Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire (7 page)

Louis-Napoleon had already revived the imperial hunt, installing a vast pack of hounds at Fontainebleau, where Eugenia was invited to a meet on 13 November. More than a firm seat and ability to take fences were required because there was so little jumping, the field being expected to show a command of dressage as well as skill at finding their way through the forest. Lent a big English thoroughbred, she impressed everyone by her horsemanship and was the first up with the hounds when they caught their stag. Next day, Louis-Napoleon sent her the horse as a present, the start of a whirlwind courtship. ‘You can’t imagine what people are saying about me since I was given that beastly horse’, an embarrassed Eugenia told a friend at the Spanish embassy. Soon she would have good reason for feeling self-conscious. Everyone in Paris was beginning to watch her with fascination, especially if they saw her talking to the Prince President.

On 21 November a small ball was given at Saint-Cloud, to mark the first day of a long-awaited referendum in which every adult French citizen (women excepted) would be asked to approve the restoration of the Napoleonic Empire. The ball’s guest list was largely restricted to the future emperor’s leading supporters, many of whom looked more like adventurers than politicians. The Austrian ambassador, Baron Hübner, observed disdainfully that the list included ‘a few Bonapartes together with a mob of obscure creatures who were equally inelegant’. He agreed with a haughty old French lady that the atmosphere was definitely ‘a little too democratic’, adding that ‘this sort of thing and, still more, democratic manners, is certainly not to Louis-Napoleon’s taste. But as a creation of universal suffrage, he can scarcely deny his own roots, and at such a time he would certainly be most unwise not to stress them. However, he’s going to find it rather expensive.’ The ambassador’s assessment did not do justice to the shrewd Prince President, who knew the value of moving with the times.

Professionally sharp-eyed, the Austrian also noticed with interest that ‘the young and beautiful Mlle de Montijo was being paid a great deal of attention by the President’. What Baron Hübner is unlikely to have known is that Doña Eugenia, as a committed Bonapartist of very long standing, was geninely delighted by the prospect of a Napoleonic restoration, which had been her dream since childhood. Needless to say, nothing could have endeared her more to Louis-Napoleon.

‘Mlle de Montijo, a young Spanish blonde of the highest birth has been the object of the Prince’s attentions ever since her stay at Fontainebleau’, the Comte de Viel Castel carefully recorded in his diary for 25 November. He comments with considerable insight (especially remarkable since it was the first time that he had set eyes on Eugenia) that ‘The young lady certainly has a most prepossessing manner and does not lack a keen sense of humour, but she is much too strong minded ever to be ruled by her heart or her emotions.’

The Second Empire was proclaimed on 2 December, followed by a
Te Deum
at Notre Dame. In every city throughout France cannon roared out salutes, church bells pealed, bands played Napoleonic marches and there was a public holiday – all without a single hostile demonstration. The Prince President had become Napoleon III, Emperor of the French, moving from the Elysée into his uncle’s former Palace of the Tuileries, which was more suited to His Imperial Majesty. The transformation cannot have displeased Doña Eugenia. But she was blissfully ignorant of the fact that on 13 December the French ambassador in London was going to solicit Queen Victoria’s approval of the emperor’s formal request for the hand of Her Serene Highness Princess Adelaide of Hohenlohe-Langenburg, still only seventeen, but possessing the invaluable asset of being the daughter of Victoria’s half-sister.

‘Mlle de Montijo is at all the receptions’, M. de Viel Castel noted on 23 December. He added pruriently, ‘she enjoys very noticeable favour, but I don’t think that she has submitted to a conqueror’s yoke’ – meaning that so far she had not gone to bed with the Prince. ‘Her mother, who was formerly known as the Comtesse de Teba, used to be very easy-going and about 1825 she had my brother Louis for a lover.’

When Viel Castel wrote this, Eugenia and her mother had already been staying at the château of Compiègne for several days, invited to spend Christmas with Napoleon III, and a hundred other guests. His unfortunate foreign minister, Edouard Drouyn de Lhuys, had been frantic with worry at the prospect of a
mésalliance
ever since the hunting party at Fontainebleau the previous month and the present of the horse, even if Louis-Napoleon had told him not to worry. But at Compiègne Drouyn de Lhuys could see there was every reason for worrying. What would happen to that sensible marriage with Queen Victoria’s niece?

Another guest, Baron Hübner, was bowled over by Eugenia, despite believing her to be an advanced liberal and practically a revolutionary. In a lyrical dispatch the ambassador sent to Vienna a month later, he raves about ‘the noble and regular beauty of her features, the brilliance of her complexion, the elegance of her slight and supple figure’, writing of ‘an expression of gentle melancholy the result of a strange and almost tragic adventure’, of ‘the wild oddness and energy of her spirit’. It is clear from his dispatch that he also enjoyed Doña Eugenia’s conversation, ‘which recoiled at nothing’. In addition, he credited her with ‘a force of will and a physical courage which one rarely meets even among the women of the people’. Surprisingly, the man who wrote this paean of praise was a reactionary who loathed progressives.

Fascinated by the relationship between Eugenia and the emperor which, he claims, reminded him of a tale from
The Arabian Nights
, Hübner says there was a peculiarly nasty plot at Compiègne to persuade her to sleep with Louis-Napoleon. Despite having been Maria Manuela’s guest at Casa Ariza, the Marquise de Contades (a very unsavoury lady and the mistress of the emperor’s henchman, Colonel Fleury) was ‘the soul of the cabal who wished to prevent the emperor marrying by giving him a new mistress. She said to Mlle de Montijo that, after all, remorse was better than regret, to which the Spaniard answered, “Neither remorse nor regret!”’

The emperor’s aides-de-camp and the gentlemen of his household teased their unhappy master as much as they dared about his beautiful guest, placing bets on the date on which she was likely to give in and sending witty letters about the ‘siege’ to their friends. Their barely concealed amusement made him more frantic than ever. Horace de Viel Castel even has a story – probably unfounded but revealing about the atmosphere at Compiègne – that the emperor actually tried to break into her room.

During this nightmarish visit, originally planned to last for only a few days but which at the host’s insistence dragged on for nearly a fortnight, Doña Eugenia had to put up with the sidelong glances and knowing smiles, the sniggers and whispers, of the rest of the party, aware that behind her back every sort of insinuation and calumny was circulating. The British ambassador, Lord Cowley, who was among the guests, went away completely convinced by opponents of the marriage that ‘Mlle de Montijo’ was just an adventuress. He reported, ‘The Emperor’s entourage is getting seriously alarmed at his admiration of a certain Spanish young lady, Mademoiselle Montijo by name. Her mother, an Englishwoman [sic] by birth, is, with the young lady, playing a bold game, and, I cannot doubt, hopes that her daughter may wear the Imperial Crown.’ Later, Cowley added, ‘The Emperor is going it finely with the young Montijo.’ He also said that Drouyn de Lhuys was wondering how he could continue as foreign minister if Napoleon married her.

Eugenia needed considerable courage to remain at Compiègne until the party ended and to cope with an increasingly amorous emperor. Hübner tells us that when with Napoleon she was ‘the image of virginal reserve’, but as soon as he was out of sight, ‘her highly excitable nature reasserted itself’. He also claims that when the emperor, by now ‘the victim of a frenzy of passion’, was galloping beside Eugenia through the forest of Compiègne and was under the illusion they were alone when in fact they were within earshot of the fascinated house party, he had begged her to go to bed with him. ‘Mlle de Montijo pulled her horse up short, and looking the Emperor steadily in the eye, said “Yes, when I am Empress!”’ That evening she did not come down to dinner and for the rest of the visit her manner was glacial when speaking to her host. From then on, says Hübner, Napoleon began to think seriously of marrying her. Clearly, something like the incident in the forest must have happened to make up his mind.

The Spanish envoy at Paris, the Marqués de Valdegamas, believed, however, that he had done so a month before the party at Compiègne. He reported to Madrid that in November, when Napoleon had been strolling with Eugenia through the park at Fontainebleau during a break from hunting, he discovered that both their watches had stopped at precisely the same moment. Now it so happened, according to the Spanish envoy’s dispatch, that the emperor had only just received news from the Jardin des Plantes at Paris that a mysterious, exotic plant, which had never been known to flower since the year when his uncle had married his grandmother Josephine, had suddenly blossomed spectacularly. No less superstitious than his Corsican forebears, Napoleon immediately decided that the two phenomena must definitely be linked and, by some unfathomable process peculiar to himself, that this meant that Eugenia was predestined to share his throne.

There is yet another story, told by Doña Eugenia’s great-nephew the seventeenth Duke of Alba. While admitting that the tale might not perhaps be accurate in every detail, the duke was nonetheless convinced that something like it must have happened at some point during Louis-Napoleon’s courtship. According to Alba, Eugenia and her mother had been watching a military parade by the newly restored Imperial Guard in the Place du Carrousel from a window somewhere in the Tuileries when, after the parade, the emperor rode his horse beneath their window, shouting, ‘How can I come up to you?’ Eugenia shouted back, ‘Only by way of the altar.’

What is certainly beyond dispute, even among historians, is that the Emperor Napoleon III had reached his decision about whom he ought to marry within three days of Doña Eugenia’s departure from the château of Compiègne on 28 December 1852. When the Comte Walewski, the French ambassador in London, came to the Tuileries on New Year’s Eve to discuss an irksome but surmountable difficulty that had arisen over the Hohenlohe-Langenburg marriage – the girl’s devoutly Protestant parents seemed unwilling to give their permission – the Emperor shook his hand warmly and, ignoring whatever he was trying to say about Princess Adelaide, told him, ‘My dear fellow, I’ve been captured.’ He then explained his intention of marrying Mlle de Montijo. Horrified, Walewski played for time, begging him to wait for just a bit longer and to reconsider his decision. Next day, however, the Hohenlohe-Langenburg Princess formally declined Louis-Napoleon’s proposal.

Yet there were still a number of extremely formidable obstacles for Doña Eugenia to overcome, together with some even more daunting enemies. At the worst, the emperor might manage to control his passion, listen to his advisers and say goodbye to her.

M
ARRYING A
D
REAM

Despite the emperor’s frank admission to Comte Walewski on New Year’s Eve, he had not yet proposed to Doña Eugenia, so that she was far from sure he would marry her, especially when there was so much opposition. She and her mother must have been in a state of agonising tension in the early days of 1853. After all, Napoleon III was the most eligible man in Europe.

Her enemies – enemies because the emperor was in love with her – could not believe he would make her his consort. At the New Year’s ball at the Tuileries, when going in to supper Eugenia was shrilly rebuked by the minister of education’s wife, Mme Fortoul, for daring to go in front of her, a breach of official precedence. She politely gave way at once, but was so upset that Napoleon noticed and came up to ask the reason. ‘I have been insulted, Sire, and I refuse to be insulted again.’ ‘After tomorrow, no one will ever dare insult you’, promised the emperor in a deliberately loud voice. But tomorrow came and went without a proposal.

The most vicious enemies were the ‘royal Bonapartes’ – ex-King Jerome, once puppet-monarch of Westphalia, and his children Plon-Plon and Mathilde. The new emperor’s last surviving uncle, Jerome was opposed to his nephew marrying at all, as it might deprive his son Plon-Plon of his ‘rights to the throne’, even if he prophesied that Napoleon would marry ‘the first skirt who turns his head and then won’t sleep with him’. Plon-Plon, who had tried to seduce Eugenia during her visit to Paris in 1849, expressed the view that ‘You go to bed with women like Mlle de Montijo, but you don’t marry them.’ Mathilde begged the emperor not to marry Eugenia. She herself had been briefly engaged to him in 1839, but instead had made a shortlived marriage to a grotesque Russian prince. She told her cousin that Eugenia possessed neither ‘
coeur ni con
’.

Drouyn de Lhuys, the foreign minister, argued that he was throwing away a dynastic alliance to marry ‘an adventuress’, but Napoleon ignored his threat to resign. Comte Walewski, Napoleon I’s son by Marie Walewska, was equally hostile. Comte de Persigny, minister of the interior, grumbled, ‘We didn’t make the Empire so that the Emperor could go and marry some flower-girl.’

The ablest members of the Imperial Council, Achille Fould and the Comte de Morny, were wise enough not to express an opinion. Fould was an exceptionally shrewd and well-balanced man, while Auguste de Morny, Napoleon’s illegitimate half-brother, was the cleverest of all his advisers. It is most unlikely that he complained, ‘If she can’t be royal, why can’t she be a French countess instead of a Spanish one?’ He was an old friend of Doña Maria Manuela, whom he had known in Madrid.

Apparently the emperor assured Eugenia he would marry her, but that she would have to wait until he had brought his ministers to heel. Certainly mother and daughter seemed at ease on 9 January when Viel Castel dined with them at ‘a very cheerful supper’ given by Princesse Mathilde: