Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (48 page)

The son of a famous writer and one of Marcel Proust’s young friends, Lucien Daudet was a homosexual dilettante who was fascinated by the Bonapartes and had great charm, and after presenting himself to Eugénie unintroduced at the Villa Cyrnos in 1899, having arrived on a bicycle, he became almost an adopted son. He brought Jean Cocteau to see her. ‘The eyes remained a
heavenly blue although their keenness had been diluted,’ observed Cocteau. ‘A whole sea of blue water looked into you.’ He also noticed her deep Spanish laugh, which ‘conjured up the bull-ring’. Sadly, Daudet never presented Proust, who might have immortalised her in the way that he did Princesse Mathilde.

In 1911, with Eugénie’s grudging permission, Lucien published
L’Impératrice Eugénie
. The first objective study of her and one of the best, it is an odd, haunting book that stresses the poignancy of her existence, but as a collection of impressions and vignettes rather than a biography it tends to be overlooked, especially by English biographers. Clearly she had told him a good deal about herself, for example how in South Africa a smell of verbena led her to the place where her son had died – it had been his favourite scent. Like Ethel, Daudet is at pains to stress that she is neither frivolous nor a bigot. ‘She hates prejudice … in her eyes Catholics, Jews and Protestants are equal members of humanity.’ He mentions her love of handsome people – ‘for her, as for the Greeks, beauty, intelligence and goodness are inseparable’. While she has few illusions about mankind, she detests cynicism.

The empress gave ‘
le petit Lucien
’ some good advice in return. ‘Never waste time dramatising life’, she warned him. ‘It’s quite dramatic enough without it.’

In 1910 she revisited Compiègne, discreetly joining a guided tour. However, when it reached the Prince Imperial’s bedroom she nearly fainted and, asking for a chair and a glass of water, raised her veil. Realising who it was, the guide informed the
conservateur
and they let her stay in the room by herself for ten minutes. Yet she lived firmly in the modern world. ‘Mr Marconi was thunderstruck at her grasp of wireless telegraphy,’ Ethel remembered, ‘and later on the officers of the Royal Aeroplane factory were amazed at her knowledge of their particular subject.’ She planned to go up in an aeroplane but was prevented by the First World War.

If Paléologue may be believed, Eugénie told him in June 1912, ‘There is a lot of electricity in the air. Don’t you think a storm is brewing … the most serious problem I can see in European affairs is the antagonism between England and Germany.’ She added, ‘The danger of war is no longer in doubt.’ In January 1914, just before he left to take up his post as ambassador to St Petersburg, she warned him, ‘Something is rotten in Russia.’(As long ago as 1876 she had written to her mother that ‘In Russia the nobility is corrupt and the court without morals, and the people know it.’)

When the war broke out in 1914 she realised it would be long and bitter, giving her yacht
Thistle
to the Royal Navy and turning a wing of Farnborough Hill into a small hospital, which she maintained entirely out of her own pocket. Ethel was staggered to learn what immense sums she gave to hospitals in France, in strict secrecy. She also took in Prince Victor Napoleon and his wife and children when they had to flee from Belgium.

‘The spirit of France is beyond all praise and gives one confidence,’ she wrote to Lucien Daudet when the Germans were advancing on Paris in August. From the start she hoped fervently for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, and Ethel Smyth recalled what a comfort she was at dark moments, ‘so sane and unshakeable was her faith in ultimate victory’. The empress believed firmly that, together, France and England were unbeatable. She never indulged in xenophobia, however, rebuking anyone who referred to ‘
Les Boches
’.

Franceschini Pietri, who as the emperor’s secretary had ridden with him during the 1870 campaign, died in 1916 and was buried as he wished, near the stair down to the crypt of Farnborough Abbey – so that the empress would pass him on her way to pray at the tombs of her husband and her son.

Augustin Filon passed away in the same year. He had settled in Croydon, supporting himself by writing until he went blind, and left a book to be published after Eugénie’s death –
Souvenirs sur l’Impératrice Eugénie
. For Filon

the empress is a true Frenchwoman and a great one … those who know her well refuse to see her as no more than the embodiment of the Second Empire’s elegance and glitter … in reality she had been a convinced idealist in a cynically materialist society…. Just a glance at one of her notebooks, in which she jots down reactions to what she is reading or to a stimulating remark, would show you how wide was the gap in sympathy and outlook that had existed between herself and most of the people who then surrounded her.

A warning that the Germans might bomb Farnborough Hill in error, as it was next to the Royal Aerodrome Factory, exhilarated her. ‘If they come’, she told Ethel, ‘then at least we shall be in the front line.’ Ethel suspected that her own terror increased the empress’s pleasure at the prospect.

Learning in 1917 that the Allies considered Alsace-Lorraine to be part of Germany, she sent the French government a letter written to her by William I in 1871, in which he admitted that the provinces had been annexed purely for strategic reasons and not because their inhabitants were seen as Germans. The letter convinced the Allies that Alsace-Lorraine must be returned to France. It was her last and most effective intervention in foreign affairs.

Eugénie was shrewd enough to guess that conditions in Germany were very bad indeed when the German army postponed its offensive in the summer of 1918. Realising it was beaten, she foresaw that the kaiser would have to abdicate and that many other crowned heads would have to go with him. She was horrified by the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, and by the Treaty of Versailles although she took it down to the crypt to read to the emperor in his tomb. ‘I see in every article of this peace a little egg, a nucleus of more wars…. How can Germany earn the money to pay?’ She also prophesied that if England was not careful ‘Ireland will become a second Bohemia.’

Nonetheless, she was elated by the Allies’ victory, believing that God had let her live so long in order to see Alsace-Lorraine restored to France. In 1919 King George made her a Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire in recognition of her war work, sending the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York (Edward VIII and George VI) to Farnborough to present her with the insignia.

In December 1919 Eugénie returned to Cap Martin, stopping en route in Paris at the Hôtel Continental, where Paléologue called on her. He was shocked by her appearance. ‘Eyes sunk deep in their sockets, eyeballs glassy and staring’, he wrote. ‘Her neck is fleshless, her hands are the hands of a skeleton.’ She was, after all, ninety-three. ‘Yet I could see at once that even now this pitiful frame was ruled by a vigorous, tenacious, proud spirit.’ Still defending the Second Empire, she asked him, ‘Don’t you agree that the World War completely justifies my view that [Imperial] France remained capable of putting up a fight after Sedan?’ She said she was looking forward to revisiting Spain the next spring. ‘Nowadays I am just a very old bat. But, as butterflies do, I still feel I must fly towards the sun. Before death takes me, I should like to see my Castilian sky for a last time.’

Lucien Daudet also called on the empress. He, too, had not seen her since 1914, yet she made him feel it had only been the previous week. She told Lucien about her forthcoming trip to Spain. ‘Do you know, I wanted to go by aeroplane, but people might have said I was a crazy old woman.’ Someone else who met her during that winter was the Duchess of Sermonetta, a smart young Roman. She realised that Eugénie had not lost her sense of fun when she said she had three hats, ‘
Trotinette
’ for walks, ‘
Va t’en ville
’ for shopping and ‘
La Glorieuse
’ for grand occasions. She offered to lend
La Glorieuse
to the duchess.

In June 1920 the empress went to Spain by sea, sailing from Marseilles to Gibraltar. When her boat put in to Algeciras the warships in the harbour, Spanish and British, gave her a sovereign’s salute of twenty-one guns, which thrilled her as she had not been so greeted since her expedition to Suez over fifty years earlier. Looking like a ghost, she was driven to Madrid where she stayed with her great nephew Alba in the Liria Palace.

Since no doctor, British or French, had dared give chloroform to someone so frail, Eugénie remained half blind from cataracts. However, a Spanish doctor performed the operation without an anaesthetic, restoring her sight completely. As a result she thoroughly enjoyed herself, even going to a bullfight. ‘I’ve come home,’ she declared happily, and she even spoke of going up in an aeroplane at last when she got back to England, now that she could see properly again. But on 10 July she suddenly felt exhausted and in pain, and had to be put to bed without undressing. It quickly became apparent that she was failing. Having received the last sacraments, she died very peacefully at 8.30 the following morning – in a room that had once been her sister Paca’s bedroom, and in Paca’s old bed. Her last words were, ‘I am tired – it is time that I went on my way.’

The coffin was taken to the station in the king of Spain’s state coach, with an escort of halberdiers and footmen carrying tapers. Accompanied by the Duke of Alba and another great nephew, the Duke of Peñaranda, the body of the last empress of the French travelled back by train and ferry to her English home. If unacclaimed by her former subjects, it was received with fitting pomp at Farnborough, drawn from the station on a gun-carriage escorted by cavalry to the abbey church. Here it lay in state for two days, draped in a blue imperial pall which bore the golden eagles and golden bees of the Bonapartes.

The congregation at the funeral on 20 July included George V and Queen Mary, Alfonso XIII and Queen Ena of Spain, and Manuel II of Portugal and the Portuguese queen mother, together
with Prince Victor Napoleon, the Bonapartist pretender, and his wife. The Third Republic had protested on learning that the empress would be given a twenty-one gun salute, and, while it did not fire the salute, a battery of Royal Horse Artillery remained drawn up outside the abbey throughout the service. Although the band played the ‘Marseillaise’ instead of ‘Partant pour la Syrie’ (no one remembered how to play it), many people in the packed church bore famous Second Empire names, as the children or grandchildren of her courtiers – Murat, Bacciochi, Primoli, Walewski, Bassano, Bassompière, Clary, Girardin, Fleury. Ethel Smyth and Lucien Daudet were there too. Cardinal Bourne, archbishop of Westminster, celebrated the Mass for the Dead, the monks chanting the
Dies Irae
, and Abbot Cabrol gave the address. Finally, wearing a nun’s habit, she was laid to rest.

Eugénie’s body still lies with those of Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial in the abbey crypt at Farnborough, where the monks continue to sing an annual requiem for their souls. To those who know and sympathise with her story, the shrine is a place of extraordinary poignancy, her presence almost tangible.

Smyth, Daudet and Filon testify to the empress’s integrity. Human beings of her type do not change so very much and it is clear that during her reign she was already the person whom they knew in exile. Yet France rejected her even before Sedan, as a foreigner and as a woman who dared to covet power. Nevertheless, more than a few contemporaries thought of her as a character out of a play by Corneille, whose women are embodiments of stoicism and endurance, driven by love, honour and duty, and Admiral Jurien de La Gravière often compared her with Chimène in Le Cid.

Her best epitaph, however, is a dedication found by Ethel in a copy of Lord Rosebery’s
Napoleon I: the Last Phase
, which the author had presented to Eugénie:

To the surviving Sovereign of Napoleon’s dynasty

The empress,

who has lived on the summits of splendour, sorrow

and catastrophe

with supreme dignity and courage.

Notes

P
ROLOGUE

xiv.
   ‘She cannot really …’: ‘Elle n’aura pas été véritablement un caractère, ayant trop femme pour cela’, Loliée (190k7a), p. 404.

xiv.
   wider influence’: One of Loliée’s disciples was Ferdinand Bac, who, as a (natural) grandson of Jerome Bonaparte, sympathised with her enemy Plon-Plon.

O
NE

    
1.
  ‘On 28 May an earthquake …’: Filon (1922), p. 9.

    
1.
  ‘Her father’s name …’: Filon (1894), pp. 51–2.

    
2.
  ‘the story …’: Jean des Cars (2000), pp. 17–18.

    
2.
  ‘Kirkpatrick of Closeburn’: Burke (2000), I, p. 787.

    
4.
  Llanos y Torriglia (1932).

    
4.
  ‘Among her guests …’: S.T. Williams (1935).