During the late nineteenth century, the ‘sick man of Europe’ was a phrase generally applied to the moribund Turkish Empire, whose decline sometimes threatened the peace between the great powers, but suited the Emperor Napoleon III. Only a handful of people realised that intermittently he became very ill indeed, although his courtiers were aware that he seemed to be ageing earlier than most men and suffered from occasional bouts of a mysterious disease, which he tried unsuccessfully to conceal from his wife. His health made Eugénie still more uneasy about the new liberal empire’s viability.
She did not conceal her dislike of Emile Ollivier, ‘Look at him,’ she had said in February to Félix, the chief usher at the imperial court. ‘Don’t you have the impression that he thinks he’s saved us?’ During the same month she had grumbled bitterly, ‘I do not understand what spell M. Ollivier is casting – the emperor seems to be in love with him.’ Her disapproval was due to far more than resentment at the minister’s attempt to exclude her from politics. She genuinely suspected that he was not the right man for a crisis, if one should occur, although he might be able to cope if Napoleon was there to take the real decisions.
Because of the alarming state of France’s relations with Prussia, the senior generals, who had learned about the mysterious disease from court gossip, were beginning to worry about the possibility of the emperor being incapacitated if war broke out. In the Napoleonic state it was essential for the emperor to command his troops at the front – his absence would be unthinkable. What worried Eugénie even more was the thought of his being disabled during a crisis in foreign affairs.
Napoleon had first suffered from the illness in the autumn of 1864, when he had been at Chalons with the army for the annual manoeuvres. One night he had suddenly woken with acute pains in the abdomen, which were so agonising that he thought he must be dying. Baron Larrey, the imperial army’s senior medical officer, identified what seemed to be a gallstone that was blocking the mouth of the urethra and causing an infection. Instead of removing the stone, Larrey merely dislodged it and the infection cleared. Napoleon ordered him to tell no one about the attack, not even the empress.
There were other attacks since then, almost annually. They usually began with a fluctuating fever and a severe headache, and culminated with excruciating pains. On each occasion the emperor was given Larrey’s treatment (which consisted of little more than drinking vast quantities of water) and they had cleared fairly quickly, which meant that at one moment he would seem to be at death’s door and a few days later would appear to be in normal health. Unfortunately the attacks became increasingly painful, so that he was forced to take either laudanum (‘tincture of opium’) or the recently patented chloral, or both – in those days they were the only effective painkillers – which inevitably left him comatose and incapable of concentration.
Eugénie did her best to discover precisely what was causing the attacks. One of the court medical team, Dr Conneau, who was a devoted and long standing personal friend of the emperor, could only think of such possibilities as rheumatism or cystitis. Other medical men suggested that it might be a heart condition, or diabetes. Eugénie learned to look out for such symptoms as blood in her husband’s urine, spasms of the bladder and shooting pains. He himself could not tell her what it was, simply because he did not know; admittedly, if he had known, he would probably have kept it a secret.
When General de Montebello’s wife, a close friend of the empress, fell ill in January 1870, the general suddenly noticed that Eugénie was carefully timing her visits to coincide with those of Mme de Montebello’s physician, Augustin Nélaton, who was also one of the emperor’s physicians. With a shock, Montebello realised that she was doing so in order to question Dr Nélaton about Napoleon’s health.
In June, sensing that he was about to undergo yet another attack, the emperor decided that he wanted a fresh opinion on his malady. Accordingly, Germain Sée, a young professor of medical pathology at the University of Paris who was an expert on diseases of the bladder, came to examine him at Saint-Cloud on 19 June. Professor Sée found that he had a huge gallstone.
Six doctors met in secret on 2 July to discuss Sée’s diagnosis. At first a Dr Fauvel argued eloquently that the cause was not a stone but in fact an abscess in the patient’s bladder, while Dr Conneau was very much inclined to think that it was probably no more than a severe internal chill. In the end, however, all agreed with the professor’s diagnosis. Sée insisted that an operation to remove the stone must take place urgently, adding that it ought to have been performed six months earlier. But Dr Nélaton, the most distinguished surgeon in France, disagreed, saying that they should wait until September and then reassess the situation. Since a majority of the doctors supported Nélaton, all that Professor Sée could do was give his report to Dr Conneau and ask him to present it to the emperor.
Later, a slanderous story was put about by Plon-Plon or by one of his allies, that Eugénie had not only intercepted and suppressed the report but that she had also withheld from Napoleon the doctors’ unanimous opinion that the stone had made him incapable of riding a horse or of bearing the slightest physical fatigue. Her motive, claimed the slander, was to make certain that he either collapsed or died, so that she could be regent until her son came of age. In reality, she did not see the report or know that her husband was suffering from a gallstone until long after, while the doctors had never given any such opinion. Meanwhile, in early July, Napoleon suffered a particularly severe attack which almost totally incapacitated him for several days. He could not have fallen ill at a worse moment.