eck they had encountered: how well on
that trying occasion did she behave! how, when danger was over, he
pressed her in his arms!'" "Jerome loved me to the last," says Mme.
Bonaparte: "he thought me the handsomest woman in the world, and the
most charming. After his marriage to the princess he gave to the
court-painter several miniatures of me from which to make a portrait,
which he kept hidden from the good Catherine."

With the return of the Bourbons, Mme. Bonaparte was free to tread the
soil of France, and among the throngs of lovely women who entered Paris
after Waterloo she was no inconspicuous figure. Portraits and
contemporaries represent her as uncommonly beautiful--the spirited head
crowned with waving brown hair; large, lustrous, liquid hazel eyes,
promising a tender sensibility that did not exist; a nose of delicate
Greek outline; mouth and rounded chin nests for Cupid; arms, bust and
shoulders to satisfy a sculptor. Surgeon-General Larrey, the medical
attendant at St. Helena, meeting Mme. Bonaparte at dinner in Paris,
requested their host, Count Rochefoucauld, to intercede with her for the
privilege of looking at the back of her neck. After studying her a
moment, he said, "It is extraordinary! The bend of the neck, the contour
of face, the pose of the head, even the manner of rising from her chair,
are singular in their resemblance to the emperor." The duchess
D'Abrantes (Mme. Junot) describes in her _Memoirs_ a meeting with
Jerome, "who showed us a fine miniature of his wife, the features
exquisitely beautiful, with a resemblance to those of the princess
Borghese, which Jerome said he and many Frenchmen in Baltimore had
remarked. 'Judge,' he said, replacing the portrait in his bosom, 'if I
can abandon a being like her! I only wish the emperor would consent to
see her, to hear her voice, but for a single moment. For myself, I am
resolved not to yield.'" Walpole's friend, Miss Berry, met Mme.
Bonaparte in the _salon_ of Mme. Recamier, "who sat on a _chaise longue_
with a headache and twelve or fifteen men, only two ladies being
present--Mme. Moreau and Mrs. Patterson, the ex-wife of Jerome
Bonaparte, who is exceedingly pretty, without grace and not at all
shy.... Mme. Recamier is _the_ beauty of this _new_ world, if she can be
called handsome: her manners are _doucereuses_, thinking much of
herself, with perfect carelessness about others, for, besides being a
beauty, she has pretensions to _bel esprit_: they