Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (31 page)

Count von Bismarck had decided to escort his king, much to Napoleon’s irritation. Apparently quite indifferent to the stares of the fascinated French, the Prussian chancellor cut a striking figure in the dazzling white uniform and black thigh-boots of a major of Cuirassiers, the scabbard of his sabre clanking noisily along the pavement. He looked even more colossal when he wore his eagle-topped steel helmet. As a piece of subtle mockery that had been inspired by Princess Metternich, the fashionable colour this year for the ladies’ new straight dresses was brown often set off by coral jewellery, a brown called ‘
la couleur Bismarck
’. (During the Königgrätz campaign, the brown-coated Austrian artillerymen had inflicted substantial casualties on the Prussian army.)

The real world broke in suddenly and unpleasantly upon the autocrat of all the Russias when he paid a formal visit to the Palais de Justice, where there were yells of ‘
Vive la Pologne!
’ and ‘
À la porte!
’ (‘Get out!’) from several of the younger advocates, who had not forgotten how the Russians were behaving in Poland.

La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein
had been running since mid-April, attracting enormous audiences who laughed and applauded rapturously, and afterwards sang its cheerful, catchy tunes in the streets of Paris. Its fame had spread to every European capital. An imperial gala performance was arranged for the visiting sovereigns. In the imperial box, next to Napoleon and Eugénie, the Russian emperor and the king of Prussia sat side by side with Don Francisco de Assisi, king consort of Spain, King Louis and Queen Maria Pia of Portugal, Queen Sophia of Holland, the ex-King Ludwig I of Bavaria and his melancholy grandson Ludwig II, and the khedive, Ismail of Egypt. Behind them, but not seated, were the Tsarevich Alexander of Russia and his brother Grand Duke Vladimir, with Crown Prince Frederick of Prussia, Crown Prince Albert of Saxony and Crown Prince Umberto of Italy.

At the far end of the box, which was arranged as a drawing-room, stood a group of ambassadors, ministers and generals with their ladies – among them were Prince and Princess Metternich, Count von Bismarck in his white uniform, the aged Russian chancellor Prince Gortchakov, the Prussian ambassador Count von der Goltz, and those two faithful old warhorses Marshal Canrobert and General Fleury.

The empress, wearing rose-coloured silk with her shoulders bare, her throat adorned by a superb collar of pearls, seemed to glow with all the brilliance of her heyday. She had certainly come a long way from 1853, when not a single foreign royalty had attended her wedding.

Bismarck was seen to bellow with laughter, again and again, at the way in which the operetta mocked the tiny armies of the minor German states, so much so that it seemed almost as if he were laughing at some private joke. ‘That’s it! That’s exactly it!’ he said afterwards when, accompanied by General von Moltke, he paid a perfectly respectable, if for him unusually frivolous, visit to the leading lady, Mme Hortense Schneider. ‘We are going to get rid of the Gerolsteins and very soon none of them will be left. I am grateful to you Parisian artistes for showing the world just how ridiculous they were.’

Unfortunately, and no doubt just as Bismarck hoped, most of the audience left the Théâtre des Variétés totally convinced that all German troops were no less laughable and ineffectual than those of General Boum-Boum and the Grand Duchy of Gerolstein.

If the empress found the libretto of
La Grande Duchesse
marginally less distressing than usual, one can only hope that she did not hear about the excessively patriotic behaviour of the operetta’s leading lady, whose hospitable welcome for foreign royalty earned her the cruel name of ‘
les passages des princes
’ and convulsed Paris with laughter. Hortense slept with a good few princes, including it seems the Prince of Wales. One of her numerous discarded lovers equipped himself with the flag of every nation and took the house opposite, hoisting and floodlighting the appropriate flag during each royal visit.

On the evening before the performance of
La Grande Duchesse
Eugénie invited her royal guests to a fête at Versailles, of such splendour that those who were there believed it could not possibly have been rivalled in any preceding age, not even in the days of Louis XIV. There were elaborate water pageants in the park that surrounded the great palace, which was illuminated by torches and flares, pageants accompanied by music from concealed orchestras of violins, together with a fleet of gondolas for the guests on the Grand Canal, then an epicurean supper for 600 in the Hall of Mirrors, and finally a brilliant firework display that reached its climax when 100,000 rockets lit up the night sky over Versailles.

In the small hours Princess Metternich encountered her friend the empress, creator of the feast, wandering happily by herself through the park, a white, gold-embroidered burnous thrown over her shoulders – ‘admiring murmurs following in her wake like a trail of lighted gunpowder’. Yet, typically, the Princess reminds us, Eugénie was simply not interested in polite compliments about her appearance or her clothes – what she really wanted was to be congratulated on giving a good party. ‘What do you think of my fête?’ she asked Pauline, who replied sincerely enough, ‘Worthy of Your Majesty.’

The ‘révue de Longchamps’ was always the climax of the French military calendar, a mixture of parade, picnic and national celebration, when the Parisians flocked out to Longchamps racecourse to applaud the red-trousered army that was France’s glory. This year the review was even more spectacular than usual, 60,000 men taking part in an attempt to impress the visiting sovereigns and their staffs – in particular the Prussians.

On 6 June 1867 tens of thousands of spectators cheered when Eugénie’s carriage arrived at the saluting base, the empress smiling and bowing. She was followed by Napoleon III and his fellow monarchs on horseback, together with a host of crown princes and lesser potentates. Quick-stepping to the raucous military music of France, the infantry marched past. Then, to the staccato, braying fanfares of their mounted trumpeters came the cavalry in tunics and dolmans of dark blue, light blue or green. Among them were the empress’s own personal regiments – her cuirassiers, carbineers, lancers and dragoons.

‘When squadron on squadron charged with drawn swords upon their sovereigns and their escorts, and halted but a few paces from them with the cry of “
Vive l’Empereur!
” the thrill was magical’, said Roger Sencourt, who, writing in the 1920s, could well have spoken to survivors who had watched the legendary review. ‘At that moment there swept through the people and the army a conviction that French power was irresistible.’

Unlike the handful of keen-eyed Prussian officers and their king, very few among the spectators appear to have realised that, despite all the magnificent uniforms, the army’s artillery was out of date. Even those rare French experts who did notice remarked proudly that these guns were the cannon that had triumphantly smashed the way into the fort at the Malakhoff in the Crimea, and had won the victories of Magenta and Solferino in 1859.

While the cavalcade of visiting sovereigns and princes was riding back from Longchamps, led by Napoleon III, a twenty-year-old Polish refugee called Berezowski fired a single pistol shot at the Russian emperor, but missed, the bullet passing through a horse’s nostril and covering the tsarevitch with the animal’s blood, and wounding a lady in the crowd. The young man was seized by the police before he could shoot again. ‘Sire, we have been under fire together, which means that now we are brothers-in-arms,’ said Napoleon smoothly. ‘Our lives are in the hands of Providence,’ replied the angry tsar in tones of ice. He had not forgotten how his host had encouraged the Poles to hope for independence.

On 10 June, the day before Alexander was due to leave France, when he was about to join a shooting party at Fontainebleau, the police discovered that there was a Polish conspiracy to ambush and kill him in the woods. In order to avoid further embarrassment by revealing yet another plot on his life, Eugénie engaged the tsar in conversation, dragging it out until it was too late for him to reach the party.

The only major European sovereigns not to visit the Exposition Universelle were Queen Victoria, by now the reclusive ‘Widow of Windsor’, and Queen Isabella of Spain who was about to lose her throne. Even the sultan of Turkey came. Deliberately, the pleasure-loving, ineffectual Abdul Aziz arrived late, after the tsar had gone, blazing with diamonds when he attended the exhibition’s prize-giving on 1 July.

Just as Napoleon and Eugénie were about to leave the Tuileries
for the prize-giving, they were told that Emperor Maximilian had been executed by a Juarist firing squad on 19 June. The news underlined France’s humiliation by Prussia and made Franz-Joseph still less inclined to ally with a man who was ultimately responsible for the death of his brother – noisily derided as ‘The Archdupe’ by the French opposition.

‘The glitter of the Exposition Universelle hid our country’s discontent at home and its danger abroad’, said La Gorce. ‘But for how long? Napoleon III can seldom have felt more isolated than when he rode at the head of his cavalcade of kings. Everything was going wrong.’

‘L’E
SPAGNOLE
’ –
THE
S
PANISH
W
OMAN

The Second Empire had lost its way. Napoleon III was failing spectacularly to win the ‘glory abroad’ that was a vital part of Bonapartism – Russia had crushed Poland, Prussia had become a menacing rival and now Mexico had shot his protégé Emperor Maximilian. France felt humiliated. Throughout history the French have always looked for a scapegoat and, already inclined to dislike Eugénie as a foreigner, they had no need to look further than the ‘Spanish Woman’.

She was too intelligent to be unaware of their hostility, while she knew very well that she had stayed Spanish in temperament and outlook – when she spoke, her intonation if not her accent remained Spanish and she retained a deep Spanish bark of a laugh. Meeting the empress in her mid-seventies, Lucien Daudet realised at once that he was talking to a Spaniard.

On the morning after Napoleon had been informed of the Emperor Maximilian’s death he summoned the chief of the Empire’s secret police, Hyrvoix, to the Tuileries. How, he asked him, were Parisians reacting to the news?

‘If you really want to know, Sire, it is not just Parisians but the whole nation who are thoroughly indignant and upset by the way this unlucky war has ended’, answered the policeman. ‘Everywhere you’ll find that everybody is saying the same thing. They say it’s the fault of …’

The emperor broke in quickly, ‘Whose fault?’

‘Just as they used to say in Louis XVI’s time, “It’s the Austrian’s
fault”, now under Napoleon III they’re saying, “It’s the Spaniard’s fault”.’

No sooner had he spoken than Eugénie burst into the room – looking like ‘one of the furies’ in a white wrapper, her hair loose over her shoulders, her face red with anger, her eyes blazing, recalled the wretched Hyrvoix.

‘Repeat what you’ve just said,’ she demanded.

‘All right, Madame, since it’s my job to report the facts, but I hope Your Majesty will forgive me,’ said the unfortunate policeman. ‘I was telling the emperor that today’s Parisians talk of the “Spanish Woman” just as, seventy or eighty years ago, they used to talk of the “Austrian Woman”.’

‘The Spanish woman, the Spanish woman!’ shouted the by now infuriated empress. ‘I’ve become French, but, if I need to, then I’ll show my enemies that I know how to be Spanish.’ Then she rushed out of the room, slamming the door.

‘I am a ruined man,’ exclaimed the terrified Hyrvoix.

‘Oh no, you only did your duty.’ Napoleon assured him.

Within a week, however, poor Hyrvoix found himself transferred from Paris to a post in a remote area of eastern France, in the Jura. Yet the policeman had merely been quoting from his agents’ reports, which were accurate enough. More and more of the French were blaming ‘the Spaniard’ for anything that went wrong, just as they had Marie-Antoinette.

The story of Eugénie and Hyrvoix comes from
An Englishman in Paris
by Albert Vandam, a journalist who had developed an intense dislike of the empress, and should be treated with caution. Yet the incident is in character and undoubtedly reflects popular feeling in Paris at the time. Writing in 1905 the historian Jean Guétary had heard a similar story from ‘a high functionary at the Tuileries’. ‘Answer me frankly, Monsieur Hyrvoix’, Eugénie asked the policeman. ‘Am I popular?’ Hesitating for a moment, Hyrvoix replied. ‘Yes, Madame…. especially in the provinces.’ Guétary says she never forgave him.

If that alarming burst of ferocity in response to Hyrvoix’s unpalatable warning may give one the illusion that Eugénie was a virago, she left a more pleasing impression on most people who encountered her. Sixty-five years afterwards, the English historian Sir Charles Oman, who had watched her at a ceremony in the Tuileries gardens during the summer of 1868, remembered (in
Things I Have Seen
) ‘a splendid figure, straight as a dart, and to my young eyes the most beautiful thing I had ever seen’. (She was wearing ‘a zebra-striped black and white silk dress with very full skirts, and a black and white bonnet’.) He recalled how Napoleon III made a dismal contrast. ‘On a bench overlooking the scene sat a very tired old gentleman, rather hunched together, and looking decidedly ill. I do not think I should have recognised him but for his spiky moustache. He was anything but terrifying in a tall hat and a rather loosely fitting frock coat.’

Significantly, Oman informed us that the empress ‘was a commanding figure and dominated the whole group on the terrace while the emperor, huddled in his seat, was a very minor show’. The ‘old gentleman’ had only just reached his sixtieth birthday, but clearly to Oman he appeared to be almost senile. Although he sometimes revived for brief periods, and if the agonising attacks of pain resulting from the stone in his bladder were intermittent, he was very tired indeed. He had lost his once insatiable sexual appetite – there were to be no more ‘little distractions’.