On 18 August – the feast day of St Helena, Comte Horace de Viel Castel observed – Queen Victoria and Prince Albert sailed into Boulogne, with the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal. They were met by the emperor who rode with them to the station where they boarded a train for Paris. Arriving when it was nearly dark at the Gare de Strasbourg (now Gare de l’Est), the royal party drove in six carriages (the sovereigns with the Princess Royal in the first, the fourteen-year-old Prince of Wales with Plon-Plon in the second), along the boulevards and the Champs Elysée, across the Bois de Boulogne, to the lovely château of Saint-Cloud in the countryside. Troops lined the entire route. A crowd 800,000 strong, some standing on the rooftops, cheered them in the dusk, waving banners with greetings in English. The empress was waiting for them at Saint-Cloud, where their rooms were hung with Gobelins tapestries and Lyons silks, furnished with the finest Louis XV or Louis XVI cabinets, with Flemish or Venetian old masters.
The Goncourt brothers relate maliciously how, anxious to outshine Windsor Castle and Buckingham Palace, Eugénie had borrowed some of the items from the Louvre, and had done the same thing at the Tuileries. Since the queen had listed the pictures she hoped to see at the Louvre, she was astonished to find them in her hostess’s palaces. But such details could not spoil the visit. ‘Nothing, no description, can give you any idea of what Paris has looked like for the past week’, Viel Castel wrote afterwards. ‘Streets and boulevards were a forest of banners with triumphal arches everywhere, all bearing the arms or monograms of the British and French sovereigns.’
‘I am DELIGHTED, ENCHANTED, AMUSED and INTERESTED’, Victoria wrote in her diary. ‘The Emperor has done wonders for Paris.’ With Albert, she inspected and admired an international exhibition that displayed exhibits from every European and American country – even from Russia despite the war, Russian businessmen having been given safe conducts. There were glittering balls at the Tuileries and the Hôtel de Ville, and a visit to the Conciergerie where the emperor had been imprisoned. There was an evening when by torchlight during a thunderstorm the royal family saw Napoleon I’s tomb at the Invalides. The queen told her son to kneel down, although privately she thought the shrine looked like a swimming bath. When she and Albert went to the Opéra, at their departure the audience sang ‘God save the Queen’, gave three cheers and then sang ‘God save the Queen’ again.
Napoleon drove the Prince of Wales through Paris in a dog-cart, pointing out the sights. ‘I wish I were your son’, sighed the future Edward VII, remembering his stern existence at home. It was the start of his lifelong love of France.
The climax was a ball in the Galerie des Glaces at Versailles, the ‘Hall of Mirrors’, which had not seen such splendour since 1789 – understandably, as Eugénie had chosen an eighteenth-century print for its inspiration, ‘Une fête sous Louis Quinze’. She was waiting to welcome Victoria, looking, in her guest’s opinion, ‘like a fairy-queen or nymph’. The empress stood at the top of the great marble staircase, which was covered with a purple carpet, its balustrades almost concealed by masses of orchids, ferns and mosses, and lined by Cent Gardes. Her white dress was thickly sewn with diamonds and bunches of green grass, while there were more diamonds at her waist and in her hair.
At ten o’clock sharp the gardens were suddenly lit by rockets and Chinese candles, then ‘a million fireworks’ painted Windsor Castle in the night sky, after which Napoleon and Victoria, Albert and Eugénie, opened the ball. There was little dancing, people preferring to admire the magnificent decorations in the palace and the park. However, the emperor insisted on waltzing with the Princess Royal. Even Viel Castel agreed that the evening had been ‘beyond all praise’.
The nine days went by, more and more amiably, the emperor and Prince Albert even singing duets in German. ‘His German is perfect’, commented the queen approvingly. Throughout, Napoleon was, as the foreign secretary Lord Clarendon put it, ‘making love’ to Victoria. He took her for a long walk in the park at Saint-Cloud, during which they discussed European politics with the utmost frankness and he paid her some highly agreeable compliments. ‘Isn’t it odd, Lord Clarendon’, she confided later, ‘the emperor remembers every dress he has seen me in.’ She was in ecstasies over his tact, his dignity, his modesty. ‘I know very few people in whom I feel so ready to confide or to speak to so frankly. I felt, I can’t quite explain it, so safe with him.’
The friendship between Eugénie and the queen grew still stronger. She confessed to Victoria that she was pregnant and that, despite two previous miscarriages, she expected to bear a child. The queen was full of sympathy and useful advice. As the end of the visit approached, both the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal, who had begun to worship the empress, begged her to ask their mother to let them stay for a few days longer in Paris.
The emperor took the royal family out to their yacht in his barge when they left from Boulogne on 27 August. Victoria’s visit had been no less of a dazzling success than his own to England. ‘Throughout her stay the celebrations have been superb,’ Viel Castel admitted – despite observing, when Plon-Plon received the Order of the Bath, ‘the Queen would have done better to give him a cake of Windsor soap’.
Moreover, the visit made the French forget, if only for a little while, the war in the Crimea. Early in September, however, their troops finally stormed the Malakhov, the key fort to Sevastopol, which surrendered – and then it was only a matter of time before Russia gave in. When the Imperial Guard returned and Napoleon rode at their head, the Parisians threw flowers beneath his horse’s feet, and the subsequent peace conference in Paris made it seem that France was once again the leading power in Europe. Yet both Victoria’s visit and victory in the Crimea would turn out to be surprisingly hollow triumphs.
The emperor, said General Fleury, was deeply impressed by the queen’s ‘knowledge of the politics of all Europe and by the obviously very active part she took in the British government’s foreign policy’. Poor Napoleon did not realise that however many state papers she read, and however much she liked ‘my nearest and dearest ally’, she had little influence. Now that Russia had been kept out of the Mediterranean, England lost interest in a French alliance that could easily mean being dragged into another war.
All that survived was the friendship between Eugénie and Victoria. When the imperial couple spent four days at Osborne in August 1857, Victoria told Lord Clarendon that she would have liked them to stay much longer, as she felt ‘none of the gêne of royalty in the society of friends like them’. Ironically, only a few years before, the queen’s advisers had been telling her that the empress was a ‘Spanish adventuress’, yet during the state visits the two women had found a surprising amount in common. They would meet again only occasionally and very briefly until 1870. However, they remained genuinely devoted friends for the rest of their long lives.