homesick for his grandfather and for the comfortable, predictable life in Baltimore that William had provided. He was soon assuring his grandfather th
at he would return home as soon as his education was complete. “I shall hasten over to America,” he wrote, admitting that he regretted ever leaving it.

  Bo’s longing for home, genuine though it might be, was not based entirely on his emotional attachment to family, friends, and familiar places. Like his father, Bo was growing into a young man given to extravagances, but his mother’s limited resources required life on a tight budget. He quickly learned that he could not live in Geneva in as grand a style as he had in Baltimore. Betsy, who lived a relatively Spartan life in a four-room apartment, with only one servant, was willing to sacrifice in order to provide for Bo’s tuition, lodgings, and a host of gentlemanly lessons like fencing and riding. But she was not willing to indulge her son’s whims. She was, in fact, appalled by his cavalier attitude toward money, especially her money. She found it necessary to lower his expectations: when, for instance, he asked for a horse, she bought him a dog instead. Providing a home for this pet, Betsy reasoned, would be far less expensive than renting space in a stable, even if she did indulge the dog with sheets and pillows for its bed.

  With Bo settled at school, Betsy could investigate the city’s social possibilities. She discovered, to her delight, that many of the Russian and Polish aristocrats who had befriended her in Paris were now in residence in Geneva. Among them were the philanthropist Karl Viktor von Bonstetten, Princess Alexandra Gallitzin, and the aging Nicolay Demidov, rumored to be the richest man in Europe, whom Betsy seemed to genuinely care for and admire. Delighted to see their American friend, this circle of Europeans happily included Betsy in their endless rounds of dinners, parties, balls, and amateur theatrical performances. Writing to his grandfather, Bo reported that “Mamma goes out nearly every night to a party or a ball.”