EPILOGUE
Sedan was a defeat even more bitter than Waterloo. Although the war was far from over, it delivered France into the hands of Prussia, and generations of Frenchmen have never forgiven Napoleon III for their country’s humiliation. Yet during the shabby régime that followed, many regretted the Second Empire. For the next few years the possibility of a Bonapartist restoration can never have been very far from the empress’s thoughts, and with reason.
After a dramatic reunion with the Prince Imperial in Hastings, at the Marine Hotel on Eastern Parade, mother and son stayed on the Sussex coast for the next fortnight. Filon, who appeared out of the blue on 12 September, was shocked to see them in such ‘modest apartments’, if impressed by the way in which the empress adapted to ‘private life’. Before the end of the month, however, they had moved into Camden Place at Chislehurst in Kent. Just outside the village, and only twenty minutes by train from Charing Cross station in London, this had been found for them by the tireless Dr Evans. If scarcely imposing, it was a nice enough Georgian gentleman’s mansion, built in red brick. (Today it is the clubhouse of Chislehurst Golf Club.)
Eugénie was pleasantly surprised by the arrival of her former maître d’hôtel from the Tuileries, together with the palace butler and even the principal chef – whose cuisine made a welcome change from the food they had endured at English seaside hotels. Fortunately, money was not a problem. Although the new government had at once confiscated all imperial assets in France, Pauline Metternich had smuggled the empress’s jewellery out of the Tuileries in August and sent it to London in a diplomatic bag – even if she dropped Eugénie when she lost her throne. In any case, Doña Maria Manuela was prepared to help, while Napoleon still owned his mother’s house in Switzerland, Arenenberg.
Eugénie was soon joined by the amiable Duc de Bassano, her former grand chamberlain, and by Marie de Larminat, one of her favourite readers. Together with Mme Lebreton and other refugees, these diehards formed a little court in exile at Camden Place, which quickly became too crowded for comfort. Eugène Rouher, the leader of the Mamelukes, who settled at Richmond was a frequent visitor. Having asked the empress for permission, Filon went back to enlist in the French army – to be arrested, held in prison for weeks with every likelihood of being shot, and then expelled from France.
Since the empress had never abdicated, technically she was still regent, although her authority was recognised only by Marshal Bazaine and the remnant of the imperial army besieged in Metz.
Intending to discuss the situation, Plon-Plon turned up unexpectedly at Chislehurst, the first of his many unwelcome visits. Characteristically, he began by informing Eugénie that ‘Palikao’s government was a ministry of imbeciles’. Understandably she lost her temper, telling him sharply that the general and his ministers had been good and faithful friends, loyal to the very end. ‘Monseigneur, for eighteen years we have watched you criticising the Empire,’ she reminded the prince. ‘You and your friends have never ceased trying to undermine it, and you are continuing to behave in just the same way even though the empire has fallen. No doubt had you been in Paris on 4 September, presumably you could have told us just what we ought to have done. But you were not there, as you have never been at any really dangerous moment, on all too many occasions.’ This brought their discussion to an end, Plon-Plon storming out in a fury.
Meanwhile, a mysterious Monsieur Regnier, of whom nothing was known, had tried to call on her while she was still at Hastings, eloquently explaining to Filon his scheme for her restoration. Sensing that there was something wrong about the man, she had refused to see him. Regnier was almost certainly a double-agent, employed by Russia as well as Prussia, since both powers hoped to avoid recognising the ‘revolutionary’ government. Evans said that he possessed a Prussian passport, obtained from the embassy in London, which enabled him to pass through the enemy lines. (Later he would be condemned to death in absentia as a spy by a French military tribunal during Bazaine’s court martial.)
Whoever he may have been working for, Regnier was undoubtedly a very skilful operator. For a time he even succeeded in giving the impression that he had tricked Bismarck into believing he was the empress’s personal representative – he was supposed to have done so by showing him a postcard of the Marine Hotel at Hastings signed by the Prince Imperial, which he had obtained from the gullible Filon. Bismarck sent him to Metz with a proposal that Marshal Bazaine should immediately ask for an armistice and then restore Napoleon III, who would negotiate peace with Prussia. The glib Regnier impressed the marshal so much that he at once dispatched General Bourbaki, commander of the Imperial Guard (and Mme Lebreton’s brother), through the Prussian siege lines, disguised as a doctor from the Red Cross, to Chislehurst in order to obtain the empress’s agreement. When he arrived there, an amazed Eugénie explained to the general that she knew nothing about Regnier’s activities or about the proposal, which she dismissed out of hand. Too bewildered and inarticulate to explain the proposal properly, poor Bourbaki went back to France, hoping to rejoin his men.
After finally meeting and questioning Regnier, and although the meeting confirmed her distrust of the man, she became more interested in his ideas, especially when General Boyer, chief of staff of the French army of the Rhine, arrived from Metz on 22 October with a new, detailed plan which had the Prussian chancellor’s full approval.
General Boyer had seen Bismarck, who had specifically stated that the plan’s primary purpose was ‘for the army of Metz to remain faithful to its oath and become the champion of the imperial dynasty’, and who had then given him a safe conduct through the Prussian lines. Boyer also brought letters from Bazaine and General Frossard, who both implored Eugénie to accept the Prussian conditions for peace, whatever they might be, ‘in order to save the country which will otherwise be utterly destroyed by prolonging the present situation’.
The plan was that after an armistice, Marshal Bazaine should march on Paris and proclaim the empress as regent, whereupon she would summon the illegally dissolved Corps Législatif and Senate, and negotiate a peace treaty – the terms of which would be decided later. All the officers had stayed loyal to the emperor and the army would certainly obey them, Boyer assured her, but, haggard and visibly weak from starvation, he added that she must accept Bismarck’s offer as quickly as possible, since no more than two days’ rations had remained when he left Metz.
However, the general was unable to give Eugénie any information about what Prussia’s conditions were likely to be, nor could she obtain the slightest idea of them despite visiting the Prussian ambassador in London and cabling desperate appeals to King William. Then Bismarck informed her in a telegram that he wanted Bazaine to launch a ‘pronunciamento’ of the sort that had recently taken place in Spain. Well aware that every Frenchman, whether Bonapartist, republican or royalist, was united against the invaders, she saw at once that a coup would alienate the Empire’s remaining supporters by starting a civil war which, as the Prussian chancellor obviously hoped, would weaken France’s resistance.
Bismarck made a serious misjudgement in assuming that he was dealing with a woman who would seize any chance of regaining her throne. Realising the scheme was a trap, she refused to have anything more to do with it, saying that she was not going to give the Prussians a ‘blank cheque’. It was a bitter disappointment – she had genuinely believed that she could obtain better terms than the ‘Government of National Defence’ at Tours.
On 27 October Bazaine and his starving army surrendered unconditionally – the entire French regular army had now been taken prisoner. With it disappeared the last vestige of imperial authority and France’s only government became the one at Tours. Yet the emperor thought Eugénie had been right to refuse Bismarck’s offer. ‘I am in complete agreement with you, and the letters I have written, and which crossed with your last one to me, will show you how well we understand each other, body and soul,’ he wrote from his captivity. ‘It is a thousand times better to live in obscurity and poverty than to owe our position to abandoning our self-respect and our country’s best interests.’
After Sedan, Napoleon had not heard from his wife for over a fortnight. Then three letters reached him on 17 September, the first of many. ‘My heart breaks to see from your letters how deeply wounded you are,’ he told her on 6 October. ‘From our past grandeurs, nothing remains of what once separated us,’ she wrote to him after Metz surrendered. ‘We are more attached to each other, a hundred times more attached, because of our sufferings and all our hopes have become one in the dear young person of Louis. The darker the future, the more we shall feel the need to support each other….’
‘You and Louis mean everything to me,’ she would tell him later. ‘You take the place of family and country. France’s misfortunes move me to the depths of my soul, yet not for one moment do I miss the brilliance of our past life. Simply to be together again, that is all I wish for. My poor cher ami, if only my devotion to you could make you forget just for an instant the trials that you have endured with such greatness of soul. Your long, admirable suffering reminds me of Our Lord.’ Some historians have marvelled at Eugénie’s ‘inconsistency’ in transforming the man whom she had accused of being a coward, because of his surrender at Sedan, into a martyr. They recall how violently she had abused him in that dreadful outburst at the Tuileries in front of Filon and Conti. Yet she remained devoted to him for the rest of his life.
Meanwhile, Napoleon was being treated with almost too much consideration by his Prussian captors. No less disagreeable prison could be imagined than Wilhelmshöhe near Cassel, with its beautiful park and lake – King William used it as a favourite summer residence. Once the palace of the emperor’s late uncle Jerome, as king of Westphalia under the First Empire when it had been called ‘Napoleonshöhe’, it even contained a portrait of the prisoner’s mother, Queen Hortense. Nor could any jailer have been politer than its military governor, General Count Monts. The imperial staff included not only his aide-decamp but such stalwarts as his cousin Prince Joachim Murat and his old friend Dr Conneau – and also his hairdresser from the Tuileries, M. Caumont. The attacks from his stone ceased, for the time being, and there was a definite improvement in his health.
The Prussians were not entirely altruistic, however, keeping a careful account of the cost of the emperor’s upkeep and eventually sending the bill to the government of the Third Republic, and extracting full settlement. Moreover Napoleon’s treatment made an embarrassing contrast to that of most French prisoners of war, some of whom died from exposure in the open cattle trucks in which they were taken to prison camps. Dr Evans, who visited the camps, was horrified by their sufferings during the terrible winter of 1870/1, when 20,000 died from disease. The emperor did what he could, sending money to buy them proper clothing.
The authorities had no objection whatever to the empress visiting Napoleon at Wilhelmshöhe. Dressed in deep black, she arrived on 30 October, having travelled through Belgium. Her husband met her on the palace steps, coldly formal – a little to her alarm – but then there was a highly emotional reunion when they were in private. She stayed with him for four days before returning to England.
General Monts was fascinated by Eugénie, noticing that her obvious exhaustion seemed to add to her distinction. As a good Lutheran he observed patronisingly, in a book written many years afterwards, that he was convinced her sufferings had purged her of all traces of frivolity. The forcefulness of her manner made him feel sure that she had always influenced her husband’s policies, and ‘was accustomed to having the last word’. He also claimed that she spoke to Napoleon not as an equal but as a grown-up talking to a child, which must have been a figment of his imagination.
The emperor did not forget the feast of St Eugénie, 15 November. ‘I hope that you received, yesterday and today, my little flowers,’ he wrote. ‘They are not very beautiful, but I could not find any others. My thoughts are with you and I suffer from being far away from you on this day more than any other.’
‘What matters above all else is seeing you again,’ she wrote back with renewed affection. ‘These long days of exile are so sad for me…. I am quite sure God will give us happier days, but when? I cannot tell. Yet my tenderness and love for you continue to grow. I would make any sacrifice to make life happier for you, and the more everything looks dark, the more we should remember that all things have an end, both good and bad.’
Eugénie informed Doña Maria Manuela on 16 November:
The events through which we are living have broken my heart. I cannot get used to the idea of France being in ruins and miserable, even less to the idea that in her day of trial I am not there. In England they are beginning to see that nowadays Prussia and Russia rule the world. I only hope it is frightening enough to shake them out of their apathy … All that matters is saving France, no matter how or by whom. As for us, the world is big enough for us to hide our misfortunes somewhere, even if we are not allowed to save our country.
Even so, it is clear that Eugénie still regarded herself as regent. She had complained to Monts that if only his king had given them back the army in Metz, ‘it would have let us make an honourable peace and restore order in France’. Yet even had the Prussians done so, this was wishful thinking. A scheme she proposed in a letter to Wilhelmshöhe in December, when Paris was besieged and starving, was no less unrealistic. She would go to a city in the French provinces, summon the Corps Législatif and negotiate a peace. The Prussians were bound to offer her better terms than to the Tours government, and she would submit them for approval in a plebiscite.
Horrified, Napoleon forebade the scheme by return of post. (So much for Monts’s view of their relationship.) ‘We cannot take such risks, which might end in ridicule and being arrested by four gens d’armes’, he told her. Even if they did not, any peace was going to be disastrous for France. ‘After the position we have held in Europe, all our actions must bear the hall-mark of dignity and grandeur.’ Eugénie abandoned the scheme – it was her last attempt to take control.
On 30 November Camden Place was honoured by a visit from Queen Victoria. ‘At the door stood the poor empress in black, the Prince Imperial and, a little behind, the Ladies and Gentlemen,’ the queen noted in her diary. ‘She looks very thin and pale, but still very handsome. There was an expression of deep sadness on her face, and she frequently had tears in her eyes.’ As for the Prince Imperial, he was ‘a nice boy but rather short and stumpy. His eyes are rather like those of his mother, but otherwise I think him more like the emperor.’ Victoria’s summing-up was, ‘a sad visit and seemed like a strange dream’.
She invited Eugénie to come and see her at Windsor the following week. ‘What a fearful contrast to her visit here in ’55’, thought the queen. ‘Then all was state and pomp, wild excitement and enthusiasm – and now? … The poor empress looked so lovely in her simple black, and so touching in her gentleness and submission.’
For thirty years their friendship was to grow closer and closer, always unclouded. Yet no two women could have been more different. Filon, who compares them in his memoirs, said that as time went by the contrast grew even more striking. Since he knew her better, his comparison sheds more light on Eugénie than on Victoria:
The Queen was hard-working and methodical, keen to store facts in her brain and arrange them neatly; impulsive like all her race, the empress was incapable of keeping to a regular routine, quick at seeing truths that might escape more experienced eyes, yet then losing sight of them after much reflection and discussion: one woman was very reserved, the other highly indiscreet, but both were incapable of deceit; they had reached an age when one values sincerity more than anything else.
Meanwhile, the Prussians routed the last makeshift armies of France, plundering and burning. Among the casualties was the lovely château of Saint-Cloud, which went up in flames. On 18 January King William of Prussia was proclaimed Emperor William I of Germany by his fellow rulers in the hall of mirrors at Versailles – the new Germans were unaware they had set out on a road which was going to end in two world wars. Napoleon realised it immediately, however, prophesying that eventually Europe would have to crush Prussia.
After an armistice between France and Germany was signed in February 1871 a general election was held in order to produce a National Assembly that would ratify the peace terms. These were draconian, having been designed by Bismarck to crush France for the next hundred years. All of Alsace and most of Lorraine were to be handed over to Germany while a war indemnity of 5,000 million francs would have to be paid to Berlin. Out of 650 deputies elected to the new National Assembly, only 30 were Bonapartists while nearly 400 were Legitimists or Orleanists and, when it met at Bordeaux on 1 March, besides endorsing the peace terms the Assembly formally confirmed the deposition of Napoleon III.
Starved in a terrible siege, humiliated by the Prussian army’s triumphant ceremonial entry into the city and infuriated at the election of so many monarchist deputies, on 18 March Paris erupted in the revolution which Napoleon and Eugénie had so much feared during the last years of their reign, proclaiming itself an independent republic, the Commune: a fatal mistake had been made in allowing National Guardsmen to keep their rifles, since they now became a citizen army.
Flying the red flag, the Commune was a conscious attempt to repeat the Jacobin Revolution of 1792, reviving the revolutionary calendar and replacing ‘monsieur,’ with ‘citoyen’. Right-wing newspapers were shut down, churches and rich men’s houses pillaged, and banks and insurance companies forced to contribute to the régime. Hundreds of innocent people were thrown into prison, merely on suspicion of being enemies of the revolution.
From Versailles, Thiers, now President of France, ordered a second siege of Paris which lasted from 2 April until 21 May. The communards shot their hostages in batches, among them a group of seventy who included the archbishop of Paris, besides murdering dozens of monks and priests. A detachment billeted themselves in Eugénie’s orphanage, raping the children and leaving many of the girls pregnant. When government troops stormed in, during the ensuing ‘Bloody Week’ fire-bombers (often women called ‘pétroleuses’) destroyed the Tuileries, the Palais Royal and the Hôtel de Ville – the Louvre was saved only just in time. Led by General de Gallifet, Thiers’s men shot over 17,000 communards in seven days, 40,000 more being tried and either shot or transported.
Among those transported was that scourge of the Second Empire, Henri de Rochefort, who had been one of the Commune’s leaders but he soon escaped from his prison settlement in New Caledonia. Always unbalanced, he then became not only an extreme Legitimist but a fanatical anti-Semite.
Released from captivity, Napoleon III landed at Dover on 20 March 1871, two days after the revolution had broken out in Paris. In tears, Eugénie met him on the quay while the English crowd cheered. He quickly settled down to life at Camden Place, and despite the sadness of exile this was the most serene period of his marriage. The empress’s jewels (sold to the Rothschilds for over £150,000), together with her money in Spain provided an adequate income, and she was an excellent manager. He may have also had secret funds.
Queen Victoria came to see the ex-emperor soon after his arrival, admiring the way in which ‘he bore his terrible misfortunes with meekness, dignity and patience’. She says he had ‘grown very stout and grey and his moustaches are no longer curled or waxed as formerly, but otherwise there was the same pleasing, gentle and gracious manner’. (One wonders if the Prince Consort, had he lived, would have been quite so welcoming.) Eugénie told Paléologue how much she owed to the queen: ‘You would never believe all the delicate attentions she lavished upon us in those first cruel days of our exile. She always treated us as sovereigns, just as in the days when we were allies of England; one day she said to me: “you no longer have the sovereignty of power; but you have a still higher sovereignty, that of misfortune”. Her visits to Chislehurst did us so much good.’
Another visitor to Chislehurst was Dr Evans, who found Napoleon more worried about the miseries of France than his own misfortunes. He was also impressed by the ‘kindly way’ the emperor spoke of the men who were running France. Evans did not realise that he was already planning to win them over when he regained his throne.
Germany was now the leading European power in Europe, while France was becoming second-rate. Plenty of Frenchmen resented the prospect. Moreover, France was not just Paris and many people had been horrified by both the Commune and its repression. At the same time, a majority of deputies in the Assembly felt there was something undignified about a republic. While most of them were monarchists, their candidates handicapped them. The Comte de Chambord was a charismatic and unmistakably regal personality, but as a romantic who lived in the Middle Ages he was incapable of making the compromises that were needed. If highly intelligent, his rival the Comte de Paris was dull and uninspiring. In any case there was a long-standing vendetta between Legitimists and Orleanists.
Even the republicans were divided into left and right, conservatives fearful of revolution such as Thiers, or radical firebrands like Gambetta. Meanwhile the government was dominated by Orleanist aristocrats, who were unable to restore their pretender. Nobody was satisfied with the situation.
Crushed by war and the indemnity, the French were beginning to miss the prosperity they had known under Napoleon III. While the army blamed the emperor for failing to prepare adequately for hostilities in 1870 and for appointing commanders such as Bazaine, they recognised his bravery on the battlefield, dismissing smear stories about ‘the Coward of Sedan’.
The British ambassador Lord Lyons was convinced that the emperor still enjoyed widespread support. His assessment was borne out by an agent of the Rothschild family in Paris, known only by his initials ‘C. de B.’, who in October 1871 reported that a group of senior French bureaucrats had secretly carried out a political survey. They estimated that if France had the opportunity of choosing its rulers, 1 million would vote for the Comte de Paris, 2 million would vote for a republic, 2 million would vote for the Comte de Chambord – and 3 million for the emperor.
No doubt this may have been wishful thinking by the bureaucrats, who were probably closet Bonapartists – the administration was full of them – yet C. de B., a self-confessed Orleanist, reluctantly put Napoleon’s chances even higher, and believed that he could secure 5 or even 6 million votes in a plebiscite. C. de B. also claimed that in the capital’s salons, ‘the possibility of a Bonapartist restoration is the one topic of conversation’.
Eugène Rouher, the old ‘Mameluke’ and former president of the Imperial Council of State, was elected to the Assembly for a Corsican constituency in February 1872, leading a small but vigorous group of about thirty Bonapartist deputies. He had already founded La Situation, one of several newspapers that supported Napoleon III. A network of Bonapartist clubs busily distributed large quantities of leaflets and photographs.
Among the propaganda photographs was a carte-de-visite-sized re-enactment of Eugénie escaping from the Louvre. About to enter the fiacre outside the main entrance, she is shown with Mme Lebreton and flanked by Prince Metternich and Cavaliere Nigra, as she graciously says goodbye to Conti and Lieutenant Conneau, who are seen kissing her hand; a fifth man holds open the cab door. (In reality, as we now know, she had already made Conti and Conneau leave her, while there was no fifth man.) The photograph is of course a montage, the faces having been superimposed over those of the actors who replayed the scene. It was produced by ‘M. le Cte Aguado’ – Olympe Aguado, once the imperial court’s photographer.
The emperor had been plotting his return to France ever since his surrender at Sedan. His light had been seen burning all night throughout his enforced stay at Wilhelmshöhe, and there were even rumours that he had been in touch with Regnier during the abortive negotiations for an armistice at Metz. He was undoubtedly in close contact with his leading supporters in France, not merely with Rouher and his friends, but with senior army officers who might help him launch a coup. Bonapartist agents were constantly slipping in and out of the Channel ports.
Just how seriously M. Thiers’s government regarded the possibility of a Bonapartist restoration could be seen from the large number of French spies who swarmed around Camden Place, much to the locals’ amusement. One of them installed himself with atelescope in the windmill on Chislehurst Common while others actually climbed trees overlooking the house. Frenzied attempts were made to identify every visitor, lists of names being sent regularly to Paris. A valet was bribed lavishly to steal important-looking papers from Napoleon’s desk.
When Eugénie went to Spain in September 1871 to stay with Doña Maria Manuela, quite innocently the emperor and the Prince Imperial travelled down together to Torquay for a holiday. To their surprise, they frequently found themselves being cheered in the streets, with shouts of ‘Vive L’Empéreur!’ a reception that was zealously noted by republican spies. Did the people of Torquay know something that they did not, they wondered? In France, newspapers began to talk of an imminent attempt by Napoleon, who was said to be about to sail from Torquay with an expeditionary force, his destination being the sea port of Rochefort, where troops and police were put on full alert. Secret agents were urgently dispatched from Paris to Spain with orders to shadow the empress wherever she went, since she was clearly involved in what the press was by now calling the ‘descent from Torquay’ – obviously she was about to launch a simultaneous rising across the Pyrenees, from an as yet unidentified base in the Basque country.
Republican hysteria over the ‘descent from Torquay’ delighted the emperor, encouraging him to spread rumours of other imaginary risings. At the same time, however, he was hatching a real and very formidable plot. He wanted to re-establish the throne for the sake of his son, and he was confident he would succeed, telling the boy, ‘If the Empire has lost fifty per cent of its prestige, it still has the other half.’
During the autumn of 1872 the watcher in the windmill on Chislehurst Common must often have had the thrill of sighting Plon-Plon through his telescope. The self-proclaimed republican was enthusiastically helping to plan the restoration of the Second Empire. By the end of the year a detailed programme for a coup had been decided, which can to some extent be reconstructed. Timed for 20 March 1873, it was full of striking and no doubt deliberate echoes of Napoleon I’s return from Elba in 1815.
Like his uncle, the emperor would discreetly slip away from exile, in a yacht from Cowes where he was going to convalesce after an operation. Crossing to Belgium, he would join Plon-Plon in Switzerland. They would then enter France across Lake Annecy,making for Lyons, where General Bourbaki was the garrison commander. From here, acclaimed by Bourbaki’s troops, the emperor intended to march to Paris, where Marshal MacMahon would already have won over the key officers in the army. Any deputies opposed to the restoration – which meant most of them – were to be removed at bayonet point from the National Assembly, forced on to a train and incarcerated in the Saint-Cloud tunnel during the coup’s consolidation.
Since both the Tuileries and Saint-Cloud had been burned down, the emperor and empress would use the Louvre as their principal palace. Rouher’s new administration was to include the Comte de Kératry (minister for the interior), MacMahon (minister for war) and Fleury (governor of Paris). Foreign governments, who had been secretly sounded out, made no objections.
The plan had serious weaknesses. Far too much depended on Bourbaki and MacMahon. Although brave enough and a fine leader, the general was notoriously stupid, while if the marshal was a monarchist he was more inclined to favour Legitimism, and in any case he was an unimaginative man, too fond of army regulations, who did not care for political gambles. The most obvious weakness, however, was Napoleon’s poor health.
Everybody felt that Chislehurst was bad for him. ‘These fogs are the cause of all my discomfort,’ he told a German visitor. ‘A fortnight of brilliant sunshine such as we enjoyed at Wilhelmshöhe, and I should be cured.’ Eugénie disliked it just as much. ‘In this foggy weather I feel like a fish in an aquarium,’ she wrote to Maria Manuela in November. ‘At any rate, that’s how it seems when I look out of the window; everything looks as if it is yellow, just like the water in which we put some miserable fish….’ Nor did it help matters that while she loved fresh air, the emperor loved central heating, as hot as possible. Yet nothing disturbed the serenity of these last years together. ‘If you could have seen him at Chislehurst,’ she recalled. ‘Never a word of complaint or blame or recrimination.’ He was helped by his stoicism and his humour. When a dissenting minister invited him to a lecture proving he was the Antichrist he sent Filon, listening to his report with wry amusement.
In December 1872 Napoleon received a German journalist from Cassel, Mels Cohen, who had interviewed him during his time at Wilhelmshöhe and had been impressed by his forecasting the Commune – ‘horrible things will happen in France after the peace’.This time he told Cohen that the republic was a disease that must be eradicated. ‘The Empire will be re-established, that is certain,’ he prophesied confidently. ‘M. Thiers knows that at a single word from me the flag of the Empire would be raised in fifty places at once, from one end of France to another, and the Army would recall as if by magic its ancient battle-cry at Malakoff and Solferino.’ He then added, as if to deny any intention of a coup, ‘M. Thiers knows also that I will never speak that word.’
Napoleon carefully concealed his intentions. Although Dr Evans was convinced that the empire was going to be restored, he was naively sure that the emperor would do nothing to hasten the process. ‘Those persons who imagine that the emperor was at this time conspiring to overthrow the French Republic, and intriguing to recover his throne, are greatly mistaken,’ Evans stated sternly in his memoirs.
Dr Evans never knew of Napoleon’s worries about staying on a horse when he rode into Paris at the head of his troops, or that he practised every day on a wooden horse, commissioned by Eugénie from a sculptor and smuggled into Camden Place.
Although the emperor began to suffer from the gallstone again in September 1872, he insisted that he was going to go on with the coup when Plon-Plon saw him in early December. ‘The worst that can happen to me is being shot like poor Emperor Maximilian,’ he said. ‘Better than dying in bed, in exile’. Shortly afterwards, as a test of his fitness, he tried to ride over to the Woolwich Military Academy, a few miles away, which the Prince Imperial had just entered as a cadet. The pain was so dreadful, however, that he had to dismount after less than a mile. The jolting carriage in which he came home made it worse and he spent three days in bed with a fever, in agony. Reluctantly, he summoned specialists from London. Evans commented, ‘he was at last compelled to give up all exercise, rarely leaving the house’.
Filon confirms that after the loss of their throne Eugénie had given back to her husband all her old affection, especially when she learned how bravely the man branded as a coward by his enemies had behaved at Sedan. He explains that she had completely forgotten her terrible outburst on receiving his telegram after the battle, just as a man forgets a fit of madness. ‘It is my duty to say that during those last hours of married life, perfect sympathy existed between the emperor and empress.’
‘I have been worried to death about the emperor,’ Eugénie – who had never seen Professor Sée’s report – wrote to her mother on 30 December. ‘He has at last agreed to be examined and the examination showed that he has a stone. He will have a first operation the day after tomorrow, and I profoundly hope that having undergone so much awful pain he will get better and eventually be completely cured. I am praying for this and am sick with worry.’
There were two excruciating operations, which Napoleon bore with his usual patience. A third was to be performed on 9 January, but at 10.25 a.m. that day it was realised that he was deteriorating fast and a priest was summoned to give him the last Sacraments. He died twenty minutes later – after muttering to Dr Conneau, ‘We weren’t cowards at Sedan, were we, Conneau?’ Eugénie whispered, ‘C’est impossible!’ again and again. Then she flung herself across the bed, weeping.
In Napoleon’s will he had told his son to ‘make himself thoroughly familiar with the writings of the Prisoner of St Helena, and study the emperor’s decrees and letters … the spirit of my glorious uncle has always inspired and sustained me’. As for his wife, ‘I hope that my memory will be dear to her and that when I am dead she will forgive me whatever sorrows I may have caused her.’ It was a belated apology for his unfaithfulness.
Eugénie was too overcome to attend the funeral at the little Catholic church in Chislehurst, when the Prince Imperial walked behind the hearse at the head of the cortège. There was a crowd estimated at 17,000 while the mourners included all the famous names of the Second Empire – among them Plon-Plon, Fleury, Rouher, Haussmann, Palikao, Bourbaki, the duc de Gramont and Marie-Anne Walewska. There were two marshals of France, seventeen generals and twenty-seven ex-ministers, together with a hundred who had been senators or deputies during the reign. Lord Cowley was there, while Queen Victoria was represented by the Prince of Wales and the Duke of Edinburgh. Marshal MacMahon was absent, however, and so was Princesse Mathilde.
The emperor might not have succeeded in launching his last coup, yet even so his son was greeted with shouts of ‘Vive L’Empéreur! Vive Napoléon IV!’ as he left the church.
The crowd, as well as Eugénie, knew that the Second Empire was not dead yet.