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.
By July 1778, William was ready to go home. But he did not head for Philadelphia; instead he made his way to the growing city of Baltimore, Maryland. Here, where he would live for the rest of his life, William began a pursuit of respectability and social status with the same steely ambition that had formerly marked his pursuit of wealth. Although his own parents had been Church of England, he joined the local Presbyterian church, for its pews were filled with the merchant elite of Baltimore. He built a fine brick home, and beside it he constructed his countinghouse. He took a final step to the gentility he craved—and believed he had earned—by marrying Dorcas Spear, a beautiful young woman with impeccable family credentials.
In choosing Dorcas as his wife, William had not allowed sentiment or affection to cloud his judgment. Despite the romantic revolution swirling around him that led genteel young men and women to seek a marriage built on affection and companionship, he saw wedlock as a simple matter of enhancing or consolidating economic or social advantage. What Dorcas thought of her new husband is unknown, for she left no record of her courtship or of her own motives for the marriage. But it is clear that she was many things William was not: cultured, well educated, socially secure. Through blood and marriage, she was related to elite families in Virginia and Maryland, to revolutionary war officers and capital city political figures. And in temperament, she must surely have been patient and forgiving, for William proved a difficult man to live with and a faithless one at that.
By the time William and Dorcas said their vows, the bridegroom was numbered among the leading merchants and shippers not simply of Baltimore but of the new nation. He was intensely proud of his success, and it was a badge of honor that he was a self-made man. “What I possess,” he declared, “is solely the product of my own labor. I inherited nothing of my forefathers, nor have I benefitted anything from public favors or appointments.” His journey from rags to riches had come with a price, however. William’s ambition, perseverance, and capacity for delayed gratification in everything but sexuality had calcified into a near obsession with security, a rigidity of thought, and a brittle sense of moral superiority. He valued practicality above sentimentality and found it easier to express disapproval than affection.
As a husband and a parent, William Patterson settled firmly into the role of patriarch. He expected not only obedience from all members of his family but also their confirmation of his wisdom in any situation. He was, in his own way, devoted to that family, but he could comprehend no other way to demonstrate his love than to control the lives of all who bore his name. He ruled his household with an iron fist that he believed to be a velvet glove.
William had strong, and unshakable, convictions about appropriate male and female roles in his family and in the larger society. For him, these roles were fixed and immutable. Men belonged in the broader public world of business and politics; women belonged in the home, where their lives were to revolve around the wishes and needs of husband or father. Other men might accept some latitude in the actual day-to-day compliance by their wives and daughters. Some might even delight in spirited or competent daughters as well as sons. But William was an absolutist. In this respect, he bore more resemblance to a fellow self-made man, a Frenchman named Napoleon, than to his American peers. “We treat women too well,” the Corsican soldier would observe when he became emperor, “and in this way we have spoiled everything. We have done wrong in raising them to our level. Truly the Oriental nations have more mind and sense than we in declaring the wife to be the actual property of the husband.”
Dorcas Spear Patterson would surely have disagreed with Napoleon that women were treated too well. Hers could not have been a happy life, for of her thirteen children, several died in childhood. And despite her submission to a domineering husband, she did not have the satisfaction of knowing that he honored his marriage vows. A string of mistresses, often drawn from the housekeeping staff, reflected his cavalier attitude toward marital fidelity; in 1814, as Dorcas lay dying, William would bring his current mistress into the household, no doubt to console him for the loss of a dutiful wife.
Dorcas’s first daughter, Elizabeth Spear Patterson, was born on February 6, 1785. Elizabeth, or Betsy, and her country would grow up together, but from her earliest years, this child of the young republic would steadfastly refuse to embrace America’s cultural and social trajectory. In part, this was the legacy of her mother’s marital experience. The unhappiness that Betsy saw in the Patterson home seared into her consciousness the high cost of the social assumption that, in a proper household, a wife’s duty was to please her husband and to spend a life confined to the parlor and the nursery. Betsy’s devotion to her mother did not blind her to Dorcas’s passive acceptance of her fate. She would carry a lock of Dorcas’s hair with her all her life, but she would also carry her childhood memory of a woman bullied and scorned by her husband.
Dorcas had, however, played a second, more positive role in forging Betsy’s rejection of American culture. For in her one rebellion against William Patterson, Dorcas Spear Patterson imparted to her daughter a deep appreciation of the arts, literature, and social refinement—an appreciation entirely foreign to her husband. Thus while others might find the vitality and expansiveness of the young republic exciting or satisfying, while they might praise the energy of its moneymaking or the fecundity of its women, Betsy came to see only a country that was raw and crass, devoid of any appreciation of high culture, its leading lights as dull-witted as its dock workers.
Betsy dreamed of an alternative, an escape from the culture into which she had been born. She found it, at least in her young imagination, across the ocean in the aristocratic world of Europe. Friends and neighbors, politicians and public opinion makers might condemn the Old World as stagnant and decadent, but in Betsy’s vision, it was sophisticated and glamorous. Her romantic notions of the charms of Europe may have been fostered by the presence in Baltimore of a number of French émigrés and refugees, for the city’s Catholic tradition acted as a magnet to Royalists fleeing the Terror, to displaced Acadians, and to the many white families uprooted by St. Dominique’s slave revolts in the 1790s. The arrival of these French immigrants swelled the population of this Maryland port city and increased its prosperity. It also gave Betsy a glimpse of a culture very different from her own.
When she was ten, Betsy became far more familiar with the local French culture. That year her mother enrolled her at Madame Lacomb’s school, where she mastered the French language. This fluency gave her entrée into the city’s immigrant community. She formed a close relationship with Henrietta Pascault, daughter of one of Baltimore’s most cultured refugees, the Marquis de Poleon. For Betsy, the refined manners and sparkling sociability she witnessed in Madame’s presence and in the Pascault household stood in sharp contrast to the somber atmosphere she found at home.
Indeed, for Betsy, the Patterson home was more prison than refuge. Her father watched over his children’s lives with hawk-like concentration. He was unapologetic about his close supervision of everyone under his roof, including his adult unmarried sons. “I always considered it a duty to my family to keep them as much as possible under my own eye,” he declared, “so that I have seldom in my life left home whether on business or pleasure.” His rule, he added, was to “be the last up at night, and to see that the fires and lights were secured before I retired myself; from which I found two advantages: one was that there was little or no risk of fire under my own roof, and the other that it induced my family to keep regular hours.” For William Patterson, sons and daughters, like lamps and fireplaces, were property under his care and supervision.
But of all his children, William believed Betsy was most in need of his watchful eye. Her yearning for an alternative to American society was only one of the traits that disturbed him. The truth was that this daughter was both a source of displeasure and an absolute mystery to William Patterson. He could not, and would never, see how similar in temperament and personality he and Betsy were; indeed, she shared with him a fierce ambition, a stubborn desire to have her own way, and in her teenage years, an impetuosity and risk-taking that reflected his own character at that same age. Father and daughter, so much alike, would spend their lives locked in a battle of wills that neither could hope to win.
Betsy found an escape from the pall cast by her father in books. She developed a habit of writing commentary in the margins as she read, and she would continue this in later years as she annotated the letters she read and saved. She was clearly precocious, memorizing French texts like La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims and poring over a book by the French intellectual Madame de Staël. Her intelligence and intellectual bent did not escape the notice of more conventional friends and relatives. “She is a most extraordinary girl,” observed another young Maryland woman, Rosalie Stier Calvert, labeling Betsy “in short, a modern philosophe.”
Whatever the sources of her attachment to European culture—the French presence in Baltimore, the romantic poems and Enlightenment manifestos she read, her father’s strict supervision, or her deep desire to escape her mother’s fate—by the time she was seventeen, Betsy Patterson would have agreed with a later critic of American culture, Henry James, who would give voice to her discontent in succinct fashion: America lacked all that was desirable, “No sovereign, no court … no museums, no pictures.” Betsy was convinced she had been born on the wrong side of the Atlantic. The problem was how to get to the other side.
Betsy’s criticism of American culture and her attachment to Europe’s aristocratic society made her unusual in Baltimore’s elite circles. Her beauty made her exceptional. At seventeen, she was petite but perfectly proportioned; her hair was thick and chestnut brown; her eyes, which some described as hazel and others as blue, were large and bright. She was slender, with the softly rounded shoulders that men of her day admired, and her clear complexion was the envy of her female peers. Men were quick to take note of her extraordinary looks, and long into middle and even old age, she was showered with flowery compliments and ardent poetry from admirers. A young cousin declared in 1802 that even when she was absent, her beauty outshone that of other young women: “I most solemnly declare that all … were incapable of arresting my attention away for a moment—no madam each thought, each idea, were immoveably [sic] fixed upon the pleasing tho’ dangerous, perhaps delusive contemplation of an absent object … at the bare recital of that name ten thousand inexpressible sensations crowd impetuously upon me.”
Betsy was flattered but apparently unmoved by the admiration of local suitors. If she assumed, as surely all girls of her class and era did, that marriage and motherhood were an inevitable part of female life, she nevertheless nurtured a hope that someone would rescue her from the dull and constricting married life that lay ahead. And in 1803 that hope seemed to become a reality when a handsome stranger appeared in staid Baltimore City. His name was Jérôme Bonaparte, and he was the youngest brother of the first consul of France, Napoleon.
Jérôme was handsome, charming—and terminally spoiled. He was the youngest son of Letizia Ramolino and Carlo Buonaparte, who, like Dorcas and William Patterson, had thirteen children, although only eight survived. The family’s rise was already legendary in 1803—from the isolation and unrest of Ajaccio, Corsica, to the slums of Marseilles and on to the palaces of France, where Napoleon now directed that country’s political and military future. Carlos, who died when Jérôme was only an infant, had been extravagant and self-indulgent, but his widow, Letizia, was willing to sacrifice for her children. When Corsica was turned over to the French, she saw to it that they were educated in French schools. When the island’s Italian population rebelled against French rule, she fled to the safety of Marseilles, where she took in laundry to support her younger children. Napoleon, already on his way to power, carried in himself Letizia’s determination and focus; Jérôme, on the other hand, seemed to have inherited his father’s hedonism.
As a child in Marseilles, Jérôme was not expected to contribute to the family’s survival. While his older sisters and mother toiled as laundresses, the young boy played in the city’s streets. Unlike his four brothers—Napoleon; the good-natured, intelligent Joseph; the gangly, nearsighted Lucien; and the often depressed and sexually ambivalent Louis—Jérôme was uneducated and undisciplined. Napoleon soon saw his brother for what he was, an illiterate street urchin, and set about to change him. It was too late: Jérôme had no interest in books, little intellectual rigor, almost no self-discipline, and no ambition except to enjoy the benefits, material and social, of being a member of the now great Napoleon’s family.
Comfortably ensconced in Napoleon’s palace, fourteen-year-old Jérôme quickly began to take full advantage of the first consul’s wealth and fame. He ran up an impressive number of bills, all of which he ordered sent to his brother. Napoleon was stunned by Jérôme’s profligacy. Nothing illustrated this irresponsibility and impulsiveness more than his young brother’s purchase of an elegant and expensive travel set of shaving and grooming equipment—razors, shaving pots, mustache combs—all made of gold, silver, ivory, and mother of pearl. The cost—ten thousand francs—was shocking enough, but what caused Napoleon to fly into a rage was the fact that Jérôme Bonaparte was still too young to shave. When challenged, Jérôme replied that the absence of a beard was irrelevant; the shaving set was beautiful, and “I am like that: I only care for beautiful things.”
Jérôme’s character was thus formed: he was charming, irresponsible, self-indulgent. He loved beautiful things, and he soon discovered he loved beautiful women as well. If he was not willing to master science or math, he proved very willing to master the art of attracting women. He carefully studied the elite and elegant women who surrounded his sister-in-law Josephine de Beauharnais, and he recognized that, to win the hearts of such women, a man must be gallant, generous, and responsive to their wishes. To his natural charm, Jérôme therefore added the ability to read what a woman most desired—and to promise it to her.
Jérôme charmed many of the women who were assigned to oversee him. Indeed, Napoleon placed the blame for his younger brother’s weakness of character on the women who spoiled him. “You brought him up well,” he remarked sarcastically to Madame Permon, a woman blind to the boy’s failings. “I find him willful, and willful in bad things.” The greatest fault lay, however, with the matriarch of the family, Letizia Bonaparte, known as Madame Mère. As Napoleon knew, “Signora Letizia spoils him so totally that I much doubt whether he will mend.” In a final effort to cure Jérôme of his worst habits, Napoleon arranged a commission for his young brother in the French navy. He hoped that the rigors and discipline of military life would have a positive effect on the young man, and he hoped as well that, eventually, Jérôme’s naval experience would be useful, as Napoleon determined a strategy for reducing England’s domination of the seas.
Thus in 1803 the nineteen-year-old Jérôme was a naval officer, stationed in the Caribbean. His brother’s influence ensured that he rose rapidly through the ranks. He moved in record time from midshipman to ensign to the commander of a patrol boat policing the waters around French-owned Martinique. When Jérôme’s vessel encountered a ship that would not identify itself, the novice captain ordered his men to fire a warning shot across its bow. Unfortunately, the shot hit the rigging of the ship—an accident that had potentially serious consequences, as it turned out to be a British naval vessel. Jérôme’s commanding officer, fearing the incident might disturb the fragile peace then existing between Britain and France and equally frightened that it might raise the ire of Napoleon himself, ordered Jérôme to sail home to France to explain things—at once. Jérôme, never good at taking orders he did not like, and worried that he might be captured by the British on the high sea, decided to ignore this order. Instead, he headed to the United States, traveling under the name M. d’Albert. His true identity was discovered soon after he landed on American soil.
Jérôme’s arrival in America caused a stir, not simply because of his good looks, his flamboyant attire, and the impressive entourage of friends and servants who accompanied him. The French chargé d’affaires in America, Louis-André Pichon, had no warning that the young naval officer had decided to visit the United States. He was astonished, he informed his superior, Talleyrand, to receive word that Jérôme had landed at Portsmouth, Virginia, and was on his way to Philadelphia to arrange transport to France. Without any instructions from Napoleon, Pichon did not know what to do. Jérôme suggested that Pichon ask the Americans to “lend him a frigate” or, if that were not possible, to allow him passage on the next American ship sailing to Europe. Both, as Pichon well knew, were out of the question: the United States was no more likely to “lend” one of its ships than it was to jeopardize its neutrality in the emerging Anglo-French struggle by allowing Napoleon’s brother to sail under the American flag.
Jérôme decided to send one of his entourage, Lieutenant Meyronnet, to France with letters for the Bonaparte family. While he waited to hear their advice on his own travel home, he fell comfortably into the role of distinguished visiting dignitary. Having wrung a good deal of money out of the befuddled Pichon, he now decided to enjoy his time as a tourist.
One of the few Americans Jérôme knew was Baltimore’s Joshua Barney, a larger-than-life sailor whose daring and bravery in the American Revolution had made him a local celebrity. Barney had begun trading with the French soon after their revolution and somehow encountered Jérôme in the Caribbean. The two men found they had much in common, especially their appreciation of the opposite sex. Barney had boasted that the most beautiful American women lived in Baltimore, and remembering this, Jérôme made his way to the Maryland port city. When the young Frenchman saw Elizabeth Patterson, he was ready to concede that Barney’s boast was true.
Exactly how and where Elizabeth and Jérôme met is uncertain, for the accounts are many and various. According to one, Jérôme first saw Betsy while attending one of the Baltimore elite’s favorite summer pastimes—a horse race. She was dressed in silk, and on her head she wore a hat decorated with ostrich plumes. But it was her face and form, not her elegant attire, that drew Jérôme’s attention. What the writer of this account described as her “pure Grecian contours, her exquisitely shaped head, her large dark eyes, a peculiarly dainty mouth and chin, the soft bloom of her complexion, beautifully rounded shoulders and tapering arms” were perfection itself.
But there are other, equally romantic stories. They met, one account said, at a ball given by Supreme Court justice Samuel Chase. They were formally introduced, and Jérôme immediately asked Betsy for a dance. While they were dancing, Betsy’s necklace became tangled in the buttons of Jérôme’s uniform, a sign, it was said, that their lives too would entwine. Still another account has the two meeting at the home of her close friend Henrietta Pascault. As Jérôme and his friend Jean-Jacques Reubell came into view outside the door, Henrietta declared she would marry Reubell, the taller of the two. Betsy replied that she would marry his companion.
These accounts, with their images of instant attraction, their delight in young love, and their conviction that destiny had brought two exceptional people together, made their way into letters, memoirs, and newspaper accounts not only in Baltimore but throughout the United States. From her first encounter with Jérôme Bonaparte, Elizabeth Patterson became an American celebrity, and her fame would last until her death.
For Betsy, Jérôme’s appeal ran deeper than his charm, his stylish dress, and the self-confidence that detractors saw as arrogance. In him she saw the antithesis of her dour and domineering father. And like the fairy-tale hero who rescues the imprisoned maiden from the tower, Jérôme could rescue Betsy from that life of tedious domesticity she feared was her future if she remained in America. For Jérôme, the attraction was far simpler, less fraught with meaning. Elizabeth was beautiful, and he longed to possess her, as he did any beautiful thing.
The meaning of their romance thus differed, and, so too did its expected consequences.
Though young, Jérôme Bonaparte had already enjoyed many romantic encounters, and no matter what promises he had made or what understanding he and his lovers had reached, marriage was not a likely outcome. But as he was quickly learning, the rules of courtship in genteel American society left little room for brief affairs. Indeed, even a quick embrace during a carriage ride—an action, Jérôme declared, that any Parisian woman would see as harmless flirtation—was read in America as an opening step to a marriage proposal. Betsy may have felt disdain for the domesticity that followed on the heels of marriage, but at seventeen, she was less a rebel against social norms than she imagined. She never doubted that she was about to become Madame Jérôme Bonaparte. And Jérôme decided he was willing to pay the price for possession of an object far more beautiful than ivory-handled razors.