h Bonaparte_, which would be a virtual acknowledgment of
the legality of her marriage and her claims on the head of the family.
To this stipulation the emperor acceded, and until his abdication the
annuity was regularly paid. Jerome was stung to a protest against her
acceptance of aid from his brother while rejecting his own, to which she
retorted that she "preferred shelter beneath the wing of the eagle to
suspension from the pinion of the goose."

Mme. Bonaparte now applied to the Maryland Legislature for a divorce,
which was at once granted. This action on her part was natural, but as a
matter of policy questionable. His wife by every law human and divine,
she could better have guarded her son's interests, and even maintained
her own rightful position, by ignoring Jerome's alliance with the
princess, which was regarded by Catholic Christendom as illegal, the
pope stoutly refusing to nullify the previous marriage.

Mme. Bonaparte always expresses enthusiasm for the emperor, despite the
despotism that shivered the fair fabric of her life, seeking its excuse
in the exigencies of his anomalous position. During her residence in
Paris after the Restoration, Louis Dix-Huit--_Des Huitres_, the wits
styled him from his inordinate love of oysters--fancying that her
presence would reflect contemptuously on the late "Corsican usurper,"
made known his wish to see her at court. This honor she declined, "not
wishing to pose as a victim of imperial tyranny: she had accepted the
emperor's kindness, and ingratitude was not one of her vices." Marshal
Bertrand--"faithful among the faithless" Napoleon called him--who heard
the last sigh of the great heart at St. Helena, visited this country
thirty years ago and requested an interview with Mme. Bonaparte. "The
emperor," he said, "had spoken of her talent with admiration tinged with
regret for the shadow he had cast over her life, for he had heard of her
generous sentiments toward him, alluding to which he one day said,
'Those whom I so wronged have forgiven me: those I overwhelmed with my
bounty have forsaken me.'"

Mme. Bonaparte bore no malice to Jerome, whose nature was not of heroic
mould; and yet what touching professions of fidelity he sent
her!--letters unsurpassed in manly tenderness. A few months after their
separation a gentleman writes of him: "He is always saying, 'My wife!
my dear little wife!' He seems much affected, and declares that he
'shall for ever remember the shipwr