Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (21 page)

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 to 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.

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.

The American Bonapartes seemed to settle into their anonymity with sighs of relief. Junior, who resigned his commission in the French cavalry and returned to his native country, appeared content to enjoy the prosperous and respectable life relished by his father and his maternal grandfather before him. With his wife, Caroline Leroy Appleton Edgar Bonaparte, the granddaughter of one of antebellum America’s greatest orators and political figures, Daniel Webster, Junior lived out the century
as a businessman, released at last from his grandmother’s ambitions.

By the time Junior’s son, the fourth to carry the name Jerome Bonaparte, came of age, the burden of Betsy’s ambitions had been entirely lifted. This Jerome entertained no thoughts of an active connection to his European relatives; he was American born and bred. In 1914, as a new war appeared on Europe’s horizon, he married an American divorcée and made his home in Washington, D.C. The only member of the Bonaparte family to achieve a place in European nobility was his sister, Louise Eugenie, who married a Danish count, Adam Comte de Molke-Huitfeldt. When she died in 1923, at the age of forty-nine, she left behind five children who were not newsworthy in America.

William Patterson’s devotion to respectability seemed to run in the veins of Betsy’s descendants, but there were signs that her pride in bearing the name Bonaparte was not entirely absent. Her son, after all, could be seen until his death in 1870 riding in an elegant carriage that carried his mother’s unofficial coat of arms on its doors. And his grandson raised his family in a home on Washington’s K Street so lavish that neighbors dubbed it “Chateau Bonaparte.”

Still, it was not a Jerome but a Charles Bonaparte who brought the family name to national prominence once again. This second son of Jerome and Susan Bonaparte, born twenty years after his older brother, grew up in a new, modernizing America, far more confident of itself than the fledgling republic that had seen potential danger in a seventeen-year-old’s marriage to Napoleon’s brother. Charles was a Harvard junior in
1871, the year his brother married and Napoleon III lost his throne. As a young boy, Charley had been Betsy Bonaparte’s favorite oceanside companion, and as an adult, he became her trusted business manager. But in 1875 he too disappointed his grandmother by taking Ellen Channing Day, the daughter of an attorney, as his wife.

Charles was a lawyer—and by all accounts a brilliant one. He opened his practice in Baltimore, but having inherited a fortune from his grandmother, he had no need to take on cases that brought in huge fees. Instead he established himself as a champion of justice. He joined the Baltimore Reform League and the Maryland Civil Service League, thus aligning himself with one of the major reform efforts of the Gilded Age. With other civil service reformers, he campaigned to replace a patronage system that led to the corrupt and inefficient operations of government with a nonpartisan test of competency for appointees. The Pendleton Act of 1883 marked the movement’s first major success. In 1889 Charles met Theodore Roosevelt, who was then serving on the relatively new Civil Service Commission. The two Harvard alums became close friends, and when Roosevelt became president, he appointed Charles Bonaparte to the Board of Indian Commissioners. Soon afterward he made Charles a special prosecutor in cases of fraud in the postal service. By 1905 Charles Bonaparte had entered Roosevelt’s cabinet as secretary of the navy, and the following year, at age forty-five, he was sworn in as U.S. attorney general.

As attorney general, Charles produced an impressive record. He appeared before the Supreme Court more than five hundred
times and delivered more than a hundred opinions on a broad range of legal matters to the president. His prosecution of cases under the antitrust laws earned him a national reputation as one of Teddy Roosevelt’s “trust busters.” During his years with the Justice Department, he mounted a crusade to improve law enforcement by creating special agents under his direction. The result was a Bureau of Investigation; its agents became known as “G Men,” and the bureau was the precursor of the FBI.