The Brothers of Napoleon.
In 1803, Jerome Bonaparte, nineteen years of age, arrived in New York. Visiting Baltimore, he fell in love with Miss Elizabeth Patterson, and was accepted by her, and married with great ceremony by the Catholic bishop of the diocese.
In 1805 he started for France, leaving his wife to follow. An order of the emperor prohibited her entering France at any place, and she saw her husband only once after his departure.
The First Consul had their marriage annulled by his council of state, and forced Jerome, who was his youngest brother, to marry the daughter of the King of Würtemberg. Six days after the ceremony the young prince was made King of Westphalia.
Joseph Bonaparte, a brother, one year older than the emperor, was by him invited—or, rather, compelled—to accept the kingdom of Naples in 1806, and the kingdom of Spain two years later.
After Wellington's victory at Waterloo, Joseph, with leave of his brother, quitted France, and coming to the United States as the Comte de Survilliers, he purchased an estate of fifteen hundred acres of land in Bordentown, New Jersey, and settled down to the life of an opulent gentleman and philosophical student. He also established a summer residence at Lake Bonaparte, in the Adirondacks. In 1832 he returned to France to aid in sustaining the pretensions of his nephew, Louis Napoleon, to the throne, and failing in this he went to Florence, where he died in 1844.
Three other Bonaparte princes who crossed the Atlantic were Charles Lucien, Pierre, and Antoine, sons of Lucien Bonaparte, Prince of Canino, and nephews of the great emperor. Pierre—best remembered, perhaps, as the man who shot Victor Noir in a duel—and his brother Antoine were mere transient visitors, but Charles Lucien lived in Philadelphia for half a dozen years. He was a man of quiet tastes, and an enthusiastic student of bird-life. He devoted most of his time to the preparation of a revised and enlarged edition of Alexander Wilson's "American Ornithology." The work appeared in three volumes, from 1825 to 1833, with both Wilson's name and that of Charles Lucien Bonaparte upon its title pages. Before the third volume was issued the prince had returned to Europe, where the rest of his life was spent.