Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (16 page)

T
HE
M
OTHER AND THE
G
RANDMOTHER

Throughout changes in her life that inevitably resulted from marrying a ruling sovereign, Eugénie remained devoted to her mother and sister. Nobody could ever take their place as the confidantes of this deeply reserved woman. If for obvious reasons it was quite unthinkable that Doña Maria Manuela should stay in Paris, Paca was another matter, although there was plenty to keep her in Spain. Since she could not see them, Eugénie wrote often, long and revealing letters still preserved in the Alba family archives.

Her mother had had to leave Paris six weeks after Eugénie’s wedding, with the utmost reluctance. ‘I have two incurable faults, which will soon be found out,’ she had admitted before the marriage,
‘I am a foreigner and I am a mother-in-law.’ She might have added a third, that she was known all over Europe as a compulsive intriguer – her old friend Lord Clarendon warned her bluntly that she would find it difficult to stay in her son-in-law’s capital. Even so, she obviously hoped to remain at her daughter’s side. However, the emperor soon insisted that she must leave. He paid her off handsomely (if so indelicate an expression may be used) through three secret bank accounts, so that she went back to Spain even richer than before. Despite joking bravely about her enforced departure, she was resentful and once or twice in her letters to Mérimée refers slightingly to Napoleon as ‘Don Louis’ or ‘Don Isidore’.

Maria Manuela found an impeccable excuse for returning to France with Paca in the late autumn of 1855, however, which was to be present at her grandchild’s birth. She stayed in the Albas’ great house in Paris (long since demolished), just off the Champs Elysée and near today’s rue Lincoln. This was the former Hotel de Lauriston, which Eugénie had purchased for them from the Lauriston family and then refurbished luxuriously at her own expense. Republicans grumbled sourly that the empress was plundering the nation’s coffers for the sake of her relations.

After this Maria Manuela came back fairly regularly, although only for comparatively short visits. Brief as they were, she was seen as something of a joke by the Parisians, on account of her rather too splendid carriages, her stately, self-conscious promenades down the Champs Elysées accompanied by her maid and footman, and her excessively lavish parties in the ‘Hôtel Alba’ – which were invariably full of handsome male guests, even if they always included the indispensable Prosper Mérimée.

All the same, Maria Manuela was sufficiently nervous of her son-in-law to ration her visits to the Tuileries. Taking her cue from the Albas, she declined any special treatment, refusing to sit on red velvet chairs near the imperial couple, unlike Plon-Plon and Mathilde. Occasionally she was invited to stay at Biarritz, and sometimes Fontainebleau or – more rarely – to the
séries
at Compiègne.

However, Doña Maria Manuela found life at home in Spain far from disagreeable. Her position as mother of both the empress of the French and the Duchess of Alba made her one of the indisputable leaders of Madrid society, and her receptions at Casa Ariza and Carabanchel were attended with more enthusiasm than
ever. Queen Isabella appointed her honorary Camera Mayor, which gave her considerable influence at court without any of the irksome duties of a mistress of the robes. Hers had been the sort of beauty that lasts, so that well into her seventies, tall, dignified and exquisitely dressed, she remained a splendid-looking woman.

Eventually, however, she lost the sight of her flashing dark eyes. ‘When my mother realised she was going blind, she made almost unbelievable efforts to conceal it, not just from strangers but even from herself’, Eugénie told Filon. ‘She would insist on finding her own way, besides telling others where they should go, so that she was always knocking over furniture, hurting herself against the walls she could not see and trying to walk through closed doors. It was simply impossible for her to acknowledge that she was beaten by a physical weakness.’

In many ways Paca had been altogether different from her mother and sister, in both looks and temperament, although despite harsher features she possessed a certain family resemblance to Eugénie. A thin brunette, she had always seemed frail and did not share their iron health. Everybody had liked her for her friendliness and sense of humour. Her son Jacobo – ‘James’ – and her daughters Maria and Louise (the future duchesses of Tamames and Medinacoeli) spent a good deal of time in Paris, where they were constantly at the Tuileries with their aunt.

Mme Carette had never seen Paca, who died before her appointment as a lady-in-waiting, but she had met many people who knew her. She describes her as ‘an adorable woman … for the empress such a sister really was the unfailingly affectionate comrade, the ultimate confidante and faithful heart which every human being needs during the trials of life.’ Gushingly expressed as this may be, it appears to have been the truth.

Paca had been unable to come to Paris as often as she would have liked because of her husband Jacobo’s demanding position in Spain and his enormous estates, in whose management he took a very serious interest. Although he had once broken her heart, by now Jacobo was Eugénie’s trusted friend, and he remained one as a widower. At her request, he lent her the letters between his ancestor, the great third Duke of Alba, and King Philip II – until her death she continued to be fascinated by Spanish history.

Despite everything that had happened, the bond between mother and daughter stayed as strong as ever, particularly after the loss of
Paca – even if sometimes Eugénie still laughed at Doña Maria Manuela. Although she would never admit it, what made the bond so strong was that, as empress, she never really felt at ease with more than one or two Frenchwomen, however fond she may have been of her ladies.

A good deal of her remained Spanish, however much she tried to hide it. In April 1860 Cowley wrote to Lord John Russell that Eugénie had asked him if the British ambassador at Madrid could help ‘friends and relations’ who were in trouble after a Carlist plot. She would not do so herself, clearly anxious not to remind her French subjects of these friends and relations in Spain.

E
UGÉNIE AS
D
ECORATOR

In the Duc de Morny’s
La corde sensible ou les Dadas favoris
, a revue performed at Compiègne in 1862, one of the characters gives advice on how to flatter the empress. ‘It’s no use telling her she’s beautiful, amusing or good’, he explains. ‘What you must do is say is that no decorator can rival her at choosing furniture, picking materials and creating a drawing room.’ It was one of her passions. Rejecting the fashionable ‘Henri II renaissance’ in favour of rococo, she evolved her own special style.

Her decoration at the Tuileries went up in flames in 1871, but you can still catch glimpses of it in paintings and memoirs. She had had a daunting task, since after being constantly adapted for centuries the palace was a rabbit warren, with endless, windowless corridors lit even in daylight by smoking oil lamps that made them unbearably hot and stuffy. There was no running water, everyone washing from jugs. By 1860, however, comfortable new apartments had been completed. Eugénie’s were on the first floor.

The first of her drawing-rooms was the
salon vert
, whose walls had leafy green friezes on a green background, with green parrots and woodpeckers over the doors, dominated by a vast mirror reflecting the gardens. The waiting-room, the
salon rose
, was hung in rose silk, its ceiling painted by Chaplin with a
Triumph of Flora
, Flora being a portrait of the empress. Guests were received in the
salon bleu
where scallop-shaped blue pelmets matched the chairs’ blue needlework and small blinds of dark blue gauze could be drawn over the windows to soften the light. Plaster medallions on the walls held portraits of her ladies. The three rooms were lit by wax candles in rock-crystal chandeliers, and filled with clocks, bronzes and vases of old Sèvres or lapis-lazuli, while the furniture was mostly from the eighteenth century, much of it marquetried, with gilt armchairs.

A painting of Eugénie’s private salon by Giuseppe Castiglione shows a drawing-room and study joined by a curtained arch, with long windows looking out onto the Tuileries gardens. The high walls are covered in green silk, the draped curtains and furniture in red velvet, and the mahogany wainscot, window-frames and doors are picked out in gilt. In the drawing-room, on the eighteenth-century porphyry fireplace stands an ornate oromolu clock of the same period, topped by Cupid and Psyche in white marble, which is flanked by two Chinese bronze lamps. On the walls hang small landscapes and portraits of the emperor, Paca, Anna Murat and the dauphin. The furniture includes a buttoned sofa, a Chinese screen of crystal and a Louis XVI cabinet on which there is a bust of Marie-Antoinette, while the carpet is a red Savonnerie. Through the arch, flanked by two tall red vases on gilt stands, what may have been Marie-Antoinette’s writing table can be glimpsed in the study.

There are masses of flowers in the big vases and an immense jardinière. Eugénie was fond of orchids from China, India or Mexico, forced in the Tuileries’ hot-houses, but she loved simple flowers too – roses, carnations, geraniums – while she had a passion for ivy. ‘Her writing table was fenced off by a crystal screen over which graceful climbing plants hung in green festoons, making her look as if she was in some tropical forest’, Augustin Filon tells us.

Her son played in her study, her husband coming to smoke his eternal cigarettes. Nobody else was allowed to smoke here, however, since she had developed a loathing for tobacco and could generally smell it at 25 metres. She seldom visited him in his own stiflingly overheated rooms on the floor above, partly because they stank of nicotine – whenever she wanted to see the emperor of the French, she would bang a gong at the foot of his staircase.

Eugénie always sat in a low armchair with the light behind her, near the door and next to the fireplace, resting her feet on a stool, a green silk screen protecting her complexion from the heat. At her left, by the fire, was an ebonised worktable of several tiers strewn with papers that served as her desk – although generally she wrote
letters on her knees, very fast, in a large, neat hand – while at her right was a revolving bookcase.

Loliée claims that she never read books, but left them lying around to give the impression of wide reading. In reality, she read voraciously, keeping a commonplace book that ran into many leather-bound volumes kept in a special bookcase. Filon, who unlike Loliée, had actually visited her study, tells us the entries that occurred most frequently in the volumes were taken from Bossuet, Châteaubriand, Lamartine, de Maistre, Victor Cousin and Donoso Cortés. Besides reading, she had what almost amounted to a mania for filing documents in cabinets which stood in the study – in those days filing meant tying letters in bundles with coloured tape and then docketing them with handwritten slips.

The empress’s bedroom was dominated by an uncomfortable-looking state bed on a raised platform and by a commode on which stood the Golden Rose – Pepa always made the sign of the cross when passing it on her way to the dressing-room. There was an oratory next door, where she heard Mass on weekdays.

The best place to see Eugénie’s ‘
Louis XVI-Impératrice
’ style is at Compiègne, where some of her interiors have been brilliantly recreated. The Third Republic had tried to banish all trace of the Second Empire, dispersing its furniture, even its carpets, to ministries or embassies. Since the 1950s, however, some of the empress’s furniture has been reassembled here, while the fabrics which she used have been reproduced from samples still possessed by the Mobilier National (formerly Mobilier Impérial), the state furnishers.

Her style was a blend of the
ancien régime
with comfort. Nostalgia for the days before 1789 was already widespread, and inspired by her heroine Marie-Antoinette she pioneered a revival of interest in eighteenth-century furniture – acquiring as much of the queen’s as she could, made by such ébénistes as Weisweiler, Riesner, Oeben and Carlin, besides commissioning copies. With this, she mixed cosily upholstered nineteenth-century sofas and
confortables
(easy-chairs) together with little gilt or ebonised Italian chairs from Chiavari, all carefully arranged to encourage conversation.

The Salon de Musique gives a particularly good idea of the style. Its panelling is hung with an eighteenth-century Gobelins tapestry and a nineteenth century one from Beauvais, while the ornaments include plenty of Sèvres and Chinese porcelain. Two magnificent red lacquer cabinets (incorporating Chinese panels of about 1775)
are set off by Marie-Antoinette’s armchairs from Saint-Cloud in red silk, supplemented by a buttoned
canapé
(sofa) and
confortables
, likewise in red silk.

Eugénie remodelled the Salon de Réception, once Louis XVI’s bedchamber, adding extra pier-glasses as well as more elaborate plasterwork and gilding. What look like Louis XV tables and chairs are copies by Selme from 1859, while the floral upholstery and yellow damask curtains were supplied by Beauvais. The ‘conversational’ chairs are in a yellow damask that matches the curtains.

Her only totally new room is the Galerie Natoire, built in 1858 as a covered way to the palace theatre. An architectural pastiche in the Louis XVI manner, it is hung with six paintings by Natoire (from the 1740s) of Don Quixote’s adventures, which began as designs for a set of tapestries.

One comes very close to Eugénie in these imaginatively restored rooms at Compiègne. All that is missing is the astonishing profusion of heavy-scented flowers, both hothouse and native, that filled them winter and summer alike.

The style can also be seen at Fontainebleau, whose tiny theatre, rebuilt and enlarged in 1857, echoes Marie-Antoinette’s theatre at Versailles. Eugénie covered it entirely in a pale gold silk known as ‘bouton d’or’. What is even more striking is how she displayed her collection of oriental art. Starting with a wedding gift from the emperor (two Chinese vases of beaten gold), this eventually included the French army’s loot from the Summer Palace at Peking, together with the presents from Siam and Japanese porcelain bought from Morny’s executors. Eugénie came to Fontainebleau early in April 1863 in order to inspect progress on building her
Salon Chinois
, after discussing furnishings at the Garde-Meuble at Paris, returning in July to supervise the collection’s installation.