LITMIR.BIZ

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and if I might apply this irreverent comparison to the smile of an Empress, I would say that I think I have noted just such a change in the expression of the brilliant Eugénie. Indeed, it must be a tiresome part, that which she has had to play through all these resplendent years; a part thrilling with danger, made thorny by many sharp vexations. Were the Empress of the French the mere belle of a court, she might doubtless have joyfully swallowed all the bitternesses for the sake of the brightness and splendor of her lot; were she a woman of high, imperial genius, a Maria Theresa, an Anne of Austria, she might have found in the mere enjoyment of power, or in the nobler aspirings of patriotism, abundant compensation for her individual vexations. But being neither a mere coquette nor a woman of genius, being neither great enough to rise wholly above her personal troubles, nor small enough to creep under them untouched, she must have suffered enough to render her life very often a weary trial; and the traces of that weariness can be seen on her face when the court look is dropped for a moment.

      The Empress seems to have passed through three phases of character, or at least to have made on the public opinion of France three successive and different impressions. For a long time she was set down as a mere coquette, a creature whose soul soared no higher than the aspiration after a bonnet or a bracelet, whose utmost genius exhausted itself in the invention of a crinoline. Indeed, it may be questioned whether any invention known to modern Europe had so sudden and wonderful a success or made the inventor so talked about as Eugénie's famous jupon d'acier. A sour and cynical Republican of my acquaintance once declared that anybody might have known the Empress to be a parvenue by the mere fact that she could and did invent a petticoat; for he maintained that no born emperor or empress ever was known to have done even so much in the way of invention. Decidedly, the Empress did a great deal of harm in those her earlier and more brilliant days. To her influence and example may be ascribed the passion for mere extravagance and variety of dress which has spread of late years among all the fashionable and would-be fashionable women of Europe and America. It is not too much to say that the Empress of the French demoralized, in this sense, the womanhood of two generations. How literally debauching her influence was to the women immediately under its control, the women of the fashionable world of Paris, I need not stop to tell. Graceful, gracious, and elegant as she is, she did undoubtedly succeed in branding with a stamp of vulgarity the brilliant court of the Second Empire. It is not wonderful if scandal said coarse and bitter things about the goddess of prodigality who presided over the revels of the Tuileries. The most absurd stories used to be told of the amusements which went on in the private gardens of the palace and in its inner circles; and the levity and occasional flightiness of a vivacious young woman thirsting for fresh gayeties and new excitements were perverted and magnified into reckless and wanton extravagances. Of course it was inevitable that there should be scandal over the birth of the Prince Imperial. Were the Empress Eugénie chaste as ice, pure as unsunned snow, she could not, under the circumstances, escape that calumny.

      About the time of her sudden and mysterious escapade to London, the Empress began to emerge a little from the character of a mere woman of fashion, and to become known and felt as a politician. People say that some at least of the influence and control which she began to obtain over her husband was owing to her knowledge of his many infidelities and his reluctance to provoke her into open quarrel. Unless Eugénie was wholly free from the jealousy which is supposed to lie in the heart of every other woman, she must have suffered cruelly in this way for many years. In her own court circles, at her own side, were ladies whom universal report designated as successive maîtresses en titre of the Emperor Napoleon. Stories, too, of his indulgence in low and gross amours were told everywhere, and, true or false (charity itself could not well doubt that some of them were true), must have reached the Empress's ears. She suffered severely, and she took to politics—perhaps as a harassed man sometimes takes to drinking. Her political influence was, in its day, simply disastrous. She was always on the wrong side, and she was always impetuous, unreasoning, and pertinacious, as cynical people say is the way of women. She became a devotee of the narrowest kind; and just as Madame de Maintenon's religious bigotry did infinitely more harm to France than the vilest profligacy of a Pompadour or a Dubarry could have done, so the religious fervor of the Empress Eugénie threatened at one time to prove a worse thing for the State and for Europe than if she had really carried on during all her lifetime the palace orgies which her enemies ascribed to her. Reaction, Ultramontanism, illiberalism, superstition, found a patroness and leader in her. She fought for the continued occupation of Rome; she battled against the unity of Italy; she recommended and urged the Mexican expedition. Louis Napoleon is personally a good-natured, easy-going sort of man, averse to domestic disputes, fully conscious, no doubt, of his frequent liability to domestic censure. What wonder if European politics sometimes had to suffer heavily for the tolerated presence of this or that too notorious lady in the inner circles of the French court? "Who is the Countess de ——?" I once asked of a Parisian friend who was attached to the Imperial household—I was speaking of a lady whose beauty and whose audacities of dress were then much talked of in the French capital. "The latest favorite," was the reply. "I shouldn't wonder if her presence at court cost another ten years of the occupation of Rome."

      With the Empress's introduction to politics and political intrigue, the era of scandal seems to have closed for her. She dressed as brilliantly and extravagantly as ever, and she would take as much pains about her toilet for the benefit of Persigny and Baroche and Billault at a Council of State as for a ball in the Tuileries. She received the same sort of company, was surrounded by the same ladies and the same cavaliers as ever. But she ceased to be herself a subject of scandal—a fact which is not a little remarkable when one remembers how many bitter enemies she made for herself at this period of her career. She seems to have seriously contemplated the assumption of a great political and religious part—the part of the patroness and protectress of the Papacy. I believe she studied hard to educate herself for this part, and indeed for the work in politics generally which devolved upon her. The position of Vicegerent, assigned to her by the Emperor during his absence in the Lombardy campaign, stirred up political ambition within her, and she seems to have shown a remarkable aptitude for political work. She certainly sustained the opinion expressed by John Stuart Mill in his "Subjection of Women," that the business of politics, from which laws in general shut women out, is just the one intellectual occupation in which, whenever they have had a chance, they have proved themselves the equals of men. When Eugénie was raised to the Imperial throne, she appears to have had no better education than any young Spanish woman of her class, and that certainly is not much. A lady once assured me that she was one of a group who were presented to the Empress at the Tuileries, and that there being in the group two beautiful girls from America, to whom Eugénie desired to be particularly gracious, her Imperial Majesty began to ask them several questions about their native land, and astonished them almost beyond the capacity to reply by kindly inquiring whether they had come from New York "over the sea, or over the land." But the Empress has read up a good deal, and mastered much other knowledge besides that of geography, since those salad days. Meanwhile, she became more and more the divinity of the Ultramontanes; and the French court presented the interesting spectacle of having two rival and extreme parties, one led by the Emperor's wife, and the other by his cousin, Prince Napoleon, between whom the Emperor himself maintained an attitude something like that of the central figure in a game of seesaw. I presume there can be little doubt that the Empress regarded her husband's portly cousin with a cordial detestation. She is not a woman endowed with a keen sense of humor, nor in any case would she be quite likely to enjoy anything which was humorous at her own expense; and Prince Napoleon is credited broadly with having said things concerning her which doubtless made his friends and followers and boon companions laugh, but which, reported to her, as they assuredly would be, must have made her cheek flame and her lips quiver. Moreover, the Red Prince was notoriously in the habit of turning into jest some things more sacred in the eyes of the Imperial devotee than even her own reputation. She feared his tongue, his reckless wit, his smouldering ambition. She feared him for her boy, whose rival and enemy he might come to be; and Prince Napoleon had more sons than one. Therefore the rivalry was keen and bitter. She was for the Pope; he was for Italy and the Revolution. She sympathized with the South in the American civil war; Prince Napoleon was true to his principles and stood by the North. She favored the Mexican enterprise; he opposed it. She was for all manner of repressive action as regarded political speaking and writing; he was for a free platform and free press.

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