grief, he so far forgot his princely rank as to make an American marriage. Two sons were born to this second Jerome. The younger, Charles Joseph Bonaparte, became attorney general in President Roosevelt's cabinet, while the elder was the late Col. Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, a graduate of West Point, who married Caroline Le Roy, daughter of Samuel Appleton of Boston, and granddaughter of Daniel Webster. Their son, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte of Washington, is the greatgrandson of King Jerome and great-grandnephew of Napoleon. If his great-grandmother's marriage had been recognised, this young man in Washington would be the head of the house of Bonaparte and first in line for the vanished throne of Napoleon, instead of King Jerome's other great-grandson, Victor of Brussels. Betsy ever remained faithful to the Empire that banned her. Long after it had fallen, she continued to wander about Europe where she could humour her conceit by mingling with titled people. To her hard-headed father's protest against her forsaking her place as the head of his household, she replied: "It was impossible to bend my tastes and ambitions to the obscure destiny of a Baltimore housekeeper, and it was absurd to attempt it after I had married the brother of an Emperor.' When at length she did return to America it was to take up the management of her estate in her native city. After the Second Empire had risen from the ruins of the First at Waterloo and fallen at Sedan, and she was four score and ten, Mme. Bonaparte still did her own bargaining and collecting as she went through the streets of Baltimore, an old carpet bag in her hand. Although reputed to be more than a millionaire, she passed the last eighteen years of her life in a boarding house, where in her many trunks she cherished her fondest treasures-the purple satin coat Jerome wore at their wedding, a gown given to her by the Princess Pauline, another from Mme. Mere and all the other faded finery of the days of her imperial dreams. Is not the gravestone of Betsy Paterson, in Greenmount Cemetery, near the Union railway station of Baltimore, a marker in the path of Napoleon to his downfall? Perhaps it was in dissolving her marriage that the Emperor took the first fateful step toward his own divorce. At least it lost him a sister, whose loyalty to his throne would have been an example to his own sisters, whose thrift and ambition would have been useful to the prodigal and silly Jerome, and whose beauty of person and purity of life would have done credit to the court of the Empire. W CHAPTER XXVI THE KINGMAKER HEN, on the first anniversary of his coronation, Napoleon gained the great battle with his two rival Emperors at Austerlitz, he stood forth the chief magistrate of Christendom. He lost no time in assuming the imperial prerogative to crown his vassal princes. There were then only eight kings in Europe, the Kings of England, Prussia, Spain, Portugal, Denmark, Sweden, Sardinia, and Naples. Napoleon opened wide the flood gates of royal honours and there was a downpour of ten kingly crowns in half a dozen years, or more than time had conferred upon princely brows in as many centuries. He had already made himself King of Italy, and now on his way from the field of Austerlitz in December, 1805, he sent a messenger, who overtook the Elector of Bavaria while he was hunting, with a message addressed to "His Majesty, the King of Bavaria." Wherefore the Bavarian sovereigns are kings to this day. The Kings of Würtemberg and Saxony also are indebted to Napoleon for their present titles. The new Emperor's success as a kingmaker flattered him into the conceit that in the plenitude of his imperial power he could do more than make over hereditary dukes and electors, and could manufacture kings out of the raw material of the common earth. After he had fairly warned the domineering wife of the Bourbon King of Naples that if she did not cease playing fast and loose with France, her children would curse her as they wandered over Europe begging their bread, he drove the royal family from their capital to take refuge on the Island of Sicily. Thereupon, in 1806, Joseph Bonaparte was thrust upon the vacant throne. "I can no longer have relatives in obscurity," the Emperor said. "Those who will not rise with me, shall no longer be of my family. I am making a family of kings attached to my federative system." The Revolution had expelled the House of Orange from Holland and set up the Batavian Republic in the Netherlands. When Napoleon prepared to remove this republican reminder from the French border, he placed the crown of Holland on the head of Louis Bonaparte. At one time he thought of snatching the crown of Portugal from the brow of the Braganza king and conferring it on Lucien Bonaparte. Lucien, however, rejected the stipulation that he should divorce his wife, and in loyalty to her, he turned his back on crowns and thrones. Jerome was the only obedient member of the family, but when he was enthroned as King of Westphalia in 1807, his regal magnificence and royal vices troubled his brother much, and he was as hopelessly incompetent as any hereditary prince well could be. His poor subjects had to plough deep to support his pomp and luxury, and he drained the resources of his made-to-order kingdom to fill his little capital, Cassel, with extravagant splendour. His royal theatre alone cost his people $80,000 a year, and he adorned his country palace, Napoleonshoe, until it took high rank among the show places of Europe. By a strange retribution Napoleonshoe became the prison of Napoleon III, after his capture by the Germans at Sedan, in 1870, and it was there that the last of the Bonapartes took leave of royal palaces forever. By a trick of nature Napoleon found his only real brothers among his sisters. Although, even as the effeminate emperors of degenerate Rome assumed the name of Cæsar, the crowned brothers all styled themselves Napoleons-Joseph Napoleon, Louis Napoleon, Jerome Napoleon-Caroline and Elisa were better counterfeits of the Emperor than any of the male Bonapartes. Those two sisters were ambitious and masterful spirits, while in point of personal appearance they held their own in a remarkably handsome family. The elder, Caroline, wife of Murat, had fair hair and a dazzling complexion, with roses in her cheeks. "She bore the head of Cromwell, on the shoulders of a pretty woman," Talleyrand said of her. |