After a round of exchanges with Napoléon III’s cabinet, Rose was invited to visit the Tuileries Palace, on the right bank of the Seine, at half past one on January 22, a Friday afternoon. She was led through a web of hallways opening into improbably grand spaces: reception parlors, a chapel, a theater, dining rooms covered in wall panels illustrated with hunting and mythological scenes, acres and acres of gilding. The last stop, after several flights of a spiral staircase, was the audience chamber, where the duc de Bassano, an imperial aide, greeted her and invited her to sit. “His majesty will receive you in just a few moments,” he promised. She glanced up at the soaring dome ceiling and was briefly transported to the Senate chamber back home in Washington, where, exactly three years before, she’d listened to then senator Jefferson Davis reluctantly make the case for secession and bid his Northern colleagues a “final adieu.”
The imperial aide returned and bowed low. “Entrez, Madame, dans le cabinet de l’Empereur,” he said, and closed the door behind him.
Napoléon III stood like an ornament in the middle of the room, wearing a large diamond eagle in the clasp of his kerchief. He was fifty-five years old and known for equally vigorous political and sexual appetites. Nearly an inch shorter than his uncle, Napoléon Bonaparte, he seemed too small for his striking face, dominated by thick lips and a mustache with bayonet-sharp tips. His gray eyes appeared expressionless and somehow veiled, as if his gaze were directed inward rather than to the outside world. It was rumored that he had his first love affair at the age of thirteen. As emperor he pursued an eclectic array of women, delegating the responsibility of arranging trysts to his beleaguered social secretary. Once his wife, Empress Eugénie, produced an heir, she reportedly refused to have sex with him again, finding the whole business “disgusting.” He reminded Rose, in a way, of Confederate general Earl Van Dorn, a notorious lothario known as “the terror of ugly husbands,” murdered the previous year by a man who claimed that the general had bedded his wife.
Rose curtsied deeply, holding the pose as Napoléon approached and extended his hand.
“Vous parlez français, madame?” he asked.
In nearly flawless French, which she’d learned from her late husband, Rose responded, “Non sire, je ne parle pas assez pour me faire comprendre, mais je sais que Votre Majesté parle parfaitement anglais [No sir, I do not speak well enough to make myself understood, but I know Your Majesty speaks English perfectly].”
He smiled, his mustache tips slicing upward, and held Rose’s hand as he led her to a chair. He sat opposite her and leaned forward, intertwining long fingers.
“You are from the South,” he said.
“Yes sir, from that unhappy country.”
She wasted no time making her case, urging the question of recognition. The Confederacy was entitled to it, she argued, and the moral strength it would provide.
Napoléon was inclined to agree, for various reasons. He was a nationalist who sympathized with the aspirations of people for national self-determination. The Union blockade had disrupted the French economy, crashing the cotton textile industry and hindering the export of such luxury goods as wine, silks, clothes, and perfumes, and influential Parisian merchants were demanding that the government relieve their distress. Above all he wished to expand his empire overseas in Mexico, where he had troops stationed for two years, a plan the Lincoln administration vehemently opposed. And on a personal note, Napoléon shared Rose’s view of the American first family as boorish and unsophisticated. In August 1861 his cousin and close adviser, Prince Napoléon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte, “Plon-Plon” for short, attended a state dinner at the White House, disdainfully noting the president’s “large, hairy hands” and Mary Todd Lincoln’s attempt to speak French in an atrocious Kentucky accent. “Mrs. Lincoln,” the guest of honor reported, “was dressed in the French mode without any taste; she has the manner of a petit bourgeois and wears tin jewelry.”
Now Napoléon hedged his bets, telling Rose he had hoped to support the South but could not do so alone. He had, in fact, made frequent overtures to England on the subject, which the country consistently “evaded or rejected.” Please, he urged, assure President Davis of his sympathy and his untiring efforts.
Rose opened her mouth to respond, but the emperor wasn’t finished.
“Tell the President that I have thoughts on his military plans,” he added. “He has not concentrated enough. The Yankees have also made true blunders. If instead of throwing all your strength upon Vicksburg, you could have left that to its fate, and strengthened Lee so as to have taken Washington, the war would have ended. England would have been obliged to recognize you, as I should, of course.”
Rose felt her throat pulse against her neck. It didn’t matter that he was the emperor of France, or that she was a guest in the royal palace; no one would get away with criticizing the Confederacy in her presence.
“The President is fully convinced of the wisdom of such a movement,” she said, the words hot in her mouth. “But there were grave political reasons for pursuing the course we have pursued in order to prevent the alienation of our own territory.” She raised an eyebrow and lowered her voice, adding, “Besides, you can have no just conception of the war and of our military operations. The State of Virginia is as great as this mighty Empire, and to show disregard to any portion of the country would excite feelings injurious in a crisis like this.”
Napoléon conceded the point and changed the subject, asking about General Lee, and she took the opportunity to boast: “Sir, he is worthy to be one of your marshals.”
With that she was finished and stood to go. The emperor again reached for her hand.
“I wish you would remain in France,” he said.
She allowed his hand to linger over hers and replied, “Even the attractions of your mighty capital cannot keep me.”
“I know your history. The women of the South have excited the admiration of the world.” They walked toward the door, still touching. “I wish you a prosperous voyage, and tell President Davis that my admiration and my sympathy are with him and his people.”
She turned to face him and tried one last time. “Ah, Sire,” she said, “I wish you would bid me tell him that you would recognize us as one.”
“I wish to God I could. But I cannot do it without England. . . . But you may assure the president that I will make renewed efforts to serve him.”
They said good-bye and Rose returned to her hotel, where she recorded the meeting in her diary—“So much for my interview with this ruler of the destiny of Europe”—and drafted letters to both Jefferson Davis and her friend Alexander Boteler. “I had the honor of an audience with the Emperor,” she wrote. “The French people are brutal ignorant and depraved to a degree beyond description and have no appreciation of our struggle.”
Despite Rose’s disdain for the French she accepted every social invitation she received, taking particular delight in returning to the Tuileries Palace for a masked ball, where Napoléon III greeted her wearing a plain dark suit festooned with a broad red sash (a subdued choice of attire for the emperor, who usually dressed for such events as a seventeenth-century Venetian noble). She pinned red roses in her hair and jewels at her breast and felt, for the first time in nearly a decade, that her mourning had passed, that she had permission to separate her business from her pleasure, that not every glance or word or touch was a piece of currency waiting to be exchanged.
The evening was like a scene from Arabian Nights, which she had just seen with Little Rose at the Théâtre Impérial, with armed guards lining the grand stairs “like so many petrified steel clad warriors” and the salon a wild blur of pomp and color: sword-wielding gentlemen in embroidered court dress; diplomats swathed in sashes and medals; ladies in gowns with exaggerated volume only at the back thanks to a modified crinoline called the crinolette, the precursor to the bustle. At midnight sharp the doors to the dining room swung open, but only the foreign ambassadors were invited to dine with the royal family. One ambassador asked Rose to accompany him, and she quickly accepted, thrusting her arm through his. The duc de Morny, Napoléon’s half-brother, engaged her right away. Rose deemed him “very like the emperor, only younger, handsomer, and not so intellectual looking.”
She was less impressed with the women. Princess Mathilde, Napoléon’s first cousin and former fiancée, wore a magnificent tiara of diamonds but was herself “fat and vulgar looking.” Princess Clotilde, the wife of Prince Napoléon, Matilde’s brother, was “thin with sharp features, turned up nose and very unnatural looking.” The empress wore a dress of white tulle garnished with a smattering of brown velvet butterflies, and her thick neck was entirely obscured by looping rows of pearls. The entire room knew that her husband was currently having an affair with a dancer. “She is not at all pretty,” Rose concluded, “nor distinguished in appearance.” She stood next to the empress for as long as possible, a tacit invitation for everyone to compare.
After the ball Rose felt “no desire to enter further with the gaieties of Paris” and longed for news from home. A letter from a Confederate friend in London buoyed up her spirits slightly—“I think things are looking better for ‘our’ side,” he wrote—but reports in the Yankee press suggested otherwise. The papers spoke of daily bread riots; food was so scarce in Richmond that every rat, mouse, and pigeon had deserted the city. A single hotel meal cost nine Confederate soldiers $600, and a common kitchen utensil cost $1,000. One woman sold her hair for $100 in order to buy four pounds of flour. The masses were turning against Jefferson Davis, suggesting that if he thought $25,000 and the presidential mansion weren’t sufficient compensation, then he had best resign.
The military situation was equally troubling. Soldiers had to kill their best mules for sustenance. Davis was so desperate for new recruits that he urged passage of a law to employ free blacks and slaves in noncombatant duties normally performed by soldiers, so as to utilize every white man possible on the battlefield. Richmond was bound to the South only by a single narrow line of communication, and the city was in imminent danger. “As soon as General Butler has a sufficient force (and we know he is increasing it day by day),” read one report, “we trust he will do more than harass and threaten the rebels.”
Rose still believed in her mission and in a Confederate triumph, but it was now a question, she wrote, “of hope deferred.” She did not know how much time she had left.