Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (3 page)

Don Cipriano joined them in the summer of 1835. If he had become a rich man, he was as austere as ever: once again, Eugenia and Paca could only wear linen dresses and cotton stockings, and were not allowed to carry umbrellas or go for carriage rides. He had plenty to tell them about Paris, no doubt showing them the site of the battery at Montmartre where in 1814 he had given the last order for cannon to fire in defence of the Emperor Napoleon. Perhaps, too, he told them how after Waterloo the emperor’s troops had hidden him in their barracks from the Bourbon police.

He made the girls read the
Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène
. A brilliant piece of propaganda from the grave, this was a book that cast an extraordinary spell over their generation. ‘I have given France and Europe new ideas that will never be forgotten’, claimed Napoleon, boasting ‘My enemies will find it hard to make me disappear.’

By the mid-1830s Napoleon’s legend had become a cult. ‘
Toujours lui. Lui partout
’, sang Victor Hugo. He dominated the memoirs of every great man and painters vied at producing Napoleonic battle scenes, while there were portraits, busts or prints of him in countless drawing-rooms. Hoping to attract a few rays of reflected glory for his own lacklustre régime, Louis-Philippe restored the emperor’s statue to the top of the column in the Place Vendôme and ordered the completion of the Arc de Triomphe.

In November 1835 Cipriano, who was Senator for Badajoz, returned to Spain where the Liberals had split into two squabbling
factions. The confiscation of Church lands was outraging Catholics and the Carlists were far from beaten. It would have been madness to bring his family home. Maria Manuela told a friend that if the Carlists won they would certainly shoot her husband.

Eighteen months later, she and her daughters crossed the Channel, landing in the England of
The Pickwick Papers
. She wanted them to learn English – they had had an English governess in Paris, Miss Cole – so they were sent to a boarding school in the recently built watering place of Clifton, a small, Regency town overlooking the River Avon near Bristol. Eugenia was miserable. The English girls called her ‘Carrots’ because of her red hair; and she tried to change the colour with a lead comb. She wrote to her father, however, that she would be his interpreter if he came to England. With a little Hindu friend, she decided to run away to India, the two eleven-year-olds sneaking down to the Bristol quayside and clambering on board a ship, but luckily a mistress saw them.

After only a few weeks Maria Manuela decided that a governess could teach them English and in August they returned to Paris, accompanied by a Miss Flowers. A timid young woman, she had difficulty controlling her charges – when she tried to make Eugenia rise at seven, her pupil would hold out five fingers from under the blankets, meaning another five minutes in bed, and when they had passed would hold out five more. The girls went back to the Sacré Coeur. On their father’s instructions, they also attended a physical training school, run on Pestalozzi methods by a Spaniard, Colonel Amoros, who like Cipriano had fought for Napoleon. This was probably the first strenuous exercise that Eugénie had ever taken, apart from riding her ponies, and she enjoyed it.

Don Cipriano reappeared in Paris in autumn 1837. The war still dragged on in northern Spain, but the enemy’s best general had died and they had failed to capture any of the major cities. Ostensibly for reasons of health, his visit may have been because he feared that his marriage was in danger. His wife had more or less stopped writing to him, and he knew she was entertaining lavishly. Although they lived together until his departure in January 1838, afterwards Maria Manuela sent him very few letters.

In a report of autumn 1838 Colonel Amoros tells Eugenia’s parents that their daughter enjoys physical exercise, that her character is ‘good, generous and firm’ and her temperament ‘sanguine and nervous’. This fits with what we know from other sources. She was very highly strung, almost hyperactive, never able to keep still or stop talking, even during meals, in an age when children were not supposed to speak unless spoken to, often having long conversations with herself, and obsessively fond of her father – one biographer comments that her letters to him sound like ‘an impatient woman in love’. When only nine, she wrote, ‘I’m so looking forward to your coming here that I think you’re going to arrive every day, although it’s three weeks since I asked you if you were coming soon.’ In other letters she says, ‘Dear Papa, I want to throw my arms around you’; ‘Dear Papa, when are you coming, my heart is sighing for you?’

Sometimes she seems very grown up. ‘It’s just not possible to live in Paris any more as they’re always trying to kill the king’, she complains early in 1837. ‘Yesterday the gas blew up, breaking lots of windows, and we were told it happened because people had set light to it. What was so funny was how all the soldiers came running with their guns, afraid that it was a revolution.’ This is written by a girl not yet twelve, who in the same letter tells her father that she is looking forward to reading
Robinson Crusoe
and
The Swiss Family Robinson
. She also mentions Napoleon, reminding Cipriano he has told her to read a book about Napoleon, and that what happened to him on St Helena made her cry.

Meanwhile, Doña Maria Manuela was meeting as many of the great as possible, including Legitimist diehards such as the Duc de Richelieu and Orleanist leaders like the Duc de Broglie, and also a young Bonaparte, Princesse Mathilde. Nor did she neglect literary lions, renewing her acquaintance with Prosper Mérimée, by now the author of several successful books and recently appointed Inspector General of Historic Monuments. A trim, birdlike man, very well dressed, with black hair starting to go white, a high forehead and a nose that enemies called ‘snout-like’, if not a grandee he had polished manners and a marvellous sense of humour. Lonely despite his constant party-going, he was grateful for her friendship, writing regularly to her for the rest of his life, while she valued someone so scholarly and amusing, who knew everyone worth knowing. It is unlikely that he slept with her, however – he told Stendhal, his closest male friend, that the countess was definitely not his mistress.

Mérimée played games with Maria Manuela’s daughters, took them for walks – buying cream cakes – and even to shooting
galleries where they learned to use pistols. He admired Eugenia’s high spirits, calling her ‘a lioness with a flowing mane’ (
une lionne à tous crins
), referring to the red hair that still embarrassed her. He helped them with their homework – they were day girls at the Sacré Coeur, not boarders – and improved their rather Spanish French. It was his idea that they should make a first visit to the theatre and in September 1838 he and Maria Manuela took them to a production at the Comédie-Française of Corneille’s
Horace
, in which Camille’s role was played by the sixteen-year-old Rachel (who was to become one of the century’s greatest classical actresses). He brought Rachel to some of Maria Manuela’s receptions, where she thrilled everybody with recitations from Racine. Eugenia was dazzled, announcing that when she grew up, she too would be an actress.

‘Mr Mérimée’ also became a trusted ally of their governess, the dismal Flowers, calming her down after the girl’s unending attempts to run away and roam the streets of Paris. On one occasion, inspired by the nuns’ teaching on the need to be kind to outcasts, the two children walked after a hearse because the sole mourners were its coachman and two mutes – ‘not a wreath, not a single lily, not even a dog’, recalled Eugenia. They followed it all the way to the Père Lachaise cemetery, where they attended the lonely funeral.

Among Mérimée’s outings with the children was a walk to see the recently completed Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs Elysées, on which was inscribed a roll-call of the emperor’s victories, while in 1836 he introduced their mother to a fanatical Bonapartist, a shy, burly man with a round face fringed with thick black whiskers. This was the novelist Henri Beyle, better remembered as ‘Stendhal’. Painfully aware that he had not had the success he deserved, the novelist liked the handsome Spanish countess who talked about his books to him. He began to call on her every Thursday evening.

He told the girls about his hero the emperor, who on one glorious occasion had seized him by the lapel and actually spoken to him. Despite having nearly died on the retreat from Moscow – surviving on a lump of tallow – he thought Napoleon’s return from Elba ‘the most romantic and beautiful enterprise of modern times’, and when it was dangerous to do so had dedicated a book to ‘His Majesty Napoleon the Great, Emperor of the French, detained on the island of St Helena’. Convinced that Spanish blood flowed in his own veins, he felt he had found a worthy audience in these children from Spain.

‘He came in the evening and sat us on his knee to tell us about Napoleon’s campaigns’, Eugenia remembered. ‘We couldn’t eat our dinner, we were so eager to hear. Every time the bell rang, we ran to the door. Finally we brought him in triumphantly, each one holding him by the hand, and sat him in his armchair next to the fire. We wouldn’t even let him draw breath, reminding him of which of our Emperor’s victories he had told us about last time, since we’d been thinking about it all week, waiting impatiently for the magician who knew how to bring Napoleon back to life.’ Part of the magic came from his treating the girls as grown-ups. ‘We wept, we groaned, we went crazy’, recalled Eugenia. Sometimes their mother told the girls to stop bothering ‘Monsieur Beyle’ with their questions, but he encouraged them. Eugenia never forgot their evenings with Stendhal. In 1840 she would write from Spain to tell him how pleased she was that the emperor’s body was being brought back to France for reburial at the Invalides.

Another friend to whom Mérimée introduced Maria Manuela was his mistress’s husband, Gabriel Delessert, the Prefect of Police. Delessert sent his daughter Cécile to Colonel Amoros’s gymnasium where she became Eugenia’s best friend. In November 1836 Mme Delessert took Cécile and the two Montijo girls to catch a glimpse of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor’s nephew, when he was imprisoned in the Conciergerie after a farcical attempt to mount a
coup d’état
at Strasbourg. This was the first time that Eugenia saw her future husband, shortly to be deported to the United States. No doubt she was disappointed, as he did not look in the least like his uncle. Nevertheless, everything was conspiring to make Eugenia a dedicated Bonapartist. Her father’s example was almost enough to do so, while Stendhal completed the process. In her words, ‘He gave us his fanaticism.’

Late in 1839, Don Cipriano’s doctor sent an urgent message from Madrid. He was dying, unlikely to last long. A coach journey across the Pyrenees in midwinter might give the girls pneumonia so, never worried about her own iron health, Maria left them with Miss Flowers and hurried back to Spain. She did not tell Paca or Eugenia how ill their father was – perhaps she did not even realise it herself. Travelling on the fastest coaches available, it took her ten days to reach Madrid and on arrival she found him beyond recovery. He died on 15 March.

Meanwhile, the girls thoroughly enjoyed their mother’s absence. The normally gentle Paca became fiendish, tormenting the spineless Flowers so dreadfully that the latter appealed to ‘Mr Mérimée’ for help. He seems to have restored order, giving Paca a good scolding.

Mérimée guessed that Maria Manuela would stay in Spain. He wrote, ‘I have been so fond of those children that I simply can’t get used to the idea of not seeing them again for such a long time. They are leaving at a time in a woman’s life when a few months can change them completely, and I know I’m going to lose them. If one parts from a friend like you, one is fairly sure of finding her again one day, just as she was, but instead of our two little friends, I’m afraid that I shall meet two prim and haughty young ladies who have quite forgotten me.’

Stendhal, too, was depressed at the departure of the girls, whom he had not seen for several months as he was busy writing. Wondering how to give them a really exciting account of the battle of Waterloo, he had suddenly become inspired, producing his greatest novel,
La Chartreuse de Parme
. ‘Monsieur Beyle has disappeared,’ Eugenia had reported indignantly to Don Cipriano early in November. ‘He’s told the porter where he lives to say he’s gone shooting if anyone asks for him.’ He dedicated
chapter three
of
La Chartreuse
to them, in a cryptic footnote – the letters ‘
P y E
’ – but never saw them again, dying before they returned to France.

As the weather had improved, Doña Maria Manuela wrote to Miss Flowers, telling her to bring her daughters to Madrid. She did not say that Don Cipriano had died. The three left Paris on 17 March.
En route
, snow blocked the road over the Pyrenees, so that they were held up for nearly a week on the frontier, at Oloron Sainte-Marie beneath the mountains. When they reached Madrid, the children were at last told that their father was dead. Paca collapsed in hysterics. Without a tear or a word, Eugenia went upstairs and shut herself in her room for two days.

S
PAIN

The next few years transformed Doña Eugenia. If a Parisian childhood had given her a lasting command of French and a love of France, now she developed traits traditionally regarded as Spanish – a harsh pride and a rigid sense of honour, an elaborate courtesy, a boundless generosity and a deep religious faith, together with an incapacity for moderation. ‘She became used to living inside a world she had created for herself’, says Lucien Daudet, who knew her when she was an old lady. ‘She steeled her soul, that Spanish soul, toughening it ruthlessly, ignoring human weakness and despising compromise, to such a degree that she became unyielding and unconquerable in her determination, blindly, unswervingly straightforward.’

Don Cipriano had left her mother very rich indeed, with an income equivalent to £20,000 a year in contemporary English money and those two fine houses at Madrid, Casa Ariza and Carabanchel. Extravagant and ambitious, no longer held in check by an austere husband, Doña Maria Manuela began to entertain lavishly, her receptions becoming a popular feature of Madrileño social life. Eager to obtain a high appointment at court, she ran after influential statesmen. Above all, she was determined her two pretty daughters should make marriages no less dazzling than her own.