The pressures on Eugénie grew throughout the reign. Years afterwards, she was to confide in a close friend, ‘If only you knew what we had to endure!’ It was not just the claustrophobic, demanding life in the great palaces, always on show and in the public eye, hemmed in by stifling pomp and etiquette, that was such a strain on her, but the ever-increasing worries – about her husband’s compulsive infidelities, about a dangerous international situation that deteriorated steadily and about the régime’s sheer insecurity at home, more than just a few times expressed in determined attempts at assassination by bomb, revolver or dagger. (After one particularly narrow escape she commented, ‘It’s our business to be shot at.’) Often her life as a sovereign at the Tuileries, even at Compiègne, must have seemed barely tolerable to a woman who was so highly strung and who in any case was by nature a free spirit, fiercely independent, and who loathed any form of constraint on her personal liberty. She needed a special refuge where she could relax and be herself.
Fortunately, Eugénie had already found it at Biarritz, that obscure, south-western fishing village on the shore of the Bay of Biscay, just north of the Spanish frontier, which she had first discovered in 1847. She loved its pleasant weather, so much gentler than the weather in northern France even if often interrupted by storms; but she took a perverse pleasure in storms. When she returned to Biarritz a few months after her marriage, there were still only a few hundred people in the village, all of them Basque-speaking fishermen and their families, while the only building larger than the little church and the local lighthouse was a ruined castle, the château d’Atalaye. The landscape was ‘wildly picturesque’, with a magic coastline of little bays, caves and grottoes, together with the Pyrenean mountains for a background. But the couple also explored inland, driving through the Landes. One of the expeditions was to visit new mineral springs near Grenade, where a tiny spa (which still exists) was subsequently established, with the name ‘Eugénie-les-Bains’.
In 1854 Napoleon III built the empress a large, rambling and luxurious house to the north of Biarritz, as an annual haven. He christened it, ‘The Villa Eugénie’, although it was really a palace and much bigger than a mere villa. The Villa Eugénie was not without splendour, seven Gobelin tapestries of Don Quixote being priceless. Surrounded by iron railings, the house was protected by Cent Gardes and a detachment of the Imperial Guard in barrack-like lodges at the gates. There were few guests (Mrs Moulton never received an invitation), only one or two statesmen or foreign royalties. Each year, Eugénie spent several weeks at the villa, nearly always with her husband, and frequently with her mother and sister as well. Not only did she walk or drive along the beach as much as possible, watching the waves endlessly, but every morning in her voluminous bathing dress she swam in the sea – preferably when a storm was approaching – swimming very far out from land, from a small boat and escorted by three or four reliable fishermen, to ensure that she would be well beyond the range of any prying telescope. She also liked to sail up and down the Bay of Biscay with Napoleon in their luxurious yacht, although seldom for more than a day, or up the River Irun or along the Spanish coast. (Yachting was a taste which she preserved into her old age.) In addition, she enjoyed driving herself along the shore or through the pretty countryside around Biarritz in a fast dog-cart, with only a single lady-in-waiting for company.
Sometimes, accompanied by Napoleon and a small group of friends, the empress would ride into the mountains for a picnic in some Pyrenean glen or to drink from the mountain springs of mineral water at Cambo. A favourite expedition was to ride up to a peak such as La Grande Rhune, 3,000 feet high, from the top of which they could look down into Spain. Then, leading their horses by the bridle, the party would clamber down the mountain on foot to where carriages were waiting to take them back to the Villa Eugénie. Driving home through the dusk, escorted by outriders carrying flaming torches, they would stop and dine at an isolated tavern, remote but renowned locally for its good country food and wine.
Occasionally, Eugénie would take the emperor to Bayonne a little further up the coast, whenever bullfights were taking place in the town. It was a sport for which she retained a Spaniard’s ineradicable passion and which she tried, unsuccessfully, to popularise in France. (Once she arranged a bizarre, not to say grotesque, boar and cow fight at the Trianon, personally goading the cows with a lance; when the cows, unusually savage animals imported from Spain, turned and charged her, she calmly avoided them, although her terrified ladies ran away screaming.) Needless to say, there was a certain amount of criticism from the not very effective ‘animal rights’ lobby of the day, while republicans attempted to portray her in pornographic pamphlets as a bloodthirsty pervert who took sexual pleasure in such horrible spectacles. On the whole, however, as is so often the case with people who enjoy hunting – or even bullfighting – she was genuinely fond of most animals, especially horses.
A barely credible yet solidly documented adventure, resembling some wild tale from one of Alexandre Dumas’s novels, took place during the Biarritz holiday of 1858. After the empress had met and made friends with ‘Monsieur Michel’, a handsome French Basque who was the most successful smuggler in the entire Pyrenees – and the most powerful since he controlled all the main smuggling routes between France and Spain – he boldly invited the emperor and herself to dine with him at the lair high up in the mountains where he hid his contraband. Although Michel was not much better than a brigand, they knew they would be perfectly safe in his hands because all the French Basques were fanatical Bonapartists, and they accepted. Accompanied by a small, carefully picked escort, the imperial party was guided by smugglers along secret, hair-raisingly precipitous paths up to a huge cave, below a mountain peak just across the Spanish border. Tables and chairs were waiting in the cave, which was lit by torches. Throughout a splendid meal the night outside was illuminated by fireworks, while the smugglers sang and danced, serenading the guests with guitar music. Their host enthusiastically joined in the dancing himself as soon as the meal was over. ‘The empress simply could not stop herself’, says an admiring eyewitness, a doctor who had come with the imperial party. ‘Throwing off her hat and cloak, she started to dance a particularly graceful fandango. She was completely unaffected and altogether enchanting, the look on her face being one of pure delight. We all of us felt that the empress had come back to the land of her birth and that, for a moment, she had regained the freedom of her early days.’
‘The freedom of her early days’ is a highly significant phrase. Those precious six weeks spent each year at Biarritz, after midsummer, were certainly the closest that Eugénie came to recovering it, and to releasing at least some of her frustration. Here the etiquette of the Tuileries, even of Compiègne, was relaxed to the barest minimum and there was a good deal of boisterous horseplay. On more than one occasion, the same courtier-doctor tells us that the empress and her ladies chased the emperor and his gentlemen through the villa, flicking them with twisted napkins and making them jump over tables and chairs.
When Prince and Princesse Metternich first came here in September 1859, Pauline Metternich was astonished to find the empress sitting quietly at a big round table playing patience, her ladies reading or sewing as they sat with her. It reminded Pauline of life in a country house rather than in a palace. She noticed, however, that when the emperor came in, Eugénie rose to her feet – as she always did so, ‘even when one was alone with her in her study or her private drawing-room’. Nevertheless, she called her husband ‘Louis’, never ‘Napoleon’.
Pauline Metternich went on a mountaineering expedition with Eugénie, who wore a broad-brimmed Spanish hat. Tough as she was, Pauline found it hard going, but when they halted for a picnic, the empress of the French danced a vigorous and lengthy fandango. Everyone else was exhausted by the ascent. A tearful Mme de la Bedoyère begged to be left to die, and had to be carried down by relays of mountaineers, Eugénie grumbling, ‘My ladies are always ill, by land or by sea.’
The household dreaded her love of the sea, as Pauline makes clear in ‘Une promenade en mer’. One afternoon in September 1859 the empress insisted on everyone accompanying her despite a high wind. Blown across the Bay of Biscay like the Flying Dutchman, all save Eugénie were seasick, the ladies, led by Clothilde de la Bedoyère, sobbing and screaming. The boat was almost sent to the bottom by huge waves when trying to re-enter Biarritz. By now it was 2.00 a.m. and Napoleon was waiting on the jetty. ‘We haven’t had much luck with our little voyage’, the empress told him nervously. ‘This is the last time you go on one of these escapades,’ he replied, the only time Pauline ever saw him in a bad temper.
But nothing would stop her. In October 1867 Mr Whitehurst, the Daily Telegraph correspondent, watched Eugénie’s little steamer ‘staggering too and fro, and occasionally shipping a sea’. When a gale blew up the captain tried to land his passengers at Saint-Jean-de-Luz, but the boat hit a rock. ‘In a few minutes the empress was sitting in water up to her waist, and the prince was almost out of his depth.’ Keeping their heads, they were rescued in the nick of time, but the panic-stricken pilot jumped overboard, hit his head and was drowned.
‘Twenty years ago no Frenchman would have believed that this little Basque village could have become the seat of an imperial Court’, wrote Whitehurst, noting that the site of the Villa Eugénie had been bought for £12. Now the smart world spent holidays at ‘Eugénieville’, buses bringing day-trippers from Bayonne or San Sebastian. There were hotels and a casino. Eugénie continued to mountaineer and picnic – as well as to sail – yet the first thing Felix Whitehurst saw on arriving was ‘a compact crowd … following the emperor and empress, who were strolling up the high street’.