Decision of the Bonaparte-Paterson case.
The Paris Court, on the 29th ult., decided the suit of Mad. Bonaparte, (formerly Miss Paterson, of Baltimore,) in which she sought to obtain the legal recognition of her marriage with Prince Jerome Bonaparte. The Court declared that as the object of the demand made by Madame Elizibeth Paterson and Jerome Bonaparte, her son, was the liquidat on and the division of the succession of the Prince Jerome, who died on the 24th of June, 1860; and inasmuch as among the grounds of opposition to the demand is one that the claim has been already judged by two decisions of the conseil de famills, dated the 4th of July, 1856, and the 7th of July, 1860, which proclaimed the nullity of the marriage of the 24th of December, 1803, and its invalidity even as regard property, the Court added:‘ ‘"It is expedient above all to examine the validity of this ground of opposition, in as much as if it be well founded it would establish a peremptory exception to the present demand, and it would no longer belong to the Tribunal to examine the other grounds of opposition, or to decide whether the marriage is not null for having been contracted in a clandestine manner, or whether Madame Elizabeth Paterson could rely on her good faith in the legal acceptation of the term, or what efficacy should be attributed to the decrees of the 11th and 30th Ventose of the year '13: and, in fine, whether the possession of a position claimed by the parties represented by M. Berryer does not meet an energetic, incessant, and manifest contradiction in the simple fact of the second marriage contracted in 1807 by Prince Jerome and the Princess Catherine of Wurtemburg, on the faith of the legal non existence of the first marriage; and whether, consequently, the title of relative given to Jerome Paterson be according to the habitual relations of life, particularly when it must be recollected that to admit a clear right by blood would, on the part of the children born of the second marriage, be a denial of their own legitimacy."’
’ The Court then referred to the 1,350th and 1,351st articles of the Code Napoleon, and having recapitulated all the facts of the case as stated by counsel, it declared that the demands of Madame Elizabeth Paterson and her son, Jerome Bonaparte, are not admissible and must be rejected, and orders that the present judgment shall be mentioned on the margin of the deed dated the 19th of July, 1860, containing a declaration of the acceptance by Jerome Bonaparte of the succession of Prince Jerome. The Court further sentenced the claimants to pay the costs.
