Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte (12 page)

Betsy’s success in Paris made her even more loath to return to America, “
where no pleasures no hopes await me.” In Paris she could forget her husband’s desertion, her father’s rejection, and the dreariness of Baltimore. Here in the City of Light, “the weight of existence is lightened by intercourse with the world & one’s unhappy recollections are suspended—there is no time here to reflect on a future which has no hopes to enliven it, or to deplore an experience of life which has stripped it of all illusion.” She knew her income was too meager to remain in France, and yet few cords bound her to America: “Ah! That Country can claim no gratitude from me for I never experienced its favors. Bitter are its recollections—deplorable the anticipation of returning to it.”

When she spoke of America, Betsy could conjure up only
her deadening image of
“those long wearisome winter Evenings varied only by the entrance of tea Equipage minding the Fire & handing round Apples & nuts.” The tedium was unbearable, for “imagination, feeling, taste intelligence are not only superfluous to such a situation, they irritate a mind without amusement & render the load of existence as insupportable [and] as disgusting.” She knew there were “dull persons” able to support this stagnation of life with patience, but it promised nothing but “the most acute of all pains to one of an animated disposition.” After only a few months in Paris, she believed that for her it was “the only habitable place on earth.” The only question was, How long could she really remain there?

Increasingly, this realization that she must return to the “waste of life” that defined existence in America depressed Betsy. She dreaded returning to a world in which men and women were
“shut up in our melancholy country houses where we vegetate for months alone.” In truth, the thought of the long wearisome winter evenings that awaited her made her physically ill. By the spring of 1817, she suffered from congested lungs. Her doctor warned that her liver was also affected. Back home in Dublin by this time, Sydney Morgan worried about her friend’s
“tone of tristesse and suffering” and urged Betsy to come to Ireland. She wished she could magically transport her American friend to her home, where she could “nurse you out of your illness & laugh you out of your ennui.” But Betsy knew such a trip would further drain her resources and only briefly delay the inevitable.

On September 12, 1817, the inevitable came. Betsy sailed from Le Havre for New York on the
Maria Theresa.
Only a
few days after her departure, James McIlhiny sent her a letter that was typically judgmental in tone. She suffered, he wrote, because she had clung to
“an Eroneous [
sic
] notion of things as Respected yourself … your ideas soar’d too high for anything in your own Country which of course must have given offence to all around you & consequently must have been Disagreeable to your own Family.” If Betsy would only adjust her expectations to fit the realities of life in Baltimore, she could find a measure of contentment. “How happy would Millions of Millions be,” he reminded her, “if they had the same Means that you have in your Power.”

Betsy took no consolation from the thought that “Millions of Millions” might envy her situation. True, she had sufficient means to live comfortably in Baltimore, but could she find a way to accumulate enough to return to Europe? It seemed unlikely. Betsy had returned to an America that was in the throes of a financial crisis as severe as her own. Agricultural prices had fallen dramatically, especially in the cotton states, and this had a ripple effect: credit grew tight, and foreclosures on farms across the country began. Soon banks began to fail. In 1819 a full-fledged panic would grip the nation, but already in 1817 fortunes were being lost, and Betsy’s uncle, Samuel Smith, was among those who were ruined in the first wave of the crisis. Although her own cautious investment habits ensured that she was not wiped out, her resources seemed inadequate to fulfill her desires.

Betsy understood both her own and the nation’s economic situation far better than many middle-class or elite women. For whether her fortunes rose or fell, she had played an active role in managing her own finances ever since her pension from Napoleon began in 1808. She had followed the economic upswings and downturns both at home and abroad with a concentration
that matched her father’s. In her careful husbanding of her wealth, in her active study of the relative worth of stocks and bonds and real estate investments, she would reveal time after time how deeply she had become implicated in the very moneymaking American culture that she criticized. Her letters to her father, brothers, and the family members managing her investments at home were regularly filled with sharp questions about the relative merits of stocks, real estate properties, and government bonds. She kept detailed records of her expenditures, weighing the cost of repairs to her rental properties and measuring the returns on treasury bonds. She followed political developments with a watchful eye and often commented on their impact on economic conditions. An ungenerous father and a faithless husband had forced financial independence upon her, and her survival required her to be as clever about wealth as any of the men whose brains she declared were clogged with thoughts of commerce.

Betsy was probably unaware of the inherent contradiction between her behavior and her ideology, but she was all too painfully aware of her misery in Baltimore. Despite the danger that she would have to deplete her capital, she was determined to return to Europe as soon as possible. A second trip abroad was necessary, she decided, not simply for her sanity but for Bo’s future. In 1818 he was a young man of fourteen and in need of a proper education. When her good friend the Swiss-born Albert Gallatin suggested she consider educating Bo in Geneva, she saw a chance to justify an escape from the tedium of her native city. She and Bo would go to Europe, where she would enroll him in one of Switzerland’s excellent schools. The decision was
a bit reckless, given her financial situation, but the ennui and despair that had settled over her made her bold.

By May 1819, as the economic depression deepened across the United States, Betsy and Bo were on their way to Europe. The most convenient route for mother and son would have been to travel through France to Geneva. But to Betsy’s surprise, the French government refused to grant Bo a passport. Unlike his mother, Bo carried Bonaparte blood in his veins, and this was enough to disturb the officials of the restored monarchy. The fact that Bo bore a striking resemblance to his notorious uncle, Napoleon, hardened the government’s resolve. A roundabout route—and for added security, false identities—was necessary. Thus in June 1819 a “Mrs. Patterson” and her son “Edward Patterson” arrived in Amsterdam. From there they made their way through Germany to Switzerland.

Arriving in Geneva, Betsy was immediately convinced of the wisdom of Gallatin’s advice. She wasted no time enrolling her son in a school and finding accommodations for herself. She settled into a small but pleasant apartment in town, big enough for Bo to spend weekends with her.

Betsy was enthusiastic about her son’s new situation, but Bo was far less satisfied. Unlike his mother, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte had a strong and conflict-free attachment to his grandfather William Patterson.
William, in turn, had come to dote on his grandson, so much so that he had made the unusually generous gesture of paying for Bo’s schooling in Maryland during Betsy’s first trip abroad. Despite the novelty of his own first trip to Europe, Bo was homesick for his grandfather and for the comfortable, predictable life in Baltimore that William had
provided. He was soon assuring his grandfather that he would return home as soon as his education was complete. “
I shall hasten over to America,” he wrote, admitting that he regretted ever leaving it.

Bo’s longing for home, genuine though it might be, was not based entirely on his emotional attachment to family, friends, and familiar places. Like his father, Bo was growing into a young man given to extravagances, but his mother’s limited resources required life on a tight budget. He quickly learned that he could not live in Geneva in as grand a style as he had in Baltimore. Betsy, who lived a relatively Spartan life in a four-room apartment, with only one servant, was willing to sacrifice in order to provide for Bo’s tuition, lodgings, and a host of gentlemanly lessons like fencing and riding. But she was not willing to indulge her son’s whims. She was, in fact, appalled by his cavalier attitude toward money, especially her money. She found it necessary to lower his expectations: when, for instance, he asked for a horse, she bought him a dog instead. Providing a home for this pet, Betsy reasoned, would be far less expensive than renting space in a stable, even if she did indulge the dog with sheets and pillows for its bed.

With Bo settled at school, Betsy could investigate the city’s social possibilities. She discovered, to her delight, that many of the Russian and Polish aristocrats who had befriended her in Paris were now in residence in Geneva. Among them were the philanthropist Karl Viktor von Bonstetten, Princess Alexandra Gallitzin, and the aging Nicolay Demidov, rumored to be the richest man in Europe, whom Betsy seemed to genuinely care
for and admire. Delighted to see their American friend, this circle of Europeans happily included Betsy in their endless rounds of dinners, parties, balls, and amateur theatrical performances. Writing to his grandfather, Bo reported that
“Mamma goes out nearly every night to a party or a ball.”

Whatever Bo thought of his mother’s social life, Betsy found it a tonic. Her renewed popularity seemed to dispel her melancholy and restore her health. The contrast with her dreary life in Baltimore was obvious to her: now thirty-five, she was considered old in America; but in Europe’s aristocratic circles, where wit and charm were valued in a woman, she knew she could remain a belle well into her fifties or sixties. Here, in the company of Demidov and his friends, she could feel the suffocating constraints of America’s emerging cult of domesticity fall away; among these aristocrats, she could indulge in sociability elevated to an art form. She could act, in short, upon a public stage rather than be confined to the private world of parlor and nursery. Bo conveyed her delight in a letter to William:
“She says she looks full ten years younger than she is, and if she had not so large a son she could pass for five and twenty years old.”

Betsy ignored her own countrymen and -women living in Geneva, just as she had avoided them during her earlier sojourns in London and Paris. Her contempt for American tourists remained intense; she believed their sole purpose in coming to Europe was to affirm their belief that American culture was morally superior to that of a decadent Old World. And yet as contemptuous as she was of her fellow Americans, she refused to allow Europeans to criticize or mock them. One of the most
widely recounted anecdotes of Betsy’s brilliant wit involved a dinner table exchange with an Englishman who spoke ill of American manners. He asked her if she was surprised by the judgment of a British travel writer who had concluded that Americans were vulgarians. It was a view Betsy herself had often expressed. But she replied,
“I was not surprised. Were the Americans descendants of the Indians and Esquimaux, I should have been. But being direct descendants of the English, nothing is more natural than that they be vulgarians.” Clearly, like expatriates in every century, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte believed that only she enjoyed the privilege of criticizing the country she had fled.

The only American Betsy did befriend was the German American fur trader John Jacob Astor, a man whose rags-to-riches story was different only in scale from that of her father, William Patterson. Like Betsy, Astor had come to Switzerland to place one of his children, a daughter, in school. Betsy sensed that Astor and her father shared more in common than an immigrant past and a prosperous present: their great wealth had brought them little happiness. Betsy might have been talking about William Patterson as much as Astor when she wrote:
“He seems, poor man, afflicted with possession of a fortune which he had greater pleasure in amassing than he can ever find in spending.” But Astor’s friendship had important consequences for both her and her son, for it was Astor who brought Betsy to the attention of the Bonaparte family in Italy.

In the autumn of 1819, John Jacob Astor made a trip to Rome, where members of Napoleon’s family had found sanctuary after the emperor’s exile. Here he met the family matriarch, Letizia,
as well as her brother, Cardinal Fesch, and Jérôme’s notorious sister Pauline, now the Princess Borghese, whose beauty and sexual infidelities were legendary in Europe. When Astor told Pauline and her mother that Betsy and Bo were in Geneva, the strong-willed Madame Mère and her profligate daughter grew excited. They were eager, they told him, to meet Jérôme’s American wife and her son.

In March 1820, Astor dutifully reported their interest to Betsy, but he warned her not to trust any member of the family. Soon afterward Betsy’s good friend Lady Sydney Morgan and her husband stopped by to see her in Geneva, on their way back to Dublin from Rome. Sydney confirmed the fur merchant’s judgment. She told Betsy frankly that it would be madness to take the child on a visit to Italy. The Bonapartes were quixotic and self-centered, Sydney observed; they were simply not to be trusted. In fact, Sydney was certain that Pauline had ulterior motives for inviting them to visit: she hated both her brother Jérôme and his wife, Catherine, and any contact with Betsy and her son would be a slap in their faces. It was best, Betsy’s friends agreed, to avoid contact with the Bonaparte family.

Betsy was uncertain what course of action to take. She had sound reasons to ignore the Bonapartes’ invitation, chief among them the expense of a trip to Rome and the need to take Bo out of school. She was especially hesitant to disrupt her son’s education on the vague chance that the family, as Pauline broadly hinted, intended to provide an inheritance, or at least an allowance, for him. Knowing Bo’s tendency toward extravagance, she also worried about the impact of Pauline’s lifestyle on her son. Writing to her father in April 1820, Betsy sounded decidedly
like one of those practical, conscientious Americans whom she so often held up to contempt.
“If I took my son to live in a palace,” she wrote, “he would naturally prefer pleasure to study.”