The Stourbridge Observer, Cradley Heath, Halesowen & District Chronicle.
Stourbridge, West Midlands, England, 1879-04-12 00:00:00

PRINCE WALDEMAR'S ILLNESS.

The following is an authentic statement of the course of
the illness of the late Prince Waldemar, says the British
Medica Journal :

His Royal Highness Prince Waldemar of Prussia
was taken ill on Monday morning, March 24, with an
inflammatory throat attack, which showed itself by
redness and a swelling of the tonsils and the soft
palate, the right tonsil being covered with diphtheritic
membranes. The fever, at first slight, increased to-
wards evening, as well as the swelling in the throat.
After an unbroken sleep of four hours the fever slightly
decreased in the morning of the 25th, bit at the same
time no change had occurred in the local symptoms,
and, in spite of energetic and continued treatment, the
membranes spread further over the soft palate and the
left tonsil. In the course of the 25th a swelling of.the
connective tissues along the under jaw was developed,
and swallowing became so difficult that only a
small quantity of liquid food could be taken. The
increase of fever in the evening was not considerable.
The employment of local and internal remedies was
continued without interruption. After a sleep of
almost five hours in the night before the 26th no dimi-
nution of the swelling of the throat and tonsils could
be perceived, and the difficulty in swallowing was ac-
cordingly great. The membranes covering the tonsils,
the velum, and the uvula increased in thickness in the
course of the day, and only in the upper margin the
signs of a separation from the mucous membrane pre-
sented themselves in consequence of the application of
gargles. Food was declined. The increase of the
fever in the evening was less marked than on
the last. The air-passage between the tonsils was
sufficiently free. Towards twelve o'cicck at night
a difficulty of breathing, accompanied by stertor,
was perceived, which wax partially stopped by
waking the patient, but returned with sleep;
so that between one and, two o'clock preparations
for tracheotomy were 'made. However, after two
o'clock breathing became more free (21 respirations a
minute), and, by auscultation, normal sounds were to
be heard over the whole chest and back. As the voice
also become louder, Iliad no longer hoarse, the presence
of a diphtheritic aff,.,ction of the larynx could be ex-
eluded, and no inelication for an operation existed.
At two o'clock in f,he morning of to 27th the patient
became delirious, the breathing being quiet and the
pulse tolerably s,trong. This stets continued till half-
past three, mly.en quite suddenly, under slight convul-
sions and irrsgular respiration, fte%th ensued through
paralysis of the heart. This rrport is authenticated
by Baron von Langenbeck, Pr. Wegner, and Dr.
Schrader, the medical men in sttendance.

REmEDTron WAEhod '74lE' tdialf,:—ton't puu
the tlylog of your shower-bath, —.Fun.

THE DEATH OF THE WIDOW OF
JEROME
_BONAPARTE.

The Times of Monday has the following leader on thi
death of the widow of Jerome Bonaparte (the brothel.; of
Napoleon 1):
. .

Onr Philadelphia Correspondent telegraphed on
Friday, "Madame Elizabeth Patterson-Bonaparte,
widow of Jerome Bonaparte, is dying of old age, in
Baltimore. Her age is ninety-four. She is tuicon-
scions. Her two grandsons attend her;" and subse-
quently on the same day, "Madame Bonaparte died
at 1,30 this afternoon." These brief announcements
read like news from another world. When Napoleon
Bonaparte was still only First Consul, Jerome,
his youngest brother, was serving in the French
Navy on the American coast. In 1803, at the
age of nineteen, having been driven by the
pursuit of an English squadron to take refuge
in the United States, he met and fell pas-
sionately in love with Miss Elizabeth Patterson, the
daughter of a wealthy Baltimore merchant. He mar-
ried her; and it might have been thought the Bona-
parte family could scarcely complain of disparage-
ment. But in 1804 Napolen proclaimed himself Em-
peror, and his views on the Bonaparte destinies ex-
panded. He required in vain his brother Lucien to re-
pudiate his marriage with Madame jouberthon. He
insisted upon the consent of Jerome to a divorce from his
American bride, and declared the marriage void. Jerome
had less force of will and sense of honour than Lucien,
He had, moreover, the excuse of more absolute de-
pendence on his elder brother and Sovereign, His
wife had followed him to Europe, and had borne him
a son in England, where she had taken up her abode.
Yet he allowed himself to be bent by the iron resolu-
tion of the Emperor. His wife forbidden to set foot in
France; he accepted a divorce; and in 1807 he took
another wife, the Princess Catherine, the daughter of
the King of Wertemburg. The repudiation of Eliza-
beth Patterson was the price he paid for the crown of
the new kingdom of Wesphalia. Jerome, now a
reigning King, now an exile, and now again a titular
King, in his various alternations of prosperity and
adversity forgot, so far as the world could see, that
short romance of Baltimore, The victim of no fault of
her own, but only of her brother-in-law's grandeur,
was likely to have a better memory. She refused any
terms which implied acquiescence in the nulity of her
marriage. Jerome Bonaparte had wedded her law-
fully, and she maintained her right to bear his name.
On the establishment of the Second Empire, the
iniquity of the shame cast upon an innocent woman
could scarcely be disguised. On the other hand, the
son of Jerome's second and royal wife was, on his
father's death, the recognized heir-presumptive of his
cousin. There was danger in doing justice at the risk
of clouding the Imperial succession. A third course
was adopted. The son of Elizabeth Patterson was ad-
mitted to be legitimate, as the son of a Byzatine Ern-
peror born before his father's accession to the throne
might have been held legitimate. But Elizabeth Patter.
son's descendants were not admitted to possess any
claims to Imperial rank. The dignity of membership
in the Napoleon family was reserved for Prince
Napoleon Jerome, born, as it were, in the purple. A
solemn family council, held at the Tuileries not many
years before the disaster of Sedan, affirmed the deci-
sion of Napoleon the First. Without denying ordinary
civil rights to the offspring of a marriage perfectly
regular by American law, it rejected the claim of
Jerome, a grandson of Madame Bonaparte-Patterson,
who had served courageously in the Crimea, to the
full rights of his birth. Every other avenue of distinc-
tion was open to him. He is reported to have been
offered a ducal title by the Emperor. A specially
brilliant career was before;him, if only he would not
insist upon a rank contradicting the legitimacy of
Jerome's second marriage. Much to his credit he
refused to compromise his grandmother's honour. If
his father, the son of Elizabeth Patterson, were not in
all respects Jerome's legitimate son, Elizabeth
Patterson could not have been his lawful wife. Eliza-
beth Patterson claimed to be the only true and lawful
Madame Jerome Bonaparte. As Madame Jerome
Bonaparte she lived, and as Madame Jerome Bona-
parte she has died.

The end of seventy-six years of disappointed hopes
awakens melancholy sentiments. It was a strange
and sad fortune for a woman to witness the most
extraordinary family vicissitudes the world has ever
known, feeling herself entitled to share them all, yet
condemned to stand by as the merest spectator. In the
first scene of the marvellous exaltatiou of the house of
Bonaparte she and her husband bore, indeed, together
a principal part. But it was the part of joint victims
of the Holy Office at a Spanish auto da fe. Only,
though both wore the san benito, she carried hers to
the stake, and he his to a throne. The proclamation
of the Napoleonic Empire cost her the name of
wife. Thenceforth her husband might be crowned
a King, and she wore no diadem. He might be de-
posed, and she did Lot participate in his fall. There
was the fever of the Hundred Days. He had once
more a transient vision of a throne, and received the
single real honour of his undistinguished life in a
wound at Waterloo. His wife could show no title to
thrill at the possible chances of the political crisis, or
to sympathize with its dangers and sufferings. A
hopeless interval of thirty-five years passed for the
Bonapartes. Then Jerome was back again in Paris, the
new Emperor's uncle, and next to the Throne. His wife,
the only wife who still remained to him, must have heard
of all these wondrous events as she might read a page of
history. She had no place by his side, even at his
deathbed. The Napoleonic star waned again, and the
hoxr of its rising seems far distant. Lastly, after
being trodden under foot by one Napoleonic Empire,
and having outlived another, she herself has died the
one lingering survivor of the first generation of the
house of Bonaparte. In all Madame Patterson
Bonaparte's long life one signal calamity was the soli-
tary incident. She had, we may hope, her share of
happiness. Jerome, whether Prince or King, was
scarcely a husband to be grudged to a more nobly-born
bride. But, contented or repining, she neither exerted
nor attempted to exert any power over the history of
the race with which she had the misfortune to be
allied. The interest of her life is that it is a kind
of milestone by which to measure a period
infinitely more eventful than itself. It appears
almost inconceivable that a single existence
should cover the Peace of Amiens and the Peace of
Berlin. The world was very new when the young
Frenchman wooed the Baltimore beauty. The ardour
and the enthusiasm of the great Revolution had not yet
faded. The tide of conquest rolling from France over
Europe was still imagined to be a crusade for the re-
generation of society. As the wife of a brother of the
First Consul of France expires, the World seems old
indeed. A general sense of decrepitude and infirmity
has crept over the face of things. The nations appear
to be folding their hands as if the reign of decay and
stagnation had set in. The symptoms of lethargy are
certainly as deceptive now as were the conqueror's
declarations of zeal for humanity and the apparent
collapse of every ancient landmark in 1803.

Few things, in fact, show more conspicuously the in-
fluence of old Hess amid new circumstances than the
ruin which befell Madame Patterson-Bonaparte's mar-
ried life. Napoleon Bonaparte was the heir of the
French Revolution. The feeling of a need for concen-
trating all the powers of the nation in a single hand
prepared the ground for a more despotic throne
than that of the Bourbons. Yet it might have been
supposed that an Emperor the creature of a revolution
would have cared little for dynastic prejudices. On
the contrary,not merely did he surround himself
with more than the state of monarchy, but he
insisted, like an ennobled mandarin, on carrying his
monarchical associations a degree further back, and
investing his brothers with them likewise. They also
were to be sovereigns and to found royal lines. Though
for the present his exuberance of glory and renown
might be enough to endow his Empress as well as him-
self, Jerome, if not Lucien, must be more economical
of majesty; Jerome must eke out his own defieiency
by taking to himself a royal consort. Elizabeth
Patterson was sacrificed to the apparent tyranny over
so independent an intellect as that of Napoleon
of a faith in the inherent virtues of royal blood. Fed
on the milk of revolutionary principles, and taught the
creed that peoples were the arbiters of their own des-
tinies, he acted as a devout believer in the divine right
of Guelphs and Hohenzollerns and Hapsburgs to
supply Sovereigns to the earth. Napoleon's brother
might be crowned by the victor of Austerlitz and Jena
King of Westphalia; to perpetuate a dynasty his chil-
dren must hayu a royal mother, and not be born of the
daughter of a citizen merchant. Napoleon himself can
hardly have been the slave of such a superstition.
Partly his unwritten Napoleonic marriage law was
dictated by the innate despotism of the man. He
would be lord in the family of Bonaparte as in
Europe. In a still greater measure he was moved
by a fancy that European opinion would be more
inclined to accept his sway were he to engraft his new
sceptre on a stock of royalty consecrated by the tradi-
tion of ages. His crime of the murder of the Due
d'Enghien was a tribute to the respect he paid to the
vitality even of French faith in hereditary royalty.
Mirabeau was said to have revolutionized France to
storm the drawing-rooms of Paris. Napoleon desolated
Europe frQm Madrid to Moscow as if for the one
purpose of compelling t,e masters of Court cere-
monies to acknowledge the eons of the Advo-,
cate of Ajaccio as peers of a Grand Duke of
Baden or a Prince of Reuss. A new keynote for
the Vanity of Human Wishes might be found in the
pains and tribulations inflicted and suffered in the
enterprise of interpolating the Bonaparte family
among old world dynasties. Each new throne the
Emperor planted up and down Europe was a
fresh burden under which the foundations of his own
tottered. He could scarcely have deceived even
himself into supposing that personages like Joseph
and Louis and Jerome were made for sentinels
whom he could post about the Continent to see
that the nations endured their yoke with patience.
Of all the Imperial lieutenants the most incapa-
ble was Jerome. A ruler with the instincts
of a statesman enthroned at Cassel might have
warned his great kinsman at Paris of the work
of Scharnhorst in time for him to nip it in the bud.
A Jerome was content to enjoy the splendours of
royalty, and leave all its cares to a brain already over-
burdened. If the lady who died on Friday ever
desired vengeance on the brother-in-law who refused
to recognise her, she bad it in the miserable failure of
that brother-in•law's project for aggrandizing his name
and race at the expense of a woman's fair fame and
heart.

STRANGE ANTIPATHIES.- Marshal d'Albret got ill
at a repast where either a sucking pig or a wild boar
was served. Erasmus could not even smell fish with.
out getting feverish. Scafiger trembled all over at
seeing water-cresses. Tycho Brahe (the celebrated
Danish astronomer) felt his limbs failing when he en-
countered a hare or a fox. Bacon fell into a fainting
fit during an eclipse of the moon. Bayle got convul-
sions when he heard the sound of water issuing from a
spout. Lamothe le Vayer could not endure the sound
of any instrument. Favoriti' an Italian poet, who
died in 1682, could not bear the odour of the rose.
Henry 111. of France, who had so decided a passion
fer little dogs, could not remain in the same room with
a cat. Tile Duke d'Epernon fainted at the eight of a
leveret. Marshal de Breze (who died in 1650) swooned
at the sight of a rabbit, as related by Tallemant. One
of the Spanish kings could not endure any one in his
presence who had taken tobacco. He had, besides,
the mania of feeling incensed at any man's demanding
the age of a woman, unless he had intentions of mar-
riagek .XI,V. detested lea chaptaux gris (zrey
late or bonnets), *4(3#. Its muck as... he
Janseniate.

I,4iag,