THREE
During the early years Eugénie did not find much time for politics, so busy being a hostess and trying to bear a child, with entertaining and setting the fashion. Parisians called her ‘La Reine Crinoline’.
She knew that the régime’s survival depended on her having a son. Plon-Plon was a most unsatisfactory heir, while a daughter could not inherit the throne. Her attitude to sexual matters did not make life easy for her. ‘Physical love, what a filthy business ‘quelle saleté’, she complained to Cécile Delessert, after her honeymoon. ‘Why do men think of nothing else?’
Once, only half-joking, the empress said men were ‘just animals, bears walking on their hind-legs and opening their mouths to frighten poor little women. They don’t bite, however. They simply rattle their chains. Then they dance. Then they give in. Then they pay the bills.’ Often she regarded them as semi-human. Yet she developed an eye for a good-looking one, horrifying Archduke Maximilian by saying she had seen ‘a delicious sailor’ when out driving. ‘If I wasn’t a believer, I would have taken only too many lovers,’ she told Émile Ollivier in 1867. ‘Love is the only good thing there is.’ Ollivier comments in his journal, ‘She’s never had affairs, only flirtations … I’ve seen her at a ball, letting herself be kissed by a man.’
On the other hand she admired beauty in women and to some extent chose her ladies for their good looks, sometimes having their portraits painted. Once she gave a dinner party for the emperor at which the guests were the twenty most beautiful women in Paris. Too much should not be read into this, however – the sapphist Ethel Smyth, who knew her well in old age, tells us ‘she had no sensuality in her nature’.
A pre-Freudian biographer, Roger Sencourt, argues eloquently that Eugénie belonged to a specific type, and that ‘women (or men) who have this Platonic enjoyment of the beauty of their own sex, if they marry, marry those who gratify their ambitions and not their senses …. It explains both her disgust with, and her long loyalty to the first man she had loved.’ In Sencourt’s view it explains, too, her combination of excitability and hot temper with kind-heartedness and generosity.
After two miscarriages, which had made her thoroughly miserable, when Eugénie found herself pregnant again in June 1855, she only saved the child by going to Eaux-Bonnes. ‘If I had left it longer, I would not have been able to have children at all’, she confided to Paca. She went into labour at about midnight on 14 March. Close members of the imperial family were asked to witness the birth. Plon-Plon took his revenge. ‘The Prince stood in the doorway wearing his eye-glass, coolly examining the unfortunate woman who, having thrown almost everything off in her convulsions, was practically naked,’ Princess Bacciochi recalled. ‘The Prince said, “How can you call a woman pretty with legs like that.”’
After twenty-two hours, Eugénie gave birth early on the morning of 16 March. She almost died. Barely articulate, the emperor suddenly cried, ‘Save the empress!’ and the doctor used forceps to extract her child. Later, the doctor said he had never seen such suffering. It was a boy. Overjoyed, Napoleon rushed out of the room in tears and embraced the first five people he saw, then pulled himself together, muttering, ‘I can’t kiss you all!’ As dawn broke, cannon at the Invalides fired a 101-gun salute. On the same day, the emperor amnestied all political prisoners. No longer heir, Plon-Plon refused to attend the private christening, but Mathilde smoothly congratulated the empress on saving the dynasty. Two days later, when market women from Les Halles brought flowers to the Tuileries, Napoleon let them see the baby. Then the diplomatic corps solemnly filed past the cradle, Hübner noting that he had blue eyes and was wearing the red sash of the Légion d’honneur. Cardinal Patrizzi arrived from Rome bringing the Golden Rose – twenty-three gold roses in a gold vase – the highest honour the papacy could give to a woman.
There was more rejoicing when peace was signed with Russia on 30 March, marked by a splendid military parade. ‘Returning to the Louvre at about one in the morning, I met processions of workers in the streets and on the boulevards, carrying torches and cheering the emperor and peace’, records Viel Castel. ‘Who would have recognised the France of 1848?’ Yet there were shadows. Dr Fergusson, one of Queen Victoria’s physicians, had examined Napoleon and found signs of premature ageing. As for Eugénie, she was unable to walk or even stand until the end of May – doctors warned that another child would kill her and that she must never sleep with her husband again.
The Prince Imperial’s formal christening by Cardinal Patrizzi took place at Notre Dame on 14 June. The child was named Napoleon Eugène Louis Jean Joseph, Pope Pius IX being the boy’s godfather. (His parents called him ‘Lou-Lou’ when he was very small, then ‘Louis’.) Hübner said he had never seen a more beautiful service, but Lord Cowley thought it more theatrical than religious, adding that the crowds showed little enthusiasm. Even so, Thomas Couture’s painting of the occasion was one of the most successful official pictures to emerge from the Second Empire.
The child was given a formidable nanny, Miss Shaw, chosen because she was English, while the abbé Deguerry, curé of the Madeleine – afterwards murdered by the Communards – gave him religious instruction. He was made a grenadier of the Imperial Guard when only eight months old and issued with a soldier’s red pay book. A photograph taken when he was five shows him proudly wearing a grenadier’s bearskin. His first proper tutor was M. Monnier.
For a time M. Lévy of the College de Vanves came to the Tuileries every day, bringing a group of his boys so that the prince could study with them. At the end of each week Lévy announced the class’s marks, always beginning, ‘First, His Imperial Highness the Prince Imperial’ – then taking another boy aside, he would whisper ‘You were first, the prince came fifteenth.’ All this changed in 1867 when General Frossard (a former polytechnicien) became his ‘governor’ and the empress appointed Augustin Filon as his tutor, on the recommendation of Victor Duruy. He was assisted by Ernest Lavisse who taught the boy history. Augustin Filon, as loyal as he was gifted, turned out to be an excellent choice.
Eugénie wanted her son brought up with the icy dignity of a Spanish duke, approving highly of Carpeaux’s patrician statue of him with his dog Nero, which was exhibited in 1865. When she was away, however, ‘Lou-Lou’ played games like hide-and-seek with other small boys all over the Tuileries, making what his father called ‘a hellish noise’. Yet if she rebuked the emperor for not stopping him, he would answer, ‘Why spoil his happiest years?’ Father and son enjoyed playing together with the model railway in the park at Saint-Cloud. The child picked up slang from his friends; when his mother told him off, he replied ‘You speak French quite well for a foreigner, Mamma, but you don’t really understand our language.’
Everybody liked the little boy, even the crusty Mérimée. So too, despite herself, did Princesse Mathilde, who joyfully quoted him – ‘Maman has already said some silly things [bêtises] today.’ – and gave him one of the new bicycles as a birthday present.
There were more implications for Eugénie than simply bearing an heir, however; she had made real the Bonapartes’ claim to be a dynasty as well as saviours of the Revolution, the ‘fourth dynasty’, who ruled in succession to Capetians, Valois and Bourbons. Napoleon III ordered a tomb at Saint-Denis, so that he would lie among the old kings, and spoke of his son as ‘L’Enfant de France’ – the term for a royal child during the ancien régime. Above all, under the imperial constitution, Eugénie would now become regent when her husband was away on campaign or should he die before ‘Lou-Lou’ came of age.