Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (4 page)

The statesmen were shabby figures, Eugenia learning a good deal about an unsavoury form of politics. Although very young and definitely not a Carlist, in September 1839 she wrote to tell Stendhal of her contempt – ‘It’s not nice’ – when after a bribe the Carlist General Maroto betrayed Don Carlos by ordering the troops under his command to surrender, ending for the moment what was to be a perpetual dynastic war. Next year the leading
Progresista
General Espartero (the man who had bribed Maroto) seized power, becoming Spain’s first military dictator and banished the Regent, Isabella II’s mother. In 1843 he was toppled in turn by another dictator, the
Moderado
General Ramón Nárvaez, who banned the press and gave the firing squad a new role in Spanish politics, shooting not just Carlist diehards but over 200 of Espartero’s
Progresistas
without the tiresome formality of a trial.

Eugenia watched her mother flatter these petty tyrants, who had made themselves masters of Spain. Even a slight acquaintance left her with an intense dislike of corrupt, self-styled liberals, whether
progresistas
or
moderados
. Very different from her father, they concentrated on making fortunes out of confiscated Church lands or exploiting government contracts. Together with many other Spaniards, including even her mother in certain moods, Doña Eugenia yearned for a really capable ruler who would clear up the mess, a Spanish Napoleon.

Early in 1843 Eugenia danced with a young Frenchman who, like the Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte she had glimpsed at the
Conciergerie in Paris, bore the emperor’s name, but in contrast to Louis-Napoleon resembled their uncle in appearance. Later known as ‘Plon-Plon’, Prince Napoleon was the son of the emperor’s youngest brother, ex-King Jerome of Westphalia, and had come to Spain hoping to marry Queen Isabella, although she was only twelve and matchmakers no longer took Bonapartes seriously. If unbalanced, with a cruel wit, he was also highly intelligent despite extreme opinions – he loathed Christianity and was a 1790s republican rather than a Bonapartist. There is a legend that he tried to seduce Eugenia and never forgave her for rejecting him, but the real cause of their lasting dislike for each other is more likely to have been the instinctive antipathy of natural opposites.

In 1843 Bonapartism was a sentiment, not a political programme, no more than nostalgic hero-worship of the emperor, whose uninspiring heir, the ex-King Joseph of Spain, did not die until 1844. The next heir, their brother, ex-King Louis of Holland, died the following year. Before Louis’s death, despite two inept attempts at a
coup-d’état
, his son Louis-Napoleon could not properly call himself the Bonapartist pretender and had no followers other than a handful of adventurers. Plon-Plon was a figure of even less importance.

The ball where Eugenia met him was a fancy-dress ball at Casa Ariza for the carnival on the night of Shrove Tuesday. She went as a Highlander in tartan, her sister dressing in Polish costume ‘
à la Cracowienne
’. Doña Maria Manuela was the first Spanish hostess to give costume balls, those at Casa Ariza becoming so popular that Queen Isabella began to copy them. Maria Manuela gave three a year – for the carnival, for St Eugenia’s day in November and for Paca’s birthday in January.

This particular ball was part of the celebrations for Paca’s forthcoming wedding to a distant cousin, the fifteenth Duke of Alba, holder of Spain’s most ancient dukedom and the richest man in the realm. Only twenty, he was a shy, tongue-tied young man, perhaps because of his ugliness – portraits show a gnome-like face with a very long nose and a thick-lipped mouth hiding behind a heavy moustache and goatee beard. When at Madrid he lived in the magnificent Liria Palace, filled with superb old masters. The girls had first met him in Paris, Doña Maria Manuela having long ago marked Alba down. Surprisingly, in view of his ugliness, both fell in love with him. Their mother decided that Paca should have the glittering prize.

The duke had proposed in 1842, being immediately accepted, but
for reasons unknown the wedding was postponed twice before it finally took place in February 1844. Among the reasons seems to have been Eugenia’s distress at losing him, and which culminated in a suicide attempt – she drank milk in which she had dissolved the poisonous heads of phosphorous matches.

Eugenia sent the duke a farewell letter. ‘People [her mother?] treat me like a donkey, punishing me in front of everyone, it’s more than I can bear’, she complained:

My blood boils and I don’t know what to do. Clever people think nobody in the world is as happy as I am, but they’re wrong. I’m unhappy because I make myself unhappy. I should have been born a century sooner, as these days all my dearest ideas seem ridiculous and I’m more frightened of being laughed at than dying. I love and hate violently, and I don’t know which is better, my love or my hatred. I have an awful mixture of passions inside me, all wild; I fight them, but I always lose, and my life is going to end miserably, in a whirl of passions, virtues and follies.

… Perhaps you’ll say I’m romantic and silly, but I know you’re generous enough to forgive a poor girl who has lost all those she loved and who is being treated so cruelly by everyone, even by her mother and sister and, dare I say it, by the man she loved best, for whom she would have begged, whom she would even have allowed to dishonour her. Don’t say I’m mad, please, but pity me; you don’t realize what it is to be loved and rejected. But God will give me courage; he never denies it to those who need it, and he’s going to give me the courage to end my life quietly, deep inside some gloomy cloister, so that no one will know I ever existed.

Some people are born happy; you’re one of them, and God grant it always stays that way. My sister is a good person; she loves you, your marriage can’t be delayed much longer, and then nothing will be missing from your happiness. If you have children, love them equally; remember they’re all your children and never hurt their feelings by showing more affection for one than another. Follow my advice and be happy. This is what is wanted for you by your sister, Eugenia.

In a postscript she adds, ‘Don’t try to stop me, it’s madness. I shall end my life far away from the world and its affections; nothing is ever impossible with God’s help and I’ve made up my mind as my heart is broken.’

A little surprisingly, Eugenia not only became fonder than ever of Paca but, in spite of what she had insisted on seeing as Alba’s heartless rejection, almost as devoted to her brother-in-law and their children. At seventeen, however, her wounds had time to heal, even if they left a few scars – especially on her relations with her mother.

She had plenty to distract her. Despite telling Alba that she should have been born a century earlier, she was a ‘socialist’ at sixteen, having read Fournier’s
Le nouveau monde industriel
, with its proposals for abolishing all authority and establishing communes of men and women, the ‘
phalanstères
’. She spoke so often about this utopia during Maria Manuela’s Sunday evening receptions that she became known as ‘
la jeune phalanstérienne
’. An instinctive feminist (if fully developed feminism was unimaginable at that date), what probably appealed to her most in Fournier’s socialism was his view that marriage enslaved women and needed radical reform.

Eugenia was also a keen liberal, sympathising with the
progresistas
shot down daily in the streets of Madrid, hiding one in her mother’s house when he was being hunted for his life after killing a political opponent. She quarrelled in public with Maria Manuela over her opinions, no doubt expressed a little too intensely, threatening to throw herself down a marble staircase.

‘Even as a girl I had a taste for politics’, Eugenia explained in old age:

It was a taste inherited from my mother, in whose house I became used to hearing statesmen, diplomats, generals and journalists expounding all day long. You can imagine how extreme politics were in the time of the Regent Queen Cristina, Nárvaez and Espartero. But I was bored by the squalid infighting of political parties, by all their murky little rivalries, petty intrigues and wretched manoeuvring. What did interest me were the really big questions, the ones where national prestige was involved and when a nation’s reputation was at stake.

At one of her mother’s receptions Nárvaez sneered that no woman had a right to political opinions because she would run away on seeing a bayonet – Doña Eugenia’s response was to seize a knife and stab herself through the arm.

In the summer of 1845 she went with Doña Maria Manuela to take the cure at a small watering place in the Pyrenees, Eaux-Bonnes, where she met a woman who influenced her political ideas profoundly. This was the dashing Mme Eleonore Gordon, whom they heard singing at a musical evening given by some French friends. The beautiful daughter of a captain in the Imperial Guard and the widow of a British officer, still in her late twenties, Eleonore was a lady of very easy virtue indeed and an ‘adventuress’, not a suitable person for a well-brought-up young girl to know. But Doña Maria Manuela, never prudish, was intrigued when she learned that the lady had been tried for her part in Prince Louis-Napoleon’s abortive coup at Strasbourg in 1836, and asked to meet her. Mme Gordon turned out to be fascinating and, after regretfully declining her offer to arrange for them to visit the prince in prison at Ham, Maria Manuela invited her to come and stay in Spain.

During Mme Gordon’s visit to Madrid, she converted Eugenia to a Bonapartism of which she had hitherto been unaware. Presumably Eleonore repeated what she had told the court in 1836: ‘The cause I openly defend to the best of my ability is so noble, so splendid and so holy that it has become my religion, a religion of which I shall always be a loyal and faithful disciple.’ She is less likely to have repeated her admission to the court that Louis-Napoleon ‘produces the same effect on me as a woman’, or confided that she had slept with the prince and two of his key supporters.

Indoctrinated with the Napoleonic cult by her father and Stendhal, Eugenia now realised that the emperor might have an heir worthy of him, very unlike the horrible Plon-Plon, and that there was at least a chance of a Bonapartist restoration. She learned about the prince’s programme from his book
Des idées napoléoniennes
, published in 1839, in which he argued that while his uncle had kept all the Revolution’s best innovations, Bonapartism was in no way revolutionary but simply meant to make France a fairer and more efficient place, replacing aristocracy by meritocracy and parliamentarianism by ‘disciplined’ democracy – Frenchmen must learn to live together. For the moment, however, Louis-Philippe appeared to be firmly in control.

Significantly, she developed a passion for violets, which were the Bonapartist flowers, as opposed to the Bourbon lilies. From now on she wore them whenever they were in season, in her hair or pinned in a bunch at her waist. When spring drew to an end and they became hard to find, she employed a shepherd to bring them down from the glens of the Sierra Nevada.

A natural athlete, Colonel Amoros’s former pupil kept herself fit by riding the biggest stallions obtainable (sometimes bareback), fencing daily, becoming a fine shot and hunting regularly. She swam like an otter and enjoyed sailing, particularly if the weather was stormy enough to be dangerous. Her favourite resort for swimming and boating was Biarritz on the Atlantic coast, just across the frontier into France – not a resort at all when she discovered it in 1847 but a lonely Basque fishing hamlet. She also drove a smart English phaeton pulled by mettlesome ponies, at such a terrifying pace that she had several bad smashes, both she and her passenger being thrown through the air into a roadside ditch. (Prosper Mérimée wrote to her deeply unamused mother that any normal young man would be only too glad to share a ditch with Eugenia.)

Some of Eugenia’s more colourful behaviour made Madrid’s dowagers raise their eyebrows. She was rumoured to smoke cigars, while she could be seen at the bullring or at ranches where the bulls were reared, wearing outrageous clothes – a bullfighter’s hat and bolero jacket, with red leather boots and a dagger stuck in her belt – besides cracking a riding switch instead of fluttering a fan. More shocking still, she flirted with the strutting bullfighters idolised by the Madrid mob, whom the celebrity-obsessed Maria Manuela invited to the parties at Carabanchel. She was known to make long, solitary rides into the countryside, visiting gipsy encampments to have her fortune told. During the great Easter fair at Seville she and a girlfriend disguised themselves as gipsy dancers, setting up a booth where they gave a performance that completely deceived some English tourists, whom they then astonished by speaking English.

Madrid itself offered plenty of amusement and a vigorous social life, Maria Manuela taking care to see they were always there for the season. By the time she was eighteen Doña Eugenia de Montijo had become a celebrity whose name was seldom out of the gossip columns, at every court function or fashionable reception. She enjoyed going to the theatre, but being almost tone deaf except with gipsy music, never went to the opera. She liked dancing, however, especially at costume balls where she appeared as a Sicilian country girl, a Spanish jewess or a Spanish gipsy, and she also danced regularly at her sister Paca’s balls in the Liria Palace. In addition, she acted in amateur theatricals staged in the little private theatres of the Liria and Carabanchel, in 1845 receiving an ovation for playing her part so professionally in
El Hombre del Mundo
– written by one of her mother’s innumerable young protégés, Ventura de la Vega.

Stories of Doña Eugenia’s beauty, of her tawny hair, exquisitely poised little head, violet eyes and white skin, spread throughout Spain. When she was staying at a house in the depths of the country a bandit broke in and hid under her bed just to see her. Realising someone was there, she bemused him by sitting silently on the bed and dangling her stockingless legs before his eyes while quietly sending a note through her maid to alert the staff. Rushing in, they hauled the man out, but as he was dragged off he begged to kiss her feet, saying he was proud that he and she were both Spaniards.