Free Wondrous Beauty: The Life and Adventures of Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte by Carol Berkin Page B

will offend you, would much afflict me, but I write with confidence, when I say I am sure that at least politeness, will bid you favor me with an answer, if that answer is by return of post it will much oblige me, the tenor if this letter sufficiently indicates that anything like insult, that anything like offence to you, is most remote to the wishes of your devoted S Colleton Graves.
    In short, Graves was ready to marry her immediately but would settle for her willingness to begin a courtship.
    Betsy might have found Samuel’s adoration flattering, but she showed no signs that his passion was—or would ever be—returned. She had no interest in marrying him, or anyone, especially in 1808, when her only concern was securing her son’s “brilliant destiny” and achieving a successful escape from her father’s household. She had no intention of repeating past mistakes; she would not rely on a callow youth to rescue her. Napoleon, not the young Mr. Graves, held her future in his hands. Yet she sympathized with her suitor, for she knew what it was like to be young and madly in love. Because of this she made every effort to avoid crushing the spirit of her overzealous suitor.
    Graves proved persistent if not perceptive. A year after hisopening salvo, he was writing to her once again from Philadelphia. He was, he said, headed home to England but intended to return to America as soon as possible to press his suit once again.“In returning,” he wrote, “I have but one object, that one is but too powerful.”
    Two days later Betsy sent a letter addressed to Samuel and included with it a note to his father, the admiral. She clearly intended the older man to read what she had to say to his son. Her rejection was put as tactfully but as firmly as possible:“I should extremely regret that a sentiment more painful to yourself should impel a voyage, the result of which can only be disappointment. My time & attachment must be devoted exclusively to my Son from whose destiny whether inauspicious or the reverse I can never divide myself. The resolution of consecrating to him every sentiment & action of my life, is irrevocable—which with other Circumstances peculiar to myself, will ever preclude a change of my Situation.”
    The admiral should have recognized that Samuel had been politely rejected. But affection for his son, who was clearly in agony, prompted him to support a second effort to change Betsy’s mind. On July 27, 1809, the younger Graves wrote to her once again from England.“After the letter I received from you last May … I should not have again addressed you, were not my affection stronger than my hope.” Despite all efforts to forget her, “the warmth of my attachment is unchilled by absence, is unabated by time and distance.” Because of this, he confessed, he had enlisted his parents in the effort to change her mind. “The enclosed,” he declared, “is the expression of theirsentiments.” And indeed, enclosed with his own declaration that his “love will be as lasting as my recollection” were letters from his mother and father.
    Mrs. Graves addressed Betsy as one mother to another: your maternal devotion is admirable, she wrote, but surely your son would be better off with his paternal relatives; why not turn him over to the Bonapartes and thus free yourself to marry my son? The advice regarding Bo’s future was both unwelcome and presumptuous, and what followed it was a burst of English patriotism. If Betsy would consent to marry Samuel, Mrs. Graves declared,“My husband & myself will accompany our Son to meet you at Paris to celebrate Nuptials.” There was, of course, no possibility of Betsy entering Europe, let alone marrying an Englishman in the capital of France, as long as Napoleon remained emperor. And in 1809 Mrs. Graves’s assumption of a speedy victory by Britain in its efforts to unseat the French emperor might well be seen as folly.
    Betsy felt compelled to reply: on December 1,