Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (43 page)

Eugénie was pleasantly surprised by the arrival of her former
maître d’hôtel
from the Tuileries, together with the palace butler and even the principal chef – whose cuisine made a welcome change from the food they had endured at English seaside hotels. Fortunately, money was not a problem. Although the new government had at once confiscated all imperial assets in France, Pauline Metternich had smuggled the empress’s jewellery out of the Tuileries in August and sent it to London in a diplomatic bag – even if she dropped Eugénie when she lost her throne. In any case, Doña Maria Manuela was prepared to help, while Napoleon still owned his mother’s house in Switzerland, Arenenberg.

Eugénie was soon joined by the amiable Duc de Bassano, her former grand chamberlain, and by Marie de Larminat, one of her favourite readers. Together with Mme Lebreton and other refugees, these diehards formed a little court in exile at Camden Place, which quickly became too crowded for comfort. Eugène Rouher, the leader of the Mamelukes, who settled at Richmond was a frequent visitor. Having asked the empress for permission, Filon went back to enlist in the French army – to be arrested, held in prison for weeks with every likelihood of being shot, and then expelled from France.

Since the empress had never abdicated, technically she was still regent, although her authority was recognised only by Marshal Bazaine and the remnant of the imperial army besieged in Metz.

Intending to discuss the situation, Plon-Plon turned up unexpectedly at Chislehurst, the first of his many unwelcome visits. Characteristically, he began by informing Eugénie that ‘Palikao’s government was a ministry of imbeciles’. Understandably she lost her temper, telling him sharply that the general and his ministers had been good and faithful friends, loyal to the very end. ‘Monseigneur, for eighteen years we have watched you criticising the Empire,’ she reminded the prince. ‘You and your friends have never ceased trying to undermine it, and you are continuing to behave in just the same way even though the empire has fallen. No doubt had you been in Paris on 4 September, presumably you could have told us just what we ought to have done. But you were not there, as you have never been at any really dangerous moment, on all too many occasions.’ This brought their discussion to an end, Plon-Plon storming out in a fury.

Meanwhile, a mysterious Monsieur Regnier, of whom nothing was known, had tried to call on her while she was still at Hastings, eloquently explaining to Filon his scheme for her restoration. Sensing that there was something wrong about the man, she had refused to see him. Regnier was almost certainly a double-agent, employed by Russia as well as Prussia, since both powers hoped to avoid recognising the ‘revolutionary’ government. Evans said that he possessed a Prussian passport, obtained from the embassy in London, which enabled him to pass through the enemy lines. (Later he would be condemned to death in absentia as a spy by a French military tribunal during Bazaine’s court martial.)

Whoever he may have been working for, Regnier was undoubtedly a very skilful operator. For a time he even succeeded in giving the impression that he had tricked Bismarck into believing he was the empress’s personal representative – he was supposed to have done so by showing him a postcard of the Marine Hotel at Hastings signed by the Prince Imperial, which he had obtained from the gullible Filon. Bismarck sent him to Metz with a proposal that Marshal Bazaine should immediately ask for an armistice and then restore Napoleon III, who would negotiate peace with Prussia. The glib Regnier impressed the marshal so much that he at once dispatched General Bourbaki, commander of the Imperial Guard (and Mme Lebreton’s brother), through the Prussian siege lines, disguised as a doctor from the Red Cross, to Chislehurst in order to obtain the empress’s agreement. When he arrived there, an amazed Eugénie explained to the general that she knew nothing about Regnier’s activities or about the proposal, which she dismissed out of hand. Too bewildered and inarticulate to explain the proposal properly, poor Bourbaki went back to France, hoping to rejoin his men.

After finally meeting and questioning Regnier, and although the meeting confirmed her distrust of the man, she became more interested in his ideas, especially when General Boyer, chief of staff of the French army of the Rhine, arrived from Metz on 22 October with a new, detailed plan which had the Prussian chancellor’s full approval.

General Boyer had seen Bismarck, who had specifically stated that the plan’s primary purpose was ‘for the army of Metz to remain faithful to its oath and become the champion of the imperial dynasty’, and who had then given him a safe conduct through the Prussian lines. Boyer also brought letters from Bazaine and General Frossard, who both implored Eugénie to accept the Prussian conditions for peace, whatever they might be, ‘in order to save the country which will otherwise be utterly destroyed by prolonging the present situation’.

The plan was that after an armistice, Marshal Bazaine should march on Paris and proclaim the empress as regent, whereupon she would summon the illegally dissolved Corps Législatif and Senate, and negotiate a peace treaty – the terms of which would be decided later. All the officers had stayed loyal to the emperor and the army would certainly obey them, Boyer assured her, but, haggard and visibly weak from starvation, he added that she must accept Bismarck’s offer as quickly as possible, since no more than two days’ rations had remained when he left Metz.

However, the general was unable to give Eugénie any information about what Prussia’s conditions were likely to be, nor could she obtain the slightest idea of them despite visiting the Prussian ambassador in London and cabling desperate appeals to King William. Then Bismarck informed her in a telegram that he wanted Bazaine to launch a ‘
pronunciamento
’ of the sort that had recently taken place in Spain. Well aware that every Frenchman, whether Bonapartist, republican or royalist, was united against the invaders, she saw at once that a coup would alienate the Empire’s remaining supporters by starting a civil war which, as the Prussian chancellor obviously hoped, would weaken France’s resistance.

Bismarck made a serious misjudgement in assuming that he was dealing with a woman who would seize any chance of regaining her throne. Realising the scheme was a trap, she refused to have anything more to do with it, saying that she was not going to give the Prussians a ‘blank cheque’. It was a bitter disappointment – she had genuinely believed that she could obtain better terms than the ‘Government of National Defence’ at Tours.

On 27 October Bazaine and his starving army surrendered unconditionally – the entire French regular army had now been taken prisoner. With it disappeared the last vestige of imperial authority and France’s only government became the one at Tours. Yet the emperor thought Eugénie had been right to refuse Bismarck’s offer. ‘I am in complete agreement with you, and the letters I have written, and which crossed with your last one to me, will show you how well we understand each other, body and soul,’ he wrote from his captivity. ‘It is a thousand times better to live in obscurity and poverty than to owe our position to abandoning our self-respect and our country’s best interests.’

After Sedan, Napoleon had not heard from his wife for over a fortnight. Then three letters reached him on 17 September, the first of many. ‘My heart breaks to see from your letters how deeply wounded you are,’ he told her on 6 October. ‘From our past grandeurs, nothing remains of what once separated us,’ she wrote to him after Metz surrendered. ‘We are more attached to each other, a hundred times more attached, because of our sufferings and all our hopes have become one in the dear young person of Louis. The darker the future, the more we shall feel the need to support each other….’

‘You and Louis mean everything to me,’ she would tell him later. ‘You take the place of family and country. France’s misfortunes move me to the depths of my soul, yet not for one moment do I miss the brilliance of our past life. Simply to be together again, that is all I wish for. My poor
cher ami
, if only my devotion to you could make you forget just for an instant the trials that you have endured with such greatness of soul. Your long, admirable suffering reminds me of Our Lord.’ Some historians have marvelled at Eugénie’s ‘inconsistency’ in transforming the man whom she had accused of being a coward, because of his surrender at Sedan, into a martyr. They recall how violently she had abused him in that dreadful outburst at the Tuileries in front of Filon and Conti. Yet she remained devoted to him for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile, Napoleon was being treated with almost too much consideration by his Prussian captors. No less disagreeable prison could be imagined than Wilhelmshöhe near Cassel, with its beautiful park and lake – King William used it as a favourite summer residence. Once the palace of the emperor’s late uncle Jerome, as king of Westphalia under the First Empire when it had been called ‘Napoleonshöhe’, it even contained a portrait of the prisoner’s mother, Queen Hortense. Nor could any jailer have been politer than its military governor, General Count Monts. The imperial staff included not only his aide-decamp but such stalwarts as his cousin Prince Joachim Murat and his old friend Dr Conneau – and also his hairdresser from the Tuileries, M. Caumont. The attacks from his stone ceased, for the time being, and there was a definite improvement in his health.

The Prussians were not entirely altruistic, however, keeping a careful account of the cost of the emperor’s upkeep and eventually sending the bill to the government of the Third Republic, and extracting full settlement. Moreover Napoleon’s treatment made an embarrassing contrast to that of most French prisoners of war, some of whom died from exposure in the open cattle trucks in which they were taken to prison camps. Dr Evans, who visited the camps, was horrified by their sufferings during the terrible winter of 1870/1, when 20,000 died from disease. The emperor did what he could, sending money to buy them proper clothing.

The authorities had no objection whatever to the empress visiting Napoleon at Wilhelmshöhe. Dressed in deep black, she arrived on 30 October, having travelled through Belgium. Her husband met her on the palace steps, coldly formal – a little to her alarm – but then there was a highly emotional reunion when they were in private. She stayed with him for four days before returning to England.

General Monts was fascinated by Eugénie, noticing that her obvious exhaustion seemed to add to her distinction. As a good Lutheran he observed patronisingly, in a book written many years afterwards, that he was convinced her sufferings had purged her of all traces of frivolity. The forcefulness of her manner made him feel sure that she had always influenced her husband’s policies, and ‘was accustomed to having the last word’. He also claimed that she spoke to Napoleon not as an equal but as a grown-up talking to a child, which must have been a figment of his imagination.

The emperor did not forget the feast of St Eugénie, 15 November. ‘I hope that you received, yesterday and today, my little flowers,’ he wrote. ‘They are not very beautiful, but I could not find any others. My thoughts are with you and I suffer from being far away from you on this day more than any other.’

‘What matters above all else is seeing you again,’ she wrote back with renewed affection. ‘These long days of exile are so sad for me…. I am quite sure God will give us happier days, but when? I cannot tell. Yet my tenderness and love for you continue to grow. I would make any sacrifice to make life happier for you, and the more everything looks dark, the more we should remember that all things have an end, both good and bad.’

Eugénie informed Doña Maria Manuela on 16 November:

The events through which we are living have broken my heart. I cannot get used to the idea of France being in ruins and miserable, even less to the idea that in her day of trial I am not there. In England they are beginning to see that nowadays Prussia and Russia rule the world. I only hope it is frightening enough to shake them out of their apathy … All that matters is saving France, no matter how or by whom. As for us, the world is big enough for us to hide our misfortunes somewhere, even if we are not allowed to save our country.

Even so, it is clear that Eugénie still regarded herself as regent. She had complained to Monts that if only his king had given them back the army in Metz, ‘it would have let us make an honourable peace and restore order in France’. Yet even had the Prussians done so, this was wishful thinking. A scheme she proposed in a letter to Wilhelmshöhe in December, when Paris was besieged and starving, was no less unrealistic. She would go to a city in the French provinces, summon the Corps Législatif and negotiate a peace. The Prussians were bound to offer her better terms than to the Tours government, and she would submit them for approval in a plebiscite.

Horrified, Napoleon forebade the scheme by return of post. (So much for Monts’s view of their relationship.) ‘We cannot take such risks, which might end in ridicule and being arrested by four
gens d’armes
’, he told her. Even if they did not, any peace was going to be disastrous for France. ‘After the position we have held in Europe, all our actions must bear the hall-mark of dignity and grandeur.’ Eugénie abandoned the scheme – it was her last attempt to take control.

On 30 November Camden Place was honoured by a visit from Queen Victoria. ‘At the door stood the poor empress in black, the Prince Imperial and, a little behind, the Ladies and Gentlemen,’ the queen noted in her diary. ‘She looks very thin and pale, but still very handsome. There was an expression of deep sadness on her face, and she frequently had tears in her eyes.’ As for the Prince Imperial, he was ‘a nice boy but rather short and stumpy. His eyes are rather like those of his mother, but otherwise I think him more like the emperor.’ Victoria’s summing-up was, ‘a sad visit and seemed like a strange dream’.

She invited Eugénie to come and see her at Windsor the following week. ‘What a fearful contrast to her visit here in ’55’, thought the queen. ‘Then all was state and pomp, wild excitement and enthusiasm – and now? … The poor empress looked so lovely in her simple black, and so touching in her gentleness and submission.’