The Fall of Paris: The Siege and the Commune 1870-71 (6 page)

Few were more memorable than the one held at the Ministère de la Marine in 1866 where the guests were required to form
tableaux vivants
of the four continents. A procession of four crocodiles and ten ravishing Oriental handmaidens covered in jewels preceded a chariot. ‘in which was seated Princess Korsakow
en sauvage
’, noted an English guest. ‘The fair diplomate gratified us by the sight of one of the best-shaped legs it has been my good fortune to see for many a day; we could judge of its proportions above the knee, as the flesh-tinted maillot which covered while it did not conceal the limb, was of the most zephyr-like texture.’ Next came Africa, Mademoiselle de Sèvres, mounted on a camel fresh from the deserts of the Jardin des Plantes, and accompanied by attendants in enormous black woolly wigs; finally America, ‘a lovely blonde, reclined in a hammock swung between banana trees, each carried by negroes and escorted by Red Indians and their squaws’. Three thousand guests came, and the cost of this one ball alone was put at four million francs.
¹

As the prevailing styles decreed, the women at these balls emphasized their bosoms to the limits of decency (sometimes beyond): they were magnificent, outrageous, and predatory animals. There was the Marquise de Gallifet (whose husband was to play so sinister a role in Paris during the last days of the Commune), sometimes clad as a great white swan, at others as Archangel Michael, her breast sheathed in golden armour. And there was the nineteen-year-old Comtesse de Castiglione, Louis-Napoleon’s most ravishing and dangerous mistress, who once appeared at the Tuileries as a provocative Queen of Hearts; which drew from the Empress the deadly shaft that ‘her heart is a little low’. What went on in the antechambers to these entertainments the rest of Paris suspected, without needing to hear about Madame X, who had once returned to the ballroom with the Duke de Morny’s Légion d’Honneur imprinted upon her cheek.
¹
To the prudish or the uninvited, these balls seemed thinly veiled orgies, and indeed the scene more often resembled Rubens than Watteau.

A Victorian visitor to Paris in 1870, Lady Amberley,
²
wrote to her mother: ‘We have been each night to the play and are much disgusted with the badness of the morals they exhibit. I hope real life is not as bad.’ A curious film of hypocrisy slicked over the surface of the Second Empire; Flaubert was prosecuted in 1857 for offending public morals by
Madame Bovary
, Manet was subjected to most virulent Press attacks for the ‘immorality’ of his
Olympia
and the
Déjeuner sur l’herbe;
and women smoking in the Tuileries Gardens were as liable to arrest as were young men bathing without a top at Trouville. But underneath, in fact, the morals of the Second Empire were every bit as bad as Lady Amberley feared, and probably worse.
Nana
was its ikon, and its motto the rhetorical question from Offenbach’s
La Belle Hélène
that required no answer:

Dis-moi, Vénus, quel plaisir trouves-tu

À faire ainsi cascader ma vertu?
³

From top to bottom Paris was obsessed with love in all its forms as perhaps never before. In 1858 the Goncourts confided to their journal, almost with a note of surprised discovery: ‘Everybody talks about it all the time. It is something which seems to be extremely important
and extremely absorbing.’ Even in their own circle, where some of the greatest intellects of the times gathered, few evenings went by without Sainte-Beuve or another holding forth on sex on an almost schoolboy plane. According to Paris police records, during one month in 1866, 2,344 wives left their husbands, and 4,427 husbands left their wives; there were some five thousand prostitutes registered at the Prefecture, and another thirty thousand ‘free lances’.

The greatest of the
grandes horizontales
, ‘La Païva’, once asked Ponsard the playwright to compose some verses in honour of her sumptuous new staircase (in what is now the Travellers’ Club on the Champs Elysées), and he replied with a single line adapted from
Phèdre
: ‘
Ainsi que la vertu
,
le vice a ses degrés
.’
¹
Certainly this was true of the Second Empire, where all was meticulously, one might almost say decorously, organized. There was a place, a step on the staircase, for everyone. A married woman, driven from her home on account of some revealed indiscretion, could establish herself at one of several levels within the
demi-monde
before the barrier of actual prostitution was crossed. At the top of the social staircase, immense fortunes passed through their hands. Even Egyptian beys could be ruined in a matter of weeks. Louis-Napoleon supposedly gave the Comtesse de Castiglione a pearl necklace costing 422,000 francs, plus 50,000 a month pin-money; while Lord Hertford, by reputation the meanest man in Paris, gave her a million for the pleasures of one night in which she promised to abandon herself to every known
volupté
(afterwards, it was said, she was confined to bed for three days). La Païva, who adopted the splendidly suitable motto of
qui paye y va
, herself spent half a million francs a year on her table. Among the other
grandes horizontales
were Cora Pearl, an English
demi-mondaine
, born Emma Crouch and seduced at fourteen, and Giulia Barucci, a favourite of the Prince of Wales. Typical of her profession, she was described as having the manner of a patrician, ‘but of education, of pudicity, of any concern for convention, not a shadow’. Her whole talent lay in the art of the courtesan.

For clients the
grandes horizontales
drew from the idle rich dandies like Feuillet’s ‘
Monsieur de Camors
’, who described his day as follows: ‘I generally rise in the morning…. I go to the Bois, then to the club, and then to the Bois, and afterwards I return to the club…. In the evening if there’s a first night anywhere I fly to it.’ Everything in the Second Empire seemed designed for their greater convenience; there was even a newspaper, the
Naïade
, made of rubber—so that it could be read while wallowing in the bath. Later, as the fortunes of the rich
dandies poured away into the same bottomless chasms, they became known as
petits crevés
, to whom, in their debauched tastes, there was no more diverting spectacle than watching a turkey dance on a white-hot metal plate. For their delectation, as well as for those lower down the social scale, there were the semi-amateurs: the
comédiennes
(whom it was said the Bois de Boulogne ‘devoured in quantity’), the
lorettes
with their apprentices called
biches
, the
grisettes
, and the
cocodettes
. All could be picked up by the bushel at ‘Mabille’s’, or at the circus which on opening night reminded the Goncourts of ‘a stock exchange dealing in women’s nights’. For the Bohemians there were the
grenouillères
; unattached, easy-going young women who hopped from garret to garret, like the English art student who declared she was for ‘free love and Courbet!’ Still lower down the scale, there were the pathetic children such as the little girl recorded by the Goncourts who had offered her fourteen-year-old-sister, while ‘her job was to breathe on the windows of the carriage so that the police could not see inside’. Finally, below the stairs, for the working men of Paris there were innumerable cabarets where his pitifully few sous could find him a low woman, or—more usually—make him obliviously drunk on raw spirit.

To this picture of unrestrained libertinism under the Second Empire, there was a grim reverse side. The brilliant masked balls would soon be no more than a memory as ephemeral as that of an Offenbach first night, the beauties would vanish across the stage with only a vaguely seductive scent to mark their passage. But something infinitely more sinister lingered on. Syphilis was rampant, and still virtually incurable. Many of the great men of the age were to die of it; among them de Maupassant, Jules Goncourt, Dumas
fils
, Baudelaire, and Manet. Renoir once remarked, almost regretfully, that he could not be a true genius because he alone had not caught syphilis. This terrible disease was symptomatic of the whole Second Empire; on the surface, all gaiety and light; below, sombre purulence, decay, and ultimately death.

With that peculiar ease the French have for unloading upon an individual the shortcomings of the nation at large, blame for all that was wrong with the Second Empire, all that was corrupt in it, was sooner or later to be heaped upon the man at the top. As far as its morals were concerned, the Second Empire was perhaps justified in pointing an accusing finger. ‘The example’, as the Goncourts heard someone complain at Princesse Mathilde’s, ‘comes from high up.’ One of the few traits Louis-Napoleon shared with his illustrious uncle was the remarkable sexual potency of the Bonapartes. The incessant string of mistresses and paramours, which so shocked the virtuous Eugénie, lasted as long as his health. Even his marriage has been
attributed to the fact that, in an endeavour to seize the impregnable fortress by guile, Louis-Napoleon entered Eugénie’s bedroom one night by a secret door, unannounced, but was so frustrated in his desires as to be left no alternative but the marital bed. The power of the Emperor’s gallantry was indeed attested by no less a person than Queen Victoria. ‘With such a man,’ she wrote in 1852, ‘one can never for a moment feel safe’, but when, three years later, during a drive through the Bois, her host appears to have flirted with the thirty-five-year-old queen as no one ever had before, her views were quite changed: ‘I felt—I do not know how to express it—safe with him.’

It was not in matters of morality alone that the Emperor could be held responsible for setting the tone of the epoch. For only in kind was Louis XIV’s
‘L’État, c’est moi!’
less true of Louis-Napoleon. Upon his shoulders rested the whole weighty fabric of the Empire that he had re-established. As the years passed it became more and more evident that, should this main pillar ever be removed, the structure it supported would instantaneously collapse. And the pillar was crumbling.

As long as historical speculation proves profitable, the character of Louis-Napoleon will engage biographers. Seldom has so controversial a character held the sceptre of such power in Europe. It would be hard to name an opposite not contained in him: outrageous audacity and great personal courage wrestled with timidity; astuteness with almost incredible fallibility; seductive charm with its antonym; downright reaction with progressiveness and humanity ahead of their age. Machiavelli jousted with Don Quixote, and the arbiter was Hamlet. All these conflicting components tended to lead to the same cul-de-sac; whatever Louis-Napoleon intended for his people, the final result was usually the opposite. Above all, he pledged them ‘the Empire means Peace’, but gave France her most disastrous war; Canute-like, during the terrible floods of 1855 he had declared, ‘I give my honour that under my reign rivers, like revolutions, will return to their beds and not be able to break forth’; yet in his wake France was plunged into the bloodiest revolt in her history. ‘If surnames were still given to Princes’, said de Girardin, the journalist, ‘he would be called the Well-Meaning.’ It was fair comment.

To look at, he had none of the presence of his great uncle, the first Napoleon. As a young man, Chateaubriand noted him as being ‘studious, well informed, full of honour and naturally serious’. Later, to a guest who met him while in exile in England at Lady Blessington’s, he was ‘a short, thickish, vulgar looking man without the slightest resemblance to his imperial uncle or any intelligence in his countenance.’ Those who saw him in his full glory enthroned at the Tuileries
were disappointed to find a man with dull eyes and a large moustache. In the cruelly unflattering circumstances of Sedan, Bismarck’s biographer, Dr. Moritz Busch, remarked that the defeated Emperor seemed a little unsoldierlike. ‘The man looked too soft, I might say too shabby….’ In many ways, Louis-Napoleon was an extraordinarily talented man. His reading during the long years in prison had made him much better educated than the average ruler of the day. Taking up chemistry, he had written a treatise on beet sugar competent enough to be accepted seriously by the industry, and a pamphlet on unemployment gained him considerable (though ephemeral) popularity with the workers. In 1860 he began work on a major life of Julius Caesar, for which Roman
ballistœ
were re-created to hurl missiles about in the grounds of St.-Cloud. First and foremost his inventiveness took a military bent. An excellent horseman, as early as 1835 his
Manuel d’Artillerie
impressed the professionals, and a few years later he was busy improving the current French Army musket. By 1843 he was recommending something ironically similar to the Prussian system of conscription that would eventually be his ruin, and even as Bismarck’s captive at Wilhelmshöhe he soon busied himself collecting material on Prussian military organization.

The real tragedy of Louis-Napoleon was that for him the time was out of joint. Under other, simpler circumstances he might—who knows?—have proved one of the great beneficial rulers of Europe. At his back was the constant warning of the insecurity of his, and his dynasty’s, position. He knew that he had ridden into power through a technical split between the royalist parties, that many considered him a usurper (which indeed he was); and he knew that it was
l’ennui
—that deadliest of all French diseases—with the bourgeois dullness of poor King Louis-Philippe which had paved the way for him, Louis-Napoleon, and how easily this fickle jade could turn against him too. Therefore for all these reasons France had to be distracted, and like other French leaders before and after him, he was forced into the pursuit of that equally fickle mistress,
la gloire
. At home he would implant the glorious and indelible stamp of his reign on a brilliantly rebuilt Paris. Abroad, grandiose foreign adventures would leave their mark on the world; and, finally, when all else failed, he would distract by gigantic Exhibitions. Unfortunately, most of his schemes were destined to end in dangerous failure because of his erratic character. ‘
II ne faut tien brusquer
’ was one of his favourite maxims, but it was something which in fact he never stopped doing. De Morny, the most valuable of his advisers, remarked in despair that ‘the greatest difficulty… is to remove obsessions from his mind and to give him a steadfast will’. George Sand regarded him as ‘a sleepwalker’, a view that
was later upheld by his conqueror, Bismarck, who saw him as ‘really a kindly man of feeling, even sentimental; but neither his intelligence nor his information is much to speak of… and he lives in a world of all sorts of fantastic ideas’. But still the abysmal tragedy of Louis-Napoleon’s reign might have been averted had he not found himself confronted with the two most adroit and dangerous statesmen of the nineteenth century: Cavour, and Bismarck.