Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte

She was a Baltimore legend, a curiosity, walking slowly down the streets of the city in the 1870s, her trademark red parasol high above her head to protect her from sun or rain or, in winter weather, draped carefully over one arm. On the other arm, she carried an ornate, elaborately embellished bag that, it was rumored, held all her jewels. Her dress was no longer fashionable, perhaps made in that bygone era when Napoleon dominated Europe and America was little more than a fledgling nation. No matter; it was clear she had once been a great beauty, and even in her old age, she conveyed an elegance and a sense of superiority that captured admiration as well as curiosity. As she stopped at one building and then the next, rapping on doors and demanding the rent owed to her by tenants, passersby might have recognized her as their city’s first celebrity, Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte.

Had those same passersby followed her home after her business was completed, they would have once again marveled at her eccentricity. Despite all the property she owned, both in the city and in surrounding areas, she abhorred the idea of setting up a household and had chosen to live in a rented room on the top floor of a stranger’s home. The small room was crowded with ornate furniture, every surface covered with souvenirs, the
single closet bulging with faded ball gowns that had been worn in the heady days after France’s emperor was sent into exile. And there, in an atmosphere heavy with memory and nostalgia, they would have found her, poised to tell her story with the same wit and sense of irony and the same sharp powers of observation that had always been as much a part of her as her beauty and her ambition. She had lived a long and remarkable life—and she knew she had a remarkable story to tell.

Wondrous Beauty
tells that story. It begins like a fairy tale of old: he was a dashing French naval officer who was the youngest brother of the great Napoleon Bonaparte; she was Baltimore’s most beautiful belle, a seventeen-year-old eager to escape both the humdrum society of her native city and an overbearing father. They met. They fell in love as perhaps only teenagers then and now can do. Despite her father’s serious misgivings and the French consul’s blunt warning that Napoleon would not approve, Elizabeth Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte married on Christmas Eve 1803. “We are not meant to be separate,” Jérôme had declared—and yet they soon were. For there was no happily-ever-after to this romantic tale. In 1805, Napoleon annulled the marriage and sent the weak-willed Jérôme off to marry a German princess. Betsy, now the mother of an infant son, returned to America, an abandoned woman.

But if the fairy tale ended here, Betsy’s story was just beginning. Her abandonment transformed her from a naïve girl into a fiercely independent woman. She refused to play the penitent, eager to make amends for poor judgment and youthful rebellion. Instead, when Napoleon was languishing on Elba, and his
ban on her entering Europe was at last lifted, she crossed the Atlantic once again. She spent much of the next four decades in London, Geneva, Rome, and Paris. The celebrity she had once acquired in America because of her marriage was equaled by her celebrity in the ballrooms and salons of Europe; her tragic tale of betrayal, her beauty, her intelligence, and her wit proved as powerful a passport into the aristocratic society of the Old World as a wedding ring from Jérôme Bonaparte might have done. The belle of Baltimore became the belle of Europe.

Betsy never criticized the emperor who had destroyed her marriage. But she did not spare American society as she did Napoleon. Her stinging critiques of American mores and morals filled the pages of her letters home. She missed no opportunity to contrast the glamour and elegance of aristocratic European life with the pedestrian world of American shopkeepers and their wives. She condemned America as gauche and boring, its men too preoccupied with moneymaking to appreciate wit and good conversation, too democratic in their values to acknowledge the superiority of birth and breeding. Most of all, she condemned a gender ideal that demanded a woman’s devotion to her husband and family, that confined her world to the parlor and the nursery, and that denied her the public space enjoyed by the women of the French salons. Even in her old age, when she had returned to her native city, Betsy continued to convey a certainty that she, no less than Henry Adams, was fated to remain a stranger in a familiar land.

Despite her efforts, Betsy could not instill in her son or his sons the same alienation from America and the same intense
pride in carrying the Bonaparte name. For them, being the American Bonapartes proved as much a burden as a blessing. They embraced American culture and married American women—choices that Betsy read as betrayals as wounding as her husband’s abandonment. As the Bonaparte fortunes fell and rose again in France, Betsy continued to cling to her dream that one day the American Bonapartes would take their place in that family’s reviving power and privilege. This delusion was the burden she could not escape.

Perhaps Betsy’s son and grandsons saw the ironic contradictions between her ideology and her behavior that she could not see. For despite her avowed distaste for American culture, she embodied many of its central values. She condemned her country’s obsession with moneymaking, yet she proved to be a shrewd investor, carefully monitoring her assets, following interest rates and economic trends. She built a fortune based on government bonds and real estate that led to her emerging as a self-made woman in a world of self-made men. And although she exhorted her son to marry into the European nobility, she provided him with a Harvard education to ensure that he could make his way in the American meritocracy. Like expatriates in later generations, she carried American values with her no matter where she fled to escape them.

In the end, Betsy’s story is a woman’s story, for it captures the difficulty women of the early nineteenth century faced in constructing independent lives within a country that lauded self-interest and self-fulfillment for its men but confinement and sacrifice for their wives. What prompted her to cross the Atlantic
Ocean was the promise of opportunities that an American woman could not hope to enjoy if she remained in her native land: intellectual freedom, the chance to establish an individual identity, and the right to exist not as a bundle of female duties or behaviors but as a unique person. She wished to be more than “female”; she wished to be Elizabeth.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte’s story began, as so many American stories still do, with an immigrant’s arrival. The man who would become Elizabeth’s father, William Patterson, was a perfect example of the economic opportunities the new republic promised and sometimes delivered. He arrived in Philadelphia in 1766, a penniless fourteen-year-old, a Scots-Irish castaway from that poorest of British possessions, Ireland. But what he lacked in education or family wealth, he made up for in raw ambition and keen business sense. As an apprentice in a countinghouse, he did not waste time, as many of his peers did, drinking or playing cards after hours; instead, he sought the company of older men, established merchants who could add to his knowledge of the buying, shipping, and selling of goods. He kept a keen eye out for the main chance, scrimping and saving while he waited for fortune to smile on him. His first good luck came in the form of the American Revolution.

William had no interest in enlisting in the army as many young men would soon do. Indeed, throughout his life he boasted that he had none of the civic pride that drove poor men to military service or rich men to philanthropy. As war approached, he wanted neither glory nor adventure. He wanted wealth and respectability. And he reckoned that a man who
invested his money in the purchase and sale of European arms and ammunition could acquire both. At twenty-two, William Patterson risked his entire savings on shares in two vessels headed to France to purchase the weapons that the American army so desperately needed. Where his money went, William was determined to go as well, and thus the budding entrepreneur took passage in one of the ships.

On the return voyage, which carried the ships first to the West Indies, fortune smiled on William once again. Here, on foreign-owned islands like the Dutch St. Eustatius, military supplies could be warehoused before final sale and shipment to the American forces. A fine profit could be made for the middlemen in this process, and William meant to make it. His two ships sailed home, but Patterson remained in the Caribbean for eighteen months. With remarkable speed, his fortune grew, and so did his rejection of the risk-taking attitude that had begun his climb up the economic ladder.

In truth, by the age of twenty-five, Patterson had become that oxymoron, a cautious entrepreneur. He had worked hard to acquire his fortune, and he intended to keep it all. A strong fatalist streak ran through his philosophy: men could fall as quickly as they could rise, and the man who owned a mansion was only one foolish or impetuous step away from the beggar outside its doors. He did not plan to wind up on the outside looking in ever again.