Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (19 page)

‘Comtesse W … is definitely the new favourite’, Viel Castel noted in September. ‘W … struts in the shadow of his wife’s new
dignity
.’ ‘The way in which she threw herself at the emperor was the theme of everybody’s conversation’, Cowley informed Clarendon after a week at Compiègne in November. ‘She had neither eyes nor ears for anyone else.’ In the imperial train on the way down to the
série
Princesse Mathilde had seen ‘her very dear cousin’ mounted on Marie-Anne’s knees as if riding a horse, kissing her mouth and pushing his hand down her bosom. Walewski pretended to be unaware of the affair, after receiving a valuable country estate in the Landes.

‘Mme W… hides her good fortune as little as possible, to convince as many people as she can of her power over the emperor’, Viel Castel observed. ‘A short time ago she went to the empress and with superb effrontery told her, “I am forced to beg Your Majesty not to invite me any longer to your private
soirées
since people are accusing me of being the emperor’s mistress and I don’t want such a calumny to harm Your Majesty’s opinion of me. I hope you will keep me at a distance until these vile rumours die down.” Deeply moved, the empress kissed her and their friendship has grown even closer.’

Although Marie-Anne saw off Clothilde de la Bedoyère, the other blonde whom Napoleon mentioned to Mathilde, by March 1859 she was making a scene at a ball because he had flirted with a ‘Mme G …’. By January 1860 it was rumoured that a ‘Mme C …’ was enjoying the imperial favour and that her husband, a naval lieutenant, had been promoted to captain for no apparent reason. This was the month when Walewski ceased to be foreign minister. Yet in November that year Cowley assured Lord John Russell, ‘Madame is more powerful and more in favour than ever.’ However, she finally lost her hold during the next few months.

‘W…. is very shaken’, Viel Castel cackled diabolically in November 1861. ‘His wife’s credit is at an end, and she is to be found among the ranks of reformed sultanas.’ The diarist then relates gleefully how when Marie-Anne had admired one of Viollet-le-Duc’s gargoyles at Pierrefonds, saying ‘What an expensive drainpipe’, Marshal Vaillant had answered, ‘Less expensive than yours,
Madame.’ Someone present reproached him for being ‘too lively’. ‘You just don’t understand’, replied the coarse old minister for the household, ‘drainage like that costs us four million francs a year’. Her reign was definitely over.

For a while there was no
maîtresse-en-titre
, Napoleon sleeping with any good-looking and easy woman who happened to catch his fancy, as he had done even during Marie-Anne’s ascendancy. When some unusually pretty young ladies were presented at court, Eugénie muttered grimly, ‘I’d like to know which one of them hasn’t slept with the emperor.’ A staircase led discreetly from the imperial study to a bedroom above. If he was brought a girl whom he found unattractive, he would say, ‘I am summoned by my papers’, and she would be shown out.

Napoleon III’s papers did not always summon him, however. According to the Goncourt brothers, when a girl met with his approval she was taken to a room to undress before being led naked into another where her sovereign, also naked, was waiting, the chamberlain on duty telling her, ‘You may kiss His Majesty on any part of his person except for his face.’ But Mme de Taisey-Châtenoy says that the emperor generally wore a mauve silk nightshirt in which he looked undistinguished, and that, personally, she had found his performance in bed equally lacking in distinction.

Unable to share a bed with her husband because another pregnancy might easily kill her, in desperation the empress attempted to make herself more interesting. One method she tried was photography. She posed as a smiling odalisque in a harem, wearing Turkish trousers and reclining seductively on silk cushions, and also as a pensive bride in white with her veil thrown back. Perhaps in private she dressed like this once or twice for the emperor, but obviously it made no difference. Ordinary studio photographs taken during the early 1860s, show her with a tense, melancholy expression.

Even when Eugénie did not know who her rival was, she lived in a state of constant suspicion. The strain took its toll. The last straw was the death of her beloved sister Paca at Paris in 1860, after a long illness – an undiagnosed disease of the spine. Paca died on 16 September, but the emperor, who had been informed, did not tell Eugénie until a week later, so as not to spoil their cruise to Algeria on the imperial yacht. She found it hard to forgive him.

Almost without warning, the empress suddenly left for England on 14 November, under the name of the ‘Comtesse de Pierrefonds’, with only two ladies-in-waiting, two gentlemen and ten servants – the personal maids and valets, and the footmen who were needed to look after a mountain of trunks and hatboxes. ‘The Empress of the French arrived in London, and drove with her suite to Claridge’s Hotel in hack cabs’, an astounded Lord Malmesbury noted on 16 November. ‘The following morning she went shopping on foot, and to the Crystal Palace in the afternoon.’ Afterwards he added that she had been cheered wherever she went and ‘was evidently delighted’.

From London the imperial party then made a long, exhausting journey up to Scotland in a jolting, unheated steam train, sitting all the way in an ordinary first-class carriage swathed in cloaks and rugs against the cold, equipped with foot warmers and picnic baskets. Part of the reason for going north was to consult Dr Simpson at Edinburgh, the world expert on diseases of the sort that had killed Paca, since although not a hypochondriac Eugénie was a firm believer in what would now be termed ‘preventative medicine’. After he had confirmed that she was basically in good health, she climbed up Arthur’s Seat, turning back halfway up because of the cold. Then she went to her friend the Duchess of Hamilton at Hamilton Palace near Glasgow.

In December she returned to London, staying at Claridge’s. She spent two days at Windsor with Victoria and Albert, who found her thin and sickly looking. ‘She gave me a melancholy impression as if some deep grief and anxiety weighed upon her’, wrote the kindly perceptive queen, who liked her as much as ever. Clearly there was some other motive besides grief at Paca’s death for her absence from France, almost certainly a severe rift with her husband, but there is no firm evidence.

Napoleon was waiting at Boulogne to welcome her home and there was some sort of reconciliation between them – for the moment. ‘Great is the despair in the harem of the Tuileries’, Cowley could nonetheless write in April 1862. ‘The Empress would not appear at a ball for the Queen of Holland on Monday night, and was reported very sulky.’ Whoever the woman was, it does not appear to have been a particularly important affair. A new ‘distraction’ that emerged in 1863, however, was much more serious than for some time. This was Marguerite Bellanger, whom an early twentieth-century biographer
^*
calls ‘a new and vulgar amour’, and whom Viel Castel does not even deign to mention. A big, statuesque peasant, twenty-five years old, with yellow hair and a pink complexion, she came from a little village in the Loire Valley near Saumur and her real name was Julie Leboeuf, a name that suited her coarse good looks. In Paris she had become a walk-on actress and what we might perhaps describe today as a part-time call-girl.

Probably brought to the Tuileries during the summer of that year by one of Napoleon’s procurers, Marguerite made a deep impression, which was due to more than physical qualities. She was, quite simply, great fun, cheerful and good-natured, the archetypal whore with a heart of gold, and had acquired a remarkable collection of ‘friends’ – politicians, courtiers, soldiers and actors – for whom she gave little parties. Once again, Napoleon was infatuated, installing her at a small house in Paris at Passy and an even smaller one at Montretour, just outside the park at Saint-Cloud. In February 1864 she gave birth to a son.

At times the ‘friendship’ proved too strenuous for Napoleon, worn out by years of sexual excess. Returning late one August night from Montretour, he collapsed, although he quickly recovered. The empress was horrified – this new mistress was killing him. If he died now, the Prince Imperial could never inherit the Second Empire, since it would fall apart at once.

What took place the following morning has been described by a recent biographer
^*
as a scene straight out of
La Dame aux Camélias
. Accompanied by Napoleon’s private secretary (and procurer), old Mocquard, the empress of the French called on Marguerite at Montretour. ‘Mademoiselle, you’ll kill the emperor’, she informed her. ‘If you love him, you must go away tomorrow. It has to stop and I order you to leave. I shall pay you but you must leave, now.’ Astonishingly, Marguerite stood her ground. ‘Your husband comes here because he’s bored and tired – if you don’t want him to come, then make him stay at home by being nice and kind, good-humoured, gentle.’

Eugénie went back to Saint-Cloud and gave the emperor an ultimatum, but he refused to abandon Marguerite. Unable to eat or sleep, the empress fled to Schwalbach, a watering-place near Hesse. Nothing had changed when she returned in October, Cowley reporting
that the atmosphere at Compiègne had been ‘most painful’. ‘The emperor and empress are hardly on speaking terms…. She taxes him with his present liaison to his face – calling the lady the scum of the earth.’ She told the Walewskis that she had always known of his infidelities. ‘I’ve tried everything, even to make him jealous’, she confided, rather pathetically. ‘It made no difference, but now that he’s lowered himself to this
crapule
[scum] I can’t take any more.’

‘Spanish blood and Spanish jealousy have often begotten imprudences, but I have never heard of such an imprudence as the visit of Eugénie to Marguerite’, thought Lord Cowley. ‘It was certain to end in miserable failure as the damsel would feel sure of better provision from the husband than the wife and at the same time be able to give him a
preuve éclatante
of her disinterested love.’ Yet he felt sorry for the empress. ‘The fact is that she had worried herself to death over the emperor’s liaison with Mlle Bellanger’, he wrote later. ‘This worry had fallen upon her nerves and produced loss of appetite, nausea, etc….’

Mercifully, Napoleon suddenly grew tired of Marguerite, and by the summer of the next year he had pensioned her off – handsomely. A courtier commented that by now he was so terrified of Eugénie’s scenes that ‘he would set all Europe on fire to avoid them’.

In August 1865, when the emperor and empress were at Neuchâtel, the horses of the carriage in which her ladies-in-waiting were sitting bolted after an engine driver sounded his steam-whistle. Hurled out, Princess Anna Murat and Mlle Bouvet (Mme Carette) were badly hurt. Napoleon and Eugénie organised their removal to hospital, and the empress spent the night with them. The experience seems to have done much to bring the pair together again.

Even so … ‘The Emperor is setting up a new flirtation with a Countess Merci d’Argenteau’, wrote Cowley in April 1867. ‘She is young, pretty, and being deserted very much by her husband, has taken to poetry and painting. It is supposed that she will not surrender but will try to prevent the Imperial mind from its perverted ways.’ He added, ‘I shall look out for squalls on the other side of the ménage.’ However, the Imperial manhood was by then a thing of the past.

One lasting effect of the ‘distractions’ and the scenes which resulted, an effect never admitted by either, was to strengthen Eugénie’s increasing domination over her husband.

FOUR

Zenith

T
HE
I
TALIAN
W
AR

O
n 14 January 1858 the programme at the Paris Opéra, then in the rue Lepelletier, included among other items the ballet from Auber’s
Gustave III
. Although this ended with an assassination, Napoleon and Eugénie, who liked the composer, decided to attend. At 8.00 p.m., three-quarters of an hour before the performance, Colonel Pieri, a well-known Italian republican, was arrested outside, armed with a pistol, a knife and a grenade. No one bothered to tell the emperor but the equerry on duty had sent a troop of twenty-four lancers as escort, unaware that he preferred to be without one.

As they arrived at 8.30, three grenades packed with bullets were thrown at their carriage, exploding in succession under the wheels. The first grenade put out the street lighting, plunging the street into pitch darkness, and smashed both the opera house and carriage windows, a glass splinter cutting the emperor’s lip, another splinter grazing the empress’s eyelid. The carriage doors were forced open, the ‘most horrible faces she ever saw’ peering in; but they were policemen’s faces.

Getting out in the dark onto the broken glass, among the screaming men and horses, Eugénie’s white dress became spotted with blood. (Someone in the crowd seized the chance to kiss her bare shoulders.) ‘Stop worrying about us,’ she said. ‘This is our job. Help the wounded.’ Napoleon wanted to help the injured himself. ‘Don’t be silly,’ she muttered, pushing him into the opera house, where they received an ovation. His face was twitching, but Eugénie’s was totally composed. They were cheered all the way back to the Tuileries.

‘The poor little boy, of whom the emperor speaks so feelingly’, commented Lord Cowley, ‘would of course have no chance. By the way, talking of him, I am told that when everybody had left the Tuileries on the night of the
attentat
, the emperor and empress went to the poor child’s room where their firmness forsook them both and they burst into tears, the emperor crying most bitterly.’ On reaching the palace, they immediately went to the Prince Imperial’s bedroom – had they been killed, what would have happened to him?

Seventeen of the lancers were wounded, one fatally, the final casualty list (including spectators) being ten dead and one hundred and forty wounded. The attackers had meant to knife Napoleon and Eugénie amid the chaos, but were thwarted by the police’s quick reaction. Tracked down and arrested, they proved to be three more Italians, led by Felice Orsini, whose aim was to turn France into a revolutionary republic that would unite Italy under a similar régime. Orsini and Pieri were sentenced to death.