In 1854, Winterhalter painted the empress in a garden at Versailles, in an eighteenth-century dress of pale gold taffeta and with powdered hair. Only the year before Hübner had watched the ninety-year-old Isabey picking up her fan – if Isabey, who had painted Marie-Antoinette, saw Eugénie dressed like this, he may well have thought that he was seeing a ghost. Princesse Mathilde told the Goncourt brothers it was ridiculous for the empress to compare herself with the queen, yet the two women had much in common. Disliked as foreigners, criticised for their clothes, jewels and parties, both were on insecure thrones and had a vulnerable child.
When Napoleon III asked Eugénie to marry him, he warned of the dangers and reminded her of Marie-Antoinette’s fate, which frightened even Doña Maria Manuela. During her honeymoon the empress visited the Petit Trianon where the queen had played at being a milkmaid, and later installed a copy of the dairy in a small country house near Saint-Cloud. In future years she would warmly encourage the Petit Trianon’s restoration, visiting it regularly – as if hoping to commune with the spirit of her predecessor. Sometimes the great antiquary Count Nieuwerkerker expounded learnedly on how the little palace must have looked in Marie-Antoinette’s day, the empress listening with rapt attention.
As early as 9 May 1853, when Eugénie was pregnant for the first time, she wrote to Paca, ‘I am thinking with terror of the poor dauphin Louis XVII, of Charles I, of Mary Stuart and of Marie-Antoinette. What is going to be my poor child’s destiny? I would a thousand times rather that my son had a less glittering but safer crown.’ In her far from infrequent moods of depression, Eugénie began increasingly to fear that her husband would be overthrown like Louis XVI, and that she too would die a terrifying death. Above all, she worried about the Prince Imperial. Would he end as horribly as the little Dauphin had in the Temple, sixty-three years before?
Viel Castel had noticed the empress’s obvious emotion when shortly after her marriage she went to the Conciergerie to see the cell where Marie-Antoinette had been imprisoned during her trial, and from where she was taken to be guillotined. She also visited the National Archives to read the letter written by the queen on the night before her execution. One night she returned unexpectedly to the Archives, asking the keeper to show her the queen’s last letter again, while she chose Maundy Thursday 1860 (when she was probably fasting) to revisit the cell at the Conciergerie.
Baron Hübner thought that her obsession bordered on the morbid. Staying at Saint-Cloud in April 1855 he was shown the imperial couple’s private apartments, and observed, ‘The empress’s almost superstitious cult for Queen Marie-Antoinette may be seen in her own rooms (these were the rooms that had once been occupied by Marie-Antoinette):
In the bedroom that she shares with the emperor, only one picture hangs on the walls. It is an old print that depicts Louis XVI’s unlucky consort. Clearly, ‘Doña Eugenia’ is convinced that she is going to die on the scaffold. She has said to me more than once, and when I smiled she went red. She mentioned, as absolute proof that a tragic fate awaited her, how when preparing her trousseau for her marriage she had been offered a lace veil that the queen had worn. It was really most tempting, but Mlle de Montijo simply did not have enough money to buy it. She was therefore overwhelmed – both elated and depressed – when opening her wedding presents she found sitting on top of them the same veil, the very same, that had once belonged to Marie-Antoinette.
In October the following year (only a few months after the demoralising ordeal when she had so painfully given birth to the Prince Imperial), the empress and Hübner had another conversation while he was staying at Compiègne, during which they discussed the queen and her execution. ‘I would much rather be assassinated in the streets’, Eugénie confided in the ambassador. ‘I have lost all my sang-froid. Since my lying-in, I have had a deeply disturbed imagination.’ Hübner comments condescendingly, ‘Poor woman. It is no bed of roses being on a throne, even an imitation one.’ Obviously an element of terror contributed to Eugénie’s not infrequent bursts of ill-temper.
Understandably, the birth of the Prince Imperial made the empress think still more of Queen Marie-Antoinette and the dauphin. In London The Times reflected that since Louis XIV no French monarch had been succeeded by his son although almost none of them had been childless, gloomily prophesying, ‘The Napoleon born last Sunday morning may be crowned the last of his line; or may add one more to the Pretenders of France.’ During the weeks that followed the Orsini plot Cowley reported that ‘The poor empress is tormented to death by anonymous letters telling her that the little Prince is to be carried off and the poor child is now never let out of sight of the house.’
Eugénie bought everything she could find that had belonged to the martyred queen, or might have belonged, as if it were a sacred relic. Horace de Viel Castel presented her with a ring worn by Louis XVI, together with Gravelot’s sketch for the invitation to the ball for Marie-Antoinette’s wedding (but, sadly, they did not earn him an invitation to Compiègne). Eventually her collection included furniture, jewellery, paintings, tapestries, bronzes, porcelain and letters – and books whose bindings bore Marie-Antoinette’s coat of arms, particularly prayer-books. Among the most prized items were the queen’s ivory and ebony mandolin, her jewel casket decorated in Sèvres and some exquisite chairs by J.B.B. Demay with the monogram ‘M.A.’. In addition, a bust, a portrait or a print was prominently displayed in the empress’s apartments at each of the imperial palaces.
In 1861 the British foreign secretary Lord Clarendon compared her vendetta with Plon-Plon to the feud between the queen and Philippe Egalité. After his embarrassing refusal to fight a duel with the Duc d’Aumale – one of the Orleanists pretender’s uncles – she had expressed her contempt for Plon-Plon during a dinner at the Tuileries. ‘He will never forgive the empress any more than Egalité did Marie-Antoinette, who was always abusing his lâcheté, and this chimes in curiously with her belief that she is in all things like Marie-Antoinette and that the same fate is reserved for her.’
Rumours of her cult circulated widely, revealing how frightened she was of a revolution and delighting the régime’s opponents, republican or royalist. At the costume ball for the carnival of 1866, on 8 February, she received the guests in a dress of crimson velvet trimmed with sable and a matching toque with red and white plumes – modelled on what the queen had worn in one of Mme Vigée-Lebrun’s portraits. A masked man sidled up through the crowd, to hiss in her ear, ‘Some day you’re going to die just like her, and your son is going to die in the Temple just like the dauphin.’
‘Until 1860, so far as I can make out, most people thought that the empress’s time was entirely taken up with dress and frippery’, said Augustin Filon, the Prince Imperial’s tutor. ‘It was when Italian unity had begun to be very much the question of the day and when this unity, already half-achieved, had started to threaten the pope’s temporal power, that whispers began to circulate about the empress’s political influence.’ This alteration in her public image was not unlike that undergone by Marie-Antoinette seventy years before. As early as 1862 Viel Castel noticed how the resemblance to the queen was being used to damage the empress’s reputation during M. Thouvenel’s sudden replacement as foreign minister by the pro-Austrian Drouyn de Lhuys. Eugénie was blamed by Thouvenel’s enraged friends. ‘I was told this morning that Marie-Antoinette perished because of her Austrian name, and that the Spaniard had better take care of herself’, recorded the diarist. ‘For some days now the unhappy empress has been considered capable of almost any crime – she is even said to be hoping for her husband’s death so that she can become Regent.’
Just as the queen had been accused of plotting against the Revolution, so the empress was blamed for all the Second Empire’s more unpopular policies at home as well as abroad. Filon heard that she was supposed to have her own political party, but never saw any trace of one during his three years at court. What is beyond dispute is that the hostility towards Eugénie noted by Viel Castel was growing stronger every day. There were rumours that she was responsible for the emperor’s failing health, even for France’s loss of standing as a world power after Prussia’s victory at Königgrätz. However half-baked, such rumours may have been, they did her no good.
‘It really is quite extraordinary how much our empress resembles poor Marie-Antoinette’, wrote the loyal if not uncritical Filon, two years later when Eugénie’s unpopularity had soared to alarming heights. This was after he had read the memoirs of Mme Campan, the queen’s woman of the bedchamber during the Revolution. Filon noticed in Eugénie the same love of domesticity as the queen’s, while he thought that he could see certain resemblances in their temperaments – the same mixture of haughtiness and affection, the same vivacity interrupted by moods of melancholy and bitterness. Yet Filon was shrewd enough to recognise at the same time the more sterling qualities that marked the two women – the same morality and decency, together with an honest, unaffected desire not only to please but to serve the French people.
By the end of the 1860s the Second Empire was losing impetus and obviously nearing a crisis. Eugénie’s comparison of herself with Marie-Antoinette, which had begun in 1853 as little more than an affectation, partly romantic and partly superstitious, now seemed only too convincing. It looked as if she had good reason to fear that she might share the queen’s fate.