Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (16 page)

Those who knew Bo well were not surprised by his actions. Even William, who loved Bo deeply, recognized that his grandson lacked the qualities that defined a self-made man. Bo was “
by nature rather indolent and without much ambition” and thus had chosen a path that suited his character. Betsy’s brother Edward had also taken his nephew’s measure over the years and wrote that the marriage was, as Bo himself conceded to his mother, “a mercenary transaction altogether and carried through in a purely mercantile spirit.” And where was the surprise in that? Edward asked. What else was to be expected when there was “a total want of ambition in Jerome and an inordinate desire of wealth on his part”?

It was, of course, Betsy, not Bo, who shared William’s pride in being self-made, in succeeding through her own efforts. But she had not seen what both her father and her brother had seen in Bo’s character. She had always viewed her son through the halo glow of her own hopes and dreams for an only child. She had planned meticulously, fervently, for his future without a clear picture of his inclinations, his interests, or his abilities. Now, rather than accepting Bo as he was, she nurtured an intense sense of betrayal.

On December 21 she dropped all pretense that she was reconciled to events. She would never condone the marriage, she told her father. She would not disown Bo, as she believed William had disowned her—he was her legitimate heir, and she would do her duty as his mother. But she would no longer sacrifice for her son. She would spend all the funds that her investments spun off each year on herself. “
I have gained my fortune by the strictest economy—by privations of every kind,” she declared,
and she would not see the fruits of her labor go to “strangers” like Susan Williams. Her anger, her sense of betrayal by an ungrateful son, was a distant, ironic echo of Napoleon Bonaparte’s reaction to her marriage to his favorite brother.

Disturbing as Bo’s marriage was, it was not the only surprising event that 1829 would bring to the life of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte. For in the same year that Bo married for money, his mother fell in love. At forty-four, despite all her protestations that love was sheer foolishness, out of fashion even among novelists and poets, Betsy began a romance with a young Russian named Prince Alexander Mikhailovich Gorchakov.

Prince Gorchakov was a thirty-one-year-old attaché at the Russian embassy in Florence. He was blond and handsome, with a high forehead and eyes that revealed a deep and probing intelligence. He would rise to be the chancellor of the Russian Empire under Tsar Alexander II, but in the 1820s his career was just beginning. He shared with Betsy a disdain for insipid gossip and a love of serious conversation. He also shared with her a tendency to hide his more serious nature from others, to take on a flirtatious persona that charmed but kept those he charmed at arm’s length. Betsy quickly recognized in him the same depths she knew to exist in herself.
“A duller person,” she told him, “could not have seen through the mist with which your caprice and impertinence envelope you.”

Betsy’s attraction to Gorchakov shone through in the undated description of him she kept for the rest of her life: it spoke of his “unique simplicity,” his “generous sentiments,” and his exquisite taste. Yet Betsy knew his faults as well as his virtues: he was
intensely ambitious and vain, two qualities that defined her as precisely as they did the prince. And just as Betsy enjoyed being courted by men, Gorchakov was a man who wished all women to adore him, even if he felt no love for them in return. To win his love, Betsy declared, a woman “must be beautiful, spirited,” and she must be in demand and fashionable and be considered as charming by others as by himself. This portrait of Gorchakov’s ideal woman fit Betsy perfectly.

So many men had courted Betsy over the decades, but none had stirred her emotions as Gorchakov did. In Alexander she had found a man not only as charming as she, but as intelligent. For months, the pair engaged in spirited arguments about philosophy, politics, and poetry. Often their discussions collapsed into heated argument, for he was as stubbornly confident of his views as she was of hers. When they were not debating the merits of a poem or a philosophical principle, they challenged each other in contests of wit and penned word portraits of friends and enemies.

Watching Alexander and Betsy, their Russian friends knew they were witnessing the sparring of brilliant equals and the electricity of a doomed attraction. It was clear to all that the relationship would not, could not, end in marriage, for Alexander had to marry a woman of the Russian aristocracy if he hoped to fulfill his ambitions as a national leader.

Alexander’s solution to their dilemma was as simple as it was acceptable to the society in which they traveled: Betsy must become his mistress. But Betsy refused. Like Caesar’s wife, she had taken care, since her marriage to Jérôme ended, to lead a
life above reproach. No matter how tempted she was now, she would do nothing that might cast doubt on her moral character. She guarded her honor carefully, for to do otherwise would suggest that Napoleon had annulled her marriage on moral grounds. For Betsy’s pride, and for her son’s reputation, the annulment must stand as a purely political decision. Thus through all the years since Jérôme abandoned her, despite all the suitors, all the men who longed to bed her or to marry her, none, not even Alexander Gorchakov, would succeed.

In 1834 Betsy left Europe. Her romance with Alexander Gorchakov was long over, and the charms of the continent had paled. A cholera epidemic, begun in 1826, still raged, taking thousands upon thousands of lives. Many of her friends had fled to the countryside, leaving Paris, Rome, and Florence in hopes of avoiding the gruesome death that reminded many of the bubonic plague. The political and social face of Europe was, in Betsy’s view, equally blighted. The July Revolution of 1830 had created a constitutional monarchy in France, and the new king, Louis-Philippe, now ruled as “King of the French” rather than as the French king. The implication was clear: France’s citizens were sovereign, and the king they put on the throne must rule in their best interest. The revolution in France sparked revolutions in the Netherlands, Belgium, and Poland. Cholera was thus not the only epidemic sweeping across the continent; democracy was threatening to make bloodlines less important in Europe than the ability to amass wealth.

In America, William Patterson had watched the turmoil produced by these events with concern—and a measure of satisfaction at the crumbling of the world his daughter had so admired. “
Every thing is turning upside down in Europe,” he wrote as the
July Revolution’s impact began to be felt across that continent, and there would be “confusion & distress … before things can settle down in any regular way.” He predicted, “It is not likely there will be a crowned head left except at the will of the people,” for “they are all looking forward to independence & Republicanism & nothing short of this will satisfy them.” He clearly felt that Europe was becoming more American every day.

Betsy’s response to the declining power of Europe’s aristocrats was a measure of how consumed with bitterness and anger she had become in the wake of Bo’s marriage and the loss of Alexander. In her darkest mood, she proclaimed her hope that the aristocratic classes would at last experience the suffering she had long endured. “
Let them all descend from their rank & try the disgusting life as citizens,” she wrote to her friend and financial manager, John White. Why should they escape the “blighted existence” she had endured? The weariness that this attack on the aristocrats who had befriended her conveyed was no romantic posturing; in 1834 she felt “old, enfeebled by misery of every sort, soured by disappointments, disgusted with the Past, despairing of a future which can afford me nothing.”

In America, a different plague seemed to be spreading, and the entire national economy appeared to be in chaos. The nation’s president, Andrew Jackson, had done battle with the Bank of the United States and had won: he vetoed the renewal of a charter for this financial institution, created by Alexander Hamilton in the 1790s. But in slaying what he called the dragon of economic privilege, he unleashed economic instability, panic, and depression. William Patterson used the economic crisis as
an occasion to reprimand his daughter. “
We are in great confusion and distress in this country,” he told her, adding that “there is no saying how it may end, or that it may not ultimately bring about a revolution. Your presence here is absolutely necessary to look after your affairs and property, and the sooner the better.” For once, Betsy decided her father was right.

The America she was returning to had, like Europe, experienced a surge of democratic reform. In a land whose credo was now more solidly egalitarian and whose feminine ideal was more firmly domestic, Betsy’s aristocratic tastes would continue to alienate neighbors and family. She knew she had no choice but to return to Baltimore and manage her property there, yet she could not accept now, any more than she could in the past, her father’s conviction that “
sweet home and the natural intercourse and connexion with our family is, after all, the only chance for happiness in this world.”

By 1834, Betsy had felt the winds of change on both continents. But perhaps the change that shook her most deeply was an intimate one: her father had grown old. In a letter in August 1833, Nancy Spear had warned Betsy what to expect: “
Your Father is excessively old & miserably infirm.” But the shock of seeing the man who had so dominated her life for what he now was—lonely and feeble—must have been great. A decade before, the Patterson patriarch had found himself in a house empty except for a mistress. To remedy his loneliness, he had brought his son Henry to live with him. But it was his attachment to Betsy, expressed as always in a potent mix of criticism and disapproval, that remained his most intense emotional connection.
Now in old age, he revealed to Nancy Spear the longing that lay beneath the surface of that criticism. “He frequently talks of you to me & of your leaving him,” she told Betsy. It was time, she continued, to heal the breach. “I wish most ardently you would forgive him for your own sake as well as his, for he is almost childish.”

William’s recent letters to his daughter revealed the twisted expression of this need. “
How could you have neglected the duty of writing for so long a time,” he wrote in perverse welcome to the news that his daughter was returning home. This reprimand was followed by the surprising confession that “it still affords me much pleasure to have heard from you at length.”

Betsy’s relationship with her father was not the only emotional Gordian knot she faced. She had not seen her only child since they said their goodbyes in 1825. Now in 1834, Bo was not only a husband but also the father of a four-year-old boy. Betsy could not forgive his marriage, and she could not accept Susan May Williams into her family, yet she found herself drawn to her grandson, the third male in her life to carry the name Jerome Bonaparte. As this Jerome grew older, he would find many of her old dreams of greatness rewoven around him as they had once been woven around his father.

In the winter of 1835, the long war—and its brief, fragile truce—between Betsy and her father at last ended. William Patterson died that February, leaving behind a will that testified to his enduring anger at a daughter who would not accede to his wishes, heed his advice, or lead a life he could approve. When the will was published in the local newspaper, his condemnation
of Betsy became a matter of public record. Despite his promise in her marriage contract of 1803, she would not receive an equal share of his estate. “
The conduct of my daughter Betsey has through life been so disobedient that in no instance has she ever consulted my opinions or feelings; indeed, she has caused me more anxiety and trouble than all my other children put together, and her folly and misconduct have occasioned me a train of expense that first and last has cost me much money. Under such circumstances it would not be reasonable, just, or proper that she should inherit and participate in an equal proportion with my other children in an equal division of my estate.” Insult was then added to injury, for William announced a willingness to temper justice with mercy: “Considering, however, the weakness of human nature, and that she is still my daughter,” he had chosen not to entirely exclude her from a share in his property.

Had William failed to revise his will in that last year, when Betsy had come home to him? Would he have removed its condemnation and punishment had death not come upon him so soon after his daughter’s return? No one will ever know. But Betsy’s resentment and hurt could still be felt years later when she wrote: “
The clause in his will which relates to myself plainly betrays the embarrassment of a loaded conscience, & of a bad cause.” Her anger was as enduring as his, her condemnation as complete: “He had violated every principle of honour & of equity to make a ruin of my ambition, of my hopes & of my happiness. & it has ever been a principle in human nature that men cannot forgive those to whom they have been guilty of
great cruelty, perfidy & injustice.” In her mind, William’s animosity toward her was a companion sin to his contemptuous infidelity to her mother: “The grave of my Mother had never interposed a barrier between herself & this malignant & relentless hatred with which he had pursued her from the day of her fatal marriage to him.” With this will, he had meted out his vengeance from the grave, hoping to drown Betsy’s defense of herself—not as he had done with his wife, through a demand for feminine submission, but with his “falsehood, persecution, injustice & calumny.” Still, Betsy felt a sense of triumph, for, in their battle of wills, she had always been his equal. “He had flattered himself,” she wrote, “that his firmness of purpose & his cunning could defraud Death of the right to freeze that torrent of injuries & of misfortunes of which he my father had been to me the first, the copious & the unfailing Source,” yet he had defeated neither death nor Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte.