The Man Who Had Been King by Patricia Tyson Stroud

Author:Patricia Tyson Stroud [Stroud, Patricia Tyson]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biography & Autobiography, Historical
ISBN: 9780812290424
Google: DXbAAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Published: 2014-01-28T01:41:32+00:00

30. Ferdinand VII by Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, c. 1814. Oil on canvas. Prado Museum, Madrid. Scala/Art Resource, NY.

But indulgent and affectionate a father as he was, Joseph could still be a strong critic of his daughter’s attitude. “I am angry that you commence to dislike your beautiful villa,” he wrote the following year regarding the Villa Paolina in Rome that belonged to Charlotte. “It is necessary to resist capricious tastes for the things you have. It is though I would become disgusted with Point Breeze!”39

Perhaps this strong reaction surfaced from an underlying feeling that he was becoming disenchanted with Pointe Breeze, as he spelled it in the French way. Without his family, without a mistress, and fewer French friends as they drifted away to other parts of the country, returned to Europe, or died, Joseph was increasingly lonely. He was feeling his exile more acutely than ever. Part of the estrangement must have been language since he had fewer and fewer of his countrymen with which to converse. Charles Ingersoll said that Joseph “could not, and seldom, if ever, attempted to speak English.”40

Zénaïde had written her mother a few years before that she thought her father was a bit disgusted (dégoûté) with the United States. “If I am not mistaken,” she says, “his health and the isolation he finds here, your distance from him most of all [she was wrong about that considering the presence at the time of a pregnant Emilie], and the absence of Charlotte makes him want to return to Europe. He will tell you all this himself, if I am right in my suppositions, although I am mixing myself up in what is not my business.”41 There may indeed have been an element of truth in Zénaïde’s suppositions, in spite of all that then surrounded Joseph in America—family, a mistress, and splendid possessions—because he ever yearned to be back in France.

At the end of May 1829, there was a major auction of Napoleon’s possessions at Malmaison. No doubt Joseph’s Parisian agent, Jean-Baptiste Presle, alerted him about the sale and Joseph sent Presle to bid on various items for him. Sometime afterward, a handsome armchair carved with gold designs on a black background with red wool upholstery, one of ten from Napoleon’s Council Chamber at Malmaison, reached Point Breeze (fig. 31).42 There may have been other items as well, but only the armchair is known for sure. Seeing this faded trophy of his dead brother’s past unloaded at his house in America must have recalled numerous memories of Paris, family, and friends Joseph had been forced to leave, perhaps never to see again.

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