The Ambitious Madame Bonaparte (48 page)

Shaking his head, Bo whispered, “No. My cowardice.”

“Don’t think of it anymore.”

Despite her reassurance, Bo retained a troubled expression. After a moment, he released a shuddering sigh. “Are you sorry—married Father?”

“How could I be when he gave me such a fine son as you? You have always been my shining prince.”

Closing his eyes, Bo grew so still that Betsy thought he had fallen asleep. After a minute, though, he shook his head. “No. Denied me.”

Betsy patted his hand, knowing exactly what he meant. After Bo’s cousin Louis-Napoleon, the son of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense, became Emperor Napoleon III, he had restored Bo’s French citizenship and made it legal for him to use the Bonaparte name in France. Bo had not, however, been included in the imperial line of succession, so he and Betsy had filed suit in the French courts after Jerome died. In spite of all the documentation they were able to produce—the original marriage contract, the love letters from Jerome to Betsy, and years of correspondence from the Bonapartes greeting Bo as dear son, grandson, brother, nephew, and cousin—the ruling went against them.

“Never mind that now. We did our best. Refusing to make you an heir was their mistake, which they will regret eternally if Plon-Plon ever becomes emperor.” In spite of his pain, Bo smiled at the disparaging nickname for his universally disliked half-brother. “Besides, I hope that Jerome Jr.’s obvious worth and service to France may eventually induce the imperial family to reverse their decision in his favor.”

Shaking his head, Bo said, “You never change.”

“I set my feet upon a certain course the day I met your father, and I have never deviated from it.”

Sighing, Bo closed his eyes. Knowing that this might very well be their last meeting, Betsy wanted to sit with him for hours, but she could tell from the shadows beneath his eyes and the lines etched by his mouth that he was exhausted. Reluctantly, she rose. “I will let you rest.”

Bo stirred and met her gaze. “I love you, dearest Mama.”

“I love you too, my boy.”

Betsy smoothed back his hair, taking some slight comfort in the fact that he still wore the upswept hairstyle she had given him as a boy, and then she kissed his forehead in a gesture of farewell. As Charley led her from the bed, her daughter-in-law stepped in front of her. Although Susan May’s face held no warmth, she whispered, “Thank you,” and Betsy felt they had made peace at last.

Out in the hall, Betsy gave way to tears and Charley held her close. “Don’t cry, Grandmama. Papa loves you.”

Pulling away, Betsy nodded and wiped her eyes. “Thank you for trying to comfort your poor old grandmother. You are exceptionally adult for your years. At your age, your grandfather thought of nothing but amusement.”

“You and Grandpapa must have made quite a pair.” Charley tucked her hand in his arm again. “I wish I could have seen you when you were young and taking society by storm.”

“We were as thoughtless and vain as peacocks.” Thinking of her son lying on his deathbed, Betsy reflected how strange it was that, with herself and Jerome as parents, Bo should have turned out to be such an unambitious man. He had wanted nothing more than a quiet life on his country estate, raising his sons and breeding his horses. “A pair of peacocks who somehow gave birth to a house sparrow.”

“Father is a good fellow, and he is proud of being a Bonaparte even if he did not want to live in Europe.” Charley’s voice cracked. “I am going to miss him dreadfully.”

Pressing herself tightly against his arm, Betsy murmured, “We will miss him together.”

Charley drove her to Mrs. Jenkins’s boarding house and helped her up to her rooms, where he settled her into the rocking chair he had given her on her last birthday. Then Betsy asked him to drag the trunk that held her most precious mementos so that it stood next to her. She did not open it right away.

Remembering a long ago ball in Florence when Gorchakov had watched with thinly masked jealously while she danced with the French writer Lamartine, Betsy murmured, “Once I had everything but money. Now money is all I have left.”

“Grandmama, that isn’t true.” Charley squatted before her and took herhands. “You have Jerome Jr. and you have me. We will always love you.”

“Thank you, my boy,” she murmured, grateful for the reassurance and yet not entirely satisfied. How could she tell this nineteen-year-old boy, who knew her only as a grandmother, that she had always longed for more than a merely domestic existence?

Charley rose. “Shall I come back tomorrow to fetch you for another visit?”

Betsy shook her head. “No, your father and I have said what we needed to say to one another. To see him again would only upset us both needlessly.”

“If you say so, Grandmama. But I shall look in on you just the same.”

After he left, Betsy opened her trunk. On the very top, wrapped in tissue paper, was the dress in which she had been married. Directly beneath it lay Jerome’s purple wedding coat. Fingering the plush velvet, she thought back to the first time she danced with him and the way her necklace had caught on his uniform. “Do you see,
chère mademoiselle?”
he had whispered. “Fate has brought us together, and we are destined never to part.”

Betsy closed her eyes, and almost immediately, her imagination carried her to another place, to Napoleonic France at the height of the emperor’s power. In her vision, she was still young and beautiful, and her husband was at her side. Together they crossed the parquet floor of an imposing reception room decorated with red draperies, neoclassical paintings, and gilt moldings. Crowds of courtiers watched their progress, but she and Jerome kept their gaze fixed straight ahead on a gilded throne with a round back that held a uniformed man who, although of no great physical height, towered over all of Europe by virtue of his genius. When they reached the dais on which he sat, his grey eyes drilled into Betsy. Jerome introduced her, and she made a deep curtsy. Napoleon rose and, taking her by the hand, raised her up and kissed her on each cheek.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank the Maryland Historical Society for preserving the Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte papers and for giving me permission to quote from them. I am grateful to the staff of Homewood House Museum on the campus of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and to the guides at Fort McHenry for historic information that helped shape this novel.

My intrepid team of readers made many helpful suggestions. My gratitude goes to Ginni Davis, Susan Eisenhammer, Kate Elledge, Steve Hillis, Deb Modde, Lise Nauman, and Erika Nicketakis. I also want to thank Sid Allen-Simpson, Rich Elliot, Richard Halstead, and Chris Johnson for useful and timely advice. Kathryn Ariano provided an invaluable service as my Baltimore-based research assistant.

I owe very special thanks to the wonderful people at Amika Press: to Jay Amberg for giving me a chance to bring this story to completion, to John Manos for insightful editorial suggestions, and to Sarah Koz for creative design work.

Last but not least, I want to thank my husband, Michael Chatlien, for being a reader, critic, cheerleader, and travel companion on the journey of discovery that was this novel.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BIOGRAPHIES OF BETSY, JEROME AND BO

Atteridge, A. Hilliard.
Napoleon’s Brothers.
London: Methuen & Co, 1909.

Bourguignon-Frasseto, Claude.
Betsy Bonaparte: The Belle of Baltimore.
1988. Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2003.

Burn, Helen Jean.
Betsy Bonaparte.
Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 2010.

Didier, Eugene L. “An American Bonaparte.”
The International Review.
Volume II. July 1881.

Didier, Eugene L.
The Life and Letters of Madame Bonaparte.
New York: Scribner’s, 1879.

Lewis, Charlene M. Boyer.
Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte: An American Aristocrat in the Early Republic.
Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2012

Mitchell, S.
A Family Lawsuit: The Story of Elisabeth Patterson and Jérôme Bonaparte.
New York: Farrar, Straus, & Cudahy, 1958.

Saffell, W.T.R.
The Bonaparte-Patterson Marriage in 1803 and the Secret Correspondence on the Subject Never Before Made Public.
Philadelphia: privately published, 1873.

Sergeant, Philip W.
The Burlesque
Napoleon.
London: T. Werner Laurie, 1905.

HISTORIES, MEMOIRS, AND OTHER RESOURCES

Adams, Henry.
History of the United States in 1800.
Library of America, Book 31. New York: Library of America, 1986.

Arthur, Catherine Rogers and Cindy Kelly.
Homewood House.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

Beirne, Francis. F.
The Amiable Baltimoreans.
1951. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1984.

Callcott, Margaret Law, editor.
Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert 1795–1821.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1991.

Childs, Frances Sergeant.
French Refugee Life in the United States 1790–1800: An American Chapter of the French Revolution.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins P, 1940.

Côté, Richard N.
Strength and Honor: The Life of Dolley Madison.
Mount Pleasant, SC: Corinthian, 2005.

Cronin, Vincent.
Napoleon.
1971. London: Harpercollins, 1994.

Dungan, Nicholas.
Gallatin: America’s Swiss Founding Father.
New York: New York UP, 2010.

Gallatin, James.
The Diary of James Gallatin, Secretary to Albert Gallatin: A Great Peace Maker: 1813–1827.
New York: Scribners, 1916.

Hayward, Mary Ellen and Frank R. Shivers, Jr.
The Architecture of Baltimore: An Illustrated History.
Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois Duc de. Translated by J.W. Willis Bund and J. Hain Friswell.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims.
London: Simpson Low, Son, and Marston, 1871.

Lay, K. Edward.
The Architecture of Jefferson Country: Charlottesville and Albemarle County, Virginia.
Richmond: UP of Virginia, 2000.

LeFever, Gregory. “Men’s Pocketbooks.”
Early American Life.
December 2007.

Lord, Walter.
The Dawn’s Early Light.
1972. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1994.

Maude, John.
Visit to the Falls of Niagara in 1800.
London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown, & Green, 1800.

Monroe, James.
The Writings of James Monroe, Volume V, 1807-1816.
Edited by Stanislaus Murray Hamilton. New York: Putnam, 1901.

Morgan, Sydney.
Lady Morgan’s Memoirs: Autobiography, Diaries, and Correspondence.
London: Allen & Co., 1862.

Parton, James.
Daughters of Genius.
Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers. 1886.

Perkins, Mary Mendenhall. “The Marble Bath of Jerome Napoleon.”
Art and Achaeology.
Volume 12. July 1921

Rath, Molly. “You Never Know What Will Turn up Among the Collectibles at the Maryland Historical Society.”
Baltimore Sun.
November 20, 1994.

Reynolds, William.
A Brief History of the First Presbyterian Church of Baltimore.
Baltimore: Session of the First Presbyterian Church, 1913.

Wake, Jehanne.
Sisters of Fortune: America’s Caton Sisters at Home and Abroad.
New York: Touchstone, 2010.

Wass, Ann Buermann and Michelle Webb Fandrich.
Clothing Through American History: The Federal Era Through Antebellum, 1786–1860.
Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2010.

COPYRIGHT INFORMATION

The novel contains excerpts from several of the letters written by the people whose lives are the basis for this story as well as other documents from the time. The sources for those letters and documents are listed below. If a letter does not appear in this list, I wrote it.—RHC

VI

Anonymous writer to William Patterson. In W.T.R. Saffell.
The Bonaparte-Patterson Marriage in 1803 and the Secret Correspondence on the Subject Never Before Made Public.
Philiadelphia: privately published. 1873. 29–30. [Hereinafter, Saffell.]

XI

Robert Patterson to William Patterson, March 12, 1804. Saffell. 36–39.

XII

French government decree, 11 Ventose, 1804. In Eugene L. Didier.
The Life and Letters of Madame Bonaparte.
New York: Scribner’s. 1879. 16. [Hereinafter, Didier.]

XIV

Jerome Bonaparte to Minister Decrès, August 18, 1804. In Philip Sergeant.
The Burlesque Napoleon.
London: T. Werner Laurie. 1905. 87. [Hereinafter, Sergeant.]

XV

Robert Patterson to William Patterson, November 2, 1804. Saffell. 105.

Joseph Bonaparte to Jerome Bonaparte, October 19, 1804. Saffell. 103.

XVII

News article beginning “The beautiful wife of Jerome Bonaparte.”
London Times.
May 19, 1805.

Napoleon Bonaparte to Jerome Bonaparte, May 1805. Saffell. 212–213.

XIX

Alexandre Le Camus to William Patterson, June 12, 1805. Saffell. 195–196.

XX

Jerome Bonaparte to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. Letters of October 4, 1805; October 7, 1805; October 16, 1805. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Papers. MS 143. H. Furlong Baldwin Library. Maryland Historical Society. [Hereinafter, MdHS]

XXI

Jerome Bonaparte to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. Letters of May 23, 1806; June 20, 1806; July 17, 1806. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Papers. MS 143. MdHS.

XXIII

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to Robert Gilmor, Jr. September 30, 1807. Didier. 40.

Anna Kuhn to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. November 24, 1807. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Papers. MS 142. MdHS.

XXIV

Jerome Bonaparte to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. Letters of May 15, 1808; November 22, 1808. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Papers. MS 143. MdHS.

James Monroe to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte.
The Writings of James Monroe, Volume V, 1807–1816.
Edited by Stanislaus Murray Hamilton. New York: Putnam, 1901.

XXV

Napoleon Bonaparte to M. de Champagny. In
The Living Age.
Volume 215. Boston: The Living Age Company. 1897.

XXVII

Jerome Bonaparte to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, February 20, 1812. Sergeant. 111–112.

Jerome Bonaparte to Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte. February 20, 1812. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Papers. MS 143. MdHS.

XXX

Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. March 30, 1815. Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte Papers. MS 144. MdHS.

XXXI

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to William Patterson. September 2, 1815. Didier. 42–45.

William Patterson to Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. November 16, 1815. Didier. 50–51.

XXXIII

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to Pauline Bonaparte. March 25, 1820. Didier. 59–60.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to William Patterson. January 29–30, 1822. Didier. 90.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte. March 8, 1821. Didier. 96.

XXXIV

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to Lady Morgan, beginning, “I love him so entirely….” Didier. 118.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to William Patterson. February 21, 1826. Didier. 176–177.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to William Patterson. December 4, 1829. Didier. 219.

Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to William Patterson. December 21, 1829. Didier. 221.

Epilogue

Last Will and Testament of William Patterson. In James Parton.
Daughters of Genius.
Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers. 1886. 515–516.

READER DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

1. Had you ever heard of any of these people before reading this book? Were you surprised to learn that there were American Bonapartes?

2. What role does Odette’s prophecy play in the story? Do you think Betsy would have made the same choices if she hadn’t received it?

3. What was Betsy’s view of her mother’s life? How did her view of Dorcas’s circumstances shape her own decisions?

4. Betsy often says that fate brought her and Jerome together. Do you agree, or was that viewpoint just an excuse for her decisions?

5. How did you feel about Jerome’s character? Did your feelings about him change over the course of the book?

6. If Betsy had been reunited with Jerome, do you think they would have had a happy marriage? What do you think would have happened, and why?

7. For most of the story, Betsy is torn between the desire to win her father’s approval and the desire to break free of his domination. What events reveal this inner conflict?

8. What do you think was Betsy’s main reason—spoken or unspoken— for never marrying again?

9. What were Betsy’s strengths and weaknesses as a mother?

10. Why did Bo exclude Betsy from his marriage? How did you feel about the way he handled it?

11. Was Betsy as cruel to Susan May as Napoleon was to Betsy? Explain.

12. Betsy’s friend Eliza urges her to use her talents to achieve a meaningful life. In what ways did Betsy use her talents, and in what ways did she fail to do so? Did her failures stem more from her character or from society’s limits on women?

13. Whom do you blame most for the disappointments in Betsy’s life: Jerome, Napoleon, William Patterson, or Betsy herself?

14. Several times, Betsy says she does not intend to deviate from the course she set for her life, yet at times, she asks herself, “What could I have done differently?” If she were to ask you that question, how would you answer?