Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (13 page)

In 1854 Napoleon III built the empress a large, rambling and luxurious house to the north of Biarritz, as an annual haven. He christened it, ‘The Villa Eugénie’, although it was really a palace and much bigger than a mere villa. The Villa Eugénie was not without splendour, seven Gobelin tapestries of Don Quixote being priceless. Surrounded by iron railings, the house was protected by Cent Gardes and a detachment of the Imperial Guard in barrack-like lodges at the gates. There were few guests (Mrs Moulton never received an invitation), only one or two statesmen or foreign royalties. Each year, Eugénie spent several weeks at the villa, nearly always with her husband, and frequently with her mother and sister as well. Not only did she walk or drive along the beach as much as possible, watching the waves endlessly, but every morning in her voluminous bathing dress she swam in the sea – preferably when a storm was approaching – swimming very far out from land, from a small boat and escorted by three or four reliable fishermen, to ensure that she would be well beyond the range of any prying telescope. She also liked to sail up and down the Bay of Biscay with Napoleon in their luxurious yacht, although seldom for more than a day, or up the River Irun or along the Spanish coast. (Yachting was a taste which she preserved into her old age.) In addition, she enjoyed driving herself along the shore or through the pretty countryside around Biarritz in a fast dog-cart, with only a single lady-in-waiting for company.

Sometimes, accompanied by Napoleon and a small group of friends, the empress would ride into the mountains for a picnic in some Pyrenean glen or to drink from the mountain springs of mineral water at Cambo. A favourite expedition was to ride up to a peak such as La Grande Rhune, 3,000 feet high, from the top of which they could look down into Spain. Then, leading their horses by the bridle, the party would clamber down the mountain on foot to where carriages were waiting to take them back to the Villa Eugénie. Driving home through the dusk, escorted by outriders carrying flaming torches, they would stop and dine at an isolated tavern, remote but renowned locally for its good country food and wine.

Occasionally, Eugénie would take the emperor to Bayonne a little further up the coast, whenever bullfights were taking place in the town. It was a sport for which she retained a Spaniard’s ineradicable passion and which she tried, unsuccessfully, to
popularise in France. (Once she arranged a bizarre, not to say grotesque, boar and cow fight at the Trianon, personally goading the cows with a lance; when the cows, unusually savage animals imported from Spain, turned and charged her, she calmly avoided them, although her terrified ladies ran away screaming.) Needless to say, there was a certain amount of criticism from the not very effective ‘animal rights’ lobby of the day, while republicans attempted to portray her in pornographic pamphlets as a bloodthirsty pervert who took sexual pleasure in such horrible spectacles. On the whole, however, as is so often the case with people who enjoy hunting – or even bullfighting – she was genuinely fond of most animals, especially horses.

A barely credible yet solidly documented adventure, resembling some wild tale from one of Alexandre Dumas’s novels, took place during the Biarritz holiday of 1858. After the empress had met and made friends with ‘Monsieur Michel’, a handsome French Basque who was the most successful smuggler in the entire Pyrenees – and the most powerful since he controlled all the main smuggling routes between France and Spain – he boldly invited the emperor and herself to dine with him at the lair high up in the mountains where he hid his contraband. Although Michel was not much better than a brigand, they knew they would be perfectly safe in his hands because all the French Basques were fanatical Bonapartists, and they accepted. Accompanied by a small, carefully picked escort, the imperial party was guided by smugglers along secret, hair-raisingly precipitous paths up to a huge cave, below a mountain peak just across the Spanish border. Tables and chairs were waiting in the cave, which was lit by torches. Throughout a splendid meal the night outside was illuminated by fireworks, while the smugglers sang and danced, serenading the guests with guitar music. Their host enthusiastically joined in the dancing himself as soon as the meal was over. ‘The empress simply could not stop herself’, says an admiring eyewitness, a doctor who had come with the imperial party. ‘Throwing off her hat and cloak, she started to dance a particularly graceful fandango. She was completely unaffected and altogether enchanting, the look on her face being one of pure delight. We all of us felt that the empress had come back to the land of her birth and that, for a moment, she had regained the freedom of her early days.’

‘The freedom of her early days’ is a highly significant phrase. Those precious six weeks spent each year at Biarritz, after
midsummer, were certainly the closest that Eugénie came to recovering it, and to releasing at least some of her frustration. Here the etiquette of the Tuileries, even of Compiègne, was relaxed to the barest minimum and there was a good deal of boisterous horseplay. On more than one occasion, the same courtier-doctor tells us that the empress and her ladies chased the emperor and his gentlemen through the villa, flicking them with twisted napkins and making them jump over tables and chairs.

When Prince and Princesse Metternich first came here in September 1859, Pauline Metternich was astonished to find the empress sitting quietly at a big round table playing patience, her ladies reading or sewing as they sat with her. It reminded Pauline of life in a country house rather than in a palace. She noticed, however, that when the emperor came in, Eugénie rose to her feet – as she always did so, ‘even when one was alone with her in her study or her private drawing-room’. Nevertheless, she called her husband ‘Louis’, never ‘Napoleon’.

Pauline Metternich went on a mountaineering expedition with Eugénie, who wore a broad-brimmed Spanish hat. Tough as she was, Pauline found it hard going, but when they halted for a picnic, the empress of the French danced a vigorous and lengthy fandango. Everyone else was exhausted by the ascent. A tearful Mme de la Bedoyère begged to be left to die, and had to be carried down by relays of mountaineers, Eugénie grumbling, ‘My ladies are always ill, by land or by sea.’

The household dreaded her love of the sea, as Pauline makes clear in ‘
Une promenade en mer
’. One afternoon in September 1859 the empress insisted on everyone accompanying her despite a high wind. Blown across the Bay of Biscay like the Flying Dutchman, all save Eugénie were seasick, the ladies, led by Clothilde de la Bedoyère, sobbing and screaming. The boat was almost sent to the bottom by huge waves when trying to re-enter Biarritz. By now it was 2.00 a.m. and Napoleon was waiting on the jetty. ‘We haven’t had much luck with our little voyage’, the empress told him nervously. ‘This is the last time you go on one of these escapades,’ he replied, the only time Pauline ever saw him in a bad temper.

But nothing would stop her. In October 1867 Mr Whitehurst, the
Daily Telegraph
correspondent, watched Eugénie’s little steamer ‘staggering too and fro, and occasionally shipping a sea’. When a gale blew up the captain tried to land his passengers at Saint-Jean-de-Luz,
but the boat hit a rock. ‘In a few minutes the empress was sitting in water up to her waist, and the prince was almost out of his depth.’ Keeping their heads, they were rescued in the nick of time, but the panic-stricken pilot jumped overboard, hit his head and was drowned.

‘Twenty years ago no Frenchman would have believed that this little Basque village could have become the seat of an imperial Court’, wrote Whitehurst, noting that the site of the Villa Eugénie had been bought for £12. Now the smart world spent holidays at ‘Eugénieville’, buses bringing day-trippers from Bayonne or San Sebastian. There were hotels and a casino. Eugénie continued to mountaineer and picnic – as well as to sail – yet the first thing Felix Whitehurst saw on arriving was ‘a compact crowd … following the emperor and empress, who were strolling up the high street’.

A
N
I
NSECURE
R
ÉGIME

One of the Second Empire’s greatest historians is the royalist, Pierre de la Gorce, even if wrong in believing that it was doomed from the start. His description of France in the days immediately after Eugénie’s marriage cannot be bettered:

This is the state of the country in spring 1853. Too many festivities, as tiring as hard work; important reforms on the way to fruition; a remarkable growth of public wealth; a future sure enough to allow for long-term planning; a frivolous but well-meaning society; no liberty but not so as to miss it very much; extremist politicians powerless or cowed; fine minds alienated or ignored, but no general awareness of so much lost talent; an all-powerful government, sufficiently moderate to limit itself and not be tyrannical.

The new, Bonapartist France seemed a rich, contented land. The economic misery of the 1840s had vanished, together with the spectre of a return to the upheavals of sixty years before. ‘Nobody can deny that the Emperor is a most extraordinary man, and that he has raised France to a position in Europe which she had long since ceased to occupy’, Lord Cowley would comment in 1856.

Yet, in Pierre de la Gorce’s words, ‘there were seeds of decline and misjudgement, although so deeply buried that no-one could possibly foresee they would ever ripen’. Beneath the surface Legitimists and Orleanists were resentful, and republicans simmering – everyone recalled how the last two régimes had been toppled by revolution. And the Bonapartists lacked able leaders, Alexis de Tocqueville sneering that the Second Empire was ‘a paradise for the envious and mediocre’. The biggest danger, however, lay in Napoleon III’s foreign policy. He wanted to show the world that France was
the
power in Europe by helping Italy and Poland win their freedom.

England had headed every European coalition against France, so Napoleon was eager to secure her goodwill. His opportunity came in July 1853 when Tsar Nicholas I occupied the Danubian principalities (Romania) and assembled a fleet at Sevastopol in the Crimea, obviously planning to seize Constantinople (‘that object of eternal Muscovite desire’ as one of Napoleon’s ministers put it). England was outraged. Here was the emperor’s chance of an Anglo-French alliance. In any case, war against Russia would please all those who pitied the Poles and who hated Russian tyranny, while saving the Holy Places in Palestine from Russian domination would please Catholics. Hostilities became inevitable in November when the Russians blew the Turkish navy out of the sea, although France and England did not declare war until February 1854.

So far Eugénie had had little influence on foreign affairs, but we know that Napoleon showed her ambassadors’ dispatches, explaining his policy. From the first he used her to sound out foreign envoys and argue his point of view, as is clear from Hübner’s reports, and sometimes Cowley’s. She was opposed to the war – a defeat might bring down the Second Empire – even if she disliked the idea of the Holy Places being ruled by Russian Orthodox, referring to what she called ‘the antagonism between the Greek cross and the Latin cross’.

During the summer of 1854, 70,000 troops assembled at Boulogne (from where, half a century ago, the great Napoleon had hoped to invade England), marching, counter-marching, firing volley upon volley of blanks, in manoeuvres before the emperor and on one occasion the Prince Consort, who crossed over from England. Napoleon personally inspected the French expeditionary force, 25,000 strong, accompanied by the empress who, riding in front of the forest of red képis, wore instead of a bonnet a broad-brimmed Spanish hat with a white plume. Roars
of ‘
Vive l’Impératrice!
’ showed that the army knew a beautiful woman when it saw one. They knew, too, how she had given a humble infantryman a lift in her carriage when he was cut off from his unit.

In September the French landed in the Crimea, to be joined by 25,000 British troops. They had a fine commander in Marshal Saint-Arnaud. Within days, the allied army had driven back the Russians at the Alma and were able to invest Sevastopol, but Saint-Arnaud died of a heart attack. The siege dragged on, the allies barely surviving the Russian winter which had destroyed the Grande Armée in 1812, in disease-ridden dugouts.

In its early stages the war earned the Second Empire some badly needed popularity. Displacing countless families during the rebuilding of Paris, together with a bad harvest and soaring food prices had caused widespread unrest by the end of 1853, but now Napoleon was cheered to the echo. Republicans applauded a war against tyranny, while
L’Univers
, the main Catholic newspaper (most Catholics were Legitimists) welcomed a ‘crusade’ against the Orthodox. The empress helped to exploit this popularity, suggesting that, besides being given a hero’s funeral, Saint-Arnaud should have a street and a bridge named after him.

But Sevastopol refused to surrender, false rumours of its capture causing bitter disappointment. By early 1855 the emperor was unpopular again, Lord Cowley noting that a professor had been hissed for praising him during a lecture, that the empress was rumoured to be buying property with stolen public money. He also reported that Napoleon was desperate to ‘get out of the scrape in which we are in the Crimea’.

The Legitimists now hoped for a defeat in the Crimea that would bring Napoleon III crashing down. His best organised and most dangerous enemies, they had never accepted the Revolution of 1789 and were united in believing that France was embodied by the exiled Comte de Chambord. They ran secret royalist clubs all over the country, even infiltrating freemasons’ lodges, besides owning over fifty newspapers that were fuelled by press releases from a centralised news agency. Although Chambord was one of those Bourbons who had learned nothing and forgotten nothing, so many army officers supported him that his party never ceased to be a threat.

Far less dangerous, the Orleanists supported the rival pretender, the Comte de Paris. Liberals who accepted the Revolution and wanted an English-style parliamentary democracy, they had an eloquent if treacherous spokesman in Adolphe Thiers and a few genuine idealists such as the Comte de Montalembert. Their opponents accused them of being cynical trimmers, unpatriotic Anglophiles who were planning to rob the poor.