Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (30 page)

As early as 9 May 1853, when Eugénie was pregnant for the first time, she wrote to Paca, ‘I am thinking with terror of the poor dauphin Louis XVII, of Charles I, of Mary Stuart and of Marie-Antoinette. What is going to be my poor child’s destiny? I would a thousand times rather that my son had a less glittering but safer crown.’ In her far from infrequent moods of depression, Eugénie began increasingly to fear that her husband would be overthrown like Louis XVI, and that she too would die a terrifying death. Above all, she worried about the Prince Imperial. Would he end as horribly as the little Dauphin had in the Temple, sixty-three years before?

Viel Castel had noticed the empress’s obvious emotion when shortly after her marriage she went to the Conciergerie to see the cell where Marie-Antoinette had been imprisoned during her trial, and from where she was taken to be guillotined. She also visited the National Archives to read the letter written by the queen on the night before her execution. One night she returned unexpectedly to the Archives, asking the keeper to show her the queen’s last letter again, while she chose Maundy Thursday 1860 (when she was probably fasting) to revisit the cell at the Conciergerie.

Baron Hübner thought that her obsession bordered on the morbid. Staying at Saint-Cloud in April 1855 he was shown the imperial couple’s private apartments, and observed, ‘The empress’s almost superstitious cult for Queen Marie-Antoinette may be seen in her own rooms (these were the rooms that had once been occupied by Marie-Antoinette):

In the bedroom that she shares with the emperor, only one picture hangs on the walls. It is an old print that depicts Louis XVI’s unlucky consort. Clearly, ‘Doña Eugenia’ is convinced that she is going to die on the scaffold. She has said to me more than once, and when I smiled she went red. She mentioned, as absolute proof that a tragic fate awaited her, how when preparing her trousseau for her marriage she had been offered a lace veil that the queen had worn. It was really most tempting, but Mlle de Montijo simply did not have enough money to buy it. She was therefore overwhelmed – both elated and depressed – when opening her wedding presents she found sitting on top of them the same veil, the very same, that had once belonged to Marie-Antoinette.

In October the following year (only a few months after the demoralising ordeal when she had so painfully given birth to the Prince Imperial), the empress and Hübner had another conversation while he was staying at Compiègne, during which they discussed the queen and her execution. ‘I would much rather be assassinated in the streets’, Eugénie confided in the ambassador. ‘I have lost all my
sang-froid
. Since my lying-in, I have had a deeply disturbed imagination.’ Hübner comments condescendingly, ‘Poor woman. It is no bed of roses being on a throne, even an imitation one.’ Obviously an element of terror contributed to Eugénie’s not infrequent bursts of ill-temper.

Understandably, the birth of the Prince Imperial made the empress think still more of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the dauphin. In London
The Times
reflected that since Louis XIV no French monarch had been succeeded by his son although almost none of them had been childless, gloomily prophesying, ‘The Napoleon born last Sunday
morning may be crowned the last of his line; or may add one more to the Pretenders of France.’ During the weeks that followed the Orsini plot Cowley reported that ‘The poor empress is tormented to death by anonymous letters telling her that the little Prince is to be carried off and the poor child is now never let out of sight of the house.’

Eugénie bought everything she could find that had belonged to the martyred queen, or might have belonged, as if it were a sacred relic. Horace de Viel Castel presented her with a ring worn by Louis XVI, together with Gravelot’s sketch for the invitation to the ball for Marie-Antoinette’s wedding (but, sadly, they did not earn him an invitation to Compiègne). Eventually her collection included furniture, jewellery, paintings, tapestries, bronzes, porcelain and letters – and books whose bindings bore Marie-Antoinette’s coat of arms, particularly prayer-books. Among the most prized items were the queen’s ivory and ebony mandolin, her jewel casket decorated in Sèvres and some exquisite chairs by J.B.B. Demay with the monogram ‘M.A.’. In addition, a bust, a portrait or a print was prominently displayed in the empress’s apartments at each of the imperial palaces.

In 1861 the British foreign secretary Lord Clarendon compared her vendetta with Plon-Plon to the feud between the queen and Philippe Egalité. After his embarrassing refusal to fight a duel with the Duc d’Aumale – one of the Orleanists pretender’s uncles – she had expressed her contempt for Plon-Plon during a dinner at the Tuileries. ‘He will never forgive the empress any more than Egalité did Marie-Antoinette, who was always abusing his
lâcheté
, and this chimes in curiously with her belief that she is in all things like Marie-Antoinette and that the same fate is reserved for her.’

Rumours of her cult circulated widely, revealing how frightened she was of a revolution and delighting the régime’s opponents, republican or royalist. At the costume ball for the carnival of 1866, on 8 February, she received the guests in a dress of crimson velvet trimmed with sable and a matching toque with red and white plumes – modelled on what the queen had worn in one of Mme Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits. A masked man sidled up through the crowd, to hiss in her ear, ‘Some day you’re going to die just like her, and your son is going to die in the Temple just like the dauphin.’

‘Until 1860, so far as I can make out, most people thought that the empress’s time was entirely taken up with dress and frippery’, said Augustin Filon, the Prince Imperial’s tutor. ‘It was when Italian unity had begun to be very much the question of the day
and when this unity, already half-achieved, had started to threaten the pope’s temporal power, that whispers began to circulate about the empress’s political influence.’ This alteration in her public image was not unlike that undergone by Marie-Antoinette seventy years before. As early as 1862 Viel Castel noticed how the resemblance to the queen was being used to damage the empress’s reputation during M. Thouvenel’s sudden replacement as foreign minister by the pro-Austrian Drouyn de Lhuys. Eugénie was blamed by Thouvenel’s enraged friends. ‘I was told this morning that Marie-Antoinette perished because of her Austrian name, and that the
Spaniard had better take care of herself
’, recorded the diarist. ‘For some days now the unhappy empress has been considered capable of almost any crime – she is even said to be hoping for her husband’s death so that she can become Regent.’

Just as the queen had been accused of plotting against the Revolution, so the empress was blamed for all the Second Empire’s more unpopular policies at home as well as abroad. Filon heard that she was supposed to have her own political party, but never saw any trace of one during his three years at court. What is beyond dispute is that the hostility towards Eugénie noted by Viel Castel was growing stronger every day. There were rumours that she was responsible for the emperor’s failing health, even for France’s loss of standing as a world power after Prussia’s victory at Königgrätz. However half-baked, such rumours may have been, they did her no good.

‘It really is quite extraordinary how much our empress resembles poor Marie-Antoinette’, wrote the loyal if not uncritical Filon, two years later when Eugénie’s unpopularity had soared to alarming heights. This was after he had read the memoirs of Mme Campan, the queen’s woman of the bedchamber during the Revolution. Filon noticed in Eugénie the same love of domesticity as the queen’s, while he thought that he could see certain resemblances in their temperaments – the same mixture of haughtiness and affection, the same vivacity interrupted by moods of melancholy and bitterness. Yet Filon was shrewd enough to recognise at the same time the more sterling qualities that marked the two women – the same morality and decency, together with an honest, unaffected desire not only to please but to serve the French people.

By the end of the 1860s the Second Empire was losing impetus and obviously nearing a crisis. Eugénie’s comparison of herself with Marie-Antoinette, which had begun in 1853 as little more
than an affectation, partly romantic and partly superstitious, now seemed only too convincing. It looked as if she had good reason to fear that she might share the queen’s fate.

T
HE
W
ORLD
T
RADE
E
XHIBITION

‘For everyone who grew to manhood towards the end of the Empire, the year of 1867 must stay firmly among recollections that can never be forgotten’, wrote Pierre de La Gorce, born in 1846. ‘A picture lingers on of a vast, cosmopolitan party given by France for the entire world.’ He tells us, however, that those who saw it ‘remember two feelings, a feeling of dazzling brilliance and a feeling of fear…. Never have people enjoyed themselves more frenziedly or more uneasily.’ If it was the year of
La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein
, it was also the year when Prussia consolidated the gains won at Königgrätz, and when the Mexican adventure ended in tragedy.

Augustin Filon, who took up his appointment as the Prince Imperial’s tutor in the year of the Exposition Universelle, in September, was surprised by Eugénie’s simple manner and way of speaking – noticeably more natural than that of her ladies. Her looks were beginning to go, her face already lined and her complexion a little faded, but her only make-up was a line of kohl under her eyelids. Filon was struck by her advanced views on education and the approval with which she spoke of Victor Duruy. ‘What she said impressed me deeply, completely changing my idea of her as some haughty beauty reigning theatrically like a fairy queen in splendour’, he wrote. ‘Here was a woman with both brains and heart, who filled me with passionate loyalty.’

One of the best descriptions of the World Trade Exhibition in Paris is that of La Gorce. He tells us that the centre was the park known as the Champ de Mars, in which stood the Palais de l’Exposition, the principal showroom, ringed by galleries that displayed the latest marvels of industry and art, together with Egyptian temples, Greek porticos, Chinese pagodas, English and Dutch cottages, Tyrolean huts, Swedish log cabins and Turkish kiosks. (Among England’s exhibits were a Bible stall and an Anglican church.) If some of the buildings were shoddy, the overall impression was one of astonishing colour and variety. There were restaurants, photographers’ studios, dance halls, boutiques and
casinos, police turning a blind eye to ‘waitresses’ in exciting versions of Bavarian, Dutch or Spanish folkdress.

The capital’s streets had never been more frequented. The carnival went on and on, lasting for six months. In La Gorce’s words, ‘Paris became the abode of princes and meeting place of kings.’ They included the Russian and Austrian emperors and the Turkish sultan, the kings of Prussia, Sweden, Portugal, Holland, Belgium and Greece, the shah of Persia and the khedive of Egypt. Among the heirs to thrones were the prince of Wales, the crown princes of Prussia and Italy and the hereditary prince of Sweden.

Clearly, Lillie Moulton had no reservations when she called the exhibition ‘magnificent’, and spent 100 francs on a season ticket which contained her photograph and her signature. She reported that the main building on the Champ de Mars was circular, a segment of the circle being devoted to the exhibits of each country. Outside were cafés that served the food of every nation represented. ‘We go almost every day, and it is always a delight’, wrote Lillie enthusiastically. ‘The villa of the Bey of Tunis, a Buddhist temple, a Viennese bakery, where people flock to taste the delicious rolls hot from the oven, and where Hungarian bands of highly coloured handsome zitherists play from morning till night, and a hundred other attractions, make the Exposition a complete success. You pass from one lovely thing to the other. The gardens are laid through avenues of trees and shrubs where fountains play.’

On 17 May the Cowleys gave a ball for 2,000 guests at the British embassy in the rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré. Albert Edward, Prince of Wales, was there with his brother the Duke of Edinburgh and many other royalties. ‘Waldteufel played his wonderful music’, wrote Whitehurst, ‘and if any lady or gentleman thinks that Paris society does not like American drinks, that lady or gentleman is very much deceived.’ The emperor and Eugénie came, Whitehurst reporting ‘there was the prettiest picture – a Winterhalter it should have been – which I have ever seen in a ballroom. At the end, before a glass, and in a bower of flowers, sat the empress surrounded by her ladies-in-waiting and some of the best specimens of London and Paris beauties.’ The Princess of Wales, the lovely Alexandra, had been left in England – still in his twenties, the future Edward VII meant to enjoy the Parisian fleshpots to the full.

The most august of the visiting sovereigns, Alexander II, emperor of Russia, arrived in Paris on 1 June, handsome, stately and coldly polite, exuding a Byzantine aura of divine right. He and his two tall sons, the Tsarevitch Alexander and Grand Duke Vladimir, were installed at the Elysée. The king of Prussia, William I, who came with Queen Augusta and Crown Prince Frederick William four days later, was not so daunting, a fine old soldier, who had unusually pleasant and kindly manners. Despite remarking with a certain lack of tact that Paris was looking even more beautiful than when he had seen it during the allied occupation of 1814, the septuagenarian monarch charmed his hosts, particularly Eugénie.

The even more amiable and much younger King Charles XV of Sweden was unaffectedly made welcome in Second Empire Paris, as a ruler belonging to a dynasty no less parvenu than the Bonapartes. In any case, he was also a kinsman, related to them through both the Bernardottes and the Beauharnais. His brother and heir, Prince Oscar, was equally welcome, flitting up and down the Seine on a private
bateau-mouche
and singing duets with Mrs Moulton. (The emperor was godfather to Oscar’s little son.)