Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (24 page)

Acutely aware of this grinding hardship and misery, Eugénie was anxious that her son should learn what poverty really meant. ‘He probably thinks the poor are people who don’t own carriages’, she told his tutor when the boy was eleven. ‘It is essential that he understands and realises what it is, for him to listen to what these wretched folk have to say. No doubt a good deal of it is lies, but most of it is true. He must see for himself their ghastly homes, without any air or food, where happiness is an impossibility. He isn’t fit to reign until he’s done it.’

Whenever Eugénie was in Paris, a nondescript dark blue landau, without any coat of arms or other form of identification and driven by a coachman in a plain livery, might be seen leaving a side door of the Tuileries at least a once a week, usually in the mornings. Sometimes the landau went out more than once a week, especially in the winter during cold spells. It had small, curtained windows in order that no one could see from the street that inside was the empress, accompanied by a single lady-in-waiting, both of them so muffled in cloaks and veils that they were quite unrecognisable. The landau was setting off to visit a hospital, an orphanage, a school for poor children, a shelter for the destitute, a home for foundlings or just some family starving in an attic.

Eugénie kept an entire staff at the Tuileries whose job it was to let her know of any cases of hardship or of welfare institutions that urgently needed financial help or to inform her of requests for assistance from charities, even from individual men and women in distress. It was the indispensable Pepa’s job to keep the accounts and make a note of donations.

The empress’s first large-scale charity was paid for with the 600,000 francs that the municipality of Paris had offered her as a wedding present. Instead of spending the money on a diamond necklace as they suggested, she used it to found and endow an orphanage for girls in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, a notoriously poverty-stricken district, where 300 poor girls were given a sensible
education that would enable them to earn a decent living. As its patron, she visited it regularly until the very end of the Second Empire. In addition, she contributed large sums, generally anonymously and always with a minimum of fuss or ostentation, for homes and relief agencies all over France. Among these were convalescent homes for children at Falaise and Epernay, a convalescent home and lying-in hospital at Lyons, a hospital for scrofulous children at Berck-sur-Mer, and a relief scheme for old sailors at Dieppe. In and around Paris, besides her orphanage she helped to found a hospital for terminally ill young girls, a hospital for sick boys and a scheme to provide foster-parents, as well as convalescent homes for adults.

Her personal visiting never flagged. Shortly after Augustin Filon took up his post as tutor in 1867 he saw ‘an old lady’ in spectacles, with a large hat and a heavy veil, alighting from a carriage in the courtyard of the Tuileries. Raising her veil and removing her glasses, she laughed at him. It was the empress, returning from ‘poor peopling’.

Even Ferdinand Loliée, Eugénie’s most subtly disparaging biographer, could not fault her behaviour during the cholera scares of the 1860s. In September 1865, when she was at Biarritz in bed with a bad bout of ’flu, news arrived that the dreaded cholera (the nineteenth-century equivalent of the plague) had broken out in Paris and that people were dying every day. Parisians were fleeing from their city in terror. Napoleon rushed back, the empress following as soon as she could. Ordering her lady-in-waiting to stay in the landau, she visited the Beaujon, Lariboisière and Saint-Antoine hospitals, personally shaking each of the patients by the hand and telling them they were going to get better. Smallpox had broken out too, so in addition she insisted on visiting the smallpox ward at Saint-Antoine hospital, although this time she did not shake hands. Her visits reassured patients and staff, and did a good deal to halt the panic that was sweeping through the capital.

Next summer cholera broke out at Amiens, where public health was not so well organised as in the capital. The news reached Paris on 4 July, just when France was learning that Prussia had defeated Austria at Königgrätz the previous day. Ignoring the political crisis, Eugénie immediately took a train north and drove straight to the Hôtel Dieu, the city’s main hospital. When Marshal Vaillant, who was escorting her, warned the empress to be careful, she replied, ‘Marshal, this is how we women behave when we’re under fire.’ She toured every ward in the Hôtel Dieu, stopping at each bed and shaking every hand. Then she issued detailed instructions for sanitary precautions to be enforced throughout Amiens, supplied all hospitals with funds for extra food and medicine, gave money to people whom illness prevented from working, and arranged for the adoption of two small children orphaned by the epidemic. The bishop was alarmed at her disregard for her own safety. ‘Do take special care of your health, Monseigneur’, she told him drily on leaving. The municipality of Amiens described her courage as ‘heroic’.

Eugénie’s charity was invariably practical. During a tour of Brittany in 1855 a young lady, the daughter of a naval officer and grand-daughter of an admiral, was presented to her. Good looking and intelligent, she made a pleasant impression. When the empress heard, six years later, that Mlle Bouvet’s father had died and that she and her mother were living in poverty, she wrote inviting the girl to become a lady-in-waiting and then gave her the post of reader. The future Mme Carette – she made a good marriage – always remained devoted to Eugénie, as may be seen from her memoirs.

I
NTELLECTUALS AT
C
OMPIÈGNE

Most intellectuals disliked the Second Empire for its absolutism and for the censorship, however mild. As this was a great era of French literature, the imperial couple were slandered with a venom that still stings, noisily by the republican Victor Hugo, slyly by the Goncourt brothers, who were Orleanists. In any case Napoleon III and Eugénie did not have very much in common with professional writers. No doubt, they had a few literary supporters – Mérimée, Vigny, Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Sardou (author of a play called
Tosca
) and Feuillet – while Taine admitted, ‘The emperor understood his age better than anyone.’ But that was all.

Throughout, the ‘immortals’ of the Académie Française, mainly Orleanists, were hostile, led by the Orleanist elder statesman Guizot. Any candidate of whom the Tuileries was known to approve, like Théophile Gautier, would find himself unelected. Despite declaring that he would never occupy his ‘
fauteuil
’, in 1860 the Dominican Lacordaire was elected to fill Alexis de Tocqueville’s place because he had opposed the coup and had later attacked Napoleon in his sermons. But by the time of his investiture he had come out in
favour of the war in Italy and Eugénie attended the ceremony at the Coupole. If she did so from curiosity, she was nonetheless keen to win the support of writers, composers and artists.

‘I go to Monday receptions at the Tuileries’, wrote Hector Berlioz in 1857 while he was composing
Les Troiens
:

The last time that I and Marie went, the empress had me presented to her, and we discussed my opera in detail; she asked what each act was about. Her ‘gracious’ Majesty (and she is) has read a lot of Virgil and I was amazed by her precise references to the
Aeneid
. My God, she’s beautiful, just the sort of Dido I want. But perhaps not, as her wonderful looks might wreck the opera – the audience would howl down any Aeneas who even thought of leaving her.

Clearly Eugénie had taken a lot of trouble being nice to the prickly M. Berlioz, who was not one of nature’s Bonapartists.

With the limited education of women of her time, Eugénie was ill equipped to cope with intellectuals, some of whom were extremely vain. Her only solution was inviting them to Compiègne. No women writers or artists were asked, except for the sculptor Marcello (Carpeaux’s most distinguished pupil), although she came as a great lady under her real name, the Duchess of Castiglione-Colonna. One or two declined, such as the composer Meyerbeer and the painter Ingres. Others found difficulty wearing the obligatory skin-tight silk knee-breeches; the contortions of the novelist Jules Sandeau embarrassed even Mérimée. Such visitors generally slept on the second floor, the Galérie de l’Orangerie. In November 1864 Eugène Fromentin, the painter and writer (notably of an autobiographical novel,
Dominique
) informed his wife – writers’ wives were not invited – that he was between Corvisart, the emperor’s doctor, and Meissonnier the painter. The younger Dumas, author of
La Dame aux Camélias
, was next door and Gustave Flaubert further down the gallery. Émile Augier, the playwright, was on another floor. ‘Is he warmer?’ asks Fromentin. ‘That’s all we worry about. I have a lobby, a bed-sitting room, two dressing-rooms, a room for my servant, a whole forest of logs on my fire – and Siberia two steps away from my fireplace.’

Not so prickly as many writers, Octave Feuillet became something of a favourite with the imperial couple after his
Roman d’un pauvre jeune homme
was performed in the Palace theatre in 1858 – his plots always had happy endings. He was
appointed imperial librarian and invited to stay no less than six times. He described one of his visits to Compiègne to his wife Valérie: ‘I am very pleased at being placed directly over the park…. I look down long avenues hidden in the morning by a jewelled, shining frost, with marble gods and goddesses, trellises and flowerbeds and, in the distance, the tall forest towards Pierrefonds. I have only small rooms but they’re very pretty.’ Feuillet enjoyed writing charades and was even more amused by a tableau not of his devising, the ‘Temptation of St Anthony’, who was played by M. de Nieuwerkerker with Mmes de Morny and Girardin as female devils, while he found it hard not to laugh when, led by the aged Duke of Atholl, four Scots chieftains ‘with naked legs’ danced a Highland reel for the empress, ‘a species of bizarre jig’ (
une espèce de gigue bizarre
). He watched Gounod singing his own songs in a low voice, accompanying himself on the piano and ‘rolling his eyes in a frightful way’. Eugénie, listening with her son on her knee, was moved to tears and had to leave the room. The composer was clearly enchanted at making such an impression.

Other musicians invited besides Gounod included Auber, Ambroise Thomas and Verdi, while among the artists were Delacroix, the younger Isabey Horace Vernet and the sculptor Carpeaux.

The emperor showed more interest in science, which to him meant ‘progress’. During a visit in 1865, Pasteur explained his current work on wine, giving a lecture for the
série
, Eugénie carrying his microscope and test tubes. He recalled happily that, for a moment, she ‘gave the impression of being transformed into a laboratory assistant’.

‘The bourgeois of Rouen would be even more astonished than they already are, if they knew what a success I’ve had at Compiègne’, wrote Flaubert. ‘I’m not exaggerating. Simply, instead of being bored, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself.’ But the dressing and the strict timetable were trying. He had had reason before to be grateful to the empress. When prosecuted in 1857 for his ‘immoral’ novel,
Madame Bovary
, she had interceded with the judges. Similarly, when Baudelaire (never asked to Compiègne) was fined 300 francs he did not possess, on publishing
Les Fleurs du Mal
, he wrote to Eugénie, who had the fine reduced to 50 francs. Neither Flaubert nor Baudelaire nor, save for Vigny, any of the writer guests who was not already a Bonapartist, was completely won over to the Second Empire, but undoubtedly they all became less hostile. Inviting them was the
séries
’ most positive feature.

‘At Compiègne, the empress needed the utmost skill to perform her challenging and enormously varied obligations as hostess’, Filon recalls:

The guest list had first to be decided on and the
séries
organised so as to consist of fairly equal numbers of patricians, international figures, diplomats, artists, men of learning, pretty women and members of the Académie Française. These different elements had to be neatly balanced to harmonise; feuds and quarrels were taken into account when achieving variety and contrast while at the same time avoiding hurt feelings or misunderstandings. To do this required a knowledge of each guest’s personality and background…. Many of them could testify to her triumphant success.

No other nineteenth-century court used hospitality with such imagination.

J
ACQUES
O
FFENBACH

Just as Mozart conjures up the
ancien régime
, so Offenbach’s wild yet slightly melancholy gaiety conjures up the Second Empire. Napoleon and Eugénie attended the first run of several Offenbach operettas, and from the 1850s until the end his music was heard at every court reception.

The emperor ordered a command performance,
Les Deux Aveugles
, at the Tuileries to entertain the statesmen attending the Congress of Paris, and Eugénie encored the bolero. However, the empress soon began to disapprove of Offenbach’s operettas, even if she quite enjoyed the music. What she disliked were the ‘immoral’ plots, full of sly jokes about the régime. Her husband laughed at them uproariously, but they offended her Catholic puritanism and Spanish dignity. In 1855 Offenbach met a comic genius, a young civil servant called Ludovic Halévy who, with Henri Meilhac, supplied him with hilarious scripts.

If Eugénie had no objection to
Les Dragées du Baptême
, celebrating the birth of the Prince Imperial (Halévy did not write the words), she was horrified by
Orphée aux Enfers
, which came out at the Bouffes-Parisiens in October 1858. The philandering, bacchanalian life led by the gods on Mount Olympus – ‘tired of nectar, ambrosia and virtue’ – was clearly a skit on the Second Empire court, while the lustful Jupiter wore a beard and waxed moustaches just like the emperor. Nor can she have been amused by Pluto, disguised as a fly, seducing Eurydice. Far from being displeased, Napoleon sent the composer a bronze figure inscribed, ‘
L’Empéreur à Jacques Offenbach
’, saying that he would never forget how much he had enjoyed
Orphée aux Enfers
. He approved his application for French citizenship, later making him a member of the Légion d’honneur.