Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (15 page)

The Goncourt brothers relate maliciously how, anxious to outshine Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, Eugénie had borrowed some of the items from the Louvre, and had done the same thing at the Tuileries. Since the queen had listed the pictures she hoped to see at the Louvre, she was astonished to find them in her hostess’s palaces. But such details could not spoil the visit. ‘Nothing, no description, can give you any idea of what Paris has looked like for the past week’, Viel Castel wrote afterwards. ‘Streets and boulevards were a forest of banners with triumphal arches everywhere, all bearing the arms or monograms of the British and French sovereigns.’

‘I am
DELIGHTED, ENCHANTED, AMUSED
and
INTERESTED
’, Victoria wrote in her diary. ‘The Emperor has done wonders for Paris.’ With Albert, she inspected and admired an international exhibition that displayed exhibits from every European and American country – even from Russia despite the war, Russian businessmen having been given safe conducts. There were glittering balls at the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, and a visit to the Conciergerie where the emperor had been imprisoned. There was an evening when by torchlight during a thunderstorm the royal family saw Napoleon I’s tomb at the Invalides. The queen told her son to kneel down, although privately she thought the shrine looked like a swimming bath. When she and Albert went to the Opéra, at their departure the audience sang ‘God save the Queen’, gave three cheers and then sang ‘God save the Queen’ again.

Napoleon drove the Prince of Wales through Paris in a dog-cart, pointing out the sights. ‘I wish I were your son’, sighed the future Edward VII, remembering his stern existence at home. It was the start of his lifelong love of France.

The climax was a ball in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, the ‘Hall of Mirrors’, which had not seen such splendour since 1789 – understandably, as Eugénie had chosen an eighteenth-century print for its inspiration, ‘
Une fête sous Louis Quinze
’. She was waiting to welcome Victoria, looking, in her guest’s opinion, ‘like a fairy-queen or nymph’. The empress stood at the top of the great marble staircase, which was covered with a purple carpet, its balustrades almost concealed by masses of orchids, ferns and mosses, and lined by Cent Gardes. Her white dress was thickly sewn with diamonds and bunches of green grass, while there were more diamonds at her waist and in her hair.

At ten o’clock sharp the gardens were suddenly lit by rockets and Chinese candles, then ‘a million fireworks’ painted Windsor Castle in the night sky, after which Napoleon and Victoria, Albert and Eugénie, opened the ball. There was little dancing, people preferring to admire the magnificent decorations in the palace and the park. However, the emperor insisted on waltzing with the Princess Royal. Even Viel Castel agreed that the evening had been ‘beyond all praise’.

The nine days went by, more and more amiably, the emperor and Prince Albert even singing duets in German. ‘His German is perfect’, commented the queen approvingly. Throughout, Napoleon was, as the foreign secretary Lord Clarendon put it, ‘making love’ to Victoria. He took her for a long walk in the park at Saint-Cloud, during which they discussed European politics with the utmost frankness and he paid her some highly agreeable compliments. ‘Isn’t it odd, Lord Clarendon’, she confided later, ‘the emperor remembers every dress he has seen me in.’ She was in ecstasies over his tact, his dignity, his modesty. ‘I know very few people in whom I feel so ready to confide or to speak to so frankly. I felt, I can’t quite explain it, so safe with him.’

The friendship between Eugénie and the queen grew still stronger. She confessed to Victoria that she was pregnant and that, despite two previous miscarriages, she expected to bear a child. The queen was full of sympathy and useful advice. As the end of the visit approached, both the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal, who had begun to worship the empress, begged her to ask their mother to let them stay for a few days longer in Paris.

The emperor took the royal family out to their yacht in his barge when they left from Boulogne on 27 August. Victoria’s visit had been no less of a dazzling success than his own to England. ‘Throughout her stay the celebrations have been superb,’ Viel Castel admitted – despite observing, when Plon-Plon received the Order of the Bath, ‘the Queen would have done better to give him a cake of Windsor soap’.

Moreover, the visit made the French forget, if only for a little while, the war in the Crimea. Early in September, however, their troops finally stormed the Malakhov, the key fort to Sevastopol, which surrendered – and then it was only a matter of time before Russia gave in. When the Imperial Guard returned and Napoleon rode at their head, the Parisians threw flowers beneath his horse’s feet, and the subsequent peace conference in Paris made it seem that France was once again the leading power in Europe. Yet both Victoria’s visit and victory in the Crimea would turn out to be surprisingly hollow triumphs.

The emperor, said General Fleury, was deeply impressed by the queen’s ‘knowledge of the politics of all Europe and by the obviously very active part she took in the British government’s foreign policy’. Poor Napoleon did not realise that however many state papers she read, and however much she liked ‘my nearest and dearest ally’, she had little influence. Now that Russia had been kept out of the Mediterranean, England lost interest in a French alliance that could easily mean being dragged into another war.

All that survived was the friendship between Eugénie and Victoria. When the imperial couple spent four days at Osborne in August 1857, Victoria told Lord Clarendon that she would have liked them to stay much longer, as she felt ‘none of the
gêne
of royalty in the society of friends like them’. Ironically, only a few years before, the queen’s advisers had been telling her that the empress was a ‘Spanish adventuress’, yet during the state visits the two women had found a surprising amount in common. They would meet again only occasionally and very briefly until 1870. However, they remained genuinely devoted friends for the rest of their long lives.

THREE

‘
Queen Crinoline
’

A S
ON AND
H
EIR

D
uring the early years Eugénie did not find much time for politics, so busy being a hostess and trying to bear a child, with entertaining and setting the fashion. Parisians called her ‘
La Reine Crinoline
’.

She knew that the régime’s survival depended on her having a son. Plon-Plon was a most unsatisfactory heir, while a daughter could not inherit the throne. Her attitude to sexual matters did not make life easy for her. ‘Physical love, what a filthy business ‘
quelle saleté
’, she complained to Cécile Delessert, after her honeymoon. ‘Why do men think of nothing else?’

Once, only half-joking, the empress said men were ‘just animals, bears walking on their hind-legs and opening their mouths to frighten poor little women. They don’t bite, however. They simply rattle their chains. Then they dance. Then they give in. Then they pay the bills.’ Often she regarded them as semi-human. Yet she developed an eye for a good-looking one, horrifying Archduke Maximilian by saying she had seen ‘a delicious sailor’ when out driving. ‘If I wasn’t a believer, I would have taken only too many lovers,’ she told Émile Ollivier in 1867. ‘Love is the only good thing there is.’ Ollivier comments in his journal, ‘She’s never had affairs, only flirtations … I’ve seen her at a ball, letting herself be kissed by a man.’

On the other hand she admired beauty in women and to some extent chose her ladies for their good looks, sometimes having their portraits painted. Once she gave a dinner party for the emperor at which the guests were the twenty most beautiful women in Paris. Too much should not be read into this, however – the sapphist
Ethel Smyth, who knew her well in old age, tells us ‘she had no sensuality in her nature’.

A pre-Freudian biographer, Roger Sencourt, argues eloquently that Eugénie belonged to a specific type, and that ‘women (or men) who have this Platonic enjoyment of the beauty of their own sex, if they marry, marry those who gratify their ambitions and not their senses …. It explains both her disgust with, and her long loyalty to the first man she had loved.’ In Sencourt’s view it explains, too, her combination of excitability and hot temper with kind-heartedness and generosity.

After two miscarriages, which had made her thoroughly miserable, when Eugénie found herself pregnant again in June 1855, she only saved the child by going to Eaux-Bonnes. ‘If I had left it longer, I would not have been able to have children at all’, she confided to Paca. She went into labour at about midnight on 14 March. Close members of the imperial family were asked to witness the birth. Plon-Plon took his revenge. ‘The Prince stood in the doorway wearing his eye-glass, coolly examining the unfortunate woman who, having thrown almost everything off in her convulsions, was practically naked,’ Princess Bacciochi recalled. ‘The Prince said, “How can you call a woman pretty with legs like that.”’

After twenty-two hours, Eugénie gave birth early on the morning of 16 March. She almost died. Barely articulate, the emperor suddenly cried, ‘Save the empress!’ and the doctor used forceps to extract her child. Later, the doctor said he had never seen such suffering. It was a boy. Overjoyed, Napoleon rushed out of the room in tears and embraced the first five people he saw, then pulled himself together, muttering, ‘I can’t kiss you all!’ As dawn broke, cannon at the Invalides fired a 101-gun salute. On the same day, the emperor amnestied all political prisoners. No longer heir, Plon-Plon refused to attend the private christening, but Mathilde smoothly congratulated the empress on saving the dynasty. Two days later, when market women from Les Halles brought flowers to the Tuileries, Napoleon let them see the baby. Then the diplomatic corps solemnly filed past the cradle, Hübner noting that he had blue eyes and was wearing the red sash of the Légion d’honneur. Cardinal Patrizzi arrived from Rome bringing the Golden Rose – twenty-three gold roses in a gold vase – the highest honour the papacy could give to a woman.

There was more rejoicing when peace was signed with Russia on 30 March, marked by a splendid military parade. ‘Returning to the Louvre at about one in the morning, I met processions of workers in the streets and on the boulevards, carrying torches and cheering the emperor and peace’, records Viel Castel. ‘Who would have recognised the France of 1848?’ Yet there were shadows. Dr Fergusson, one of Queen Victoria’s physicians, had examined Napoleon and found signs of premature ageing. As for Eugénie, she was unable to walk or even stand until the end of May – doctors warned that another child would kill her and that she must never sleep with her husband again.

The Prince Imperial’s formal christening by Cardinal Patrizzi took place at Notre Dame on 14 June. The child was named Napoleon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph, Pope Pius IX being the boy’s godfather. (His parents called him ‘Lou-Lou’ when he was very small, then ‘Louis’.) Hübner said he had never seen a more beautiful service, but Lord Cowley thought it more theatrical than religious, adding that the crowds showed little enthusiasm. Even so, Thomas Couture’s painting of the occasion was one of the most successful official pictures to emerge from the Second Empire.

The child was given a formidable nanny, Miss Shaw, chosen because she was English, while the abbé Deguerry, curé of the Madeleine – afterwards murdered by the Communards – gave him religious instruction. He was made a grenadier of the Imperial Guard when only eight months old and issued with a soldier’s red pay book. A photograph taken when he was five shows him proudly wearing a grenadier’s bearskin. His first proper tutor was M. Monnier.

For a time M. Lévy of the College de Vanves came to the Tuileries every day, bringing a group of his boys so that the prince could study with them. At the end of each week Lévy announced the class’s marks, always beginning, ‘First, His Imperial Highness the Prince Imperial’ – then taking another boy aside, he would whisper ‘You were first, the prince came fifteenth.’ All this changed in 1867 when General Frossard (a former
polytechnicien
) became his ‘governor’ and the empress appointed Augustin Filon as his tutor, on the recommendation of Victor Duruy. He was assisted by Ernest Lavisse who taught the boy history. Augustin Filon, as loyal as he was gifted, turned out to be an excellent choice.

Eugénie wanted her son brought up with the icy dignity of a Spanish duke, approving highly of Carpeaux’s patrician statue of him with his dog Nero, which was exhibited in 1865. When she was away, however, ‘Lou-Lou’ played games like hide-and-seek with other small boys all over the Tuileries, making what his father called ‘a hellish noise’. Yet if she rebuked the emperor for not stopping him, he would answer, ‘Why spoil his happiest years?’ Father and son enjoyed playing together with the model railway in the park at Saint-Cloud. The child picked up slang from his friends; when his mother told him off, he replied ‘You speak French quite well for a foreigner, Mamma, but you don’t really understand our language.’

Everybody liked the little boy, even the crusty Mérimée. So too, despite herself, did Princesse Mathilde, who joyfully quoted him – ‘
Maman
has already said some silly things [
bêtises
] today.’ – and gave him one of the new bicycles as a birthday present.

There were more implications for Eugénie than simply bearing an heir, however; she had made real the Bonapartes’ claim to be a dynasty as well as saviours of the Revolution, the ‘fourth dynasty’, who ruled in succession to Capetians, Valois and Bourbons. Napoleon III ordered a tomb at Saint-Denis, so that he would lie among the old kings, and spoke of his son as ‘
L’Enfant de France
’ – the term for a royal child during the
ancien régime
. Above all, under the imperial constitution, Eugénie would now become regent when her husband was away on campaign or should he die before ‘Lou-Lou’ came of age.