The court of the the second empire

Contents

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CHAPTER

XVII.

CHAPTER I NAPOLEON III x SINGLE portrait of those who have played

a great part in history is not enough; to represent them fairly it is essential to sketch the different phases of their career. In age and ill health they were no longer the same, morally or - physically, as when young and strong. There is as much difference between the periods of a human life as there is between the seasons of a single year. Aided by the impressions and recollections of our contemporaries, we are about to attempt the reproduction of the historic figure of Napoleon III. as we saw him from 1856 to 1859, and we hope that those who lived in Paris at that period will find the likeness faithful.

On the morrow of the birth of the Prince Imperial the Second Emperor was a happy man and one who enjoyed his happiness. Neither on his countenance nor in his heart at that time was there a trace of

B 1 melancholy. Appearing at Rome in the character of another Charlemagne, and throughout Europe as an arbiter and peacemaker, if he recalled the painful experiences of childhood and youth, it was only by way of contrast with his actual prosperity, and as yet he foreboded none of the calamities awaiting him in the future.

Princes born on the steps of the throne and who have never known adversity have not the same enjoyment of power as a man like Napoleon IIT, for. whom the fortress of Ham was the vestibule of the Tuileries. If in earlier days he had been flouted, jeered at, contemned, in 1856 at least he was lauded to the skies. Foreigners courted him even more assiduously than the French. Take, for example, a telegram sent from Sebastopol, March 28, 1856, to the Minister of War by Marshal Pélissier : —

“ Your despatch of the 16th announcing the happy delivery of H. M. the Empress and the birth of the Prince Imperial did not arrive until Sunday morning, the 28d. At noon the news was greeted by one hundred and one salvos of artillery fired simultaneously by the French, English, and Sardinian armies and by the fleets. At the same moment a Te Deum was chanted in every army corps in presence of all the troops. During the day the commanders-in-chief of the English and Sardinian armies came to offer their congratulations, which I beg you to lay with mine and those of the generals under my command at the feet of Their Imperial Majesties. Our soldiers have ended the day by continued cheering around a multitude of fires which give our camps the appearance of a splendid illumination. The Scotch and Sardinians encamped on the heights of Kamarak were able to build such enormous fires that the light from them could be seen at immense distances. And lastly, the Russians, taking part in our special manifestations, suddenly illuminated the whole line from Inkermann to Corolés, thus completing this unique spectacle.”

As soon as Napoleon III. was made acquainted with Marshal Pélissier’s despatch, he sent an aide-de-camp to Lord Clarendon, Count Cavour, and also to Count Orloff, thanking them for the demonstrations by which the birth of his son had been celebrated in the Crimea. The attentions he received from the powers, and the extraordinary respects paid to the cradle of his heir delighted him both as a father and a sovereign. He was particularly pleased at seeing the court of Russia display exceptional courtesy even before peace was concluded.

People forgave Napoleon III. his success because he used it in moderation and without conceit or violence. His past misfortunes had left behind them no trace of bitterness or rancor. Nearly all his ministers had formerly been Orleanists, and if the most advanced republicans had presented themselves at the Tuileries, they would have received a cordial welcome. Napoleon III. had forgotten the injuries inflicted on Louis Bonaparte. He left the salons which opposed him entirely undisturbed, and no such persecutions as those of which Madame de Staël was the victim under the First Empire occurred during his reign. |

Invariably self-possessed, the former outlaw and captive was as tranquil in gladness as in sorrow. If his letters are ever published, as has happened in our day to those of Napoleon I., we do not believe they will be found to contain a single phrase, a single word of hatred or anger. M. Pinard, one of his ministers, has said: “He became familiar with those who had been his earliest friends without permitting them to cross the distance separating them. He was always the Emperor; but his voice at that time had inflections of great sweetness, and, I may add, of great power as well. The sovereign whom the political world sometimes called William the Silent had in private conversation a seductive charm which the firstcomer might not suspect, but of which women had an intuition.”

The imperturbable apathy of the Second Emperor was only a mask. At bottom, no disposition could be more impressionable, ardent, or passionate than his. Naturally violent, it had cost him much to acquire that self-mastery which was afterwards the principal trait of his character. Madame Cornu, the companion of his earliest years, has said: “ As a child he was subject to such fits of anger as I have never seen in any one else; while they lasted he knew neither what he said or what he did.” Experience and misfortune taught him to control himself, and he succeeded in making his thoughts as impenetrable as his face. “When I met him again, in 1848,” says Madame Cornu, “I asked what was the matter with his eyes. ‘Nothing,’ said he. I saw him again a day or two later. His eyes seemed still more singular. Finally I noticed that he had contracted a habit of keeping the lids half-closed and assuming a vacant and dreamy expression.”

Napoleon III. has often been called a-dreamer by those who judged him by his manners and facial expression. It would be much truer to say that he was a man of action, for there are few political personages who have had a hand in so many things or broached so many formidable problems. Not all of his attempts succeeded, but every one of them, in Asia and America as in Europe, was marked by an adventurous spirit and an audacity truly extraordinary.

The sovereign whom, in the final period of his career, we shall see timid and undecided, wavering between the most contradictory resolutions, and letting himself be dragged by a sort of fatality into a war to which he was averse, displayed in 1856 a coherency, a vigor, and energy which nothing could withstand. His power was essentially personal ; his policy originated entirely with himself. He reigned and governed. Having succeeded in spite of the predictions of all others, he had no confidence in any opinions but his own, and no one ventured to advise him.

The powerful monarch applied when on the throne the programme which the prisoner had elaborated. His ministers were mere docile instruments in his hands. There was but one will at that time, and it was his. “If a minister,” says M. Pinard, “developed an idea coincident with his, his eyes, ordinarily half-closed, lighted up in a singular manner, although the face still remained grave and almost impassible. If the speaker had not succeeded in convincing him, the Emperor maintained a significant silence which often disconcerted the most resolute; he seemed to forget those who were near him, and even him who had just been speaking. When he expressed his own opinion, the deliberate slowness of his speech was not unlike that of his gait: it seemed to indicate a man who was listening to an interior voice. At such times he appeared to be talking with himself.”

Everything great and useful that was done during his reign bears the sign manual of the sovereign. Baron Haussmann, that prefect to whom grateful Paris ought to raise a statue, has admitted that he could have done nothing without Napoleon III. “ Alone,” he says, “ I should never have been able to continue, much less to carry to a successful termination, the mission confided to me by the Emperor, and for the accomplishment of which his increasing confidence left me by degrees a greater freedom of decision. I could never have struggled successfully against the inherent difficulties of each operation; against opposing wishes, whether due to sincere convictions or to unavowed but implacable jealousies in the great governmental bodies, and even in His Majesty’s immediate circle; nor against the open attacks of parties inimical to the imperial régime, which, not daring to censure the policy impressed on the country by the sovereign, endeavored to oppose him indirectly in the municipal enterprises due to his initiative and executed under his inspiration; if I had not been really the expression, the organ, the instrument of a great idea, the conception and merit of which I must in the first place attribute to him, and whose realization he invariably guarded with a firmness never belied.” In reality, the transformation which has made Paris the capital of capitals is the personal work of Napoleon ITI.

The Second Emperor was a cosmopolitan sovereign. During his long exiles his character had assimilated somewhat from each country in which he had lived. From the Italian carbonari he had borrowed the inclination to conspiracy ; from German philosophers the tendency to dream; from English statesmen the habit of combining business and pleasure. Humanitarian rather than patriotic, a citizen of the world still more than Emperor of the French, he may be accused of having entertained projects too vast, and of sacrificing the special interests of France to what he considered the general interests of civilization. His policy may have aimed too high, but its noble and chivalric aspects cannot be despised. To better the moral and material conditions of the majority, not merely in France but throughout Europe, to proclaim the principle of nationalities, to maintain the right of peoples to dispose of their own destiny, to unite them by commercial treaties, the multiplicity of exchanges, the rapidity of communications, — such was the object of his efforts. Never would he have vaunted the programme of blood and iron, nor have declared that force takes precedence of right. The policy of M. von Bismarck, his successful rival, was a survival from the Middle Ages. His own was modern, and it may be affirmed that if he had triumphed in 1870 as he did in 1855 and 1859, general civilization, instead of being retarded, would have advanced with giant strides.

It might have been believed in 1856 that Napoleon TII., pleased with his unexpected successes and at the summit of his fortunes, would be contented tranquilly to enjoy the benefits of a peace which public opinion desired and which had been purchased by so many heroic sacrifices. But, on the contrary, his ambition as the apostle of nationalities sought new aliment, and he began conspiring to deliver the country of Machiavelli from Austrian domination as seriously as he had conspired to gain the throne of France. After the hecatombs of one of the most sanguinary struggles of modern history, all Frenchmen, with the single exception of the Emperor, longed for the maintenance of peace. Even at the moment when the signing of the treaty of Paris was causing universal joy and satisfaction, and when people supposed that the sovereign was definitively returning to the programme of the famous speech of Bordeaux and could once more say with sincerity, “The Empire is peace,” he alone had an approaching war in prospect. His passion for military affairs, his youthful memories, his temperament as a political gamester, his adventurous spirit, his pretensions as the champion of the cause of nationalities, all combined to drag him into a path the end of which was an abyss.

Napoleon III. believed himself a military man of the first order, and nothing interested him so much as the army. His greatest amusement as a child was to play soldier. In Switzerland, as a young man, he had been the pupil of a great tactician, General Dufour. He was especially occupied with the artillery branch of the service, and had published works on this subject of which he was very proud. Full of confidence in his talents as a strategist, he had a presentiment of winning great victories. He had keenly regretted his inability to go to the Crimea, and when his troops returned triumphantly to Paris it afflicted him to think that it was not he who had conducted them to victory. But that, he told himself, was but a game deferred; the day would come when he would gain battles, and when his head on the coins would be crowned with laurels. Up to the present he had fought during a few days only, —in the Romagna, in 1832, — and then he had suffered a lamentable defeat. He wanted his revenge.

It has been said that Napoleon III. was more of an Italian than a Frenchman. That is an exaggeration, but it may be affirmed that he considered Italy as his second fatherland, and thought that he had duties toward it. He said it was the land of his ancestors; that Napoleon First had been crowned in the cathedral of Milan as well as in Notre Dame de Paris; that Italians, companions in arms of Frenchmen throughout the whole duration of the Empire, had shed torrents of blood for France under Murat, King of Naples, and Prince Eugene de Beauharnais, Viceroy of Italy. The insurgent of 1832 had made promises to Italian liberals which the powerful Emperor desired to keep. The recollection of that fatal expedition of the Romagnas, where he made his first campaign, was destined to exert the greatest influence over all his subsequent career. There his brother died, and he longed to avenge him.

Such were the thoughts by which the Emperor was obsessed. Persuaded that it was his providential mission to do away with the treaties of 1815 and assure the independence of Italy from the Alps to the Adriatic, he likewise believed that in so doing he would serve the interests of France, which, after a successful war with Austria and an accession of territory to Piedmont, would regain its own natural frontier on the southeast. Madame Cornu has written: “A war intended to drive the Austrians out of Italy, in which he should have command, has been his dream from childhood. He once said to me at Ham: ‘I feel that I shall command a great army some day; I know that I shall distinguish myself; I am conscious of possessing all the great military qualities.’ A triumphant entry at Milan at the head of a victorious and liberating army, amidst a tumult of applause and under a rain of flowers, was a vision which delighted his ardent and poetic fancy.

But the realization of such a dream was by no means easy; in France the impediments were as many and as serious as in foreign parts. To surmount them Napoleon III. summoned in the first place cunning, dissimulation, mystery, to his assistance. He concealed his Italian schemes from his wife and his ministers just as he had concealed the Strasbourg expedition from his mother. He had had but two confidants at Ham: his physician, Doctor Conneau, and Charles Thélin, his valet. The confidants of his designs on Italy were hardly more numerous between 1856 and 1859. Whom will he send to Turin in May, 1858, to arrange his interview with Cavour at Plombiéres? Doctor Conneau, who was far more conversant with his plans than his Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Napoleon III. had relapsed into his inveterate habit of conspiring. The apostle of nationalities took good care not to prate about his programme. He never mentioned it during the Crimean War, for then he absolutely needed Austria; if that power had taken sides with Russia, it would have drawn all Germany in its train, and the Crimean War would have resulted in frightful disasters to France and England. Hence Napoleon III. was mute. It was not one of his own plenipotentiaries who brought up the Italian question at the Paris Congress, but Count Cavour, secretly supported by him. And as if to get his hand in while awaiting the day when he could openly concern himself with Italy, the Emperor sought to constitute a nationality: that of Roumania. The idea that Piedmont and Prussia might play a similar part in Italy and Germany, far from alarming him, was agreeable. He foresaw an agreement between Turin and Berlin, and made special advances to the Crown Prince of Prussia, the future Emperor of Germany, the man who was to be his deadliest foe. Under the most pacific appearances, amidst incessant festivities at Fontainebleau and Compiégne, at Biarritz and Plombiéres, at the Tuileries and Saint-Cloud, the crowned conspirator pursued his purpose patiently and mysteriously. The period we are about to retrace may be summed up in one phrase: preparation for the Italian war. The apostle of nationalities never suspected that he would be its martyr.

CHAPTER II THE EMPRESS EUGENIE hae Empress had just fulfilled her principal

mission. She had given a son to her husband and an heir to the Empire. The child was born on Palm Sunday, a day of triumph. She did not forebode that he would end his brief existence by a calvary. What delighted the happy mother above all was that this longed-for child was not merely a son of France but a son of the Church, and that as a godson of the Pope, the benediction of the Holy Father had rested on his cradle.

There was not a cloud on the relations between the Empire and the Holy See at this period. French troops were on guard at the doors of the Vatican. Pius IX. had written to Napoleon III., February 8, 1856: “I feel bound to tell Your Majesty that God has inspired me with a pleasing hope. I flatter myself that He is about to shed abroad new mercies which will descend abundantly upon you, Sire, in proportion as you fulfil your promise to support and protect the Church in whose bosom you were born. As for me, my words and prayers have no object but the glory of God, the salvation of souls, the propagation of the faith and the honor of Catholic princes. Receive, Sire, the apostolic benediction which I give Your Majesty from the bottom of my heart, as well as to Her Majesty the Empress and the august infant she carries in her womb, and to all France.”

The tidings of the birth of the Prince Imperial reached Rome just as the Pope was celebrating the Mass of Palm Sunday in the basilica of Saint Peter’s. A salvo of one hundred and one cannon, fired from Castle Saint Angelo, announced it to the crowds assembled for the ceremonies of Holy Week. In the evening the palace of the French embassy, the academy of France, the national churches, and the military club were illuminated.

Count de Rayneval, French ambassador at Rome, wrote on March 29 to Count Walewski, Minister of Foreign Affairs: “I had the honor to present in person the letter by which the Emperor acquainted the Holy Father with the birth of the Prince Imperial. The Holy Father availed himself of the occasion to express in most affecting terms the extreme interest he takes in this auspicious event, the wishes he forms for the welfare of the young Prince and for the speedy restoration of Her Majesty’s health. So evident a sign of the favor of Heaven cannot fail to have the best results. Security of the future will be a powerful assistance in overcoming the difficulties of the present. The prayers of His Holiness will never be lacking to Their Imperial Majesties nor to France. The Holy Father was very keenly affected

THE EMPRESS EUGÉNIE 15 by the mention in His Majesty’s speech of the pontifical blessing which reached the young Prince almost at his birth. Aside from his personal interest in this display of the Emperor’s sentiments, His Holiness greatly praised this striking testimony to the union of the two powers and their mutual sympathy. Under every aspect their cause cannot but be the gainer by it.”

Count de Rayneval announced at the same time a piece of news which delighted the Empress Eugénie. “ His Holiness,” he added, “has decided that the golden rose which he blesses annually during Lent shall be sent this year to Her Majesty the Empress. This pious custom, the origin of which it would not be easy to discover, is not often carried out. The last occasion was when the golden rose was given to Her Majesty the Queen of Naples at the time the Holy Father returned to his States, in grateful recognition of the generous hospitality he had received at Gaéta and Portici during his entire exile.” No gift could have been more acceptable to the Empress than the golden rose. Her ardent faith and her devotion to the interests of the Holy See made her deserving of it. Throughout her reign she acted like a faithful daughter of the Church, and the difficulties which sometimes arose between the Empire and the Papacy were the greatest annoyances of her life. But on the morrow of the birth of the Prince Imperial there was as yet no symptom of dissension between Napoleon III. and Pius IX. Their agreement seemed absolute and definitive.

The Empress showed herself as charitable as she was devout. The numerous foundations placed under her patronage received her constant solicitude. She took great interest in the Eugénie-Napoleon asylum, the first capital for which was the six hun-. dred thousand francs intended by the city of Paris for the purchase of a necklace for the sovereign ; the Sainte-Eugénie hospital, founded in 1854, and the orphanage of the Prince Imperial, created in 1856. The salvage society for the shipwrecked, like all other asylums, was placed under the protection of the Empress. Committees were organized in Paris and its suburbs to collect subscriptions for a testimonial of devotion to her at the time of the Prince’s birth. The lists were speedily filled up in every quarter. More than six hundred thousand signatures were collected in a few days, and the sum raised exceeded eighty thousand francs. The amount received from each subscriber being limited to between one and five cents, the number of names proved that the working classes had been especially anxious to show their sympathy with the sovereign.

The presidents of the committees having inquired to what purpose Her Majesty desired this sum to be devoted, M. Billault, Minister of Internal Affairs, replied, May 20: “The Empress thanks you for herself and her son. She will gratefully accept the volumes of signatures, eloquent witnesses of the sentiments of the inhabitants of Paris, but as to the sums realized from the subscription, you will permit

THE EMPRESS EUGÉNIE 17 her to devote them to some benevolent work for the children of the people, as was done with the six hundred thousand francs voted by the municipality of Paris at the time of her marriage. Herself the patroness of the maternities and refuges, she wishes to place the poor orphans under the patronage of her son. She desires that the poor workman carried off prematurely from his family may at least have in dying the consolation of knowing that imperial benevolence will watch over his children. A gratuitous and permanent commission will seek out in Paris both orphans and families of honest workingmen, by whom, in consideration of an annual payment, these poor children will be taken, brought up, given a new family and apprenticed to a trade. . . . Thus the Empress will have realized the tender and pious desire of assuring to these poor little creatures, deprived by death of their natural supporters, not the shelter of an asylum but the aid, affection, and care of a new family.”

We cite also this extract from the journal of M. Pinaud: “The rôle of a charitable lady who never tells her name to any one and who visits the sick and poor in person, was very attractive to the Empress. At certain dates she made discreet excursions to humble dwellings and climbed many pairs of stairs, accompanied only by a lady of the palace dressed as simply as herself. One day she was recognized and followed. From that time two agents were designated to assure her safety, but dis-

Cc creetly and without her knowledge, whenever these charitable pilgrimages were renewed.”

The Empress was really popular at the time of the Prince Imperial’s birth. People were pleased with her kindness and her beauty. To charm, to console, and to do good seemed to be her motto. People liked to fancy her as the Emperor’s good angel and the Providence of the poor. As yet no trait of the female politician had been discovered in her. Her husband reserved to himself all the duties and responsibilities of power.

The Empress was really happy at this period. The clergy treated her as a second Blanche of Castile. If she entered a cathedral, it was beneath a canopy and surrounded by a cloud of incense. She enjoyed all the prestige of supreme rank without being subjected to the minute and fastidious details of antiquated royal etiquette. Her ladies of the palace were young, agreeable, and distinguished women. The chateau of the Tuileries had lost its sombre appearance and no longer suggested the terrible catastrophes which are a part of its history. The sovereign’s apartments were a model of luxury and elegance. Instead of being imprisoned there as Louis Philippe and his family had been, she could walk in the private garden in front of the chateau without being exposed to the curiosity of the crowd. The palaces of Saint-Cloud, Fontainebleau, and Compiègne were delightful residences in which she quietly enjoyed the most agreeable pleasures of

THE EMPRESS EUGENIE 19 country life and according to her taste could choose between the pomp of an empress and the privacy of a simple châtelaine.

We would not guarantee that Napoleon III. was an absolutely faithful husband in 1856. But as to that, we remind our readers that where sovereigns are in question, certain weaknesses do not belong to history except when made so notorious by display —as during the reigns of Louis XIV. and Louis XV.— that they become public scandals. What may be affirmed is that Napoleon III. never ceased to display towards the companion whom his heart had chosen the most respectful and affectionate attention, and that he always professed profound love and admiration for her. In July, 1856, having left her at Saint- Cloud to go and take the waters at Plombiéres, he wrote: “You and the little one are everything to me.... It makes me happy to see the moment drawing near when I shall see you and our child again, and I am so contented about it that I torment myself with thinking that it is really too good to be true, and that between now and then one or other of you will certainly fall ill, or that they will not be careful enough when he goes near the pond. Be sure not to tire yourself too much. All these recommendations are stupid, perhaps; but when I am so happy I am frightened.”

Barring a few escapades which never attained publicity and which were perhaps more excusable in a sovereign exposed to every sort of temptation than they would be in a private citizen, Napoleon III. was a very good husband. Madame Cornu said of him: “ Under various aspects his temperament is feminine. His love for his son is rather that of a mother than a father.” Gentle and kindly, affectionate and sentimental, he displayed in private life an affability, good nature, and equanimity that nothing disturbed. It pleased him to see the Empress play her part as sovereign so well, and he eagerly sought occasions to amuse her, bring her into prominence, and make her admired. The things of the mind entertained her more than those of art, and her husband was never better contented than when he saw her taking a brilliant lead in conversation and charming her interlocutors.

We have remarked already that Napoleon had forgotten the injuries done to Louis Bonaparte. We may add that the Empress Eugénie forgave the persons who had been inimical to Mademoiselle de Montijo. She bore no grudge against those who had opposed her marriage, although there was a spice of malice in her occasional allusions to that fact. M. Mesnard, for example, former vice-president of the Senate and at one time counsellor to the Court of Cassation, had not approved of this marriage. After reading the message in which the Emperor announced and gave reasons for it, he had said: “A fine discourse, but I like the sauce better than the fish.” Not long afterwards M. Mesnard was dining at the Tuileries and sat very

THE EMPRESS EUGENIE 21 near the Empress. Just as he was accepting some turbot the sovereign addressed him: “Ah! senator, I thought you merely liked the sauce and not the fish.” Surprised for a moment, M. Mesnard bowed and said that he had changed his mind.

The three prosperous and peaceful years we are about to describe were the happiest period of Eugénie’s life. Anxieties about her future, the anguish of the Crimean War, the dread of remaining childless, had disturbed the beginning of her reign. But as a mother she touched the summit of her fortune as well as of her beauty. The Countess Stéphanie de Tascher de la Pagerie describes her at this epoch: “I have seen women as pretty as the Empress, but I have never known a finer or more distinguished beauty. It is perfection in the most minute details. And the most remarkable thing about this beauty is that it is peculiar to herself; she is no more like a Spanish woman than a French or English one. There is this about her, — that wherever she appears she takes the precedence by her brilliancy and distinction.”