After the Prince Imperial’s birth the court became more austere, but this changed in 1859 with the arrival in Paris of Pauline Metternich. Two years younger than the empress, she was the wife of the Austrian ambassador, a small, slight woman with wavy chestnut hair, simian features and a sallow complexion. If far from beautiful, she had a lively, amusing face lit by huge, dark eyes, shoulders that were admired by Winterhalter and a pretty bosom. (Asked why she had had her bust sculpted by Carpeaux, she replied ‘I may be ugly, but I’ve got nice details.’) What made her so attractive was an extraordinary dynamism, inherited from her half-insane Hungarian father Count Sandor. She was also totally Parisian in her attitude, despite her lack of French blood.
Pauline’s husband, who was also her uncle, was the great chancellor’s son. Only thirty, a handsome, amiable grand seigneur without his father’s genius, a lover of music who was on friendly terms with Verdi and Wagner, he had been given the job of restoring good relations between France and Austria after the Italian war. His success owed a good deal to his wife.
The princess, whom Mérimée thought looked ‘half great lady and half tart’, soon became known as ‘the prettiest belle laide in Paris’ and acquired the odd nickname of ‘Cocomacaque’ (‘Cocoa Monkey’). Her dress sense made her a leader of fashion, while her eccentricity amused most people, if not perhaps everybody. Known to turn cartwheels in her crinoline, she founded a smokers’ club where she and her friends could enjoy cigars. She also played the piano, singing some extremely vulgar Parisian songs.
Long after first seeing Eugénie at Biarritz in September 1859 one recalled that impression: the empress was wearing her red shirt and the black skirt looped up for walking in the country that showed her ankles. (Old dowagers grumbled that she dressed ‘like the dancers at the Opéra’.) Pauline was struck by her beauty and an easy charm that made you feel you had known her for years. She was also impressed by Napoleon III’s pleasant manners and lack of self-consciousness.
‘Madame la princesse de M… who affects the mannerisms and tone of the inferior type of prostitute, has become a great favourite of the empress, who now invites her to all her parties’, sniffed Horace de Viel Castel. ‘She drinks, she smokes, she swears, she’s ugly enough to frighten you, and she tells dirty stories.’ Whatever the count may have said, in Mme Carette’s opinion Pauline was ‘a great lady to her finger-tips’.
One may perhaps wonder what endeared someone like this to a woman who disapproved quite so strongly of Offenbach. Yet Pauline Metternich had a good deal in common with Eugénie, coming from an aristocratic background instead of the steps of a throne, while as a girl she too had liked hard exercise and been a superb horsewoman and reckless driver. For all her oddity, she was highly intelligent and very amusing. Above all, she knew how to make the empress enjoy herself.
Despite Austria having only recently been an enemy, the Metternichs behaved with such tact that the Austrian embassy, then in the rue de Grenelle, became the smartest house in Paris, with endless dinners, receptions and balls. ‘The Princess Metternich receives after midnight every evening’, said Lillie Moulton. ‘To sit up till twelve o’clock to go to her is very tiresome, though when you are once there you do not regret having gone. It is something to see her smoking her enormous cigars.’
Lillie went to a ball in the rue de Grenelle, among the other guests being Napoleon and Eugénie. Johann Strauss had been brought from Vienna for the evening and for the first time Paris danced to the ‘Blue Danube’. ‘We had thought Waldteufel perfect; but when you heard Strauss you said to yourself you had never heard a waltz before’, Lillie tells us. She was also impressed by the princess’s ‘wonderful taste’ as a decorator, admiring a new ballroom hung with lilac and pink satin.
Besides enjoying Strauss, Pauline Metternich was a pioneer Wagnerian and persuaded the emperor to invite the composer to give a performance of Tannhäuser at the Opéra. When it was hissed and booed, she stood up amid the tumult, cheering and beating the edge of her box with her fan till it broke – only making matters worse. Afterwards, she insisted fiercely, ‘I did what I could to save Wagner’s honour.’
‘The court is disporting itself at Compiègne’, Viel Castel recorded in December 1863. ‘The young fry are playing charades and that restless little monster Princess de M…. is dancing in ballets.’ She was particularly good at directing the plays staged during theséries, although she sometimes fell out with the cast. When Persigny’s wife, who had very beautiful blonde hair, was playing a lady’s maid, she refused to let her wear it loose. ‘Do be kind and remember that her mother was a little crazy.’ begged Eugénie, who loathed quarrels. ‘My father was crazy too and I’m not going to give in,’ said Pauline.
This performance was a tableau vivant rather than a play, a recreation of Watteau’s Dejeuner Champêtre – nostalgia for the days before 1789 – but often Compiègne productions were more up to date, and so was Pauline. In 1865 she made a memorable appearance in a review called Les Commentaires de César, in compliment to the emperor’s book on Julius Caesar. As leading lady, she sang a song as a vivandière from the Zouaves, and another as a Paris cab-driver – smoking a pipe, speaking impeccable argot and swearing horribly. There was a repeat performance for charity at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris two years later and, perhaps because it took place during a cab strike, she was cheered to the echo. Mme Carette tells us, she sang ‘with more style and spirit than I ever heard in any theatre’.
The princess genuinely admired Eugénie, writing afterwards of ‘her grace, her kindness, her ravishing beauty …’. She shared her interests in decoration and in clothes. At the same time, she persuaded her to be a little more adventurous and once or twice they seem to have travelled together on the top of Paris buses, unrecognisable in veils. There were rumours they did so disguised as men, and even of a successful hoax that they were going to attend a reception wearing tights – several thousand people gathered outside the building, only to be disappointed.
The empress grew so fond of Pauline that she commissioned Ernest Hébert to paint a sketch of her for the private salon at the Tuileries. She also kept a photograph of the princess in her bedroom.