“I have preferred a woman whom I love and respect.” 1
—NAPOLÉON III, JANUARY 1853
“Tomorrow he will risk his crown rather than not share it with me.” 2
—EUGÉNIE TO PACA, JANUARY 1853, JUST BEFORE THE CIVIL MARRIAGE
In 1833 Spain was again in turmoil with the death of Ferdinand VIII and his replacement, not by his brother Carlos, but by the king’s two-year-old daughter, Isabella II. Civil war followed and Don Cipriano, the Count of Montijo, and his family were caught up in the midst of it. In July 1834 Cipriano’s elder brother died without issue, leaving him everything, including a veritable network of estates, accompanied by a string of ancient titles going back to the twelfth century. That same year brought cholera to the streets of Madrid. So dangerous had the situation become that Don Cipriano was unable to wait even for his brother’s funeral, as he hastily dispatched his wife and young daughters from Madrid on July 18, 1834, in a mule-drawn carriage. Traveling via Barcelona, Perpignan, and Toulouse, they reached Paris around mid-August 1834.3 There, the two girls—Eugénie now eight, and Paca nine years old, spent the next six years studying, beginning at the Sacred Heart Convent in fashionable Saint-Germain.
When Don Cipriano finally arrived in Paris the following year, it was not as a stranger, having commanded the artillery atop Montmartre in 1814 in a last effort to save Napoléon. But today in 1835, the girls’ father’s objective was to obtain for them a better, more modern education, transferring them to the gymnasium (high school) run by a fellow Spaniard, Colonel Amoros.4 Over the remaining four years in Paris, their education was supplemented by English governesses, and in particular by Prosper Mérimée—“a small birdlike little man.” Mérimée, a brilliant scholar and linguist, was director general of Historical Monuments in France and the author of Colomba and Carmen—which was based on the Comtesse de Montijo. He had first met Don Cipriano many years earlier when as a student he was traveling to Granada, and had since become a close family friend of his wife, Doña Maria Manuela, and the children. His friend, young Henri Beyle (Stendhal), also tutored the children in French.
It was while at school that Eugénie and her sister, Paca, met Cécile Delessert, one year older, who was to become a very close lifelong friend of Eugénie. Cécile was the daughter of Gabriel Delessert, a descendant of Swiss Calvinists, and the brother of a prominent Parisian banker and industrialist. The Delessert mansion in Passy was to prove a home and refuge for Eugénie over the next three decades. Earlier on, Delessert had served as a tutor to the young Auguste de Morny, another old friend of the family. Later, as Louis Philippe’s prefect of police, one of the few civilized men to hold that post, Gabriel Delessert briefly served as Louis Napoléon’s jailer following the Strasbourg coup. It was at Delessert’s that Morny and his father, General Flahaut, had probably first met Doña Maria Manuela, and Eugénie as a schoolgirl.
Eugénie’s mother’s family had risen from the Spanish middle classes, her lowland Scottish merchant father, William Kirkpatrick, having married the daughter of Belgian businessman, Baron Grivégnée, from Malaga. On the other hand, Don Cipriano was not merely a distinguished aristocrat, but a grandee of Spain, the grand marshal of Sevilla, and the descendant of two kings. Tall, slender, handsome if severe, taciturn, haughty, and aloof, he had family titles more ancient and distinguished than those of the king of Prussia. In society he was known as Cipriano de Guzmán y Palafox y Portocarrero, Count of Teba, his wife as the Countess of Teba, as well as of Montijo (that latter title then being transferred to Eugénie.)5 A liberal and a Bonapartist, Don Cipriano had fought with the French under Admiral Gravina’s command against Nelson at Trafalgar in October 1805, where a musket ball had shattered his left arm. Later, as a colonel in the French army, he had supported the French invasion of Spain in 1808 and King Joséph Bonaparte at Madrid. He next lost an eye in fighting the forces of King Francisco when he was captured and imprisoned. He was saved from execution and subsequently released from prison thanks to the intervention of his wife. Meanwhile, he had inherited his late brother’s vast estates and wealth, including their Madrid mansion Casa Ariza, as well as the Casa Montijo and their summer palace of Carabanchel—the three principal family residences.
If Eugénie and her sister, Paca—Maria Francisca—were close, not so Eugénie and her daunting, dynamic mother, Doña Maria Manuela, noted for an unending list of male companions in a Spain where “forthright” conversation and sexual license astonished even the French. Eugénie, on the other hand, idolized her father, and went into a prolonged depression following his death in 1839, the reason for the family returning to Spain.
Given her mother’s rather promiscuous reputation and Eugénie’s devotion to her father—although never a prude—her subsequent relationships with men, including her future husband, Louis Napoléon, had to be understood in consequence. Following her father’s death, in her teens she became the typical rebel, challenging her mother by her independence, dressing like a man, even donning a matador’s costume, on occasion smoking a cigar (though she later disliked all tobacco and smoking in her presence)—clearly associating herself with her father, as the son he never had. Unusually keen on physical fitness, she was hyperactive, highly strung, ill-tempered, and impulsive. She was a chatterbox and always spoke quickly—in Spanish, French, and English.
Like Louis Napoléon, she loved horses and rode well, if with reckless abandon. (In later years, when pregnant, she stubbornly insisted on riding powerful horses, and was thrown, losing her first child.) At the same time, only too aware of her feminine charms, she appeared at balls in exquisite gowns. A passionate aficionada of the corrida, she later attempted to convince her husband to have bullfights restored in Bayonne. Carrying her enthusiasm one step further, she later set up a temporary corrida in the grounds of the Trianon Palace. There attended by her ladies-in-waiting, she would force a wild boar and an imported Spanish cow to fight each other, prodding them on with the aid of a sharp cavalry lance. Unfortunately, the Spanish cow, which did not appreciate cold steel piercing her hindquarters, turned on Empress Eugénie, who had to make a hasty retreat. Like her father, she had a passion for blood sports and shared his love of hunting. She was to remain an enthusiastic participant of Louis Napoléon’s stag hunts at Fontainebleau and Compiègne in the future, on one occasion losing her patience with him for calling off the dogs too early, who were in the midst of tearing at the stricken stag, in order to shoot it and put it out of its misery. The cries of terrified animals literally being torn apart by dogs never repelled Eugénie de Montijo. This slender, very feminine looking woman had a very real fierce, almost bloodthirsty side to her character. This clash of personalities within her was never resolved—her great compassion for human suffering and total disregard for that of animals. People were “Catholics,” animals were not.6
In Madrid in the 1840s Doña Maria Manuela was a close friend of the very young and dissolute Queen Isabella II, who had rejected the recent proposal of marriage by the ubiquitous son of ex-king Jérôme, Plon-Plon. Doña Maria Manuela served as lady-in-waiting to the Spanish queen and was a regular visitor to the royal palace, El Prado. She was better known, however, in her own right for her sumptuous costume balls and lavish receptions offered at the Casa Ariza, as large as the royal palace and serviced by dozens of servants. Her mother thrived on the politics of the day, and all leading men, however disreputable, in and out of government, were constant guests at the Casa.
Eugénie was brought up and educated in the central political vortex of the day. She was highly strung with very strong political opinions, which inevitably led to personal confrontations with senior officials on occasion. The daughter of Doña Maria Manuela was never known for her shyness. “Even as a girl I had a taste for politics,” Eugénie remarked years later, “a taste inherited from my mother, in whose house I used to hear the statesmen, diplomats, generals and publishers expounding all day long.” On the other hand, Eugénie had no patience for “petty party squabbles,” preferring, she insisted, loftier subjects, “the really big issues of the day, the ones where national prestige and a nation’s reputation were at stake.”7 An outspoken feminist, she naturally objected when Spanish ministers spoke dismissively of female interference in politics. At one dinner party given at the Casa Ariza, a seventeen-year-old Eugénie was denouncing the violence in the streets of the Spanish capital of government troops under the dictator-general Ramón Nárvaez, these troops of this rather “fat, ugly little man with a vile expression” who just happened to be her mother’s dinner guest that evening. Angered, Nárvaez turned on her, stating that it was none of her business, because it was not women doing the fighting for the government. Moreover, women would never have the courage to face a bayonet, he snapped. A furious Eugénie impulsively grabbed a knife from the dinner table and plunged it into her own arm.8 Clearly this was the daughter of the fabled Don Cipriano, and however courageous, one very complex, tortured young lady.
* * *
Doña Maria Manuela’s principal reason for returning to Spain following the death of her husband had been to find husbands for two of the most eligible daughters of the kingdom. Prospective suitors for a lovely heiress were not wanting, but the proud, arrogant Eugénie was not easy to please. There was something more to her personal hesitation to marry, for most of the men she was attracted to were physically weak, shy, and far from handsome. The Duke of Osuna proposed and was rejected.9 She next declined the offer of her cousin, Count José de Xifre, and then Prince Albert de Broglie, the only qualified French candidate, went the way of his predecessors. Her only English suitor, the wealthy Ferdinand Huddleston, fared no better. He was turned down because at this stage of her life Eugénie was violently anti-English and would accept no Englishman, regardless of rank and fortune.
“I love and hate violently,” she acknowledged.10 Her first personal choice for a husband was a distinctly ugly distant cousin, the fifteenth Duke of Alba, whom she had known since childhood and whose ancestors were even more illustrious than her own. Her elder sister, Paca, also loved him, and the typical sisterly rivalry brought hysterics, but her mother naturally decided in Paca’s favor, she being the eldest. A distraught young Countess de Montijo swallowed a concoction of homemade poison, which nearly proved fatal. “I have an awful mixture of passions, in me, all wild,” she admitted, predicting she would be the ultimate victim of them, and almost was. “My life is going to end miserably, in a whirl of passions, virtues and follies.” “Don’t say I am mad,” she implored the young Duke of Alba, “please, just pity me.”11 This assertion the young countess proved most dramatically when rejected by the next suitor, Pedro, Marquess de Alcañices; she again took poison, a lethal dose this time, and was only saved by an antidote at the very last moment. This proved too much even for the remarkably unflappable Doña Maria Manuela, who decided it was time for a change of scenery, as mother and remaining daughter headed north for the first time in ten years, settling in post-revolutionary Paris in the early months of 1849.12
* * *
With the death of Don Cipriano in 1839, Doña Maria Manuela had come into personal control of one of the most fabulous family fortunes in recent Spanish history, bringing them an annual income equivalent to 500,000 francs (nearly six and a half million dollars) at a time when a crown minister might consider himself most fortunate indeed with 30,000 francs a year. Establishing themselves in a palatial apartment overlooking the chic Place de Vendôme, Doña Maria and her twenty-three-year-old daughter—now well and truly considered by some to be “on the shelf”—Eugénie nevertheless soon became much talked about as they drove daily along the Champs-Élysées with their ostentatious display of diamonds and beauty, in a luxurious phaeton complete with the family coat of arms. Even her usually persistent gossipy social critic, Count Horace de Viel-Castel—who on occasion even disapproved of the palace’s weekend invitation list for Compiègne—admitted that Eugénie had “a most prepossessing manner” and a “keen sense of humor.”13 Despite her mother’s phenomenal ego and confidence in every undertaking, even Maria Manuela may have had some anxieties about finding a suitable husband for such a difficult, wayward daughter. And the last thing she wanted was to see her bury herself in a convent for the rest of her life, the traditional solution for unmarriageable daughters.
Having exhausted the list of eligible bachelors in Madrid, Eugénie’s mother had come to fish in the French pond, setting her sights on no one less than the president of the Republic, Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. Eugénie, with her beauty and her late father’s excellent Bonapartist credentials, was received at most of the social events of the French capital. They were introduced to Countess Fanny Le Hon, Princess Mathilde, Prince Felix Bacciochi, and others, resulting in a first meeting a few years later between Eugénie and Louis Napoléon at the Élysée in 1849, followed by invitations to St. Cloud, and hunts and “house parties” at Fontainebleau, Rambouillet, and Compiègne.
The siege to Louis Napoléon’s heart had been too obvious and too successful, winning the equally powerful opposition to such a marriage with “the Spanish woman,” as the distinguished Spanish aristocrat was referred to contemptuously by Colonel Émile Fleury and his debauched mistress. Surprisingly, using language worthy of Henri Rochefort, Maxime Du Camp—a self-appointed enemy of Morny and the Bonapartes—in a blistering thirty-page attack in his memoirs lashed out against Eugénie’s character, calling her a cheap, selfish publicity-seeker of low intelligence leading a wasteful, utterly pointless existence. In brief he declared, “I do not think she has ever had a serious thought in her life.… She has been a disaster.” Auguste de Morny, who had warned Du Camp in advance of his arrest in December 1852, thereby permitting him to escape imprisonment, also came in for a thorough drubbing by this self-same gentleman and fellow member of the Jockey Club. Gilbert Persigny made no pretence of concealing his feelings before or after the wedding. “From the day of my marriage I was honored with the hatred, a venomous slandering hatred,” by this man, Eugénie recalled. “Sometimes he could not stop himself calling me ‘the Spanish woman,’ or ‘the Foreigner.’”14 And yet worse and more direct were the attacks by Mathilde and her “coarse, brutal, violent … jealous” brother, Plon-Plon—whose crude attempted seduction of Eugénie back in Madrid had been rebuffed as scornfully as had his earlier proposal of marriage to Queen Isabella. “You go to bed with women like Mlle. de Montijo, but you don’t marry them,” the bumptious Plon-Plon told Louis Napoléon, then repeated this “story” in society. Like most members of the Diplomatic Corps, the Austrian ambassador, Alexander Graf von Hübner, found Prince Jerome obnoxious, publicly describing him as “the scourge of the imperial family.” Mathilde’s enmity was more subtle and insidious, being feminine and dished out behind the scenes. In a vocabulary as earthy and crude as her brothers’, she confided to Louis Napoléon, “Cette Eugénie n’a pas plus de coeur que de c.…” 15 Mathilde, always genuinely fond of Louis Napoléon, and perhaps regretting her father’s decision to break off her earlier engagement with him, now instead advised his marrying into a ruling European family. The last person the ever jealous clan wanted to see as empress was the daughter of a distinguished grandee of Spain, an extremely attractive and wealthy foreign heiress who not only outranked them but over whom they had absolutely no influence to manipulate toward their own ends.
They then brought in reinforcements, the Bonaparte claque. Foreign Minister Drouyn de Lhuys, Ambassador Waleswki, and the onetime greengrocer, vaudevillian failure, and reprobate gambler, General Saint-Arnaud, all strongly advised Louis Napoléon against the marriage with the ninth Countess of Montijo. The outspoken former army sergeant Gilbert Persigny publicly referred to Eugénie as “that little schemer,” and in private with the usual barracks vocabulary.16 England’s foreign minister, Lord John Russell, dismissed her in similar language, judging it would be “lowering of the imperial dignity with a vengeance by marrying the daughter of the 17th Marquis de Mora.” “A foolish marriage,” British ambassador Lord Cowley echoed; the Contessa de Montijo was just another “adventuress,” he concluded, and not worthy of a Bonaparte.17 The London Times, however, pointed out the absurdity of these pretentions: that unlike the parvenu Bonaparte clan—after fifty years hardly a dynasty—Eugénie came of ancient aristocratic stock going back over seven hundred years, whose titles included one duke, seven marquises, eight counts, and one viscount. Prosper Mérimée, as an old friend of the family, was so outraged by the slander and blatant character assassination of Eugénie that he had the College of Heralds in Madrid send a copy of her father’s complete, most distinguished ancestry, which he then had published in Paris.18
Eugénie and her mother were among more than a couple of dozen guests invited by Louis Napoléon to celebrate Christmas of 1852 at the Château de Compiègne some fifty kilometers north of Paris. While out riding alone with her host on the twenty-seventh of December, he asked her outright to sleep with him. “Yes,” she replied, “when I am empress.” According to Maxime Du Camp, the year before, Louis Napoléon had had a secret door built into the wall of the bedroom at Fontainebleau he had assigned her to, but on entering was immediately shown out by the young lady. By now thoroughly tired of having to make herself perfectly clear to the deaf, newly proclaimed emperor of the French, the following day, the twenty-eighth of December, she and her mother departed abruptly, leaving an embarrassed Louis Napoléon behind to make his excuses to a château full of guests.19
At a dinner party at the Tuileries Louis Napoléon had taken his half brother, Auguste, aside, asking him for his frank opinion about marriage with Eugénie. Morny had steered him straight during his initial coup d’état in 1851, and then again during his second coup of December 2, 1852, establishing the Second Empire. Louis Napoléon put much store in his advice and assessment of the state of affairs. “She will make an excellent and most worthy spouse for an emperor,” Morny assured him formally. “She will also serve as a fine symbol for the French people … who will appreciate … the choice of a girl who for a change is not a member of the traditional royal families that have been opposing your own family for the past fifty years.” “Your opinion on this is more important to me than you can possibly imagine,” a much relieved Louis Napoléon said.20 He also learned from the spies of the prefect of police that Morny had, unlike the rest of his family and supporters, been praising Eugénie in public and in private as a fine choice as imperial consort for the emperor. “Mademoiselle de Montijo is lovely and carries herself with a natural dignity and grace,” Morny was reported to have said. “The emperor respects the quality of a person’s basic goodness, and wants to be able to love his wife without reservation.”21
* * *
As if the past humiliations had not been bad enough, when James de Rothschild as a favor to Eugénie (her mother’s friend and Paris banker) escorted her to a ball given at the Tuileries on January 12, 1853, she was about to sit down at one of the tables set aside for the ministers, when the bourgeois wife of an otherwise worthy minister of public instruction, Hippolyte Fortoul, took it upon herself to inform the elegant Countess de Montijo that she was not allowed to sit with them, with members of the government. A hush fell over the emperor’s reception. A very grim Louis Napoléon immediately stepped over to the embarrassed lady, personally inviting her and Baron de Rothschild to join him and the imperial family. Holding her head high when dancing with him afterward, she told him tonight’s episode was the last straw, the last insult, and that she would be leaving France permanently. The long procrastinating Louis Napoléon was in a corner.22
Three days later, on the fifteenth of January, Achille Fould, the emperor’s much trusted minister of state, arrived at 12 Place de Vendôme to deliver a handwritten letter from Louis Napoléon to Doña Maria Manuela. “Madame la Comtesse, I fell in love with your daughter long ago. I have now come to ask you for her hand in marriage.”23 Brief and to the point. “A happy event, one destined to consolidate the government of His Imperial Majesty and ensure the future of the dynasty, is about to take place. The Emperor is to marry Mademoiselle de Montijo, Comtesse de Téba,” the official newspaper, Le Moniteur, informed the French public at long last after months of rumors.
* * *
On Saturday, the twenty-second, the Corps Legislatif and Senate were summoned to the Tuileries to receive the official announcement. Eugénie was to become empress, he began. “French by heart, education and through the blood spilt by her father in defense of the Empire,” she was endowed with all the fine qualities he sought. “A good and gracious lady she will bring to us the same virtues that Empress Joséphine brought to Napoléon.… [sic!] Once you get to know her I believe that you will be convinced that Providence itself played a role in discovering her.” Tell France that “I have preferred a woman whom I love and respect to an unknown partner selected for me by the dictates of international politics.”24
How true was Eugénie’s love for this man after a pursuit of three years? If it was not a romantic love, it was certainly not social climbing. Perhaps she just considered it her due, given her high position in Spanish society. Her real feelings were revealed in a letter to her sister, Paca, the Duchess of Alba, just before the wedding. For all her physical posturing as a cigar-smoking matador, for all her praise of her very stoic, manly, almost unapproachable father and his exploits on the battlefield, in Louis Napoléon she found someone totally different. With him she felt completely at ease and safe. He was charming, gentle, soft-spoken, quiet, undemanding, and thoughtful. She admired his remarkable willpower, “yet without being blindly obstinate. He is capable of making the greatest of sacrifices for something in which he really believed. He will go looking for a wild flower in a wood on a wild winter’s night … and all this just to please the whim of a woman he loves. And now tomorrow he will risk his crown rather than not share it with me. He never counts the cost once undertaking something. He is always ready to risk his whole future on a venture in which he truly believes, and that is why he always wins in the long run.”25 These very qualities she so admired in Louis Napoléon were of course the very qualities that reflected her own personal values, some found in her own thoughts and acts, others she personally lacked but so admired.
She could be very aggressive, terrifyingly obstinate, and could talk rapidly nonstop for an hour. He was a man of few words, sure of his position, which really required no public justification. He was equanimity personified, fully at ease with himself and what he stood for. Eugénie, on the other hand, was always questioning, arguing, restless, and almost hyperactive. She was rarely content with her existence and was always looking for something. She could lose her temper in a flash—as when she had stabbed herself—while, like Mathilde, she had found Louis Napoléon phlegmatic, a cold fish, extremely slow to anger. When she had a whim, she had to act on it vigorously. Louis Napoléon did not have whims—with the unique exception of Eugénie and this marriage—and was in any case very suspicious of “emotion” or “change” in any form. She was more of a reader than he. She had a sense of color and decor that he lacked. Fine art and old masters left him cold. She was tone deaf and disliked opera, whereas he at least liked the music hall. They both enjoyed dancing, Louis Napoléon waltzes and polkas, she only the Spanish fandango, which she gladly performed with complete abandon for her friends. He enjoyed a casual stroll in the gardens; she preferred a mad ride cross-country on a powerful horse. She found in him the peace she so desperately sought but never really found in herself.
* * *
Never in historical memory had plans for a full-scale royal wedding been decided on and executed in less than seventeen days, including the preparations for the full pageantry of a cathedral ceremony with thousands of invited guests—all senior officials, elected or appointed, crown counselors, senators, deputies, judges, court officials, the entire diplomatic corps, senior military officers, and officials of the Legion of Honor, etc. State carriages last used by Napoléon I in 1815 had to be found at the Trianon Palace, Versailles, cleaned, refurbished, and brought back to Paris. Dozens of well-trained teams of horses for the carriages had to be found and brought to the capital, including some from as far as England. Invitations had to be printed and addressed by hand. All the spare bedrooms and suites at the Élysée, the Tuileries-Louvre complex, and at the Luxembourg Palace had to be cleaned and prepared, including the acquisition of thousands of new sheets and hundreds of additional staff. Moreover, many of the guests would be arriving with their personal servants in tow. Feeding thousands of people more or less simultaneously, preparing the dinner service and silver required for such state banquets, and finding enough additional well-qualified cooks and servants, would prove a nightmarish challenge itself. Many tons of fresh food would have to be ordered, and transported in from the countryside by cart and barge. Literally hundreds of new gowns and a variety of costumes to be designed and sewn just for the empress and the ladies of the court would prove a real strain and tug-of-war, as the aristocratic ladies of the French capital all vied for the best-known couturiers. And then of course there was the demand for hairdressers skilled in current court styles.
Louis Napoléon had decided on this marriage on the twelfth of January, it being accepted by Eugénie on the fifteenth. To the utter astonishment of everyone an extremely agitated Louis Napoléon had then impetuously decided that the wedding was to take place, beginning with the civil service on the twenty-ninth of January, in fourteen days’ time. Preparing the decorations for the Tuileries and the cathedral alone would take weeks, and then only with the continuous work of hundreds of men. Tons of fireworks would have to be ordered and prepared, and decorations for the capital and the ceremonial routes to and from the cathedral would require importing tens of thousands of flowers, and a few thousand flags all to be hand sewn, and an army of workers to install all this.
Napoléon III’s “impulse” to set the wedding ceremonies for the twenty-ninth and thirtieth of January left the prefect of Paris little time in which to work out most complicated security arrangements for the palaces, the theaters, and the concert halls, this in a city no stranger to assassination attempts. Hundreds of known political opponents and agitators would have to be rounded up. The route to the cathedral covering the full length of the newly completed Rue de Rivoli would prove a challenge in itself, with hundreds of thousands of sightseers. In addition, at least sixty thousand troops and cavalry—not to mention thousands of national guardsmen—would have to be assigned their positions and tasks.
It was not only madness, it was impossible, all within less than a fortnight! Yet it has never been established convincingly why this mad rush had to take place now in 1853. Clearly an unusually impulsive Louis Napoléon had decided to act without planning and thinking out the consequences. It was reminiscent of his Strasbourg and Boulogne fiascos. In the present case there was no valid reason for this incomprehensible haste, when a late spring wedding would have saved enormous anguish for everyone. The famously nonchalant, phlegmatic, quiet, amiable Louis Napoléon had suddenly lost his head completely, astonishing even his closest staff and associates. Nor could anyone reason with him, nor dissuade him from launching this social tsunami. Moreover, Louis Napoléon and Eugénie decided to repeat as closely as possible everything that had been done for the marriage ceremony of Napoleon I and Marie Louise in 1810, as librarians were sent scurrying for the original plans.
Most of the crown jewels not seen since 1814 were finally located in the vaults of the ministry of finance. This included the gold, jewel-encrusted crown Marie Louise had worn, her rings and diamond-and-sapphire-studded belt. To these Napoléon III added a little surprise of his own, the celebrated Regent’s Diamond, the 141-carat blue-white stone discovered in India in the seventeenth century, purchased by Governor Thomas Pitt—“the Pitt Diamond” as it was then known—eventually to be worn by Marie Antoinette, then seized during the revolution, and placed in the pommel of Napoléon I’s sword. Although Marie Louise took it back with her to Vienna in 1815, her father had it returned to the newly enthroned Louis XVIII. Today Empress Eugénie wore it—at $63 million (today’s value), the most expensive single gem in the whole of Europe—around her neck and would finally have it mounted in her Grecian-style crown.26
Meanwhile, the reception salons of the Tuileries were to be restored to their former glory, just as they had stood in Napoléon’s day, including the towering Hall of Marshals, where the marriage contracts were to be signed. Not content with that enormous project, every effort was made to replicate the costumes worn under the First Empire down to Napoléon’s silk knee breeches. Louis Napoléon was to wear the uniform of a lieutenant general with Napoléon I’s collar of the Legion of Honor and the Order of the Golden Fleece, and Eugénie a specially designed gown of Alençon lace, complete with a twelve-foot train.27
* * *
On the wedding day, both sides of the Rue de Rivoli were lined with thousands of soldiers and national guardsmen restraining an estimated 600,000 onlookers, 200,000 of whom had reached Paris by the recently opened railways. The bunting, flags, flowers, and rousing military music might have been festive, but the mood of the people was almost neutral, unemotional, more curious than anything else. There were some “Vive l’Empereur!” and “Vive l’Impératrice!” but they were few and far between. A dozen carriages, each drawn by six horses and bearing high state and military officials and members of the clan, preceded Napoléon’s celebrated glass 1804 coronation coach, now carrying Napoléon III and Eugénie. Drawn by eight superbly dressed horses, preceded by a squadron of guides, and followed by a full regiment of heavy cavalry, they reached Notre Dame. The hastily begun decorations in this cavernous gothic cathedral had not been completed, but in any event nothing could lighten grimy stone pillars and walls that had not been cleaned in decades.
Monseigneur the Archbishop of Paris and his clergy led Louis Napoléon and his bride up the main aisle over three hundred feet to the altar, surrounded by a vast amphitheater for all the high officials and officers of the land, although the seating assigned to foreign European royalty, as a token of their disapproval of the House of Bonaparte, remained entirely empty. The archbishop, Cardinal Sibour, performed the service as the couple exchanged vows and France was presented with its first emperor and empress since Waterloo.28 Mass and the “Te Deum” followed, accompanied by the orchestra and choir. Eugénie was visibly nervous and “melancholy” during and after the ceremony, which passed as if in a dream, she later said, incapable of remembering any of it. The Bonaparte clan had remained openly hostile to the new empress—just as they had been to Joséphine back in 1804. Uncle Jérôme, to whom Louis Napoléon had given Louis Philippe’s private property, the Palais Royal, and his son Plon-Plon, towering over Eugénie, had refused before all present to make the prescribed bow before her, the female cousins following their lead, refusing in turn to make their reverences. Eugénie had been shaken, and a visibly angered Louis Napoléon had been obliged publicly to command cousin Mathilde to curtsey.
Cannons roared and every church bell in Paris rang out as the procession returned along the quay to the Tuileries, where to everyone’s surprise and approval the unpredictable Empress Eugénie turned and made a gracious curtsey of her own. A reception was held there for all the officials, followed by a smaller one in their private apartments. The newly married imperial couple then drove under cavalry escort to St. Cloud that same Sunday evening. There they were to spend their honeymoon, in the most secluded spot in France, completely cut off from the outside world, thanks to a strongly armed permanent garrison. Eugénie and Louis Napoléon—she always called him “Louis”—stayed in the villa of Villeneuve L’Étang near the park of St. Cloud. Louis Napoléon had made it perfectly clear that Eugénie’s mother, Doña Maria Manuela, would be expected to return to Spain, as her rather promiscuous habits and staggering unpaid debts (charged to her son-in-law), her enormous wealth not withstanding, had rendered her presence an embarrassment.
* * *
“My dear Morny,” Louis Napoléon wrote him a few days later, “Eugénie and I should like you to come dine with us this Saturday at six thirty [the week after the wedding] that you might witness for yourself this intimate foyer which your personal cooperation had helped bring about thanks to your devoted and enlightened friendship.”29
Auguste de Morny, who had remained in the background at the Tuileries during the signing of the marriage contracts, and again the following day at the cathedral, lost amid the thousands, was now the couple’s first visitor during their honeymoon. And thus the Second Empire began, and with it that strange relationship of two brothers who were to reshape the historical face of France. As for Louis Napoléon and Eugénie, if theirs was not to be a marriage of warmth and romance, it was to justify Morny’s earlier faith in this union, which in its own certainly unique manner was to prove fruitful, reflecting a genuine mutual respect.
Eugénie was to become celebrated for her kindness and generosity, which began immediately, when the municipality of Paris offered to spend 600,000 francs on a diamond necklace for her. Gratefully declining, she asked instead that the money be used to build an orphanage for homeless girls. As a personal gift to her, Louis Napoléon had given her violets, her favorite flower, and 250,000 francs in cash, which she also dispersed for “maternal societies” and a hospice, keeping nothing for herself.
But of course she was now alone permanently in a foreign country, and Spain and family always remained in her thoughts. As she wrote to her sister, Paca, “Everyone’s fate has a sad side … I who used to be so obsessed with my liberty am now in chains for the rest of my life … amid all this court etiquette, of which I am to be the principal victim.” She would adapt, however, and add a whole new dimension to Napoléon III’s court and empire. Here at St. Cloud she asked for only one wedding gift of her husband, that he grant pardons to the political prisoners who had been filling French prisons ever since the coup of December 1851; 4,312 men were released forthwith.30