Early in 1867, at the age of eighty-two, something drove Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte to pull out her large cache of letters and clippings and read through them again. One can easily picture her: dressed in outmoded Parisian finery, carefully opening the fragile documents with their faded ink, and peering closely at the words and images that surely conjured up memories of more brilliant scenes and glittering occasions. Intriguingly, while she reviewed her life, she also rewrote it. Though she could not change the past, as she probably longed to do, she could analyze, explain, and comment on it; indeed, Elizabeth...

After their Christmas Eve wedding, Elizabeth and Jerome embarked in early 1804 on a honeymoon tour, spending a few weeks in the capital. Seemingly everyone who was anyone in the city wanted to meet the couple whose romance provided material not just for gossips but even for newspapers. Margaret Bayard Smith, the wife of the editor of the powerful National Intelligencer and one of Washington’s social leaders, quickly recognized that Elizabeth’s husband and, even more significant, her style of dress would make this young woman from Baltimore a celebrity. Bayard Smith even contributed to Elizabeth’s growing fame by writing about...

Just a few years after her return to Baltimore with her newborn son, Elizabeth became the center of a debate not in genteel drawing rooms, but on the floor of Congress. By the summer of 1809, rumors swirled around Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and other parts of the United States that Napoleon intended to make his brother’s former wife a duchess. After crowning himself emperor, Napoleon had handed out dozens of titles, turning dozens of commoners into noblemen and-women. Yet everyone wondered whether the emperor would actually bestow such a title on an American woman living in their midst. Since the...

During the final months of 1812, in the midst of a war with Great Britain that was already going poorly for Americans, the members of Maryland’s House of Delegates discussed a divorce for “Madame Bonaparte.” One issue that had to be decided was whether Elizabeth would appear before the House and “exert the blandishments of her beauty and address to induce a favorable impression.”¹ Many delegates “express[ed] great anxiety to see you here, saying they are sure your presence would remove every scruple,” according to Delegate William B. Barney. But Barney thought her presence unnecessary, notifying Elizabeth: “I will not...

In late 1816, missing her dear friend desperately, Elizabeth wrote to Lady Sydney Morgan, listing all of the people in Paris who had asked her to send their good wishes to the author, who had recently departed France. “In fact,” Elizabeth noted, “if I were to write all that your admirers and friends tell me, I should never put my pen down.”¹ Lady Sydney Owenson Morgan, an Irish noblewoman, and Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte, an American divorcée, had met earlier that year on each woman’s first trip to Paris, as each rose to celebrity status in Europe. As the author of...

When William Patterson drew up his will in 1827, he used it as a chance to state, publicly and finally, precisely what he thought about his eldest daughter, Elizabeth. After spending several pages chronicling his life, relating how he had amassed his great fortune, and providing pieces of advice in a manner similar to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Patterson proceeded to the distribution of his vast estate. Various neighbors, friends, and civic organizations received respectable sums. To Nancy Spear, who had overseen Elizabeth’s investments and lived with Patterson at times over the years, he provided a one-hundred-dollar annuity, accompanied by a...

After her essentially permanent return to Baltimore in 1834, at the age of almost fifty, Elizabeth seemed far less concerned with playing a prominent role on the public stage, with being a celebrity. She did not attend balls, parties, and dinners as often, nor did she dress as scandalously as she had in her youth. For years, though, she continued to wear the French fashions—dresses, bonnets, jewelry, and even umbrellas—that she had stocked up on before returning to the United States. Fashions had changed dramatically by the 1830s; the revealing Grecian styles that had brought Elizabeth so much...