The Portland daily press. [volume] (Portland, Me.) 1862-1921, 1892-12-24
AN IMPERIAL POSSIBILITY.

the cable is beginning to say so much,
is granddaughter of the first Napoleon.
and grandson of that great soldiers
Youngest brother, Jerome, king of the
short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia, and
at the time of his death in 1860 mar
shall of France. By the terms of the first
Emperor's will Prince Victor is the heir
to the imperial throne, and whatever
pretensions that claim carries with it;
though disinherited by his own father in
favor of the younger son Louis, and by
he ordinary rules of succession second
to another branch of the house-indeed
to his more immediate kinsmen, the
American Bonapartes of the Baltimore
and Betsy Patterson line. To make this
clear bit of Bonaparte genealogy and
brief chapter of its history must be
given.
Napoleon had four brothers, Joseph.
his elder, Lucien, Louis and Jerome, all
younger. Of these Joseph, King of
Spain and the Indies, had no male issue,
and by the salique law, which excludes
women from the throne, his pretensions
as survivor of the great Emperor could
not pass to, his daughters. Lucien,
Prince of Canine, married an inn-keep-
er's daughter, and was promptly de-
barred by his imperial and imperious
brother from the succession, though his
grandsons are recognized as princes of
the imperial house. Louis, King of Hol-
land, who married Hortense Beauhar-
nails, daughter of Josephine Rose Tas-
cher de la Pagerie, Empress of the
French and Queen of Italy, left as sur
viving son Charles Louis Napoleon who,
by the settlement of the Emperor be-
came heir in case of the failure of direct
issue and the death of the elder son Of
Louis Bonaparte.
That failure came in 1882, when the
only son of the Emperor, the King Of
Rome, known to the Bonapartists as
Napoleon II. and to everybody else as
Francis. Duke of Reichstadt, died with
out issue at Schonbrunn, the palace of
his grandfather Francis, the last of the
Holy Roman Emperors, and the first
who bore the title of Emperor of Austria.
Thus did the heirship fall to Charles
Louis Napoleon, who came to his for
tune in 1852, and was crowned in Notre
Dame as Napoleon III. Emperor of the
French. Dying, this man left son,
Napoleon Eugene Louis Jean Joseph,
Prince Imperial, who persisted in South
African corn field, pierced with Zulu
assegais, in 1879. So the line of Louis
Bonaparte failed, and the heritage passed
to son of Jerome.
But not to the elder son, whose fright
This elder son was the fruit of a mar
rage betwee en- Jerome, who visited this
country in 1908, and Betsey Patterson,
the beautiful daughter of Baltimore
the ambitious views of Napoleon. who
held it as invalid because contracted
without his consent; though it has al
ways been recognized by the Catholic
church, by one of whose priests the rite
was performed Jerome yielded to his
brothers stronger will, discarded his
wife, and married Frederick Katharine,
daughter of the king of Wurtemburg.
By her he had one son, the Prince Napo-
leon of our own time, the Plon-Plon''
(rub-a-dub) of French satire, who took
an inglorious part in the Crimean war
that provoked from his imperial cousin
the cutting remark that g 'Plon-Plon' will
never have bullet inside his body I'M
less he swallows it,
''Plon-Plon'' married Clotilde of Savoy
a daughter of Victor Emmanuel, King of
Italy, by whom he had two sons, Victor,
born in 1862, and Louis in 1854. This
eldest son, now thirty years old, is the
present Bonapartist pretender, though
he quarreled with his father who, short
ly before his death, made over his claims
to the younger son, Louis. That youth
shows no disposition to assert them, but
Loyalty follows the fortunes of the eldest
brother whom the Bonapartists term Ma
poleon VI. reckoning his father as the
fifth and his cousin as the fourth of the
name.
If Prince Victor looks like his father
who, though tall and enormously corpu
lent, bore SO startling a resemblance in
face to the first Emperor that he was de-
scribed as medallion of Napoleon done
in tallow, he may awaken the enthusiasm
of the volatile French to whom the feat
ures of the great italian soldier they love
to call Frenchman have been made
familiar by countless pictures and busts.
The cowardice imputed, perhaps unjust
ly, to the father, might prejudice the
prospects of the son did not SO many re-
member his heroic maternal ancestry and
the proud motto of the Piedmont house
that ''Fear and Savoy never met 1t is
possible, though hardly probable, that
the old cry Viue pEnepereuri may again
be heard in the French armies, and
Prince Victor take his place upon the