Caroline Moorehead Reviews: ‘Wondrous Beauty,’ by Carol Berkin
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Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte had a will of steel and an unrelenting stubbornness not unlike that of her legendary brother-in-law.
In the 1870s, a still-beautiful and distinguished old woman could be seen walking through the streets of Baltimore holding a red parasol against rain or sun, a splendid hat on her head, said to hold her impressive collection of jewelry. She was Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, briefly wife to Napoleon’s feckless youngest brother, Jérome, and she had spent her long life consumed by battles to win recognition at the courts of Europe for her son and grandsons. She didn’t succeed, but as she told a friend, she had met her fate “with philosophy, resignation or forgiveness,” and she had fought with “unending courage.” As Carol Berkin shows in her well-researched if somewhat uninspired biography, “Wondrous Beauty,” Elizabeth had a will of steel, a domineering nature and an unrelenting stubbornness not unlike that of her legendary brother-in-law.
Elizabeth—known as Betsy—was born in Baltimore in 1785 to a canny merchant father who had made a fortune buying weapons during the Revolutionary War and invested it wisely in property and stock. He wasn’t a nice man, but rigid, chilly and controlling. His loveless marriage to a well-born and cultured local girl produced 13 children, of whom Betsy was the eldest girl.
Baltimore then was home to many royalist émigrés from the Terror in France, and Betsy grew up to yearn for a country and a continent that she was certain were more exciting than drab and tedious Baltimore. Along with her ferocious determination, Betsy possessed remarkable looks. She was slight, with chestnut hair and round eyes, and she had a gleaming complexion. She felt herself a perfect match for the weak and spoiled Jérome, dispatched to the New World by his brother in 1803 in an attempt to curb the boy’s laziness and extravagance. It may not exactly have been love, but each saw in the other something they both craved: Jérome beauty, respectability and a fortune; Betsy escape from Baltimore to a life of glamour and excitement.
Though it took considerable time to overcome Betsy’s father’s many misgivings, the two finally married and set sail for Europe. The 19-year-old Betsy was pregnant. But Jérome’s brother Lucien had already thwarted Napoleon’s plans for a dynastic marriage with a noble European house by marrying his mistress, and the emperor had no intention of losing a second opportunity. He had the marriage declared invalid and forbade Betsy from landing on French soil. His threats of disinheritance, bankruptcy and ostracism hadn’t worked on Lucien, but the ambitious and venal Jérome quickly succumbed. Soon married off to the daughter of the king of Württemberg—a stout and charmless young woman whose train, remarked the bitchy Duchesse d’Abrantès, reminded her of a beaver’s tail—he was rewarded for his obedience with the new kingdom of Westphalia. Jérome and Betsy parted ways for good.
Wondrous Beauty
By Carol Berkin
(Knopf, 237 pages, $27.95)
She was now 20, the mother of a son she defiantly christened Jérome Napoleon Bonaparte, known as Bo. She could, quite simply, have married one of her many suitors. Instead, bypassing her ex-husband, she appealed directly to Napoleon, claiming money and recognition and saying that she would rather be “sheltered under the wings of an eagle than dangle from the beak of a goose.” Like the father from whom she never quite managed to free herself, either emotionally or financially, Betsy was a smart businesswoman, and when the eagle finally offered a pension, she invested it shrewdly.
Ever restless, she moved between Baltimore, London, Geneva and, after Napoleon’s fall, Paris and Rome, where Napoleon’s mother and his sisters made overtures toward Bo. Betsy’s beauty and considerable wit brought her offers of marriage and an entrée into the best salons, but she preferred to stay single, portraying herself as the wronged and guiltless victim of geopolitical machinations. When the turmoils of 1848 brought Louis Napoleon, the emperor’s nephew, to the presidency of France, she again hoped to see Bo and his sons restored to their rightful succession. It was not to be. More legal challenges were lost, and she was bitter and angry when first Bo and then her first grandson turned their backs on Europe and settled for American wives. Only her youngest grandson, Charley, later attorney general in President Theodore Roosevelt’s cabinet, brought her much joy.
Though her fight against her brothers to claim a larger portion of her father’s will—he had kept up his disapproval of her wayward behavior to the very end—also failed, Betsy was a rich woman. Even so, after resettling in Baltimore, she chose to live in a series of boardinghouses, which she filled with mementos of her exotic past. It was in one of these that she died, in April 1879, at the age of 94, somewhat crabby and still obsessed with the destiny of her grandsons.
“Wondrous Beauty” is a slim book, thin on the rich details of the period. Neither Betsy nor her vast and scheming family stand out very clearly, and the few quotes taken from her letters serve mostly to make the reader long for more. But there remains something endlessly fascinating about Napoleon’s overbearing relations with his embattled family, and Carol Berkin’s book has brought another of his vast entourage out of the shadows of history.
Ms. Moorehead is the author of “A Train in Winter: An Extraordinary Story of Women, Friendship and Resistance in Occupied France.”
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