Mme. Bonaparte now applied to the Maryland Legislature for a divorce, which was at once granted. This action on her part was natural, but as a matter of policy questionable. His wife by every law human and divine, she could better have guarded her son's interests, and even maintained her own rightful position, by ignoring Jerome's alliance with the princess, which was regarded by Catholic Christendom as illegal, the pope stoutly refusing to nullify the previous marriage. Mme. Bonaparte always expresses enthusiasm for the emperor, despite the despotism that shivered the fair fabric of her life, seeking its excuse in the exigencies of his anomalous position. During her residence in Paris after the Restoration, Louis Dix-Huit--_Des Huitres_, the wits styled him from his inordinate love of oysters--fancying that her presence would reflect contemptuously on the late "Corsican usurper," made known his wish to see her at court. This honor she declined, "not wishing to pose as a victim of imperial tyranny: she had accepted the emperor's kindness, and ingratitude was not one of her vices." Marshal Bertrand--"faithful among the faithless" Napoleon called him--who heard the last sigh of the great heart at St. Helena, visited this country thirty years ago and requested an interview with Mme. Bonaparte. "The emperor," he said, "had spoken of her talent with admiration tinged with regret for the shadow he had cast over her life, for he had heard of her generous sentiments toward him, alluding to which he one day said, 'Those whom I so wronged have forgiven me: those I overwhelmed with my bounty have forsaken me.'" Mme. Bonaparte bore no malice to Jerome, whose nature was not of heroic mould; and yet what touching professions of fidelity he sent her!--letters unsurpassed in manly tenderness. A few months after their separation a gentleman writes of him: "He is always saying, 'My wife! my dear little wife!' He seems much affected, and declares that he 'shall for ever remember the shipwreck they had encountered: how well on that trying occasion did she behave! how, when danger was over, he pressed her in his arms!'" "Jerome loved me to the last," says Mme. Bonaparte: "he thought me the handsomest woman in the world, and the most charming. After his marriage to the princess he gave to the court-painter several miniatures of me from which to make a portrait, which he kept hidden from the good Catherine."