‘I am alone now,’ Eugénie wrote to her blind old mother at Madrid early in September 1879, ‘in a country where I am forced to live and die.’ She described herself as ‘truly crushed’. For the moment the English were sorry for her, she said but their sympathy would soon fade. One day there would be an obituary in The Times, then it would all be over. ‘Not a single friend to pray at my tomb,’ she prophesied. ‘Alone in life – alone in death.’ Within two months Doña Maria Manuela, too, was dead, leaving the bulk of her considerable fortune to her daughter.
In March 1880 the empress went on what she called ‘a pilgrimage’ to South Africa, to retrace her son’s last weeks. On Queen Victoria’s instructions a British general accompanied her, Sir Evelyn Wood, together with two of the prince’s closest brother officers, Lieutenants Bigge and Slade of the Royal Artillery, while at Capetown she was the guest of the governor, Sir Bartle Frere. Even so, the journey meant a trek of several weeks through the veldt by wagon, sleeping in tents that were nearly blown away by storms. She spent the night of the anniversary of Louis’s death kneeling in prayer by the cross placed where he had fallen in the little valley – when her candle flickered, she believed that he was there with her.
On the way back the party passed by the battlefield of Isandhlwana, which was still littered with British bones, and at Eugénie’s suggestion they spent a day burying them, shovelling earth over as many as they could, she herself wielding a spade. After the trip Evelyn Wood remained a friend for life while she took a personal interest in the career of Arthur Bigge, whom she considered to be exceptionally able, and on her recommendation the queen made him her assistant private secretary. Her judgement did not fail her – Bigge ended as private secretary to King George V, who created him Lord Stamfordham.
In September 1881 the empress moved into a new and much larger house in Hampshire, Farnborough Hill, which had been built in the 1860s for Longman the publisher, on a knoll overlooking the minute but fast-growing town of that name near Aldershot. She made it even bigger, so that eventually it needed more than twenty servants to run it. (Nikolaus Pevsner described it as ‘an outrageously oversized chalet with an entrance tower and a lot of bargeboarding’). This was to be her final home.
One of the main reasons why Eugénie moved to Farnborough was her wish to create a worthy resting place for the emperor and the Prince Imperial. During his reign Napoleon had prepared a tomb for himself in the crypt of the abbey of Saint-Denis with the kings of France, and until 1879 she had confidently assumed that he would be reinterred there, after her son’s restoration. The little Catholic parish church at Chislehurst was obviously quite inadequate, and if the British had honoured the prince by placing a monument to him in St George’s Chapel, then in her view the French must do as well. Moreover, as a Spaniard, she set a particularly high value on praying for the dead.
Unable to enlarge the mortuary chapel at Chislehurst, she had found a site at Farnborough where she could build a great church dedicated to St Michael, patron saint of France, with a crypt in which their bodies and her own would lie. There would also be an abbey of monks to pray for their souls. The site was on another knoll, opposite Farnborough Hill, separated by the London to Southampton railway line. She would have liked Viollet-le-Duc as architect but, anxious not to upset his new republican masters, he declined. Instead she employed another Frenchman, Gabriel Destailleur, who had remodelled the château de Mouchy for Anna Murat and designed Waddesdon for the Rothschilds. There is a story that she showed him just what she wanted by tracing the church’s outline on the turf with her walking-stick.
Destailleur proved an inspired choice, producing a most beautiful building, admired even by Pevsner, which Ronald Knox described as ‘France transplanted into England’. It is late French Gothic, flamboyant, with swirling tracery, ogee arches, flying buttresses and soaring gargoyles, crowned by a small Baroque dome that is a copy of the dome over the Invalides. Bonaparte eagles and bees abound, even in the Romanesque crypt where there is royal as well as imperial symbolism, with a high altar dedicated to St Louis, to proclaim the Bonapartes’ claim to be the ‘fourth dynasty’ and the legitimate successors of the Bourbons as rulers of France. The two bodies were moved here from Chislehurst in 1888 and placed in red granite sarcophagi, a present from Queen Victoria. Four White Canons (Premonstratensians) were installed in the abbey next door. Often curiously ill at ease with priests, Eugénie soon fell out with the canons, who seem to have been a boorish and uncouth group and whose prior was in any case a republican. Eventually they left, leaving the abbey in a state of squalor.
The empress was on far better terms with their successors. These were a community of scholarly Benedictine monks led by Dom Cabrol, former prior of Solesmes, who had been forced to leave their native land by a growing climate of anticlericalism. They brought with them a tradition of superb Gregorian chant and liturgy that made services in the church worthy of an imperial foundation. As well as a roll of priceless silk that had been presented to her by Sultan Abdul Aziz Eugénie gave them her wedding dress, with which to make vestments. (They are still preserved at the abbey.) Nonetheless, although she attended a monthly requiem Mass in the church, besides the great requiems on each anniversary, normally she preferred to hear Mass in the private chapel at Farnborough Hill.
In 1881 the French authorities allowed her to travel through France so that she could attend the inauguration of a monument to Napoleon III in Milan. On the way back she stayed discreetly in Paris with the Duchesse de Mouchy (Anna Murat) and went to Fontainebleau where, despite an ecstatic greeting from the staff, she wept on seeing again the rooms which had been her son’s. She was almost as upset when she saw what the Prussians had done to her beloved Saint-Cloud.
Two years later she went back to Paris after Plon-Plon’s ludicrously inept attempt at a coup. He had plastered the capital with posters demanding a referendum to decide if France should become an empire again – with himself as emperor – and, promptly arrested by ‘four gendarmes’, was immured in the Conciergerie. Before the ‘César déclassé’ was released and expelled from France, Eugénie rushed over to Paris to see if she could help, her main reason, however, being to try and unite the two branches of the Bonapartist party.
Afterwards Queen Victoria congratulated her on her courage. ‘You know how great are the affection and friendship which I feel for you,’ wrote the queen, ‘and you will, I hope, understand that for a few hours I have been feeling anxious for you.’ Someone who still insisted on styling herself ‘Empress Eugénie’ – although never ‘empress of the French’ – might easily have joined Plon-Plon in the Conciergerie.
Even so, informally if not officially, her relations with the Republic grew more relaxed as the years went by. Despite the French crown jewels being put up for public auction in 1887, a large number of priceless possessions were restored to her. Among them were the Golden Rose, paintings by Winterhalter (including that of herself with her ladies), by Mme Vigée-Lebrun (of Marie-Antoinette and of the dauphin) and by David. Also returned were her collections of Louis XVI furniture and Sèvres porcelain from Compiègne, and the Gobelin tapestries of Don Quixote from the Villa Eugénie. Farnborough Hill became an imperial palace in more than just a nostalgic sense.
Enthusiastically enlarged by Destailleur, the architect of the abbey church who added turrets, gables and huge chimneys, what had originally looked like some sort of cross between a big Swiss chalet and a Scottish hunting lodge was slowly transformed into a vast French château. An undeniably eccentric building, which to Lucien Daudet appeared like ‘a fantastic village’, its elaborate roofs were at different levels and it had an incongruous little clock tower. Inside, Destailleur extended the main gallery by constructing a ‘cloister in the Renaissance style’ that was paved with a marble terrazzo, and added a large, glass-roofed courtyard. The kitchen wing was also extended, to provide accommodation for the staff, while there was an entire new annexe of three storeys. Today the building houses a girl’s school, originally founded as a convent school with Eugénie’s encouragement and still forming a tenuous link with her.
In the empress’s time there were several great drawing-rooms, including a Salon d’Honneur, a Salon des Princesses, a Salon des Dames and a Salon des Greuzes – each of them named according to the paintings they contained. Another room re-created the Prince Imperial’s study at Chislehurst in every detail, with his clothes, his swords and guns, and his books; it was a cross between a museum and a shrine.
A phantom imperial court shared Eugénie’s exile here, one or two of its members spending the rest of their lives with her at Farnborough Hill – notably the veteran secretary Franceschini Pietri. Luncheon was at one o’clock, dinner at eight, and the rosary was said in the chapel at five. She almost invariably went to bed before eleven, the tiny household bowing and curtsying to her when she retired and she herself curtsying in response, as if they were all still at the Tuileries. There were plenty of visitors. Most of them were young relatives from Spain or former courtiers from France, such as Anna Murat, Jurien de La Gravière, Mme Carette or even Mme de Gallifet, although not her husband, the hero of Sedan. (The general had accepted the new régime and eventually became the Third Republic’s minister for war.)
The most faithful visitor was undoubtedly Queen Victoria. Few could equal the delicacy of this fearsome old lady, who wrote often, always in French, inviting the empress to Windsor or Osborne, or to her Scottish castles. As time passed, they grumbled to each other about the infirmities of advancing age, Eugénie’s being rheumatism and bronchitis which, privately, she blamed on the English weather. The queen told her to stop calling her ‘Your Majesty’ or ‘Madame’ – ‘Why not “sister” or “friend” – that would be so much more pleasant.’ Neither would precede the other through a door, gently remonstrating. ‘Après vous, ma soeur.’ Eugénie’s manner towards Victoria was not unlike that of ‘an unembarrassed but attentive child talking to its grandmother’, said Ethel Smyth, who saw them curtsy to each other. ‘The movement of the Queen, crippled though she was, was amazingly easy and dignified; but the empress, who was then sixty-seven, made such an exquisite sweep down to the floor and up again, all in one gesture, that I can only liken it to a flower bent and released in the wind,’ Ethel tells us. They shared similar views on foreign affairs, Victoria becoming increasingly pro-French, a development which an angry Bismarck attributed to Eugénie.
Other sovereigns besides Queen Victoria treated her as an equal. In 1888 alone she was visited at Farnborough by King Oscar of Sweden, King Luis of Portugal, the Crown Prince of Italy and Empress Frederick of Germany, who still remembered with pleasure her visit as the young Princess Royal to Eugénie in Paris over forty years before. Kaiser William II would come in 1894.
In 1892 Eugénie built a villa at Cap Martin between Monte Carlo and Menton, where she was to spend many winters: the Villa Cyrnos (‘Cyrnos’ is Greek for Corsica). En route she usually stayed in Paris at the Hotel Continental, because it stood opposite the site of the Tuileries, overlooking the gardens where the Prince Imperial had played as a little boy – on one occasion a gardener scolded her for picking a flower. During her stay here in 1894 she went to see the dying Victor Duruy in his flat, toiling up eight flights of stairs.
Eugénie had renewed her friendship with Empress Elizabeth of Austria, by now a melancholy, slightly unbalanced wanderer, and became one of the few people in whom Elizabeth would confide. She often wrote to Eugénie, especially after her son Crown Prince Rudolph shot himself and his mistress at Mayerling in 1889. Later, she sometimes stayed with her at the Villa Cyrnos.
In the late 1890s Eugénie regained her energy, learning to ride a bicycle when she was over seventy and exploring the shores of the Mediterranean each summer in her steam yacht, Thistle. This had six cabins but anybody unwise enough to accept an invitation to go for a cruise regretted it, since the boat rolled horribly. Their hostess did not even notice and had lost none of her taste for stormy weather, having herself tied in a chair to the mainmast when rounding the Mull of Kintyre in a high sea.
She watched events in France but took no part in politics although she still thought that a Bonapartist restoration was not impossible – the Third Republic was riven by scandal and royalism was in steep decline, while Plon-Plon had died in 1891. However, Prince Victor Napoleon, whom she regarded as emperor, proved to be an ineffectual pretender. She became a fervent Dreyfusard, convinced that Captain Dreyfus had been wrongly convicted of spying for Germany, and if she did not speak out publicly she quarrelled bitterly with Anna Murat for saying he was guilty. She was outraged when the maniac Edouard Drumont claimed in La Libre Parole that she was anti-Semitic, writing an indignant letter of denial.
‘I feel even more than ever a foreigner, alone in this land,’ she lamented when Queen Victoria died in 1901. ‘I am very saddened and discouraged.’ Yet Edward VII was fond of her too, writing, ‘I knew how deeply Your Majesty would sympathise with us in our grief. Our dear mother was deeply attached to you.’ Queen Alexandra often visited Farnborough, generally without warning.
Maurice Paléologue first met Eugénie at the Hôtel Continental in 1901. ‘Despite her seventy-five years, she retains traces of her former beauty,’ he said. ‘The quick, deep-set eyes shine with a steely, sombre fire and you notice her make-up, the pencilled eyeshadow underlining the rims of the faded eyelashes. Her straight back and upright shoulders do not touch the back of the armchair.’ Among the books she was reading he saw one of the volumes of Sorel’s massive L’Europe et la Révolution Française.
Other sovereigns as well as King Edward continued to treat Eugénie with deep respect. She was invited to Austria in 1906, staying at Ischl. Franz-Joseph met her at the station and at dinner wore the star of the Légion d’honneur with Napoleon III’s head given to him by the emperor long ago; she looked magnificent, her white hair crowned by a jet tiara, recalled an English friend who was present. Yachting in the Norwegian fiords in 1907, she encountered a German cruiser carrying the kaiser, who came on board the Thistleand behaved with the utmost courtesy. (Paléologue’s account of their meeting should be treated with caution.)
Eugénie was ageing well, climbing Vesuvius when she was eighty and sailing with Sir Thomas Lipton on board his famous, ocean racing yacht Erin on at least one occasion. She never tired of travel, her cure for depression, and set out for India on a liner in 1903, although illness forced her to turn back at Ceylon. She welcomed new inventions with enthusiasm. Meeting a young scientist called Marconi, she lent him Thistle to try out his experiments between Nice and Corsica. When his system of wireless communication was established in Canada, she was the first person after Edward VII to whom he transmitted a message. She also became interested in the use of radium as a medicine and was fascinated by aviation, reading everything available on the subject – in 1908 she went to a flying display at Aldershot by Colonel Cody, being photographed with him. She even went to the cinema.
Always practical, Eugénie installed a wireless on her yacht, as well as electric light and a telephone at Farnborough Hill. She also acquired a gramophone, which Filon thought ‘one of the most perfect I ever heard’; she told him, ‘it enables me to listen to entire operas without leaving my home’. She bought a car, too, a large black and green Renault, engaging a somewhat erratic chauffeur to drive it – on one occasion the vehicle and its passengers had to be rescued from a ditch by a steam roller, while in 1913 he was fined for speeding although his employer disliked going at speed.
Speaking noticeably poor English with a strong accent – she invariably dropped her ‘h’s – Eugénie made comparatively few close English friends. Among them, a little surprisingly, was the colourful Ethel Smyth, whom she first got to know in 1891 and who spoke excellent French. A lesbian (and a future admirer of Virginia Woolf), Ethel would cycle to Farnborough Hill in tweed knickerbockers, changing into a dress in the shrubbery. None of this bothered Eugénie. What interested her was that Miss Smyth was a composer and, always eager to overcome ‘sex-prejudice’, she did everything she could to further her career, even arranging for her to sing before Queen Victoria. In Ethel’s memoirs Eugénie emerges as a delightful old lady, if also a fierce one, who when arguing would sometimes bang the table until the glasses rattled.
Predictably, Eugénie approved of the suffragette movement. Despite deploring violence, she ignored Ethel’s prison sentence for smashing an MP’s window and was keen to meet ‘the Militant Leader’. When Mrs Pankhurst came to lunch, they took to each other immediately, and Ethel was asked to bring her as often as possible.
Ethel Smyth’s account of Eugénie, largely ignored by French historians, is telling. ‘Many are under the impression that certain of her qualities were only acquired in old age,’ wrote Ethel. ‘But in 1891 she was a great deal nearer to “les événements”, as she always called the downfall of the Second Empire than in 1918.’ (People had been saying that time had mellowed the empress.) While describing her as the kindest person she had ever met, Ethel admits that Eugénie lacked ‘poetic imagination’ and suffered from an ‘extremely halting and uncertain sense of humour’. What impressed her most was the way – ‘betrayed, falsely accused, vilified – the empress has attacked no one, nor uttered a single word in her own defence’. ‘Can anything transcend the dignity of that long, iron silence?’ asked Ethel.
Isabel Vesey, like Ethel the unmarried daughter of a retired army officer who lived nearby, but a very different personality, became no less of a friend. Eugénie particularly enjoyed her company, inviting her to stay at Cap Martin and for cruises. Isabel remained devoted to the empress for the rest of her life, her diaries and reminiscences in The Times complementing Ethel’s memoirs. She was a guest on Thistle when the kaiser came on board at Bergen in 1907, and noticed how Eugénie ‘rather liked him’, and said ‘he is always most agreeable and charming to her’. Her liking is understandable – he went out of his way to treat her as if she was still empress of the French. Isabel also tells us that when Eugénie gave a young girl a pair of her own shoes, they proved to be too small, although the child only wore size 3.
Another English friend, loyal if scarcely close, was the general who had gone to South Africa with her, and who often came to play tennis at Farnborough Hill in top hat, frock-coat and white flannel trousers. ‘She would enjoy the ludicrousness of dear Sir Evelyn Wood falling on his knees before her on the gravel path, and kissing her hand in the costume he adopted.’
Predictably, Eugénie remained unpopular in France among republicans, who with relentless unfairness accused her of being responsible for 1870. In 1907 Ferdinand Loliée published the first of his poisonous books. There was even antagonism on the right, and not just from royalists. ‘The emperor’s death and the awful tragedy in Zululand should have aroused sympathy for the empress, so sorely tried as wife and mother,’ Jean Guétary, one of Napoleon III’s earliest apologists, had written two years earlier. ‘It did not.’ But although a Bonapartist Guétary was also a bigoted anti-Dreyfusard, outraged at Eugénie having sent a letter of enthusiastic support to Colonel Picquart, the officer who established Dreyfus’s innocence. Even so, Guétary reminded his readers that those most eager for war in 1870 had been the deputies and journalists of the left: Eugénie certainly possessed at least some French admirers among those still faithful to the dynasty.
The son of a famous writer and one of Marcel Proust’s young friends, Lucien Daudet was a homosexual dilettante who was fascinated by the Bonapartes and had great charm, and after presenting himself to Eugénie unintroduced at the Villa Cyrnos in 1899, having arrived on a bicycle, he became almost an adopted son. He brought Jean Cocteau to see her. ‘The eyes remained a heavenly blue although their keenness had been diluted,’ observed Cocteau. ‘A whole sea of blue water looked into you.’ He also noticed her deep Spanish laugh, which ‘conjured up the bull-ring’. Sadly, Daudet never presented Proust, who might have immortalised her in the way that he did Princesse Mathilde.
In 1911, with Eugénie’s grudging permission, Lucien published L’Impératrice Eugénie. The first objective study of her and one of the best, it is an odd, haunting book that stresses the poignancy of her existence, but as a collection of impressions and vignettes rather than a biography it tends to be overlooked, especially by English biographers. Clearly she had told him a good deal about herself, for example how in South Africa a smell of verbena led her to the place where her son had died – it had been his favourite scent. Like Ethel, Daudet is at pains to stress that she is neither frivolous nor a bigot. ‘She hates prejudice … in her eyes Catholics, Jews and Protestants are equal members of humanity.’ He mentions her love of handsome people – ‘for her, as for the Greeks, beauty, intelligence and goodness are inseparable’. While she has few illusions about mankind, she detests cynicism.
The empress gave ‘le petit Lucien’ some good advice in return. ‘Never waste time dramatising life’, she warned him. ‘It’s quite dramatic enough without it.’
In 1910 she revisited Compiègne, discreetly joining a guided tour. However, when it reached the Prince Imperial’s bedroom she nearly fainted and, asking for a chair and a glass of water, raised her veil. Realising who it was, the guide informed the conservateurand they let her stay in the room by herself for ten minutes. Yet she lived firmly in the modern world. ‘Mr Marconi was thunderstruck at her grasp of wireless telegraphy,’ Ethel remembered, ‘and later on the officers of the Royal Aeroplane factory were amazed at her knowledge of their particular subject.’ She planned to go up in an aeroplane but was prevented by the First World War.
If Paléologue may be believed, Eugénie told him in June 1912, ‘There is a lot of electricity in the air. Don’t you think a storm is brewing … the most serious problem I can see in European affairs is the antagonism between England and Germany.’ She added, ‘The danger of war is no longer in doubt.’ In January 1914, just before he left to take up his post as ambassador to St Petersburg, she warned him, ‘Something is rotten in Russia.’(As long ago as 1876 she had written to her mother that ‘In Russia the nobility is corrupt and the court without morals, and the people know it.’)
When the war broke out in 1914 she realised it would be long and bitter, giving her yacht Thistle to the Royal Navy and turning a wing of Farnborough Hill into a small hospital, which she maintained entirely out of her own pocket. Ethel was staggered to learn what immense sums she gave to hospitals in France, in strict secrecy. She also took in Prince Victor Napoleon and his wife and children when they had to flee from Belgium.
‘The spirit of France is beyond all praise and gives one confidence,’ she wrote to Lucien Daudet when the Germans were advancing on Paris in August. From the start she hoped fervently for the recovery of Alsace-Lorraine, and Ethel Smyth recalled what a comfort she was at dark moments, ‘so sane and unshakeable was her faith in ultimate victory’. The empress believed firmly that, together, France and England were unbeatable. She never indulged in xenophobia, however, rebuking anyone who referred to ‘Les Boches’.
Franceschini Pietri, who as the emperor’s secretary had ridden with him during the 1870 campaign, died in 1916 and was buried as he wished, near the stair down to the crypt of Farnborough Abbey – so that the empress would pass him on her way to pray at the tombs of her husband and her son.
Augustin Filon passed away in the same year. He had settled in Croydon, supporting himself by writing until he went blind, and left a book to be published after Eugénie’s death – Souvenirs sur l’Impératrice Eugénie. For Filon
the empress is a true Frenchwoman and a great one … those who know her well refuse to see her as no more than the embodiment of the Second Empire’s elegance and glitter … in reality she had been a convinced idealist in a cynically materialist society…. Just a glance at one of her notebooks, in which she jots down reactions to what she is reading or to a stimulating remark, would show you how wide was the gap in sympathy and outlook that had existed between herself and most of the people who then surrounded her.
A warning that the Germans might bomb Farnborough Hill in error, as it was next to the Royal Aerodrome Factory, exhilarated her. ‘If they come’, she told Ethel, ‘then at least we shall be in the front line.’ Ethel suspected that her own terror increased the empress’s pleasure at the prospect.
Learning in 1917 that the Allies considered Alsace-Lorraine to be part of Germany, she sent the French government a letter written to her by William I in 1871, in which he admitted that the provinces had been annexed purely for strategic reasons and not because their inhabitants were seen as Germans. The letter convinced the Allies that Alsace-Lorraine must be returned to France. It was her last and most effective intervention in foreign affairs.
Eugénie was shrewd enough to guess that conditions in Germany were very bad indeed when the German army postponed its offensive in the summer of 1918. Realising it was beaten, she foresaw that the kaiser would have to abdicate and that many other crowned heads would have to go with him. She was horrified by the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, and by the Treaty of Versailles although she took it down to the crypt to read to the emperor in his tomb. ‘I see in every article of this peace a little egg, a nucleus of more wars…. How can Germany earn the money to pay?’ She also prophesied that if England was not careful ‘Ireland will become a second Bohemia.’
Nonetheless, she was elated by the Allies’ victory, believing that God had let her live so long in order to see Alsace-Lorraine restored to France. In 1919 King George made her a Dame Grand Cross of the British Empire in recognition of her war work, sending the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York (Edward VIII and George VI) to Farnborough to present her with the insignia.
In December 1919 Eugénie returned to Cap Martin, stopping en route in Paris at the Hôtel Continental, where Paléologue called on her. He was shocked by her appearance. ‘Eyes sunk deep in their sockets, eyeballs glassy and staring’, he wrote. ‘Her neck is fleshless, her hands are the hands of a skeleton.’ She was, after all, ninety-three. ‘Yet I could see at once that even now this pitiful frame was ruled by a vigorous, tenacious, proud spirit.’ Still defending the Second Empire, she asked him, ‘Don’t you agree that the World War completely justifies my view that [Imperial] France remained capable of putting up a fight after Sedan?’ She said she was looking forward to revisiting Spain the next spring. ‘Nowadays I am just a very old bat. But, as butterflies do, I still feel I must fly towards the sun. Before death takes me, I should like to see my Castilian sky for a last time.’
Lucien Daudet also called on the empress. He, too, had not seen her since 1914, yet she made him feel it had only been the previous week. She told Lucien about her forthcoming trip to Spain. ‘Do you know, I wanted to go by aeroplane, but people might have said I was a crazy old woman.’ Someone else who met her during that winter was the Duchess of Sermonetta, a smart young Roman. She realised that Eugénie had not lost her sense of fun when she said she had three hats, ‘Trotinette’ for walks, ‘Va t’en ville’ for shopping and ‘La Glorieuse’ for grand occasions. She offered to lend La Glorieuse to the duchess.
In June 1920 the empress went to Spain by sea, sailing from Marseilles to Gibraltar. When her boat put in to Algeciras the warships in the harbour, Spanish and British, gave her a sovereign’s salute of twenty-one guns, which thrilled her as she had not been so greeted since her expedition to Suez over fifty years earlier. Looking like a ghost, she was driven to Madrid where she stayed with her great nephew Alba in the Liria Palace.
Since no doctor, British or French, had dared give chloroform to someone so frail, Eugénie remained half blind from cataracts. However, a Spanish doctor performed the operation without an anaesthetic, restoring her sight completely. As a result she thoroughly enjoyed herself, even going to a bullfight. ‘I’ve come home,’ she declared happily, and she even spoke of going up in an aeroplane at last when she got back to England, now that she could see properly again. But on 10 July she suddenly felt exhausted and in pain, and had to be put to bed without undressing. It quickly became apparent that she was failing. Having received the last sacraments, she died very peacefully at 8.30 the following morning – in a room that had once been her sister Paca’s bedroom, and in Paca’s old bed. Her last words were, ‘I am tired – it is time that I went on my way.’
The coffin was taken to the station in the king of Spain’s state coach, with an escort of halberdiers and footmen carrying tapers. Accompanied by the Duke of Alba and another great nephew, the Duke of Peñaranda, the body of the last empress of the French travelled back by train and ferry to her English home. If unacclaimed by her former subjects, it was received with fitting pomp at Farnborough, drawn from the station on a gun-carriage escorted by cavalry to the abbey church. Here it lay in state for two days, draped in a blue imperial pall which bore the golden eagles and golden bees of the Bonapartes.
The congregation at the funeral on 20 July included George V and Queen Mary, Alfonso XIII and Queen Ena of Spain, and Manuel II of Portugal and the Portuguese queen mother, together with Prince Victor Napoleon, the Bonapartist pretender, and his wife. The Third Republic had protested on learning that the empress would be given a twenty-one gun salute, and, while it did not fire the salute, a battery of Royal Horse Artillery remained drawn up outside the abbey throughout the service. Although the band played the ‘Marseillaise’ instead of ‘Partant pour la Syrie’ (no one remembered how to play it), many people in the packed church bore famous Second Empire names, as the children or grandchildren of her courtiers – Murat, Bacciochi, Primoli, Walewski, Bassano, Bassompière, Clary, Girardin, Fleury. Ethel Smyth and Lucien Daudet were there too. Cardinal Bourne, archbishop of Westminster, celebrated the Mass for the Dead, the monks chanting the Dies Irae, and Abbot Cabrol gave the address. Finally, wearing a nun’s habit, she was laid to rest.
Eugénie’s body still lies with those of Napoleon III and the Prince Imperial in the abbey crypt at Farnborough, where the monks continue to sing an annual requiem for their souls. To those who know and sympathise with her story, the shrine is a place of extraordinary poignancy, her presence almost tangible.
Smyth, Daudet and Filon testify to the empress’s integrity. Human beings of her type do not change so very much and it is clear that during her reign she was already the person whom they knew in exile. Yet France rejected her even before Sedan, as a foreigner and as a woman who dared to covet power. Nevertheless, more than a few contemporaries thought of her as a character out of a play by Corneille, whose women are embodiments of stoicism and endurance, driven by love, honour and duty, and Admiral Jurien de La Gravière often compared her with Chimène in Le Cid.
Her best epitaph, however, is a dedication found by Ethel in a copy of Lord Rosebery’s Napoleon I: the Last Phase, which the author had presented to Eugénie:
To the surviving Sovereign of Napoleon’s dynasty
The empress,
who has lived on the summits of splendour, sorrow
and catastrophe
with supreme dignity and courage.