Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (10 page)

Eugénie had her own household, many of whose members were paid enviably large salaries. The Grand Mistress was the coldly severe Princesse d’Essling, a tiny little woman with fragile good looks and a permanent, insincere smile. The person who did most of the work, however, was the first
dame d’honneur
, the far from fragile Duchesse de Bassano, a plump, handsome and somewhat haughty Belgian noblewoman who had married the emperor’s amiable Grand Chamberlain. She had the demanding job of vetting each one of the countless ladies from every country in the world who were determined to be presented at court. There were six other
dames d’honneur
in the team, each one doing a week on duty, waiting in turn on the empress, although sometimes all seven were in attendance on her together.

Like Mme de Bassano, not all the
dames d’honneur
were French; for example the Spanish Marquèsa de Marisma, who had been a friend of Eugénie’s since childhood and was known as ‘the most amiable woman in Paris’, and Baronne de Pierres, born Miss Thorne, an American. A shy and timid girl upset by the slightest thing, she was nevertheless a superb horsewoman who usually rode by the Empress’s side when she hunted at Compiègne or Fontainebleau and whose transatlantic slang delighted her. In secret the baroness smoked a clay pipe, an odd habit for one of Winterhalter’s beauties.

The ladies were immortalised by Franz Xaver Winterhalter, a German from Baden who looked a most unlikely artist with his stiff bearing, formal clothes and high black stock. When he painted Eugénie with them in 1855 he had already painted the courts of Louis-Philippe and Victoria, transforming the English queen and her consort into figures of Renaissance splendour. In this group portrait, which has been called the empress’s ‘Decameron’, all the sitters are shown in full dress and bare shouldered, Eugénie wearing her favourite mauve. (‘Not a man in it’, commented her husband.) Winterhalter painted other portraits of the empress, although contemporaries say he never did justice to her beauty. Photographs, as well as paintings, also capture something of Eugénie and her
entourage. Comte Olympe Aguado was the court photographer when what the English called ‘sun-pictures’ were still regarded as semi-miraculous. There were others, too, such as Edouard Delessert and Gustave Le Gray. Their faded sepia prints sometimes succeed in conveying faint, ghostly glimpses of Eugénie’s world.

Some English visitors, accustomed to their own prim court, were shocked by the ladies’ relaxed behaviour. ‘I returned to Paris in the Royal carriage – a large omnibus’, the earl of Malmesbury would write in 1862. ‘Madame de Pierres, an American, née Thorne, and the Duchess de Morny, a Russian, just married, smoked all the way in the Empress’s face, notwithstanding her plain hints against the proceedings. She is much too good-natured to her
entourage
, but enhances her singular beauty by the most natural gaiety.’ (Eventually Eugénie forbade anyone save the emperor to smoke in her presence.)

In the earl’s opinion, her ladies nearly all dressed in ‘vile’ taste. ‘Their hair is dragged off their faces so tightly that they can hardly shut their eyes, and their scarlet accoutrements, jackets, cloaks, etc., as they happen to be very fair, make an
ensemble
indescribably unbecoming.’ Yet most people thought they looked delightful – as did Eugène Boudin, when he painted them promenading with Eugénie along the beach at Trouville in 1864.

There were also the gentlemen of the empress’s household, who wore her uniform of pale blue coat and white silk breeches. Among them was her principal chamberlain, Comte Charles de la Pagerie, an ugly little man, who was always grimacing nervously. Although still in his early forties, he was the Empress Josephine’s nephew, seemingly his sole qualification for anything. Eugénie teased him unmercifully. When she told him to imitate the sun, he would twist his face into a ball and then scream, ‘
Voilà le soleil!
’, while if ordered to imitate a turkey he would run round the room, gobbling at the top of his voice. He was much in demand for charades. She possessed a more effective chamberlain in the Comte de Cossé-Brissac, a nobleman of impeccable lineage and manners, who knew how to handle haughty members of the old aristocracy whenever they condescended – and many of them did – to visit the court of the Bonaparte usurper.

The background of the men and women who held court posts shows how central Napoleon I’s inspiration remained. The Grand Chamberlain, the Duc de Bassano, was the son of the great emperor’s war minister; the master of ceremonies, the Duc de Cambacères the
son of his chancellor; and the
premier veneur
, the Prince de Moskova, was the son of Marshal Ney, while the chamberlain, Prince Bacciochi was the son of Napoleon’s sister, Elisa. They formed the apex of the ‘old’ Napoleonic nobility (not yet fifty years old, sniffed Legitimists) and dominated Second Empire society.

Between New Year and Lent four astonishingly lavish balls were held at the Tuileries, culminating with a costume ball for the carnival on Shrove Tuesday, each attended by 5,000 guests. There were also the empress’s ‘
Petits lundis
’, her Monday evening receptions and dances in the palace’s salon
bleu
, to which at least 500 people were always invited. Then there were the masked balls occasionally given by ministers at their ministries. In addition, there were balls for foreign royalties visiting Paris. All this was known collectively, with a hint of sarcasm, as the
fêtes impériales
– best translated as ‘Imperial merry-making’. If there had been court balls under the restored Bourbons between 1814 and 1830, nothing quite like it had been seen since the eighteenth century.

White was
de rigueur
for ladies’ dresses at the Tuileries, if only because it had been the custom at the first Napoleonic court, with gowns of tulle, velvet or gauze, trimmed with vast amounts of embroidery and lace; Eugénie sometimes appeared in a dress trimmed with ivy. Long trains, no shorter than three metres and no longer than four, hung from their bare shoulders, the empress wearing a red or purple velvet train on important occasions of state.

Guests at the Tuileries had to arrive in carriages, cabs being forbidden, so that on evenings when the balls were being held the entire length of the rue de Rivoli, from where they approached the palace, was jammed by a seemingly endless line of vehicles. Presumably their impatient occupants were supposed to be consoled by the fireworks which were bursting over the Seine. Having at last reached the Pavillon de l’Horloge in the centre of the Tuileries’ interminable façade, they went up a broad staircase into the Galerie de la Paix, a huge Cent Garde with carbine and fixed bayonet standing motionless on each step. Dancing, which began at 9.30 p.m. precisely, took place in the Galerie de la Paix, where the imperial couple had their thrones, gilt chairs draped in red velvet that fell in folds to the floor. Flanking the thrones were red velvet chairs for members of the imperial family – old King Jerome and Princesse Mathilde being often in evidence, Prince Napoleon rarely. The emperor and empress invariably opened the dancing
themselves, in a quadrille with the most illustrious guests. The music consisted mainly of waltzes by Waldteufel, Strauss or Olivier Métra, Waldteufel frequently conducting in person.

The memoirs of American guests are unusually vivid since, having no court life at home, they tended to be more observant than Europeans. Mrs Charles Moulton – Lillie Greenough, born and brought up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and the wife of an American banker resident in Paris – has left us a cameo portrait of Eugénie holding court at the Tuileries. While skating one January day in the Bois de Boulogne, the emperor and empress (whom she had never met before) had suddenly come up and asked her to teach them to skate, since they could scarcely stay on their feet on the ice. An invitation to one of the big balls followed, so Lillie was vetted formally by the daunting Duchessse de Bassano, who found no difficulty in giving her approval.

At the Tuileries, Lillie admired ‘the superb Cent Gardes, standing like statues’, before she and her mother-in-law were taken by an usher to the grand master of ceremonies, who passed them on to a lesser master of ceremonies, who took them into the ballroom. ‘Each lady showed to great advantage as, on account of their crinolines, they had to stand very far apart,’ wrote Lillie. The ballroom, she noticed, was lit by wax candles instead of gas. After the
quadrille d’honneur
, ‘Mme Moulton’ (wearing her old wedding dress) was sent a message from the empress to come and talk to her. The note was brought by Prince Achille Murat, who took the young American up to the throne.

‘I can’t imagine a more beautiful apparition,’ said Lillie. ‘She wore a white tulle dress trimmed with red velvet bows and gold fringes; her crown of diamonds and pearls and her necklace were magnificent. On her breast shone the great diamond (the Regent) which belongs to the Crown.’

Learning that Mme Moulton could sing (she had been trained by Malibran’s brother), Eugénie invited her to a Monday evening reception. ‘ “
Le petit lundi
” of the empress was not so
petit
as I had expected; there were at least four or five hundred people present’, reported Lillie, who nervously sang them some American songs (including ‘Swanee River’), and was warmly applauded by the emperor and the empress.

Lillie Moulton and Dr Evans, the dentist, show us what nonsense it is to suspect that Eugénie was anti-American, as one or two
historians have suggested. Evans has been accused of sycophancy yet he wrote long after the empress had lost her throne. ‘Everyone likes him, and every door as well as every jaw is open to him’, said Lillie. ‘At the Tuileries they look on him not only as a good dentist, but as a good friend.’ If a bit fulsome, Evans was clearly no fool. He tells us that during the Second Empire, ‘It used often to be said that “Paris is the heaven of Americans”.’

Certainly there were always plenty of them to be seen at the Tuileries and in 1869 General John A. Dix, United States envoy to France, told the American colony, ‘We are invited to participate most liberally – far more liberally than at any other court in Europe – in the hospitalities of the Palace.’ Eugénie, who spoke English, obviously enjoyed American company. Evans wrote that General Ulysses S. Grant was fascinated by her ‘never failing kindness to Americans’. No less obviously, the liking was reciprocated. General Dix recalled how he loved to watch the empress at receptions, ‘moving about with a gracefulness all of her own’.

Formal dinners at the Tuileries were served by a footman behind each chair and eaten off silver-gilt, with dessert plates of old Sèvres: Eugénie barely noticed what she ate. Very occasionally there was unseemly behaviour. One day she heard loud laughter. A napkin having fallen off a lady’s lap, the Marquis de Gallifet had dived beneath the table to retrieve it, but had failed to re-emerge. ‘He’s been on the Mexican campaign and thinks he’s still under canvas’, Napoleon told the angry Eugénie. She experimented with dinners that separated the sexes, men and women sitting at different tables, but no one enjoyed them, apart from a handful of natural feminists like the empress herself.

There was of course a private side to Eugénie’s life at the Tuileries. Every day at noon Baron de Pierres, the American’s husband and equerry in charge of the stables, came to see if she needed a carriage, and when she went for a drive he rode at its side. The Grand Mistress, the principal lady-in-waiting, the private secretary, the librarian and the reader also came to this midday audience. The private secretary organised her engagements, the librarian brought a selection of books, since the empress spent a good deal of time reading in her boudoir, and the job of the ‘reader’ was not to read but to go through her correspondence and answer letters. At about one o’clock a carriage was sent to bring the two ladies-in-waiting on duty to the palace from their apartments; their role was essentially decorative and if there were no public engagements or if Eugénie did not go for a drive, after lunch the carriage would take them home for the afternoon. However, the Grand Mistress, the ladies and one or two of the household gentlemen always dined with the empress.

The shrewish Mme Pollet was a key member of the team. Supposedly the daughter of a Carlist general, ‘Pepa’, who had been with Eugénie since she was a girl, she was a cross between maid and ‘companion’, running the empress’s wardrobe, keeping her accounts (paying dressmakers’ bills, sending donations to charity) and looking after her jewels. Still young, she suffered from phobias, convinced that she was dying and that assassins lurked behind the curtains. Bad-tempered, she was always being rude to the ladies-in-waiting or upsetting the servants, much to Eugénie’s irritation. But although she occasionally screamed at Pepa, she could not do without her.

The empress had a tiny circle of close friends whom she received before dinner at about six o’clock, notably Cécile Delessert and her mother, with another old acquaintance, Mme de Nadaillac. The circle included Princesse Mathilde, who pretended she had grown fond of her despite waging a relentless campaign of character assassination, the emperor’s niece, Anna Murat, who married the Duc de Mouchy – just the sort of marriage between the old and new aristocracies that Eugénie liked to see – and, later, Princess Clothilde, the unfortunate young Savoyard who married Plon-Plon. Paca’s children came when they were in Paris. Few others were ever admitted to the empress’s private apartments.

Gaiety was not confined to the Tuileries. In 1859, for example, there were masked balls at the office of the minister of state in the Louvre (M. Fould), at the ministry of foreign affairs in the newly opened Quai d’Orsay (Comte Walewski) and at the chamber of the Corps Législatif in the Palais Bourbon (Comte de Morny). Normally austere rooms were draped in silk and full of exotic flowers while sweet champagne – the Second Empire liked it sweet – was served inexhaustibly to the guests, who wore fancy dress or dominoes with masks. Accompanied by the empress, Napoleon came to all three balls, under the impression that his mask disguised him, but everyone recognised his slow, sidling walk and the way he twirled his moustache.