Laetitia Marie Wyse Bonaparte - Biography

Biography

She was born in Waterford, Ireland. She was the granddaughter of Lucien Bonaparte by his second wife, through the marriage of his daughter Letizia to Sir Thomas Wyse, an Irishman, British plenipotentiary at Athens, and Member of Parliament. However, she was born after Letizia had been separated from her husband for three years, and her father was Letizia's lover Captain Studholm John Hodgson (1805–1890), a British Army officer.

She was educated in Paris. In December 1848, aged seventeen, Marie married Frédéric de Solms (1815-1863), a rich gentleman from Strasbourg who soon left her to go to America. Marie, known as the Princess de Solms, remained with her mother, who kept a brilliant salon in Paris frequented by Victor Hugo, Eugène Sue, the younger Alexandre Dumas, and other writers.

In the early 1850s Marie had an affair with Count Alexis de Pommereu that produced a son in 1852. In February 1853 the French authorities ordered her expulsion from the Empire, after accusations that she had illegally bore the name Bonaparte and had stirred up "scandalous disorders." There were however reports that the Emperor Napoleon III had secretly paid a number of visits to his beautiful young cousin, that the jealous Empress Eugenie had learned of the visits and told her husband that Marie maintained a salon of subversives, and that he had thereafter ordered her expulsion.

In August 1853 Marie settled at Aix-les-Bains in Savoy, then a part of the Kingdom of Sardinia, where her lover Pommereu built her a chalet that soon became the center of a new literary salon. She went often to Turin, capital of the kingdom, where she established yet another salon at the Hotel Feder. She maintained friendships with Hugo, Sue, Dumas, and others including Lajos Kossuth, Alphonse de Lamartine, Hughes Felicité Robert de Lamennais, Victor Henri Rochefort, Marquis de Rochefort-Luçay, Tony Revillon, and the American minister to the Kingdom of Sardinia, John Moncure Daniel.

In 1859 Napoleon III's profligate cousin, Prince Napoleon, was betrothed to Clotilde, the 15-year-old daughter of King Vittorio Emanuele II. This was done as part of an agreement concluded by the King's prime minister, Count Cavour, to guarantee French support for Sardinia in the oncoming war to free northern Italy from Austrian occupation. Turin society was scandalized when the Princess de Solms flouted the Emperor by appearing at the betrothal ball on the arm of U.S. Minister Daniel. The King, openly unhappy with the betrothal, was secretly pleased.

She was an early woman journalist, and through Sainte Beuve, Marie contributed to the Constitutionnel under the pen name of Baron Stock. She also wrote for the Pays and the Turf. After Savoy was annexed to France (1860) as another part of the agreement between Napoleon III and Cavour, Marie went back to Paris where she played a prominent part in the literary and social events of the time. In her salon, she gathered men of all shades of opinion. In 1863, her husband having died, she married Italian statesman Urbano Rattazzi, and lived with him in Italy where she was known as “Divina Fanciulla.” After he died in June 1873, she returned to Paris, and a few months later married her friend Spaniard Under Secretary Don Luis de Rute (1844-1889) whom she also outlived.

She had one son, during her first marriage, Alexis de Solms (1852-1927) by her lover Count Alexis de Pommereu, one daughter Romana Rattazzi (1871-1943) by her second husband, and two adopted daughters Teresa de Rute (1883-89) and Dolores de Rute (1885-88) with her third husband.