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the Maryland legislature. Soon after, Napoléon’s empire collapsed and all the ruling Bonapartes were booted from their thrones.
    With the collapse of the empire, Elizabeth felt free to return to Europe in 1815. Though once forbidden to step foot on the continent, she was now warmly welcomed by the European elite, and believed she had found her rightful place in the world. “I get on extremely well,” she wrote her father, “and I assure you that altho’ you have always taken me for a fool, it is not in my character here. In America, I appeared more simple than I am, because I was completely out of my element. It was my misfortune, not my fault, that I was born in a country which was not congenial to my desires. Here I am completely in my sphere…and in contact with modes of life for which nature intended me.”
    For the next twenty-five years, Elizabeth spent most of her time in Europe and became increasingly contemptuous of American mores and culture. In other words, she became French. Surrounding herself with aristocrats, artists, and intellectuals, she reveled in the attention lavished upon her and fancied herself a member of the nobility. She maintained friendly ties with the Bonapartes in exile, as she considered the family connection advantageous for her son, who she believed was born for greatness. And though she continued to call Baltimore home, she returned only occasionally to attend to her financial affairs. It was impossible, she sniffed, “to be contented in a country where there exists no nobility.”
    One of Elizabeth’s primary obsessions as her son grew older was to marry him into an aristocratic European family. “Bo has rank,” she informed her father. “His name places him in the first society in Europe.” She was devastated, therefore, when she learned in 1829 that the young man had wed a girl from Baltimore. “When I first heard my son could condescend to marry anyone in Baltimore I nearly went mad,” she wrote. Elizabeth’s sense of nobility was offended by her son stooping so far beneath him. She had married “the brother of an emperor,” and had not the “meanness of spirit to descend from such an elevation to the deplorable condition of being the wife of an American.” But, she conceded in resignation, she and her son were different people. The young man, “not having my pride, my ambition, or my utter abhorrence to vulgar company,” had the “right to pursue the course he prefers.” She had done all she could “to disgust him with America,” and “give him the ideas suitable to his rank in life.”
    Eventually Elizabeth settled back in Baltimore, among the masses she so disdained. She wasn’t happy. “There is nothing here worth attention or interest,” she wrote a friend, “except the money market.” She returned to Europe one last time in 1860, when Jérôme died and left no provision for their son in his will. In a celebrated lawsuit against the surviving Bonapartes, she vainly sought to have Bo recognized as a legitimate heir. Defeated, she returned home and settled in a boarding house where she lived as an imperial relic until her death in 1879.

10
Stephen Pleasonton: The Clerk Who Saved the Constitution
    (and the Declaration of Independence, Too)
    The Founding Fathers are revered for having created two of history’s most enlightened testaments: the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution. But no one seems to remember poor Stephen Pleasonton, who rescued the precious documents from almost certain destruction.
    The sweltering languor of August in Washington gave way to a spreading panic in 1814. It was two years into America’s second war with Britain, and the enemy was marching ever closer to the heart of her former colonies. Local residents, having heard of the terrible destruction already inflicted by the British on a number of