At the request of his half-brother a family council was called, before which the celebrated Berryer pleaded the cause of Madame Jerome Bonaparte and her son, whose rights were ultimately defined as limited exclusively to the use of the name.
On November 3, 1829, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, to his mother's intense dissatisfaction and disappointment, married an American, the lovely Miss Susan Mary Williams, of Baltimore. During a long residence abroad Madame Bonaparte had become imbued with the idea that it was a duty her son owed both to her and to himself to ally himself matrimonially with some European family of distinction. Writing to her father from Florence, where she was residing at the time of her son's marriage, she said, "I would rather die than marry any one in Baltimore, but if my son does not feel as I do upon this subject, of course he is quite at liberty to act as he likes best."
Her father died in 1835. He had never been in sympathy with her desire to live in a foreign country, and had frequently upbraided her for her prolonged absence from home. In his will he denounced her as an undutiful daughter, bequeathing her a few small houses besides the home in which she was born, on the east side of South Street, with the lot surrounding it.
In April, 1879, Madame Bonaparte, who was then in her ninety-fifth year, having outlived her son and all of her own generation, passed from the sphere where she had been so conspicuous a figure. She died in a boarding-house in her native city, where she had acquired the reputation of being a keen, eccentric old woman. The sorrows of her youth, belonging to the early days of the country, were too remote to be remembered by her later-day contemporaries, who discovered in her no trace of the bewitching Elizabeth Patterson who had taken by storm the heart of the youthful Prince Jerome.
She rests to-day in Greenmount Cemetery, Baltimore, in a small triangular lot which she selected shortly before her death, saying that as she had been alone in life, so she wished to be in death. On her monument are graven the words that express so much for her,—"After life's fitful fever she sleeps well."
[THE CATON SISTERS]
Among the belles of the early century loom the forms of those gracious women whose names are interwoven with those of the most historic figures of their age, the Caton sisters of Baltimore. Granddaughters of Charles Carroll of Carrollton, one of the most illustrious Americans of the period, they became through marriage identified with the most distinguished families in England.
In 1787 Richard Caton, an Englishman who had settled in Baltimore two years before, and engaged in the manufacture of cotton goods, succeeded in winning the fair hand of Mary Carroll. Rumor said that it had been already partially plighted to her cousin John Carroll of Duddington Manor. Cousin "Longlegs," however, as Kitty, her irreverent younger sister, called him, was in Europe at the time with her brother Charles, and in those days of slow travel Mary had probably capitulated to the young Briton before John even knew that he had a rival.