Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (42 page)
Read Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Online
Authors: Desmond Seward
The side doors were locked so that the only way out was through the main entrance, opposite the church of Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. A crowd was surging past on its way to the Tuileries, howling ‘
A mort! A mort! A bas l’Espagnole!
’ (‘Death! Death! Down with the Spanish woman!’) The four waited for a bit in the doorway, Eugénie on Nigra’s arm, Mme Lebreton on Metternich’s. Nigra asked the empress if she was afraid. ‘Not a bit,’ she answered. ‘Why ask? You’re holding my arm and you don’t feel it trembling.’ The men wanted to wait longer but, saying ‘One has to be bold,’ she stepped into the street.
Metternich had gone off to find a cab, when a lout of about eighteen or twenty recognised Eugénie and shook his fist at her, yelling to the crowd, ‘Here’s the empress’, but nobody could hear him because of the uproar. Then Nigra saw a
fiacre
, hailed it and pushed in the two women. The youth came back, shouting, so Nigra grabbed him, holding on until the cab disappeared in the direction of the rue de Rivoli.
Early on the sunlit evening of Sunday 4 September 1870, Dr Thomas W. Evans returned to his home in Paris. He had been deeply saddened by the news from Sedan. A tubby little man with comical mutton-chop whiskers, at forty-seven he was one of the most successful dentists in the world and owed a lot of his success to the emperor’s friendly patronage. He had spent the morning with his young nephew Dr Edward A. Crane, making the new American hospital ready for the trainloads of wounded troops that were expected to arrive at any moment.
Evans had arranged to meet his nephew again later in the day, at 4.00 p.m. at his office in the rue de la Paix, and then go for a drive in the Bois de Boulogne. On the way to his office in his light American carriage, he had come across groups of men shouting ‘
Vive la République!
’ who seemed to be marching towards the Palais Bourbon. At the office Crane had told him he had heard that a large mob was invading the Tuileries gardens, but that it appeared to be fairly harmless, singing and dancing. However, from the office balcony of the rue de la Paix they had then seen that the evergrowing crowds were being joined by soldiers, while shopkeepers were tearing down the crowned gold ‘N’s that denoted imperial custom. Uncle and nephew had driven back to Evans’s house in a melancholy mood.
Reaching the house in the avenue de l’Impératrice at 6.00 p.m., the dentist handed the reins to his nephew and got down to order their dinner before going on to the Bois. When he came in, a servant informed him that two mysterious ladies were in his library. ‘They haven’t given their names and won’t say why they’ve come,’ he was told. ‘But they seem very anxious to see you and have been waiting for more than an hour.’ After ordering dinner, Evans went up to see them. Both in black, heavily veiled, one was standing and the other was seated, wearing a smart little bowler hat with a heavy veil. The lady in the bowler raised her veil. It was the Empress.
After leaving the Louvre, their
fiacre
had gone at a snail’s pace through the dense crowds in the rue de Rivoli. In any case, it was a slow vehicle with four wheels, pulled by a single horse – a cab of the type the English called a ‘growler’. When a ruffian stuck his head through the window, yelling ‘
Vive la Nation!
’ he did not recognise Eugénie, who had lowered her veil and covered her mouth with her hand. After he had gone, she calmly pointed out to Mme Lebreton the shopkeepers pulling down the imperial warrants, commenting ‘They don’t waste much time, do they?’
The only money they had with them was 500 francs in Mme Lebreton’s handbag (about £20) while they did not know where to go. Mme Lebreton had told the driver to take them to the house of a friend in the boulevard Malesherbes. She paid off the cab when they got there, only to find that the friend was out. Hailing another cab, they drove to Monsieur de Piennes in the avenue de Wagram. He too was out and his servant, who would not even open the door, refused to let them come in and wait. Eugénie had thought of going to Mr Elihu Washbourne, the United States minister, but did not know his address. Then she had remembered her American dentist.
‘I have come to you for protection and assistance,’ she told Dr Evans, who at once offered to help in any way that he could.
‘You see, I am no longer fortunate,’ she continued, her eyes filling with tears. ‘The evil days have come, and I am alone.’ She asked him to help her escape from Paris and go to England as soon as possible, producing a passport obtained from the British Embassy a short time before by a courtier who had anticipated disaster. This transformed the empress into an English invalid being taken home by her doctor and her brother.
Eugénie revived after a meal, surprising Evans by her calmness. He could not avoid thinking of what had happened to Marie-Antoinette. Yet Eugénie knew very well that, if she was caught, General Trochu’s ‘provisional government’ might put her on trial as a scapegoat – or she might be lynched by a mob.
At 5.30 the next morning, just before sunrise, they set out for the Norman coast in the dentist’s landau. He pretended to be the invalid’s brother, while Crane was her doctor and Mme Lebreton her nurse. They had no trouble in leaving Paris. The empress joked how only a few days ago she had been saying, ‘I will never leave the Tuileries in a cab, as Charles X and Louis-Philippe did. Well, that’s just what I’ve done.’ And she began to laugh.
Hiring new carriages several times, they drove for twenty-four hours, with nothing to eat but bread and sausage which the fugitive sliced with her penknife. The party finally had a coarse meal at a wretched little inn at La Rivière, where they spent the night. When Eugénie saw her bedroom, she burst out laughing at its squalor. Mme Lebreton broke down. ‘Oh, mon Dieu! Mon Dieu!’ she lamented. ‘Madame, how can you laugh in this sad situation?’ From La Rivière they travelled to Lisieux by train. At La Rivière station the empress became really frightened when the stationmaster leered at her maliciously – she thought that the man had recognised her.
When they arrived at Lisieux it was pouring with rain. Evans went to look for a carriage to take them on to Deauville, leaving the empress sheltering in a shop doorway. Only the previous year he had seen her being rowed across the Bosphorus blazing with jewels, he reflected. Now, looking at the bedraggled, rain-sodden woman in the doorway, he wondered if he was dreaming. The dentist told himself with pride, ‘her existence is known but to two men – and those two are Americans’.
Eventually on 6 September, they reached Deauville without incident at about 3.00 in the afternoon. Mrs Evans had been staying here for some weeks, at the Hôtel du Casino. Fearing that a description of his party might have been sent to every French seaport and that the hotel was being watched by the police, Evans smuggled Eugénie into his wife’s rooms through the hotel garden. After greeting her hostess, she collapsed exhausted into an armchair, exclaiming, ‘My God, I’m safe!’ She did not know that the most frightening part of her escape still lay ahead of her.
Going off to search for a boat in which to cross the Channel, Evans and Crane saw a beautiful English yacht in the harbour, the
Gazelle
. The owner, Sir John Burgoyne, a baronet and a former officer of the Grenadier Guards, was only too pleased to show them over the vessel – 42 tons and 60 feet long, with a crew of six. He told them that he hoped to sail from Deauville the next morning. When Evans explained why he was in the port and asked him bluntly if he would take the empress over to England, Sir John’s manner changed and he replied coldly, ‘I regret, gentlemen, that I am unable to assist you in this matter.’ Furious, Dr Evans informed him that in America, ‘every man will run any risk for a woman, and especially for a lady in danger’. Pointing towards a small schooner in the harbour, he added that he was sure she was a craft which would do just as well as Burgoyne’s yacht. Sir John then said he was by no means sure that he would be able to leave Deauville in the morning, because of heavy seas and a stiff north west wind. Indicating the other boat that Evans had mentioned, he added, ‘That little schooner, in such weather as we shall probably have, would be very likely to go to the bottom.’ Dr Crane then joined in, imploring the baronet to change his mind. Finally, Sir John referred the matter to Lady Burgoyne. She immediately overruled her husband and invited the empress to come on board that night.
There was a secret and at first even cheerful supper in Mrs Evans’s rooms, Eugénie laughing loudly at the improvised meal. ‘What does it amount to, this Revolution in Paris?’ she demanded. ‘It can’t change the past and the future is in God’s keeping.’ But then she took a locket with a miniature of the Prince Imperial out of her pocket, looked at it and burst into tears. Mrs Evans insisted that she lay down on her bed.
At midnight, wading through the moonlit puddles left by the rain, which by now had stopped, the empress, Mme Lebreton and Evans stole out of the hotel across the gardens. The path to the harbour had turned into a quagmire so that by the time they reached the yacht, as Eugénie recalled, ‘Our shoes were soaked and our clothes bespattered with mud.’ On board the
Gazelle
, Sir John kissed the empress’s hand and Lady Burgoyne curtsied – she also gave up her cabin to the two women and had hot punch served to them.
Suddenly they heard shouts of ‘
Vive la République!’ ‘Vive la Nation!
’ and hoarse voices singing the ‘Marseillaise’. Taking Dr Evans up on deck, a nervous Sir John told the dentist that he had always suspected that the empress was being followed by police spies. However, the shouts and the singing were from some rowdy passengers who had just got off the Paris train. At about 11.30 p.m. there was another alarm when a young Russian, whom Sir John knew only slightly, appeared out of the blue and despite it being so late, asked if he and a friend could see over the boat. They were shown everything – except Lady Burgoyne’s cabin.
Ironically, contrary to the fears of Burgoyne and Evans, the new government of France was not interested in finding the empress and had given no instructions about her to the police.
Next morning at just after 7.00 a.m. the
Gazelle
sailed out from Deauville. Despite a rough sea and a little rain, the yacht made good headway until, towards one o’clock, a violent squall blew up. The wind veered round, almost dead ahead, and the spinnaker boom was lost. All hands were summoned, reefing sails, battening down hatches. The wind increased steadily. Sir John wanted to take refuge in the nearest French harbour but was shamed into sailing on, as he put it, by Eugénie’s ‘cool courage and a consideration for others that won the esteem of everyone on board’. The gale worsened, however, and the sea ran higher and higher. At 6.00 p.m. the Isle of Wight was sighted, but by then the storm appeared to offer very little hope that they would ever reach port. ‘The gusts of wind became still more frequent and the rain fell in torrents, accompanied by vivid flashes of lightning and sharp thunder,’ wrote Dr Evans. ‘The yacht reeled and staggered in the wild sea that swept over her deck.’
Mme Lebreton spent the whole night on her knees, saying her rosary. There was a dreadful moment when someone shouted an alarm, mercifully false, ‘We’re aground!’ (If true, it would have meant that the boat had struck a rock and would soon break up.) ‘What are they saying?’ screamed the poor woman, who did not understand English. ‘We’re nearing land,’ the empress answered dryly, although she herself expected to drown at any moment. ‘The little boat was jumping on the waves like a cork’, she remembered. ‘I really thought we were lost.’ Afterwards, she confided in Evans that if they had sunk, since no one knew where she was, no one would ever know what had happened to her – ‘there could not have been a more welcome grave’.
Towards midnight, however, the gale at last began to lessen and at 4.00 a.m. on 8 September the battered
Gazelle
limped into Ryde harbour. Here they learned that during the same storm their host’s cousin, Commander Sir Hugh Burgoyne RN, had gone down with his ship HMS
Captain
off Finisterre, together with the entire crew of 500 officers and men.
The best hotel in Ryde, next to the jetty, would not admit such impossibly shabby people, on foot and without even hand-luggage, so they had to walk up George Street until they came to the clearly very inferior York Hotel. Here Evans booked accommodation in the names of ‘Mr Thomas and sister, with a lady friend’, which he wrote on a bit of paper. The landlady was barely civil, giving them tiny bedrooms at the top of the house.
When he knocked on the former empress’s door a few hours later, he discovered her reading an English Bible, which she had found by her bed. It had fallen open at Psalm 23, ‘The Lord is my Shepherd: I shall not want.’ He was able to tell her that, according to the morning papers, her son the Prince Imperial had also reached England.
S
edan was a defeat even more bitter than Waterloo. Although the war was far from over, it delivered France into the hands of Prussia, and generations of Frenchmen have never forgiven Napoleon III for their country’s humiliation. Yet during the shabby régime that followed, many regretted the Second Empire. For the next few years the possibility of a Bonapartist restoration can never have been very far from the empress’s thoughts, and with reason.
After a dramatic reunion with the Prince Imperial in Hastings, at the Marine Hotel on Eastern Parade, mother and son stayed on the Sussex coast for the next fortnight. Filon, who appeared out of the blue on 12 September, was shocked to see them in such ‘modest apartments’, if impressed by the way in which the empress adapted to ‘private life’. Before the end of the month, however, they had moved into Camden Place at Chislehurst in Kent. Just outside the village, and only twenty minutes by train from Charing Cross station in London, this had been found for them by the tireless Dr Evans. If scarcely imposing, it was a nice enough Georgian gentleman’s mansion, built in red brick. (Today it is the clubhouse of Chislehurst Golf Club.)