Thiers, that the second Empire had developed two great statesmen--Cavour
and Bismarck. I do not know of any one great idea, worthy of being
called a contribution to the science of government, which Louis Napoleon
has yet embodied, either in words or actions. The recent elections, and
the events succeeding them, only demonstrate the failure of Imperialism
or Caesarism, after a trial and after opportunities such as it probably
will never have again in Europe. I certainly do not expect any complete
collapse during the present reign. Doubtless the machine will outlast
the third Emperor's time. He has sense and dexterity enough to trim his
sails to each breeze that passes, and he will, probably, hold the helm
till his right hand loses its cunning with its vital power. But I see no
evidence whatever which induces me to believe that he has founded a
dynasty or created an enduring system of any kind. Some day France will
shake off the whole thing like a nightmare. Meantime, however, I am
anxious to help in dethroning the Louis Napoleon of the journals rather
than him of the Tuileries. The latter has many good qualities which the
former is never allowed to exhibit. I believe the true Louis Napoleon
has a remarkably kind and generous heart; that he is very liberal and
charitable; that he has much affection in him, and is very faithful to
his old friends and old servants; that people who come near him love him
much; that he is free and kindly of speech; that his personal defects
are rather those of a warm and rash, than of a cold and stern nature.
But I think it is high time that we were done with the melodramatic,
dime-romance, darkly mysterious Louis Napoleon of the journals. He
belongs to the race of William Tell, of the Wandering Jew, the Flying
Dutchman, the Sphinx to whom he is so often compared, the mermaid, the
sea-serpent, Byron's Corsair, and Thaddeus of Warsaw.
EUGENIE, EMPRESS OF THE FRENCH.
There are certain men and women in history who seem to have a
peculiarity, independent of their merits or demerits, greatness or
littleness, virtues or crimes--a peculiarity which distinguishes them
from others as great or as little, as virtuous or as criminal. They are,
first and above all things, interesting. It is not easy to describe what
the elements are which make up this attribute. Certainly genius or
goodness, wit or wisdom, splendid public services, great beauty, or even
great suffering, will not always be enough to create it. The greatest
English king since the First Edward was assuredly William the Third; the
greatest military commanders England has ever had were Marlborough and
Wellington; but these three will hardly be called by any one interesting
personages in the sense in which I now use the word. Why Nelson should
be interesting and Wellington not so, Byron interesting and Wordsworth
not so, is perhaps easy enough to explain; but it is not quite easy to
see why Rousseau should be so much more interesting than Voltaire,
Goethe than Schiller, Mozart than Handel, and so on through a number of
illustrations, the accuracy of which nearly all persons would probably
acknowledge. Where history and public opinion and sentiment have to deal
with the lives and characters of women, the peculiarity becomes still
more deeply emphasized. What gifts, what graces, what rank, what
misfortunes have ever surrounded any queens or princesses known to
history with the interest which attaches to Mary Stuart and Marie
Antoinette? Lady Jane Grey was an incomparably nobler woman than either,
and suffered to the full as deeply as either; yet what place has she in
men's feelings and interest compared with theirs? Who cares about Anna
Boleyn, though she too shared a throne and mounted a scaffold?
_Absit omen!_ I am about to speak of an illustrious living lady, who has
in common with Mary Stuart and Marie Antoinette two things at least: she
has a French sovereign for a husband, and she has the fame of beauty.
But she has likewise that other peculiarity of which I spoke: she is
interesting. It is only speaking by the card to say that by far the most
interesting of all the imperial and royal ladies now living is Eugenie,
Empress of the French. I think there are princesses in Europe more
beautiful and even more graceful than she is, or than she ever could
have been; I fancy there are some much more highly gifted with
intellect; but there is no woman living in any European palace in whom
the general world feels half so much interest. There is not the
slightest reason to believe that she is a woman of really penetrating or
commanding intellect, and should she be happy enough to live out her
life in the Tuileries and die peacefully in her bed, history will find
but little to say about her, good or bad. Yet so long as her memory
remains in men's minds, it will be as that of a princess who had above
all things the gift of being interesting--the power of attracting toward
herself the eyes, the admiration, the curiosity, the wonder of all the
civilized world.
"We count time by heart-throbs, not by figures on a dial," says a poet
who once nearly secured immortality, Philip James Bailey. There
certainly are people whose age seems to defy counting by figures on a
dial. Ask anybody what two pictures are called up in his mind when he
hears the names of Queen Victoria and the Empress of the French, no
matter whether he has ever seen the two illustrious ladies or not. In
the case of the former I may safely venture to answer for him that he
sees the face and figure of a motherly, homely body; a woman who has got
quite beyond the age when people observe how she dresses; to whom
personal appearance is no longer of any importance or interest. In the
case of the latter he sees a dazzling court beauty; a woman who, though
not indeed in her youth, is still in a glorious prime; a woman to
captivate hearts, and inspire poets, and set scandal going, and adorn a
ball-room or a throne. The first instinctive idea would be, I think,
that the Empress of the French belonged positively to a later generation
than the good, unattractive, dowdyish Queen of England. Yet I believe
the difference in actual years is very slight. To be sure, you will find
in any almanac that Queen Victoria was born on the 24th of May, 1819,
and is consequently very near to fifty-one years of age; while the fair
Eugenie is set down as having been born on May 5th, 1826, and
consequently would now appear to be only in her forty-fourth year. But
then Queen Victoria was born in the purple, and cannot, poor thing, make
any attempt at reducing by one single year the full figure of her age.
History has taken an inexorable, ineffaceable note of the day and hour
of her birth; and even court flattery cannot affect to ignore the
record. Now Eugenie was born in happy obscurity; even the place of her
birth is not known by the public with that certainty which alone
satisfies sceptics; and I have heard that the date recorded as that of
her natal hour is only a graceful fiction, a pretty bit of polite
biography. Certainly I have heard it stoutly maintained that if any
historian or critic were now to be as ungallant in his researches as
John Wilson Croker was in the case of Lady Morgan (was it not Lady
Morgan?), he would find that the birth of the brilliant Empress of the
French would have to be dated back a few years, and that after all the
difference between her and the elderly Queen Victoria is less an affair
of time than of looks and of heart-throbs.
About a dozen years, I suppose, have passed away since I saw the Empress
Eugenie and Queen Victoria sitting side by side. Assuredly the
difference even then might well have been called a contrast, although
the Queen was in her happiest time, and has worn out terribly fast since
that period. But the quality which above all others Queen Victoria
wanted was just that in which the Empress of the French is supreme--the
quality of imperial, womanly grace. I have never been a rapturous
admirer of the beauty of the Empress; a certain narrowness of contour in
the face, the eyes too closely set together, and an appearance of
artificiality in every movement of the features, seem to me to detract
very much from the charms of her countenance. But her queenly grace of
gesture, of attitude, of form, of motion, must be admitted to be beyond
cavil, and superb. She looks just the woman on whom any sort of garment
would hang with grace and attractiveness; a blanket would become like a
regal mantle if it fell round her shoulders; I verily believe she would
actually look graceful in Mary Walker's costume, which I consider
decidedly the most detestable, in an artistic sense, ever yet indued by
mortal woman. Poor Queen Victoria looked awkward and homely indeed by
the side of this graceful, noble form; this figure that expressed so
well the combination of suppleness and affluence, of imperial dignity
and charming womanhood. Time has not of late spared the face of the
Empress of the French. Lines and hollows are growing fast there; the
bright eyes are sinking deeper into their places; the complexion is
fading and clouding; malicious people now say that, like that of the
lady in the "School for Scandal," it comes in the morning and goes in
the night; and the hair is apparently fast growing thin. But the grace
of form and movement is still there, unimpaired and unsurpassed. The
whitest and finest shoulders still surmount a noble bust, which, but
that its amplitude somewhat exceeds the severe proportions of antique
Grecian beauty, might be reproduced in marble to illustrate the contour
of a Venus or a Juno. I have seldom looked at the Empress of the French
or at any picture or bust of her without thinking how Mary Wortley
Montagu would have gone into bold and eloquent raptures over the superb
womanhood of that splendid form.
Well, the face always disappointed me at least. It seems to me cold,
artificial, narrow, insincere. It wants nobleness. It does not impress
me as being the face of a frivolous woman, a coquette, a court
butterfly; but rather that of one who is always playing a part which
sometimes wearies. If I were to form my own impressions of the Empress
of the French merely from her face, I should set her down as a keen,
politic woman, with brains enough to be crafty, not enough to be great.
I should set her down as a woman who needs and loves the stimulus of
incessant excitement, just as much as a certain class of actress does.
Indeed, I think I have seen in the face of more than one actress just
such an habitual expression, off the stage, as one may see in the
countenance of the French Empress. I fear that sweet and gracious smile,
which is said to be so captivating to those for whose immediate and
special homage it is put on, changes into sudden blankness or weariness
when its momentary business has been done. Sam Slick tells us of a lady
whose smile dropped from her face the moment the gazer's eyes were
withdrawn "like a petticoat when the strings break;" and if I might
apply this irreverent comparison to the smile of an Empress, I would say
that I think I have noted just such a change in the expression of the
brilliant Eugenie. Indeed, it must be a tiresome part, that which she
has had to play through all these resplendent years; a part thrilling
with danger, made thorny by many sharp vexations. Were the Empress of
the French the mere _belle_ of a court, she might doubtless have
joyfully swallowed all the bitternesses for the sake of the brightness
and splendor of her lot; were she a woman of high, imperial genius, a
Maria Theresa, an Anne of Austria, she might have found in the mere
enjoyment of power, or in the nobler aspirings of patriotism, abundant
compensation for her individual vexations. But being neither a mere
coquette nor a woman of genius, being neither great enough to rise
wholly above her personal troubles, nor small enough to creep under them
untouched, she must have suffered enough to render her life very often a
weary trial; and the traces of that weariness can be seen on her face
when the court look is dropped for a moment.
The Empress seems to have passed through three phases of character, or
at least to have made on the public opinion of France three successive
and different impressions. For a long time she was set down as a mere
coquette, a creature whose soul soared no higher than the aspiration
after a bonnet or a bracelet, whose utmost genius exhausted itself in
the invention of a crinoline. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any
invention known to modern Europe had so sudden and wonderful a success
or made the inventor so talked about as Eugenie's famous _jupon
d'acier_. A sour and cynical Republican of my acquaintance once declared
that anybody might have known the Empress to be a _parvenue_ by the mere
fact that she could and did invent a petticoat; for he maintained that
no born emperor or empress ever was known to have done even so much in
the way of invention. Decidedly, the Empress did a great deal of harm in
those her earlier and more brilliant days. To her influence and example
may be ascribed the passion for mere extravagance and variety of dress
which has spread of late years among all the fashionable and would-be
fashionable women of Europe and America. It is not too much to say that
the Empress of the French demoralized, in this sense, the womanhood of
two generations. How literally debauching her influence was to the
women immediately under its control, the women of the fashionable world
of Paris, I need not stop to tell. Graceful, gracious, and elegant as
she is, she did undoubtedly succeed in branding with a stamp of
vulgarity the brilliant court of the Second Empire. It is not wonderful
if scandal said coarse and bitter things about the goddess of
prodigality who presided over the revels of the Tuileries. The most
absurd stories used to be told of the amusements which went on in the
private gardens of the palace and in its inner circles; and the levity
and occasional flightiness of a vivacious young woman thirsting for
fresh gayeties and new excitements were perverted and magnified into
reckless and wanton extravagances. Of course it was inevitable that
there should be scandal over the birth of the Prince Imperial. Were the
Empress Eugenie chaste as ice, pure as unsunned snow, she could not,
under the circumstances, escape that calumny.
About the time of her sudden and mysterious escapade to London, the
Empress began to emerge a little from the character of a mere woman of
fashion, and to become known and felt as a politician. People say that
some at least of the influence and control which she began to obtain
over her husband was owing to her knowledge of his many infidelities and
his reluctance to provoke her into open quarrel. Unless Eugenie was
wholly free from the jealousy which is supposed to lie in the heart of
every other woman, she must have suffered cruelly in this way for many
years. In her own court circles, at her own side, were ladies whom
universal report designated as successive _maitresses en titre_ of the
Emperor Napoleon. Stories, too, of his indulgence in low and gross
amours were told everywhere, and, true or false (charity itself could
not well doubt that some of them were true), must have reached the
Empress's ears. She suffered severely, and she took to politics--perhaps
as a harassed man sometimes takes to drinking. Her political influence
was, in its day, simply disastrous. She was always on the wrong side,
and she was always impetuous, unreasoning, and pertinacious, as cynical
people say is the way of women. She became a devotee of the narrowest
kind; and just as Madame de Maintenon's religious bigotry did infinitely
more harm to France than the vilest profligacy of a Pompadour or a
Dubarry could have done, so the religious fervor of the Empress Eugenie
threatened at one time to prove a worse thing for the State and for
Europe than if she had really carried on during all her lifetime the
palace orgies which her enemies ascribed to her. Reaction,
Ultramontanism, illiberalism, superstition, found a patroness and leader
in her. She fought for the continued occupation of Rome; she battled
against the unity of Italy; she recommended and urged the Mexican
expedition. Louis Napoleon is personally a good-natured, easy-going sort
of man, averse to domestic disputes, fully conscious, no doubt, of his
frequent liability to domestic censure. What wonder if European politics
sometimes had to suffer heavily for the tolerated presence of this or
that too notorious lady in the inner circles of the French court? "Who
is the Countess de ----?" I once asked of a Parisian friend who was
attached to the Imperial household--I was speaking of a lady whose
beauty and whose audacities of dress were then much talked of in the
French capital. "The latest favorite," was the reply. "I shouldn't
wonder if her presence at court cost another ten years of the occupation
of Rome."
With the Empress's introduction to politics and political intrigue, the
era of scandal seems to have closed for her. She dressed as brilliantly
and extravagantly as ever, and she would take as much pains about her
toilet for the benefit of Persigny and Baroche and Billault at a Council
of State as for a ball in the Tuileries. She received the same sort of
company, was surrounded by the same ladies and the same cavaliers as
ever. But she ceased to be herself a subject of scandal--a fact which is
not a little remarkable when one remembers how many bitter enemies she
made for herself at this period of her career. She seems to have
seriously contemplated the assumption of a great political and religious
part--the part of the patroness and protectress of the Papacy. I believe
she studied hard to educate herself for this part, and indeed for the
work in politics generally which devolved upon her. The position of
Vicegerent, assigned to her by the Emperor during his absence in the
Lombardy campaign, stirred up political ambition within her, and she
seems to have shown a remarkable aptitude for political work. She
certainly sustained the opinion expressed by John Stuart Mill in his
"Subjection of Women," that the business of politics, from which laws in
general shut women out, is just the one intellectual occupation in
which, whenever they have had a chance, they have proved themselves the
equals of men. When Eugenie was raised to the Imperial throne, she
appears to have had no better education than any young Spanish woman of
her class, and that certainly is not much. A lady once assured me that
she was one of a group who were presented to the Empress at the
Tuileries, and that there being in the group two beautiful girls from
America, to whom Eugenie desired to be particularly gracious, her
Imperial Majesty began to ask them several questions about their native
land, and astonished them almost beyond the capacity to reply by kindly
inquiring whether they had come from New York "over the sea, or over the
land." But the Empress has read up a good deal, and mastered much other
knowledge besides that of geography, since those salad days. Meanwhile,
she became more and more the divinity of the Ultramontanes; and the
French court presented the interesting spectacle of having two rival and
extreme parties, one led by the Emperor's wife, and the other by his
cousin, Prince Napoleon, between whom the Emperor himself maintained an
attitude something like that of the central figure in a game of seesaw.
I presume there can be little doubt that the Empress regarded her
husband's portly cousin with a cordial detestation. She is not a woman
endowed with a keen sense of humor, nor in any case would she be quite
likely to enjoy anything which was humorous at her own expense; and
Prince Napoleon is credited broadly with having said things concerning
her which doubtless made his friends and followers and boon companions
laugh, but which, reported to her, as they assuredly would be, must have
made her cheek flame and her lips quiver. Moreover, the Red Prince was
notoriously in the habit of turning into jest some things more sacred in
the eyes of the Imperial devotee than even her own reputation. She
feared his tongue, his reckless wit, his smouldering ambition. She
feared him for her boy, whose rival and enemy he might come to be; and
Prince Napoleon had more sons than one. Therefore the rivalry was keen
and bitter. She was for the Pope; he was for Italy and the Revolution.
She sympathized with the South in the American civil war; Prince
Napoleon was true to his principles and stood by the North. She favored
the Mexican enterprise; he opposed it. She was for all manner of
repressive action as regarded political speaking and writing; he was for
a free platform and free press. Her triumph came when, during the
Emperor's visit to Algeria, Prince Napoleon delivered his famous Ajaccio
speech--a speech terribly true and shockingly indiscreet--and was
punished by an Imperial rebuke, which led him to resign all his
political offices and withdraw absolutely from public life for several
successive years.
But just when the Empress seemed to have the field all to herself, her
political influence began somehow to wane. Perhaps she grew a little
weary of the work of statecraft; perhaps she had not been so successful
in some of her favorite projects as she had expected to be. The Mexican
expedition turned out a dismal, ghastly failure, and that enterprise had
always been regarded as the joint work of the two influences which
cynical people say have usually been most disastrous in politics--the
priest and the petticoat. Then the idea of working out the scheme of
European politics from the central point of the Tuileries was suddenly
exploded by the unexpected intrusion of Prussia, and the dazzling
victory in which the Bonaparte as well as the Hapsburg was overthrown
and humbled. The old framework of things was disjointed by this
surprising event. A new political centre of gravity had to be sought for
Europe. France was rudely pushed aside. The fair Empress, who had been
training herself for quite a different condition of things, found
herself now confronted by new, strange, and bewildering combinations.
One thing is highly to her credit. I have been assured by people who
claim to know something of the matter, that her earnest influence was
used to induce the French Government to accept, without remonstrance,
the new situation. While Louis Napoleon was committing the inexcusable
blunder of feeling his way towards a war with Prussia, and thereby
subjecting himself to the ignominy of having to draw hastily back, the
voice of the Empress, I am assured, was always raised for peace. But I
think the new situation was too much for her. She had made up for a game
of politics between the Pope and Italy; when other players and other
stakes appeared, the Empress was disinclined to undertake a new course
of education. She thereupon passed into the third phase--that of
philanthropic devotee, Lady Bountiful, and mother of her people; and
since then, if she cannot be said to have grown universally popular, she
may fairly be described as having got rid of nearly all her former
unpopularity. Her good deeds began to be magnified everywhere, and even
ancient enemies were content to sing her praises, or, at least, to hear
them sung.
Undoubtedly she has a kindly, charitable heart, and can do heroic as
well as graceful things. Her famous visitation of the cholera hospitals
may doubtless have been done partly for effect, but even in this sense
it showed a lofty appreciation of the duties of an Empress, and could
not have been conceived or carried out by an ignoble nature. When the
cholera appeared in Madrid, the fat, licentious woman who then cumbered
and disgraced the throne of Spain, fled in dismay from her capital; and
this act of peculiarly unwomanlike cowardice told heavily against her
and hurried her deeply down into that public contempt which is so fatal
to sovereigns. The Empress Eugenie, on the other hand, dignified and
served herself and her husband by her fearless exposure of her own life
in the cause of humanity and charity. Kindly and generous deeds of hers
are constantly reported in Paris, and these things go far in keeping up
the superstition of loyalty. Every one knows how gracious and winning
the Empress can be in her personal relations with those who approach
her. Sometimes her demeanor and actions come into sharp contrast with
those of other sovereigns in matters less momentous than the visiting of
death-charged hospital wards. I have heard of an American lady who once
made some rich and complete collections of specimens of American
foliage, collected them at immense labor, arranged them with exquisite
taste in two large and beautiful volumes, and sent one as an offering to
Queen Victoria, the other to the Empress of the French. From the British
court came back the volume itself, with a formal reply from an official
intimating that Her Majesty the Queen made it a rule not to accept such
gifts. From Paris came a letter of genial, graceful acceptance, written
by the Empress Eugenie herself, full of good taste, good feeling, and
courteous, ladylike expression. These are small things, but womanly tact
and grace seldom have much opportunity of expressing themselves save in
just such small things.