“We weren’t cowards at Sedan, were we?” 1
—A DYING LOUIS NAPOLÉON TO HENRI CONNEAU, JANUARY 9, 1873
“I think France is quite ungovernable unless her
vanity and self-love are satisfied.” 2
—EUGÉNIE TO HER MOTHER, DOÑA MARÍA MANUELA
“She was pale and looked terrible, her eyes were hard, gleaming with anger, her face distorted by emotion,” is how Augustin Filon, the young Prince Louis’s tutor, described Empress Eugénie and the events breaking at the Tuileries late in the afternoon of the second of September, 1870. “Do you know what they are saying?” she said, handing a telegram to Filon and her private secretary, Eugène Conti, “That the Emperor has surrendered [at Sedan], that he has capitulated! Surely you don’t believe it?” Clearly in a state of shock from this news that Interior Minister Henri Chevereau had just given her moments earlier, and hardly in control of herself, she angrily burst out, “Why didn’t he kill himself!… Didn’t he realize he was disgracing himself? What a name to leave to his son!” “We remained there speechless and stunned,” after this veritable “torrent of mad, incoherent words,” Filon recalled.3 This sudden outbreak of war, Louis Napoléon insisting on commanding an army when he was crippled by so many maladies, and now followed by days without any news of him whatsoever; Eugénie was beside herself, and for the first time since declaring the empire, Louis Napoléon had left no reliable official to advise her. Since mid-August quite literally no one had been governing France.
Despite loud protests and even serious threats against the empire and Louis Napoléon, Eugénie, as regent in her husband’s absence, defied them all. “I am quite prepared to face any danger,” she insisted. “My one personal concern is to fulfill all my duties [and] … not to desert my post.”4 By Sunday the fourth of September, however, the Tuileries was surrounded by a raging mob of some 200,000 men and women from the St.-Antoine slums, hurling abuse as they attempted to break through the heavy wrought-iron gates before the palace. It was no longer a matter of directing the affairs of state, or even of remaining there.
Eugénie found herself a veritable prisoner. Long a fan and admirer of Queen Marie-Antoinette, the empress feared sharing the same fate as that beautiful young queen, beneath the blade of a guillotine. Nevertheless, even at this desperate hour, Eugénie refused to permit the handful of remaining troops to fire on the threatening masses. “I would prefer the dynasty to perish rather than lose a single French life,” she told General Mellinet, who was in charge of the dwindling palace security. “I wasn’t frightened of dying,” she later explained, but “what did frighten me was falling into the hands of those thugs,” who would defile her in a crude death, and “I could already imagine them lifting up my skirts and hear their savage laughter.”5
By now, on this sweltering September Sunday, Eugénie having been abandoned even by her devoted ladies-in-waiting, it became clear that there was no choice left but flight. Apart from Admiral Jurien de la Gravière and Henri Conneau’s son, Eugène, only Austria’s ambassador, Richard von Metternich, and the Italian ambassador, Constantin Nigra, remained with her. The French had abandoned her. Nigra, braving the pressing crowd, finally hailed a passing cab in the Rue de Rivoli. A young hooligan lunged out to grab Eugénie, but was held back by the two diplomats as she and Mme. Lebreton-Bourbaki, her reader, friend, and sister of General Charles Bourbaki, narrowly escaped in the hired open one-horse fiacre.6
Leaving with neither money nor jewels and only the black dress and veil she was wearing, Eugénie was never to see her entire life’s possessions and the Tuileries again. After driving in vain for hours seeking the protection of friends, late that afternoon the two by now utterly desperate ladies finally reached the mansion of Louis Napoléon’s American dentist and personal friend, Thomas Evans, in Haussmann’s recently constructed Avenue de l’Impératrice (today’s Avenue Foch), near the Arc de Triomphe. Intending to avoid the obvious ports of Calais and Boulogne, setting out before dawn in Evans’s closed landau the following morning, Monday the fifth, they safely reached the late Auguste de Morny’s recently built coastal resort of Deauville the afternoon of the sixth. Evans, attended by his nephew, approached Sir John Burgoyne, a former officer of the Grenadier Guards, and the owner of a splendid English yacht in that small harbor, the sixty-foot Gazelle, to ask for his services in secreting the empress to England. More Flashman than Guardsman, he refused outright. In fact a powerful gale was churning the channel into a sailor’s nightmare, with most fishing smacks seeking a lee shore. In any event, the gallant Sir John was not about to risk a French prison or worse for a French woman, not even for an empress. Fortunately, Burgoyne’s wife was able to overrule him. Late that night the two ladies and Evans were whisked aboard the yacht. Storm or no, and despite a foundering ship of the Royal Navy, the Gazelle braved the worst, reaching Rye at four a.m. on Thursday the eighth.7
By the end of the month the plump, ever resourceful American Evans had found and rented the small Georgian mansion of Camden Place, in Chislehurst, Kent, just a few miles southeast of London. There mother and son were gratefully united after weeks of separation. She was also now joined by Augustin Filon, the palace butler, the maître d’hôtel, and the principal chef of the Tuileries. Her immediate aim was to see her fourteen-year-old son, Louis, enrolled in the British army at Woolwich Barracks, and to prepare Camden Place for her husband upon his release by the Prussians.8 It proved to be a longer wait than expected.
This period of anxiety, pending the arrival of the prisoner’s first letters, provided time for thought, and in the case of Eugénie, time for a reassessment of her marriage. And it is to her credit that after her terrible, angry Latin explosion, including a scathing condemnation of Louis Napoléon, she now felt remorse, pity, and the need for reconciliation. Her letters from Chislehurst were to reflect a renewed concern and sense of compassion for a man who had in his personal relations so egregiously betrayed and alienated her over the years. It was not simply the failure of the war that drew her anger, but his years of abandonment, the acute pain and humiliation he had inflicted on her through his incessant, ill-concealed series of affairs and trysts. With a surprisingly rapid change of attitude, she now looked eagerly for her wayward husband’s arrival when they could spend their final years together peacefully in this English exile.
There was always in Eugénie two persons, the gracious empress and the Spaniard, the one feminine and compassionate, the other the hardened, disciplined daughter of her father, a grandee of the Spanish aristocracy, a proud, distinguished, and courageous soldier. Then when, by the third week of August, Louis Napoléon, too weak and in too much pain even to sit a horse, no longer capable of providing even the symbolic leadership the army so desperately needed, had written to Eugénie pleading to be allowed to return to Paris, the “Spanish” side of her had replied like a thunderbolt, “ordering him” to remain with the Army of Châlons. “If you return now it won’t be just rocks the people will be hurling at you in the streets, but dung!” Augustin Filon, still at the Tuileries as her son’s tutor, was appalled. But she had been outraged, for an emperor to abandon his own army in the field, to surrender in mid-battle. To Eugénie it was simply inconceivable. He might not be able to appear on horseback, or even be able to stand up, but at least he would be present on the battlefield. “Don’t you realize … he is doomed if we don’t stop him [from returning here]!” she had screamed hysterically at a bewildered Filon.9
* * *
On the fifth of September Louis Napoléon reached the splendid château of Wilhelmshöhe, where he would remain in gilded bondage until March 19, 1871. Here, along with an entourage of fourteen, including his oldest and dearest companion, Henri Conneau, and his other doctor, Adolphe Corvisart, his young Corsican private secretary, Franceschini Piétri, Achille Murat, and five captured generals—Castelnau, Ney, Reille, Pajol, and Waubert de Genlis—and equerries, they settled in for the duration.10 Louis Napoléon was assigned a suite of six elegant rooms and extensive use of the enormous park, gardens, and wood. The thoughtful Prussian queen, Augusta, sent servants and her own chef from the palace in Potsdam. It was ironic that Wilhelmshöhe, near Cassel, had been chosen as Louis Napoléon’s “prison,” as it was the former palace (then called Napoleonshöhe) of his late uncle Jérôme Bonaparte, the father of Plon-Plon, when King of Westphalia, from which Jérôme had fled decades earlier against Napoleon’s orders at the approach of allied troops.
Louis Napoléon, who had been prostrate on his arrival, gained strength slowly, while automatically falling into exactly the same routine he had followed as a prisoner at Ham in the 1840s, rising early and spending most of each day closed up in his study with his secretary, books, and papers. The defeated emperor had three primary preoccupations here: the developments of the war and tentative peace negotiations, the volatile political situation in Paris, and his son and Eugénie. The relations between himself and his wife over the past few years had deteriorated considerably, they each going their own way. The only thing bringing them together were their public obligations and an abiding love of their much cherished son, Imperial Prince Louis, or the Comte de Pierrefond, as he was now officially known in exile. Tragedy frequently heals divisions and brings families together, and it was with great trepidation that in the third week of September Louis Napoléon opened his wife’s first letters from England.
* * *
“Nothing remains of the imperial grandeur of the past, nothing separates us any longer,” a calm, resigned Eugénie now wrote. “Instead we are reunited closer than ever by our sufferings and our hopes, all concentrated on our dear little Louis. The darker the future appears, the greater our need for mutual love and support.” Enormously relieved, but never an eloquent man himself when it came to expressing deep personal emotion, Louis Napoléon gratefully thanked Eugénie for “the tender expression of these letters, which have done me so much good,” simple emotions he had not written or expressed since the death of his mother, Hortense, more than two decades earlier. The barrier of acrimony and distrust of the past few years was broken. There would never again be a harsh word spoken between them.11
A much reassured Louis Napoléon buried himself in his study from morning to night with his young secretary, Franceschini Piétri, to help him with his documents and books. Above all Louis Napoléon was intent on setting down all aspects of the historical record of this war of 1870, a project he would continue later in England.12 Once again he and Henri Conneau dined together, and those long, uneventful evenings in the salon, often with Corvisart, Piétri, and his cousin, Achille Murat, the son of Joachim and Caroline (Bonaparte). Occasionally the generals, now discarding their military uniforms, also participated. The army, once the center of Louis Napoléon’s existence, no longer held the same attraction or garnered the same admiration. Following lunch he would take a short walk through the lovely gardens, the long rides and hunts of the past, just memories.
Louis Napoléon was allowed visitors, including the loyal Hortense Cornu, Lord Malmesbury from England, his faithful friend Count Francesco Arese coming all the way from Milan, and the Duchess of Hamilton, the daughter of his favorite cousin, Stéphanie de Baden. The most important visitor of all, however, was Eugénie, who arrived on the thirtieth of October for just three days. Their reunion was complete; she remained dutifully devoted to him till the day he died. But he did decline her offer to share his internment there. Bismarck for his part quite naturally rejected Louis Napoléon’s request to have units of his own Imperial Guard brought there. On the other hand, rather surprisingly, he was allowed to invite several of his marshals here, Patrice de MacMahon alone declining that honor. Apparently Bismarck did not fear a new plot by Napoléon III. A German journalist, Mels Cohen, interviewed the French emperor several times, who talked freely on every aspect of the war, international affairs, and his life as a prisoner of the Prussians.13
Louis Napoléon remained greatly preoccupied with the continuing current campaigns of the war and Bismarck’s subsequent terms for a peace agreement. He followed the news of the daily events of both the war and Parisian politics through the French, Italian, German, and English newspapers placed at his disposal. General Louis Trochu, the commanding general protecting Paris, Plon-Plon’s appointment assigned to protect Eugénie, had immediately abandoned her without so much as a by-your-leave to join Jules Favre and Léon Gambetta in their coup d’état on the fourth of September, when they took over the Hôtel de Ville. From Prefect Haussmann’s old office they announced the demise of Napoléon’s Second Empire and the creation of “a republic,” to be ruled by the new Government of National Defense, with none other than this selfsame Major General Louis Jules Trochu as its president.
Paris was an armed camp with ample army supplies, and some 2,000 pieces of artillery placed atop Montmartre and Belleville. But Trochu was as devious a politician as he was incompetent a soldier. An intensive German bombardment of Paris began in January 1871, and by the eighteenth of that month Prussia’s victorious King Wilhelm I, now installed at Versailles, at long last pronounced himself emperor, kaiser, of “Germany.” Bismarck had achieved the unification of the German states, including Bavaria. On the twenty-eighth of January, Adolphe Thiers (who finally joined the government) and Jules Favre signed an armistice with Bismarck and nominally surrendered Paris and France. In February, Thiers became Head of the Government of National Defense (and president of the republic that August).
With the signing of the armistice, when Prussia’s Wilhelm I planned to send in hundreds of cartloads of food for the people of the French capital now cut off from the rest of the country, the mercurial Bismarck exploded in an “outburst of rage.” “Count Bismarck has won for himself the reputation of being the instigator of all the cruel reprisals we have, alas, been forced to carry out,” a frustrated Prussian crown prince confided to a friend. “They even say that he intends to establish a reign of terror in Paris!”14 On the first of March of 1871, Kaiser Wilhelm I, Bismarck, Moltke, and the Prussian army concluded their victory celebrations with a grand parade of 30,000 meticulously turned-out troops down the Champs-Élysées to the Arc de Triomphe. The humiliated French were literally in tears. On their return to Berlin, a similar victory parade was held at the Brandenburg Gate.
Even as the newly elected French government convened in Bordeaux on the twenty-sixth of March, the people of Paris, who had rejected any armistice or talk of peace, formed a government of their own, the Commune, fighting the French army, while the Prussians looked on in astonishment. This Commune, begun on the eighteenth of March, was suppressed on the twenty-eighth of May, 1871, but only after fierce fighting between the Communards and the French army, not to mention the path of destruction those Communards left behind, including the burnt-out Palace of St. Cloud (shelled earlier by French guns) and the deliberate arson attacks by drunken working-class men and women, who looted and burned the Tuileries, the Imperial Library of the Louvre, the Palais de Justice, part of the Palais Royal, the Palais de la Légion d’Honneur, the Hôtel de Ville, the Théâtre Lyrique, and the Théâtre Porte Saint-Martin, while seriously damaging the Odéon, Le Châtelet, the Théâtre de Cluny and the Bataclan, and dozens of businesses and other buildings, private and public, in the heart of the French capital.
And then came the shocking results of the war’s battles: over 281,000 French dead and wounded, exclusive of 474,414 French prisoners of war—138,871 French coffins. The Germans had suffered 116,696 casualties. Perhaps another 25,000 French were civilians killed or starved during the Commune of 1871. Bismarck should have been a very happy man.15
* * *
Meanwhile Louis Napoléon, who was gradually recuperating but still suffering from the gallstone that was to lead to his death, watched events helplessly from Uncle Jérôme’s study and the enervating peaceful isolation of Wilhelmshöhe. Back in France on February 8, 1871, French national elections took place, the people unanimously overthrowing Napoléon III and his dynasty. Only the French would hold national elections while in a state of war and surrounded by hundreds of thousands of German soldiers. Of the 650 new deputies elected to the assembly, a mere twenty represented the Bonapartists. It was all Louis Napoléon’s fault, the new assembly declared. Of course no one knew then or indeed for many decades to come that Bismarck, von Roon, and von Moltke had for the past eight years been planning to take this revenge on France, regardless of the country’s leader. The extent of the sweeping Prussian success across the battlefields of 1870, however, took the French completely by surprise, as Maxime Du Camp discovered upon returning to Paris.
* * *
“I saw that to contest the position any longer would be futile, an act of desperation,” Louis Napoléon later reflected. “The honor of the army having been saved by the bravery already demonstrated, I exercised my sovereign right and gave orders to hoist a flag of truce. I claim the entire responsibility for that act. The further destruction of another 80,000 men [of the Army of Châlons] could not have saved France.… My heart was broken, but my conscience was clear.16… Now that the struggle is suspended, that the capital, in spite of a heroic resistance has fallen, and with it all hope of a national victory has vanished, it is time for everyone to demand an accounting from those who have usurped power from us in September.”17
He remained optimistic, however, and felt that the impressive endorsement by universal suffrage that had placed him on the throne would soon restore that empire and a place for his son. On the other hand, he was never under any illusions. “Power is a heavy burden,” he acknowledged, “because one cannot always succeed in doing everything one hopes to achieve for the people, and because your peers rarely acknowledge or appreciate what you are attempting to accomplish on their behalf.”18
The final months at Wilhelmshöhe did at least assure Louis Napoléon of a warm welcome in England upon his release. “You and Louis mean everything to me,” Eugénie wrote. “You take the place of family and country for me.” But the brilliance of their past and court life meant nothing to her, she insisted. “For us simply to be together now, that is all I wish for, my poor cher ami.” She wanted to share the much-welcomed new peaceful refuge with him. “What matters above all else now is seeing you again,” a contrite Eugénie wrote from her new home at Camden Place. “These long days are so difficult for me, too.… And I am quite sure God has reserved a happier future for us.… My love and tenderness for you continue to grow again. I would make any sacrifice to make life happier for you.”19 But he was returning a broken man haunted by Sedan and the fall of his empire and everything he had striven to achieve.
* * *
Hardly known for his moderation, Otto von Bismarck now inflicted a five-billion-gold-franc war indemnities bill on France—the equivalent of the staggering war indemnity Napoléon I had extracted at gunpoint from Prussia in 1807. For good measure, Bismarck then took large swathes of Alsace and Lorraine, forcefully seizing 1,600,000 French men, women, and children. Bismarck had achieved his ultimate goal of avenging “the mistreatment and humiliation” inflicted on the Prussians by Napoléon, avenging their “hatred of that foreigner,” as he put it.20 In the process he finally unified the whole of “Germany” including Bavaria, without which World War I could never have been fought. Furthermore, ironically, Bismarck could never have executed this unification of the German Confederation had not Napoléon I, upon invading the whole of the German states comprising the Holy Roman Empire, completely suppressed and restructured it with a new, tightly knit structure under French command. Bismarck had simply replaced it with Prussian administration and troops. In the end it was in part thanks to Uncle Napoléon I’s legacy of rampant aggression that nephew Napoléon III ultimately fell.
* * *
Neither Prussia’s Wilhelm I nor Bismarck had realized what a sick man they had on their hands when they decided to hold Louis Napoléon a prisoner of war. His dying while in their custody would have brought the wrath of God upon them and international condemnation, an alienation even their sweeping victory over the French could hardly efface. But with terms of peace now in the works, on the nineteenth of March Bismarck put Louis Napoléon and Drs. Corvisart and Conneau on the kaiser’s special train, taking them to the Belgian frontier, where Louis Napoléon’s cousin Mathilde came to bid a tearful final adieu, and then on to the Channel port of Ostende. King Leopold, hardly a close friend or admirer, nevertheless placed his yacht at the disposal of the deposed emperor, even as disastrous news of a fresh revolt in Paris reached him, news of the creation of the brief but bloody “Paris Commune.” Louis Napoléon’s party reached Dover the following day, and by dusk on that twentieth of March he was driving up the alley of ancient elms leading up to Camden Place, his final home. Despite rumors to the contrary, he was no longer a rich man with a reputed twenty million francs stashed away in the strong rooms of Barclays alone. In reality he had a total of only 260,000 gold francs (a little over three million dollars) to his name, but at least he was a free man, exiled safely under the protection of the English once again.21
* * *
After the enforced immobility as a German prisoner of war at Wilhelmshöhe and despite his plague of physical preoccupations, Louis Napoléon established a surprisingly busy agenda in Chislehurst. Following Eugénie’s arrival back in September 1870, members of the family, friends, and opportunists had descended on the Kentish village, some as permanent residents and members of the household, including the family of Henri Conneau, Dr. Lucien Corvisart, Count Adolphe Clary and his wife, Augustin Filon, Franceschini Piétri, Napoléon Hugues Maret (the Duke of Bassano), the Grand Chamberlain of the Tuileries, and Louis Napoléon’s new secretary and former journalist, Alfred de La Chapelle. In addition, a steady stream of visitors also came from France, including former premier Eugène Rouher, the Duke and Duchess of Mouchy, related to Eugénie, Louis Lucien Bonaparte, and the late Jérôme Bonaparte’s bastard son, Senator Jérôme David, to name a few of a very long list.22
To the disapproval of the newly anointed emperor of Germany, Wilhelm I, Otto von Bismarck, and of many French and English political figures as well, Queen Victoria was one of Eugénie’s earliest and most regular visitors at Camden Place. “At the door stood the poor Empress in black, [and] the Prince Imperial,” the queen noted in her sharply slanting handwriting hand on the thirtieth of November, 1871. “She is very thin and pale, but still very handsome. There was an expression of deep sadness in her eyes.” Her fifteen-year-old son, Louis, she found to be “a nice boy but rather short and strumpy.” Moreover, the diminutive queen, herself still in black as well—Albert had died a decade earlier—described this, the first of many, as “a sad visit … like a strange dream.”23 The two grim ladies continued to see each other frequently thereafter. The Prince of Wales, the future Edward VII, too, was the first to greet Louis Napoléon upon his arrival at Camden Place. “He has grown very stout and gray and the moustaches are no longer curled and waxed,” Victoria noted, but there remained “the same pleasing, gentle and gracious manner.” Nor could she but admire the stoic attitude of the fallen emperor, he bearing “his terrible misfortunes, [with] dignity and patience,” just like Albert during his last illness.24
At a time when she was being attacked brutally, even crudely, in Paris and by the French press in particular, the continuing kindness the queen of England so publicly bestowed on her and Louis Napoléon—including reciprocal invitations to Windsor, Balmoral, and Cowes—meant a very great deal to a proud Eugénie. “You could never believe all the delicate attentions she lavished on us in those first bitter days of our exile. She always treated us as sovereigns,” Eugénie later reminisced. “Her visits to Chislehurst really lifted our spirits.”25
Alas the same could not be said of the ever smug Prince Jérôme of Crimean “Sans-Plomb” repute, who persisted on arriving uninvited with his gratuitous advice and presumptuous orders. Rarely did one meet a man whose repulsive physical appearance so brutally reflected his actual character. One day Eugénie’s dignified Spanish blood, no longer able to tolerate his latest interference, suddenly turned on him. “Monsiegneur, for eighteen years we have had to put up with your constant criticism of the Empire.… But you were never there to help out when really needed, and especially at the most dangerous moments!”26 “Gutless” Bonaparte left for Paris. A couple of years after the death of Louis Napoléon, this same thoughtful cousin Jérôme would return to Camden Place yet again, not to see what he could do to alleviate the situation facing Eugénie and her son, to offer his aid, but to bully her again. On this occasion he pointed out that her son needed a man to take charge of his education and insisted that Prince Louis return to Paris and live with him! As Louis positively loathed this bumptious individual as much as his mother did, their disappointed visitor yet again returned to Paris, alone.27
As for Louis Napoléon, he really did become a homebody now, apart from occasional excursions to the clubs of Pall Mall, visits with the queen, or country tours. Most of his time, when not spent in his study, he devoted to Eugénie and his son. He was especially preoccupied with Prince Louis’s education and watched with satisfaction his progress as a cadet officer at the nearby Woolwich Barracks. Whenever he and Eugénie visited there, the ex-emperor was always very popular with the young men and the staff. Louis Napoléon also had him enrolled in a couple of courses at King’s College, London. And when Eugénie was out of the country, in Spain on family business, or up in Scotland, Louis Napoléon would proudly take his handsome son on excursions to Torquay, Bath, London, and elsewhere. They now became very close, much to Eugénie’s delight. What a difference from Louis Napoléon’s most painful relationship with his own father.
In one respect Louis Napoléon had not changed, however, for like his uncle, Napoléon, he was a born conspirator. There were always rumors to be picked up in the clubs of Pall Mall about “French plots.” Both the Bourbons and Louis Philippe’s sons were always up to something. The Comte de Chambord wanted the crown for himself. And of course now that Louis Napoléon was once again exiled in England, his attempted coup at Boulogne was remembered. What was he up to now at Camden Place? In fact both the English and French governments had spies in Chislehurst, one visibly perched in a windmill overlooking the small estate.
It was the inimitable Plon-Plon who first broached the subject of Louis Napoléon’s return to Paris, and gradually formulated a plan. Although adamantly declining to participate in any more active conspiracies, ultimately he gave a reluctant nod of the head, and by 1872 one was well in hand. Louis Napoléon’s former ADC, écuyer, and confidant, the fifty-seven-year-old General Émile Fleury, was coordinating everything. The old Napoleonic guard in France and exiles in the surrounding countries were willing to back this operation, depositing sufficient funds with the Bank of England. Newspapers were acquired or subsidized to keep Louis Napoléon’s name alive and his activities reported, if often laced with enthusiastic embellishment. The emperor was alive and well and preparing for the day of his return. Moreover, General Fleury had received word from Chancellor, and now Prince, von Bismarck, through the good offices of the Russian diplomat Count Shuvaloff, that Prussia would welcome such a coup against Thiers’s new republic.
It was the old Hundred-Days-Elba-scenario all over again, with one variation. Instead of approaching from the south of France like his uncle, Louis Napoléon would sail to Holland and pass through Germany to Switzerland. From Thonon on the French side of Lake Geneva, they would descend to Chambéry to be joined by the local regiment, and thence down to Lyon, where the commanding general, Charles Bourbaki, would have his entire eastern army corps ready to march on Paris, when Plon-Plon would join them.
Such were the plans Prince Jérôme reviewed with Louis Napoléon at Camden Place on December 9, 1872. They now set the date for the operation to begin: January 31, 1873, in seven weeks’ time. Louis Napoléon’s health was clearly a factor, but he seemed well enough at this stage. He would just have to sit in a coach and watch. Eugénie, only too happy with her new refuge—“Camden Place,” she was later to comment, “for me it was heaven,” compared to palace life in Paris—certainly would have put a stop to these plans for a coup, but Louis Napoléon was the master of secrecy. Jérôme probably felt that should anything happen to Louis Napoléon en route, he, Plon-Plon, could act as regent in his name, or in that of his son, Louis. Such was the situation as Plon-Plon then returned to Paris. Everything was set for D-day, the thirty-first of January.28
Despite Louis Napoléon’s gallant attempt at a new life, and Eugénie’s complete support, later in December his health deteriorated rapidly. Back on the eighteenth of November three specialists had met at Camden Place: Sir Henry Thompson, Sir James Paget, and at the urging of Queen Victoria, her personal physician, Sir William Gull. After a fresh examination under chloroform in the first week of December, they came to a unanimous conclusion. The greatly enlarged stone had descended, completely blocking the flow of urine, they had to operate; there was no choice in the matter. But still Louis Napoléon hesitated, perhaps wishing to complete his appointment with Jérôme on the ninth. Later, when attempting to set out to visit his son at Woolwich, however, he barely reached the gates of the estate before collapsing in pain.
The first operation, on the second of January, 1873, failed, and the London newspapers were filled with columns written on the French emperor’s health. Louis Napoléon suddenly became the focus of national attention, and long articles appeared on his career and personal life. Suddenly the whole country wanted to know something about the fabled “Sphinx.” Daily health bulletins appeared in the Times and the Morning Chronicle, just as they had done during Prince Albert’s last days—always the sign of impending death. Edward, the Prince of Wales, now thirty-one, who had been devoted to Louis Napoléon from the day of their first meeting in Paris during the Universal Exhibition of 1855, wrote almost daily on behalf of himself and Queen Victoria.
A second operation on the sixth was as painful as it was unsuccessful. Louis Napoléon was put on opium and chloroform from now on, and Eugénie wanted to send for their son at Woolwich, but her husband would not allow it. A third operation was planned for noon on the ninth of January. Eugénie sat by his bed night and day, refusing to leave him. Prince Louis had been sent for. The specialists were there, including Henri Conneau, Louis Napoléon’s daily companion since Arenenberg. By the morning of the ninth the patient was delirious much of the time, and the end seemed near. When relatively lucid, he seemed preoccupied with only one thing—Sedan, and those nearly 139,000 French coffins for which he was solely responsible. “We weren’t cowards there, were we?… Were you at Sedan, Henri?”29 Eugénie held Louis Napoléon’s hand as Father Goddard administered the last rites. When horses were finally heard pulling up before the house, Eugénie rushed to the door and took her by now tall sixteen-year-old son in her arms. “You are all I have left now.” It was 11:45 a.m. Louis Napoléon Bonaparte, Emperor of the French, had died thirty minutes earlier.30