The Comedy & Tragedy of the Second Empire. Edward Legge

I have represented to the Emperor that he ought to consider the interests of his throne; but I have not had to be his judge, and to decide whether he is right or wrong.”

      De Morny told one of his colleagues that the Emperor, having once got an idea into his head, could not be disabused of it. More than one of his courtiers said: “He is mad, and this marriage is an act of the grossest stupidity.”

      If the Emperor believed in his star, so did Mlle. de Montijo place an implicit reliance upon hers. A gipsy fortune-teller once told her that she would be a Queen. She might have made a good—nay, a splendid—marriage long before she set her cap at the Emperor. The Duc d’Ossuna was madly in love with her, and wished to make her his Duchess. The Duc de Sesto proposed to her, but she declared she would only marry a Frenchman.

      The Emperor’s private friends were more difficult than the Ministers to argue with, and he had many a mauvais quart d’heure with Mme. Drouyn de Lhuys, Mme. Fortoul,[32] and Mme. de St. Arnaud, the latter the wife of the celebrated Marshal who fought with us in the Crimea. These grandes dames sneered at the fair interloper, as they considered Eugénie de Montijo. When they were at Compiègne they did all in their power to snub her and make her look small. To such a point, indeed, did they carry their persecution that the victim complained to the Emperor, who, observing that all the ladies in question were close by, broke a branch off a tree, and, twisting it into a crown, put it on Eugénie’s head, with the remark (which all had the satisfaction of hearing), “Take this until I give you the other!”

      Judging by those who are, or were, in a position to know, it would seem that the Empress was somewhat coquettish. Her Imperial Majesty, however, never publicly compromised herself, as the ex-Queen Isabella of Spain is credited with having done. She was flirty, that was all: the sort of woman that “Gyp” has sketched in “Autour du Mariage”; perhaps “Gyp” got her idea of Paulette d’Alaly from the former fair ruler of the Tuileries. “You know,” said the Emperor to one of his Ministers who had complained of the Empress’s attitude towards him—“you know the Empress is very hasty, but, au fond, she likes you very much.” She was not, however, hypocritical, but may be compared to a child who has got tired of a toy and cries for another. She became possessed of all manner of fancies, and was exceedingly romantic, while remaining perfectly mistress of herself.

      “It is a delicate question,” writes one of her biographers, “and I approach it with the greatest circumspection; but was the Empress the passionnée she was said to be, and was she faithful to the Emperor? Merely to ask the question was to misunderstand the Empress. Had she any love intrigues? Was she always the woman who is said to have confessed to the Emperor before marriage, ‘J’ai aimée, mais je suis restée Mademoiselle de Montijo’? The answer to this is—‘No; the Empress had no weaknesses. Yes; the Empress always remained the slave of her marital duties.’” There were, doubtless, times when it seemed as if she thought of somebody of more consequence than her imperial consort; but her leanings in this direction appear to have been platonic—the griserie to have been of very slight duration. “It was with her as with a fire of straw, which burnt and burnt, making one think and fear that it was going to destroy everything. Then the individual who flattered himself with having set light to it was surprised at the flame which had illuminated and warmed him, and turned away, his only consolation being the parody of a celebrated sonnet. The Empress was one of those women who like to be made (platonic) love to. If she flirted, it was without real peril to her honour and sans rien céder de son intimité.” When she was a prominent figure in the salon of the Comtesse de Laborde, it is told of her that she was “très libre d’allures.” Eugénie de Montijo tutoyait people very freely, and when she ascended the throne she made any lady who had been a friend in former days “thou” and “thee” her as of yore.

      Much may be forgiven the Empress in consideration of her bringing up. From the first she knew what opinion the Emperor really entertained of her—how he saw in her a beautiful woman whom he had marked down as a pretty plaything, the toy of a week, a month, or mayhap a year. She quickly undeceived him, and brought him to his senses almost ere he had taken leave of them. It must not be forgotten that she was thrown among those who composed the gayest Court in Europe. Money was of no more value in the Paris of the “sixties” than it is to-day in the neighbourhood of Monte Carlo, where a sovereign is thought less of than a fourpenny-piece in London. That was the time when champagne baths were the vogue, and beauty was worth ten times the market value of respectability. Those were the days when adventurers flocked to Paris as to a promised land, when the Emperor’s favourites—the De Mornys, the De Persignys, et hoc genus omne—got concessions for every “enterprise” that fertile brains could devise, and when to be “in the swim” was to be in the way of making your fortune.

      At the reveillon du jour de l’an at the Tuileries—December-January, 1853—the Emperor, in accordance with French custom, kissed all the ladies on the cheek. He approached Mlle. de Montijo with the same agreeable object; but she drew back, and, curtseying, said to the astonished Sovereign, “Sire, only my husband shall ever kiss me.” This rebuff would have chilled most men, but the Emperor took it very good-humouredly, although such a display of excessive modesty was a new experience for him. Among those who had tried to put Mlle. de Montijo on her guard against the Emperor’s compromising attentions was the Duchesse de Bassano. “Take care,” said this lady; “you are preparing either regret or remorse for yourself. But do not forget that I warned you.” A few days later the engagement was known, and Mlle. de Montijo was able to write to the Duchesse: “I marry Louis without regret and without remorse.”

      Towards the close of 1849—when the poor man whom she had seen under arrest, after the Boulogne fiasco, was in the second year of his Presidency—a Spanish gipsy told Mlle. de Montijo that she would marry an Emperor. The señorita knew very well that at the moment there was not one marriageable Emperor in existence, and she asked the gitana if she did not mean a King or a Prince. “No,” was the reply, “I mean an Emperor—an Emperor of a great country.” “Then it must be Souloque,” said the Comte de Breda, then a French attaché, “for there is no other Emperor in the matrimonial market, and he would not be particular as to the number of his wives.”

      The proposed marriage was very obnoxious to some of the Emperor’s Ministers; but when they began to remonstrate, His Majesty cut them short with that abruptness which characterized him when his wishes were opposed. “Gentlemen, there is nothing more to say. My marriage with Mlle. de Montijo is an arranged affair. I am resolved upon it.”

      The discomfited Ministers withdrew, but they did not cease to protest. There were people whose anger led them to say unpleasant things about both mother and daughter. The former, they asserted, held a very free-and-easy salon at her hôtel in the Place Vendôme. People gathered there after the opera, and the “goings-on” were of the liveliest. “Adventures” of the young lady in former years were fabricated, and openly discussed. People who stuck at nothing asserted that she had had a “past.”

      One of the numerous malcontents was M. Thiers, who appears to have had a sardonic kind of humour. “There is nothing to fear from people who are only tipsy,” he murmured; “but they are to be dreaded when they get quite drunk.” The French appreciate this description of wit, and the saying “went the rounds.”

      Prince Napoleon, for reasons, and his sister, Princesse Mathilde, for none, bitterly inveighed against what they regarded as sheer lunacy on the Emperor’s part. The Prince, who, as long as there was no legitimate son of the Emperor in existence, stood next in the succession, had some sort of excuse for denouncing his cousin’s marriage with “a mere femme du monde,” who had nothing but her good looks to recommend her. Princesse Mathilde, who had contracted a most unhappy alliance with Prince Anatole Demidoff, but had been long freed from her tyrant, made theatrical appeals to the Emperor to abandon his intention. What was to be done with a man whose infatuation made him cover with kisses Nieuwerkerke’s little bust of Mlle. de Montijo?

      M. Vieil-Castel, a Rochefort born out of his time, marvelled what the Emperor would do when an Empress was at the head of a Court numbering among the officials so many men whose lives were the reverse of edifying. “Perhaps a day would come when Mlle. de Montijo would see herself allegorically depicted