He had, moreover, despatched his eldest son, Robert Patterson, to Paris, to discover which way the wind of the imperial temper blew. As the matter lay rather outside the pale of usual diplomatic issues, it required most delicate manipulation, and while young Patterson received kindly yet cautious expressions of interest and good-will from Napoleon's brothers, an ominous and forbidding silence enveloped the First Consul. His indignation increased with Jerome's continued absence, and when at length he spoke through his Minister of Marine, it was to bid Jerome, as lieutenant of the fleet, to return to France, at the same time forbidding all captains of French vessels to receive on board "the young person to whom Jerome had attached himself." Through the same channel Napoleon offered his forgiveness to Jerome on condition that he abandon Elizabeth and return to France, there to associate himself with his fortunes. Should he persist in bringing her, she would not be allowed to put foot on French territory. Jerome's mother wrote to him at the same time, suggesting that he return to France alone and send his wife to Holland. Robert Patterson, however, who succeeded admirably in keeping himself posted on the variations in the attitude of Jerome's family, advised that Jerome should not return to France without his wife. Though he made several efforts during the year that followed to return thither, there is only one on record when it was his purpose to sail alone. In September, 1804, General Armstrong sailed from New York to replace Livingston at Paris. He had agreed with Jerome to take Madame Bonaparte with him, Jerome himself intending to go on one of the French frigates then in New York harbor. She could thus, at least, have landed in France as a member of the family of the American minister, who might have succeeded in presenting her to Napoleon, with whom she could, no doubt, have pleaded her cause with more effect than could have been produced by any amount of diplomatic correspondence or family intervention. She had the gifts which he most admired in women, great personal beauty and wit, and though the latter might have been too keen for his entire appreciation, she no doubt would have been shrewd enough to temper it to his taste. She wrote her father from New York, September 5, 1804, of her disappointment at Armstrong's having sailed without her. The reason given was that Jerome and Elizabeth had arrived by stage a few hours after the ship had sailed. An effort to sail during the following month ended in shipwreck off Pilot Town, where they were finally landed and temporarily housed by one of the inhabitants, on whose clothes-line Madame Bonaparte dried her wardrobe, and from whose hospitable board she enjoyed a dinner of roast goose with apple-sauce, being in exuberant spirits over her rescue.