12

MARKING TIME

“For my part, I always prefer to think the best of someone,

until I have proof to the contrary.”1

—LOUIS NAPOLÉON ON COUSIN JÉRÔME BONAPARTE, DECEMBER 10, 1846

“I have been installed in my new house for the past fortnight, and for the first time in seven years I am enjoying the pleasure of living under my own roof,” a freed Louis Napoléon had written Narcisse Vieillard after settling in London in February. This rather modest rented brick house in King Street reflected his new, reduced circumstances—with only a secretary, Thélin, a cook and a couple of maids, instead of the staff of twenty he had earlier had at Carlton Gardens, and a more sobered view of his situation. And he would soon be joined by his closest companion, Henri Conneau, when he was released from Ham.2

A terraced London house was a great difference from the freedom offered by Arenenberg and its surrounding grounds, but for Louis Napoléon it was a welcome change. There were no more immediate painful memories associated with his dying mother, while gaining a new personal security here in the capital of the British empire where Louis Philippe’s police would commit no follies. So determined was he to cut himself free from Switzerland now that he ordered his agent to put Arenenberg up for sale to raise badly needed cash. This new existence for a recently liberated prisoner included seeing old friends and acquaintances, including his most loyal English friend throughout the years, James Harris, Lord Malmesbury, Foreign Secretary Lord Palmerston, Lord Shelburne (the future Lord Lansdowne), the kindly Lord Brougham, Giuseppe Panizzi, Lord Archie Montgomerie, and Count Alfred d’Orsay and his lovely Lady Blessington (Marguerite Gardiner).

Nearly six years of confinement had appreciably changed Louis Napoléon physically and emotionally, his expression continually more preoccupied and his shoulders stooped, as Malmesbury and Panizzi remarked. But he enjoyed social life all the more, free of the high stone walls that had denied him both basic physical exercise and the outside world. He was welcomed back to the aristocratic houses in and around Mayfair, while returning to his old haunts in the theater district between Piccadilly and Leicester Square. At a dinner given by the director of His Majesty’s Theatre, the humorous Benjamin Lumley, the prince was introduced to the thirty-four-year-old Giuseppe Verdi, who was presenting his opera I Masnadieri. More to his liking was the new French acting sensation: “I have seen Rachel, and have been enchanted by her,” he informed Hortense Cornu. “It is the first time I have ever seen a French tragedy played [Racine’s Phèdre],” he confessed.3 And if this summer he did not return to Scotland for Eglinton’s jousting festival, he did regularly attend the races at Newbury, where he lost more than he won. An excellent horseman, Louis Napoléon invariably rode in Hyde Park daily, regardless of the weather. And then for good measure during the Chartist riots he briefly accepted the staff of office as a special constable, responsible for guarding dangerous Park Lane, across from Apsley House. A Bonaparte protecting the Duke of Wellington. Alors!

Hortense Cornu and her artist husband visited the prince in the summer at Bath, where he was taking the waters. While in the capital, Louis Napoléon had written asking Narcisse Vieillard to help build a political organization.4 The soft-spoken Vieillard found his erratic cousin, Prince Jérôme, to be quite a prickly character. (This was the same Plon-Plon who had years earlier spent several months at Arenenberg following his mother’s death. Commiserating with his old friend, Louis Napoléon conceded that his young cousin did indeed have an “unintelligible disposition.” He was at times “frank, loyal and open, only to change abruptly, becoming constrained and dissimulating. Sometimes his heart seems to speak enthusiastically of the glory of a particular cause and to suffer with you for all that is great and generous. At other times he displays hardness, trickery and knavery. Who then is he really?” he asked. “For my part, I always prefer to think the best of someone, until I have positive proof to the contrary, and while remaining ever on my guard, I continue to withhold none of my affection and friendship.”5 [Author’s italics] Louis Napoléon rarely spoke about people behind their back, and this was the only time he was ever known to have discussed his difficult cousin so freely. What many were later to take for weakness or even stupidity on his part was in fact the attitude of a mature, very decent man, one capable of understanding the foibles and limitations of those around him, while trying to continue to work with them given their limitations.

Although Louis Napoléon’s name was by now as familiar in France as those of Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo—both of them still his admirers at this stage—unlike them, Bonaparte could not earn a living by writing, and now back in London he had to concentrate on restoring his finances. The name of Bonaparte could, nevertheless, draw financial backers, even in Italy, where Counts Orsi and Armani, in conjunction with a Mr. Rappalo, managed to borrow 250,000 francs (over $3,300,000), and the Marquis Pallavicino lent another 325,000 francs (nearly $4 million), which included a mortgage on a Bonaparte villa in Civita Nova. Fortunately, Louis Napoléon now met Joshua Bates, an American—the founder of the Boston Public Library, and senior partner of Barings Bank. From now until his death in 1864, he was to handle the prince’s investments.6 In brief, contrary to rumors, at this time he always had immediately available all the cash he needed on short call—exclusive of any funds he might receive from generous personal friends later, although he continued to live simply, apart from his gambling debts and, of course, women.7

Unlike his earlier stay in London, Louis Napoléon spent very little time on his public relations political tracts, though he did continue to work on the second volume of his history of artillery (the first volume having just been published).8 After those years in Ham, naturally he took his pleasures seriously, which centered more and more around Gore House, Kensington (on the site of Albert Hall). There the lovely Marguerite Gardiner, the Countess of Blessington, resided with her dissolute, effeminate lover and Parisian playboy, the talented painter and sculptor, Alfred, Count d’Orsay, dubbed “the Archangel of Dandyism” by Lamartine.

The self-taught daughter of a small-holdings farmer from Tipperary, Ireland, through two marriages Marguerite had gradually improved “her situation,” and in 1818 had married the Irishman, Charles John Gardiner, the first Earl of Blessington, complete with his previous four children. During their extensive travels on the Continent, they had met Alfred d’Orsay, and the ménage à trois later settled in at Gore House, where they became renowned for their extravagant dinners and soirées attracting the artistic set, including Sir Thomas Lawrence, who painted the portrait of the ravishing brunette. Among her acquaintances she counted Lord Byron, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, Charles Dickens, and Benjamin Disraeli. Then in 1846 she introduced Louis Napoléon to her “protégée,” Harriet Howard, the woman who was to become intimately associated with his name over the next several years.9

Harriet Howard (baptized Elizabeth Ann Haryett) was born of humble origins in Brighton in 1823. At the age of fifteen, she ran off to London with hopes of a career on the stage and changed her name to Harriet Howard. There, a wealthy married army officer, Mountjoy Martyn, provided her with a son, Martin Constantin Haryett, and a remarkably handsome fortune. She was twenty-three years old living with her son in Berkeley Street when she met the prince. Theirs was an unusual romance from the start, Louis Napoléon soon bringing his two illegitimate sons—Eugene and Louis—from Ham to live with Harriet and her son Martin, and to be brought up together with them for the next several years. Thereafter the prince spent most of his time in Berkeley Street in 1847 and the early part of 1848.

As for the situation in Paris, no one was following events there more attentively than the prince. It was just a matter of time now.