Most intellectuals disliked the Second Empire for its absolutism and for the censorship, however mild. As this was a great era of French literature, the imperial couple were slandered with a venom that still stings, noisily by the republican Victor Hugo, slyly by the Goncourt brothers, who were Orleanists. In any case Napoleon III and Eugénie did not have very much in common with professional writers. No doubt, they had a few literary supporters – Mérimée, Vigny, Gautier, Sainte-Beuve, Sardou (author of a play calledTosca) and Feuillet – while Taine admitted, ‘The emperor understood his age better than anyone.’ But that was all.
Throughout, the ‘immortals’ of the Académie Française, mainly Orleanists, were hostile, led by the Orleanist elder statesman Guizot. Any candidate of whom the Tuileries was known to approve, like Théophile Gautier, would find himself unelected. Despite declaring that he would never occupy his ‘fauteuil’, in 1860 the Dominican Lacordaire was elected to fill Alexis de Tocqueville’s place because he had opposed the coup and had later attacked Napoleon in his sermons. But by the time of his investiture he had come out in favour of the war in Italy and Eugénie attended the ceremony at the Coupole. If she did so from curiosity, she was nonetheless keen to win the support of writers, composers and artists.
‘I go to Monday receptions at the Tuileries’, wrote Hector Berlioz in 1857 while he was composing Les Troiens:
The last time that I and Marie went, the empress had me presented to her, and we discussed my opera in detail; she asked what each act was about. Her ‘gracious’ Majesty (and she is) has read a lot of Virgil and I was amazed by her precise references to theAeneid. My God, she’s beautiful, just the sort of Dido I want. But perhaps not, as her wonderful looks might wreck the opera – the audience would howl down any Aeneas who even thought of leaving her.
Clearly Eugénie had taken a lot of trouble being nice to the prickly M. Berlioz, who was not one of nature’s Bonapartists.
With the limited education of women of her time, Eugénie was ill equipped to cope with intellectuals, some of whom were extremely vain. Her only solution was inviting them to Compiègne. No women writers or artists were asked, except for the sculptor Marcello (Carpeaux’s most distinguished pupil), although she came as a great lady under her real name, the Duchess of Castiglione-Colonna. One or two declined, such as the composer Meyerbeer and the painter Ingres. Others found difficulty wearing the obligatory skin-tight silk knee-breeches; the contortions of the novelist Jules Sandeau embarrassed even Mérimée. Such visitors generally slept on the second floor, the Galérie de l’Orangerie. In November 1864 Eugène Fromentin, the painter and writer (notably of an autobiographical novel, Dominique) informed his wife – writers’ wives were not invited – that he was between Corvisart, the emperor’s doctor, and Meissonnier the painter. The younger Dumas, author of La Dame aux Camélias, was next door and Gustave Flaubert further down the gallery. Émile Augier, the playwright, was on another floor. ‘Is he warmer?’ asks Fromentin. ‘That’s all we worry about. I have a lobby, a bed-sitting room, two dressing-rooms, a room for my servant, a whole forest of logs on my fire – and Siberia two steps away from my fireplace.’
Not so prickly as many writers, Octave Feuillet became something of a favourite with the imperial couple after his Roman d’un pauvre jeune homme was performed in the Palace theatre in 1858 – his plots always had happy endings. He was appointed imperial librarian and invited to stay no less than six times. He described one of his visits to Compiègne to his wife Valérie: ‘I am very pleased at being placed directly over the park…. I look down long avenues hidden in the morning by a jewelled, shining frost, with marble gods and goddesses, trellises and flowerbeds and, in the distance, the tall forest towards Pierrefonds. I have only small rooms but they’re very pretty.’ Feuillet enjoyed writing charades and was even more amused by a tableau not of his devising, the ‘Temptation of St Anthony’, who was played by M. de Nieuwerkerker with Mmes de Morny and Girardin as female devils, while he found it hard not to laugh when, led by the aged Duke of Atholl, four Scots chieftains ‘with naked legs’ danced a Highland reel for the empress, ‘a species of bizarre jig’ (une espèce de gigue bizarre). He watched Gounod singing his own songs in a low voice, accompanying himself on the piano and ‘rolling his eyes in a frightful way’. Eugénie, listening with her son on her knee, was moved to tears and had to leave the room. The composer was clearly enchanted at making such an impression.
Other musicians invited besides Gounod included Auber, Ambroise Thomas and Verdi, while among the artists were Delacroix, the younger Isabey Horace Vernet and the sculptor Carpeaux.
The emperor showed more interest in science, which to him meant ‘progress’. During a visit in 1865, Pasteur explained his current work on wine, giving a lecture for the série, Eugénie carrying his microscope and test tubes. He recalled happily that, for a moment, she ‘gave the impression of being transformed into a laboratory assistant’.
‘The bourgeois of Rouen would be even more astonished than they already are, if they knew what a success I’ve had at Compiègne’, wrote Flaubert. ‘I’m not exaggerating. Simply, instead of being bored, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed myself.’ But the dressing and the strict timetable were trying. He had had reason before to be grateful to the empress. When prosecuted in 1857 for his ‘immoral’ novel, Madame Bovary, she had interceded with the judges. Similarly, when Baudelaire (never asked to Compiègne) was fined 300 francs he did not possess, on publishing Les Fleurs du Mal, he wrote to Eugénie, who had the fine reduced to 50 francs. Neither Flaubert nor Baudelaire nor, save for Vigny, any of the writer guests who was not already a Bonapartist, was completely won over to the Second Empire, but undoubtedly they all became less hostile. Inviting them was the séries’ most positive feature.
‘At Compiègne, the empress needed the utmost skill to perform her challenging and enormously varied obligations as hostess’, Filon recalls:
The guest list had first to be decided on and the séries organised so as to consist of fairly equal numbers of patricians, international figures, diplomats, artists, men of learning, pretty women and members of the Académie Française. These different elements had to be neatly balanced to harmonise; feuds and quarrels were taken into account when achieving variety and contrast while at the same time avoiding hurt feelings or misunderstandings. To do this required a knowledge of each guest’s personality and background…. Many of them could testify to her triumphant success.
No other nineteenth-century court used hospitality with such imagination.