Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (17 page)
Read Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
The Chinese Salon is approached through an ante-chamber that contains the larger Siamese presents, such as the pagoda. Looking onto the lake, the Salon’s walls are covered with carved panels of Chinese design while three great ironwood cabinets display the smaller pieces of ivory, jade and goldwork. Huge candelabra and a gigantic incense burner, great Chinese vases and two mighty Dogs of Fo contrast with Cordier’s statue of an Arab woman, a Sèvres jardinière and portraits of Louis XV and his queen. (Winterhalter’s painting of the empress among her ladies hung here too, but is now at Compiègne.) Six sofas in striped green silk make it habitable
– there is a mechanical piano in case the court should wish to dance. A smaller room, opening off the Salon, displays the bulk of the collection – jade, rock crystal and porcelain, ivories, bronzes and cloisonné enamels. ‘Anyone except Eugénie might so easily have turned the room into a kind of museum’, comments Filon, who had known it well. ‘But she created what you might call a corner of the abode of “The Son of Heaven”.’
Entered through an ante-chamber hung with Chinese papers in lacquered frames, her study here (still being restored), was no less oriental, with lacquered panels and Chinese cabinets, lit by a Chinese lantern. Leather armchairs gave the room a masculine appearance, very unlike her study at the Tuileries.
At Fontainebleau Eugénie showed herself even more imaginative than King George IV had been at Brighton. Few contemporary decorators knew how to make such inspired use of the plunder that was flooding in from the East. The restoration of the Salon Chinois in 2000 was a revelation.
What may well have been the most unusual of all her decorative schemes perished during the Franco-Prussian War. This was her use of the ‘
style Pompéien
’ at Saint-Cloud, inspired by Roman frescos. For this she employed Jean-Louis Hamon, a former pupil of Ingres.
No one had set the fashion in France since the empress Josephine. Marie-Louise had been too young to make much impression, while Louis-Philippe’s queen Marie-Amélie and his daughter-in-law, the Duchesse d’Orléans, were frumps. Eugénie succeeded brilliantly, her clothes being copied throughout Europe and across the Atlantic, even in the sultan of Turkey’s harem.
Initially, she was not very interested in smart clothes, but was forced to dress up for her countless official engagements. Ideally, she preferred to wear a plain dress of wool or faille (cheap silk) which was what most women wore every day; driving through Paris, often she merely put a smart cloak over her dress. She once said she had never spent more than 1,500 francs on a gown. When Princess Metternich first met her, she was wearing a black skirt and a red flannel shirt with a black leather belt. Instead of lounging in a dressing-gown, for years she did without one, dressing as soon as
she rose, until finally Mme Carette bought her a ready-made red flannel wrapper for 84 francs at one of the new department stores near the Louvre.
Eugénie’s first triumph was to popularise the crinoline. Invented in 1856, the ‘cage-crinoline’ was a bell-shaped petticoat stiffened with hoops of steel wire that replaced the petticoats previously used to create width. ‘Crinolinomania’ conquered France, Britain and the United States within months. According to
Punch
, ‘Dr Punch has ample grounds for the belief that the persons first affected were the ladies attached to the Imperial court; and that the symptoms of the mania were primarily betrayed by the young and lovely empress.’ In a letter of 1856 Ernest Barthez (the Prince Imperial’s doctor) said that if the emperor teased Eugénie about her ‘cage’, she told him she didn’t know how she had ever managed to do without one – the doctor thought she liked it because she could dispense with layers of petticoats and use her legs.
A boon in hot weather, the crinoline gave ladies a certain stateliness while enabling them to walk with a gliding motion that had definite sexual allure. (Significantly, the last women to discard the cage after it went out of fashion were expensive prostitutes.) Despite its drawbacks – entering a carriage or even just sitting down needed great skill, so that travelling was a nightmare – the cage crinoline remained indispensable for over a decade.
One can gain an idea of how completely women’s clothes differed from today’s by imagining how Eugénie began her morning at the Tuileries during the 1850s. She entered her dressing-room to wash, ‘a vast room’ according to Mme Carette. Besides tall pier-glasses on the walls that reflected each other and a cheval glass, its main features were a washstand with jug and basin (a hip-bath underneath) and a dressing-table draped in lace over a blue silk cloth. On the table stood Queen Hortense’s silver-gilt dressing-case, flanked by scent bottles and by pots that contained rice powder for her white complexion, kohl for a line beneath lower her eyelashes and rouge for the lobes of her ears. As she washed, four dummies descended on a lift through a trapdoor in the ceiling from the wardrobes overhead, in response to orders screamed by Pepa down a speaking-tube. The dummies were dressed in the four outfits the empress would wear that day – the system gave rise to rumours that she was dressed in a single movement, by a machine like a candle-snuffer.
First, Eugénie stepped into her ‘pantaloons’, long drawers that opened down the middle and fastened with a drawstring, to enable the wearer to use a chamberpot without undressing. Then she slipped into a silk under-petticoat, before her maids – supervised by bad-tempered little Pepa – laced up a corset of woven horsehair stiffened with whalebone to hold her breasts in a tight, narrow-waisted bodice. Next the maids put on silk stockings and pointed boots of glacé kid, varnished leather or embroidered satin, tying garters above the knee and buttoning the boots’ cloth sides with a special hook – her feet were no bigger than a child’s. A ballooning petticoat went on, reinforced with horsehair and hoops of split cane. (Although known as a ‘crinoline’, this was not the ‘cage’.) Finally, with the aid of pulleys the maids lowered on her cage, another silk petticoat and dress itself, from the tall stand onto which they had been moved from a dummy.
She wore day dresses of wool or poplin, of silk, velvet or plush, in every colour of the rainbow, plain or patterned. Among them was the new English mauve called ‘Perkins’s Purple’ (since it suited her violet eyes), made with a recently invented aniline dye, and ‘Magenta’, named after the French victory, which was another new aniline dye. She was fond of pastel shades such as dove grey, cream or buttercup yellow, because they had been favourites of Marie-Antoinette. Cashmere or Paisley shawls took the place of coats, while long, buttoned gloves of soft leather or silk, kept in flat boxes and extended with stretchers, reached halfway up her arms.
Demure, face-framing bonnets had held sway for sixty years, tied under the chin by a bow and with a frill behind, but she liked a broad-brimmed straw hat when relaxing in the summer. She always wore her own new hairstyle ‘
à l’Impératrice
’, with her hair pulled back (over round pads) from a central parting so as to reveal her ears, instead of combing it down flat on either side of her face or letting it hang in ringlets.
Unless she was at Biarritz, the empress changed her clothes several times a day, and never wore a formal gown more than once. Every six months she gave the discarded dresses to her ladies, who sold them for a high price – often to Americans since there was a good market in New York where they were hired out – and at least one imperial gown appeared on the stage of a Paris theatre.
During the 1850s her dressmakers were Mmes Vignon and Palmyre, Mme Félicie made her shawls and cloaks, and Mme Lebel
or Mme Virot supplied her bonnets. Her riding habits came from Henry Creed, her husband’s English tailor who had a branch in Paris. In 1860 she began to order her morning dresses from the newly established Mme Laferrière.
Today Second Empire clothes may seem excessively elaborate. Mme Carette tells us that even simple dresses were hard to wear, requiring an upright bearing which had to be taught in childhood, by such instruments of torture as backboards. Yet the men of the time loved them. ‘There is an acme of dressing, just as there is of genius’, sighed the philosopher-historian Hippolyte Taine in 1867. ‘A perfect toilette is worthy of a poem. Taste and judgement are needed in placing and contrasting each ribbon or silk rose on soft, silvery satin, on palest mauve, against the softness of sweet colours made sweeter still by layers of lace, tulle flounces and billowing frill … It is all the poetry left to us, and how women are aware of it!’ (Admittedly Taine had developed some very odd theories – he believed that Englishwomen possessed exceptionally large feet, evolved to cope with the marshy, rain-sodden soil of ‘
perfide Angleterre
’.)
The French crown jewels, unseen since 1830 because Louis-Philippe would not let his consort wear them for fear display might harm his bourgeois image, consisted of gems bought by Napoleon I and the restored Bourbons, together with those of the Orleans family. Among the few from before 1789 were some magnificent pear-shaped diamond earrings, which were doubly precious to Eugénie because they had belonged to Marie-Antoinette. She often wore the great Regent diamond, an Orleans heirloom, on her breast. The largest of the crown diamonds was yellow, ‘as big as a nut’ and set in smaller white diamonds in a comb-like ornament, but she stopped wearing this after learning its history. Swallowed by one of the mob during the sacking of the Tuileries in 1848, it had perforated his intestines and was recovered in the subsequent autopsy. ‘It’s a daring little rascal who has plumbed the very lowest depths of society’, joked the emperor.
Eugénie had many diamonds reset. Impressed by the work of such jewellers as Oscar Massin and Lemonnier, she preferred a naturalist style – currant-leaves, flowers or ears of corn – for her tiaras, sprays and shoulder knots, her crescents and aigrets. In 1855 she brought a reliquary cross from Bapst, in 1867 a spray of lilac blossom from Massin. Her favourite piece, however, was a clover-leaf in emeralds set with diamond dew – Napoleon’s first gift
to her. At the Tuileries ball for the Carnival of 1863, when she went as a Venetian
dogaressa
, Mrs Moulton says that she was ‘literally
cuirassée
in diamonds and glittered like a sun-goddess. Her skirt of black velvet over a robe of scarlet satin was caught up by clusters of diamond brooches.’
Sometimes Eugénie wore a huge dog-collar of pearls, for which she had a passion, in particular for the rare black pearls from Mexico. Until then, black pearls had not been much prized, but when her interest became widely known their price soon overtook that paid for the finest white ones.
She liked to give presents of jewellery; Lillie Moulton, for example, received a bracelet of large rubies and diamonds set in three heavy gold coils, with Eugénie’s name and the date engraved inside. During her visit to England in 1855 she gave the young Princess Royal, in Queen Victoria’s words, her own ‘beautiful watch of rubies and diamonds and a beautiful little chain, seal and watch-key … Vicky was in ecstasies.’
When, in the 1860s, the dashing Princess Metternich danced at one of the great Tuileries balls wearing a startlingly beautiful dress of white tulle sequined with silver, an entirely new material that was sewn with fresh daisies, Eugénie asked her who had made it. ‘An Englishman, madame, a rising star,’ answered Pauline. ‘What is his name, pray?’ ‘Worth, madame.’ ‘Such a star should have some satelites,’ said the empress. ‘Tell him to come and see me at ten o’clock tomorrow morning.’
When the ‘man-milliner’ (a term coined by Charles Dickens) arrived at the Tuileries, as a test Eugénie asked him to make a ballgown, and to choose the material and style. He returned the same day with a dress of beige brocade. She sniffed, saying, ‘I hate brocade – it looks like curtain material.’ The emperor came in and Worth told him that wearing brocades would please the silk-weavers of Lyons, notorious republicans. Napoleon and Eugénie took the point. Soon Worth became dressmaker to the empress, and by the end of the year his dresses were being ordered in London and New York.
Eugénie had reason to patronise Worth and ignore his being a man – until now male couturiers had been unknown. He measured and cut his patterns with such skill that a dress needed only one fitting instead of half a dozen. Employing teams of seamstresses (who toiled twelve hours a day, six days a week), later supplemented by the new sewing machines, he delivered a garment to the Tuileries the morning after Eugénie had ordered it, faster in an emergency – once he made her a dress in under four hours. His materials – tulles and muslins woven with fine silver or gold wire, failles, chiffons and taffetas, satins, velvets and brocades, laces and embroideries – all save the lace specially manufactured for him at Lyons – were exquisite, his design and workmanship superb. He always ensured that no one else anticipated what the empress would wear. She ordered hundreds of outfits from him, because he knew what would suit her.
The magic of these marvellous dresses, enhanced by the
frou-frou
of silk petticoats and the gleam of wonderful jewellery, is almost impossible to imagine today. (‘We heard the rustle of silk and satin, the soft jangle of swinging bracelets and chains’, Filon recalls, remembering a door opening on a certain evening at Compiègne. ‘It was the empress.’) Only Winterhalter can give us a faint inkling, as he does in his portraits, especially in those of the Duchesse de Morny, Princess Rimsky-Korsakov and Princess Metternich, transformed into a beauty.
Worth was more than a gifted dress designer. In a few years he changed the way in which women of even modest means dressed throughout the world. In 1863 at Eugénie’s request he designed a ‘walking crinoline’ with skirts 10 centimetres shorter than usual so that she could go for country walks without getting muddy. She made her ladies wear the skirts first, to prepare public opinion, then wore them herself. Five years later he summoned up the courage to make a dress without a crinoline, which Pauline Metternich promptly introduced at court. Basically, a narrow skirt of very thick satin with no hoops or stiffened petticoat and falling straight to the ground, this caused a sensation as wide skirts had been in vogue since the 1820s. It was immediately copied by Eugénie, condemning her once beloved ‘cage’ to extinction. He revived the alluring bustle, which had not been seen since the seventeenth century and among his other innovations were jackets (with or without sleeves), and shirts with skirts.