Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (6 page)

Eugenia and Maria Manuela realised that the invitation had been a stratagem inspired by lechery. They immediately left Paris, moving to Brussels, escorted by the lovelorn Duke of Osuna, and then spent a few weeks at the smart Belgian watering place of Spa. Eugenia was always ‘taking the cure’, so frequently that one cannot help wondering if she was suffering from psychological problems, not unlikely in a young woman who was so highly strung. Certainly, she had not enjoyed her months abroad, and neither had Doña Maria Manuela. In September Eugenia wrote to Paca of their sense of isolation, of being in exile. ‘Instead of today [her mother’s birthday] being one of rejoicing and feasting, it was really very sad, to be so far way from you all…. At lunch Mamma and I did nothing but cry.’

In November they returned thankfully to Madrid, to Doña Maria Manuela’s accustomed round of dances and receptions, of visits to Queen Isabella at the Prado. The guests at a particularly successful fancy-dress ball held at Casa Ariza for the carnival of 1851 included over twenty august ladies of the highest rank, ranging from duchesses to countesses, together with all the Spanish cabinet ministers of the moment and most of the ambassadors to Madrid, but not Marshal Nárvaez, who had again fallen from power.

In April 1851 mother and daughter went abroad to London, in order to see the Great Exhibition. Here they ran into Nárvaez, accompanying him to a reception given by Lady Palmerston at her house in Carlton Gardens. A former foreign secretary, the Earl of Malmesbury recorded that at the reception he had seen ‘the Spanish beauty, Mademoiselle Montijo … very handsome, auburn hair, beautiful skin and figure’. He was especially impressed by ‘her lovely complexion’. During this visit to England Doña Eugenia and her mother also stayed with Ferdinand Huddleston, still besotted, at his country house in Cambridgeshire, Sawston Hall, where she enjoyed riding his horses over the flat dreary fields.

By July they were in Wiesbaden, yet another smart watering place, and which was also the capital of a tiny independent state, the duchy of Nassau, with its own miniature army of 5,000 men (one of those comical little German principalities of the sort that would one day be caricatured so uproariously by Offenbach in
La Grande Duchesse de Gerolstein
). From Wiesbaden they travelled to Paris, but were only there for a few weeks, during which time they did not bother to call on the Prince President.

By the end of November they were back in Spain for the winter, remaining in Madrid until May the following year, when they drove across the frontier up into the French Pyrenees to take the cure again, at Eaux-Bonnes. The husband hunting was not being very successful. Doña Maria Manuela must have despaired at her daughter losing the chance of marriage to a man – or, rather, a duke – such as Osuna. Yet an even greater catch was not beyond the bounds of possibility.

T
HE
B
IG
F
ISH

Doña Maria Manuela watched what was happening in France with the keenest interest. When she and her daughter had met the Prince President in 1849 he had been elected for a mere three years and all the ‘informed’ political observers assured everyone that he would definitely not enjoy a second term. They underestimated him. For on 2 December 1851 he brought off a brilliant
coup d’état
, making himself president for a further ten years. Obviously it was only a matter of time before he would be proclaimed Emperor of the French. An hereditary emperor was clearly a much greater prize as a husband than a president who might easily be voted out of office. Admittedly, ever since 1789, the French had been addicted to revolutions – no régime had lasted for as long as twenty years – but that did not lessen the glamour of a throne.

Doña Maria Manuela always thought on the grand scale, and while she may not have known much history she knew from Donizetti’s opera
Anna Bolena
how a strong-minded lady without royal blood had captured King Henry VIII by refusing to sleep with him. At that horrible little dinner party near Saint-Cloud three years earlier, Louis-Napoleon had shown unambiguously that he had fallen under the spell of her daughter’s beauty, and as a natural matchmaker and social mountaineer, Maria Manuela began to see glittering possibilities.

Plenty of basic information about the Prince President was, of course, easily available. He had been born in 1808, the son of Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland and of Hortense de Beauharnais, the Empress Josephine’s daughter by her first marriage. Brought up as an exile in Switzerland by Queen Hortense, he had launched two badly planned and under-supported coups against Louis-Philippe which had both ended in abject disaster. In restoring the Napoleonic Empire, however, he was revealing that he possessed considerable political ability.

Prosper Mérimée supplied intimate details of the all but emperor Louis-Napoleon, which were not easy to obtain. We do not know exactly what Mérimée said in his letters at this time, because Eugenia destroyed the important ones, but we can make a fairly accurate guess. He must have warned them frankly that the man was an almost pathological lecher, with a semi-official mistress living at Saint-Cloud – a rich English courtesan called Miss Howard, who had helped to finance his
coup d’état
. If Prince Bacciochi was his
chef-de-protocol
at the Elysée, he also acted as his procurer.

In common with most French intellectuals, not to mention most French politicians, Mérimée could not believe that this exotic new Bonapartist régime run by adventurers and opportunists was likely to last very long – whether in the form of a republic or an empire. In any case he thought the priapic Prince Louis-Napoleon would make Eugenia a bad husband and lead her a miserable life.

But his letters to Madrid failed to deter Doña Maria Manuela. Nor did they deter her daughter. From the very beginning the prospect of marrying the future emperor had attractions for Doña Eugenia, which may seem surprising in so fastidious a young woman. One would have thought there was a good deal about him which repelled her. Not only was he eighteen years older, but he was far from handsome, with a puny physique. A small, dumpy man, his legs were too short for his body, which gave him an odd, crab-like walk. His head was too big, with a huge hook nose and fishlike pale blue eyes, while his heavy, expressionless face was hidden by a goatee beard and a thick moustache whose long, waxed antennae he twirled constantly when nervous. He dressed badly, in sombre, clumsily cut clothes, and because he chain-smoked cigarettes his pockets were always full of tobacco ash. Slow, almost dull in manner, he spoke very little, only after careful thought and then with a sing-song, slightly German accent that was due to his Swiss upbringing.

On the other hand the Prince President possessed extraordinary charm, a charm on whose impact contemporaries remark again and again. Much of it came from the impression made by his calmness, gentleness and obvious kindliness – he was seldom known to lose his temper, and never with inferiors or servants – while he had beautiful manners. His lack of good looks was redeemed by an oddly fascinating expression, sphinx-like yet benign, and a remarkable smile which would suddenly light up his dark features. He seems to have been one of those rare human beings to whom, without knowing why, most people take an instinctive liking.

His lack of physical allure did not bother Eugenia since she was largely indifferent to male beauty. No one could have been uglier than her brother-in-law Alba, yet once she had loved Alba to distraction. (In middle age she once said, with obvious conviction, ‘After the first night it no longer matters much whether a man is handsome or ugly, and at the end of the first week it’s always the same thing.’) Nor is she likely to have succumbed to an arcane sexual chemistry. What Eugenia found attractive, long before she set eyes on him, was
who
Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte was – the heir of his uncle and the Napoleonic legend incarnate. A convinced Bonapartist, she had always been ready to devote herself to the imperial cause. Despite that humiliating attempt to seduce her at Saint-Cloud, she had written to Felix Bacciochi, shortly before the coup of 1851, to offer the Prince President financial assistance should it fail. (The gesture shows how closely she and her mother were watching his progress.) She was convinced that the Bonapartist cause would triumph in the end.

There was another reason why this complex young woman should find him immensely interesting, even if she did not fully realise it until later. He and his legend embodied power, enormous power, and as a husband he could offer her influence on a vast scale, something which in those days was largely denied to her sex. Generally the very few women who possessed influence on such a scale did not use it – like the insanely irresponsible Queen Isabella of Spain. Even so, Eugenia undoubtedly believed that the marriage might give her at least some chance of making the world a better place. For although she had by now abandoned her Fourierism and her socialism, she remained an idealist.

Finally, one should not overlook the simplest of all reasons why the prospect of marrying the Prince President appealed to Eugenia. In May 1852 she had reached the ripe old age of twenty-six and was only too well aware that, according to the harsh conventions of her time, she was entering spinsterhood. This was a state of life that automatically condemned a woman to a condition of pity and contempt, since during the first half of the nineteenth century it was very difficult for any woman without a husband to find a proper, respected role in society, however rich she might be in her own right.

Both mother and daughter must have been fully aware that in pursuing the Prince President of France they risked losing touch with reality. Eugenia’s chance of succeeding was one in a hundred. But Doña Maria Manuela – from whom the real initiative surely came – was never a woman to be daunted by the odds being heavily against her.

By midsummer 1852 everyone in France, even at such quiet little watering places as Eaux-Bonnes, was saying that when Prince Louis-Napoleon became their emperor he would immediately set about founding a dynasty. He needed to find a bride who would be able to bear him children as quickly as possible, since he was already forty-four. Presumably he would choose a foreign princess from one of Europe’s great ruling families. In June the diarist Comte Henri de Viel Castel heard a well-founded rumour that the Prince President was going to marry Princess Carola of Vasa, a member of the former ruling house of Sweden who had the added advantage of possessing
Beauharnais blood. Carola refused his proposal, however, marrying the king of Saxony instead. There were equally well-founded rumours that he was on the look-out for a German princess. Gossip of this sort was not exactly encouraging for Doña Eugenia’s hopes.

At the same time Louis-Napoleon’s long-standing mistress was pestering him to marry her. Everybody suspected, correctly, that he was still sleeping with Lizzie. Admittedly Viel Castel noted that at supper during a ball at the château of Saint-Cloud where his mistress was present, ‘his love for Miss Howard did not stop him from stroking the thighs of the lovely Marquise de Belboeuf, who appeared to be neither surprised nor flattered’. Viel Castel also tells us that at the end of October Lizzie went to a state performance at the Paris Opera in honour of the Prince President. ‘The more respectable element among the audience was horrified at seeing Miss Howard, the President’s mistress, sitting in a prominent box and covered with diamonds, which gave a most unfortunate impression.’

Eugenia and her mother were back in Paris by early October, occupying the apartment at 12 Place Vendôme with the big rooms that Maria Manuela had so much admired on a previous occasion, as being particularly suitable for giving receptions. She intended to give as many as possible, since she needed to make all the useful contacts she could, in order to further her matchmaking. The faithful Ferdinand Huddleston had rented an equally splendid flat nearby and from its windows they watched the Prince President’s triumphant return from a hugely successful tour of southern France, during which (in a widely quoted speech at Bordeaux) he had declared soothingly, ‘The Empire means peace.’

Wearing full-dress uniform, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, Prince President of France, rode a mettlesome chestnut charger through the streets of Paris on his way to the Elysée, dramatically keeping several paces ahead of his glittering staff. Looking much better on horseback than he did on foot, he made a fine, soldierly impression, which was what the people expected from someone who was the great Napoleon’s nephew – few of them can have realised that his experience of military life had been limited to a short spell with the Swiss army, as a humble captain in the Berne militia. There were big wooden arches over every street along the route, decorated with flags and bunting which bore the unequivocal words, ‘
Vive Louis Napoleon Empéreur!
’ while medals bearing the legend ‘
Napoleon III Empéreur
’, were on sale at every street corner.

The normally cynical Parisian crowd cheered him wildly. Older citizens commented with astonishment that it looked extraordinarily like the ‘
Joyeuse Entrée
’ of the old kings of France and Navarre when taking possession of their capital of Paris on succeeding to the throne – just as Charles X had done less than thirty years before – which was precisely what they were meant to think.

Doña Maria Manuela immediately set about obtaining invitations to the Prince President’s official receptions at the Elysée and Saint-Cloud, and found no difficulty in doing so. Félix Bacciochi, the
chef-de-protocol
(recently promoted to chamberlain), whom they had met in 1849, was only too ready to oblige. No doubt he fancied he could still see possibilities in Doña Eugenia; he retrieved from his files her letter of November 1851, offering financial aid for the Bonaparte cause – which so far he had not bothered to show to Louis-Napoleon – and now gave it to him. When she and her mother attended the receptions, however, everything was very decorous, the Prince President behaving impeccably.