Though the greater part of her life was spent in Europe, and she was for a time on terms of considerable intimacy with his family, she met Jerome but once, when they passed each other in the gallery of the Pitti Palace in Florence, Jerome with the Princess Catherine upon his arm. Though they recognized each other, they passed without greeting, Jerome exclaiming, "That was my American wife." Jerome Napoleon, the son of his American wife, was frequently his guest, and was treated with much kindness by the Princess Catherine. Jerome, however, added practically nothing to this son's material comfort, much to his mother's chagrin, and at his death in 1860 it was found that he had not even mentioned his name in his will, a lack of recognition which wounded both mother and son in a more profound sense than his lifelong failure to make provision for him had done. So great was his son's resemblance to his family, and particularly to the Emperor, that the _chargé d'affaires_ of France at Amsterdam, in 1820, refused his mother a passport for him to travel through France. It was a strange coincidence that Madame Jerome Bonaparte herself should bear a remarkable resemblance to the Bonaparte family, particularly to Napoleon and Pauline, even having some of their mannerisms. In August, 1855, Louis Napoleon offered to create Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte Duke of Sartène, but he declined the honor, as the object was to take away his name and the rights he possessed as his father's eldest son. At the request of his half-brother a family council was called, before which the celebrated Berryer pleaded the cause of Madame Jerome Bonaparte and her son, whose rights were ultimately defined as limited exclusively to the use of the name. On November 3, 1829, Jerome Napoleon Bonaparte, to his mother's intense dissatisfaction and disappointment, married an American, the lovely Miss Susan Mary Williams, of Baltimore. During a long residence abroad Madame Bonaparte had become imbued with the idea that it was a duty her son owed both to her and to himself to ally himself matrimonially with some European family of distinction. Writing to her father from Florence, where she was residing at the time of her son's marriage, she said, "I would rather die than marry any one in Baltimore, but if my son does not feel as I do upon this subject, of course he is quite at liberty to act as he likes best." Her father died in 1835. He had never been in sympathy with her desire to live in a foreign country, and had frequently upbraided her for her prolonged absence from home. In his will he denounced her as an undutiful daughter, bequeathing her a few small houses besides the home in which she was born, on the east side of South Street, with the lot surrounding it.