In her day Betsey Patterson was regarded as the most beautiful woman in America, so much so that Napoleon’s youngest brother became infatuated with her and married her. Well, that was just the start of a remarkable life, but in her later years she wrote to a friend saying: ‘Once I had everything but money. Now I have nothing but money… I am dying of boredom. I am tired of reading, and of all my ways of killing time… I am too old to flirt, and without this stimulus I die.’
Such was the melancholy confession of a woman who had great beauty of body, but no inner beauty of the soul – that which the Bible describes as ‘The unfading beauty of a quiet and gentle spirit, which is of great worth in God’s sight.’