Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (47 page)

Two years later she went back to Paris after Plon-Plon’s ludicrously inept attempt at a coup. He had plastered the capital with posters demanding a referendum to decide if France should become an empire again – with himself as emperor – and, promptly arrested by ‘four gendarmes’, was immured in the Conciergerie. Before the ‘
César déclassé
’ was released and expelled from France, Eugénie rushed over to Paris to see if she could help, her main reason, however, being to try and unite the two branches of the Bonapartist party.

Afterwards Queen Victoria congratulated her on her courage. ‘You know how great are the affection and friendship which I feel for you,’ wrote the queen, ‘and you will, I hope, understand that for a few hours I have been feeling anxious for you.’ Someone who still insisted on styling herself ‘Empress Eugénie’ – although never ‘empress of the French’ – might easily have joined Plon-Plon in the Conciergerie.

Even so, informally if not officially, her relations with the Republic grew more relaxed as the years went by. Despite the French crown jewels being put up for public auction in 1887, a large number of priceless possessions were restored to her. Among them were the Golden Rose, paintings by Winterhalter (including that of herself with her ladies), by Mme Vigée-Lebrun (of Marie-Antoinette and of the dauphin) and by David. Also returned were her collections of Louis XVI furniture and Sèvres porcelain from Compiègne, and the Gobelin tapestries of Don Quixote from the Villa Eugénie. Farnborough Hill became an imperial palace in more than just a nostalgic sense.

Enthusiastically enlarged by Destailleur, the architect of the abbey church who added turrets, gables and huge chimneys, what had originally looked like some sort of cross between a big Swiss chalet and a Scottish hunting lodge was slowly transformed into a vast French château. An undeniably eccentric building, which to Lucien Daudet appeared like ‘a fantastic village’, its elaborate roofs were at different levels and it had an incongruous little clock tower. Inside, Destailleur extended the main gallery by constructing a ‘cloister in the Renaissance style’ that was paved with a marble terrazzo, and added a large, glass-roofed courtyard. The kitchen wing was also extended, to provide accommodation for the staff,
while there was an entire new annexe of three storeys. Today the building houses a girl’s school, originally founded as a convent school with Eugénie’s encouragement and still forming a tenuous link with her.

In the empress’s time there were several great drawing-rooms, including a Salon d’Honneur, a Salon des Princesses, a Salon des Dames and a Salon des Greuzes – each of them named according to the paintings they contained. Another room re-created the Prince Imperial’s study at Chislehurst in every detail, with his clothes, his swords and guns, and his books; it was a cross between a museum and a shrine.

A phantom imperial court shared Eugénie’s exile here, one or two of its members spending the rest of their lives with her at Farnborough Hill – notably the veteran secretary Franceschini Pietri. Luncheon was at one o’clock, dinner at eight, and the rosary was said in the chapel at five. She almost invariably went to bed before eleven, the tiny household bowing and curtsying to her when she retired and she herself curtsying in response, as if they were all still at the Tuileries. There were plenty of visitors. Most of them were young relatives from Spain or former courtiers from France, such as Anna Murat, Jurien de La Gravière, Mme Carette or even Mme de Gallifet, although not her husband, the hero of Sedan. (The general had accepted the new régime and eventually became the Third Republic’s minister for war.)

The most faithful visitor was undoubtedly Queen Victoria. Few could equal the delicacy of this fearsome old lady, who wrote often, always in French, inviting the empress to Windsor or Osborne, or to her Scottish castles. As time passed, they grumbled to each other about the infirmities of advancing age, Eugénie’s being rheumatism and bronchitis which, privately, she blamed on the English weather. The queen told her to stop calling her ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Madame’ – ‘Why not “sister” or “friend” – that would be so much more pleasant.’ Neither would precede the other through a door, gently remonstrating. ‘
Après vous, ma soeur
.’ Eugénie’s manner towards Victoria was not unlike that of ‘an unembarrassed but attentive child talking to its grandmother’, said Ethel Smyth, who saw them curtsy to each other. ‘The movement of the Queen, crippled though she was, was amazingly easy and dignified; but the empress, who was then sixty-seven, made such an exquisite sweep down to the floor and up again, all in one gesture, that I can only liken it to a flower bent and
released in the wind,’ Ethel tells us. They shared similar views on foreign affairs, Victoria becoming increasingly pro-French, a development which an angry Bismarck attributed to Eugénie.

Other sovereigns besides Queen Victoria treated her as an equal. In 1888 alone she was visited at Farnborough by King Oscar of Sweden, King Luis of Portugal, the Crown Prince of Italy and Empress Frederick of Germany, who still remembered with pleasure her visit as the young Princess Royal to Eugénie in Paris over forty years before. Kaiser William II would come in 1894.

In 1892 Eugénie built a villa at Cap Martin between Monte Carlo and Menton, where she was to spend many winters: the Villa Cyrnos (‘Cyrnos’ is Greek for Corsica). En route she usually stayed in Paris at the Hotel Continental, because it stood opposite the site of the Tuileries, overlooking the gardens where the Prince Imperial had played as a little boy – on one occasion a gardener scolded her for picking a flower. During her stay here in 1894 she went to see the dying Victor Duruy in his flat, toiling up eight flights of stairs.

Eugénie had renewed her friendship with Empress Elizabeth of Austria, by now a melancholy, slightly unbalanced wanderer, and became one of the few people in whom Elizabeth would confide. She often wrote to Eugénie, especially after her son Crown Prince Rudolph shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling in 1889. Later, she sometimes stayed with her at the Villa Cyrnos.

In the late 1890s Eugénie regained her energy, learning to ride a bicycle when she was over seventy and exploring the shores of the Mediterranean each summer in her steam yacht,
Thistle
. This had six cabins but anybody unwise enough to accept an invitation to go for a cruise regretted it, since the boat rolled horribly. Their hostess did not even notice and had lost none of her taste for stormy weather, having herself tied in a chair to the mainmast when rounding the Mull of Kintyre in a high sea.

She watched events in France but took no part in politics although she still thought that a Bonapartist restoration was not impossible – the Third Republic was riven by scandal and royalism was in steep decline, while Plon-Plon had died in 1891. However, Prince Victor Napoleon, whom she regarded as emperor, proved to be an ineffectual pretender. She became a fervent Dreyfusard, convinced that Captain Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted of spying for Germany, and if she did not speak out publicly she quarrelled bitterly with Anna Murat for saying he was guilty. She was outraged when the maniac
Edouard Drumont claimed in
La Libre Parole
that she was anti-Semitic, writing an indignant letter of denial.

‘I feel even more than ever a foreigner, alone in this land,’ she lamented when Queen Victoria died in 1901. ‘I am very saddened and discouraged.’ Yet Edward VII was fond of her too, writing, ‘I knew how deeply Your Majesty would sympathise with us in our grief. Our dear mother was deeply attached to you.’ Queen Alexandra often visited Farnborough, generally without warning.

Maurice Paléologue first met Eugénie at the Hôtel Continental in 1901. ‘Despite her seventy-five years, she retains traces of her former beauty,’ he said. ‘The quick, deep-set eyes shine with a steely, sombre fire and you notice her make-up, the pencilled eyeshadow underlining the rims of the faded eyelashes. Her straight back and upright shoulders do not touch the back of the armchair.’ Among the books she was reading he saw one of the volumes of Sorel’s massive
L’Europe et la Révolution Française
.

Other sovereigns as well as King Edward continued to treat Eugénie with deep respect. She was invited to Austria in 1906, staying at Ischl. Franz-Joseph met her at the station and at dinner wore the star of the Légion d’honneur with Napoleon III’s head given to him by the emperor long ago; she looked magnificent, her white hair crowned by a jet tiara, recalled an English friend who was present. Yachting in the Norwegian fiords in 1907, she encountered a German cruiser carrying the kaiser, who came on board the
Thistle
and behaved with the utmost courtesy. (Paléologue’s account of their meeting should be treated with caution.)

Eugénie was ageing well, climbing Vesuvius when she was eighty and sailing with Sir Thomas Lipton on board his famous, ocean racing yacht Erin on at least one occasion. She never tired of travel, her cure for depression, and set out for India on a liner in 1903, although illness forced her to turn back at Ceylon. She welcomed new inventions with enthusiasm. Meeting a young scientist called Marconi, she lent him
Thistle
to try out his experiments between Nice and Corsica. When his system of wireless communication was established in Canada, she was the first person after Edward VII to whom he transmitted a message. She also became interested in the use of radium as a medicine and was fascinated by aviation, reading everything available on the subject – in 1908 she went to a flying display at Aldershot by Colonel Cody, being photographed with him. She even went to the cinema.

Always practical, Eugénie installed a wireless on her yacht, as well as electric light and a telephone at Farnborough Hill. She also acquired a gramophone, which Filon thought ‘one of the most perfect I ever heard’; she told him, ‘it enables me to listen to entire operas without leaving my home’. She bought a car, too, a large black and green Renault, engaging a somewhat erratic chauffeur to drive it – on one occasion the vehicle and its passengers had to be rescued from a ditch by a steam roller, while in 1913 he was fined for speeding although his employer disliked going at speed.

Speaking noticeably poor English with a strong accent – she invariably dropped her ‘h’s – Eugénie made comparatively few close English friends. Among them, a little surprisingly, was the colourful Ethel Smyth, whom she first got to know in 1891 and who spoke excellent French. A lesbian (and a future admirer of Virginia Woolf), Ethel would cycle to Farnborough Hill in tweed knickerbockers, changing into a dress in the shrubbery. None of this bothered Eugénie. What interested her was that Miss Smyth was a composer and, always eager to overcome ‘sex-prejudice’, she did everything she could to further her career, even arranging for her to sing before Queen Victoria. In Ethel’s memoirs Eugénie emerges as a delightful old lady, if also a fierce one, who when arguing would sometimes bang the table until the glasses rattled.

Predictably, Eugénie approved of the suffragette movement. Despite deploring violence, she ignored Ethel’s prison sentence for smashing an MP’s window and was keen to meet ‘the Militant Leader’. When Mrs Pankhurst came to lunch, they took to each other immediately, and Ethel was asked to bring her as often as possible.

Ethel Smyth’s account of Eugénie, largely ignored by French historians, is telling. ‘Many are under the impression that certain of her qualities were only acquired in old age,’ wrote Ethel. ‘But in 1891 she was a great deal nearer to “les événements”, as she always called the downfall of the Second Empire than in 1918.’ (People had been saying that time had mellowed the empress.) While describing her as the kindest person she had ever met, Ethel admits that Eugénie lacked ‘poetic imagination’ and suffered from an ‘extremely halting and uncertain sense of humour’. What impressed her most was the way – ‘betrayed, falsely accused, vilified – the empress has attacked no one, nor uttered a single word in her own defence’. ‘Can anything transcend the dignity of that long, iron silence?’ asked Ethel.

Isabel Vesey, like Ethel the unmarried daughter of a retired army officer who lived nearby, but a very different personality, became no less of a friend. Eugénie particularly enjoyed her company, inviting her to stay at Cap Martin and for cruises. Isabel remained devoted to the empress for the rest of her life, her diaries and reminiscences in
The Times
complementing Ethel’s memoirs. She was a guest on
Thistle
when the kaiser came on board at Bergen in 1907, and noticed how Eugénie ‘rather liked him’, and said ‘he is always most agreeable and charming to her’. Her liking is understandable – he went out of his way to treat her as if she was still empress of the French. Isabel also tells us that when Eugénie gave a young girl a pair of her own shoes, they proved to be too small, although the child only wore size 3.

Another English friend, loyal if scarcely close, was the general who had gone to South Africa with her, and who often came to play tennis at Farnborough Hill in top hat, frock-coat and white flannel trousers. ‘She would enjoy the ludicrousness of dear Sir Evelyn Wood falling on his knees before her on the gravel path, and kissing her hand in the costume he adopted.’

Predictably, Eugénie remained unpopular in France among republicans, who with relentless unfairness accused her of being responsible for 1870. In 1907 Ferdinand Loliée published the first of his poisonous books. There was even antagonism on the right, and not just from royalists. ‘The emperor’s death and the awful tragedy in Zululand should have aroused sympathy for the empress, so sorely tried as wife and mother,’ Jean Guétary, one of Napoleon III’s earliest apologists, had written two years earlier. ‘It did not.’ But although a Bonapartist Guétary was also a bigoted anti-Dreyfusard, outraged at Eugénie having sent a letter of enthusiastic support to Colonel Picquart, the officer who established Dreyfus’s innocence. Even so, Guétary reminded his readers that those most eager for war in 1870 had been the deputies and journalists of the left: Eugénie certainly possessed at least some French admirers among those still faithful to the dynasty.