Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (5 page)

Although fascinated by Eugenia, the future novelist Juan Valera (who was two years older) gives an unattractive portrait of her at this time – spoilt, noisy, petulant, wilful and bad-tempered, ‘obsessed by physical exercise and intoxicated by the adoration of handsome men’. He prophesied that one day some worshiping husband was going to be ‘tormented by this celestial, aristocratic and almost unbelievably rich young being’. But Valera only knew Eugenia from a distance.

Very highly strung, sometimes her nerves brought her near to collapse, and her mother took her abroad to recuperate. On one such occasion, when they were staying in the château at Cognac, an Abbé Boudinet offered to tell Eugenia’s fortune. ‘I see a crown’, he prophesied. ‘A duchess’s coronet or a princess’s?’, Maria Manuela enquired eagerly. ‘No, no, it’s certainly a crown’, replied the palmist. ‘An imperial crown.’ Everyone burst out laughing – in the 1840s the only empires were those of Austria and Russia.

Eugenia had countless suitors, the most eligible being the Duke of Osuna, who once saved her from drowning. Even if he was not so rich as Alba, Maria Manuela would have been delighted with such a son-in-law, but although he was genuinely in love Eugenia refused him. Nor would she marry her cousin José de Xifre. There was a French suitor, Prince Albert de Broglie, from the French embassy, and even an English suitor, Ferdinand Huddleston of Sawston Hall, Cambridgeshire. When Huddleston asked Mme Gordon to intercede
for him, she came back with the dismal news that the lady ‘would rather be hanged from a gibbet than marry an Englishman’.

As a hostess, Doña Maria Manuela was more interested in leaders than politics, particularly General Ramón Nárvaez who was President of the Queen’s Council. An Andalusian cavalry officer, created Duke of Valencia after seizing power, he was ‘an ugly, fat little man with a vile expression’, according to Lord Malmesbury, who saw him in London, swearing, threatening and bullying in a harsh, coarse voice. A dedicated ladykiller in dandified clothes, his yellow moustache and goatee beard contrasted weirdly with his greasy black hair. Despite calling himself a ‘
moderado
’, he disliked Liberals as much as Carlists. On his deathbed, he claimed proudly that he was dying without enemies – they were all dead, shot by his firing squads.

But Nárvaez ran Spain and Maria Manuela made friends with him. Soon he became a frequent guest at Casa Ariza and Carabanchel, surrounded by fawning aides-de-camp and vicious bodyguards. He found her parties useful as they were not only enjoyable but attended by everybody who mattered in Madrid. Eugenia got to know him fairly well and once or twice they had heated arguments. He thought she was a joke, with her crackpot Fourierist ideas and did not realize that she was a Liberal. Privately she thought that ‘Don Ramón’ was a murderer. Ironically, he told Maria Manuela she was lucky to have such a daughter.

Another guest at Doña Maria Manuela’s by now legendary balls was the young Isabella II, hell-bent on pleasure. For reasons of political expediency, she had been declared of age in 1843 when only thirteen and was growing up to be drunken and promiscuous, surrounded by greedy favourites. Nárvaez married Her Most Catholic Majesty off as soon as possible. (‘You don’t know these Spanish princesses,’ said a courtier. ‘They have a devil in their bodies and if you delay for a moment, the heir to the throne arrives before the husband.’) Despite a certain feeble charm the Infante Don Francisco, her first cousin, was the worst possible husband, effete and rumoured to be ‘effeminate’, the period’s code for homosexual. Isabella loathed him.

After drinking too much at an uproarious banquet at the Prado, the queen consented to the marriage, which took place in October 1846. Eugenia, a frequent guest at court, was one of the bridesmaids. It was a double wedding, Isabella’s sister marrying the
Duc de Montpensier, a younger son of Louis-Philippe. The French were convinced that Francisco could not beget children and that one day Spain would have an Orleanist sovereign, but somehow Francisco managed to give the Queen a son and three daughters – which did not stop her from going to bed with guardsmen, singers and bullfighters.

The year 1846 also saw Ramón Nárvaez lose power, briefly. On regaining it in October the following year, he appointed Maria Manuela ‘
Camerara Mayor del Palacio
’ – mistress of the robes and first of the queen’s ladies. The fruit merchant’s daughter from Malaga had risen very high indeed. Ignoring the court’s reputation as the most scandalous in Europe, she revelled in the social possibilities, persuading Isabella to make Paca a lady-in-waiting and come with ‘King Francisco’ to a ball she gave for her younger daughter. She also obtained the queen’s permission for Eugenia to use Don Cipriano’s titles, and from now on Eugenia was the Countess of Teba. But despite doing a difficult job rather well and although Queen Isabella grew devoted to her, Maria Manuela had to resign after less than two months, in mid-December 1847. An ally of Nárvaez wanted the post for a friend.

Meanwhile, the new Countess of Teba had at last taken a suitor seriously. If the handsome, amusing young Pedro, Marqués de Alcañices, was not in the same league as Alba, he could offer her a great fortune and eventually even a ducal coronet, while although an often frivolous man of pleasure, at the same time he had an impressive personality, commanding and intelligent. One day he would play an important role in Spanish politics. Since the correspondence was destroyed, the romance has to be reconstructed, most of what evidence survives coming from Ethel Smyth, who was told by one of Eugenia’s nieces. The biographer Jasper Ridley thinks Alcañices has been mistaken for Alba, but Harold Kurtz accepts the story. It certainly agrees with what we know of Eugenia’s temperament.

As Kurtz says, the most likely date is during 1848 – not in the summer as he suggests, but more probably in the early months of the year, the height of Madrid’s social season. After acting with Eugenia in the Carabanchel theatre, ‘Don Pepe’ began flirting more and more seriously, finally declaring his passion in long letters. She responded, falling desperately in love, and with her uncompromising nature, must have made up her mind to marry him. Then she noticed that whenever she was staying at the Liria Palace he came daily. Suddenly she realised she had been the victim of a cruel stratagem. He was not in love with her at all – he had designs on her sister.

Again, Eugenia tried to poison herself, refusing an antidote. As she lay in the Liria Palace dangerously ill, Pepe came to her bedside, whispering, ‘Where are my letters?’ Crying, ‘You are like Achilles’s spear that healed the wounds it made’, she swallowed the antidote. After two humiliating disappointments, Alba, followed by Alcañices, the poor girl can scarcely be blamed for distrusting men. It was time for mother and daughter to leave Spain.

T
HE
H
USBAND
H
UNTER

Disappointment at having lost her great court appointment made Doña Maria Manuela more determined than ever to find a splendid match for Eugenia, and she was ready to search all Europe for the right husband. She cannot have foreseen how long it would take, however, while unwisely she ignored the fact that her daughter had no particular wish to marry, having already discovered some very good reasons for distrusting men.

For anyone quite so proud and fastidious as the young Countess of Teba, it was another humiliation to be made to seem a vulgar, gold-digging fortune hunter who was being hawked around by a matchmaking mama. As Don Cipriano’s daughter, Doña Eugenia knew very well that she had no particular need of social position or money. She possessed a perfectly good title of her own – indeed she had several, including a duchy – while one day she was going to be an extremely rich heiress. She was not yet old enough to appreciate the cruel disadvantages of nineteenth-century spinsterhood.

As Eugenia said of Maria Manuela to an English friend many years later, when feeling old and charitable, ‘She wanted to make everybody happy, but in her own way, not in theirs.’ There were always potentially explosive tensions between mother and child, and especially at this time; it must have been very difficult for Eugenia to forgive Maria Manuela for deciding that Paca and not she should marry Alba. Even so, she admired her mother’s courage and determination.

In theory, since the Countess of Montijo and the Countess of Teba belonged to that close-knit international ruling class which in those days stretched from London to St Petersburg and from Stockholm to Naples, and whose common language was French,
the doors of great houses in every European capital should have been open to them. No doubt, too, they expected to meet kindred spirits – some of whom might even be potential husbands – at all the fashionable spas and watering places. Yet in practice it turned out to be not quite so easy.

Leaving Spain, they first of all went back to Paris. From here in March 1849 Doña Eugenia wrote to Paca, saying that she had gone with Maria Manuela to a party given by Princesse Mathilde Bonaparte, ‘where I knew absolutely nobody. No one said a single word to me’. After the social triumphs of Madrid which she had always taken for granted, it was a new experience to be ignored by her own kind.

Eugenia adds:

I’m going to tell you something that will really make you laugh. The other day, when we were looking for an appartment we saw an enormous one in the Place Vendôme that appealed very much to Mamma, who said to me: “Don’t you see how well this would suit us, as we would be able to give receptions here.” You can imagine how I trembled. Mercifully we are now in a tiny appartment into which not more than ten people at most can fit, which helps to reassure me a little.

The story underlines the incompatibility between mother and daughter.

Paris had recently been shaken by a political earthquake whose tremors were felt by nearly every European government. In February 1848 the uninspiring monarchy of King Louis-Philippe had been unexpectedly swept away by the ‘Revolution of Contempt’, the king escaping from the Tuileries in a cab, with his whiskers shaved off and wearing dark glasses, to flee across the Channel under the name of ‘Mr Smith, an English tourist’. As Prosper Mérimée had written to Doña Maria Manuela at the time:

The Revolution was the work of 600 men, most of whom had no idea what they were doing or what they wanted. Now it has done its work. The little tradesmen who howled ‘Long live reform’ are saying today that it has ruined them. Government, opposition and National Guard each behaved with unbelievable stupidity. The only thing that we can do is try and keep some sort of authority and save whatever is left. While law and order have no doubt been restored and Paris is becoming her normal self again, you see very long faces everywhere. Bankruptcies are beginning to occur. There is immense uneasiness as people are living in fear of a future no one dares to predict.

The early months of the Second Republic had seen plenty of bloodshed. When the Paris mob rose in June, it was shot down mercilessly, 5,000 being killed and another 12,000 transported to Algeria. By the time Maria Manuela and Eugenia arrived, for the moment at least the new makeshift régime seemed to be in control but no one could say if it was going to last or whether the army would bring back the monarchy – many officers were staunch royalists.

Horrified by the reports of bloodshed and social upheaval that were coming out of the capital, throughout France the majority of the bourgeoisie and the peasantry hoped that the monarchy would return as soon as possible – many older people remembered the Terror very well, and also the financial chaos of the 1790s. What prevented any chance of a restoration, however, was the existence of two competing royalist parties, the Legitimists supporting the Comte de Chambord (‘Henry V’), the grandson of Charles X, deposed in 1830, and the Orleanists supporting the Comte de Paris (‘Philip VII’), Louis-Philippe’s grandson.

Desperate for firm rule, in December 1848 France elected an ersatz monarch in the person of Prince Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, who became the republic’s Prince President and installed himself in the Elysée. Mme Gordon’s sacred dream was beginning to look as though it might come true.

Only a few weeks after she arrived in Paris, Doña Maria Manuela secured an invitation to the Elysée for herself and her daughter, and in April 1849 they were presented by Prince Félix Bacciochi, the
chef-de-protocol
, to Louis-Napoleon. As someone who adored beautiful women, after chatting with Maria Manuela for a noticeably long time – normally he was a man of very few words – the Prince President then began to speak to her daughter. ‘Monseigneur’, Eugenia tactlessly informed him, ‘we have often talked about you with a lady who is truly devoted to your cause.’ ‘What is her name?’ ‘Mme Gordon.’ On hearing the name, Louis-Napoleon broke off the conversation hastily, and quickly moved on.
Did the pretty young Spaniard with the red hair know that Eleonore Gordon had been his mistress? If so, why had she mentioned her to him? Was it some sort of invitation? Was she perhaps lascivious, like her queen in Madrid?

Some weeks later Maria Manuela and Eugenia received an invitation to dinner with the Prince President, not at the Elysée, but at the Palace of Saint-Cloud near Paris, where he was staying to escape from the midsummer heat, and also to take refuge from an alarming epidemic of cholera among the capital’s poorer classes. Thinking that this was going to be a large, formal party, the two ladies put on their most stately dresses and best jewellery.

Instead of taking them to the Palace of Saint-Cloud, however, the carriage sent to fetch them drew up at a small house in the park, over a mile from the palace. Here they found not the great gathering they expected but only Louis-Napoleon and Prince Bacciochi. The dinner for four dragged on in painful embarrassment through a long, hot summer evening. As soon as they rose their host took Eugenia’s arm, proposing a walk in the park, while Bacciochi took Maria Manuela’s. Quickly, Eugenia told Louis-Napoleon that he must escort her mother, who then insisted that she was feeling tired and demanded that the carriage should take them home at once.