THE EMPEROR AND EMPRESS AT THE SUMMIT OF PROSPERITY.
The visit paid by the Emperor Napoleon and the Empress Eugénie to
Queen Victoria at Windsor in 1856 was returned in 1857.
It was on the 18th of August that the queen, her husband, the Prince
of Wales, then a boy of fourteen, and the Princess Royal landed
at Boulogne. The royal yacht had been in sight since daybreak,
the emperor anxiously watching it from the shore; but it was two
P. M. before it was moored to the _quai_. There can be no better
account of this visit than that given by Queen Victoria. The following
extracts are taken from her journal:--
"At last the bridge was adjusted, the emperor stepped across. I
met him half-way, and embraced him twice, after which he led me
on shore amid acclamations, salutes, and every sound of joy and
respect. The weather was perfect, the harbor crowded with war-ships,
the town and the heights were decorated with gay colors."
The delay in getting up to the wharf postponed the queen's entrance
into Paris, and greatly disappointed the crowds who waited for
her coming. They were also disappointed that the greatest lady
in the world exhibited no magnificence in costume. But the queen
herself was greatly impressed by her first view of Paris:--
"The approaching twilight rather added to the beauty of the scene;
and it was still quite light enough when we passed down the Boulevard
de Strasbourg (the emperor's own creation) and along the Boulevards
by the Porte Saint-Denis, the Madeleine, the Place de la Concorde,
and the Arch of Triumph, to see the objects round us."
They drove through the Bois de Boulogne in the dusk to the palace
of Saint-Cloud; but all the way was lined with troops, and bands
playing "God Save the Queen," at intervals. The queen was particularly
impressed by the Zouaves, "The friends," she says (for the Crimean
War was then in progress), "of my dear Guards in the Crimea."
The birth of the Prince Imperial being an event in prospect, the
empress was not allowed to fatigue herself, and first met the queen
on the latter's arrival at Saint-Cloud. "In all the blaze of lamps
and torches," says the queen, "amidst the roar of cannon, and bands,
and drums, and cheers, we reached the palace. The empress, with
Princess Mathilde and the ladies, received us at the door, and took
us up a beautiful staircase, lined with magnificent soldiers....
I felt quite bewildered, but enchanted."
At dinner General Canrobert, who was fresh from the Crimea, was
placed next to her Majesty, and gave her his war experiences. Next
day the royal party went to the Exposition Universelle, then going
on in Paris, and afterwards, while the queen was receiving the
ambassadors, the emperor drove the Prince of Wales through the
streets of Paris; he afterwards took his older guests sight-seeing
in his capital. "As we crossed the Pont de Change," writes the
queen, "the emperor said, pointing to the Conciergerie, 'That is
where I was in prison." He alluded to the time when he was brought
from Strasburg to Paris, before being shipped for Rio Janeiro.
"Strange," continues the queen, "to be driving with us as emperor
through the streets of Paris in triumph!"
They visited Versailles (where the queen sketched), and afterwards
went to the Grand Opera. They saw Paris illuminated that night
as they drove back to Saint-Cloud, the emperor and Prince Albert
recalling old German songs; and the queen says: "The emperor seems
very fond of his old recollections of Germany. There is much that
is German, and very little--nothing, in fact--markedly French in
his character."
One day all the royal party went out in a hack carriage, with what
the queen calls "common bonnets and veils," and drove incognito
round Paris. Sometimes they talked politics, sometimes they seem
to have joked and laughed with childish glee and enjoyment; and one
night the emperor took the queen by torchlight to see the tomb of
his great uncle at the Invalides. A guard of old warriors who had
served under Napoleon, with Santini, his valet at St. Helena, at
their head, escorted the queen of England to the chapel where stood
Napoleon's coffin, not yet entombed, with the sword of Austerlitz
lying upon it. The band in the chapel was playing "God Save the
Queen," while without raged a sudden thunder-storm.
The mornings were devoted to quiet pleasures and sight-seeing,
the evenings to operas, state dinners, and state balls. The great
ball given on this occasion in the galleries of Versailles was
talked of in Paris for years after. "The empress," says the queen,
"met us at the top of the staircase, looking like a fairy-queen or
nymph, in a white dress trimmed with bunches of grass and diamonds,
a beautiful _tour de corsage_ of diamonds round the top of her
dress, and all _en rivière_; the same round her waist, and a
corresponding headdress, and her Spanish and Portuguese orders.
The emperor said when she appeared: 'Comme tu es belle!'"
Next day, as the emperor drove the queen in an open carriage, they
talked of the Orleans family, whose feelings had been greatly hurt
by a recent sequestration of their property. The emperor tried
to make excuses for this act,--excuses that seemed to the queen
but tame,--and then he drove to the chapel built over the house
where the Duke of Orleans had died on the Avenue de Neuilly. The
emperor bought her two of the medals sold on the spot, one of which
bore the likeness of the Comte de Paris, with an inscription calling
him the hope of France.
The visit ended after eight delightful days, and the emperor escorted
his guests back to Boulogne.
Prince Albert, the queen confesses, was not so much carried away
by the fascinations of their new friend as herself; but the empress
secured his entire commendation.
The queen and the emperor continued to correspond, and subsequently
met several times, at Osborne House or at Cherbourg.
I have told at some length of this visit, because it seemed to
me to mark the culminating point of Napoleon III.'s successful
career; not only was he fully admitted into the inner circle of
European sovereigns, but his place there was confirmed by the personal
friendship and alliance of the greatest among them.
In 1867 there was another Universal Exposition held in Paris; and
this was also a time of great outward glory and triumph for the
emperor, surrounded as he was by European emperors, crown princes,
and kings; but Queen Victoria was then a sorrowing widow, and decay
was threatening Napoleon's apparent prosperity.
It was in 1867 that the emperor and empress received the czar,
the sultan, the Crown Prince of Prussia, Princess Alice of Hesse
Darmstadt, and many other crowned heads and celebrities. It was
a year of fêtes and international courtesies. But in Paris itself
there was a strange feeling of insecurity,--a fearful looking for
something, society knew not what. "It seemed," said one who breathed
the rarefied air in which lived the upper circles of society, "as
if the air were charged with electricity; as if the shadows of
coming events were being darkly cast over the joyous city."
One of the most remarkable sights of that gay time of hollowness
and brilliancy was the review given in honor of the Emperor of
Russia, on June 6. No less than sixty thousand French troops, of
all arms of the service, filed past the three grand-stands on the
race-course of the Bois de Boulogne. On the central stand sat the
Empress Eugénie, with the Prince Imperial, the Crown Princess of
Prussia, her sister, Princess Alice, and the Grand Duchess of
Leuchtenberg. Before this stand, on horseback on one side, sat the
Grand Duke Vladimir, the Czarevitch (the present Czar of Russia),
the Crown Prince of Prussia (since the lamented Emperor Frederick),
Prince Gortschakoff (the Russian prime minister), Count Bismarck, and
an English nobleman; on the other side were the Duc de Leuchtenberg,
the Duke of Mecklenburg, and the Prince of Hesse Darmstadt; while
in the centre of them all rode the czar, with Napoleon III. on
one hand, and on the other the king of prussia.[1]
[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]
How little could any of those who looked upon that throng of royal
personages imagine what in little more than two years was coming
on them all!
The emperor was fond of literature, and when drawn into a literary
discussion, his half-closed eyes would gleam with sudden light,
and his criticisms would be both witty and valuable. During his
later years, harassed by sickness and perplexities of all kinds,
his greatest pleasure was to shut himself up in his study, and
there work upon his "Life of Cæsar." He wrote it entirely himself,
though he had many learned men in France and Germany employed in
looking up references and making extracts for him. The book was
considered a work of genuine merit. To its author it was a labor of
love. He threw into it all his experience of life, all his theories,
all his Napoleonic convictions; for in Cæsar and Napoleon he found
many parallels. He hoped to be admitted as a literary man into the
French Academy, and he meant to base his claim upon this book.
I have said nothing of the cares that oppressed the emperor in
connection with the war in the Crimea, which was prolonged far
beyond his expectations; of the campaign in Italy, broken short
off by threats of intervention made by the king of Prussia, and
followed by feelings of disappointment and revenge on the part of
the Italians; of the intervention of the emperor in 1866, after
the battle of Sadowa, to check the triumphant march of the Prussian
army through Austria; nor of the bombs of Orsini, which led to a
rupture of the friendliness between France and England, breaking
up the cordial relations which existed between the two courts in
1857, and reviving that panic about French invasion which seems
periodically to attack Englishmen ever since the great scare in
the days of Bonaparte. These subjects belong rather to historical
reminiscences of England, Italy, or Germany; but the emperor had
anxieties besides in France, and often found it hard to regulate
with discretion even the ways of his own household.
The empress, who after she had governed France as regent in 1859,
during her husband's absence in the Italian war, had been admitted
to councils of state, by no means approved either her husband's
domestic or foreign policy. We have seen that her influence was
strongly exerted to bring about the unfortunate attempt to give
an emperor and empress to Mexico; but on two other points that
she had at heart she failed. She could not persuade her husband
to undertake the reconstruction of the kingdom of Poland, nor to
assist Queen Isabella of Spain when her subjects, exasperated at
last by her excesses, drove her over the French frontier. The empress
disliked many of the coterie who enjoyed her husband's intimacy,
especially his cousin, Prince Napoleon. She resented the prince's
opposition to her marriage; she disliked his manners, his political
opinions, his aggressive opposition to all the offices of religion;
and she succeeded in detaching him from the emperor's confidence,
and in hindering his taking part in public affairs. To his wife--the
Princess Clotilde--she was deeply attached; but that did not serve to
reconcile her to the prince, her husband. Both ladies were opposed
to any diminution of the pope's temporal power in Italy; but the
private circle of the friends of the empress was too gay for the
chastened nature of the Princess Clotilde, and by degrees her intimacy
with the empress became less close and affectionate than it had
been in the early days of her unhappy marriage.
An episode in the private life of the palace, in 1859, created
considerable friction in Paris, and provoked remonstrances from
the emperor's ministers.[1] This was the admission to the circle
of intimates who surrounded the empress of the mesmerist and medium
Home. This man gave himself out to be an American; but many persons
suspected that his native land was Germany, and some said he was a
secret agent of that court, which had emissaries all over France,
in search of useful information. The empress, having heard of Home's
strange feats of table-turning and spirit-rapping in fashionable
_salons_ of the capital, was eager to witness his performances. The
women in the high society of Paris were greatly excited about them.
Spiritualism was the fad of the season, and the empress caught the
infection. The emperor, who was present at many of the exhibitions
at the Tuileries, was also, it is said, much impressed by some
of them, especially by a mysterious invisible hand laid firmly
on his shoulder, and by an icy breath that passed over his face.
But although the emperor, always indulgent to his wife, resisted
at first the advice of his counsellors to get rid of Home, he was
forced at last to put an end to the _séances_ at the Tuileries,
Fontainebleau, and Biarritz. The spirits "summoned" had had the
imprudence to obtrude upon him their own views of his policy. When
the alliance with Italy and a probable war with Austria were under
discussion in the cabinet, the spirit-inspired pencil at the Tuileries
scrawled these words: "The emperor should declare war and deliver
Italy from the Austrians." Not long afterwards, the vulgar presumption
of Home, who had accompanied the court to Biarritz, provoked the
emperor, and caused him to give ear to the earnest remonstrances of
his Minister for Foreign Affairs. He gave orders that Home should
appear at the Tuileries no more.
[Footnote 1: Pierre de Lana.]
Home died not long after in Germany, forgotten by the world of
fashion, but leaving behind him a little circle of ardent believers.
The story of the emperor's later life seems to me to be one full
of pathos and of pain. It is the record of a man who knew himself
to be slowly dying, whose physical strength was ebbing day by day,
but who was bearing up under the vain hope of accomplishing the
impossible. One admires his extreme patience, his uncomplaining
perseverance, as he tried to roll the stone of Sisyphus, yet with
unspoken misgivings in his heart that it would escape from him and
crush the hopes of his life, as it rolled back out of his hands.
"Poor emperor!" says the eye-witness who beheld him in his hour
of triumph, before the grand-stand, in 1867, at the great review.
"He was a friend to all, and he fell through his friends. He was
very true to England, whatever he may have been to other countries;
but England failed him, unfortunately in Denmark, fortunately in
Mexico, and fatally in 1870."[1]
[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]
It seems, too, as if the world forgets now--what assuredly must
be remembered hereafter in history--that it was he who relieved
Europe from the treaties of Vienna, and asserted the claims of
nationalities; that he brought about the resurrection of Italy;
that through his policy we have a solution satisfactory to the world
in general of the question of the pope's power as a temporal prince
in Italy; that he was the builder of modern Paris, the promoter of
agriculture, the railroad king of France, the peasant's and the
workman's friend.
In early life he had been an adventurer; but a kind heart gave
him gracious manners. He was grateful, faithful, and generous;
terribly prodigal of money, and the victim of the needy men by whom
he was surrounded. It seems as if, in spite of his _coup d'état_
(which, subtracting its massacres, may have been a measure of
self-preservation), he deserves better of the world and of France
than to have his memory spurned and spat upon, as men do now.
He gave France eighteen years of pre-eminent prosperity; he left
her, to be sure, in ruins. In his fall he utterly obliterated the
prestige of the name of Bonaparte. No Bonaparte, probably, will ever
again awaken the enthusiasm of the French people,--an enthusiasm which
Napoleon III. relied on, justly at first, and fatally afterwards,
when a generation had arisen in France, from whom the feeling had
passed away.
The emperor's malady, which was slowly sapping his strength, is said
to be the most painful one that flesh is heir to. Every movement was
pain to him. Absolute rest was what he needed, but cares pressed
hard upon him on every side. He must die, and leave his empire in
the hands of a woman and a child. His government had been wholly
personal. He could not transmit his power, such is it was, to any
other person,--least of all could he place it in feeble hands.
There were no props to his throne. No Bismarck or Cavour stood
beside him, to whom he might confide his wife and son, and feel
that though his hand no longer held the helm, the ship would sail
straight on the course he had laid down for her. The men about
him were third and fourth rate men,--all of them enormously his
own inferiors. They cheated and deceived and plundered him; and he
knew it in a measure, though not as he knew it after his downfall.
The emperor said once: "There is but one Bonapartist among us,
and that is Fleury. The empress is a Legitimist, I am a Socialist,
and Prince Napoleon a Republican." As he contemplated the future,
it seems to have occurred to him that the only thing that could be
done was to teach France to govern herself,--to change his despotic
authority into a constitutional government. He might live long enough,
he thought, to make the new plan work, and if, by a successful war
with Germany, a war impending and perhaps inevitable, he could
gain brilliant military glory; if he could restore to France that
frontier of the Rhine which had been wrested from her by Europe
after the downfall of his uncle,--his dynasty would be covered
with glory, and all might go on right for a few years, till his
boy should be old enough to replace him.
Both these expedients he tried. In 1869 he announced that he was
about to grant France liberal institutions. He put the empress
forward whenever it was possible, and he made up his mind that as
war with Germany was sure to come, the sooner it came, the better,
that he might reap its fruits while some measure of life and strength
was left him. Long before, Prince Albert had assured him that his
policy, which made his ministers mere heads of bureaux, which never
called them together for common action as members of one cabinet,
which compelled each to report only to his master, who took on
trust the accuracy of the reports made to him, was a very dangerous
mode of governing. It was indeed very unlike his uncle's _practice_,
though it might have been theoretically his _system_. Both uncle
and nephew came into power by a _coup d'état_,--the one on the
18th Brumaire (Nov. 9, 1799), the other on Dec. 2, 1851. Both were
undoubtedly the real choice of the people; both really desired
the prosperity of France: but the younger man was more genuine,
more kindly, more human than the elder one. The uncle surrounded
himself with "mighty men, men of renown,"--great marshals, great
diplomatists, great statesmen. Louis Napoleon had not one man about
him whom he could trust, either for honesty, ability, or personal
devotion, unless, indeed, we except Count Walewski. All his life
he had cherished his early ideas of the liberation of Italy, which
he accomplished; of the resurrection of Poland, which he never
found himself in a position to attempt; of the rectification of the
frontier of France, which he in part accomplished by the attainment
of Nice and Savoy; and, finally, his dream included the restoration
to France of self-government, with order reconciled to liberty.
As early as January, 1867, the emperor was consulting, not only his
friends, but his political opponents as to his scheme of transforming
despotism into a parliamentary government. He wrote thus to M.
Émile Ollivier, a leader of the liberal party in France:[1]--
[Footnote 1: Pierre di Lana.]
"Believe me, I am not pausing through indecision, nor through a
vain infatuation as to my prerogatives; but my fear is of parting
in this country, which is shaken by so many conflicting passions,
with the means of re-establishing moral order, which is the essential
basis of liberty. My embarrassment on the subject of a law of the
Press is not how to find the power of repression, but how to define
in a law what deserves repression. The most dangerous articles
may escape repression, while the most insignificant may provoke
prosecution. This has always been the difficulty. Nevertheless,
in order to strike the public mind by decisive measures, I should
like to effect at one stroke what has been called the _crowning
of the edifice_. I should like to do this at once and forever;
for it is important to me, and it is above all important to the
country.... I wish to advance firmly in a straight line, without
oscillating to the right or left. You see that I have spoken to
you with perfect frankness."
We also see in this letter one of Louis Napoleon's characteristics,--a
fondness for taking people by surprise. Nearly everything he did
was a surprise to the public, and yet it had long been maturing
in his own mind.
The next time M. Ollivier saw the emperor he was told of his intention
to grant the right of holding political meetings; the responsibility
of cabinet ministers to the Chamber; and the almost entire freedom of
the Press. The emperor added, with a smile: "I am making considerable
concessions, and if my government immediately succeeded that of
the First Empire, this would be acknowledged; but since I came
after parliamentary governments, my concessions will be considered
small."
The emperor's experiment was a failure. The moment restraint was
taken off, and the French had liberty of speech and freedom of the
Press, they became like boys released from school and its strict
discipline. The brutal excesses of language in the Parisian newspapers,
the fierceness of their attacks upon the Government, and the
shamelessness of their slander, alarmed the emperor and the best
of his personal adherents, who had been by no means supporters of
his policy. But though the experiment gave signs of never being
likely to succeed, and no one seemed pleased with the new system,
the emperor persevered. He refused to withdraw his reforms; he
declined to make what children call "an Indian gift" to his people:
but the effect of the divided counsels by which he was embarrassed
was that these reforms were accepted by the public merely as
experiments, to be tried during good behavior, and not as the basis
of a new system definitively entered upon.
All through the year 1869 the difficulties of the course which the
emperor adopted grew greater and greater. The emancipated Press
was rampant. It knew no pity and no decency. Its articles on the
emperor's failing health (which he insisted upon reading) were
cruel in the extreme. Terrible anxieties for the future must have
haunted him. If his project for self-government in France must
prove a failure, when he was dead, what then? Could a child and a
woman govern as he had done by a despotic will? He had done so in
his days of health and strength; but events now seemed to intimate
that his government had been a failure rather than a success.
Lord Palmerston, writing from Paris in Charles X.'s time, said:
"Bonaparte in the last years of his reign crushed every one else,
both in politics and war. He allowed no one to think and act but
himself."
Somewhat the same remark could be applied to the Third Napoleon.
But Napoleon I. was a great administrator as well as a great general;
his activity was inexhaustible, he corresponded with everybody, he
looked after everything, he knew whether he was well or ill served;
and his mode of obtaining power did not hinder his availing himself
of the best talent in France. The case of his nephew was the reverse
of this. His highest quality was his tenacity of purpose, and his
disposition was inclined to kindly tolerance, even of pecuniary
greed and slipshod service. He could rouse himself to great exertion;
but in the later days of Imperialism, pain and his decaying physical
powers had rendered him inert; moreover, in his general habits he had
always been indolent and pleasure-loving. In carrying out the _coup
d'état_ nine tenths of the public men in France had been subjected
to humiliations and indignities, by which they were permanently
outraged, and a host of co-conspirators and adventurers had acquired
claims upon the emperor that it was not safe to disregard. Places
and money were distributed among them with reckless profusion, and
many a shady money transaction, throwing discredit on some men
high in favor with the emperor, was passed over, to avoid exposure.
On the other hand, the emperor improved Paris till he made it the
most beautiful city in the world. It was his aim to open wide streets
through the old crowded quarters where revolution hid itself, hatching
plots and crimes. He provided fresh air and drainage. He turned
the Bois de Boulogne from a mere wild wood into the magnificent
pleasure-ground of a great city. He completed the Louvre, and demolished
the straggling, hideous buildings which disfigured the Carrousel in
Louis Philippe's time. The working population, which his improvements
drove out of the Faubourg Saint Antoine emigrated to high and healthy
quarters in Montmartre and Belleville, where a beautiful park was
laid out for them. No part of Paris escaped these improvements,
though it took immense sums to complete them. But while their good
results will be permanent, their immediate effect was to raise
rents and make the increased cost of living burdensome to people
of small incomes. The work brought also into Paris an enormous
population of masons, carpenters, and day-laborers,--a population
which was a good deal like the monster in the fairy tale, which
had to be fed each day with the best; for if once it became hungry
or dissatisfied, it might devour the man of science who had brought
it into being.
Still, the French are ungrateful to Napoleon III. when they forget
how much they are indebted to him for the extension of their commerce,
the growth of their railroads, the improvement of their cities, and
above all for his attention to sanitary science and to agriculture.
When he came to the throne, every traveller through France was
struck by the poor breeds of swine, sheep, and cattle; the slovenly
system of cultivation, the wide waste lands, the poor implements
for farming, and the want of drainage. In his exile the emperor
had lived much with English landowners, and he endeavored more
than anything else to improve agriculture. He spent great sums
of money himself in model farms for the purpose of showing how
things could be done. But while commercial, agricultural, and
manufacturing prosperity increased in France, so also did the cost
of living; and the cry, "Put money in thy purse!" found its echo
in the hearts of all men in all classes of society. Speculation
of every kind ran rampant, and by the year 1869 the cost of the
improvements in Paris alone became greater than France could patiently
bear.
Personally, Louis Napoleon had strong sympathy with the working-classes,
and was always seeking to benefit them. He favored co-operative
societies; he was planning, when he fell, a system of state annuities
to disabled or to aged workmen. He abolished passports between
France and England, and also the French workman's character-book,
or _livret_, which by law he had been compelled to have always
at hand.
In the midst of the emperor's other perplexities, there came, during
the first days of 1870, a most damaging occurrence connected with
his own family,--an occurrence with which the emperor had no more
to do than Louis Philippe had had with the Praslin murder; but it
helped to impair the remaining prestige which clung to the name
of Bonaparte.
Prince Pierre Bonaparte, grandson of Lucien, was a dissolute and
irregular character. His cousin, the emperor, had repeatedly paid
his debts and given him, as he did to every one connected with the
name of Bonaparte, large sums of money. At last Prince Pierre's
conduct grew so bad that this help ceased. Then he threatened his
cousin; but the emperor would not even buy an estate he owned in
Corsica. Prince Pierre went back, therefore, to the cradle of his
family, and there got into a fierce quarrel with an opposition
member of the Chamber of Deputies. The deputy, like a true Corsican,
nourished revenge. He waited till he went up to Paris, and there
laid his grievances against the emperor's cousin before his fellow
deputies of the opposition. They at once made it a party affair.
On Jan. 2, 1870,--the day the reformed Chamber of Deputies was
opened,--two journalists of Paris, M. de Tourvielle and M. Victor
Noir, went armed to Pierre Bonaparte's house at Auteuil to carry
him a challenge. They found the prince in a room where he kept
a curious collection of weapons. He was a coarse man, with an
ungovernable temper. High words were exchanged. Victor Noir slapped
the prince in the face, and the prince, seizing a pistol, shot
him dead. He then turned on M. de Tourvielle; but the latter had
time to draw a sword from his sword-cane, and stood armed. Victor
Noir's funeral was made the occasion of an immense republican
demonstration, and M. Rochefort reviled the emperor and all his
family in the newspaper he edited, "La Lanterne," calling upon
Frenchmen to make an end of the Bonapartes.
Prince Pierre was tried for murder, and acquitted; Rochefort was
tried for seditious libel, and condemned. It was an ominous opening
for the new Chamber. The emperor had been most anxious that it
should contain no deputies violently opposed to his new policy,
and the elections had been scandalously manipulated in the interest
of his dynasty.
Thiers complained bitterly to an Englishman, who visited him, of
the undisguised tampering with voters in this election. He said,--
"The Government pretends to believe in a Chamber elected by universal
suffrage, and yet dares not trust the votes of the electors; but
mark my words, this tampering with an election is for the last
time. What will succeed the Empire, I know not. God grant it may
not be our country's ruin! But the state of things under which we
live cannot last long. It is incumbent on honest men to lay before
the emperor the state of the country, which his ministers do their
best to keep from him. For a long time I kept silent,--it was no
use to knock one's head against a wall; but now we have revolution
staring us in the face, as the alternative with the Empire."
As the little man said this, we are told that the fire in his eyes
gleamed through his spectacles; and as he walked about the room,
he seemed to grow taller and taller.[1]
[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]
The new constitutional ministry, into whose hands the emperor proposed
to resign despotic power and to rule thenceforward as constitutional
sovereign, had for its chief M. Émile Ollivier; Marshal Le Boeuf
(made marshal on the field of Magenta) was the Minister of War.
The debates in the Chamber were all stormy. The opposition might
not be numerous, but it was fierce and determined. It scoffed at
the idea of France being free when elections were tampered with
to sustain the Government; and finally things came to such a pass
that the emperor resolved to play again his tromp-card, and to
call a _plébiscite_ to say whether the French people approved of
him and wished to continue his dynasty. They were to vote simply
Yes or No.
There was not such open tampering this time with the vote as there
had been in the election of the deputies, but all kinds of Government
influences were brought to bear on prefects, _maires_, and other
official personages, especially in the villages. The result was
that 7,250,000 Frenchmen voted Yes, and one and a half million,
No. But to the emperor's intense surprise and mortification, and in
spite of all precautions, there were 42,000 Noes from the army. It
was a terrible discovery to the emperor that there was disaffection
among his soldiers. Promotion, many men believed, had for some years
been distributed through favoritism. The men had little confidence
in their officers, the officers complained loudly of their men. A
dashing exploit in Algeria made up for irregularities of discipline.
Even the staff officers were deficient in geography, and the stories
that afterwards came to light of the way in which the War Department
collected worthless stores, while serviceable ones existed only on
paper, seem almost incredible. Yet when war was declared, Émile
Ollivier said that he went into it with a light heart, and Marshal
Le Bœuf was reported to have told the emperor that he would not
find so much as one button missing on his soldiers' gaiters.
The discovery that the army was not to be depended on, and needed
a war of glory to put it in good humor with itself and with its
emperor, decided Napoleon III. to enter precipitately into the
Franco-Prussian war while he still had health enough to share in
it. Besides this, a struggle with Germany was inevitable, and he
dared not leave it to his successor. Then, too, if successful,--and
he never doubted of success,--all opposition at home would be crushed,
and the prestige of his dynasty would be doubled, especially if
he could, by a brilliant campaign, give France the frontier of
the Rhine, at least to the borders of Belgium. This would indeed
be a glorious crowning of his reign.
He believed in himself, he believed in his star, he believed in his
own generalship, he believed that his army was ready (though his
army and navy never had been ready for any previous campaign), and he
believed, truly enough, that the prospect of glory, aggrandizement,
and success would be popular in France.
Spain was at that time in want of a king. Several princes were
proposed, and the most acceptable one would have been the Duc de
Montpensier; but Napoleon III., who dreaded the rivalry of the
Orleans family, gave the Spaniards to understand that he would never
consent to see a prince of that family upon the Spanish throne. Then
the Spaniards took the matter into their own hands, and possibly
stimulated by a wish to make a choice disagreeable to the French
emperor, selected a prince of the Prussian royal family, Prince
Leopold of Hohenzollern. The Emperor Napoleon objected at once.
To have Prussia on the eastern frontier of France, and Prussian
influence beyond the Pyrenees, was worse in his eyes than the selection
of Montpensier; and it was certainly a matter for diplomatic
consideration. M. Benedetti, the French minister at Berlin, was
instructed to take a very haughty tone with the king of Prussia,
and to say that if he permitted Prince Leopold to accept the Spanish
crown, it would be a cause of war between France and Prussia. The king
of Prussia replied substantially that he would not be threatened, and
would leave Prince Leopold to do as he pleased. Prompted, however,
no doubt, by his sovereign, Prince Leopold declined the Spanish
throne. This was intimated to M. Benedetti, and here the matter
might have come to an end. But the Emperor Napoleon, anxious for a
_casus belli_, chose to think that the king of Prussia, in making
his announcement to his ambassador, had not been sufficiently civil.
A cabinet council was held at the Tuileries. The empress was now
admitted to cabinet councils, that she might be prepared for a
regency that before long might arrive. She and Marshal Le Bœuf
were vehement for war. The populace, proud of their fine army,
shouted with one voice, "A Berlin!" and on July 15, 1870, war was
declared.
Let us relieve the sad closing of this chapter, which began so
auspiciously with the emperor and empress in the height of their
prosperity, by telling of an expedition in which the glory of the
empress as a royal lady culminated.
The Suez Canal being completed, its opening was to be made an
international affair of great importance. The work was the work
of French engineers, led by M. Ferdinand de Lesseps, in every way
a most remarkable man.
England looked coldly on the enterprise. To use the vulgar phrase
both literally and metaphorically, she "took no stock" in the Suez
Canal, and she sent no royal personage, nor other representative
to the opening ceremonies; the only Englishman of official rank
who was present was an admiral, whose flag-ship was in the harbor
of Port Saïd.
The Emperor Napoleon was wholly unable to leave France at a time
so critical; but he sent his fair young empress in his stead. He
stayed at Saint-Cloud, and took advantage of her absence to submit to
a severe surgical operation. The empress went first to Constantinople,
where Sultan Abdul Aziz gave a beautiful fête in her honor, at
which she appeared, lovely and all glorious, in amber satin and
diamonds. She afterwards proceeded to Egypt as the guest of the
khedive, entering Port Saïd Nov. 16, 1869, and returning to Paris
on the 5th of December.
[Illustration: _EMPRESS EUGÉNIE._]
The opening of the canal across the isthmus of Suez, which was
in a manner to unite the Eastern with the Western world, caused
the eyes of all Christendom to be fixed on Egypt,--the venerable
great-grandmother of civilization. The great work had been completed,
in spite of Lord Palmerston's sincere conviction, which he lost no
opportunity of proclaiming to the world, that it was impossible
to connect the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. The sea-level, he
said, was not the same in the two seas so that the embankments
could not be sustained, and drift-sands from the desert would fill
the work up rapidly from day to day. Ismaïl Pasha, the khedive
of Egypt, had made the tour of Europe, inviting everybody to the
opening, from kings and kaisers, empresses and queens, down to
members of chambers of commerce and marine insurance companies.
Great numbers were to be present, and the Empress Eugénie was to
be the Cleopatra of the occasion. But suddenly the khedive was
threatened with a serious disappointment: the sultan, his suzerain,
wanted to join in the festivities; and if he were present, _he_
must be the chief personage, the khedive would be thrust into a
vassal's place, and all his glory, all his pleasure in his fête,
would be gone.
The ancient Egyptians, whose attention was much absorbed in waterworks
and means of irrigation, had, as far back as the days of Sesostris,
conceived the idea of communication between the Nile and the Red
Sea. Traces of the canal that they attempted still remain. Pharaoh
Necho, in the days of the Prophet Jeremiah, revived the project.
Darius and one of the Ptolemies completed the work, but when Egypt
sank back into semi-barbarism, the canal was neglected and forgotten.
It does not appear, however, that the Pharaohs ever thought of
connecting the Red Sea with the Mediterranean. The canal of Sesostris
and of Pharaoh Necho was a purely local affair, affecting Egyptian
commerce alone.
Some modern Egyptian engineers seem first to have conceived the
project of a Suez canal; but the man who accomplished it was the
engineer and statesman, M. de Lesseps. In spite of all manner of
discouragements, he brought the canal to completion, supported
throughout by the influence and authority of the khedive. The first
thing to be done was to supply the laborers and the new town of
Ismaïlia with drinking water, by means of a narrow freshwater canal
from the Nile. Till then all fresh water had been brought in tanks
from Cairo. Next, a town--called Port Saïd, after the khedive who had
first favored the plan of the canal--was built on the Mediterranean.
The canal was to run a straight southerly course to Suez. At Ismaïlia,
the new city, it would connect with the railroad to Cairo; between
Port Saïd and Ismaïlia it would pass through two swampy lakes.
In seven years Port Saïd became a town of ten thousand inhabitants.
The total length of the canal is about ninety miles, but more than
half of it passes through the lakes, which had to be dredged. The
width of the canal is a little over one hundred yards, its depth
twenty-six feet. About sixty millions of dollars were expended on
its construction and the preliminary works that it entailed,--these
last all tending to the benefit and prosperity of Egypt.
The grand opening took place Nov. 16, 1869. The sultan was not
present; he had been persuaded out of his fancy to see the sight,
and the khedive was left in peace as master of ceremonies. The
Emperor Francis Joseph of Austria was there in his yacht, and the
Empress Eugénie, the "bright particular star" of the occasion, was
on board the French war-steamer "L'Aigle." As "L'Aigle" steamed
slowly into the crowded port, all the bands played,--
"Partant pour la Syrie,
Le brave et jeune Dunois,"
the air of which had been composed by Queen Hortense, the mother
of the emperor, so that it was dignified during his reign into
a national air.
That afternoon there was a religious ceremony, which all the crowned
heads and other great personages were expected to attend. Two of
the sovereigns or heirs-apparent present were Roman Catholics,
one was a Protestant, and one a Mohammedan. The Crescent and the
Cross for the first time overshadowed worshippers joining in one
common prayer. The empress appeared, leaning on the arm of the
Emperor of Austria. She wore a short pale gray silk, with deep
white Brussels lace arranged in _paniers_ and flounces. Her hat and
veil were black, and round her throat was a black velvet ribbon.
The Mohammedan pontiff who officiated on the occasion was understood
to be a man of extraordinary sanctity, brought from a great distance
to lend solemnity to the occasion. He was followed by the chaplain of
the empress, a stout, handsome Hungarian prelate named M. Bauer.[1]
[Footnote 1: Blackwood's Magazine.]
Even up to the morning of November 17, when the passage of the
fleet was to be made through the canal, there were persons at Port
Saïd who doubted if it would get through. The ships-of-war had been
directed to enter the canal first, and there was to be between
each ship an interval of a quarter of an hour. They were ordered to
steam at the rate of five miles an hour. "L'Aigle" entered first.
"La Pelouse," another French ship, had the greatest draught of
water; namely, eighteen or nineteen feet.
The scenery from the Suez Canal was not interesting. Lakes, then
undrained, stretched upon either side; the banks of the canal being
the only land visible. But as evening fell, and the sun sank, a
rich purple light, with its warm tones, overspread everything,
until the moon rose, touching the waters with her silvery sheen.
Before this, however, the foremost ships in the procession had
safely reached Ismaïlia. There the khedive had erected a new palace
in which to review his guests. They numbered about six thousand,
and the behavior of many of them did little credit to civilization.
The khedive had arranged an exhibition of Arab horsemanship and
of throwing the _Jereed_; but the sand was so deep that the horses
could not show themselves to advantage. The empress, wearing a
large leghorn hat and yellow veil, rode on a camel; and when an
Italian in the crowd shouted to her roughly, "Lean back, or you
will fall off, heels over head," the graceful dignity with which she
smiled, and accepted the advice, won the hearts of all beholders.
That night a great ball was given by the khedive in his new palace.
"It was impossible," says an English gentleman, "to overrate the
gracious influence of the empress's presence. The occasion, great
as it was, would have lost its romance if she had not been there.
She it was who raised the spirit of chivalry, subdued the spirit
of strife, enmity, and intrigue among rival men, and over commerce,
science, and avarice spread the gauzy hues of poetry."
Alas! poor empress. Ten months later, she was hurrying as a fugitive
on board an English yacht on her way into exile, having passed
through anxieties and griefs that had streaked her hair with gray.
Even in the midst of her personal triumphs in the East, there were
clouds on the horizon of her life which she could see darkening
and increasing. A few days before the fêtes of the opening of the
canal, she writes to her husband, who, though unfit for exertion,
had gone into Paris on some state occasion,--
"I was very anxious about you yesterday, thinking of you in Paris
without me; but I see by your telegram that everything passed off
well. When we observe other nations, we can better perceive the
injustice of our own. I think, however, in spite of all, that you
must not be discouraged, but continue in the course you have
inaugurated. It is right to keep faith touching concessions that
have been granted. I hope that your speech to the Chamber will be
in this spirit. The more strength may be wanted in the future,
the more important it is to prove to the country that we act upon
ideas, and not only on expedients. I speak thus while far away, and
ignorant of what has passed since my departure, but I am thoroughly
convinced that strength lies in the orderly sequence of ideas. I
do not like surprises, and I am persuaded that a _coup d'état_
cannot be made twice in one reign. I am talking in the dark, and
to one already of my opinion, and who knows more than I can know;
but I must say something, if only to prove, what you know, that my
heart is with you both, and that if in calm days my spirit loves
to roam in space, it is with you both I love to be in times of
care or trouble."