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 Second empire: 
 
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THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
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THE 
 
 SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 BONAPARTISM • THE PRINCE 
 
 THE PRESIDENT • THE 
 
 EMPEROR 
 
 BY 
 
 PHILIP 
 GUEDALLA 
 
 Cahallero aventurero es una cosa que 
 en dos palabras se ve apaleado y 
 Emperador. 
 
 El Inoenioso Hidalgo 
 Don Quixote be la. Mancha. 
 
 You have seen better days, dear? So 
 have I 
 
 PRiyCE HOHENSTIEL-SCHWANOAU, 
 
 Savioue. of Society. 
 
 CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD. 
 
 LONDON • BOMBAY • SYDNEY 
 
 1922 
 
 n 
 
Printed in Great Britain by T. »nd A. Constable Ltd. 
 at the Edinbiirgli University Presa 
 
D. G. 
 
 PATRIS CAEISSIill 
 MANIBTJS DILECTIS 
 
 P. G. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 BONAPARTISM 
 THE PRINCE 
 THE PRESIDENT 
 THE EMPEROR 
 Authorities . 
 Index 
 
 PAGE 
 1 
 
 35 
 . 147 
 . 231 
 
 444 
 . 453 
 
BONAPARTISM 
 
BONAPARTISM 
 
 BoNAPARTiSM stands to Napoleon in the somewhat 
 pecuHar relation in which most religions stand to 
 their founder. The picturesque imagination of in- 
 numerable ironists has exhausted itself in speculations 
 upon the probable feehngs of various divine and 
 semi-divine teachers when confronted with the full 
 glories of their own shrines. But it may be doubted 
 whether the sensations of the central personage at 
 Kamakura or St. Peter's would bear comparison 
 for irony with the thoughts which must rise in that 
 Uttle white-breeched, green-uniformed figure, fresh 
 from a bath of ambrosial eau-de-Cologne prepared 
 by an Elysian Constant, as he studies the externals 
 of his career on the painted canvas of Meissonier 
 or spells out his poHtical message from the printed 
 page of M. Paul de Cassagnac. And yet, unlike 
 many teachers, the Emperor apprehended the pur- 
 port of the gospel which he taught. Napoleon (it 
 is a singular fact) was a Bonapartist. But he did 
 not become one until he had ceased to be an Emperor. 
 
 The realities of his career have become almost 
 indecipherably obscured beneath the martyrology 
 and miracles of the Napoleonic myth. Scholastic 
 decorum confined the explanatory exuberance of 
 in Alexandrian i3ommentator to the margin of his 
 
4 THE SECOND ElVlPIRE 
 
 manuscript. But the story of that life between 
 the years 1769 and 1821 is a mere pahmpsest across 
 which the romantics, the sentimentalists, and the 
 reactionaries have scrawled their distortions of the 
 original text. 
 
 Few careers (unless musicians are in question) 
 possess any interest outside the narrow circle of 
 relatives and cm-io-hunters before the age of twenty 
 is reached. The early years of their subjects are 
 the chosen playground of imaginative biographers, 
 and a full supply of pleasing and significant incident 
 has always been stimulated by the steady demand 
 of those sympathetic students who are perpetually 
 eager to hear their little hero Ksping his first prayer, 
 to watch his tiny fingers straining round the pommel 
 of his father's sword. But the child is not, except 
 in fables, the father of the man ; and no circumstance 
 of Napoleon's boyhood possesses the faintest Euro- 
 pean significance beyond the fact, distressing doubt- 
 less at the time to his anxious father and more 
 regrettable subsequently to the populations of his 
 fraternal kingdoms of Spain, Holland, Naples, and 
 Westphaha, that he came of a large family. The 
 family lived principally upon expectations 'from their 
 father's litigation in that somewhat unsatisfactory 
 frame of mind with which Dickens has familiarised 
 his readers, and in a still Bleaker House in Ajaccio 
 Carlo Buonaparte, who was that one figure in life 
 more pathetic than a sick doctor (for he was a 
 litigious lawyer), expected a judgment shortly in an 
 interminable action in which he had cited as respon- 
 dents the Order of Jesus and the French Crown. 
 Such judgments are rarely delivered in the lifetime 
 of the parties ; and when the plaintiff died, he left 
 
BONAPARTISM 5 
 
 little to his widow and his eight children beyond 
 this welter of red tape and their wits. 
 
 The boy's education exercised even less than the 
 usual lack of influence upon his development, since 
 he was educated for the army. The world in 
 Napoleon's schooldays was full of that vague atmo- 
 sphere of Progress which is the invariable indication 
 of a stationary age. The enfants perdus of French 
 drawing-rooms were volunteering for service against 
 the English in Rhode Island ; and those who stayed 
 at home, whilst Lafayette was crusading in the 
 singular cause of American independence, were 
 learning to quote Rousseau and Montesquieu with 
 that facihty which has never failed really well-bred 
 persons in the case of authors whom they have not 
 read. But it may be doubted whether any breath 
 of the contemporary movement was permitted to 
 pass the walls of the academy for the sons of gentle- 
 men in which Napoleon received his grounding in 
 French and the rudiments before his education 
 became strictly professional. 
 
 Graduating in the paralysing study of mathe- 
 matics, he obtained the commission of King Louis 
 XVI. and passed out of adolescence as a hatchet-faced 
 subaltern in the Midi. The world was spinning 
 interminably down the long groove of the Eighteenth 
 Century ; and life, as the young gunner shaded his 
 eyes to look down the broad avenue of his prospects, 
 must have seemed to hold little beyond a weary 
 alternation of parades on the dusty drill-grounds of 
 the south and polite attentions to the anaemic 
 denizens of provincial salons, with a little leave in 
 Corsica and a little leisure for the annotation of 
 Plutarch or re-reading of Goethe for its sole, its 
 
6 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 ghastly relaxations. But one month and a day 
 before his twentieth birthday a Paris crowd, having 
 some artillery, went against the Bastille, and the 
 Revolution, which had hitherto been conducted as 
 a genteel parliamentary charade among the parterres 
 of Versailles, entered the lives of twenty-five millions 
 of Frenchmen. One of them was a starved-looking 
 young man in a garrison town with an uncertain 
 temper and an Italian accent. 
 
 The lessons which Napoleon learned from the 
 Revolution were at once simpler and less unsettling 
 than those which it taught to his more impressionable 
 contemporaries. The forcible reconstruction of the 
 French system by the men of the First Republic, 
 from which the world has learnt so much, taught 
 Napoleon so little ; and although he piously muttered 
 the orthodox incantations of the blessed Rousseau 
 and twirled a Jacobin praying -wheel with the rest 
 of his generation, he retained almost to the last the 
 administrative ideals of a sergeant-major. 
 
 His contact with the Revolution left him with an 
 extreme distaste for crowds. That tendency is in- 
 herent in most orderly minds when confronted by 
 the incalculable and illogical proceedings of large 
 bodies of men, although it is corrected for some by 
 the spectacle of their own oratorical success — it is 
 so difficult to believe evil of one's cheering supporters. 
 But for Napoleon this corrective was absent. In 
 spite of a fashionable armoury of classical allusion 
 and a hterary style that is faintly reminiscent of 
 the poUtical platform, he was a poor speaker, and 
 his early triumphs before the Patriotic Club of 
 Ajaccio (whose Jacobinism, one suspects, was some- 
 times a trifle Babu, and where a Bonaparte could 
 
BONAPARTISM 7 
 
 always command the respectful applause of his 
 relatives) were never repeated before more critical 
 audiences in France itseK. It resulted from this 
 deficiency in his equipment and from the unfortunate 
 nature of his earliest contacts with the Revolution 
 that a popular assembly became an object of intense 
 distaste to Napoleon, and he remained always the 
 scared subaltern who had faced a country crowd 
 outside Auxonne in the days when he still wore the 
 King's uniform. His military instincts had been 
 scandalised by a mutiny of his own gunners in the 
 first summer of the Revolution ; and as he watched 
 Danton's republicans sweeping against the Tuileries 
 in 1792, the poHceman in him could find no kinder 
 name for them than ' la vile canaille. ^ Such men 
 can never be practising democrats ; and it was not 
 surprising that when three years later Barras needed 
 an artillerist to blow the Parisians off the streets, 
 he found General Bonaparte. 
 
 The second impression left on him by his contact 
 with the Revolution was a contempt for civilians. 
 His first experiences of mountain warfare on the 
 Riviera in the wake of the Representants en mission 
 must have filled him with a professional distaste for 
 gesticulating parliamentarians in tricolour sashes. 
 But he learned it principally in the drawing-rooms 
 of the Directoire, when the rushing waters of 1793 
 were flowing muddily through the shallows of 1798. 
 A European war had, as usual, washed the army 
 contractors into Society, and they enjoyed a freer 
 field than usual in view of the recent execution of 
 most of the people who might have snubbed them. 
 The spectacle of their purveyors is always peculiarly 
 exasperating to soldiers, who are apt to recollect the 
 
8 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 quality of the stores supplied, and polite society 
 under the Directoire consisted almost entirely of 
 such persons with a sUght admixture of politicians. 
 These were still more distasteful to Napoleon, since 
 they were either rival adventurers, successful public 
 speakers, or academic persons of a reflective habit 
 vaguely suggestive of the Common Room. It re- 
 sulted that Napoleon felt few scruples in substituting 
 military monarchy for a civilian repubUc by succes- 
 sive stages of violence and plebiscite, although his 
 wife, a colonial lady whose mild ambitions lay in 
 the direction of a salon, would have been more easily 
 contented with a bourgeois Republic under which 
 TaUien and a few decorative aides de camp might 
 have grouped themselves solicitously round her 
 couch, whilst Sieyes in one corner explained the 
 draft of a new constitution to a circle of respectful 
 stockbrokers. But Napoleon regarded civilian ac- 
 complishments with the full contempt of one to 
 whom they have been denied ; for him any man 
 who was not in uniform must be either a sutler or 
 an agitator, and in either case his proper place was 
 in obscurity. That is how the French citizens, who 
 had unmade the Monarchy, dwindled into the 
 deferential supers of a military pageant. The 
 crowds of the Revolution became the stage crowds 
 of the Empire, and the high-waisted civilian of 
 1800 faded inconspicuously into a cheering back- 
 ground across which his masters, the soldiers, 
 clanked and jingled their triumphant way. 
 
 But the military intelligence of Napoleon could 
 apprehend at least one lesson of the Revolution. 
 Of the three virtues inculcated by the new revelation 
 the greatest for him was Equality. Liberty was 
 
BONAPARTISM 9 
 
 demonstrably bad for discipline, and Fraternity 
 was either a gesture of rhetoric or (worse than that) 
 a piece of feminine sentimentality wholly inconsistent 
 with the axiomatic institution of war. But Equality 
 was a sound lesson of the drill-ground. One could 
 not manoeuvre a troop of horse in which each rank 
 enjoyed a peculiar privilege, and the nation which 
 made equal units of its citizens would march more 
 promptly to its master's orders than any old-world 
 welter of castes and classes. To that extent and 
 for reasons comprehensible to any drill sergeant 
 Napoleon was an egahtarian. 
 
 But with that exception the contribution made by 
 the Revolution to his stock of ideas was strikingly 
 small. The Jacobin system of local administration 
 possessed irresistible attractions for a disciplinarian, 
 and a trifle of loose theory about direct consultation 
 of the will of the people proved a convenient means 
 of eluding the control of its representatives. But 
 apart from these features and a creditable command 
 of the Revolutionary idiom Napoleon had little in 
 common with the men of the First Republic. In 
 reaUty he was almost completely a man of the 
 Eighteenth Century. His enlightenment was the 
 enlightenment of Joseph ii. His secularism was 
 the modish anti-religion of the days when Voltaire 
 had led a dainty crusade against the theological 
 inelegance of the Middle Ages. He would have 
 been thoroughly at home at the Court of Catharine ii. 
 
 The romantic imagination has persistently en- 
 deavoured to see Napoleon as a condottiere of the 
 Renaissance born three centuries too late. But no 
 picturesque character of the past could be less in- 
 dicative of the modern quahty of his tight-lipped 
 
10 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 persistence. He was, as most men are, a man of 
 the type admired in the world in his own boyhood. 
 In its adventm-e the career of Napoleon has aU the 
 flavour of those other adventurers of the Eighteenth 
 Century who climbed to power in countries where 
 they had once been strangers, of WaU the Irishman 
 who became first minister in Spain, of his predecessor 
 the Cardinal Alberoni whose father was an Italian 
 gardener, and (strangest of all) of Ripperda the 
 Dutch diplomatist who turned first Spaniard to 
 become a Duke and then Moslem to become Grand 
 Vizier to the Sultan of Morocco. That, and not the 
 romantic violence of Bartolommeo Colleoni, is the 
 stuff latent in the career of a Corsican gunner who 
 played for a moment with the idea of entering the 
 Turkish service and then made himself Emperor of 
 the French. And in its ideals of monarchy his reign 
 forms an apt pendant to the long chain of genteel 
 tjrrannies which had governed Europe in the 
 Eighteenth Century. The true parallel to the First 
 Empire is not to be found in the Caesars. The 
 Emperor's spiritual home was not on the Palatine, 
 but in Potsdam and Schonbrunn. His models lay 
 ready to his hand in the Prussia of Frederick the 
 Great and the Austria of Joseph n. The Empire 
 was an elaboration of the typical monarchy of the 
 Eighteenth Century, and Napoleon was the last (and 
 perhaps the most benevolent) of the benevolent 
 despots. 
 
 The principles of his foreign poHcy were cast in a 
 still more antique mould. It fell to him to direct 
 the course of French diplomacy after the Republic 
 had established itself as the first military power in 
 Europe, and there was strikingly little in the treaties 
 
BONAPARTISM 11 
 
 of 1797 or 1800 which would have scandaHsed 
 Frederick the Great or the ministers of Maria Theresa 
 as a departure from Eighteenth Century statecraft. 
 In spite of a profession of the fashionable faith in the 
 doctrines of nationality and natural frontiers, they 
 exhibited the bland indifference to these principles 
 which had prevailed in Europe for centuries. Their 
 simpKfication of the political geography of Germany 
 by the abolition of the fragmentary and diminutive 
 territories of the Church was an unconscious prelude 
 of German unity, and the establishment of the 
 Italian republics was an unintentional contribution 
 to the poHtical education of Italy. But the con- 
 scious acts of Napoleonic policy, of which the most 
 characteristic were the annexation of Belgium and 
 the surrender of Venice to the Austrians, were in 
 perfect harmony with the diplomatic temper of the 
 century which had witnessed the First Partition of 
 Poland. 
 
 The Imperial reconstruction of Europe was still 
 more ancient in its flavour. Indeed, the great parti- 
 tion of the Continent between the Emperor of the 
 French and the Czar of Russia resembled nothing 
 so much as those allocations of the civilised world 
 with which the successors of Julius Caesar diversified 
 the last years of the Roman Republic. The Revolu- 
 tion had sent polite society to its Plutarch ; but it 
 appeared from his foreign policy that the Emperor 
 had devoted more study to his life of Mark Antony 
 than to the more fashionable figures of the Gracchi. 
 The Empire itself was indebted for much of its decor 
 to models that were only a few centuries less antique, 
 since Napoleon played, like all amateur historians, 
 at the amiable game of historical parallel and was 
 
12 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 unduly impressed by the precedent of Charlemagne. 
 One looks in vain through this welter of pastiche and 
 archaism for any trace of modern ideas. The doc- 
 trines of the Revolution found a becoming place in 
 the liturgy of Napoleonic diplomacy. But except 
 where they coincided with French interests, they 
 were rarely permitted to emerge from the area of 
 sonorous repetition. The successive annexations 
 which brought the Empire to its greatest extent 
 in the years preceding the Russian expedition of 
 1812 displayed the completest disregard of the 
 racial as well as the geographical limits of France. 
 Her eastern frontier, which the most exaggerated 
 demands of Revolutionary geographers had advanced 
 no further than the Rhine, was traced without the 
 faintest justification of contemporary theory from 
 Liibeck to Spezzia ; and every canon of nationaHst 
 doctrine was violated by the annexation of Amster- 
 dam, the Hansa Towns, and (by a vaguely Caro- 
 Ungian gesture) of Rome itself. The Napoleonic 
 rearrangement of Germany by the creation of the 
 Confederation of the Rhine was a reminiscence, 
 almost equally traditional, of French ambitions 
 under the Cardinals. The fashionable terminology 
 of the day was adapted in the usual manner to the 
 perennial aims of French poUcy, and by a pleasing 
 irony the fruits of the Revolution were secured to 
 France by political weapons drawn from the rusty 
 armoury of RicheHeu. 
 
 The farrago of reaction which was the foundation 
 of the Napoleonic state-system produced a remark- 
 able inversion of roles in the European drama. 
 Napoleon, the heir and legal representative of the 
 Revolution, was confronted by the year 1812 with 
 
BONAPARTISM 13 
 
 an almost universal popular insurrection. The Czar 
 of Russia became a symbol of European liberty. 
 King George in. commanded the undivided allegiance 
 of his subjects in a war of European independence. 
 The Bourbons of Spain turned leaders of revolt, and 
 the Bourbons of France could outbid Napoleon in 
 democracy by the promise of a constitutional 
 monarchy. The nations of Europe turned against 
 the Empire its own doctrines of nationality and 
 natural frontiers, and went to war once more to 
 confine French government within the scientific 
 hmits of French race and the geography of France. 
 The reigning Hohenzollern raised the democratic 
 banner in his proclamation ' To my people,' and when 
 the reigning Hapsburg set to his lips the trumpet 
 of nationahsm, the walls of the Napoleonic citadel 
 reeled and fell in. 
 
 An odd postscript of modernity was provided by 
 the brief adventure of the Hundred Days. When 
 the Emperor swept into Paris from Elba, he was 
 forced by circumstances into an attitude which was 
 not his own. If the Bourbons were to be excluded 
 from France, it could only be done by a more popular 
 government than theirs. Louis xvm. had played 
 the CJiarte : Napoleon doubled and played the Acte 
 additionnel, and France experienced the queer sensa- 
 tion of receiving a Legislature of two Houses, Hberty 
 of the press, and a mild degree of ministerial responsi- 
 bihty from the hands of the most uncompromising 
 autocrat in Europe. But his actions were not 
 spontaneous, and the gesture of constitutional 
 monarchy which granted the Constitution of 1815 
 was as unnatural to Napoleon as the movements 
 of a sick man. The absolutism of the Grand Empire 
 
14 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 of 1810 had been the true expression of his ideals. 
 The uncertain sketch of a Liberal Empire which he 
 made in 1815 was little more than an indication of 
 his difl&culties. Leaving it half drawn, he drove out 
 of Paris to sweep the Prussians across the Rhine 
 and the EngUsh into the sea. He failed ; and sen- 
 tenced, after the custom of that day, to transporta- 
 tion, he sailed into the South Atlantic, 
 
 ' like some rare treasure galleon, 
 Hull down, with masts against the Western hues.' 
 
BONAPARTISM 16 
 
 II 
 
 At St. Helena Napoleon became a pretender to his 
 own throne ; and in this position of greater freedom 
 and less responsibihty he addressed himself with 
 enthusiasm to that sport of kings in exile, the drafting 
 and revision of his manifesto. The alternation of 
 war and administration in which he had Hved during 
 the Empire left him with Uttle leisure for the elabora- 
 tion of political doctrine. He had been far too busy 
 being Napoleonic to find time to be a Bonapartist. 
 But on his island he had time enough to become a 
 doctrinaire, and St. Helena was the seed-bed of 
 Bonapartism. An Emperor who is his own Council 
 of Ministers in peace and his own General Staff in 
 war is unlikely to leave behind him any considerable 
 or coherent body of pohtical theory. But the 
 speculations for which the Tuileries had no place 
 were a welcome exercise at Longwood. Napoleon 
 in exile became the first of the Bonapartists, and in 
 those hot afternoons of dictation he laid the founda- 
 tions of the Second Empire. 
 
 The Emperor had held the centre of the European 
 stage for fifteen years, and it was improbable that so 
 experienced a performer would fail to appreciate 
 the dramatic value of his exile. The lights which 
 had followed him across Europe were to be swung 
 on to his rock in the Atlantic, and one can almost 
 catch the tramp of the scene-shifters in the sudden 
 drop of his tone from the pride of omnipotence to 
 
16 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the resignation of defeat. In the next act the drums 
 were to be muffled, and in a subdued glare of foot- 
 lights the lonely Emperor was to be despised and 
 rejected of men. 
 
 Napoleon had discovered that the popularity of 
 novel creeds is largely derived from the richness of 
 their martjrrology, and with sound judgment he 
 resolved to become the first martyr of his faith. 
 Within a year of his arrival at St. Helena he was 
 talking of a Bonapartist restoration based on his 
 own martyrdom, and by 1817 that acute pubHcist 
 had scandalised his generals with a cynical apprecia- 
 tion of the propagandist value of the Crucifixion : 
 ' If Jesus Christ had not died on the cross, he would 
 never have been worshipped as God.' The moral 
 was drawn for the new gospel of Bonapartism : ' If 
 I die on the cross and my son lives, all wiU be well 
 with him.' The Imperial crown was to be exchanged 
 for a crown of thorns, and Napoleon and his helpers 
 on the island set to work a trifie clumsily to improvise 
 a new Calvary. Sir Hudson Lowe found himself 
 cast for the unsympathetic part of Pilate, and the 
 evangelists of Longwood prepared their synoptic 
 gospels for the world. 
 
 The new creed had now its martyrology. It 
 remained to provide its doctrine, and the Emperor, 
 in the words of his step-daughter, ' arranged his 
 life, his defence, and his glory with the infinite care 
 of a dramatist lavishing work on his fifth act and 
 elaborating every detail for the sake of the final 
 apotheosis.' The drama which had been left un- 
 finished at Waterloo was to be provided with a happy 
 ending in which a younger Bonaparte sat enthroned 
 amid the cheers of a happy people, whilst the founder 
 
BONAPARTISM 17 
 
 of the dynasty smiled down through the incense upon 
 the realisation of his dreams. Napoleon's work at 
 St. Helena was much more than a crude and senti- 
 mental gesture of martyrdom. It was the first, 
 propaganda of Bonapartism. 
 
 The new doctrine was designed to compete in the 
 markets of European opinion with the Peace of 
 Vienna, and it became necessary to include in its 
 composition a strong admixture of those liberal 
 principles which had been violated by the old-world 
 diplomacy of Metternich and Castlereagh. A supply 
 of lofty ideals has rarely failed the critics of peace 
 treaties ; and if Napoleon n. was to outbid Louis 
 xvin., he must be prepared to offer democracy to 
 the people of France and nationahsm to the 
 populations of Europe. It became the business 
 of Napoleon in exile to delnonstrate that these 
 principles had been the political tradition of his 
 House, and the unfortunate circumstance that they 
 had not, served only to send him more eagerly to 
 his task. 
 
 The problem which confronted those aging and 
 irritable men in their farm-house in the tropics was 
 the adjustment of Napoleon's record to the novel 
 exigencies of Bonapartist doctrine, and it became 
 necessary, if the autocrat of 1810 was to pass for a 
 democrat in 1820, to handle the facts with that 
 peculiar skill which a master of English prose has 
 admired in a master of French painting under the 
 name of ' a marvellous tact of omission.' The 
 Emperor's career was hastily rearranged so as to 
 catch the high Ughts of fashionable theory, and the 
 long epic of his rise and faU became the mere subject- 
 matter of ingenious exegesis. The material was 
 
 B 
 
18 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 often stubborn ; and when Napoleon took his place 
 as the first author of Bonapartist apologetics, he 
 found the Old Testament of his first reign singularly 
 barren of helpful texts and had more frequent re- 
 course to the milder utterance of his New Testament 
 of 1815. One may catch sometimes an aside to 
 Gourgaud in which the Emperor confesses his frank 
 disgust for the democratic expedients to which he 
 had been driven by the exigencies of national defence 
 after the return from Elba. But in the main the 
 figure which it became the business of Bonapartism 
 to present to the world was the Emperor of the 
 Hiuidred Days. The imagination of posterity has 
 been engaged by a more impressive figure as he sits 
 above the thunder on the Napoleonic Olympus, 
 holding his eagle, wielding the hghtning, surrounded 
 by the minor divinities of the Imperial mythology. 
 
 ' Cannon his name , 
 Cannon hie voice, he came.' 
 
 But such visions are unfriendly to prospects of 
 restoration to the throne of a war-weary people ; 
 and the whole effort of St. Helena was directed 
 towards the evocation of a gentler scene in which 
 the mUd-eyed legislator of 1815 bent a perpetually 
 attentive ear to the strictly constitutional promptings 
 of Benjamin Constant. The prospect was bourgeois 
 in the extreme. But now all the world had turned 
 civfiian, and one must move, if one meant to reach 
 the Tuileries, with the times. 
 
 The Bonaparte succession was precluded by the 
 peace treaties of Vienna. It followed naturally that 
 the doctrine of Bonapartism must contradict upon 
 every European problem the principles on which 
 that settlement was based. The Peace of Vienna 
 
BONAPARTISM 19 
 
 was, briefly, the negation of the French Revolution 
 by the assembled monarchies of Europe. Bonapart- 
 ism was consequently driven to the odd expedient 
 of affirming the principles of 1789 in the name of 
 the man who had used field artillery as a solvent of 
 democracy in 1795, and the Emperor in retirement 
 was graciously pleased to recognise in himseK the 
 embodiment of the Revolution. The evidence, apart 
 from his soldierly appreciation of the virtues of 
 Equality, was slender ; but the facts were fused in 
 the white heat of Napoleon's new enthusiasm for the 
 First Repubhc. The returning Bourbons had re- 
 painted the Hlies on the French flag : Bonapartism, 
 if it was to inherit the future, must hoist the tricolour. 
 The attempt to detect popular tendencies in the 
 Grand Emjnre was heroic. Antommarchi was assured 
 that the Emperor ' consecrated the Revolution and 
 infused it into the laws,' and he made to Dr. O'Meara 
 a still more exphcit confession of his secret republi- 
 canism : ' I always beheved that true sovereignty 
 resides in the people. The Imperial government was 
 a sort of RepubHc' If it was, the secret had been 
 admirably kept by Fouche and the poMce. The real 
 truth shpped, as usual, into Gourgaud's diary : ' It 
 is my opinion,' the Emperor admitted one day in 
 1816, ' that a constitution would not suit France, 
 which is an essentially monarchical country. . . . 
 there should be no legislative assembly.' Napoleon 
 had inherited the national energy of the Revolution 
 and had employed it to propel the machinery of the 
 Empire. But the engineer who canalises a great 
 stream and harnesses it to his power-house cannot 
 always claim credit for the rush of its waters. 
 iThe Emperor's claim upon Liberal gratitude be- 
 
20 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 came a shade less fantastic when it was founded upon 
 a sympathetic examination of his record during the 
 Hundred Days, and posterity was invited to forget 
 that the First Consul had violated the last parliament 
 of the Revolution with infantry in a grateful realisa- 
 tion of his embarrassed constitutionahsm in 1815. 
 It must have sometimes occurred to Napoleon that 
 if he had been a Bonapartist in 1810, he would have 
 made peace with the world and founded a dynasty. 
 The evangeHsts of St. Helena suggested that he had 
 found the light on his return from Elba and searched 
 hopefully in the Constitution of 1815 for those germs 
 of Liberalism which had been so distressingly absent 
 from the Constitution of 1804. But they were con- 
 stantly discouraged by the Emperor's obstinate 
 candour in confessing at intervals that he had not 
 meant a word of it. He frequently admitted to the 
 httle circle that if he had won a victory in Belgium, 
 he would have abolished the Chambers on his return 
 to Paris ; and this inconvenient spirit of the con- 
 fessional even impelled him to assure Admiral Cock- 
 burn that he had assumed a Liberal tone in 1815 
 ' simply because my situation at that particular 
 moment made it necessary for me to jdeld to popular 
 feeling on that point.' An equal sensitiveness to 
 public opinion dictated the draft of a constitution 
 which he produced in 1820 for the benefit of Napoleon 
 II. But one can hear the undertone of autocracy 
 through the pious murmur of its Liberalism, and the 
 exalted claim of the democratic Bonapartists that 
 Napoleon was the Messiah of the Revolution must 
 remind many students of religion that there have 
 been false Messiahs. 
 
 An effort of almost equal heroism was made in the 
 
BONAPARTISM 21 
 
 scriptures of St. Helena to demonstrate that the 
 Emperor had been a practising nationahst. The 
 settlement of Vienna, conceived by Austrian states- 
 men in the Austrian capital, naturally transgressed 
 in every detail the doctrine of nationality ; and if 
 the European opposition thrown up by the peace 
 treaties was to be mobilised in support of the Bona- 
 parte succession, the history of the Empire must be 
 ransacked for instances of Napoleon's conformity 
 with the fashionable doctrine. The little group of 
 embittered chauvinists on the island was startled 
 by disquisitions upon the Emperor's affection for 
 the Germans, the Italians, the Greeks, the Poles, 
 and the Spaniards, which had been kept a profound 
 secret from the subject populations of the Empire. 
 Even Ireland, whose claim to independence had 
 rarely been refused by the enemies of England, was 
 admitted to the fast widening circle of his sympathy ; 
 and Napoleon emerged from the reflections of his 
 exile with the conviction, which in the minds of 
 Germans, EngUshmen, and Spaniards had been fatal 
 to the continued existence of his Empire, that ' there 
 are certain desires with regard to nationality which 
 must sooner or later be gratified ' and that the first 
 of those desires is an appetite for national self- 
 government or (to give to it its more impressive, 
 Bostonian name) self-determination. The trace of 
 Napoleon's frontiers had followed at some points 
 the scientific lines of European racial divisions. But 
 his nationalism, which was frankly fortuitous before 
 Waterloo, became dogmatic at St. Helena. 
 
 The Empire was now rehabilitated in French eyes 
 by the fashionable democracy of its principles, and 
 its European popularity was ensured by a still more 
 
22 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 modish sympathy with ' nations struggling to be 
 free.' It remained to reassure a nervous French 
 electorate upon its prospects of continued home life. 
 The male population of France in 1816 had only 
 recently become domesticated, and it had no desire 
 to return to the colours. But when it inquired 
 apprehensively by what coincidence the government 
 of so enlightened a dynasty had been a period of 
 uninterrupted European war conducted upon an 
 unprecedented scale, the Emperor was ready with 
 an answer and demonstrated with a wealth of quota- 
 tion and argument that the peace of the world had 
 been continually sacrificed to the insatiable ambition 
 of the Houses of Hapsburg and Hanover, whose 
 ministers had forced France into war after war with 
 an energy only equalled by the hypocrisy with which 
 they denounced Napoleon as the cause. ' L^ Empire ' 
 (the words which were to be spoken by the nephew 
 at Bordeaux were formed by the uncle at St. Helena 
 thirty years before) ' c'est la paix.' 
 
 The great Bonapartist of St. Helena had pro- 
 pounded his poHtical doctrine of democracy, nation- 
 aHsm, and peace. It was elaborated in those inter- 
 minable talks which alone stood between Napoleon 
 and madness, until at last in a great storm of wind the 
 Emperor, having upon his lips the name of a mihtary 
 rank or (as some say) of a dead woman, died also. 
 
BONAPARTISM 23 
 
 ra 
 
 The destruction of the Empire left an odd gap in 
 France, and it was hardly filled by the return of the 
 Bourbons. The appearance in public life of large 
 numbers of elderly gentlemen, speaking with the 
 accent of the last century and gloomily disapproving 
 of the generation with which they found themselves 
 surrounded, was an inadequate compensation for the 
 disappearance of those bronzed and booted young 
 men of the Empire who had ridden into every capital 
 in Europe. It cannot have been enlivening to be 
 governed by persons who regarded every achieve- 
 ment of the past thirty years as a manifestation of 
 original sin ; and for all the memories which it 
 contained of the conscription and the invasion, the 
 roll of the Emperor's drums must have seemed a 
 friendly sound, when it was compared with the dry 
 rustle of the parchments as the King's ministers 
 searched them for royal precedents. 
 
 The Restoration of Louis xvni. was as depressing 
 as any other triumph of age over youth. It seemed 
 to a generation which had sferved the guns at Wagram 
 and stood in the last trenches on Montmartre that 
 the old men and the priests and the Bretons with 
 their stupid faces had been right after all. The new 
 world which Goethe had seen looming up through 
 the mist at Valmy wavered and melted away before 
 the confused gesture of a Peace Conference, and in 
 France it was as though men came indoors out of the 
 
24 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 strong sunlight of the Empire to a long, grey after- 
 noon of deportment and gentility about the house. 
 The royal troops marched decorously once more 
 behind the white flag and the lilies ; King Louis sat 
 on his throne again ; and the Eighteenth Century 
 seemed to have resumed its interminable course. 
 
 It was a queer time, in which half the world wag 
 trying to forget that it had spent the best years of 
 its hfe by the waters of Babylon in teaching dancing 
 and the irregular verbs to the young subjects of 
 King George in., whilst the other half was almost 
 ashamed to remember that it had trailed a musket 
 across the Alps to Marengo or charged shouting 
 through the smoke of Mercer's guns against the 
 British squares at Waterloo. So long as French 
 politics were directed by that generation, there was 
 little disposition to find fault with the unimpressive 
 exterior of Louis xvni. and the blameless tedium of 
 his ministers. The lives of most Frenchmen had 
 been sufficiently eventful before 1815 for them to 
 acquiesce with rehef in the sedative provided by the 
 Restoration ; and France, which has more generally 
 regarded parhamentary institutions as a source of 
 scandal than as a form of government, sat comfort- 
 ably back in the public galleries of the Chamber to 
 enjoy the deep notes of MM. Guizot and Royer- 
 CoUard. Faint echoes of the Emperor drifted up 
 out of the South Atlantic. Gaunt old men (one aged 
 rapidly on the road from Moscow to the Beresina), 
 who had once been the masters of Europe when they 
 trailed the sabretache of the Cuirassiers or wore the 
 schapska of the Lancers of the Guard, tilted hats over 
 their eyes and drew up rickety chairs in provincial 
 caf6s to mutter about ' the Man ' and ' the Son of the 
 
BONAPARTISM 25 
 
 Man.' There was a feeble sputter of insurrection. 
 But Napoleon went to his grave dans une 'petite vallee 
 d'une tie deserte, sous un saule pleureur ; and whilst 
 the old King lived, France was profoundly and 
 excusably indifferent to the fascinations of political 
 experiment. 
 
 This temper prevailed among the men who had 
 returned home from the two exiles of the emigration 
 and the conscription until they grew old and faded 
 out of pohtics. But after the angularity of Charles x. 
 had succeeded in 1824 to the gentler curves of Louis 
 xvin., a new, more incalculable generation began 
 to come of age, and the children of the First Empire 
 gathered in the wings, prepared to shoulder their 
 way on to the stage of French affairs. The uneasy 
 temper of the age was described a few years later, 
 when Alfred de Musset set down the Confession d'un 
 Enfant du Siecle : ' During the wars of the Empire, 
 whilst husbands and brothers were away in Germany, 
 anxious mothers brought to birth a hectic, sickly, 
 nervous generation. Conceived between two battles, 
 schooled with the sound of rolling drums in their ears, 
 boys in their thousands eyed one another gloomily, 
 as they tried over their frail muscles. At intervals 
 their fathers appeared from the bloodshed, held 
 them to the gold braid on their breasts, set them 
 down, and to horse again.' 
 
 These young men, round whose cradles the sHm 
 draped Victories of the Empire had sounded upon 
 trumpets the names of AusterKtz, lena, Eylau, 
 Friedland, Wagram, were the new factor in French 
 pohtics. Peace is never in greater danger than when 
 a generation grows up which has not in its own person 
 known war ; and as the children of 1810 grew up 
 
26 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 into the young men of 1825, their imagination played 
 fitfully round the glory of their fathers. In literary 
 taste they were Romantics. In politics (since it 
 seemed tragic that old men should govern when all 
 the world was young) they were Liberal. But im- 
 perceptibly their politics became touched with 
 romance as they began to regard the Empire in 
 kindly retrospect. Napoleon had been a name at 
 which the men of 1816, according to their politics, 
 stood to attention or looked nervously behind them. 
 Gradually the sharp outlines of that little figure 
 melted into the distance, and the Imperial scene 
 began to glow for the men of 1825 through a gentle 
 haze of romance. 
 
 The revulsion at this stage was merely sentimental. 
 Bonapartism, outside the dwindling ranks of old 
 irreconcilables, was not yet adopted by any consider- 
 able body of Frenchmen as a poHtical faith. The 
 Emperor was dead, and Napoleon n. could hardly 
 be said to be alive. Few eyes turned eastward 
 towards Vienna, where the dim figure of a pale 
 young man, whom the imagination of a poet and 
 the genius of a great actress have conspired to present 
 to posterity as a stoutish woman in a white uniform 
 with a queer, haunting voice, might be seen moving 
 vaguely behind the ordered solemnity of the Austrian 
 Court. Even Beranger, so responsive always to the 
 requirements of his public, felt no deeper emotion 
 at this spectacle of predestined futihty than the 
 mild irony which inspired Les Deux Cousins, ou 
 Lettre cfun 'petit Roi d un petit Due : 
 
 ' Le^ rois nCadoraient au berceau, 
 Les rois m'adoraient au herceau ; 
 Et ce'pendant je suis a Vienne ! ' 
 
BONAPARTISM 27 
 
 This lyric of gentle sympathy was hardly a marching 
 song to which a prince might come to his own again. 
 But the Emperor himself was a more inspiring 
 subject for young poets under a dull dynasty, and 
 the declamatory possibilities of his career seemed 
 inexhaustible. Victor Hugo invoked 
 
 ' gloire au maitre swpr&me ! 
 Dieu m&me a sur son front pose le diademe.' 
 
 His imagination was excited by ' Toujours Lui ! 
 Lui partoMt.^ Even Beranger, who had found a 
 more powerful vehicle in the chanson, was inspired 
 to an ode of fashionable sensibility by the Emperor's 
 death : 
 
 ' Sa gloire est la comme le phare immense 
 D'un nouveau monde et d'un monde trap vieux.'' 
 
 But his real contribution to the renascence of the 
 Imperial legend was made in those simpler verses 
 which both recorded and stimulated the traditional 
 Bonapartism of the countryside. It was the peasant 
 who had felt most acutely the return of the gentry 
 under the Restoration, and when the shadows of his 
 new masters fell across the cottage window, the ex- 
 soldier of the Imperial armies was half inclined to 
 regret the past. Napoleon became a name for all 
 the fine freedom and brave endeavour of the past ; 
 and that odd aUiance between the Emperor and the 
 Liberal cause to which all his work at St. Helena 
 had been directed was realised by the chansonnier 
 of the Roi d' Yvetot. At that gentle music the cold 
 figure of Caesar came aUve and stepped down from 
 his niche, and the conqueror of the world became 
 the people's friend. 
 
28 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 ' On parlera de sa gloire 
 
 Sous la chaume hien longtemps, 
 Uhumbk toit, dans cinquante ans, 
 Ne cx>nnaitra plus d' autre histoire. 
 
 Le peuple encor le rivere 
 
 Oui, le revire. 
 Parlez-nous de lui, grand'mi.re, 
 
 Parlez-nous de lui. 
 
 3Ies enfants, dans ce village, 
 Suivi de wis, il passu. 
 
 II avail petit chapeau 
 Avec redingote grise. 
 Prek de lui je me troublai : 
 II me dit : Bonjour ma chere. 
 
 Bonjour ma chere. 
 — II vous a parli, grand'mere ! 
 
 II vous a parli I ' 
 
 That is how Napoleon passed from history into 
 folk-lore. 
 
 A similar movement steadUy became noticeable 
 in the printseUers' shop-windows. During the 
 Empire his representations had been strictly con- 
 fined to a somewhat dreary canon of official pictures. 
 Napoleon was to be seen in large canvases crowning 
 his Empress with a frozen gesture or distributing 
 eagles to his legions with a statuesque immobility 
 which owed almost more to David than David him- 
 self owed to the antique. Court painters posed him 
 bare-headed in the centre of obsequious princes and 
 Grands Cordons, extending an inexpressive hand of; 
 friendship or clemency to the Emperor Francis, the 
 Czar of Russia, the burghers of Madrid, or the Queen 
 
BONAPARTISM 29 
 
 of Prussia ; whilst their more martial colleagues 
 sent him caracoling across battle-fields which they 
 had never visited with a complete lack of facial 
 expression and that perfect mastery of horsemanship 
 which is only attainable by a lay figure in a studio. 
 The Emperor was depicted upon every conceivable 
 occasion of civil dignity and military triumph without 
 any deviation from his Imperial imperturbability, 
 whether the foreground was obstructed by a con- 
 quered people or the French dead. Indeed, almost 
 the sole concession to human weakness which it 
 was permissible to record in this solemn series 
 was his unforgettable wound in the right foot at 
 Ratisbon, borne bravely in a circle of solicitous 
 shakoes and with the unwounded foot in the 
 stirrup of that incomparably, that incredibly Arab 
 steed. 
 
 Adversity in the field checked the majestic flow 
 of official art, and Napoleonic portraiture entered 
 upon a new phase in defeat. The symbolic possibiU- 
 ties of the lonely Emperor on his distant rock were 
 exhausted with pitiless persistence. But the effec- 
 tive appeal of the Imperial legend in art was not made 
 by the sea, the sunset, the reflective eye. It was 
 couched in the less tortured perspective and the 
 simpler scenes of the military draughtsmen of the 
 Restoration. They began in the mere depiction of 
 uniforms and a simple enjoyment of crowded fore- 
 grounds in which the big, bearded Pioneers swung 
 along eight abreast and the massed drums brought 
 on the Guard, with the long fine of level bayonets 
 rising and falling to the swing of the bearskins and 
 the mounted field-officers riding Hke tall ships along 
 the stream. Avoiding the stately banalities of 
 
30 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 official art, Raffet and Bellange brought the 
 crowded battle-fields of the Empire within range of 
 the normal imagination or appealed to sentimental 
 reminiscence with the invisible sweep of great 
 cavalcades past the dead Emperor at midnight, or 
 the resurrection of lost legions to the roll of a dead 
 man's drum. 
 
 ' Cest la grande Revue 
 Qu'aux Champs ^lyseis, 
 A Vheure de minuit 
 Tient le Gisar dechu.' 
 
 But while they were accomplishing this in their 
 more crowded canvases, their smaller works began 
 to do for Napoleon's memory something of the service 
 which had been performed for it in verse by Beranger. 
 His praetorians, whom an indignant countryside 
 under the Restoration had been apt to set violently 
 about as ' brigands,' were displayed by Charlet in 
 an endearing light of mild comedy. Their hardships, 
 their gallantries, their potations, and their heroism 
 reinstated them in the national affection ; and 
 slowly the grognard with his growHng repartee, his 
 bearskin and his long moustache climbed to a popu- 
 larity which in a more recent war has been earned 
 by a still older soldier with a still more ragged mous- 
 tache. The Emperor himself was popularised by a 
 more human attitude, as the laurels and the purple 
 were sent back to the costumier's and he assumed a 
 more natural dress : 
 
 ' II avail petit chapeau 
 Avec redingote grise.^ 
 
 The smirk of official portraiture passed from his 
 lips, and he was seen, hunched and anxious, by the 
 
BONAPARTISM 31 
 
 camp-fires of 1814. The little figure stepped out 
 of the formal surroundings and heavy gilt frames of 
 command portraits into reality ; and the change 
 carried his image into every little room in France. 
 He galloped along cheering lines or watched the 
 gun-fire with folded arms. TaU Grenadiers were 
 called out of the ranks to have their ears pinched 
 and to exchange memories of the campaign of Italy, 
 Sleepy sentries awoke to find the Emperor on guard. 
 Napoleon himself confessed to human fraility in 
 innumerable snatches of sleep before Austerlitz. 
 Cottagers entertained him unawares, and artillery- 
 men stood aside to watch the master-gunner lay a 
 gun at Montereau. Gradually the spell was broken, 
 and the dead Emperor came to life on every wall as 
 the saviour, the guardian, and the hope of his 
 country. 
 
 A deeper note of pictorial Bonapartism was struck 
 in the eccentric blend of piety and patriotism which 
 inspired a popular engraving of ' Saint Napoleon, 
 Martyr^ and displayed the canonised Emperor in 
 the Roman paUium and short, curling beard of one 
 of Diocletian's Christians, holding the palm in one 
 hand and mildly deprecating with the other the 
 bestowal of a wreath by a foreshortened angel. 
 But sometimes mere hagiology proved insufficient, 
 and Napoleon passed into the more rarefied atmo- 
 sphere of theology itself. A grateful Church had 
 repeatedly acknowledged his services to religion ; 
 and BeUange lent a Napoleonic flavour to reHgion 
 itself, when his peasant pointed to a familiar outline 
 and exclaimed to the village priest : ' Tenez, voyez- 
 vous, Monsieur le Cure, pour moi le v'ld le pere eterneV 
 Bonapartism could fly no higher. 
 
32 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The drift of the Liberals towards Bonapartism 
 was determined by the new presentation of the 
 Imperial legend in art and letters, and it was without 
 infidelity to their master that his old officers found 
 themselves brigaded with the young rioters of 1830. 
 That sudden, summer insurrection jerked Charles x. 
 off his throne ; and by the effort of the young men 
 who ached to follow the new ways the slow, grinding 
 machinery of the Eighteenth Century was stopped 
 for ever. 
 
 The Orleans monarchy endeavoured for eighteen 
 years to satisfy the needs of France. A desperate 
 attempt was made to flatter the national vanity by 
 restoring some of the national playthings. The 
 tricolour flag fluttered once more to the masthead. 
 A forward foreign pohcy recalled the brave days 
 before the Peace of Vienna. And Napoleon's statue 
 dominated Paris again from the top of the Colonne 
 de la Orande Armee. But in its effort to be Napo- 
 leonic without a Bonaparte the reign of Louis 
 Phihppe resembled nothing so much as a production 
 of Hamlet by a company which not only omitted the 
 Prince but rarely got beyond Rosencrantz and 
 Guildenstern. 
 
 The enunciation of the Imperial legend rose, under 
 official encouragement, to a crescendo. Poets and 
 historians became incapable of other topics, and 
 the Napoleonic illustrators flooded the bookshops 
 with pictorial Bonapartism. The shadowy reign of 
 Napoleon n. closed, as that dim Hght flickered out 
 at Schonbrunn in 1832. But in Paris men were still 
 quoting the full-mouthed eloquence of Victor Hugo's 
 Ode d la Colonne, and at half the theatres French 
 audiences were staring open-mouthed whilst round- 
 
BONAPARTISM 33 
 
 shouldered actors in grey overcoats took snuff, 
 pinched ears, or raked the foothghts with that single 
 field-glass. Thiers passed from the history of the 
 Revolution to the Consulate and Empire. The 
 Memorial de Sainte-Helene appeared with Charlet's 
 drawings, and Raffet illustrated a mediocre Histoire 
 de Napoleon. Whilst the King's ministers were 
 struggling with the Egyptian question, epic j)oets 
 were collaborating to produce Napoleon en Egypte 
 in eight cantos with decorations by Vernet and 
 Bellange ; and Heine found Napoleonic engravings 
 on every wall in France. 
 
 This queer fever, which produced almost the whole 
 mass of Imperial bric-a-brac now extant, raged in 
 verse, prose, politics, and statuary ; and Louis 
 Phihppe set solemnly about to cure it by a desperate 
 homoeopathy. The Orleanist King made himself 
 the first Bonapartist in France. The Arc de 
 Triomphe was completed and consecrated to the 
 myth of the Emperor. The Chateau of Versailles 
 became a museum of Imperial battle-pictures and 
 was dedicated in great letters ' a toutes les gloires de 
 la France.^ And by a supreme gesture of Bonapar- 
 tism the frigate Btlle-Poule, commanded by the 
 Prince de Joinville, sailed in 1840 to St. Helena to 
 carry out the second clause of the Emperor's will : 
 ' Je desire que rues cendres reposent sur les bords de la 
 Seine, au milieu de ce peuple franQais quefai tant aime. 
 They brought him into Paris on a November day 
 of frost and bright sunshine ; and as Napoleon passed 
 to the Invahdes, there was a great cry of ' Vive 
 V Empereur ! ' 
 
THE PRINCE 
 
THE PRINCE 
 
 On an April morning in 1808 there was French gun- 
 fire along the Pyrenees. A son had been born in 
 Paris to the Queen of Holland, and the Emperor was 
 in Bayonne. The heads of the French columns were 
 thrusting down through the passes into Spain in the 
 first movement of the Peninsular War, and on the 
 day that the child was born King Ferdinand vii. 
 drove into Bayonne by the great south road from 
 Irun. Tliat night he dined with Napoleon and 
 received in his lodgings after dinner a message, 
 brought by General Savary, that the Emperor felt, 
 on consideration, that the House of Bourbon should 
 cease to reign. 
 
 The boy was born in the dark hours of a Wednes- 
 day morning (it was the 20th of the month). But 
 it was not until the fourth day that the news came 
 from Paris to Bayonne. Napoleon found time to 
 write a few lines and pass them to a secretary : 
 
 ' Ma Fille, j'appreTids que vous etes heureusement 
 accouchee d'un gargon. J'en ai eprouve la plus vivejoie. 
 II ne me reste plus qu'a etre tranquillise et a savoir que 
 vous vous portez hien. Je suis etonne que dans une 
 lettre du 20, que m'ecrit Varchichancelier, il ne m'en 
 • dise rien. Napoleon.' 
 
 And all along the frontier the salutes boomed up 
 the valleys of the Pyrenees. 
 
 37 
 
38 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 II 
 
 He was the third child of an unhappy marriage. 
 But the news of his birth gave pleasure almost every- 
 where except to his ailing and indifferent father. 
 Louis Bonaparte, King of Holland, might have been 
 a happier man if he had found himself in a less re- 
 markable family. He presents a vague and shifting 
 outline against the clear-cut background of the 
 Bonapartes. There is an odd flavour of modernity 
 about his nerves, his diffidence, his introspection, 
 his perpetual cures which hardly accords with those 
 bright figures of romance ; and as he circulates 
 nervously among the thrusting brothers and ex- 
 uberant sisters of the Imperial family, he has the 
 air almost of an incautious Hellenist introduced 
 suddenly into the company of some of the more 
 primitive membi^s of the House of Atreus. His 
 career was one long struggle waged by his nerves 
 against his promotion. He had worked at his school- 
 books in the little lodgings in the Midi where Lieu- 
 tenant Bonaparte polished his buttons and read 
 history. But the tense atmosphere of that hired 
 room at Valence can hardly have been congenial to 
 a youth who, as he informed the grateful author 
 some years later, wept copiously over the mild 
 sentiment of Paul et Virginie. The elder brother, 
 who had paid his school bills out of a subaltern's 
 pay, taught him the rudiments of soldiering in the 
 campaign of Italy. He was a quiet boy, combining 
 
THE PRINCE 30 
 
 in an unusual degree physical courage with taci- 
 turnity ; and as the family got strenuously on in 
 the world, the young Louis seemed to sink steadily 
 deeper into himself. It was an age in which dys- 
 pepsia was frequently mistaken for intellect; and 
 when the First Consul brought peace to France and 
 set up his little suburban Court at Rueil, his younger 
 brother was mostly to be found regarding the bois- 
 terous relaxations of Malmaison with Byronic gloom. 
 
 Louis was of the melancholy stuff that unmarried 
 uncles are made of. Indeed, the Emperor and his 
 mother-in-law subsequently disagreed as to whether 
 it was the study of Rousseau or his digestion that 
 made him impossible. Undisturbed by family life 
 such a man, who was described in the English idiom 
 of 1800 as a person of sensibility, might have passed 
 his time agreeably enough between the elegant 
 patronage of Canova and a polite correspondence 
 with Goethe. But with a wife to share his infeUcity, 
 he was bound inevitably to become the unhappy 
 husband of an unhappy woman. Unfortunately his 
 brother's wife had a daughter. ^ 
 
 When Josephine de Beauharnais married General 
 Bonaparte, that lively widow from Martinique 
 brought to him the two children of her first husband. 
 The younger of them was a fair schoolgirl with large 
 blue eyes, named Hortense-Eugenie. In the closing 
 years of the Eighteenth Century, when the Revolution 
 seemed to have spent its force in the feeble move- 
 ments of the Directoire, she was trained in the ac- 
 complishments requisite for polite society at Madame 
 Campan's celebrated academy for young ladies, 
 where that indomitable Minerva kept alive under 
 the tricolour and Phrygian cap the traditions of 
 
40 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 French gentility. There Hortense received instruc- 
 tion in perspective, deportment, correct sentiments 
 and the use of the globes ; and she displayed that 
 aptitude for playing on the harp and painting in 
 water-colour which was universally recognised to be 
 the most elegant enhancement of a pair of drooping 
 shoulders and two downcast eyes. 
 
 This accompUshed young lady became an orna- 
 ment of the Consular circle at Malmaison in the days 
 when her mother was beginning to feel the weight 
 of a republican crown. That amiable widow had 
 consented to become the wife of Napoleon without 
 anticipating either his bewildering promotion or the 
 somewhat volcanic nature of his affections, and to- 
 wards the year 1800 she found herself balanced a 
 trifle precariously at the head of French society. 
 The Bonapartes had always resented their brother's 
 choice of a West Indian wife, and her conduct during 
 his absence in Egypt provided ample material for 
 the disapproval of his family. After his return he 
 considered the possibility of a divorce upon grounds 
 which were at once more human and less royal than 
 those upon which he acted ten years later. But he 
 could not put out of his life the woman whom he 
 later called without irony ' the best woman in France,' 
 in whom he saw ' la grazia in 'persona,' whose name 
 died on his lips in the dark at St. Helena. 
 
 Josephine resumed her place at the head of the 
 Consular household with an increasing fear of her 
 husband and the future. But in such a situation 
 any step was welcome which would bind her fortunes 
 more closely to those of the Bonapartes. Now if 
 her daughter were to marry a Bonaparte, the two 
 families must rise or fall together ; Hortense might 
 
THE PRINCE 41 
 
 even raise up children who could become the heirs 
 of Napoleon himself. With some such design she 
 marked down the reflective Louis to be her son-in- 
 law. The prospect was uninviting to both parties. 
 Hortense would have preferred the more decorative 
 Duroc, and Louis would have preferred another lady 
 in spite of the discouraging circumstances that she 
 had suffered in the past from the small-pox and 
 continued to suffer from the obstinate longevity of 
 a husband. But the First Consul and his wife were 
 insistent. It was an age of submissive daughters ; 
 and Hortense, who might with a little firmness have 
 become the wife of the youngest Marshal of the 
 Empire, acquiesced in her mother's choice. Louis 
 was more restive. But, after at least two refusals 
 and a determined avoidance of the young lady's 
 company in the absence of witnesses, he succumbed 
 to the fatal atmosphere of a ball-room and consented 
 to the designs of his implacable relatives. Napoleon 
 retained a lively recollection of the conversation for 
 nearly twenty years and recorded it at St. Helena 
 in language more appropriate to the sudden storm of 
 a fortified position : ' une attaque aussi vive quHn- 
 attendue lui arracha son consentement.^ The result 
 was a winter wedding in the Rue de la Victoire, and 
 in the first week of 1802 Hortense led her blushing 
 bridegroom to the altar. 
 
 The young people were set up in a chateau in the 
 He de France, and in the autumn their first child 
 was born. But whUst the little Napoleon-Louis- 
 Charles struggled through his first ailments, his 
 father and mother were drifting from indifference 
 into hostility in the gardens of Saint-Leu. The 
 Consular circle had become the Imperial family and, 
 
42 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 in view of the continued childlessness of the Empress, 
 Hortense's child was a small boy of extreme political 
 importance. But his parents (it may have been due 
 to some fault in Madame Campan's excellent curri- 
 culum) lived in a dismal atmosphere of domestic 
 debate. A second boy was born in 1804. But 
 Louis' health deteriorated as his cures became 
 more frequent, and apart from her two little boys 
 the prospect for Hortense became increasingly 
 dreary. 
 
 At this point the Emperor, who was a trifle inclined 
 to regard his relations as a successful player of 
 draughts regards his pieces when they have reached 
 the far end of the board, conceived the unfortunate 
 design of converting the Dutch Republic into a 
 monarchy and promoting Loiiis to be its king. A 
 conscientious monarch may well prove a depressing 
 husband, and family life in the Dutch palaces varied 
 between tedium and disagreement. When Napoleon 
 sent a French nominee to The Hague, he did so in 
 the reasonable anticipation that French interests 
 would not be disregarded by the new monarch. 
 But Louis, whose sentiments were now dyed a deep 
 Orange, was perpetually insisting on the ancient 
 liberties of Holland and exasperated his brother 
 with a fervent patriotism for the country of his 
 adoption. His wife was treated to a still more 
 irritating affectation of Dutch austerity. Her French 
 light-mindedness became distasteful to the successor 
 of De Witt and William the Silent, and the solemn 
 conduct by Louis of his royal duties and diversions 
 called down a reproof from the Emperor in 1807 
 which lights up the domestic scene in which Hortense 
 was living : 
 
THE PRINCE 43 
 
 Vous gouvernez trop cette nation en capucin. La 
 bonte d'un roi doit toujours etre majestueuse et ne doit 
 pas etre celle d'un moine. . . . 
 
 Vos querelles avec la Reine percent aussi dans le public. 
 Ayez dans votre interieur ce caractere paternel et effemine 
 que vous montrez dans le gouvernement, et ayez dans les 
 affaires ce rigorisme que vous montrez dans votre menage. 
 Vous traitez une jeune femme comme on nfienerait un 
 regiment. . . . 
 
 Vous avez la meilleure femme et la plus vertueuse, et 
 vous la rendez m,alheureuse . Laissez-la danser tant 
 qu'elle veut, c'est de son age. J'ai une femme qui a 
 quarante ans : du champ de bataille je lui ecris d' alter 
 au bal ; et vous voulez qu'une femme de vingt ans, qui 
 voit passer sa vie, qui en a toutes les illusions, vive dans 
 un cloitre, soil comme une nourrice, toujours a laver son 
 enfant ? . . . Malheur eusement vous avez une femme 
 trop vertueuse ; si vous aviez une coquette, elle vous 
 miner ait par le bout du nez.' 
 
 Like so many men, Napoleon would have made a 
 perfect husband to another man's wife. But through 
 the interstices between his excellent advice one may 
 catch a vivid glimpse of that dismal Dutch interior. 
 The Emperor, whose view of married life had be- 
 come so debonair, was campaigning at the far side 
 of Europe. He had fought the battle of Eylau in 
 the winter, and he was now tasting the discomfort 
 of operations conducted against the Russian armies 
 at the end of eight hundred miles of communications. 
 But his letter had barely reached HoUand from East 
 Prussia when the long shadow of bereavement fell 
 across Hortense, and her eldest boy died in her arms 
 at The Hague. For a time grief made her husband 
 seem almost tolerable. The surviving child was sent 
 to his grandmother, and the King and Queen of 
 
44 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Holland passed the summer of 1807 in a dejected 
 little honeymoon in the Pyrenees. The news took 
 more characteristic effect upon Napoleon. After 
 a stream of kindly letters of consolation to Hortense 
 and her mother, he began to look into the causes of 
 their loss. The child, it appeared, had died of croup, 
 and on a June morning the Emperor dictated a note 
 from headquarters to his Minister of Foreign Affairs : 
 
 ' Monsieur Champagny, depuis vingt ans il s'est 
 tnanifeste une maladie appelee croup, qui enleve beaucoup 
 d'enfants dans le nord de F Europe. Depuis quelques 
 annees elle se propage en France. Nous desirons que 
 vous proposiez un prix de 12,000 francs, qui sera donne 
 au medecin auteur du meilleur memoire sur cette maladie 
 et sur la maniere de la trailer. Napoleon.' 
 
 The rest of that day's work included a minute to the 
 Minister of Marine on naval supplies and the defence 
 of Toulon, a note to Daru on an increase of the 
 tobacco ration of the forces in the field, and a decree 
 awarding pubhc lands for meritorious service in the 
 Polish army. Napoleon also found time for a line 
 to Jerome Bonaparte on his operations in Silesia 
 (with hints on the management of a discarded General 
 of Division), some notes on the conscripts of 1808 
 for the guidance of the commander of his general 
 reserve, and a strong hint to Fouche as to the prompt 
 removal from Paris to some small provincial town 
 of two ex-colonels of the royal army and a sham 
 baroness who had been spreading disloyal rumours. 
 Administrative life was sufficiently variegated at 
 Imperial headquarters without excursions into path- 
 ology. But the Finckenstein decree on croup, which 
 elicited two completely erroneous prize essays from 
 practitioners in Bremen and Geneva, was a neat 
 
THE PRINCE 45 
 
 example of Napoleonic versatility in the manner of 
 the classical Decret de Moscou which was to date 
 from the Kremlin in 1812 a thorough reorganisation 
 of the Theatre Fran^ais. Ten days after that busy 
 morning among his papers the. Emperor fought the 
 battle of Eriedland and ended the Continental war 
 which had opened at Ulm and Austerlitz. 
 
 But the death of the Prince Royal of Holland at 
 the age of four possessed an importance beyond the 
 unsound conclusions of the medical concours of 1807. 
 ' Ce pauvre Napoleon,^ as his uncle called him, had 
 been the heir to the French Empire ; and with his 
 death the Emperor turned once more to that project 
 of divorce and re-marriage which haunted Josephine 
 among her flowers at Malmaison. The surviving 
 child of Hortense could not take both the Dutch and 
 the French succession, and something must be done 
 for the perpetuation of the dynasty. The unpleasing 
 subject was opened to the Empress early in 1808, 
 and that aging, pretty woman with her forced smile 
 stared miserably down the prospect of deposition 
 and official widowhood. The Emperor postponed a 
 decision, and there was still a hope that Hortense 
 would provide an heir. ' It is your Majesty's busi- 
 ness,' as the urbane M. de Talleyrand had observed, 
 ' to give us princes ; we may depend on you.' 
 
 So it was good news, when the boy was born in 
 April, to his mother, who longed for the company 
 of children since she had lost that of her husband, 
 and to the Emperor, as he sat in Bayonne watching 
 the Spanish Bourbons stumble heavily into his net. 
 But it was best of all to the weary, bright-eyed woman 
 who waited at Bordeaux, because she was still an 
 Empress and the child in Paris might serve to keep 
 her so and then one day be Emperor of the French. 
 
46 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 III 
 
 Imperial infancy under the First Empire was apt 
 to be uneventful, but impressive. Even the com- 
 paratively human business of getting born was con- 
 ducted, for a little Prince of HoUand, with a wealth 
 of ritual. Late in the afternoon of April 20, 1808, 
 three Princes of the Empire, one Cardinal, the Dutch 
 ambassador, a French minister, a Grand-Duchess 
 who was sister to the Emperor and Murat's wife, 
 and the alarming old lady whom Napoleon called 
 Madame Mere came to the door in the Rue Cerutti, 
 and an official acte de naissance was • executed for 
 pubhcation in the next day's Mpniteur. Respectful 
 crowds cheered their King under a palace window 
 at Amsterdam, and Hortense was overwhelmed by 
 visits of ceremony in Paris. She had inherited her 
 mother's tropical taste for flowers ; but although 
 she was never without the scent of Parma violets, 
 which she introduced into France, the scent of 
 M. de Talleyrand's powder came near to over- 
 coming her. 
 
 There was some official correspondence from 
 Bayonne on the subject of the boy's name. The 
 Emperor, like aU the world, had forgotten the child's 
 father ; but with an effort of piety he recalled the 
 shadowy figure of his own and wished the new prince 
 to be called Charles-Napoleon. This desire was ex- 
 pressed in a short note to The Hague, dictated on the 
 morning after the Dos Mayo, when the Spaniards 
 
THE PRINCE 47 
 
 rose in resentment of the detention of their royal 
 family in Bayonne and the streets of Madrid were 
 cleared by French cavalry. The voUeys of Murat's 
 firing-parties were still echoing in the ears of the 
 MadrilejQos and the news of the emeute was boiling 
 slowly up through Old Castile, when the Emperor, 
 after sending some orders into Spain and answering 
 letters from Fouche and the Viceroy of Italy, con- 
 sidered the problem of his small nephew's name. 
 But the first proposal was modified by a sudden 
 recollection of the existence of King Louis ; and a 
 few weeks later the world was informed through 
 the Moniteur that the boy was to be called Charles- 
 Louis-Napoleon. He bore, a trifle ominously, the 
 names of two failures and an emperor. 
 
 The little prince started life with both parents and 
 a small brother of three. He had a king for his 
 father and an Empress for his grandmother. But 
 before his third birthday Josephine was dethroned 
 in Paris and Louis had ceased to reign in Holland. 
 The nightmare of divorce had seemed to fade in the 
 early months of 1808. The Emperor had yielded to 
 her unanswerable argument of tears in March. 
 When he moved to Bayonne to direct the Spanish 
 operation from the frontier, the Empress followed 
 him as far asBordeaux, where the news of the child's 
 birth reached her. A few days later she was pre- 
 siding over the combined Courts of France and Spain 
 in villeggiatura which must have been a trifle con- 
 gested, since Napoleon and his Empress, Charles 
 and his Queen, Ferdinand and Godoy were compre- 
 hended with an appropriate suite within the strain- 
 ing limits of a provincial chateau. The Emperor 
 was in the wildest spirits, and Josephine retained his 
 
48 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 favour, which was indicated, as was usual with him, 
 by the most distressing practical jokes. The couple 
 travelled together as far as Paris, and Napoleon 
 posted alone across Europe to the Congress of Erfurt. 
 There, in a rarefied atmosphere of diplomacy and 
 without the distraction of a pretty woman's tears, 
 he could regard the divorce of Josephine in the cold 
 light of foreign policy, and Talleyrand was instructed 
 to open negotiations with Russia for a Grand- 
 Duchess. In the autumn he was back in Paris on 
 the road to Spain, and as the berline left the Tuileries 
 for the south, they kept the Empress from taking 
 the road with her husband. 
 
 From Spain, where the Grande Armee swept 
 Palafox into Saragossa and brought King Joseph 
 back across the Guadarrama into Madrid, the 
 Emperor furnished Josephine with a curt but con- 
 jugal series of notes on his health, whilst the embers 
 of the Spanish insurrection were vigorously scattered 
 and the EngHsh were driven into the sea at Corunna. 
 Early in 1809 Napoleon crossed France once more on 
 his way to break Austria at Wagram. He took the 
 Empress with him as far as Strasbm-g, and during 
 the ensuing campaign he entrusted her with various 
 official duties. The tone of his letters gave no hint 
 of the impending divorce. Hortense and the baby, 
 who was now a year old, had gone with her other 
 boy to the waters at Baden-Baden. The Emperor 
 was busy fighting the Archduke Charles outside 
 Vienna ; but a week after the battle of Aspern- 
 Essling, in that busy military interlude in which the 
 French army prepared to re-emerge from the island 
 of Lobau and move upon Wagram, he found two 
 minutes for the composition of an indignant family 
 
THE PRINCE 4d 
 
 letter. Hortense was sharply reminded that valu- 
 able French princes must not be hazarded on German 
 territory. Peremptory orders came to her from 
 Schonbrunn to interrupt her thermal exercises, and 
 she was given precisely one hour in which to send 
 the boys back over the Rhine to Strasburg. The 
 Empress was delighted at this evidence of the value 
 which Napoleon still placed on Hortense' s children, 
 and her confidence may well have been increased 
 by the geniality of his tone in the correspondence 
 which came from Vienna after the victory of 1809. 
 It had been for many years his pleasing habit to 
 threaten her with the prospect, so alarming to wives 
 in war-time, of a sudden midnight return of the 
 wronged husband from the distant wars. The pic- 
 ture seemed to attract his somewhat primitive sense 
 of humour, and it had become a standing family joke 
 in his letters to Josephine, which abound in wild 
 imaginary scenes of nocturnal farce. So late as the 
 month of September in the year of the divorce the 
 Emperor found the heart to send to his wife a comic 
 admonition from Schonbrunn : 
 
 ' Ne te fie pas, et je te conseille de te Men garder la nuit; 
 car une des prochaines tu entendras grand bruit.' 
 
 But after his return to France the end came quickly. 
 The first hint was given by a closed door in the palace. 
 The poor lady endeavoured to retrieve the first even- 
 ing by a new dress and a wreath of blue flowers ; but 
 her husband gloomily observed that they had taken 
 an hour and a half to put on. The autumn of 1809 
 slowly deepened for Josephine in rain and wretched- 
 ness. Napoleon pleaded for a divorce, and the 
 Empress went about the Tuileries holding her head 
 
 D 
 
50 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 low so that they should not see how red her eyes were. 
 Her grief was bitter and genuine ; but she was not 
 unaware of its value as an argument, and once at 
 least with a full appreciation of the dialectical 
 advantages of unconsciousness she interrupted a 
 swoon to warn a solicitous courtier that she was 
 incommoded by his sword-belt. The swoon was 
 satisfactorily resumed, but the Emperor remained 
 unmoved. The Court calendar with a ghastly in- 
 eptitude brought on the fifth anniversary of the 
 Imperial coronation, and the unhappy Empress went 
 weakly through an evening of official felicitation at 
 the Hotel de Ville. After that she broke down, and 
 a few days later the Bonapartes sat solemnly round 
 a table in the Tuileries to hear Josephine, in white 
 and without jewellery, renounce her husband. That 
 evening she stumbled to his room, and on the next 
 day she drove out of Paris through the rain to 
 Malmaison. 
 
 The little Prince had lost an Empress for his 
 grandmother before his second birthday. But as 
 the year 1810 opened, his father was still a king. 
 That dismal, if conscientious, monarch had con- 
 sistently failed to give satisfaction in the Napoleonic 
 hierarchy. His morbid sensitiveness to the interests 
 of his subjects became increasingly distasteful to the 
 Emperor, and the Continental blockade of England 
 provided frequent topics for dissension between Paris 
 and Amsterdam. In this controversy Louis proved 
 himself no better than a Dutchman, and Napoleon 
 was indisposed to bargain with the Dutch as to the 
 precise measure of their co-operation in the economic 
 war. Shortly after the divorce he put in a French 
 army of occupation and took control of the Dutch- 
 
THE PRINCE 51 
 
 coast and custom-houses. It was the end of Holland, 
 which was not even accorded the comparative dignity 
 of partition. The King, whose monarchy had ceased 
 to be even nominal, abdicated in favour of his younger 
 son, and abandoning his family at the same time as 
 his throne, retired alone to the Austrian Alps. But 
 the little Prince never reigned in Holland, which was 
 promptly annexed to the French Empire. He was 
 reserved for a more devious ascent to a greater 
 throne. 
 
 Late in the year, when Napoleon had inflicted 
 upon the Hapsburgs the supreme humiliation of 
 matrimony and the Empress Marie Louise simpered 
 at the head of French society, the child was baptized 
 at Fontainebleau in an impressive galaxy of Dukes 
 and Counts of the Empire. The new Empress stood 
 godmother. But in spite of this encouraging beam 
 from the rising sun, Hortense, as the daughter of an 
 ex-Empress and the deserted wife of an ex-King, 
 occupied under the later Empire a position which 
 was somewhat effaced. Having consoled herself for 
 the absence of King Louis with the presence of the 
 Comte de Flahaut, she bore him a child who, as the 
 Due de Morny, was to take part in the family 
 adventure of the Second Empire. But the greater 
 part of her time was passed with her two little boys 
 in consoling the official widowhood of Josephine at 
 Malmaison. There were occasional interludes of a 
 more alarming character when they breakfasted at 
 the Tuileries with the Emperor ; he invariably bore 
 down on his small nephews and lifted them by the 
 head on to a table, a practice discouraged under 
 medical advice by their mother. But their recollec- 
 tions were mainly of Malmaison, where a smiling 
 
52 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 lady with sad eyes let them run riot among the 
 flowers and gave them the most exciting presents, 
 whilst their mother was taking the waters amongst 
 all the fine gentlemen at Aix. The little Louis, 
 dressed in the costume which delights the admirers 
 of Miss Kate Greenaway, was sufficiently delicate 
 to become the favourite ; and his health was care- 
 fully preserved by the precaution of a governess who, 
 when he watered the flowers, filled the watering-can 
 with warm water. In the years of the Empire's 
 decline a small boy, who was to see little more of 
 France until he returned to rule it, was walking in 
 the woods round Malmaison or drilling the big 
 Grenadiers of the Guard who stood sentry at his 
 grandmother's door, and rewarding them shyly with 
 a furtive biscuit. 
 
 Before the child was six, the Emperor had fought 
 a rearguard action across Europe which brought 
 him from Moscow to Leipzig and from the Rhine to 
 Champaubert. The Empire went down in the spring 
 campaign of 1814, and for the two children there was 
 a confused recollection of an excited mother and a 
 night drive out of Paris to the sound of the guns. 
 When the news came to Josephine that the Emperor 
 had ceased to reign in France, the tired woman that 
 he had put away sat weeping in the night and crept 
 back to Malmaison to die. 
 
THE PRINCE 63 
 
 IV 
 
 Small boys of six are rarely intrigued by the chang- 
 ing fortunes of their uncles. Indeed, the little Louis 
 probably welcomed the disasters of 1814, which were 
 for him the excuse for exciting journeys and delight- 
 ful visits to strange houses. The interval between 
 the collapse of the Empire and the return of the 
 Emperor in the following spring was a crowded 
 interlude of foreign visitors. There was a tall fair 
 gentleman with curly hair and such high collars to 
 his uniforms, who particularly engaged the Prince's 
 affections. He was beheved to be a mysterious 
 dignitary known as the Czar of Russia, and became 
 one day, by a sudden and furtive gift from an 
 embarrassed little boy, the possessor of Louis' only 
 ring. Then there was an unhappy-looking German 
 gentleman, who was the King of Prussia and brought 
 with him to Malmaison two small boys, to one of 
 whom fifty years later Louis was to send his sword 
 on the hill of La Marfee above Sedan. Other gentle- 
 men came to conspire in the drawing-room about 
 his uncle, and a rather alarming lady, whose excess 
 of petticoats was noticed about the same time by 
 another youthful observer, asked one a great many 
 questions and answered to the name of de Stael. 
 
 Then came a fascinating evening in March, 1815, 
 when the boys were back in Paris with their mother 
 at the house in the Rue Cerutti. An Englishman had 
 told Hortense the news that Napoleon had broken 
 
54 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 out of Elba and landed in the south, and his raid 
 spelt danger to such members of his family as were 
 in the capital of King Louis xvnr. That night there 
 was a party downstairs. In the children's room 
 there was a little hasty packing, and a governess 
 delighted them by taking them across a dark garden 
 into the streets. It was inadvisable to be a Bona- 
 parte in Paris whilst the eagles were advancing from 
 Grenoble to Lyons, and for twelve days Hortense 
 shared with her boys a lumber-room in the house 
 of an old nurse. But the Emperor swept into Paris ; 
 and when he came back from Elba to find his first 
 Empress dead in the church at RueU and his second 
 enjoying beyond the French frontier the society of 
 a one-eyed Austrian count, Hortense stood at his 
 side and her boys became a small part of the 
 Napoleonic legend. 
 
 The sudden course of the Hundred Days seemed 
 to sweep the little Louis into the direct line of the 
 Imperial succession. Hortense, who was in mourn- 
 ing for her mother, had gone to the Tuileries in black 
 on that March afternoon when the 'personnel of the 
 Empire resumed possession of the palace. Whilst 
 the Emperor was driving up the white road from 
 Fontainebleau, the ladies and gentlemen of his Court 
 passed a happy evening of hysterical recognitions, 
 diversified by the pleasing discovery that one could 
 pull thefleurs de lys off the carpet in the throne-room 
 and reveal the Imperial bees. Towards nine o'clock 
 there was a roar from the coiu-tyard, as a closed 
 carriage clattered in with a cavalry escort and 
 Napoleon, his eyes closed and a fixed smile on his 
 lips, was carried into his palace on the shoulders 
 of men. 
 
THE PRINCE 55 
 
 That night he saw Hortense ; he said a word to 
 her about her brother Eugene and seemed vexed at 
 her residence in Paris under the Bourbons. But the 
 absence of the Empress brought her into prominence, 
 and during the hurried reign which preceded the 
 campaign of Waterloo Napoleon drove out more 
 than once to be her guest at Malmaison. Sometimes 
 she took the boys to him at the Tuileries or the 
 Elysee, and once he presented them to the troops 
 outside the palace windows in the Place du Carrousel. 
 His own son was a hostage in Allied hands ; and if 
 the Emperor ever found leisure in the desperate 
 improvisation of the Hundred Days to think of the 
 succession, he must have looked curiously at his 
 small nephews. But their greatest excitement was 
 the day of the Champ de Mai, when they were taken 
 in a box with their mother and the ex- Queen of 
 Spain to see their uncle take oath to the new Con- 
 stitution and give eagles to his new armies. There 
 was a salute of six hundred guns, as the Lancers of 
 the Guard jingled across the Pont d'lena and the 
 Emperor, with four Marshals riding beside his coach, 
 drove on to the ground and took his place for the 
 ceremony. The small boys, whose places were 
 immediately above the throne, enjoyed from be- 
 hind the unusual and fascinating spectacle of their 
 uncles Lucien, Joseph, and Jerome in white velvet, 
 wearing short capes a V espagnole embroidered with 
 golden bees, and carrying remarkable feathered hats 
 which hesitated in style between the Renaissance 
 and the toreador. It was a warm afternoon of June 
 sunshine ; and the programme, which was generously 
 punctuated with salutes of one hundred guns and 
 included an open air service, eight other events, and 
 
56 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 a Te Deum, was admirably calculated to minister 
 to the enjoyment of two schoolboys with good seats. 
 
 Ten days later, as the last army of the Empke was 
 moving slowly up to the Sambre and anxious caterers 
 in Brussels were preparing for the Duchess of Rich- 
 mond's ball, the children were sent for to say good- 
 bye to their uncle before he took the road for the 
 northern frontier. Popular history, always so re- 
 sponsive to the exigencies of drama, has set a pleasing 
 scene in Napoleon's room. To the Emperor and 
 Soult, deep in the maps and papers of the approach- 
 ing campaign, enter a weeping nephew of seven ; he 
 cHngs to his uncle and begs him not to go, not to go 
 because the wicked AUies want to kill him. The 
 hero falls silent, kisses the child, and, as they lead 
 him away, turns quietly to Soult : ' There, Marshal, 
 kiss the boy : he will have a good heart and a higli 
 mind — he may be the hope of my race,' The 
 Emperor is left thinking, and the curtain descends 
 slowly upon the applause of a Bonapartist posterity. 
 But the true facts are a trifle less Sophoclean. There 
 was a family party at the Elysee on the evening 
 before Napoleon drove out of Paris to the army. 
 All the small nephews were allowed to come in to 
 dessert, and the Emperor, unaware for once of the 
 dramatic possibilities of an occasion, abstained from 
 histrionics and was in thoroughly good spirits. His 
 brief, exhausting masquerade as a citizen king was 
 at an end, and he was once more in command of the 
 armies of France. 
 
 When the news came to Hortense that Napoleon 
 had lost ' that last weird battle ' in the north, she 
 sent her boys to cover at a dressmaker's in the 
 Boulevard Montmartre and stood up bravely to 
 
THE PRINCE 57 
 
 receive the Emperor in defeat. Tliree days after 
 Waterloo he drove into Paris at eight o'clock in the 
 morning, and for three days more he struggled with 
 the unfamiliar forces of parliamentarism and Fouche. 
 Then one evening at dinner he turned abruptly to 
 Josephine's daughter : ' Je veux me retirer d la 
 Malmaison. Cest a vous. Voulez-vous nCy donner 
 Vhospitalite ? ' That night she posted out of Paris 
 to Rueil, and on a summer afternoon the Emperor 
 drove for shelter to his dead wife's house. For three 
 days Hortense made for him a home among the June 
 flowers. Her boys were fetched from their hiding- 
 place to see him once more. His mind was busy 
 with plans for America, for a scientific career, for a 
 second campaign of France. But for long intervals 
 at Malmaison he seemed to see nothing but the lost, 
 sUm figure of Josephine bending above her roses. 
 There was a great coming and going of military 
 messengers bearing the wishes of the Provisional 
 Government, the news of the Prussian advance, and* 
 the last offer to France of the sword of her greatest 
 soldier ' not as Emperor, but as a General whose 
 name and reputation may still affect the nation's 
 fortunes.' At last in the lengthening shadows of a 
 June afternoon, dressed strangely as a civilian, he 
 passed through a little gate and drove away. They 
 did not speak until the carriage reached Rambouillet. 
 
58 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The First Empire was at an end. But Prince Louis 
 had more than thirty years to wait for the Second 
 Empire to begin. The Bonapartes after Waterloo 
 were hardly likely to begin it. Elaborate measures 
 of international police excluded them from France, 
 separated them from any common centre, and dic- 
 tated the smallest details of their provincial exist- 
 ences. The King of Rome was learning to wear a 
 white uniform in Vienna with anaemic distinction. 
 Madame Mere resided at Rome in a mild aureole of 
 Papal courtesy. Joseph was on the banks of the 
 Delaware. Louis and Lucien lived lives of Tuscan 
 ease at Florence and Frascati ; whilst Jerome and 
 the sisters were in the neighbourhood of Trieste. 
 All of them were pitiably quiescent and eager for 
 the comfort of oblivion. There was a little truth 
 in the complaint of an impatient nephew : ' All the 
 Bonapartes are dead.' 
 
 In this dismal Diaspora Hortense and her two 
 boys travelled a long and embittering road. Per- 
 emptorily ordered out of Paris by a Prussian general, 
 they followed the traditional route of royal exiles and 
 headed for Switzerland. But by her brave refusal 
 to desert the Emperor in his downfall she had 
 acquired an inconvenient reputation as a Bona- 
 partist firebrand, and Geneva was rendered un- 
 pleasant by the excessive degree to which the local 
 Swiss had developed the national instinct for rallying 
 
THE PRINCE 59 
 
 to the winning side. There was even held at her 
 hotel a banquet of Swiss officers to celebrate the 
 defeat of Napoleon by almost every other army in 
 Em"ope ; and Hortense, under AUied supervision, 
 left with rehef for Aix-les-Bains. 
 
 At this stage she lost her eldest boy by the mysteri- 
 ous operation of French justice. Her husband had 
 commenced proceedings in the royal courts to 
 recover the custody of his two children. The 
 litigation can only have been inspired by spite, 
 since it is difficult to believe that the dismal Louis, 
 who was one of Nature's solitaries, was genuinely 
 anxious for the uninterrupted society of two small 
 boys. An embarrassed tribunal, following the prin- 
 ciples of jurisprudence laid down under somewhat 
 similar circumstances by King Solomon, bisected 
 the disputed family and awarded the eldest son 
 to his aggrieved father. But before the judgment 
 could be executed, Napoleon had returned from 
 Elba and Hortense enjoyed a brief respite. The 
 decree of the King's courts revived in the autumn 
 of 1815, and the elder boy was removed to his 
 father in Italy, leaving his mother to take the road 
 with the little Louis. 
 
 Hortense in exUe developed to an alarming degree 
 that tendency towards mild virtuosity which had 
 made her the youthful prodigy of Malmaison. When 
 ill-health followed her judicial bereavement of a son, 
 they found her sketching feebly on the hills above 
 Aix. Her accomplishments, which included poetry, 
 drawing, painting, singing, and musical composition, 
 were something more than queenly ; sometimes she 
 carried them to a pitch beyond the ladylike which 
 positively verged upon the professional. The air of 
 
60 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Partant pour la Syrie, which became the official 
 anthem of the Second Empire, was her work ; and 
 her Creole origin was never more clearly indicated 
 than by a Marche Imperiale for six pianos and a 
 military band. This indomitable amateur became, 
 . naturally enough, the tutor of her remaining boy, 
 and her instruction was eked out with a succession 
 of French gentlemen of mild erudition. 
 
 The exiles had money ; but it became the business 
 of the Holy Alliance to see that they had little peace. 
 An Allied Conference met in Paris and considered 
 the grave menace presented to the peace of Europe 
 by the continued residence on the shores of the 
 Lac du Bourget of Hortense and a child who was 
 now almost eight years old. It was decided, as the 
 winter was coming on, to transfer them under 
 circumstances of the greatest possible discomfort 
 to Constance in Baden. This Bonapartist invasion, 
 which was accommodated with some difficulty at 
 an exceedingly bad hotel, struck the government of 
 the Grand-Duchy with consternation ; and the poor 
 lady was promptly requested to leave. With a 
 gesture of heroism that was almost Napoleonic 
 Hortense defied Europe and took a house ; and 
 Constance became for two years the place of her 
 exile. It was a dreary period, in which the little 
 Prince was instructed in the rudiments and developed 
 a startling and hazardous form of charity for which 
 authority exists in the Life of St. Martin ; it appears 
 to have been his practice to respond to mendicant 
 appeals with the immediate gift of his clothing in a 
 manner which both embarrassed himself and alarmed 
 his mother. But after little more than a year of 
 residence in Baden, the wheels of Allied pohcy began 
 
THE PRINCE 61 
 
 to revolve once more, and the lady and her little 
 boy were moved on into Bavaria. 
 
 By the accident of royal courtesy at Munich Louis 
 became a German schoolboy, and the first stage of 
 his training for the throne of France was conducted 
 at the St. Anna Gymnasium of Augsburg. He took 
 a French tutor with him, and during the first four 
 years of his residence his mother had a house in the 
 town. But in the main his education was in the 
 hands of German teachers who observed in him 
 those signs of abihty which academic persons have 
 never failed to detect in royal pupils. It resulted 
 from his instruction at Augsburg that he acquired 
 a German accent and a vague flavour of Teutonic 
 romance ; the atmosphere of German education in 
 the year 1820 was unfriendly to undue precision of 
 thought, and the haze which it engendered can hardly 
 have been dispelled for Louis by the desultory pre- 
 dilections of Hortense. His holidays were spent in 
 travel, which took him to every resort in Switzerland 
 in pursuit of his mother's health, to the South 
 German palaces where he had friends and cousins, 
 or on more alarming visits of duty to his father in 
 Italy. In the years between 1820 and 1830, when 
 the whole western sky of Europe was alight with the 
 afterglow of Byron and the young lions of French 
 Romanticism were beginning to roar in Paris, the 
 young Louis Bonaparte was a mild-eyed German 
 schoolboy, learning to seek philosophy in a sunset 
 and romance in a ruined castle. ' 
 
 By this time Hortense had succeeded in securing a 
 permanent home. The Canton of Thurgau redeemed 
 the Swiss reputation for political hospitality by a 
 definite invitation to the ex-Queen and her son, and 
 
62 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 with some hesitation she bought a chateau at Arenen- 
 berg on the Swiss shore of the Lake of Constance. 
 The Alhed governments weighed this dangerous 
 step with their accustomed gravity, and Stratford 
 Canning, who was serving his diplomatic apprentice- 
 ship at Berne, corresponded solemnly with Lord 
 Castlereagh as to the possibility of effectively over- 
 looking a lady who lived on the banks of a lake. But 
 she proceeded with the preparation of her home. The 
 reception rooms were all decorated in the tented 
 style which had been so modish under the Consulate, 
 and the house was filled with the swans' necks and 
 the gleaming gryphons of her Empire furniture. 
 While his mother sketched the lake with all the 
 persistence of a determined amateur, Louis passed 
 out of boyhood in an atmosphere of rural gentility, 
 driving his cabriolet up and down the road to 
 Constance, riding, shooting, swimming, doing acts 
 of feudal beneficence, and performing generally all 
 those duties which are beheved to qualify an English 
 landowner for a seat on the local Bench. He emerged 
 from this training as a sportsman of tolerable pro- 
 ficiency who scandalised an English peer in 1829 by 
 riding at full gallop through the streets of Rome. 
 
 But swimming the lake and winning prizes at the 
 local Schutzenfest were not his only interests. A 
 Bonaparte, even if he were a younger son, must 
 learn the family trade of war. The French army 
 was closed to him. But in 1829, when Diebitsch 
 was moving on Sihstria, the Byronic appeal of a 
 campaign against the Turk proved irresistible, and he 
 begged his father for leave to serve with the Russians. 
 Had it been granted, the prospects of the Second 
 Empire might well have ended abruptly in a scuffle 
 
THE PRINCE 63 
 
 in the Dobrudja. But Louis at fifty was unsym- 
 pathetic to a young man's romantic predilection 
 for crusading under a foreign flag. His permission 
 was withheld in a letter which denounced as bar- 
 barism all war except a war of national defence, and 
 the Prince was left to satisfy his mihtary inclinations 
 nearer home. With a drop in the scale of romance 
 he joined the Swiss artillery. There was a volunteer 
 unit which went into camp at Thun, and route- 
 marching had no terrors for a young man who had 
 walked over the Spliigen with his tutor. Under 
 commanding officers who had learnt their experience 
 in the wars of the Empire he acquired that familiar- 
 ity with the details of military equipment which is 
 indispensable to monarchs, and when the July 
 Revolution swept Paris in 1830, he was learning the 
 elements of gunnery on the Polygon at Thun. The 
 news brought him to the frontier, and from Geneva 
 he stramed his eyes into France. 
 
 In the autumn he went into Italy with his mother 
 on a visit to her elder son at Florence. His brother, 
 from whom he had been separated by the French 
 courts, was now happily married to a cousin, and 
 in default of politics he had devoted himself to 
 industrial enterprises. After a few days Prince 
 Louis went on with Hortense to Rome and proceeded 
 to render himself impossible in the eyes of the Papal 
 pohce by attending a suspicious meeting of the male 
 members of his family and emphasising the revolu- 
 tionary nature of his sympathies by a shameless 
 exhibition of the tricolour. He was conducted to 
 the frontier under escort and rejoined his brother 
 at Florence. Early in the new year Hortense 
 warned the young men against futile adventures. 
 
64 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 But her advice came too late. When the Romagna 
 rose against the Temporal Power in February, she 
 posted after them to Florence. But her sons were 
 nowhere to be seen, and their destination was clearly 
 indicated by a note from Louis which she found at 
 her hotel : 
 
 'Your affection will understand us. We have ac- 
 cepted engagements, and we cannot depart from them. 
 The name we bear obUges us to help a suffering people 
 that calls upon us. Arrange that my sister-in-law may 
 think that it was I who carried off her husband ; he 
 is pained by the idea that he has hidden one action of 
 his life from her.' 
 
 History has been exercised as to the precise nature 
 of the ' engagements ' assumed by the young men. 
 The titillating spectacle of a future Emperor in a 
 secret society has inspired the hope that Louis had 
 actually joined the Carbonari. But there is a dis- 
 tressing lack of evidence, and it may well be that 
 they had merely enlisted in the rebel forces which 
 were campaigning in the Papal States. Upon either 
 view there can be no question that by the year 1831 
 the German schoolboy of 1820 had become an 
 Itahan romantic. 
 
 The two Princes were in the field with the insur- 
 gents. But their mother, who was a Beauharnais 
 and had kept house for Napoleon in the Hundred 
 Days, was disinclined to inactive lamentation and 
 was perfectly capable of fetching them out of the 
 firing-line. On the following morning she had an 
 interview with her husband ; and the meeting after 
 twenty years between that independent, cultivated 
 lady and her morose rehct must have resembled the 
 rencoimter, if one may employ an expression of 
 
THE PRINCE 65 
 
 Mr. Thomas Hardy's to describe a situation of 
 Mr. Bernard Shaw's, of Mrs. Clandon and Mr. Cramp- 
 ton at the seaside hotel where Gloria met her dentist. 
 The husband was flurried and faintly ridiculous. 
 He proposed to the wife whose frivoHty had shocked 
 him twenty years before that she should fetch the 
 truants from the army ; for himself he reserved the 
 manly task of interviewing the Austrian ambassador. 
 Hortense hesitated to compromise her political 
 reputation by a journey to the rebel forces in the 
 Papal States and remained in Florence, where her 
 husband subjected her to a daily series of futile 
 suggestions. MeanwhUe the Princes were in com- 
 mand of the insurgents before Civita Castellana. 
 The town was carried by an attack projected by 
 Prince Louis in accordance with the principles 
 prevaihng in the Swiss army, and the two young 
 leaders of revolt threatened Rome itself. The Pope 
 opened negotiations with the Princes. But at this 
 stage they were removed from the command on the 
 pretext that their leadership might prejudice the 
 insurrection in the eyes of Europe. An Austrian 
 army, true to Metternich's policy that the world 
 must be made safe for reaction, was in the field 
 against the insurgents, and it was ominous that its 
 commander had omitted their two names from his 
 announcement of an amnesty. Early in March 
 Hortense, alarmed by this threat of outlawry, started 
 from Florence in pursuit of her sons. She went first 
 to the army, but found that they had left it. At 
 Perugia she was told of their achievements in the 
 field ; they were further to the east, and there was 
 fever in the country. She quickened her pace 
 towards Ancona, and on the road she met a messenger 
 
66 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 with the news that the elder Prince had taken the 
 sickness. At Pesaro they told her that he was dead, 
 and she was carried fainting into Louis' house. 
 
 He had ceased to be a younger son ; but he was 
 ill and an outlaw. At Ancona the Austrians came 
 up with them, and Headquarters were actually 
 installed in Hortense's house. But although the 
 whole town believed that Prince Louis had left by 
 the saihng packet for Corfu, he could not be moved 
 from his room ; and through eight days of fever 
 Hortense, who had no intention of losing her last 
 son by an Austrian firing-party, nursed him in silence 
 with a door between her patient and the room of a 
 polite but deluded Austrian commander. She had 
 a British passport for a journey across France to 
 England, and at dawn on Easter Sunday she drove 
 out of Ancona with Louis in the full glory of Miladi's 
 footman (it was the golden age of Jeames) on the box. 
 Li his Odyssey across Italy he enjoyed the advan- 
 tages which would have fallen to the hero if Calypso, 
 instead of being one of the obstacles, had formed one 
 of his party. Hortense lavished her charm on 
 Austrian officers and Italian police, and she gave 
 evidence of a real gift for theatricals which should 
 have found a place among her more advertised 
 accomplishments. The road from Ancona to Genoa 
 lay between the ScyUa of inquiring officials and the 
 Charybdis of undue recognition by incautious friends. 
 But Louis travelled successfully from the Adriatic 
 to the Mediterranean, sometimes in livery, sometimes 
 in the character of a young English gentleman with a 
 remarkable accent and a charming but (Hortense's 
 Enghsh was confined to her passport) inarticulate 
 mother. From Genoa they entered France by sea ; 
 
THE PRINCE 67 
 
 and on a spring evening in 1831 the Prince looked 
 out at Paris from his hotel windoXvs in the Rue de 
 la Paix. 
 
 The journey from the Riviera had been broken at 
 Fontainebleau, where Hortense showed her son the 
 font where the Emperor had stood his godfather, 
 and all along the road he saw French towns, French 
 men, French women, French soldiers. The Govern- 
 ment was promptly informed of their arrival, and a 
 suspicious Prime Minister presented himself at the 
 hotel. On the next day Hortense was taken to the 
 Palais Royal with an air of operatic secrecy. She 
 was shown into a small bedroom, and almost to slow 
 music King Louis Philippe arrived with his sister 
 and his Queen in an impenetrable atmosphere of 
 conspiracy. The royal family of France was hardly 
 adapted to furtive entrances, and when Hortense 
 had reassured them that she had no intention of 
 remaining in Paris, the interview became more 
 genial. But on her return to the hotel she found 
 her son suffering from a virulent return of his illness, 
 and utterly unable to leave for London. The 
 Government, which regarded without enthusiasm 
 the presence in Paris of a Bonaparte Prince, dis- 
 played a touching anxiety as to his health ; and when 
 great crowds honoured the day of the Emperor's 
 death by piling flowers round the base of the Colonne 
 de la Grande Armee, its concern at his continued in- 
 ability to leave became positively maternal. Anxious 
 inquirers from the TuUeries pressed into his bedroom, 
 and their solicitude was followed up by a curt order 
 to leave Paris. It was injudicious for the Orleans 
 monarchy to tolerate a Bonaparte in the Rue de la 
 Paix with a crowd of Bonapartists in the Place 
 
68 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Vendome ; and at some risk to himself Louis took 
 the road again for London. His jom-ney across 
 France had taught him in wayside talks and print- 
 seUers' windows that the memory of the Empire 
 was not dead. He had heard the roar of a great 
 crowd surging up the street to do honoiir to the 
 Emperor, and in that spring journey which followed 
 on his Italian escapade Louis Napoleon became a 
 Bonapartist. 
 
 The subjects of King William iv. were undisturbed 
 by the arrival of Hortense and her son at a hotel in 
 St. James's Street. The world was far too interested 
 in the prospects of the Reform BUI, and the even 
 flow of Mr. Greville's diary was not broken by their 
 appearance in polite society. The news that a 
 nephew of Napoleon was ill with jaundice so near 
 to the new glories of Regent Street was of less 
 interest than the cholera scare ; and while Mr. Grev- 
 ille was inquiring in what pattern of crown Queen 
 Adelaide desired to suffer coronation, Hortense took 
 a house in Holies Street and began to look up her 
 English friends. The Whigs have always displayed 
 a 'penchant for the enemies of their country, and she 
 had formed a few English connections during the 
 interval of peace before Trafalgar. Whilst Talley- 
 rand looked on with suspicion from the French 
 embassy, the great ladies whose husbands were 
 following Lord John into the lobby on Reform sent 
 cards to HoUes Street ; and Hortense was presented 
 everywhere by the Duchess of Bedford, whilst her 
 son perseveringly inspected the sights of London. 
 The city had been transformed by the reconstructions 
 of the Regency into a dream of elegance in stucco, 
 nor were the miracles of science disregarded in a 
 
THE PRINCE 69 
 
 visit to the Thames Tunnel. At one moment the 
 Prince wrote to Louis PhiHppe begging for permission 
 to serve his country ; but a cautious Prime Minister 
 insisted that he should discard the dangerous name 
 of Napoleon, and the young man preferred to remain 
 in exile. The travellers proposed to return to 
 Switzerland by way of Belgium, and this choice of 
 route alarmed Prince Leopold of Saxe-Coburg, whose 
 bereavement had just been consoled by the gift of 
 the new Kingdom. It became necessary for Louis 
 to declare that he had no sinister designs on Brussels. 
 The Belgian route was abandoned, and he retired 
 with his mother to Tunbridge Wells to wait for 
 passports. 
 
 Early in August they landed at Calais, and Louis 
 re-entered the atmosphere of the Empire. Hortense 
 had decided that an excitable young man had better 
 be kept away from the somewhat explosive atmo- 
 sphere of Paris ; but she employed the jom'ney across 
 France to improve his Bonapartist education. When 
 the Army of England was in the Pas de Calais a 
 quarter of a century before, she had been a frequent 
 visitor at the cantonments. She could tell him in 
 those summer days of 1831 which were the old French 
 lines and the moorings of that fleet which never sailed. 
 He saw the Emperor's camp from the top of the 
 column behind Boulogne, and the little house at 
 Pont-de-Briques where the orders were dictated 
 which swung the Grande Armee from the English 
 Channel to AusterHtz. Then they went driving 
 along the dusty roads of France by Chantilly to the 
 northern edge of Paris, and at every turn of the road 
 Hortense banked the fires of memory with tales of 
 the Empire. At Rueil they found that a rich man 
 
70 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 had bought Malmaison and admitted only ticket- 
 holders : Josephine's daughter had no ticket except 
 her memories. But the church was open, and they 
 stood together by her mother's grave. Circling 
 round Paris, thej^ passed Versailles and took the 
 great road to the south by Melun. France seemed 
 full of voices murmuring the Imperial story. There 
 were old prints on every wall and old tales on every 
 tongue which set Louis wondering vaguely whether 
 the past Empire had perhaps a future ; and when 
 at last they repassed the Swiss frontier, the young 
 man who had left Arenenberg as a romantic lover of 
 ItaUan hberty returned to his exile as the youngest 
 and bitterest recruit of the Bonapartists. 
 
THE PRINCE 71 
 
 VI 
 
 His brother's death gave Prince Louis a step in the 
 Napoleonic hierarchy, and he found himself at 
 twenty-three the heir of Queen Hortense. But he 
 was not yet the heir of the Empire, and family 
 discipline was too well maintained for any change 
 in the succession. For the faithful there was still 
 an Emperor ; the King of Rome had succeeded to 
 his father, and somewhere beyond the mists 
 Napoleon u. was reigning in Vienna in spite of 
 Metternich and the long illness under which he was 
 fading into a figure of pale romance. Louis had 
 offered to join him in captivity ; but no word came 
 from Schonbrunn, and perhaps the letter was never 
 delivered. 
 
 The Prince returned to his lake in Switzerland 
 with a new faith in his dynasty. He could not fail 
 to see that of the younger men he stood next to 
 the dying Due de Reichstadt, and he turned from 
 the life of a sporting Swiss landowner to the more 
 serious interests of an heir presumptive. His rooms 
 were furnished with maps and accoutrements, and 
 when a Polish deputation arrived to offer him the 
 leadership of a hopeless insurrection, he seemed to 
 have entered the full stream of European politics. 
 The national movement in Warsaw had a curiously 
 French flavour. The tricolour cockade was rever- 
 ently carried in procession on a cushion like a sacred 
 relic, and there were queer tales of a French army 
 
72 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 half seen marching in the mist at night. The ghost 
 of the Grande Armee walked Lithuania in 1831 ; and 
 it seemed natural to appeal for the assistance of 
 ' un jeune Bonaparte apparaissant sur nos plages (the 
 coast of Poland has much in common with the sea- 
 board of Illyria ; but Polish patriotism has never 
 been confined within the narrow limits of literal 
 exactitude) le drapeau tricolor e a la main.'' But the 
 invitation was refused. Prince Louis was vowed to 
 another quest ; and he was no longer prepared to 
 crusade promiscuously in the cause of liberty. 
 
 All through the autumn and winter of 1831 he 
 worked in his room at Arenenberg, and in the spring 
 a pamphlet appeared which contained his first 
 manifesto as a Bonapartist. There was not yet an 
 organised body of Bonapartists to which he could 
 appeal ; but France under Louis Philippe was fuU 
 of a vague, thwarted behef in the sovereignty of the 
 people. It was an age of lost illusions. The Revolu- 
 tion of 1830 had opened with a flourish of republican 
 trumpets and ended with a deadening roll of bourgeois 
 drums, and Paris began to stir uneasily. As in all 
 periods of discontent, there was a rank and bitter 
 growth of political caricature, in which the genius 
 of Daumier cut savagely at the unheroic figure of 
 the King. The country had begun to despise its 
 new masters, and men would believe any meanness 
 of the Government. They came together easily into 
 crowds, and as they learnt that it is not difficult to 
 force up a few paving-stones and turn an omnibus on 
 its side, the barricades began to become a political 
 habit. There was an intermittent rattle of musketry 
 in the streets of Paris, as the National Guard de- 
 fended royal law and bourgeois order ; and the 
 
THE PRINCE 73 
 
 Orleans monarchy drifted steadily further from its 
 popular origins. 
 
 In this air of discontent Prince Louis propounded 
 in his Reveries Politiques a republican type of 
 Bonapartism which was intended to unite behind 
 Napoleon n. all the parties of opposition. His 
 doctrine was broad-based upon quotations from 
 Montesquieu, and he introduced himself as a republi- 
 can in theory. But his affection for the Republic 
 was purely platonic, and under the pressure of 
 practical politics and the exigencies of national 
 defence he avowed himself an Imperialist. ' Si le 
 Rhin etait une Tner, si la vertu etait toujours le seul 
 mobile, si le merite parvenait seul au 'pouvoir, alors je 
 voudrais une Republique pure et simple. Mais . . .' 
 There is a faint irony in the circumstance that it was 
 the Second Empire which lost the Rhine frontier 
 in 1870 and the Third Republic which reconquered 
 it in 1918. But in the Reveries of 1832 France was 
 directed away from the middle-aged expedients of 
 the Orleans monarchy and the visionary idealism of 
 a Republic towards the superior merits of ' un 
 gouvernement qui procur&t tous les avantages de la 
 Republique sans entratner les memes inconvenients,' 
 and the author obligingly appended the draft of 
 an Imperial constitution in which the hereditary 
 principle was tempered by plebiscite. 
 
 The gospel ol St. Helena was closely followed in 
 the Reveries of Arenenberg. Democracy was assured 
 by a parliamentary constitution and the right of the 
 people to approve by direct vote the succession to 
 the throne. Peace without conquests was to be the 
 programme of French foreign policy ; and the 
 doctrine of nationality, so fashionable since the 
 
74 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Peace of Vienna and so interesting to a young man 
 who had seen service in Italy, was respected by a 
 declaration that France was the natural ally of all 
 free nations and by an insistence that their sovereign 
 should grant to them the institutions which they 
 demand. Provision was even made for the career 
 of an energetic cousin of an ailing Emperor : on a 
 demise of the Crown ' si le fits ou le plus proche parent 
 du dernier Empereur ne convient pas a la nation (and 
 one's uncles would afford a strikingly uninviting 
 prospect), les deux chambres proposeront un nouvel 
 Empereur, et toute proposition passera a la rmtification 
 du peuple.^ Louis was indisposed to pass his life 
 as a Prince of the Empire ; and although he was 
 not prepared to supersede Napoleon n., he had few 
 doubts as to who would be Napoleon m. 
 
 In a few weeks his time came, and on a July day 
 in 1832 the Due de Reichstadt faded out of life. 
 His father was dead ; his uncles were insignificant 
 and old. But he left a young cousin by a Swiss 
 lake who was the heir of the Empire. When Louis 
 Napoleon became the Bonaparte pretender, he was 
 a horse-faced young man of twenty-four. He wore 
 a pointed beard with a romantic air and might, to 
 all appearances, have fluttered round George Sand 
 or sat cheering on a strapontin at the first night of 
 Herna7ii. His portrait was painted about this time 
 by Cottrau, a cheerful young painter whose loud 
 laugh, straw hat, and Byron collar must have sent 
 a breath from the Quartier Latin over the Lake of 
 Constance ; and one sees in the picture one of those 
 bearded young men in a high cravat who formed the 
 public of Victor Hugo and the raw material of the 
 Vie de Boheme. 
 
THE PRINCE 75 
 
 But with his accession to the full dignity of a 
 French pretender Prince Louis assumed a more 
 solemn aspect. It became his business to assure 
 pubhc opinion by the publication of political studies 
 that he had found a statesmanlike employment for 
 his leisure, and with the assistance of his barber he 
 proceeded to the first of those modifications of his 
 appearance which were to make him the delight of 
 caricaturists. A moustache was retained as an 
 indication to the world that he was a soldier, although 
 his uncle had contrived to make this obvious with 
 the shaved face of a priest. But the beard vanished, 
 leaving no trace except a slight imperial ; and in 
 his uniform he looked much like any slim young 
 officer of the French army which marched against 
 Antwerp with Marshal Gerard in 1832. 
 
 With his new responsibilities he proceeded to the 
 composition of a second book, interrupting his work 
 in the autumn with a second visit to London. On 
 the way through Belgium he drove out with his 
 maps to Waterloo ; and as he explored the ground, 
 it is to be feared that he did not escape the more 
 obvious reflections which haunt that undulating but 
 platitudinous neighbourhood. In London he became 
 unwell, suffering, as a tribute to English local colour, 
 from ' le spleen,' and he reported to his mother that 
 M. Hugo's new novel Notre-Dame de Paris was un- 
 suitable literature for an invalid. Then, as the 
 winter came on, he returned to Switzerland and 
 abandoned himself to the allied pursuits of com- 
 position and proof-reading. 
 
 The Considerations Politiques et Militaires sur la 
 Suisse, which appeared in 1833, formed an impressive 
 addition to his published works. The title alone 
 
76 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 had an air of dull distinction which was worthy of 
 any reigning family in Europe ; one would hardly 
 have been surprised to find it among the juvenilia 
 of Prince Albert. But the book was something more 
 than an inventory of the political virtues of the 
 Swiss Republic. Opening with an ominous apology 
 for the number of his references to France, the Prince 
 proceeded to a restatement of Bonapartist doctrine. 
 The necessities of his subject compelled him to dis- 
 play a tedious knowledge of cantonal constitutions 
 and the organisation of the Swiss army ; but in the 
 digressions from which, like Tristram Shandy, the 
 book derives its main interest he returned to more 
 familiar ground. Napoleon reappears as ' Empereur 
 plebeien.^ His policy is to be judged by his inten- 
 tions rather than by his achievements ; and in the 
 true spirit of the gospel according to Las Cases 
 Prince Louis sketched the programme of the Liberal 
 Empire which was to have followed a victory at 
 Waterloo : 
 
 ' S'il eut ete vamqueur, on await vu le duche de Varsovie 
 se changer en nationalite de Pologne, la Wesiphalie se 
 changer en nationalite allemande, la vice-royaute d'ltalie 
 se changer en nationalite italienne. En France, un 
 regime liberal eut remplace le regime dictatorial ; partout 
 stabilite, liberte, independance, au lieu de nationalites 
 incompletes et d' institutions transitoires .' 
 
 The bright picture which the First Empire had left 
 unfinished might be completed, as the Prince hinted 
 broadly, by a Second Empire which should be ' un 
 pouvoir national, c' est-d-dire un pouvoir dont tous les 
 elements se retrempent dans le peuple, seul source de 
 tout ce qui est grand et genereux.' Such were the pros- 
 pects for France and Europe at which Prince Louis 
 
THE PRINCE 77 
 
 glanced in the intervals of his more relevant reflec- 
 tions on the political importance of Zurich and the 
 military responsibilities of Appenzell. 
 
 His quiet life by the lake was resumed with ap- 
 propriate interludes of gentlemanly recreation. In 
 the four years which intervened between his accession 
 to the pretendership and his first attempt to seize 
 power in France there was little change in the even 
 tenor of his days. In the summer he went into 
 camp with the artillery, and in the winter he skated 
 on the lake until tea-time, whilst his mother wore 
 all her furs and ventured on the ice in a little sledge. 
 At nights he read and wrote and corrected proofs, 
 with an occasional game of billiards, and by day he 
 planned roads and bridges in the grounds or watched 
 the fuliginous progress of the steam-boat (it was the 
 year 1835) across the lake. Hortense became the 
 centre of a little French colony, and there was a 
 gentle flow of amusing visitors to the chateau. 
 Madame Recamier came, all in black, to exchange 
 Directoire gossip about the Incroyables. Chateau- 
 briand called after a correspondence of exhausting 
 chivalry with his hostess ; and a large negroid 
 gentleman named Dumas, half genius and half 
 journalist, was asked to dinner. That night there 
 was a little music in the drawing-room, and Hortense 
 sang one of her old songs : 
 
 ' Out, vous flairez et vous vaincrez sans cesse ; 
 Mars et V amour suivront partout vos pas : 
 De vos succes gardez la douce ivresse, 
 Soyez heureux, mais ne rrCouhliez pas' 
 
 It was the song which she had sung to the Emperor 
 on the night before he drove away to the campaign 
 
78 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 of Wagram, and Josephine had sat watching his 
 face, because there was something of her own story 
 in the words. At the end of the song, Napoleon 
 told his wife that she was the kindest thing on 
 earth and kissed her and turned unhappily away. 
 The Empress had sat weeping in the salon ; and 
 twenty-five years later, when the Emperor and 
 his Empress were both dead four thousand miles 
 apart, Hortense sang the old song again in exile 
 for Dumas. 
 
 The Prince was a grave young man to whom the 
 world was beginning to pay the compliment of slight 
 attention. Switzerland honoured him with the free- 
 dom of Thurgau and a captaincy in the Bernese 
 artillery. Rumour joined his name with the Queen 
 of Portugal as an intending consort and afforded 
 him an opportunity for the publicity of a dementi. 
 Energetic friends urged upon him the possibilities 
 of the Tagus as the starting point of a progress by 
 way of the Manzanares to the Seine itself. But he 
 was indisposed to make the detour. His corres- 
 pondence was increasing, and in 1835 he brought 
 out a Manuel d'Artillerie, which demonstrated that 
 the family interest in gunnery originated at Toulon 
 in 1793 had been maintained. The book was long, 
 laborious, and technical, and by its solid qualities 
 it incurred the suspicion that the Prince owed some- 
 thing to collaboration. But it was a serious achieve- 
 ment, and he distributed it broadcast to the military 
 profession in France and the rest of Europe. It was 
 something to have convinced the world that there 
 was stiU a Bonaparte. 
 
 But he found this distinction unsatisfying. Like 
 his brother, he was in love with a handsome cousin ; 
 
THE PRINCE 79 
 
 and he might have married her at some little Swiss 
 church and subsided into happiness. But it was 
 the family metier to sit upon thrones ; and since 
 thrones are not conquered by publicity alone, he 
 went forward. 
 
80 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 VII 
 
 BoNAP AUTISM in the year 1836 was a barren enthus- 
 iasm for the memory of a dead man. It was a 
 historical sentiment rather than a political cause. 
 Frenchmen were prepared to stand cheering as the 
 statue of Napoleon swung once more into place on 
 the Vendome column or to watch the workmen 
 carving the names of victories on the Arc de Triomphe. 
 They bought the innumerable Napoleonic picture- 
 books and crowded to any theatre where an actor 
 could be found to play the part of the Emperor. 
 But they made no conscious connection between 
 this pleasant exercise of the imagination and the 
 real politics of the day. The reign of Louis Philippe 
 was a dismal triumph of middle age, an age of reason 
 as depressing as the administration of Walpole ; and 
 old men might stir their memories and young men 
 their imaginations with the picture of a more vivid 
 period when the Grenadiers of the Guard went 
 swinging through the Carrousel and Prance was 
 unacquainted with the less heroic figures of M. Thiers 
 and M. Guizot. But they saw their visions without 
 any practical desire to reinstate a Bonaparte in the 
 Tuileries. The Empire was over. The Emperor 
 (it was the most dramatic turn of his story and gave 
 it a modish flavour of romantic sentiment) had died 
 on an island four thousand miles away, and one knew 
 nothing of his family : perhaps they were dead also. 
 Politicians were either Orleanist or Republican or 
 
THE PRINCE 81 
 
 Legitimist ; but they were never Bonapartist. The 
 great movement which multiplied little bronzes of 
 the Emperor and filled the printsellers' shops 
 with scenes of his career was not Bonapartist : 
 it was Napoleonic. Prolific of poetry and perora- 
 tions, it was without a practical programme or 
 dynastic loyalty. The eyes of France were turned 
 to St. Helena; but they did not look towards 
 Arenenberg. 
 
 But slowly in Switzerland a Bonapartist group 
 was beguining to form round Prince Louis. His 
 mother's friends respected his ambitions, and gradu- 
 ally the circle round her fire became a conspiracy 
 which was to grow in time into the Second Empire. 
 Queen Hortense possessed that remarkable attribute 
 of royalty, a reader. Her reader had a husband ; 
 and when MUe. Cochelet married Colonel Parquin 
 of the Guard, the Prince enlisted his first recruit. 
 But it was not enough to sit in a corner and talk 
 over old times whilst Hortense played softly on her 
 piano to entertain the ladies ; and when an excitable 
 young man named Fialin arrived from England with 
 an introduction, the Prince's conversation became 
 more practical. His new friend, who called himself 
 for no very obvious reason the Vicomte de Persigny, 
 had begun life in the Hussars ; but discouraged by 
 the tedium of barracks in peace-time, he transferred 
 his activities to the more bellicose atmosphere of 
 Parisian journalism. Bonapartism came upon him 
 under circumstances which Imperialist writers have 
 not hesitated to compare to those in which St. Paul 
 came by a greater faith. On a business journey 
 into Germany, as he was driving along a road for 
 the sufficient reason that he hoped to meet a lady 
 
82 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 whom he had seen once before, his coachman stood 
 up on the box, and, at the sight of a young man, 
 waved his hat with a strange shout of ' Vive Na- 
 poleon ! ' The young man, it seemed, was familiar 
 in those parts as a nephew of the Emperor and the 
 son of Queen Hortense. Tlie names set Persigny 
 dreaming of the Empire ; and when he reached the 
 end of his journey, he impolitely forgot the lady for 
 whom he had taken it in a queer revelation which 
 came to him in the garden of a German palace. 
 He seemed to see through the summer night a great 
 march of the armies of France roaring their loyalty 
 to a new Napoleon ; and he returned to Paris with 
 a revivalist faith in the dynasty. His exuberant 
 style had been contained with difficulty within the 
 narrow limits of the Tem.'ps, and he proceeded with 
 enthusiasm and relief to the publication of a magazine 
 of his own, of which there was one number. Pitched 
 in the shrillest key of Bonapartism, it advocated the 
 return of France and the whole western world to the 
 true faith ; the motto of this remarkable periodical 
 was a quotation from Napoleon — ' Tai dessouille la 
 Revolution, ennobli les peuples et raffermi les rois ' — 
 and its sole contributor roamed from politics to 
 economics with a haunting refrain of ' V Empereur, 
 tout V Empereur.'' The calm of Paris was undisturbed 
 by his eloquence. But Persigny, who regarded him- 
 self as an apostle, was endeavouring to attract the 
 attention of his Messiah. He called on King Joseph 
 in England with the full programme of a Bonaparte 
 restoration. But his host, who had reigned in 
 Madrid during the Peninsular War, was already 
 sufficiently instructed as to the discomfort incidental 
 to the occupation of thrones by uninvited persons ; 
 
THE PRINCE 83 
 
 and Joseph passed him on to Prince Louis in Switzer- 
 land with a polite letter. 
 
 Persigny came to Arenenberg with an ideal and 
 left it with a plan. The young man whom he had 
 met in the way to his rendezvous had grown up. 
 The two became allies, and there was some close talk 
 among the maps in the Prince's room. It was 
 agreed that the time had come for an attempt on 
 the French throne, and there can be little doubt that 
 much of the Prince's impulse and more of his plan 
 were derived from Persigny. He was launched on 
 his career as a pretender by the susceptible young 
 man whom he had passed on a road in Germany ; 
 and that singular journaHst, who lived to write a 
 book on the Pyramids, did much to promote a 
 sphinx to be Emperor of the French. 
 
 The conspirators in Hortense's drawing-room felt 
 that among civilians there might be a pardonable 
 lack of enthusiasm for any change of dynasty. King 
 Louis Philippe undeniably satisfied the somewhat 
 limited aspirations of the bourgeoisie, and revolutions 
 were always bad for trade. But there remained (had 
 not Prince Louis published a work on artillery and 
 Persigny served in the Hussars ?) the army. The 
 temper of the French army under the Orleans 
 monarchy was peculiar. Its professional grievances 
 were rarely appreciated by a government which 
 was so essentially civilian, and it stiU contained men 
 who had served under Napoleon. French policy 
 was ostentatiously pacific, and it offered to the 
 army no substitute for the glories of a European 
 war, beyond frequent changes of uniform and the 
 extreme discomfort of campaigns in Algeria. It 
 was even a trifle effaced as the guardian of domestic 
 
84 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 order by the faintly ridiculous figures of the National 
 Guard. In such a service it might well be that a 
 return to the Empire would be welcomed, and it 
 was resolved to raise the army against the King. 
 
 The plan which was adopted was vaguely modelled 
 on the return of the Emperor from Elba. The blood- 
 less revolution of 1815 was to be repeated by the 
 pretender in 1836. He was to appear suddenly in 
 a frontier town, show himself to the troops with a 
 Napoleonic gesture, and as the scene rang with the 
 familiar Vive VEmpereurf to march at their head 
 on Paris. The fortresses of the eastern frontier were 
 accessible from Switzerland, and the irrepressible 
 Persigny flitted from garrison to garrison testing 
 the state of opinion. Eventually it was decided 
 that the attempt should be made at Strasburg, 
 where the civil population was largely republican 
 and at least one unit of the garrison had Napoleonic 
 traditions : the 4th Artillery had been Napoleon's 
 regiment when he wore the King's uniform before 
 the Revolution, and it had joined him at Grenoble 
 on the seventh of the Hundred Days. 
 
 As the summer went on, Prince Louis established 
 himself in German territory at a convenient distance 
 from Strasburg ; and since it was frequently neces- 
 sary for the officers of the French garrison to re- 
 cuperate at Baden-Baden from the exertions of the 
 barrack-square, the Prince found it easy to make 
 useful acquaintances, to bow in the right direction, 
 to drop a gracious hint in a Casino or stir the ambition 
 of a subaltern with a grievance. In this way he 
 enlisted in his enterprise a dozen young men, of 
 whom Lieutenant Laity of the Engineers was the 
 most ardent. But one can hardly precipitate a 
 
THE PRINCE 85 
 
 military pronunciamiento without a senior officer, 
 and the Prince made the fortunate discovery of a 
 disappointed colonel. The 4th Artillery, with its 
 faint flavour of the Imperial legend, was commanded 
 by a colonel of the Empire. Colonel Vaudrey had 
 taken his guns into action at Waterloo with a division 
 of D'Erlon's corps which was sent against La Haye 
 Sainte, and his kindly recollection of the Empire 
 was stimulated by the Government's recent refusal 
 of a post and a perquisite. But colonels, even 
 colonels with grievances, are not readily accessible 
 to pretenders, and it was found necessary to adopt 
 a peculiar means of approach. Vaudrej'' (the story 
 becomes faintly Gallic) was, though married, a lively, 
 a susceptible colonel, and Prince Louis numbered 
 among his supporters an operatic contralto of un- 
 doubted charm whom he cast for the part of Delilah. 
 This young lady, who was the widow of an English- 
 man of exotic tastes, had adopted the Napoleonic 
 cult with the irrational fervour of her type. She 
 was devoted to the Prince, but, as she said, ' politiqtie- 
 mentj' because, ' a dire vrai, il me fait Veffet (Tune 
 femme ' ; and from the loftiest motives she undertook 
 the more congenial task of fascinating the colonel. 
 He heard her sing on summer nights in Strasburg 
 drawing-rooms ; and when he saw her with the 
 Prince in the Casino at Baden-Baden, he asked for 
 an introduction. Louis improved the occasion by 
 explaining his poUtical principles. But the colonel 
 had no head for politics, and returned to Strasburg 
 with a simple-minded devotion to duty and his 
 contralto. The Prince followed up the acquaintance 
 with a mysterious letter in which a lady named 
 Louise Wernert appeared to avow her affection for 
 
86 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the colonel with unmaidenly explicitness : it was a 
 cypher by which he desired to convey his reliance on 
 Vaudrey. But the decisive blow in the conversion 
 of the colonel was struck by his contralto. With the 
 directness of an enthusiast she informed him that 
 his advances would be refused until he joined the 
 conspiracy, and Vaudrey (what else could a suscept- 
 ible colonel do ?) succumbed. 
 
 As the autumn came on, the happy pair went on 
 leave in a kind of Bonapartist idyll, and the Prince 
 went on with his preparations. The Military Gover- 
 nor was approached without success. But one 
 evening Prince Louis rode across the bridge of Kehl 
 into Strasburg and addressed a roomful of officers 
 on the sanctity of his cause and the bitterness of 
 exile. It was a small room, and his audience did 
 not number more than twenty-five ; but the Prince 
 was impressed by their enthusiasm, and he returned 
 to Switzerland with a strong conviction of success. 
 He left his home again in the dawn of an October 
 morning, and as he went Hortense put on his hand 
 a plain gold ring engraved with the names Napoleon 
 Bonaparte and Josephine Tascher. It was the 
 Emperor's wedding-ring, and with this rather tragic 
 talisman he took the road for Strasburg. 
 
 The unwearying Persigny had gathered aU the 
 characters of the piece. Colonel Vaudrey and his 
 Eleonore were recalled from their peripatetic dream 
 of Bonapartist bliss, and the young gentlemen of 
 the Strasburg mess-rooms were warned that the 
 moment was approaching. On the evening of 
 October 28, 1836, the Prince, who had entered 
 France at Neuf-Brisach, drove into Strasburg by 
 the south road from Colmar. He passed the night 
 
 J., 
 
THE PRINCE 87 
 
 in the town at some lodgings which Persigny, true 
 to the spu-it of o^era houffe, had taken in a false 
 name. The next day was spent in paying furtive 
 calls, and after nightfall he met the conspirators in 
 a ground-floor room. The order of events was 
 arranged, and he read out his manifestoes. They 
 consisted of proclamations addressed to the citizens 
 of Strasburg, the army, and the French people, and 
 signed in the Imperial style ' Napoleon.' Opening 
 with the familiar invocation ' On vous trahit ! ' they 
 reproached the government of Louis Philippe with 
 ' des institutions sans force, des his sans liberte, une 
 paix sans prosperite et sans calme, enfin, un present 
 sans avenir,' and demanded a National Assembly to 
 be followed by the more alluring prospect of a young 
 man who presented himself ' le testament de Vempereur 
 Napoleon d'une main. Tepee d'Austerlitz de V autre.'' 
 In a bolder figure he exclaimed : ' Du rocher de 
 Sainte-Helene un rayon de soleil mourant a passe dans 
 mon dme ' ; and the proclamation closed with one 
 of those chronological appeals that are so dear to 
 French politicians, to the men of 1789, of March 20, 
 1815, and of 1830. That night he did not sleep and 
 wrote two letters to his mother. One was to be 
 sent in case of success, and the other announced a 
 failure. 
 
 In the morning five men slipped out of the house 
 in the darkness at six o'clock and walked through 
 the falling snow to the barracks of the 4th Artillery. 
 The Prince was transformed into a colonel in the 
 French army ; and Colonel Parquin, by one of those 
 sudden promotions which form a pleasing feature of 
 all military revolutions, had become a general. One 
 gf the ^roup carried a tricolour surmounted by the 
 
88 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 eagle of the Empire, and they hurried past a mounted 
 guard into the barrack-square. Vaudrey, who had 
 paraded his command at an early hour, received his 
 new sovereign respectfully. There was a roar of 
 ' Vive FEmpereur / ' and the Prince responded with 
 a speech congested with historical allusions and 
 diversified by some dramatic business with the eagle. 
 He was applauded, and the standard was solemnly 
 entrusted to Vaudrey. The band struck up, and 
 the regiment marched out of barracks with its 
 new Emperor at its head. Persigny went off on 
 the congenial errand of arresting the Prefet, and the 
 main body proceeded with the Prince and the colours 
 to the barracks of the 46th of the Line. On the 
 road they paid an early call on the Military Governor, 
 who declined in the lightest of underwear to recognise 
 the Prince as Napoleon ii. Parquin was detailed to 
 deal with him and pursued him about the house 
 through a multiphcity of doors in the best tradition 
 of Palais Royal farce. But in his hasty transit the 
 Governor found a moment to complete his dressing, 
 and with the moral support of a general's uniform 
 he emerged victorious from a struggle in which the 
 royalist cause was sustained by his wife, his mother- 
 in-law, and some stray officers. 
 
 Meanwhile there was a confused scene at the 
 barracks of the 46th of the Line. The infantry 
 seemed unwilling to take its tone from the artillery. 
 The sergeant of the guard was strikingly unrespon- 
 sive when the Prince announced himself as the son 
 of the Emperor, and a subaltern declined to parade 
 the battaUon. A dangerous suspicion began to 
 spread : perhaps the short young man was an 
 impostor. Someone shouted that he was the nephew 
 
THE PRINCE 89 
 
 (if no strongeif" expression was used) of Colonel 
 Vaudrey, and the whole conspiracy foundered on 
 the incredulity of a few privates in a barrack- 
 square. The colonel of the 46th roused his officers 
 and drove the conspirators back against a wall. 
 There was a scuffle in which Vaudrey lost his 
 epaulettes. But the Prince declined to permit 
 his men to use their swords on the infantry : the 
 return of the Emperor from his exile was to be as 
 bloodless as the march on Paris in 1815. He was 
 arrested by a young officer who lived to repent 
 his energy, and by eight o'clock in the morning 
 the attempt on Strasburg had failed. The piece 
 had been carefully staged ; but a few badly re- 
 hearsed supers had caused it to break down in the 
 second act. 
 
 Later in the day the Prince was lodged in the town 
 gaol, and the Military Governor proudly reported 
 to Paris that order reigned in Strasburg. But the 
 message went by semaphore, and there was fog 
 on the line. No news reached Paris until the 
 evening of the following day, when King Louis 
 Philippe and his ministers received a disquieting 
 fragment : 
 
 ' Ce matin vers six heures Louis-Napoleon, fils de la 
 Duchesse de Saint-Leu, qui avait dans sa confidence le 
 colonel d'artillerie Vaudrey, a parcouru les rues de 
 Strasbourg avec une partie de. . . .' 
 
 That night there was little sleep at the Tuileries ; 
 the royal ladies flitted anxiously in and out of the 
 council which sat through the night, and the Due 
 d' Orleans was on the point of starting for Strasburg 
 on the next dav, when the full news arrived and the 
 
90 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 King turned to the more congenial business of con- 
 ferring a peerage upon the MiHtary Governor. The 
 pretender was in prison with his conspirators, and 
 it remained for the Government to decide upon their 
 future. On receipt of the news Hortense had got 
 into France in a false name and was staying outside 
 Paris appealing to the King for her son's life. After 
 an imprisonment of twelve days the Prince was 
 driven to Paris in a post-chaise. He protested 
 against this separation from his friends and was 
 informed that the adroit King Louis Phihppe had 
 avoided the unpleasant publicity of a state trial by 
 granting him a free pardon. The pretender was to 
 have no opportunity of impressing pubHc opinion 
 by his demeanour in the dock, and his attempt on 
 the throne was systematically ridiculed by a stream 
 of reports and caricatures of a half-witted young 
 man who had dressed himself up in his uncle's 
 uniform and was repenting his grotesque adventure 
 in floods of tears. 
 
 But the quality of the King's mercy was diluted 
 by the further decision to deport the Prince to 
 America. Hortense was not permitted to visit him 
 in detention, and he wrote begging her not to follow 
 him into further exile. On a November morning 
 he drove out of Paris by the road to the western ports 
 which the Emperor had taken twenty-one years 
 before him, and instead of Rochefort and the 
 Bellerophon he went to Lorient and (by a variation 
 in mythology) the Andromede. As he went on board 
 the French cruiser, the Sous-prefet handed him a 
 viaticum of 15,000 francs : the King was generous, 
 but as he had secured 200,000 francs from the Prince's 
 pockets at Strasburg, he could afford to be. On 
 
THE PRINCE 91 
 
 November 21, 1836, the Andromede sailed from 
 Lorient into the Bay of Biscay ; and, in a scene which 
 has rarely provoked historians to reflect or Academi- 
 cians to paint, Louis Napoleon left France in a 
 warship. 
 
92 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 VIII 
 
 Napoleon had been exiled on a rock in the Atlantic : 
 his nephew (it was typical of the more crowded 
 atmosphere of the later age) was exiled to New York. 
 It was a sweeter, simpler New York, unguarded as 
 yet by Ellis Island or the menacing gesture of colossal 
 statuary and with a skyline not yet serrated by the 
 spectacular application of steel construction to 
 architecture, a ' small but promising capital,' as 
 Mr. Henry James described it, ' which clustered 
 about the Battery and overlooked the Bay, and of 
 which the uppermost boundary was indicated by 
 the grassy waysides of Canal Street.' In the clear 
 light of Emersonian America and across this mild 
 urban scene Prince Louis Napoleon walked in the 
 early months of 1837, when Washington Square was 
 ' enclosed by a wooden paling, which increased its 
 rural and accessible appearance ; and round the 
 corner was the more august precinct of Fifth Avenue, 
 taking its origin at this point with a spacious and 
 confident air which already marked it for high 
 destinies.' 
 
 On the voyage out the Prince had been profoundly 
 wretched. He had failed, and it appeared from his 
 intention to become a farmer in the New World that 
 he regarded his failure as final. He wrote bravely 
 to his mother about his prospects in agriculture, and 
 he endeavoured to buy some land from his uncle 
 Joseph. But that cautious potentate, who had 
 
THE PRINCE 93 
 
 retired to gentility in England, declined to answer 
 his nephew's letters ; and the disapproval of his 
 family was still more deeply marked by the action 
 of King Jerome. He had a handsome daughter, 
 and before the expedition to Strasbnrg Louis had 
 courted her in Switzerland, It was understood that 
 they were to marry, and the dark Mathilde would 
 have made a noble Empress of the French. But 
 her father was scandalised by the young man's 
 rashness or by its failure, and he expressed his sound 
 parental instincts by breaking off the engage- 
 ment. The news reached Louis before his ship 
 sailed ; and he took the blow, if one may judge 
 from his letters, in the best taste of contemporary 
 romance : 
 
 ' Lorsque je revenais il y a qudques mois de reconduire 
 Mathilde, en rentrant dans le pare, fai trouve un arbre 
 rompu par Vorage, et je me suis dit a moi-meme : Notre 
 mariage sera rompu par le sort.' 
 
 In his isolation on board the Andromede the Prince 
 was almost a tragic figure, and one can hardly wonder 
 that (it was the year 1837) he stated his tragedy in 
 terms of Lamartine. The cruiser had sailed, in the 
 best tradition of maritime romance, with sealed 
 orders. The cautious government of Louis Philippe 
 intended to isolate the pretender in the obscurity 
 of a long sea voyage until his memory had faded, 
 and the captain was directed to take his ship to the 
 United States by way of South America. They 
 passed the Canaries in mid-December, as Prince 
 Louis sat writing on deck ; and early in the New 
 Year the Andromede ran into rough weather off the 
 coast of Brazil, whilst the Prince sought inadequate 
 
94 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 consolation in a set of Chateaubriand from the ship's 
 library. There was a long wait at Rio, which so far 
 stirred his inherited virtuosity that he sketched the 
 bay. But at last, in the month of March 1837, 
 his imprisonment on a French cruiser came to an 
 end, .and Prince Louis walked ashore at Norfolk, 
 Virginia. 
 
 After a httle dinner to the ship's officers he went 
 on board the steamboat for Baltimore, and eluded 
 the persistent inquiries of a gentleman who followed 
 him twice round the deck in the interests of the 
 infant publicity of the United States. The journey 
 to New York was resumed by way of Philadelphia, 
 and on an April evening in the year of Queen 
 Victoria's (and President Van Buren's) accession 
 the Prince was installed at the Washington Hotel, 
 Broadway, in a growing metropolis which trailed 
 rapidly away to the north in incipient streets with 
 high numbers. 
 
 His arrival in New York, which produced a 
 pleasant stir, brought him once more into touch 
 with the news from France ; and it was of a char- 
 acter to distract him from the prospects of agriculture 
 in America and to revive his ambitions as a pretender 
 to the French throne. He read in the papers that 
 seven of the conspirators of Strasburg had been 
 prosecuted in January and acquitted by an Alsatian 
 jury. The irrepressible Persigny had eluded the 
 police and was conducting propaganda from London. 
 But the French authorities had secured Laitj^, Par- 
 quin, Vaudrey, and his contralto, whose white satin 
 hat and black side curls were an ornament of the 
 dock. The trial, which lasted twelve days, abounded 
 in irrelevant eloquence in the best tradition of French 
 
THE PRINCE 95 
 
 criminal jurisprudence, and a pleasing element of 
 delay was introduced by the necessity of translating 
 the entire proceedings into German for the benefit 
 of several Alsatian jurymen who knew no other 
 language. The prosecution called ninety-one wit- 
 nesses : but as every prisoner and their six counsel 
 delivered an almost uninterrupted succession of 
 political speeches, the trial, which was largely 
 attended by the public, turned into a political 
 meeting with a strong Bonapartist bias. When 
 Maitre Thierret by a masterpiece of advocacy dis- 
 closed the conclusive fact that the prisoner Laity 
 had a mother, the prosecution was shaken. But 
 when Maitre Parquin went one masterly step further 
 and added that his own client in the dock had a 
 mother also, and (better still) a mother of eighty-two, 
 there was not a dry eye in court. The jury retired 
 and returned in twenty minutes with a verdict of 
 ' Not guilty ' : there was a scene of wild excitement 
 in which the prisoners embraced their counsel pre- 
 paratory to an evening of conviviality and public 
 serenade at their hotel. 
 
 The news was profoundly interesting to a young 
 man in New York. The expedition to Strasburg 
 had demonstrated that the French army was not 
 indifferent to a Bonapartist appeal. But from the 
 acquittal of his friends he learnt the far more. gratify- 
 ing fact that there was a civilian public for his views. 
 This discovery, which he owed to the collapse of the 
 Strasburg prosecutions, modified his intention to stay 
 permanently in America and threw him once more 
 into the attitude of a French pretender. The tone 
 of his letters to Europe became less resigned, and it 
 was with the cursory glance of a distinguished visitor 
 
96 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 rather than the more anxious scrutiny of an immi- 
 grant that he surveyed the American scene. 
 
 On his first evening in New York he was invited 
 to step along Broadway to the Old City Hotel, where 
 a party of assorted senators, generals, and clergymen 
 entertained him. This circle, from which he re- 
 ceived a good deal of hospitality, found him well- 
 mannered but somewhat silent, with an odd tendency 
 to discuss his destiny and his future reign on the 
 throne of France. An American poet even described 
 him, with that licence which is permitted to the most 
 respectable poets, as ' a rather dull man of the order 
 of Washington,' and he was believed (it was so 
 dehghtfully French of him) to exhibit a preference 
 for ladies' society. But he made occasional excur- 
 sions beyond the somewhat oppressive gentiUty of 
 his new friends ; the American monde was apt, as 
 DisraeH said, to resemble ' the best society in Man- 
 chester ' ; and he was sometimes to be found playing 
 billiards in the public room or taking a glass of claret 
 with the initiated of the Order of Owls in the cupola 
 of Holt's Hotel. But these gaieties, punctuated 
 with a more sober course of visits to a great-aunt 
 of Mr. Roosevelt and a camp meeting of Wesleyan 
 Methodists, hardly sufficed to occupy the Prince ; 
 and as a serious student of the great repubHc he 
 resolved to survey its principal sights by visiting 
 the falls of Niagara and Mi\ Washington Irving. 
 Once, as he drove through Brooklyn, he took the 
 salute from the military. No self-respecting for- 
 eigner can spend a month in New York without 
 solving the problem of the United States, and 
 Prince Louis recorded his impressions with due 
 solemnity : 
 
 V 
 
THE PRINCE 97 
 
 * Un mineur qui se declare independant a seize ans, 
 quelle que soit sa force physique, n'est qu'un enfant. 
 Les Etats-Unis se sont crus nation des qu'ils ont eu une 
 administration. . . . ils n'etaient et ne sont encore 
 qu'une colonic independante.' 
 
 It was, in spite of an intelligent prevision of the 
 slavery contest, a fatal illusion for a man who was 
 one day to encounter American policy. The Prince 
 never recovered from the hallucination that he 
 understood the United States, and it was not until 
 thirty years later, when he had sent Maximilian to 
 Mexico, that he learnt his error. 
 
 But his investigations were suddenly interrupted 
 by the mail. One evening in June, as he was driving 
 with a clergyman in New York, he opened a letter 
 from his mother. It was a brave letter announcing 
 an operation, but on the outside a doctor had 
 scrawled ' Venez / venez ! ' Louis was a good son : 
 his American plans were abandoned at once, and he 
 booked a passage in the sailing packet for Liverpool. 
 Before it sailed he conveyed, with the courtesy of a 
 crowned head, his apologies to Mr. Martin Van Buren 
 for his omission to visit him at the White House, to 
 which the President had omitted to invite him. The 
 voyage of the George Washington was uneventful in 
 spite of the presence on board of two Enghsh actors 
 and one of the few men whom Prince Louis could 
 beat at chess, and he landed at Liverpool in July 
 with a desperate hope that the French embassy in 
 London would give him a passport for the journey 
 across France to Arenenberg. It was refused ; and 
 at the end of the month, when the crowds in the 
 London streets were respectfully cheering the young 
 Queen, he left the Thames in a Dutch boat with a 
 
 G 
 
98 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 borrowed American passport. Hortense was slowly 
 dying on a coucli in her garden, as her son drearily 
 worked his way up the Rhine from Rotterdam to 
 the Swiss frontier. When he came to Arenenberg. 
 she was asleep and they would not let him see her. 
 But on the next morning (it was an August day on 
 the lake outside) he came to h6r bedside. Seeing 
 her son again, she lingered into the autumn. It was 
 her belief that they would meet once more and for 
 ever ; when he was in America she had written to 
 him : ' Bien sur on se retrouve : crois a cette douce 
 idee : elle est trop necessaire pour ne pas itre vraie.' 
 And in that behef, with her face towards her son, 
 Hortense died on an October morning in the year 
 1837. She had lived too long without happiness to 
 regret life ; but she had given much pleasure in the 
 world, and she had made an Emperor of the French. 
 
THE PRINCE 99 
 
 IX 
 
 HoBTBNSE was dead, and between the dripping trees 
 of Arenenberg the long avenue of exile without her 
 to share it opened before Prince Louis. But he could 
 not face the empty house, and within a few months 
 he moved round the Lake of Constance to another 
 chateau at Gottlieben. A quiet winter which he 
 passed with a few of the acquitted prisoners of 
 Strasburg raised the suspicions of the French govern- 
 ment, and it was resolved in Paris to remove this 
 danger from the eastern frontier. Early in 1838 
 the 'French minister at Berne made a semi-official 
 suggestion that the Prince shoiild be expelled from 
 Switzerland. But the proposal, which by a pleasing 
 irony came from a son of Marshal Lannes, was re- 
 ceived without enthusiasm and referred by the 
 Federal government to the Canton of Thurgau. 
 The Canton declined and emphasised its refusal by 
 electing the Prince to the local council and the 
 presidency of its shooting club, whilst the exile was 
 intensely gratified by the pubhcity which he owed 
 to the French demarche and struck heroic attitudes 
 before Swiss audiences. 
 
 Bonapartism was taken more seriously at the 
 Tuileries than elsewhere in France, and at this stage 
 the French government was still further alarmed by 
 the publication in Paris of an account written by one 
 of the conspirators of the attempt on Strasburg. A 
 wise policy had dictated the endeavour, which had 
 
100 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 been almost completely successful, to ignore the 
 pretender and to ridicule the entire affair. But it 
 was now feared that a serious narrative might show 
 it in a graver hght, and the pamphlet received the 
 incomparable advertisement of suppression. Pub- 
 Hcity and martyrdom are the two essentials of suc- 
 cessful agitation, and by the new policy of the French 
 government both these stimulants were generously 
 admiaistered to the Bonapartist cause. The author 
 of the book. Lieutenant Laity, was arrested and 
 brought before the Peers on a charge of treason. 
 The prosecution condescended to plead the claims 
 of the Orleans monarchy and afforded to Laity an 
 admirable opportunity to expound the superior 
 poUtical virtues of Prince Louis, But the Peers of 
 France were not a Strasburg jury, and with an 
 egregious lack of proportion they sentenced to five 
 years' imprisonment and a fine of 10,000 francs the 
 histoi^ian of an unsuccessful conspiracy whose actual 
 participants had been uniformly acquitted. The 
 gravity of the sentence won sympathy for the un- 
 fortunate pamphleteer, and no jury of Bonapartists 
 could have done better work for his cause. Before 
 the trial the Prince had written to Laity that there 
 was no Bonapartist party, only a Bonapartist state 
 of mind. But after it no Frenchman could doubt 
 that a movement which had startled the Government 
 into vindictiveness and the Peers into brutality was 
 a serious competitor with the reigning dynasty. 
 
 This impression was deepened by the wholly dis- 
 proportionate anxiety with which the Government 
 pursued the trivial question of the Prince's place of 
 residence. The French minister at Berne returned 
 to this topic in a Note of portentous solemnity ; and 
 
THE PRINCE 101 
 
 the Swiss, who resented this interference with their 
 traditional (and not unprofitable) right of giving 
 sanctuary to foreigners, entered with gusto upon 
 the happy round of circumlocution for which a 
 federal constitution affords such unrivalled oppor- 
 tunities. It was debated in the Diet ; the debate 
 was adjourned ; the Note was referred to the Canton 
 immediately concerned ; the legal talent of Switzer- 
 land was mobilised to advise on nice points as to the 
 Prince's national status ; the Prince wrote letters 
 full of grave eloquence ; the French minister read 
 Notes full of vague menace ; and the world at large 
 was made to appreciate to a degree beyond the 
 wildest dreams of Bonapartist propagandists that 
 there was in existence a living heir of the First 
 Empire. The summer passed away in these fascin- 
 ating exercises. Meanwhile the French government 
 lost patience and paid the Prince the supreme 
 compliment of a mobilisation in his private honour. 
 An army corps was concentrated at Lyons to operate 
 against the Swiss frontier ; and Louis, whose re- 
 semblance to William Tell had never been marked, 
 became a national hero. Cantons rained republican 
 honours on him, patriotic guerrilleros were recruited 
 in Lucerne, and the excitement rose to a crescendo. 
 Then, having sufficiently apprised the world of his 
 existence, the Prince gave a regal display of his 
 magnanimity and withdrew to England with a 
 graceful gesture. The aimless fatuity of his per- 
 secution had assured his position on the European 
 stage, and in October the silent young man who had 
 crept back into Switzerland as an obscure failure 
 took the road again between cheering crowds as a 
 figure of international importance. 
 
102 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 He arrived in London in the late autumn of 1838. 
 It was four months after the coronation of Queen 
 Victoria, and society before the pervasion of railways 
 and the Prince Consort was faintly reminiscent of 
 the Regency. The age of Count D'Orsay and Lady 
 Blessington was an echo of the great days of Mr. 
 Brummell, an odd survival of the aUied elegances 
 of dress and dueUing into the gathering gloom of 
 the Nineteenth Century. There was a compact little 
 world of wits and beauties, where Mr. Greville kept 
 his wicked diary and ladies shook their curls at 
 gentlemen in stars and ribands. The long shadow 
 of Prince Albert had not yet faUen across the bright 
 Victorian scene, and under the urbane consulate 
 of Lord Melbourne the young Queen rode out daily 
 with her Court. It was the modish period of the 
 Books of Beauty ; and when Prince Louis Napoleon 
 came upon the town, his career was an exercise in 
 DisraeUan hon ton. 
 
 He made a quiet entrance at his old hotel in 
 St. James's Street. But after a migration to a 
 second hotel in Waterloo Place, he was soon more 
 magnificently established in a peer's house which 
 he took in Carlton Terrace, and the imagination of 
 Mr. Disraeli, always so inflammable by royalty, was 
 Idndled by the Prince's reception in London society. 
 His horses became familiar in the Park, and the 
 world learned to look for the quiet young man who 
 drove to the opera with, his equerries and had the 
 Imperial eagle painted on his carriage doors. His 
 suite included the ubiquitous Persigny and the more 
 impressive figures of Colonels Vaudrey and Parquin ; 
 and he was sometimes attended by General Mont- 
 holon, the authentic Montholon of St. Helena, author 
 
THE PRINCE 103 
 
 of the latest and least reliable of the Napoleonic 
 gospels, or by the more questionable presence of 
 Colonel Bouffet de Montauban, who had varied his 
 retirement with service in the Colombian army and 
 the management of a soap works at Richmond. 
 
 Part of his first winter was spent in instructive 
 travel. After exhausting the attractions of the Bank 
 of England and the Lord Mayor's Show, the Prince 
 visited the spa of Leamington and the more for- 
 bidding centres of the industrial North. He suc- 
 cumbed at Manchester to the delights of an Industrial 
 Exhibition in the Mechanics' Institute, and the 
 managers of provincial theatres proudly displayed 
 him to cheering audiences in decorated boxes. When 
 he returned to London the great house was opened, 
 and half a century later Endymion remembered his 
 entertainments. ' The appointments were finished 
 and the cuisine refined. There was a dinner twice a 
 week ... to which Endymion, whom the prince 
 always treated with kindness, had a general in- 
 vitation. When he occasionally dined there he met 
 always several foreign guests, and all ]nen apparently 
 of mark — at any rate aU distinguished by their in- 
 telligence. It was an interesting and useful house 
 for a young man, and especially a young politician 
 to frequent.' Since society was mildly interested 
 to meet the celebrated pretender who had given 
 Louis PhiKppe such a scare, he was weU received 
 and was much seen at Lady Blessington's. The 
 French government followed his progress with an 
 anxious eye and requested Lord Melbourne to ex- 
 clude the Prince from London. But the Prime 
 Minister, who was rarely at a loss to find excuses 
 for inaction, blandl}^ explained the unfortunate state 
 
104 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 of the law ; and Prince Louis continued to go the 
 round of the clubs. 
 
 The world found him a romantic figure, and 
 D'Orsay (it was the height of elegfl^^ made a 
 portrait of him. He escaped by a fe^R*iths the 
 acid etching of Mr. Creevey. But wheMMl^^Greville 
 met him at a party, he saw ' a short tjMkish vulgar- 
 looking man without the slightest riremblance to 
 his Imperial uncle or any intelligence in his counten- 
 ance ' ; but the old gentleman had never felt at 
 home at Lady Blessington's, and the injudicious 
 combination on that evening of Lord Durham with 
 Captain Marryat, Alfred de Vigny, and Bulwer 
 Lytton may well have disturbed his observation. 
 But the more sympathetic Mr. Disraeli found in 
 him ' that calm which is rather unusual with 
 foreigners, and which is always pleasing to an 
 EngHsh aristocrat.' The Prince even satisfied the 
 more exacting tests of tailoring ; and the member 
 for Maidstone, who matched at this time the yeUow 
 of his waistcoats with the bottle-green of his trousers, 
 declared that ' his dress was in the best taste, but to 
 a practised eye had something of a foreign cut.' 
 There could be no higher tribute in the whole length 
 of Savile Row. 
 
 But the Prince was not satisfied with his drawing- 
 room successes. It was pleasant to walk over to 
 Lord Eghnton's for a rubber after dinner. It was 
 dehghtful to breakfast with Lytton up the river, 
 even if one rowed Persigny and Mr. Disraeli on to a 
 mud-bank afterwards and endured the shrill in- 
 vective of Mrs. Disraeli as the grounded boat rolled 
 in the wash of the passing steamers. But Louis 
 Philippe was stiU King of the French, and a pretender 
 
THE PRINCE 105 
 
 must do something more for his name than explain 
 his destiny to dinner-tables. Mysterious gentlemen 
 flitted up a n^d own the steps of Carlton Terrace (and 
 later of Ca^Bl Gardens) with the preoccupied air 
 by whichJjjj^BPrench spies in the street learned to 
 distinguisn s«et agents. Money went to Paris for 
 the formatioiMf Bonapartist clubs and the founda- 
 tion of that Impressing type of newspaper which 
 derives its sole revenue from the proprietor. Behind 
 the respectable fagade of his social position the Prince 
 was busy with his dynastic ambitions, and in the 
 summer of 1839 he produced a fresh statement of 
 Bonapartist doctrine. Des Idees NapoUoniennes was 
 issued in London by Mr. Disraeli's publishers. But 
 its real public was in France, and a cheap edition was 
 printed in Paris at haH a franc, bound in the green 
 of the Empire and bearing on its cover the Emperor's 
 eagle. 
 
 The book, which was a more ambitious affair than 
 its predecessors, followed the farniliar lines. The 
 more obtrusive facts of Napoleonic policy, which had 
 been largely due to the Emperor's lamentable ignor- 
 ance of Bonapartism, were relegated to a secondary 
 place, and Napoleon was revealed by his nephew as 
 a social reformer distracted from his benefactions 
 by a fortuitous connection with the Grande Armee. 
 The revelation was in the direct tradition of 
 St. Helena, and it was made with a creditable 
 command of eloquence. The author professed to 
 be free from all party ties and, like most adversaries 
 of party, praised his own. The sound revolutionary 
 pedigree of Napoleon was carefuUy established : he 
 was the ' Messie des idees nouvelles,'' the executor 
 (not the executioner) of the Revolution, whose 
 
106 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 monarchy was the fullest expression of the First 
 Republic. His absolutism was an accident of the 
 European war, forced on a blushing Emperor by an 
 impetuous public opinion. But he was a democrat 
 at heart, and in the intervals between his victories 
 he had reconstructed France on a basis of equality. 
 The codes, the colleges, the conscription were all 
 founded on the broad base of democracy, ' un colosse 
 pyramidal a base large et d tete haute.^ It would all 
 have become obvious after a victory at Waterloo : 
 ' Sous le rapport politique, VEmpereur rCa pu organiser 
 la France que provisoirement ; mais toutes ses ins- 
 titutions renfermaient un germe de perfectionnement 
 qu'd la paix il eut developpe.' The bright prospect 
 closed at Waterloo, but it might reopen under a 
 Second Empire. 
 
 In Europe, it seemed, Napoleon had been stUl 
 more anxious to make a better world. His Italian 
 Kingdom had been the rough sketch of a free Italy : 
 ' Le nom si beau d'ltalie, mart depuis tant de siecles, 
 est rendu a des provinces jusques-ld detachers ; il 
 renferme en lui seul tout un avenir d' independance.^ 
 German unity and Polish independence were vaguely 
 foreshadowed in the Emperor's manipulations of the 
 European state-system, and his whole creation moved 
 towards the confederation of Europe, with a code 
 of European laws administered by a European court 
 of justice, in a single league of free nations, ' la sainte 
 alliance des peuples,' in which war would survive 
 only as a crime and mankind would at last set up 
 its eternal rest. It was a remarkable design which 
 had more influence upon the imagination of Prince 
 Louis than upon any of his contemporaries ; and he 
 left his readers with a vague gesture towards world 
 
THE PRINCE 107 
 
 peace and a more detailed recitation of the virtues 
 of a popular monarchy. The Napoleonic idea, as 
 the Prince expounded it, was ' une idee sociale, 
 indusirielle, commerciale, humanitaire ,'' promising to 
 France ' a travers la gloire des armes une gloire civile 
 plus grande et plus durable.^ 
 
 This adroit and intelligent piece of propaganda 
 had an immediate success. But while it was running 
 through its editions in Paris, Prince Louis was less 
 usefuUy employed in Ayrshire. Lord Eglinton held 
 a tournament at his house in Scotland which lived 
 for a generation in the memories of British humour- 
 ists. It was to be a costume affair, and mediaeval 
 costume was supremely ridiculous to a generation 
 which wore rectangular hats and strapped its trousers 
 under its boots. Even Mr. Disraeli, so tolerant of 
 sartorial eccentricities, was still laughing forty years 
 later at ' the Knights of the Griffin, and the Dragon, 
 and the Black Lion and the Golden Lion, and the 
 Dolphin and the Stag's Head, and they were all 
 always scrupulously addressed by their chivakic 
 names, instead of by the Tommys and the Jemmys 
 that circulated in the affectionate circle of White's, 
 or the Gusseys and the Regys of Belgravian tea- 
 parties.' It was all vastly entertaining, and the 
 Prince went up to Scotland to play a leading part 
 in the pageant. He proposed to appear in the lists 
 in a dazzling combination of bright steel and crimson 
 satin, with a somewhat ill-advised creation of green 
 velvet for evening wear. His horsemanship, which 
 was excellent, would have made him a more formid- 
 able pretender to the throne of England, where such 
 accomphshments are highly valued ; and with 
 Persigny as his faithful squire, he figured promin- 
 
108 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 ently in the jousting. The first day of the Tourna- 
 ment was held in pouring rain, and the knights 
 adjoiu-ned to the ball-room, where Prince Louis 
 tilted on foot. He was at home in the air of chivah-y, 
 since he was himself the author of a ballad in which 
 
 ' Brightly each targe and burgonet 
 Was glancing in the sun,' 
 
 and a number of knights displayed a laudable re- 
 collection of the works of Sir Walter Scott. His 
 remaining poetical works in Enghsh might have 
 appeared without attracting attention in any Book 
 of Beauty or Landscape Annual to which Mrs. Hemans 
 contributed. They included a thoughtful elegy by 
 Napoleon on 
 
 ' My dearest thought — my darling Son — 
 My beautiful Napoleon,' 
 
 in which the Emperor's reflections were pitched in a 
 tone of melancholy platitude and literary remini- 
 scence more usually associated with prize composi- 
 tions. The French armies pass across the stage 
 
 ' Fearless as lions when they haste 
 Athwart the long Numidian waste,' 
 
 and their master soliloquises to an extent which is 
 fatally f aciUtated by the simplicity of the metre : 
 
 ' Farewell ! ambition — lofty schemes — 
 Heroic deeds — and daring dreams ! 
 Farewell ! the field of death and doom — 
 The pealing gun — and waving plume ! ' 
 
 There is also a Byronic set of Stanzas to Ireland of 
 which the sentiment must have been more pleasing 
 to Mr. Moore than the poetry. 
 
 In the autumn, when the polite world was re- 
 
THE PRINCE 109 
 
 opening its doors in London, the Prince resumed his 
 Hfe in Carlton Terrace. Mr. Greville met him again 
 at Lady Blessington's and he found himself engaged 
 in an unpleasant dispute with a Mr. Kinglake for 
 the wandering affections of a blonde lady whom he 
 had met at Gore House. The Prince was successful, 
 as princes generally are ; and Miss Howard became 
 his unconsecrated consort for a long term of years. 
 But Mr. Kinglake bore malice and lived to demon- 
 strate by his subsequent depiction of the Emperor 
 of the French the unwisdom of exasperating a 
 historian. Early in 1840 the Prince resumed his 
 poUtics, and Persigny published in the Lettres de 
 Londres an inspiring picture of the pretender as 
 the hope of his country, in which his views were 
 fairly represented and his appearance considerably 
 improved. He appears as the living image of the 
 Emperor, ' le meme nez aux belles 'proportions et les 
 memes yeux gris ' ; and an elaborate game of historical 
 parallel is played between Prince Louis and Octavius, 
 Caesar's nephew. 
 
 Meanwhile he was going quietly about the West 
 End with his vague eye and his black stock. Politi- 
 cians professed themselves impressed by his reserve, 
 and the great world was interested to make the 
 discovery of a foreigner who could be a sportsman. 
 The unwearying Doyle made a drawing of him on 
 horseback, which was to be seen among the ' Eques- 
 trian Sketches ' in McLean's window in the 
 Haymarket. At one moment the pubUc esteem 
 of him was almost heightened by his appearance 
 as a duellist. An unpleasant person named Leon 
 developed a sudden repugnance for the Bonaparte 
 family (although he ' subsequently so far overcame 
 
no THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 it as to live in official charity under the Second 
 Empire), and the Prince found himself challenged 
 and standing on Wimbledon Common with the 
 exquisite D'Orsay for his second. But it was three 
 weeks after the marriage of Queen Victoria to her 
 Consort, and the light had died out of English life ; 
 the police intervened, and the intending duellists 
 were bound over at Bow Street. It was time for 
 the Prince to return to a larger, a less confined 
 activity. He had made himself known to the 
 world as the heir of the Empire, and he could 
 write proudly : ' Tons les Bonaparte etaient morts. 
 Eh Men, fai rattache le fiV 
 
THE PRINCE 111 
 
 X 
 
 French opinion in 1840 was not unprepared for a 
 return of Bonapartism in a militant form. A genera- 
 tion whose fathers had marched across Europe as 
 conquerors felt vaguely humiliated by the continu- 
 ance of peace, and there was little in the sober 
 spectacle provided by the existing dynasty to appeal 
 to the French imagination. An elderly king, a 
 devoted royal family, and a succession of Liberal 
 ministers formed an inadequate substitute for the 
 rolling drums and the Man of Destiny ; and it became 
 steadily more difi&cult for a Government that was so 
 eminently Victorian to control a people which was 
 preponderantly Romantic. France under Louis 
 Philippe was haunted by the little figure of the 
 Emperor ; one could catch on every wind the echo 
 of old names, and men turned to the crude memories 
 of the Empire for an escape into romance. 
 
 It was four years since Prince Louis' first ex- 
 periment in pretendership at Strasburg, and the 
 Orleanist government had unintentionally employed 
 the interval in advertising his cause with a thorough- 
 ness which might more usefully have been reserved 
 for the advertisement of its own virtues. The shrewd 
 policy which had cynically denied him the publicity 
 of a state trial in 1836 was forgotten in a new temper 
 of irritable vindictiveness, and the Bonapartist cause 
 derived more benefit from the ponderous victimisa- 
 tion of Lieutenant Laity and the aimless persecution 
 
112 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 of the exiled Prince than it had ever drawn from the 
 apocalyptic fervour of Persigny. France and Europe 
 were made aware by the ministers of Louis Philippe 
 that Napoleon had left a nephew, and the world 
 inferred from their obvious anxiety that he was a 
 formidable person. 
 
 His own propaganda was vigorously sustained, but 
 for effectiveness it bore no comparison with the 
 fatuity of the French government. His emergence 
 from the obscurity of Switzerland into the brighter 
 light of London society, which he owed entirely to 
 M. Mole and his minister at Berne, was an object of 
 mild interest in France ; and when he stated his 
 pohtical faith in the intermittent perorations of the 
 Idees Napoleoniennes he was regarded with increasing 
 attention by a widening circle. His claims were 
 pressed on the attention of Paris by the baroque 
 eloquence of two newspapers, whose expenses ex- 
 ceeded their revenue in spite of the attractive cir- 
 cumstance that one of them was edited by a claimant 
 to the throne of Hungary ; and there was a steady 
 flow of pamphlets. True behevers were offered 
 opportunities of congenial society in Bonapartist 
 clubs, two of which were formed in Paris. One was 
 a genteel receptacle for retired officers, whilst the 
 other was commended to public favour by the more 
 enlivening company of the contralto of Strasburg. 
 
 But the verbiage of the Capitole and the enter- 
 tainments of the Club des Cotillons were of less 
 service to the Prince than the slow drift of French 
 opinion towards the Napoleonic legend. The 
 national taste for drum and trumpet history was 
 vaguely thwarted by a king who carried an umbrella ; 
 and his drab combiration of a judicious foreign 
 
THE PRINCE 113 
 
 policy with the family virtues, which might have 
 captivated an Anglo-Saxon electorate, fell bitterly 
 short of the more picturesque requirements of the 
 French. His appearance was irredeemably unin- 
 spiring, and his pubHc utterances provoked M. Thiers 
 to the conjecture that his monarch's morning prayer 
 was ' Give us, Lord, our daily platitude.' His 
 ingenious and unheroic adjustments of European 
 affairs were resented as a national humiliation ; and 
 when it transpired that his Egyptian policy was 
 breaking down, the country was thrown into a 
 wholly disproportionate paroxysm of indignation. 
 The French imagination had played round the eastern 
 Mediterranean for almost a century, and these vague 
 ambitions had been incorporated in the Napoleonic 
 tradition by the operations of General Bonaparte and 
 his Regiment des Dromadaires in 1798. The Nap- 
 oleonic atmosphere was heightened by the career of 
 the Pasha of Egypt. Born by a pleasing coincidence 
 in the year of the Emperor's birth, Mehemet Ali began 
 life in the tobacco trade but soon found a more con- 
 genial occupation in the Bashi-Bazouks. The simple- 
 minded blend of homicide and intrigue by which he 
 rose to power inspired French observers to a flattering 
 comparison with Napoleon, and it became an article 
 of patriotic faith that in the intermittent warfare 
 between Egypt and Turkey the Pasha deserved every 
 encouragement. His armies were moving slowly up 
 into Asia Minor, and at Nisib on the upper Euphrates 
 they met and broke a Turkish force whose operations 
 were conducted in strict conformity with the views 
 of the accompanying judicial and rehgious authorities 
 and in defiance of the more exacting requirements of 
 a Captain Helmuth von Moltke. This young officer, 
 
 H 
 
114 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 who was not yet under the necessity of confronting 
 the world with a wig of transparent artificiality, was 
 attached to Turkish headquarters and succeeded by 
 hard riding in escaping from the rout into European 
 history. The Egyptian victory startled the world, 
 and it was resolved in London to check Mehemet's 
 too Napoleonic career. This initiative was fiercely 
 resented in France, and M. Thiers struck heroic 
 attitudes before enthusiastic audiences. But his 
 protest was overborne, and the humiliation left 
 French opinion in a state of acute seK-consciousness. 
 The government of Louis Philippe regarded its 
 high-spirited young charges with the anxious eye 
 of an elderly nurse and decided to distract their 
 thoughts from the inadequacy of the present by 
 another of their favourite stories about Napoleon. 
 The fractious pubHc already had an armful of 
 Napoleonic toys and picture-books. The Arc de 
 Triomphe looked down the Champs Elysees, an 
 army of historical painters had converted Versailles 
 into a gaUery of Napoleonic pictures, and there 
 was a statue of the Emperor on the Vendome column. 
 But it was now decided that Paris should have the 
 Emperor himself. Early in 1840 M. Guizot, who 
 had achieved a European reputation as an EngHsh 
 historian without ever visiting England, was ap- 
 pointed ambassador in London in the mistaken 
 behef that relations with Lord Palmerston would 
 be facihtated by a thorough grasp of the constitu- 
 tional struggles of the last century but one ; and 
 within a few months of his appointment he appfied 
 for the surrender of Napoleon's body to the French 
 nation. This somewhat emotional appHcation was 
 granted by the sardonic Foreign Secretary, and in 
 
THE PRINCE 115 
 
 July a French cruiser commanded by a royal prince 
 sailed for St. Helena, The challenge to a Bonaparte 
 pretender was obvious. The political funeral has 
 always been a favourite vehicle of French propaganda, 
 and it seemed almost indecent that the Orleanist 
 monarchy should be permitted to monopolise so 
 Bonapartist an occasion as the second funeral of 
 Napoleon. If the Emperor's body was to return 
 to Paris, the Emperor's nephew should be there to 
 receive it ; and Prince Louis resolved to make a 
 second attempt on the throne of France before the 
 frigate Belle-Poule could anchor at Havre. 
 
 His project at first took the romantic form of a 
 piratical attack to be made on the French cruiser 
 at sea on its long voyage from St. Helena to the 
 EngHsh Channel. But the attractive design of 
 hoisting a Bonapartist JoUy Roger in the South 
 Atlantic was abandoned, and it was decided to 
 attempt a military revolution in France on the lines 
 which had so nearly succeeded at Strasburg. Lille 
 was selected as a suitable garrison town, lying close 
 to the Belgian frontier and commanded by an officer 
 who had risen from the ranks under the First Empire. 
 The Prince's agents began to appear at the officers' 
 club, and one of the conspirators of Strasburg was 
 seen walking on the fortifications. The genial Par- 
 quin arrived on the scene, and a retired staff officer, 
 who had been converted to Bonapartism by the 
 Prince's prompt condolence upon his retirement, 
 secured an invitation to dine with the commander 
 of the garrison. As the guests on this occasion 
 included the royal Prefet, the circumstances were 
 hardly favourable to an attempt to enlist his host 
 in a Bonapartist conspiracy. But in the course of 
 
116 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 a call which he paid after this entertainment, he 
 conveyed to the General a somewhat crude offer 
 from the Prince of 400,000 francs if the attempt 
 succeeded. The simple soldier steered a cautious 
 course by declining to join the conspiracy but 
 omitting to arrest the Prince's agent. But his 
 refusal to co-operate determined the conspirators 
 to transfer their activities from Lille, and in its 
 final phase the conspiracy centred on Boulogne. 
 
 The selection of a seaport presented obvious 
 advantages to an expedition which was bound to 
 start from England. The garrison was small, and 
 great hopes were built on the sympathy of a sub- 
 altern named Aladenize, part of whose regiment 
 was stationed at Boulogne. The plan was simple : 
 the Prince was to appear in the town with a strong 
 party in the uniform of the infantry battalion which 
 was stationed at Calais, and it was hoped that the 
 Napoleonic appeal, heightened by this illusion of 
 initial success, would secure the 42nd of the Line 
 and the port of Boulogne. During the summer 
 mysterious bales of second-hand French uniforms 
 arrived at Carlton Gardens, and button-makers in 
 St. Martin's Lane were bewildered by orders for 
 military buttons of outlandish foreign patterns. 
 Muskets were ordered from Birmingham, and 
 Dr. Conneau, who had attached himself to the 
 Prince after attending his mother, divided his time 
 between sewing buttons on the uniforms and printing 
 Imperial proclamations on a hand-press in a locked 
 room. The Prince's style had crystallised slightly 
 since the manifestoes of Strasburg, and his staccato 
 appeals to the army and the people of Boulogne and 
 France had the authentic Napoleonic ring : 
 
THE PRINCE 117 
 
 ' Soldats ! 
 
 La France estfaite pour commander et elle obeit. Voiis 
 etes I' elite du peuple et on vovs traite comme un vil troupeau. 
 Vous avez recherche ce qu'etaient devenues les aigles 
 d'Arcole, d' Austerlitz, d'lena. Ces aigles, les voild ! 
 Je vous les rapporte.' 
 
 The customary references to ' la grande ombre de 
 Vempereur Napoleon ' and ' le martyr de Sainte- 
 Helene ' were salted with Hvely denunciations of 
 the competing dynasty, whose reign was dismissed 
 as ' dix ans de mensonge, d' usurpation et d' ignominie,'' 
 whilst its pretended respect for the memory of the 
 Emperor was stigmatised as ' hypocrites et impures 
 hommages.'' Promotion was promised to all classes, 
 and Europe was reassured as to the Prince's peaceful 
 intentions. There was also a curt decree in the 
 name of the French people declaring, in the true 
 Imperial style : ' La dynastie des Bourbons d' Orleans 
 a cesse de regner.' M. Thiers, who had not been 
 consulted, was graciously appointed President of a 
 Provisional Government, and the Prince, who ab- 
 stained from proclaiming himseK Emperor before a 
 decision of the people had been obtained, promised'to 
 summon a National Assembly on his arrival in Paris. 
 This happy transformation was to be effected by 
 Prince Louis and fifty-five other persons, mostly 
 armed with muskets. The party was oddly re- 
 cruited for the adventure, and the Prince was 
 supported in his endeavour to impersonate the 40th 
 of the Line by a company consisting largely of men- 
 servants. It was the need for numbers rather than 
 an affectation of royalty that led him to take his 
 chef, his |butler,'\his tailor, and his fencing-master 
 to Boulogne, and the rank and file of the.B^pedition 
 
118 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 was recruited almost exclusively from below stairs 
 at Carlton Gardens. General Montholon, who had 
 ridden through the campaign of Waterloo with 
 Napoleon and sat with him through the long after- 
 noons at St. Helena, lent a flavour of the First 
 Empire to the enterprise, and five other veterans 
 took the field again. Of Prince Louis' inner circle, 
 Conneau and Persigny went on active service, and 
 five of the heroes of Strasburg resumed their f amiHar 
 roles. But the remainder of the company, which 
 included some footmen, an Italian banker, and two 
 Poles, was of strangely miscellaneous origin. 
 
 Early in July a foreign gentleman hired a paddle 
 steamer for a month, and the Prince mobilised his 
 forces. Dining at I^ady Blessington's for the last 
 time in the first week of August Prince Louis, 
 who was wearing ' a large spread eagle in diamonds 
 clutching a thunderbolt of rubies,' caused a mild 
 sensation by inviting the company to dine with him 
 that day twelvemonth at the Tuileries, whilst an 
 indifferent stevedore was watching men at the Docks 
 load the Edinburgh Castle with a remarkable cargo 
 consisting principally of fancy di'ess and refresh- 
 ments. In addition to the uniforms and two dozen 
 cases of wine and spirits, two carriages and nine 
 horses were slung on board ; and the Bonapartist 
 Armada was complete. The steamer left London 
 Bridge on an August morning, as M. Guizot was 
 proceeding to France by a more regular route ; and 
 before it left, Colonel Parquin, with an infeHcitous 
 taste in mascots, bought a vulture at a bird-fancier's 
 in the City. The Prince went on board at Gravesend, 
 and as the Edinburgh Castle dropped down the river 
 to the Nore, the remainder of the party was picked 
 
THE PRINCE 119 
 
 up unobtrusively at various points between Black- 
 wall and Ramsgate. The night was spent at sea, 
 and the majority of the company were profoundly 
 mystified as to the object of an excm^sion which 
 rapidly became uncomfortable. There was a vague 
 idea on board that it was to be a pleasure trip to 
 Belgium, until on the next morning the Prince 
 paraded his force on deck and startled them with 
 the information that they were the companions of 
 his destiny, bound for the port of Boulogne in the 
 interests of the Bonaparte succession. Uniforms 
 were served out, and there was an additional issue 
 of one hundred francs to each member of the party. 
 Calumny has added a more convivial scene ; but 
 nervous men are rarely intemperate two days out 
 from land, and the malicious propaganda of the 
 Orleanists has suppressed the presence on board 
 among the stimulants of considerable quantities of 
 ginger-beer and soda-water. There was little en- 
 thusiasm outside the Prince's immediate circle as 
 men stood talking together behind the paddle-boxes 
 of the Edinburgh Castle and the steamer moved 
 slowly towards the quiet coast of France. 
 
 They anchored off Wimereux in the dark hours 
 of the night, and the ship's boat put off to land this 
 singular invasion. It was about three in the morning 
 of August 6, 1840, when Prince Louis Napoleon 
 stood once more on French territory. Somewhere 
 in the darkness there was an argument going on 
 with two douaniers whose professional instincts had 
 been outraged by the nocturnal arrival of fifty 
 persons from a suspicious steamer. It was explained 
 to them that it was a party of the 40th Infantry 
 proceeding down-Channel to Cherbourg and delayed 
 
120 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 by trouble to the paddle of their transpout. They 
 were invited to guide the party into Boulogne ; but 
 a dramatic colonel scared them with a revelation of 
 the Prince's identity, and at the sight of their genuine 
 alarm Louis mildly permitted them to go back to the 
 village. As the sun was rising, the little column 
 marched over the shoulder of the hill to Boulogne. 
 The Prince had come to his own again with a 
 standard-bearer and fifty men. Towards five o'clock 
 they entered the town and tramped through the 
 silent streets in the early light of a summer morning. 
 A sergeant turned out the guard at the sight of this 
 galaxy of officers, but he declined to leave his post 
 and join the party. An officer, who was stirring 
 early, was presented to the Prince ; but failing to 
 appreciate the honour, he sUpped down a quiet street 
 and warned the incorruptible Captain Col-PuygeHer 
 of the 42nd Infantry of the remarkable invasion. 
 Meanwhile the detachment had arrived at the in- 
 fantry barracks. The guard turned out respectfully, 
 and they took possession of the barrack-square. 
 Whilst Prince Louis was promoting non-commissioned 
 officers in Napoleonic attitudes, a crowd of early 
 loiterers began to gather at the barrack-gates ; an 
 officer invited them to shout ' Vive rEmpereur/^ 
 and under the stimulus of a distribution of silver 
 the seditious cry was raised. Lieutenant Aladenize, 
 who was an officer of the battahon, paraded the 
 42nd, and the Prince addressed them at some length. 
 He then proceeded to the agreeable business of 
 promoting and decorating such non-commissioned 
 officers as had not yet been presented to him. But 
 at this stage the officers of the battalion began to 
 arrive in barracks, and the truculent Captain Col- 
 
THE PRINCE 12] 
 
 Puygelier forced his way past the sentries into the 
 square. He rallied his men and commenced a 
 violent altercation with the Bonapartists. Someone 
 began to shout ' Vive le Roi ! ' and there was a 
 confused scene in which Persigny was narrowly 
 prevented from killing the royalist captain and a 
 pistol went off in the Prince's hand. The attempt 
 to win over the infantry had failed, and his party 
 marched out of barracks as the drums of the 42nd 
 began to alarm the town. 
 
 The Bonapartists moved off in the direction of 
 the upper town, where there was a small arsenal. 
 It was about six o'clock, and a few people were 
 beginning to move about the streets. They were 
 offered money and manifestoes by this eccentric 
 detachment of infantry, and enjoyed the unusual 
 spectacle of the Sous-prefet summoning the invaders 
 to disperse and being struck full in the chest with 
 the brass eagle of a regimental standard. After 
 this achievement the company reached the upper 
 town and endeavoured to force the Porte de Calais. 
 But the gate resisted their axes ; and the expedition, 
 having failed at two objectives, became a retreat. 
 Some of the older men broke away towards the 
 harbour, but the Prince led the survivors out into 
 the open country at the back of the town. With 
 a sudden reminiscence of the exigencies of drama 
 he had resolved to make a last stand under the 
 Colonne de la Grande Armee and to fall fighting on 
 a windy ridge at the foot of his uncle's monument. 
 The gesture, which was in the taste of M. Victor 
 Hugo, was an effective one ; but it was not ap- 
 preciated by his friends. Some mounted police and 
 the National Guards of Boulogne were coming up 
 
122 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the hill, and the Bonapartists scattered in all direc- 
 tions. A small party forced the Prince to leave his 
 flag fluttering at the top of the column and join them 
 in a dash for the seashore. A breathless run brought 
 them down to Wimereux ; but their pursuers were 
 close behind, and the majority surrendered on the 
 beach. The ringleaders were less cautious, and the 
 Prince plunged into the sea with Conneau, Persigny, 
 and a few others in a desperate attempt to reach a 
 small boat. The exhausted men tried wildly to 
 cHmb into it under a heavy fire from the shore. 
 Two men were lost, the boat sank, and the Prince 
 was hit. Two boats put off towards them, and by 
 a supreme humiliation the survivors were rescued 
 rather than arrested. 
 
 It was about eight o'clock when Prince Louis was 
 driven up, shivering in a borrowed coat, to the 
 Chateau in the upper town and went straight to 
 bed. He had spent five hours as a free man in 
 France. The Sous-prefet, whose contusions were 
 amply avenged, reported proudly to Paris that 
 ' Louis Bonaparte is under arrest ' and proceeded 
 to an inventory of the eccentric cargo of the Edin- 
 burgh Castle, which had been brought into harbour. 
 It included vehicles for the Prince's triumphant 
 progress and a sumptuous provision of clothes for 
 his appearance at an evening celebration. Colonel 
 Parquin's vulture, which had remained disconsol- 
 ately on board during the expedition, was consigned 
 to the town slaughter-house ; but being a bird of 
 spirit, it escaped and ended its days in a more 
 honourable captivity with a coal-merchant at Arras, 
 after providing the humourists of a continent with 
 a succession of jokes of which they never wearied 
 
THE PRINCE 123 
 
 on the subject of the new Emperor and his eagle. 
 The authorities at Boulogne prolonged the excite- 
 ment by restricting the use of post-horses, and 
 Lord Hertford and Mr. Croker were delayed for 
 as long as two hours on their way from Calais to 
 Paris by this impudent intrusion of French poUtics. 
 But the town subsided gradually into its provincial 
 repose, and the attempt on Boulogne was at an 
 end. 
 
 On the next day King Louis Philippe enjoyed 
 the story in his family circle at Eu with a humorous 
 appreciation which did not prevent him from taking 
 prompt decisions as to the disposal of the prisoner ; 
 and on an August morning about fifty hours after 
 his first landing on the coast of France the Prince 
 drove out of Boulogne by the Paris road. He went 
 in a closed carriage, wearing under a greatcoat the 
 dismal relics of his military adventure, and the 
 pohce on the seat facing him had orders from Paris 
 to shoot their prisoner if an escape was attempted. 
 Sentries were posted along the road, and as the 
 berline rumbled through the Boulonnais he could 
 see out of the windows the First Empire silhouettes 
 of his Lancer escort and the great Dragoon helmets 
 of the Gardes Municipaux. On the road he spent 
 a night at the unpleasant Chateau of Ham, and on 
 August 12 he came into Paris. The Emperor had 
 arrived in his capital ; but they brought him in at 
 midnight, and he drove through the empty streets, 
 over the dark river to the Conciergerie. Whilst the 
 preparations for a state trial went slowly forward 
 and a valet in Carlton Gardens was packing for 
 Paris some bed-linen marked with N and a crown, 
 the old King made a solemn progress to Boulogne 
 
124 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 and the fountain of honour played gently upon his 
 ' dear comrades of the National Guard, the 42nd 
 Infantry and the Douanes.' Louis Philippe struck 
 triumphant attitudes in the north ; the valet in 
 London kept for himself the Prince's ' old pink 
 hunting coat, the leather breeches, the white breeches, 
 the top-boots, the big green coat with trousers to 
 match, the shooting-boots, the big brown coat, and 
 the hats ' ; and for six weeks the pretender sat in 
 a cell in Paris translating Schiller. A letter of 
 condolence came from the elegant D'Orsay, and one 
 day Madame Recamier called to see him. The 
 prison was full of sentries (the Prince informed his 
 counsel that he proposed, when he came to the throne, 
 to make certain modifications in the uniform), and 
 some offence was caused by the Government's choice 
 of a cell for him. It had recently been in the occupa- 
 tion of the man Fieschi who had endeavoured without 
 success to assassinate the King (and to anticipate 
 the Gatling gun) with an elaborate compHcation of 
 gun-barrels. Political prisoners are notoriously par- 
 ticular as to their prison comforts and dignities, and 
 it was felt that the association was vaguely insulting 
 to the Prince. It was even resented by his father ; 
 and the strange old gentleman, who was still Hving 
 in Italy and maintained intermittent communica- 
 tions with his son through the medium of a rather 
 peevish correspondence, sent to the French news- 
 papers an emotional statement of his own patriotism 
 and infirmities and a somewhat futile defence of 
 Prince Louis as the victim of false friends and even, 
 conceivably, of Orleanist agents provocateurs. The 
 Prince was disinchned to elude his responsibUity in 
 this manner and replied with some eloquence ; 
 
THE PRINCE 125 
 
 ' Fier de la mission que je me suis imposie, je me 
 montrerai toujours digne du nom que je porte et digne de 
 voire affection.' 
 
 As the weeks went on, counsel were instructed 
 for the defence, and the Prince retained for himself 
 and his friends a galaxy of political advocates. 
 They were recruited from every group of the Opposi- 
 tion, and the court was provided with the engaging 
 spectacle of the Legitimist Maitre Berryer and the 
 republican Maitre Jules Favre expressing their re- 
 spective attachments to Charles x. and the Con- 
 vention by defending the Bonapartist prisoners. 
 
 The trial opened in the last week of September 
 before the Peers of France. It was an odd tribunal 
 for the indictment of a Bonaparte, since the roll-call 
 of the fuU court was a Napoleonic litany. Davout, 
 Marmont, Lannes, D'Erlon, Suchet, Grouchy, Lauris- 
 ton, Sebastiani were strange names for Orleanist 
 judges ; and with a certain dehcacy they abstained 
 from sitting. But by a crude irony MoHtor, Daru, 
 Dejean, Claparede, Excelmans, and Pajol sat under 
 the presidency of Chancellor Pasquier, an ex-Prefect 
 of Imperial PoUce, to try the Emperor's nephew for 
 treason. The prisoners were all neatly dressed with 
 white gloves, and the Prince wore on his coat the 
 great plaque of the Legion of Honour. He sat in 
 the dock behind Berryer and next to old General 
 Montholon, and after hearing the indictment read, 
 he rose to make a f uU statement of his political ideals. 
 The opening was effective : 
 
 ' Pour la premiere fois de ma vie il m'est enfin permis 
 d'elever la voix en France et de purler librement a des 
 FranQais. Malgre les gardes qui m'entourent, malgre 
 
126 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 les acctisations queje viens d' entendre, pkin des souvenirs 
 de ma premiere enfance, en me trouvant dans ces murs du 
 Senat, au milieu de vous que je connais, messieurs, je ne 
 peux pas croire que j'aie id besoin de me justifier, ni 
 que vous puissiez etre mes jv^es.' 
 
 The young man was ceasing to be ridiculous. He 
 expounded his principles and claimed that the Bona- 
 parte succession represented a decision of the French 
 people. Of the attempt on Boulogne he spoke with 
 jeal courage : ' Je n'tti point eu de complices. Seul 
 a. fai tout resolu, personne n'a connud^ Vavance ni mes 
 projets, ni mes ressources, ni mes esperances. 8i je 
 suis coupahle envers quelqiCun, c'est envers m,es amis 
 seuls.^ The attitude was effectively struck. Then, 
 with a drop to the staccato eloquence of M. Victor 
 Hugo, the Prince settled into his peroration : 
 
 ' Un dernier mot, messieurs. Je represente devant vous 
 un principe, une cause, une defaite : le principe, c'est 
 la souverainete du peuple ; la cause, celle de l' Empire ; 
 la defaite, Waterloo. Le principe, vous I'avez reconnu ; 
 la cause, vous I'avez servie ; la defaite, vous voulez la 
 venger.' 
 
 The Prince's speech almost reversed the effect of 
 his failure at Boulogne. The grotesque masquerade, 
 the eagle, the capture in the water had seemed to 
 make of the pretender a figure of opera houffe. But 
 by his statement from the dock he raised himself 
 once more into serious politics, and none of the 
 efforts of the prosecution could recreate the con- 
 genial atmosphere of farce. The trial dragged on 
 for four days ; Berryer was cruelly ironical to the 
 solemn rows of Counts, Barons, and Marshals of the 
 Empire who sat to condemn Bonapartism ; and 
 
THE PRINCE 127 
 
 Persigny was characteristically suppressed half-way 
 through a voluble exposition of the Bonapartist idea 
 and pubHshed his undelivered peroration in a news- 
 paper. But the conviction of the prisoners was 
 never in doubt, and the court was only concerned 
 to consider its sentence. Prince Louis Napoleon 
 was sent to imprisonment for life in a French fortress, 
 and the conspirators received sentences varying from 
 two to twenty years. All except four were confined 
 at Doullens, where Parquin died in prison. But the 
 Prince, Conneau, and Montholon were reserved for 
 the dismal Chateau of Ham, and the bright adventure 
 of Boulogne seemed to end in the trailing mists of 
 the Somme. 
 
128 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XI 
 
 Prison life, to judge from the criminal classes, is an 
 odd school of character, and it is rarely included in 
 the normal curriculum of princes. Ex-convicts have 
 a strange habit of silence, and Louis Napoleon owed 
 much of his manner and something of his character 
 to the six silent years which he spent in the citadel 
 of Ham. When a young man goes into a cell at 
 thirty-two and remains in prison until he is thirty- 
 eight, the experience will inevitably deflect or deepen 
 the normal lines of his development. Louis in 1840 
 was a silent man, and prison only deepened his silence. 
 His mother's visitors in Switzerland had always 
 thought him quiet. Madame Recamier found him 
 ' poll, distingue, taciturne,^ and Chateaubriand saw 
 ' un jeune homme studieux, instruit, plein d^honneur 
 et naturellement grave.'' The Uttle world of New 
 York in 1837 had remarked his silence, and the 
 defect of taciturnity, which Continental observers 
 regretted, was highly appreciated in London society 
 as a genteel reserve. Six years in a feudal fortress 
 varied with a little writing, an afternoon walk on 
 the ramparts, and an evening game of whist with 
 two friends and the governor of the prison drove 
 him still further within himself, and the queer, 
 silent potentate who was to mystify Europe from 
 behind the dull eyes of the sphinx of the Tuileries 
 owed much of his impenetrable manner to his six 
 years as a political prisoner at Ham. 
 
THE PRINCE 129 
 
 The prison was a massive fragment of the Middle 
 Ages, less interesting to its occupants than to 
 amateurs of military architecture, since the view- 
 commanded by its admirable bartizans consisted 
 almost completely of mist. The situation was un- 
 comfortably damp, and the Prince's two rooms were 
 inadequately furnished in the style of the lodging- 
 house rather than the cell. There were a few planks 
 fixed along the sitting-room wall to serve as book- 
 shelves, and the innumerable draughts contended 
 with a large screen of which the prisoner mitigated 
 the ugliness by cutting out and pasting on some of 
 the less sympathetic of the Charivari's caricatures 
 of the reigning dynasty. His life within these 
 narrow Hmits was of a distressing regularity. In 
 the morning he worked in his room ; after lunch 
 there was a Uttle dismal exercise on the ramparts 
 in view of a few trees and a depressing reach of the 
 St. Quentin canal with a detective in attendance 
 who never let the Prince's red M'pi out of sight, or 
 a pitiable attempt at horticulture in a little garden 
 planted with mignonette, and at one time (until the 
 expense became too great) he rode gloomily round 
 the courtyard while the guards were doubled on 
 the castle walls and the governor of the prison 
 officiated as ring-master ; then he worked until 
 dinner and passed the evening with Conneau, 
 Montholon, and a pack of cards. In that quiet, 
 grey school, as the sentries tramped up and down 
 in the mist and the barges slid by on the St. Quentin 
 canal, Louis Napoleon learned the gift of silence. 
 
 His mental life was inevitably more active, and 
 in the six years which he passed by the light of his 
 reading-lamp the Prince received an education 
 
130 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 unusual to royalty. He filled his book-shelves and 
 wrote steadily behind the white curtains of his 
 room. The ministers of Louis Philippe, with financial 
 caution more worthy of a landlady than a govern- 
 ment, had allowed the extravagant sum of 600 francs 
 for the preparation of his apartments ; but since 
 the loan of books is comparatively inexpensive in 
 cases where the borrower is in prison, they permitted 
 him to draw freely on the national libraries, and he 
 read with the persistence of an invalid. Indeed, 
 it became his boast in later years that he had 
 ' graduated at the University of Ham,' and the 
 degree of that non-existent faculty was more labor- 
 iously earned than the more impressive academic 
 distinctions with which royal persons are frequently 
 decorated. His reading was rapidly transferred into 
 a full correspondence and a queer series of mis- 
 cellaneous writings. He reached his prison on 
 October 7, 1840 (it was the day on which a French 
 cruiser four thousand miles away was anchoring 
 respectfully off St. Helena to bring his uncle's body 
 to France), and before the year was out he had 
 plunged into ' trente-six mille choses d la fois.' The 
 return of the dead Emperor to his capital inspired 
 the Prince to an eloquent exercise on the contrast 
 between the uncle at the Invalides and the nephew 
 in prison, and in a desperate hunt for employment 
 he converted a corridor into a miniature shooting- 
 range. Like so many solitaries, he turned to in- 
 vention, and early in 1841 he was on the track of a 
 minor improvement in French musketry which he 
 proposed to submit to the War Office. With a 
 touch of his mother's virtuosity he copied a picture 
 of his prison for Lady Blessington, and then as an 
 
THE PRINCE 131 
 
 escape from the present he plunged into EngHsh 
 history. French poHticians have always been care- 
 ful students of British revolutions, although they 
 appear to have learnt little from them beyond the 
 names of the characters. The contemporaries of 
 Napoleon talked fluently about Cromwell and Monck, 
 and now Guizot had brought into fashion a parallel 
 between the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the 
 July Revolution of 1830. The Prince was disinclined 
 to admit the accuracy of his comparison of Louis 
 Philippe to the heaven-sent William iii. and plunged 
 into the authorities for a refutation. Hume, Smol- 
 lett, and the French historians were sent to Ham, 
 and in the spring he published the Fragments 
 Historiques, 1688 et 1830. The pamphlet was a 
 skilful succession of variations on a theme of Guizot, 
 demonstrating that the true analogy to William of 
 Orange was rather to be found in a young man who 
 should invade a country at the head of a small force 
 proclaiming as his intentions : ' Je renverserai un 
 gouvernement, en gardant intact le prestige d'autorite ; 
 fetablirai la liberie sans desordre, et le pouvoir sans 
 violence. Pour justifier man initiative et man inter- 
 vention personelle dans une lutte si grave, je ferai valoir 
 pour les uns mon droit Mreditaire, pour les autres mes 
 principes, pour tous les inter ets communs. . . .' The 
 approximation of Boulogne to Torbay was complete, 
 and the pitiless pursuit of his parallel even led the 
 Prince to indicate vaguely an analogy between the 
 Seven Bishops and the acquitted conspirators of 
 Strasburg which was highly complimentary to 
 Colonel Vaudrey and his operatic brunette. The 
 tables were ingeniously turned on Louis Philippe, 
 and it was demonstrated with a wealth of quotations 
 
132 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 from Guizot that the real prototype of the King of 
 the Erench was to be found in the ' political atheism ' 
 of Charles ii., in the Restoration cynicism which sub- 
 stituted material advancement for national honour 
 and glory and destroyed faith by cunning. The 
 comparison was starthng to French readers famiHar 
 with the private life of their elderly King, but there 
 was an effective ring in the peroration : 
 
 ' Elle est triste, I'histoire d'un regne qui ne se signale 
 ^1 'pai'que des proces politiques et des traites honteux, et qui 
 ne laisse apres lui au peuple qu'un germe de revolution, 
 et aux rois qu'un exemple deshonorant .' 
 
 The moral was sharply pointed, even if it had been 
 necessary slightty to adorn the tale. The argument 
 was occasionally lit up by a flash of Napoleonic 
 eloquence (' Varmee est une epee qui a la gloire pour 
 poignee '), and there were passages which show a 
 queer prevision of the coup d'etat : 
 
 ' Un gouvernement peut souvent violer impunement la 
 liberte. . .' 
 
 ' En general, les revolutions conduites et ezecutees par 
 un chef tournent entierement au profit des masses ; car, 
 pour reu^sir, le chef est oblige d'abonder entierement dans 
 le sens national, et, pour se maintenir, il doit r ester fidele 
 aux interets qui Vont fait triompher.' 
 
 The epilogue was still more characteristic of the 
 coming reign : 
 
 ' Marchez a la tete des idees de votre siecle, ces idles 
 voViS suivent et vous soutiennent. Marchez a leur suite 
 elles vous entrainent. Marchez contre elles, elks vous 
 renversent.' 
 
 So the Prince sat writing in his little room through 
 
THE PRINCE 133 
 
 the spring of 1841, with a line of Guizot written large 
 on the wall : ' Pour les peuples comme pour les in- 
 dividus, la souffrance n^est pas toujour s perdue."" The 
 damp of the place was gaining cruelly on his health ; 
 but he was permitted to see a few visitors, and one 
 of them remembered for years the look which he 
 caught on the Prince's face as he turned to go and 
 the lonely man stood staring after him. In the 
 summer he set out in pursuit of a sound historical 
 parallel and began to collect material for a book on 
 Charlemagne, in which that misunderstood German 
 primitive would doubtless have received a strongly 
 Napoleonic flavour. He even ehcited a bibliography 
 of the subject from Sismondi. But as the year wore 
 on, history was neglected in favour of the more 
 active delights of chemistry. An empty room was 
 converted into a laboratory, and a local chemist 
 was permitted to assist his experiments. Faithful 
 Bonapartist correspondents were alarmed with 
 strange problems about the density of gases, and 
 the Prince's electrical work even received the mild 
 commendation of a learned society. Then he re- 
 turned to more familiar ground and began to revise 
 his Manuel d'Artillerie for republication. But his 
 attention was caught by a new subject, and in the 
 summer of 1842 he startled his supporters by pub- 
 lishing a substantial work under the forbidding 
 title of Analyse de la Question des Sucres. Beet 
 sugar is an odd topic for a pretender, and Prince 
 Louis treated it with a wealth of estabhshed and 
 agricultural technicahty. It created some interest 
 in the sugar trade, went into a second edition, and 
 stands in the Protectionist severity of its doctrine 
 as an ironical contradiction of the Free Trade policy 
 
134 THE* SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 pursued by its author when his ministers negotiated 
 with Mr. Cobden the treaty of 1860. 
 
 But the Prince's attention was not fixed exclusively 
 on carbonic acid gas and sugar islands. He studied 
 through the newspapers the slow drift of French 
 opinion, and in a letter of rare self-revelation he 
 showed that hope had not died in him : 
 
 ' En 1833 VEmpereur et son fils etaient snorts ; il n'y 
 avail plits d'heritiers de la caiise imperiale. La France 
 n'en connaissait plus aucun. Quelques Bonaparte 
 paraissaient, il est vrai, pa et la sur V arriere-scene du 
 monde comme des corps sans vie, momies petrifiees de 
 fantomes imponderables ; mais pour le peuple la lignee 
 etait rompue ; tous les Bonaparte etaient morts. Eh bien, 
 fai rattache le fil ; je me suis ressuscite de moi-meme et 
 avec mes propres forces, et je suis aujourd'hui a vingt 
 heures de Paris une epee de Damocles pour le gouverne- 
 ment. Enfin, fai fait mon canot avec de veritables ecorces 
 d'arbres, fai construit mes voiles, fai eleve ma rame et 
 je ne demande plus aux dieux qu'un vent qui me conduit.' 
 
 There was always ' ati fond du cceur le seul soutien, 
 le seul guide certain dans des positions exceptionnelles, 
 lafoi dans ma mission.' It was a queer doctrine : 
 
 Je crois qu'il y a certains hommes qui naissent pour 
 servir de moyen a la marche du genre hum,ain, comm,e ces 
 animaux qui naissent, soit pour detruire d'autres animaux 
 plus nuisibles qu'eux, soit pour servir de germes, quand 
 ils sont morts, a d'autres etres pins perfectionnes . Je 
 me considere comme un de ces animaux, et j' attends avec 
 resignation mais avec confiance le moment, ou de vivre de 
 ma vie providentielle, ou de mourir de ma mart fatale, 
 persuade que, des deux manieres,je serai utile a, la France 
 ^ I d'abord, de rhicmanite ensuite.' 
 
 In this temper he became an active contributor 
 
THE PRINCE 135 
 
 of anonymous articles to the provincial press. They 
 
 covered almost the entire field of political and 
 
 economic organisation with a system of lucid and 
 
 dogmatic views from many of which their author 
 
 had the courage to dissent when he had reached a 
 
 position to enforce them. When he approached the 
 
 military problem, the irony deepened, and he became 
 
 the advocate in 1843 of the system of recruitment 
 
 with which Prussia broke his Empire in 1870. 
 
 Meanwhile he corresponded promiscuously with 
 
 Bonapartists and democrats and entertained his 
 
 leisure with the preparation of an elaborate history 
 
 of artillery. His principal assistant was an early 
 
 friend whom he had known at Malmaison ; she had 
 
 already conducted painful researches for him into 
 
 the sugar problem, and she was now sent round the 
 
 booksellers and libraries in pursuit of information 
 
 about early bombards and Renaissance ballistics 
 
 and the effect of gun-fire in Algeria. 
 
 The Prince sat by his reading-lamp at Ham, 
 surrounded with notes on gunnery and sketches of 
 limbers. Sometimes he seemed almost to lose hope 
 and wrote : ' La 'prison est une mort anticipee. On 
 ne nt'ecrit plus, on m'ouhlie. . . .' And sometimes 
 he trailed off into introspection and religious re- 
 flections. But he kept a brave face before his 
 callers ; Chateaubriand and Louis Blanc and his 
 friends from London (and even on one delightful 
 occasion the frivolous but accomplished Mile. 
 Dejazet) saw a pale man with a slight foreign 
 accent who received them in a dismal little room 
 and talked eagerly through the few rationed hours 
 of their visit. His interest in the outer world was 
 undiminished by his excursions into the early history 
 
136 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 of gunpowder, and in the spring of 1844 he entered 
 the field of popular economics with a pamphlet on 
 the problem of poverty. The Extinction du Paupe- 
 risme was not a subtle or a profound work ; with 
 engaging simplicity it advocated the abolition of 
 unemployment by means of the transfer of surplus 
 labour to agricultural colonies formed for the develop- 
 ment of the waste lands of France. The workers 
 were to be brigaded in a semi-mihtary organisation, 
 and the project blandly ignored the pardonable dis- 
 taste of the poor for regimentation and the limited 
 qualifications for agriculture possessed by an un- 
 employed textile operative. But it was well received 
 in those advanced circles which were to succumb 
 four years later to the similar fascinations of the 
 Ateliers Nationaux, and the Prince received polite 
 letters from such oddly assorted democrats as 
 Beranger and George Sand, while large numbers of 
 French working men were favourably impressed by 
 this evidence of the pretender's gracious interest in 
 their condition. A few months later King Joseph 
 died after his long exile, and Prince Louis published 
 a polite memoir of his uncle. The ex-King of Spain ' 
 and Naples was not an impressive figure, but the 
 occasion seemed to merit a mufiied roll of Bonapartist 
 drums. His biographer even asserted that Joseph 
 had been so imperfectly acquainted with his brother, 
 the Emperor, as to identify his views with the Idees 
 Napoleoniennes. 
 
 But gradually, as the fifth year of his imprisonment 
 wore on, the writing-table in the mist at Ham became 
 intolerable to the Prince. Visitors were a faint echo 
 of the world, and the young lady from the local 
 laundry, whom her friends (and students of historical 
 
THE PRINCE 137 
 
 scandal) knew more picturesquely as 'Alexandrine la 
 BeUe Sabotiere,' was a very pale reflection of the 
 gaiety of princes. But the echo and the reflection 
 seemed to trouble the lonely man. He began to 
 trifle with one of those vast designs which fascinate 
 men in small rooms, and discussed with a Central 
 American diplomat the possibility of an inter-oceanic 
 canal. Nicaragua, with a laudable instinct for names 
 which look well on a prospectus, made a flattering 
 offer to the Prince ; and he seemed to contemplate 
 leaving Europe to assume the governorship of the 
 canal zone of the Canale Napoleone de Nicaragua. 
 That coy repubHc jilted a Belgian syndicate in favour 
 of Prince Louis ; deferential gentlemen came to Ham 
 from the Nicaraguan Legation to convey the wishes 
 of their government ; the Prince made sketch-maps 
 and composed an eloquent pamphlet in which he 
 demolished the claims of Panama and Chagres in 
 comparison with the maritime glories of Realejo and 
 San Juan ; and the whole strange episode left him 
 with a vague attraction towards Central America 
 which was to make the tragedy of Mexico. Slowly the 
 fascination of the outer world began to gain on him, 
 and it steadily became less possible to make a life 
 out of pamphleteering at long range and archaeology 
 at second hand. An English friend was asked to 
 make a move for his release ; but it produced no 
 result. Then, towards the end of 1845, his father 
 asked that he might see his son once more and for 
 the last time. The strange old man, who was still 
 living in Italy, had reached that advanced age which 
 is rarely attainable except by chronic invahds. 
 Since the day in 1810 when he abandoned his family 
 and the throne of Holland King Louis had played 
 
138 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 little part in his son's life except as an irritable 
 correspondent and the exacting host of dutiful visits. 
 The Prince's efforts at filial virtue had been con- 
 sistently discouraged, and when he was an active 
 pretender to the throne of France, he received from 
 his father an almost illegible letter in which patient 
 research has deciphered an angry request that he 
 should write more distinctly. But although Louis 
 regarded his father without enthusiasm, the old 
 man's request to see his son was turned to excellent 
 account. The Prince approached the Government 
 in the attitude of a grieving son. Filial virtue 
 makes an irresistible appeal to French opinion, and 
 when the young man undertook to return to prison 
 from his father's death-bed, it was difficult to see 
 how Louis Philippe could refuse. An agitation was 
 started in Prince Louis' favour among the deputies 
 of the Opposition, and the rotund eloquence of 
 M. Odilon Barrot was enlisted in his support. But 
 the Government insisted that its prisoner should 
 take the tone of a suppliant ; and having struck his 
 attitude, he refused to humihate himself. The 
 negotiation failed, and the Prince remained at Ham. 
 It was the year 1846, and Louis Napoleon was stUl 
 a prisoner. His mood was becoming a little des- 
 perate, and he wrote : ' Je ne sortirai plus de Ham 
 que pour aller aux Tuileries ou au cimetiere.^ The 
 Government had made an escape morally possible 
 for him by its refusal of leave of absence to visit a 
 dying father and its recent release of the other 
 prisoners of Boulogne. With his friends at liberty 
 (except Parquin, who had died at DouUens) the 
 Prince might honourably dream of prison-breaking, 
 and in the dark evenings of the first months of 1846 
 
THE PRINCE 139 
 
 he found a more immediate topic than the artillery 
 of the past or the canals of the future. A little 
 money was raised for the purpose by the opera boujfe 
 expedient of a treaty with another claimant to a 
 throne, and the escape of an imprisoned Emperor 
 of the French was financed by an exiled Duke of 
 Brunswick. His plan was told to Conneau in May ; 
 the doctor's sentence had expired, but he stayed in 
 the Prince's service at his own request and he opposed 
 the desperate project of an escape. The Prince in- 
 sisted, and that month he borrowed a British passport 
 from one of his visitors. His servant bought a suit 
 of workman's clothes in the town, and in the last 
 week of May the plan was ready. The Prince's 
 building was under repair, and he proposed to walk 
 out of his room among the workmen and, in the 
 character of one of them, to pass the gate into the 
 open country. At six on a Monday morning (it 
 was May 25, 1846) the Bonaparte pretender put on 
 a blue blouse and stood up as a builder's labourer. 
 He was a pale man, but his face was rouged. Soon 
 after seven he shaved off his moustache, and a few 
 minutes later he stepped out into the passage carry- 
 ing a plank which had been one of his book-shelves. 
 He took a knife with him, since he had formed a 
 cold resolve never to be recaptured. In the passage 
 a workman spoke to him, and at the door he passed 
 two gaolers. With a pipe in his mouth and a plank 
 on his shoulder the Prince walked across the court- 
 yard under the eyes of the guard on duty at the gate. 
 Half-way across his pipe dropped and broke, and 
 with an effort of control he stooped to collect the 
 fragments. At the gate the sergeant of the guard 
 was reading a letter. The Prince's servant and a 
 
140 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 little dog had gone down the road in front of him, 
 and with a plank held between his face and the sentry 
 he walked slowly out of the citadel of Ham. On the 
 road beyond he met two workmen, and just outside 
 the town he threw away his plank and sat down to 
 wait. There was a cross in a graveyard by the 
 roadside, and the Prince knelt suddenly and gave 
 thanks for his escape. His man came up the road 
 with a cab, and they drove to the outskirts of 
 St. Quentin. There the valet went into the town 
 to hire a chaise, and Louis Napoleon walked across 
 to the Valenciennes road. The chaise followed, and 
 about two in the afternoon they drove into Valen- 
 ciennes after exasperating their driver with a 
 continual ' Postilion, cent sous de pourboire.'' For 
 two hours they sat wretchedly in the railway station. 
 An official looked at the British passport and someone 
 in the station asked the valet after his master the 
 Prince. Then, about four o'clock, a train steamed 
 out of Valenciennes and passed the Belgian frontier. 
 Whilst Conneau at the prison was delaying the alarm 
 with an elaborate comedy of medicine and a dummy 
 in the Prince's bed, Louis Napoleon was a free man 
 in Belgium on the road to England with the memory 
 of his years in prison and an odd reflective habit 
 which he took with him from Ham to the Tuileries. 
 
THE PRINCE 141 
 
 XII 
 
 The Prince resumed his life in London on a May 
 morning in 1846, and for two years he re-entered 
 English society. He put up at a hotel in Jermyn 
 Street, and on his first walk up Bond Street he met 
 Lord Malmesbury, That evening he dined with 
 Lady Blessington at Gore House, and the elegant 
 D'Orsay was offended by the spectacle of a half- 
 shaved Prince who was regrowing his moustache 
 and imperial after a brief appearance as a smooth- 
 faced artisan. He was even to be seen at a breakfast 
 of Mr. Monckton Milnes' with D'Orsay, Disraeli, and 
 Suleiman Pasha, who had been at Nisib and refought 
 the battle with spoons and tumblers on the table- 
 cloth ; Mr. Cobden, who was of the party and feeling 
 a trifle anxious about Sir Robert and the Corn Bill, 
 found the Prince ' evidently a weak fellow, but mild 
 and amiable.' The world was kind to him on his 
 arrival in town, and he hastily assured the govern- 
 ments of Great Britain and France that his intentions 
 were purely peaceful. He made every effort to 
 obtain a passport for the visit to his father at Florence. 
 But France and Austria were hostile, and the Grand- 
 Duke of Tuscany became frankly panic-stricken at 
 the prospect of his arrival. His application was 
 refused, and in July the old man died, as he had 
 chosen to live, alone. Before the news came. Prince 
 Louis spent an evening at the play to hear Rachel ; 
 
142 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 it was his first contact with classical French tragedy, 
 and he made it in a London theatre. 
 
 In the summer he went off to Bath for his health. 
 The formative soliloquies of Ham had done much 
 for Prince Louis' intelligence; but the dripping 
 walls of the citadel and the white mist of the St. 
 Quentin canal had made a rheumatic of him, and 
 when his Etudes sur le Passe et VAvenir de VArtillerie 
 were published in the early autumn of 1846, he was 
 seeking health on the hills above Clifton. Lady 
 Blessington was at the waters, and Mr. Landor left 
 cards on the Prince. Louis Napoleon returned the 
 call, and there was an exchange of courtesies. His 
 French friends were urged to come to England by 
 the packet from Ostend and to pay especial attention 
 to the marine beauties of Ramsgate ; Prince Louis 
 offered to meet them in London and escort them to 
 Bath by the old broad-gauge Great Western Railway. 
 But when the visit took place and the Prince's faith- 
 ful correspondent on matters of artillery and agri- 
 culture arrived in England, she and her husband 
 were met by another Bonaparte. Jerome's ill- 
 natured son Napoleon had joined his cousin Louis 
 at Bath, and there were great walks of the little 
 French party along the English hills. 
 
 Late in the year the Prince was back in London, 
 wearing his buttoned frock-coat and his strapped 
 trousers in the world where Lord Eglinton played 
 whist and Lady Jersey displayed her well-bred 
 impertinence. Although he was living somewhere 
 in St. John's Wood, he was a member of two good 
 clubs and saw something of Bulwer Lytton at 
 Craven Cottage and more of Lady Blessington at 
 Gore House. He even designed artistic stalls for 
 
THE PRINCE 143 
 
 Lady Londonderry and Lady Combermere to facili- 
 tate their charitable sales at the great military bazaar 
 held at the Guards' barracks in Regent's Park in 
 aid of the starving Irish. But the sands were 
 running a little low ; he seemed to be without 
 prospects as a pretender, and the long solitude of 
 Ham had sharpened his appetite for life. The 
 association with the blonde and beautiful Miss 
 Howard was resumed, and the Prince installed her 
 in a house in Berkeley Street. But the advantages 
 of this relation were not one-sided ; the lady had 
 gathered a considerable fortune in the course of a 
 varied career which earned her the successive esteem 
 of a gentleman rider, a major in the Guards, the 
 fastidious D'Orsay, and several members of the 
 aristocracy ; and when she became the Prince's 
 unHcensed consort, she was able to give considerable 
 financial support to his fortunes. Such assistance 
 was not unnecessary at this stage of his career, 
 since he had elected to seek entertainment on the 
 turf. Early in 1847 he established himself expen- 
 sively in King Street Houses, the embryo of King 
 Street, St. James's, and his expenses there and at 
 Crockford's steadily exceeded his income. Financial 
 embarrassment, which may serve to private gentle- 
 men for a social distinction, is vaguely discreditable 
 in a prince ; and Louis' public reputation had 
 suffered a little from the fashionable atmosphere 
 of mortgages and promissory notes in which he 
 passed the year 1847. His expenditure included 
 the maintenance of a considerable pension list ; 
 Napoleonic veterans, Swiss villagers from Arenenberg, 
 Bonapartist sympathisers of every sort felt little 
 diffidence in relying upon Prince Louis' charity ; 
 
144 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 a practice had to be bought for the faithful Conneau 
 when he emerged from imprisonment to medicine ; 
 and although the Prince kept a good balance at 
 Baring's, there must have been moments in 1847 
 when he backed horses with something less than a 
 sportsman's indifference to the result of the race. 
 There was even an attempt to raise money on the 
 great Nicaragua Canal scheme from a financial 
 gentleman who lived in Hyde Park Street. 
 
 It almost seemed, in the last year of his long exile, 
 as though the light of that star with which he had 
 for so long entertained genteel dinner-tables was 
 beginning to burn a little low. He was almost forty, 
 and he had risen no higher in the world than Lady 
 Blessington's drawing-room. The French king was 
 very old ; but he would leave an innumerable family. 
 Louis kept up an intermittent flicker of Bonapartism 
 in a perfunctory correspondence with a French 
 historian about his own record, and a gesture of 
 despairing exile when they brought his father and 
 brother home to their graves in France. But France 
 with its politics began to seem so far away ; and 
 England, where one could at least live like a gentle- 
 man, was near at hand. One might even marry a 
 charming Englishwoman with sloping shoulders. 
 There was a pretty Miss Seymour ; but she preferred 
 a gentleman from the west of England, and the 
 Prince had the infelicity of attending her wedding. 
 Then there was the rich Miss Burdett, whom the 
 world had almost married to the old Duke of Welling- 
 ton and the course of time was to solemnise into 
 the Baroness Burdett-Coutts. But the nearest of 
 Prince Louis' matrimonial ventures was his success- 
 ful offer to Miss Emily Rowles. The young lady 
 
THE PRINCE 146 
 
 received some charming presents from the Prince; 
 but she was shocked by the Uttle house in Berkeley 
 Street, and the affair was broken off. Her parents 
 had a deUghtful house at Chislehurst. It was called 
 Camden Place ; and when strange news came from 
 Paris early in 1848, Louis Napoleon set out to reach 
 it by way of the Tuileries and Sedan. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 
 
THE PRESIDENT 
 
 There was an agreeable spontaneity about the 
 Revolution of 1848 wliich it shares with the best 
 earthquakes. On the morning of February 22 Louis 
 Philippe was King of the French : before sunset on 
 February 24 France was a Republic. The King's 
 ministers were tolerably unpopular. But then 
 M. Guizot rather cultivated his unpopularity ; and 
 besides it was one of the advantages of constitutional 
 government that one's ministers could be unpopular 
 without imperilling the dynasty. There was a 
 faintly nauseous atmosphere of financial scandal. 
 But revelations have always titillated rather than 
 scandalised French opinion, and it was hardly possible 
 to govern a nation with a lively imagination and a 
 peasant tradition of rapacity without giving cause 
 for some deviation from financial probity. The 
 edifice of the middle-class monarchy was not im- 
 pressive ; but it had an air of bow- windowed security 
 which seemed to promise an indefinite future. An 
 incautious minister had just commented on the still- 
 ness of affairs : it was the same calm which deluded 
 Mr. Pitt into promising the House of Commons fifteen 
 years of peace six months before his country went 
 to twenty-three years of war, which led Mr. Ham- 
 mond of the Foreign Office to observe to his Secretary 
 of State that there was not a cloud in the sky as the 
 
 149 
 
150 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 black wrack of 1870 was driving up towards France. 
 But the world seemed very still in France by the 
 grey light of February 1848. There was peace in 
 Europe ; but its blessings are rarely appreciated 
 until after an outbreak of war. French opinion was 
 a little restless. The domestic feHcity of an elderly 
 King was becoming almost exasperating to a genera- 
 tion whose appetite for sensation had been pleasantly 
 stimulated by the more adventurous morality of 
 M. Eugene Sue and his less remembered colleagues 
 of the feuilleton. A more disturbing taste for 
 political heresies had been provoked by the almost 
 simultaneous return of MM. Michelet, Louis Blanc, 
 and Lamartine to the more spacious age of the 
 Revolution of 1789 ; and it was improbable that 
 imaginations which were playing round the great 
 gestures of the Convention or the last drive of the 
 Girondins would derive any lasting satisfaction from 
 the parliamentary ingenuity of M. Guizot. The 
 reigning dynasty was beginning to seem a trifle 
 dull ; its attractions were ceasing to appeal to an 
 increasingly indifferent pubHc, and it was possible 
 for Lamartine to summarise the shrug of a nation's 
 shoulders in his bitter phrase ' la France s' ennuie.' 
 But revolutions are rarely the result of boredom, 
 and France in February 1848 seemed very far from 
 revolution. A number of preposterous persons had 
 distilled from the tedious science of political economy 
 a queer nostrum called socialism, with which they 
 mystified their patient proletarian audiences. But 
 their doctrine seemed at once too good and far too 
 logical to be true, and their strange incitements cast 
 hardly a shadow on the political scene. The centre 
 of the stage was held by a more blameless company. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 151 
 
 A number of rather solemn gentlemen who formed 
 the constitutional Opposition raised the respectable 
 banner of Reform ; their impeccable programme 
 included an extension of the franchise and the ex- 
 clusion of pubUc servants from politics, and they 
 exploited with a rather childish glee the British 
 institution of the political dinner. The Banquets 
 Reformistes were a novelty in French political agita- 
 tion ; provincial caterers were delighted with 
 enormous orders, and long tables were spread in 
 public gardens at which prominent politicians gave 
 sonorous displays of their public virtues. There 
 was a post-prandial alliance of Orleanist radicals 
 and the more respectable republicans, and the deep 
 notes of M. Odilon Barrot mingled with the shriller 
 accents of MM. Garnier-Pages and Ledru-RoUin in 
 condemnation of the existing government. It was 
 regarded officially as a harmless exercise until the 
 reformers proposed to conclude the series with a 
 monster demonstration in Paris. After a little 
 fumbling the function was proclaimed by the Govern- 
 ment. It was to have been held on February 22, 
 On that morning Louis Philippe was still King of 
 the French : two days later France was a Republic. 
 The day of the great meeting (it was a Tuesday) 
 opened in rain over Paris. Soon after nine a crowd 
 began to form outside the Madeleine, and there was 
 a little aimless singing under the grey sky. For 
 lack of any better employment they made a move 
 across the Place de la Concorde and marched over 
 the river to the Chamber of Deputies. The buUding 
 was empty, and a few minutes later the Dragoons 
 trotted out of the barracks on the Quai d'Orsay and 
 cleared the approaches, The old King was watching 
 
152 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 through field-glasses from a window of the Tuileries. 
 He turned from the window to his papers ; and as 
 he scattered some sand to dry a signature, he said 
 to Horace Vernet, ' Quandje voudrai, cela se dispersera 
 comme ceci.^ It seemed so on that first morning of 
 the Revolution. A few windows were broken, and 
 there was a little hooting ; the crowd sat round the 
 fountains in the Place de la Concorde to watch small 
 boys throw stones at the mounted police, and the 
 Deputies began to walk across to the Chamber. 
 In the afternoon the streets were gleaming with 
 rain, and there was infantry massed outside the 
 Palais Bourbon. The Dragoons sat their horses in 
 their long grey cloaks, and somewhere outside a 
 cavalry band was playing trumpet marches in the 
 rain. Inside the Chamber an interminable debate 
 dragged on about the Bank of Bordeaux, and on 
 the great square the poHce were charging the crowd. 
 There was a barricade at a corner of the Rue de 
 Rivoli, and a few shots were fired. That night 
 there was a great blaze in the Champs Elysees, 
 where someone had made a bonfire of aU the park 
 chairs, and in the late hours of Tuesday, February 22, 
 the troops marched back to barracks. Paris seemed 
 quiet, and there was little to show that by Thursday 
 the Orleans monarchy would be a memory. 
 
 The night was very stiU. But on the next morning 
 the town had an air of revolution. The rioters were 
 entrenching themselves in the streets, and the paving- 
 stones of Paris resumed their dismal duty on the 
 barricades. Long columns of cavalry and infantry 
 were marching in from the outlying barracks, and 
 the drums were beating to caU out the National 
 Guard. The mobilisation of the middle class in 
 
THE PRESIDENT 153 
 
 defence of its monarchy seemed an obvious resource ; 
 but by a queer irony it proved fatal. The bourgeoisie 
 of Paris had made the monarchy in 1830, and by a 
 singular inadvertence they unmade it in 1848. 
 Touched a little by the general indifference to the 
 King's difficulties, they inclined to the cause of 
 Reform. But as they mustered at the Mairies on 
 that February morning, it was suggested to them by 
 some queer inspiration of vanity or kindliness that 
 they might play a larger part, and it became the 
 ambition of the National Guard to keep the peace 
 of Paris as mediators between the troops and the 
 crowd. When the harassed military moved against 
 the insurrection, they found that the auxiliary force 
 had interposed itseK in the attitude (if with some- 
 thing less than the grace) of the Sabine women ; 
 and the National Guard, which should have been 
 the last pohce force of the monarchy, melted into 
 a vaguely cheering mass of middle-class politicians. 
 This odd transformation paralysed the troops and 
 startled the King. With the unheroic gesture of a 
 cautious man in a hunted sleigh, he lightened the 
 cargo and dismissed Guizot. The old man in his 
 buttoned coat announced his resignation to the 
 Chamber, and mounted pohce rode round Paris in 
 the failing hght of a winter afternoon with the news 
 that Guizot was out. That day M. Victor Hugo 
 was late at the House of Peers and went down into 
 the town to watch the crowds. The King, without 
 yielding upon the question of Reform, had summoned 
 M. Mole to form a cabinet, and the change of ministry 
 was entirely satisfying to the middle-class deus ex 
 machina of the National Guard. The honest hour- . 
 geois returned home with the proud consciousness 
 
154 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 that they had made history, and in the better y 
 quarters of the town there were Hghts in the windows 
 and cheers for the King. But revolutions are apt 
 to continue after their promoters have been satisfied 
 with the rate of progress, and it was always easier 
 to fill the streets of Paris than to empty them. The 
 shop-keepers might cheer for M. Mole ; but there 
 was a rougher type under arms behind the barricades, 
 for whom there was little to distinguish M. Mole from 
 M. Guizot. A roaring mob paraded the roadways 
 with a vague taste for disorder, and the contented 
 bourgeois took an evening walk to watch them from 
 the pavement. The crowd went smging through 
 the streets by torchlight and yielded cheerfully to 
 a pardonable impulse to break M. Guizot' s windows. 
 But a battalion of infantry barred the way. It was 
 about half-past nine in the evening. The crowd 
 was friendly and cheered the troops. Then, as a 
 rioter in front of the dark mass of the procession 
 flourished his torch in the colonel's face and shouted 
 abuse at him, a sergeant of infantry (he was a Cor- 
 sican) resented the man's insults and shot him dead. 
 The shot broke the strained nerves of the infantry : 
 and at the sound, without an order, they poured an 
 irregular volley into the crowd. The street cleared 
 in a moment ; but there were about fifty men and 
 women on the ground. Somewhere in the to"wn a 
 young man named Flaubert thought that he heard 
 firing. Down in the street the crowd had crept 
 back to the ghastly corner, and as they saw the 
 bodies, there was a great cry. There had been little 
 in the parliamentary niceties of Heform to inflame 
 a passion ; but by that chance shot at a street corner 
 a demonstration was converted into a revolution. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 155 
 
 A great open van drove by, taking some emigrants 
 to the Gare Saint-Lazare. It was stopped and 
 emptied ; and when it drew up in the circle of torch- 
 light, angry men piled the poor bodies onto it. 
 Slowly the van moved off through the dark streets 
 in a glare of torches ; and as it went, the mood of 
 Paris flamed into revenge and insurrection. The 
 queer French aptitude for political funerals was 
 exercised to the utmost, and the last hope of the 
 monarchy went down before that slow, heavy van 
 in the torchlight. When the news came to the 
 Tuileries late at night that M. Mole was scared and 
 would not take office, there was no sleep at the 
 Chateau. 
 
 In the dark hours of Thursday, February 24, the 
 old King made his last throw. Marshal Bugeaud, 
 who was a master of street-fighting, was appointed 
 to the command of the troops, and a general fetched 
 M. Thiers to the Tuileries at two in the morning. 
 He was to form a cabinet before sunrise, and the 
 little man spent a busy night picking his way over 
 the barricades to visit sleepy statesmen. The bells 
 were clashing in the church towers as the dawn 
 broke, and men were forcing the shutters of gun- 
 makers' shops to arm themselves. In the early 
 light the new ministers mustered at the Tuileries. 
 Their master was uneasy, and in the streets outside 
 the rioters were manning the barricades. The troops 
 had been thrust out into Paris in long columns ; but 
 it was hoped that there would be no fighting if they 
 could spread the news that MM. Thiers and Odilon 
 Barrot were in office and the King would grant 
 Reform. M. Barrot even rode through the streets 
 to announce his own appointment ; but somehow 
 
156 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the rare spectacle of a middle-aged politician on 
 horseback failed to rouse enthusiasm. At the 
 Tuileries there was a dismal coming and going of 
 statesmen with good advice and soldiers with bad 
 news. The troops were falling back on the palace 
 and had lost their guns ; a great crowd on the march 
 through the streets had halted in the Place Vendome 
 to present arms to the Colonne de la Grande Armee 
 and to send up a roar of ' Vive FEmpereur/' M. Thiers 
 was muttering ' la maree monte, monte ' and urging 
 his master to leave Paris until the civil war was over. 
 The King had ordered his carriages for Vincennes, 
 when he decided to review his forces in the Place 
 du Carrousel. Slowly the old man rode out of the 
 palace in the uniform of the National Guard, 
 with M. Thiers walking at his horse's head. As he 
 passed along the ranks, the cheers turned to shouts 
 for Reform ; and as the Bang caught the new tone 
 of his faithful bourgeois, his nerve gave way ; he was 
 seventy-four and it was a wild morning. The 
 National Guard had been the praetorians, the 
 janissaries of the Orleans monarchy ; and as they 
 broke their ranks to shout with the mob, it seemed 
 that the reign was over. The old man turned his 
 horse sharply and entered the Tuileries for the last 
 time. There was a hurried debate, as a mob surged 
 towards the palace, and the sharp sound of firing 
 could be heard in the room. Then Louis Philippe 
 abdicated in favour of his grandson and drove away 
 into exile up the long hiU past the Arc de Triomphe. 
 In its final phase the Revolution of 1848 was staged 
 in the Chamber. By the act of abdication a boy of 
 nine was King of the French, and his mother became 
 Regent. It was a dramatic gesture to present the 
 
THE PRESIDENT 157 
 
 young widow and her child to the chivahy of the 
 Parhament ; and as the people made free with the 
 deserted palace, a little party walked across to the 
 Chamber of Deputies. A confused session was in 
 progress, and the Duchess of Orleans made an 
 appeaMng entrance with her two boys. But before 
 the Chamber could take a decision, there was a roar 
 at the doors, and the mob surged across the floor of 
 the House. M. de Lamartine proposed the appoint- 
 ment of a Provisional Government, and the Regency 
 was at an end. Crowds swept into the Chamber, 
 and the five gentlemen of the Provisional Govern- 
 ment went off to the Hotel de Ville to govern France. 
 Someone in the Tuileries was playing the Marseillaise 
 on the Queen's piano, and M. de Balzac was exploring 
 the palace. Outside in the street an excited gentle- 
 man named Baudelaire was waving a gun and 
 shouting, and all Paris was roaring with the intoxica- 
 tion of a successful riot. The bourgeois with a singular 
 inadvertence had made possible a revolution which 
 they did not require, and by a sudden turn France 
 was swept into the Second Republic. 
 
158 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 II 
 
 Whilst Paris was striking republican attitudes, 
 France and the world looked on with mild surprise. 
 The old King lay for a night at Dreux and posted 
 on into Normandy towards the coast. Behind him 
 in Paris a committee of public speakers and literary 
 men was improvising a republic and conducting the 
 business of government before cheering audiences. 
 There was an outburst of sentimental allegory in 
 the printseUers' shops, and engravers luxuriated in 
 the upturned eyes of vu'tuous soldiers and workmen 
 or a symboHc profusion of broken chains, wings, 
 lightning, and lions harnessed to chariots ; some- 
 times there was even a queer intrusion of Christian 
 imagery amongst the Phrygian caps and masonic 
 symbols of orthodox repubHcan art. The streets 
 slowly emptied, and men who had shouldered a 
 musket on the Trois Glorieuses of February began, 
 as the echoes died away, to make small jokes about 
 ' Louis file-vite ' or to sing little songs about the end 
 of the reign : 
 
 ' Philippe s'desespere ; 
 Mironton, mironton, mirontaine. 
 
 II part pour V Angleterre, 
 
 Ne sait quand reviendra' 
 
 At the Hotel de Ville ten harassed gentlemen and 
 an inarticulate workman were sketching a new world 
 with large, free strokes. It was inaugurated under 
 the best literary auspices, and Lamartine was to be 
 
THE PRESIDENT 159 
 
 seen in the recess of a window offering to Victor 
 Hugo the portfolio of Pubhc Instruction. Universal 
 suffrage was re-established, and the needs of labour 
 were met (and the exigencies of economics defied) 
 by the guarantee of work for all and the estabhsh- 
 ment of the Ateliers Nationaux. Projects of better- 
 ment puUulated, and some one proposed the 
 estabhshment of a Ministry of Progress : it was a 
 -happy anticipation of the administrative method 
 for the solution of any problem by the formation 
 of a Ministry of it, which was subsequently adopted 
 in almost every country under the pressure of war. 
 
 The news from Paris sent a quiver through Europe. 
 Italy began to stir uneasily in the grasp of Austria ; 
 South German Liberals held strange language to 
 their masters ; democracy alarmed the Cardinals 
 by returning to its birthplace in Rome ; there were 
 barricades in the streets of Berlin, and the King of 
 Prussia went riding down the Linden hawking his 
 new principles to the passers-by ; the Viennese 
 swept into the dance, there was a little shooting at 
 the Hofburg, and Metternich was hounded out of 
 office ; even the Spaniards took the contagion, and 
 there was a faint movement in the calm air of Madrid. 
 Queen Victoria and her correspondents spent them- 
 selves in a feverish outpouring of exclamations and 
 underlinings on the subject of ' these awful, sad, 
 heart-breaking times ' and such ' an awful, over- 
 whelming, unexpected and inexplicable catastrophe.'' 
 But the news found a more favourable reception in 
 King Street, St. James's, where Prince Louis' carriage 
 waited at his door and the twopenny post began to 
 bring a steady stream of letters from France. One 
 night, before the old King had been forty-eight hours 
 
160 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 on the road out of Paris, the Prince sat talking to 
 his ItaHan banker after twelve. Early the next 
 morning Louis Napoleon left London by the train 
 
 ^ for Dover, and about midday on February 27, 1848, 
 the pretender was once more on French territory. 
 He landed with his face in a muffler and (since he 
 had no luggage) made a rapid passage through the 
 Douane. Like most travellers, he lunched as the 
 train stood in the station. At Amiens there was a 
 long wait, and the station rang with the shouts of a 
 queer party of released convicts. The train went 
 on, and the Prince was exasperated by a conversa- 
 tional traveller. Somehow the long journey drew 
 to an end, and on the next morning Prince Louis 
 drove into Paris. They were restoring the roads 
 and taking the paving-stones off the barricades, and 
 
 \ someone asked him to lend a hand. ' My good 
 woman,' he answered, ' that is just what I have 
 come to Paris for.' 
 
 The arrival of a Bonaparte four days after the 
 disappearance of Louis Phihppe was a matter of 
 
 ^ some interest. King Jerome had been in Paris 
 before the Revolution; but neither he nor his son 
 were persons of any popular importance. Louis 
 Napoleon was a more sensational figure, and after 
 midnight he sent Persigny to the Provisional Govern- 
 ment with a letter announcing his arrival ' sans autre 
 ambition que celle de servir mon 'pays' The Govern- 
 ment, which had no desire to see a pretender added 
 
 ^ to its troubles, requested him to leave the country 
 in twenty-four hours ; and the Prince, having made 
 known his existence, withdrew ' for the moment.' 
 He went from Boulogne by the Lord Warden steam 
 packet and landed at Folkestone about the time that 
 
THE PRESIDENT 161 
 
 Louis Philippe, shaved, disguised, and without his 
 wig, was making a wretched arrival at Newhaven 
 with his thin-faced Queen under the unimpressive 
 designation of Mr. and Mrs. Smith, uncle and aunt 
 of the British consul at Havre. 
 
 As the Orleans family gathered in exile at Clare- 
 mont to receive the solicitous inquiries of Prince 
 Albert, Louis Napoleon returned to King Street. 
 But his attention was distracted from the turf to 
 the larger speculation of the Second Republic. 
 M. de Lamartine and his divergent collaborators 
 were struggling with a proletariat which was too 
 excited to work and a bourgeoisie which was too 
 indifferent to moderate it. The pubUc service was 
 recruited from the ranks of the agitators, and it 
 grew in consequence more voluble than orderly. 
 A young man named Emile OlUvier represented the 
 Repubhc in the south. Life in Paris became a 
 succession of demonstrations, and in the disorders 
 the cry of ' Vive V Empereur / ' began to be heard 
 in the streets ; Persigny had remained in France 
 and, although the caricatures of the day exhibited 
 a marked distaste for pretenders with eagles, a small 
 Bonapartist committee was formed which included 
 Montholon and one or two more of the army of 
 Boulogne, the Corsican Pietri, some stockbrokers, 
 and the faithful contralto of Strasburg. The Pro- 
 visional Government struggled through the spring, 
 whilst the wind of the Revolution was sweeping 
 Europe ; and the Prince in London was sworn in 
 at Marlborough Street Police Station as a special 
 constable to stand between British society and the 
 menace of the Chartists. He carried a truncheon 
 for Queen Victoria on a beat in Piccadilly between 
 
162 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Park Lane and Dover Street and was heard to say 
 that ' the peace of London must be preserved.' It 
 was a queer gesture for a foreign prince who was 
 beginning to attain some reputation among the 
 repubUcans of his own country. But a gentleman 
 who kept his horses and hved in King Street was 
 expected to attest ; and besides it was the Bonaparte 
 tradition to keep order in revolutions. 
 
 Two weeks later France went to the polls for the 
 "^election of a National Assembly. The Prince, who 
 had taken competent advice, was not a candidate ; 
 but two of his cousins were elected in Corsica, and 
 Vaudrey and Persigny were defeated in the provinces 
 after prodigious professions of their repubhcan con- 
 victions. The mood of the country was becoming 
 steadily more favourable to any name which em- 
 bodied the idea of order, and the increasing cries 
 of ' Vive Napoleon ! ' in the Paris streets expressed 
 a growing distaste for government by processions. 
 The Provisional Government had been an experiment 
 in dictatorship ; but its history had disclosed a 
 singular failure to dictate. A crowd, which began 
 as a demonstration in favour of the PoHsh insurrec- 
 tion, had rushed the Chamber in May; there were 
 a hundred thousand workmen in Paris ploughing 
 the sand in the Ateliers Nationaux ; and M. de 
 Lamartine made speeches to the gathering storm. 
 It was small wonder that the propaganda of Bona- 
 partism began to raise its head, and the world grew 
 famihar with engravings of ' Les Troix Neveux du 
 Grand Homme ' and of Prince Louis himself (with 
 the invariable superscription ' ne a Paris ' to correct 
 the maHcious misstatement that he was a Swiss). 
 By a strange irony, just as his name began to gather 
 
THE PRESIDENT 163 
 
 force as a symbol of order, the crude economics 
 of his pamphlet on unemployment won for him a 
 considerable popularity in the stormy world of 
 socialism ; and the young man in King Street 
 simultaneously became the rising hope of the 
 harassed bourgeois and the threatening proletariat. 
 It was an odd position for one of Lord John Russell's 
 special constables. 
 
 In the last week of May he made a serious move 
 into French politics. When the Chamber was de- 
 bating the exile of the dethroned dynasties, he wrote 
 an indignant letter to the President demanding his 
 rights as a French citizen ; and his friends had 
 already taken drastic steps to enforce them by a 
 vigorous candidature opened in his name at the 
 by-elections which were to take place early in June. 
 Whilst M. Pietri was moving that the Chamber 
 should revoke the banishment of the Bonapartes 
 and the Government was agreeing in the most 
 generous terms, a handful of workers, canvassers 
 and billposters by turns, was covering the town with 
 hand-bills, small posters, and brass medals detailing 
 the virtues, the credentials, the sufferings, the 
 principles of Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, author of 
 the Extinction du Pauperisme. Persigny, Laity and 
 a financial gentleman named Ferrere walked the 
 streets all day, hstening to arguments at street 
 corners, distributing portraits of the Prince, and 
 leaving small bills in cafes and at tobacconists. 
 The Bonapartist committee worked desperately ; 
 street musicians were even hired to give a Napoleonic 
 turn to their performances and prophetic sleep- 
 walkers murmured the Prince's name. A great 
 crowd waited outside the Hotel de Ville to hear the 
 
164 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 results. The Prince was in, and the hats went up 
 with a great cheer. Louis Napoleon had arrived, 
 
 \ in June 1848, at his first public position in France ; 
 he was a Deputy for Paris. 
 
 By that queer pluralism which is possible in French 
 elections, he was returned by the Departments of 
 the Seine, Corsica, the Yonne, and the Charente- 
 Inferieure. An excited meeting of workmen sent 
 a petition to the Assembly demanding that he should 
 
 > be made First Consul ; one district offered him a 
 colonelcy in the National Guard ; and in the pro- 
 vinces he was regarded without affectation as a 
 future Emperor. In Paris there was a steady in- 
 crease of excitement. The elections had been held 
 on a Sunday, and the results were known during the 
 following week. On the Saturday, when the Prince 
 might take his seat, a great crowd waited on the 
 Place de la Concorde and the Chamber was guarded 
 by three regiments of infantry. That night the 
 Government circulated to all Prefets and Sous-prefets 
 a police description of the Prince with orders for his 
 immediate arrest. Louis Napoleon stayed quietly 
 in King Street, walking across after dinner to a 
 paper shop by the Burlington Arcade for the last 
 news from Paris. But every evening there were 
 Bonapartist meetings on the boulevards, and the 
 camelots hawked him in profile, full-face, or in 
 pamphlet form as M. de Persigny took the air after 
 his dinner at the Cafe de Paris and listened to the 
 talk of the streets. There was a spate of little 
 papers with cuts of the Emperor and his nephew, 
 echoing with prophecies from St. Helena and voices 
 from the dungeons of Ham, reporting the soliloquies 
 of Napoleon on his column in the Place Vendome or in 
 
THE PRESIDENT 165 
 
 the great sarcophagus at the Invahdes. On June 12 
 there was almost a Bonapartist journee. Crowds 
 paraded the streets all day shouting ' Vive Napoleon!'' 
 and the Place de la Concorde was full of men selling 
 little tricolour flags seditiously inscribed ' Vive le 
 prince Louis ! ' The old soldiers and the workmen 
 seemed to have joined the enemies of the Republic. 
 The republicans took fright and called out the 
 National Guard. There was an obscure scuffle in 
 the great square outside, and with the sound of 
 drums rolling through the Chamber Lamartine moved 
 that Prince Loms should remain in exile. At the 
 same time Persigny and Laity were arrested, and 
 the state was saved by its rather self-conscious 
 consuls. On the next day, with a dehghtful lack of 
 consistency, the Assembly ratified the Prince's elec- 
 tion on sound democratic principles. The rioting 
 continued, and there were great crowds in the centre 
 of Paris. Shouts of ' Vive — poleon / ' drifted into 
 the Chamber as M. Jules Favre was justifying the 
 election, and men wore Httle eagles in their hats. 
 The pohce were hustled, and someone began a barri- 
 cade at the fashionable corner of the Rue Castiglione 
 and the Rue du Mont-Thabor. But the Prince was 
 a cleverer tactician than the rioters, and on the next 
 day he asked the President for leave of absence. 
 His letter to the Assembly expressed a dignified 
 regret for the distm-bances of which he had been 
 indirectly the cause. But it contained an ominous 
 plu-ase which scandahsed repubhcan opinion : 
 
 ' Si le peuple m' impose des devoirs, je saurai les remplir; 
 mais je desavoue tous ceux qui me preteraient des in- 
 tentions amhitieuses que je n'ai pas. Mon nam est un 
 symhole d'ordre, de nationalite et de gloire. . . .' 
 
166 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The protest of the Chamber was immediate and 
 violent ; and when the news reached London, Louis 
 showed his skill with an immediate resignation of 
 his seat. With a rare mastery of himself he chose 
 to wait, hke a cautious fencer, for a better moment. 
 It was preferable, in the suspicious mood of French 
 opinion, to remain for a short time the Prince over 
 the water, hoped for and half seen ; and the new 
 idol of the Paris streets stayed in St. James's, whilst 
 his virtues were celebrated in pamphlets and medals, 
 by old soldiers and young workmen, in Paris and 
 across the provinces. The papers (he had no regular 
 press) might affect to regard him as a stupid young 
 man from Switzerland who wore his uncle's uniforms 
 and was habitually accompanied by an eagle. But 
 the elections of June had made him a figure in 
 French politics. Men had heard the name of 
 Napoleon spoken loudly ; and when the moment 
 came, they would not easily forget it. 
 
 The spring disorders deepened, as the year drew 
 on, into the flaming horror of civil war. The facile 
 expedient of the Ateliers Nationaux had concentrated 
 in Paris an army of 117,000 workmen at a daily cost 
 to the state of 170,000 francs, and an attempt to 
 demobilise this force sent the workers to the barri- 
 cades in a desperate attempt to substitute the 
 Republique sociale for the parliamentary Republic 
 of 1848. The men were starving, and they fought 
 without hope, without leaders, without cheers, 
 shooting sullenly in a dreadful silence behind great 
 barricades of stone. For four days Paris was aUght 
 with the duU glow ; guns were brought up against 
 the barricades ; a great storm broke over the smok- 
 ing town ; women were shot without pity, and on a 
 
THE PRESIDENT 167 
 
 ghastly Sunday a general in parley with the barri- 
 cades was shamefully murdered ; the Archbishop 
 of Paris, with a supreme gesture of reconciliation, 
 went out at sunset to make peace and was shot and 
 died. It was a time of horror, and for four summer 
 days Paris was tortured by the struggle. Then the 
 rebellion broke, and the Republic survived. But in 
 the servile war it had changed its character : during 
 the struggle France had found a dictator, since the 
 Assembly within sound of the guns had turned from 
 the Provisional Government with a terrified gesture 
 and handed every power of the executive to the 
 Minister of War. General Cavaignac was one of 
 those rare soldiers who manage to remain soldierly 
 in politics. The martial vii'tues of taciturnity and 
 decision rarely survive the change of occupation, 
 and mihtary men in civil affairs are too often garrul- 
 ous and irresolute. But Cavaignac had learnt silence 
 to the north of the Sahara, and he retained in the 
 Chamber the gaunt air, the strong wiU, the staccato 
 utterance of an Algerian general. Coming of a 
 republican family, he regarded the Second Republic 
 with an affection that varied between religion and 
 pedantry ; and when he was called to save the state 
 in the June days of 1848, he saved it without swerv- 
 ing, without ambition, a little fiercely. His iron 
 repression of the rebellion, the stern employment 
 of mihtary methods and martial law followed by 
 the classical gesture of divesting himself of all power 
 when the work was done, made a picture that was 
 full of republican reminiscences of Camillus on his 
 farm, of Washington at Mount Vernon. The 
 Assembly replied by retaining him in office, and 
 France was dominated by the gaunt figure of the 
 
168 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 republican soldier who had crushed the social 
 revolution. 
 
 As the echoes died away, the wise men of the 
 V Chamber began to draft a constitution for the Re- 
 pubHc, and France returned to work. Paris had 
 still a strange air ; there were Dragoons in the 
 Champs Elysees, and the sudden sound of trains 
 at the Gare du Nord brought nervous citizens to 
 their doors. The country was governed with 
 mihtary precision, and Cavaignac distributed pun- 
 ishment and multipHed his enemies with the strict 
 impartiahty of an honest man. But repubhcan 
 austerity is sometimes a little trying ; and the 
 country, although it had called for a man after the 
 confused experiment of government by committee, 
 began to wonder whether there was not perhaps 
 another man. Men had heard the name of Napoleon 
 earlier in the year. It had been shouted then across 
 the Paris streets by a rather disorderly element. 
 But after the insurrection of June and a dismal sum- 
 
 'v mer spent in the heavy grasp of General Cavaignac 
 the old name began rapidly to make new friends. 
 To the orderly classes it seemed to promise (as it 
 had once performed) the reorganisation of France 
 after revolution ; the workers saw in it a hope of 
 escape from the General and his martial law ; and 
 in the broad fields, where the Emperor had never 
 been forgotten, the sound of it made countrymen 
 think that he was still ahve. There was to be a 
 fresh series of by-elections for the Chamber in the 
 
 ^ autumn, and the propaganda of Bonapartism was 
 vigorously resumed. The Prince announced his re- 
 entry into politics in a skilful letter, and his friends 
 in France returned energetically to the organisation 
 
THE PEESIDENT 169 
 
 of opinion. Letters were sent from London to men 
 of influence, and his posters began to appear on the 
 walls. Montholon pleaded his cause in print, and 
 every class was invited to rally, according to its 
 tastes, to his democracy, his love of order, or his 
 incipient socialism. He even had a mysterious inter- 
 view with Louis Blanc at a hotel in Leicester Square ; 
 and by a skilful turn of his political facets towards 
 every class of elector he was returned once more 
 to the National Assembly. On September 17 Louis 
 Napoleon was elected Deputy for Paris, Corsica, 
 the Yonne, the Charente-Inferieure and the Moselle ; 
 and when the results were announced at the Hotel 
 de Ville, a prophetic bugle-band played the old 
 official anthem Veillons au salut de V Empire : it 
 was a just comment. 
 
 The Assembly was disinclined to exclude a Deputy 
 who had been twice elected, and eight days after 
 the poll M. Louis Bonaparte took his seat. There 
 was a great turning of heads towards one of the 
 benches of the Left, and the President took up his 
 opera-glasses to stare : he saw a small man dressed 
 in black with a heavy moustache. A little later 
 the new member rose to speak. Since he disliked 
 the tribune (he had condemned it for its dramatic 
 possibihties in an article written at Ham), he was 
 about to speak, in the Enghsh fashion, from his place. 
 But the Chamber valued its stage effects, and he 
 was hurried up the steps with cries oi ' A la tribune / 
 a la tribune !' In a still House he read a short speech 
 declaring his devotion to the Republic ; and as he 
 slipped out into the lobby, someone introduced him 
 to a dapper mihtary gentleman in a brown wig 
 named Changarnier whom he was to know better. 
 
170 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 In the weeks which followed the Prince frankly 
 became a candidate for the Presidency, since the 
 
 V new Constitution included a President on the 
 American model. He was rarely in his place at 
 the Chamber ; and when he went, he took a revolver 
 
 in his pocket ; but he was busy finding a way into 
 
 the world of politics. He took a suite at the Hotel 
 du Rhin, with a view of the Emperor on his Column, 
 and there was always a crowd round the door in 
 the Place Vendome to see him. Old soldiers waited 
 for a glimpse of the Emperor's nephew, and the world 
 made little jokes at the gaunt old men who cocked 
 their hats and wore tight, buttoned coats. Daumier 
 modelled the type, threadbare and lean and swagger- 
 ing with a great stick, and called it Ratapoil. Cham 
 poked exquisite fun at it in the Charivari. But the 
 crowds in the Place Vendome grew larger ; and 
 inside a short man with dull eyes was receiving his 
 callers. He stooped a little, and he had the thin 
 legs of an ostler ; London had done much for his 
 clothes, but once at least with a strange lapse (or 
 an ill-timed reminiscence of Mr. Disraeh) he startled 
 a visitor with a green plush waistcoat and trousers 
 that were distinctly yellow. In the morning he 
 rode in the Bois, and in the evenings he received at 
 his hotel or was seen in drawing-rooms. Sometimes 
 he gave dinner to a journalist, and once he met 
 Proudhon, the Pope of contemporary sociahsm. 
 M. Odilon Barrot took him out in November to dine 
 in the country, and before dinner they went over to 
 Malmaison. There was a little difficulty at the gate ; 
 but the porter yielded to the Emperor's nephew, 
 and they saw the old rooms, the old furniture, even 
 a little chair that he remembered. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 171 
 
 Through the autumn the Chamber was debating 
 the new Constitution, and it paid to the Prince the 
 compHment of an extreme anxiety as to the powers 
 of the President. Once he was forced to speak by 
 an amendment to exclude from office all royal and 
 Imperial families. The House was excited, and 
 Louis Napoleon was unprepared. He spoke badly, 
 with pauses and in sentences which did not end. 
 But his halting denial of sinister designs sufficed 
 to defeat the proposal and to convince an Assembly 
 which always measured ability by eloquence that 
 the Republic had little to fear from this inarticulate 
 young man with a foreign accent. He had learnt 
 to be silent in his rooms at Ham and in the cold 
 drawing-rooms of London, and parliaments are rarely 
 captivated by silent men. It became the fashion to 
 treat him as a faintly comic figure ; his career as an 
 opera houjfe pretender, his docile attendance on his 
 adviser, M. VieiUard, his inability to speak, set the 
 lobbies tittering ; and his eagle, his uncle's hat, his 
 Enghsh constable's truncheon became a blessing to 
 caricatm-ists. But the rising tide of Bonapartism 
 was unaffected. The salons might raise a polite 
 laugh with the story of his accent or lift an eyebrow 
 at the ''fits d' Hortense.^ But down in Paris crowded 
 meetings were cheering loud-voiced men as they 
 perorated confusedly on his sufferings in prison, bis 
 burning patriotism, his melting pity for the people. 
 The provinces were frankl}^ Imperialist, and the 
 rococo eloquence of countless local papers answered 
 the scorn of the clever gentlemen up in Paris who 
 multipHed little jokes about 
 
 ' un faux Napoleon 
 Qn'on met en circulaiioti.' 
 
172 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 There was a vigorous campaign of Bonapartist sheets 
 financed by his friends, by the sale of his estabhsh- 
 ment in King Street, by unknown soldiers of the 
 Grande Armee. Gradually as the crowds in the 
 
 streets sang : 
 
 \ ' Noiis Vaurons, 
 
 " Noiis Vaurons, 
 
 folion ! ' 
 
 the politicians began to feel the infection. 
 M. Berryer sank his loyalty to the Bourbons in 
 support of a Bonaparte interregnum ; M. Guizot 
 did the same; Marshal Bugeaud saw a possibility 
 of order in the Presidency of the Prince ; M. Thiers 
 saw a possibihty of office. Late in October he even 
 recovered something of a position in the Chamber by 
 a dignified defence of his own candidature : 
 
 ' Eh bien ! oui,je I'accepte, cette candidature, parce que 
 trois elections successives et le decret unanime de VAssem- 
 blee nationals contre la proscription de ma famille 
 m'autorisent d croire que la France regarde mon nom 
 comme pouvant servir d la consolidation de la societe. . . . 
 Ce qu'il lui faut, c'est un gouvernement ferme, intelligent 
 et sage, qui pense plv^ d guerir les maux de la societe qu'd 
 les venger.' 
 
 The young man was beginning to take a sound tone, 
 and his elderly preceptors redoubled their good 
 advice. M. Thiers even suggested, after consulta- 
 tion with M, Mole, that he should shave his mous- 
 tache for the election : it was felt (since they were 
 both clean-shaven) that Presidents should not wear 
 \ moustaches. As the day came nearer the Prince 
 pubHshed his manifesto. It spoke of the defence 
 of society and the removal of taxes. Foreign poHcy 
 was to be peaceful but firm (' Une grande nation doit 
 
THE PRESIDENT 173 
 
 56 taire ou ne jamais parler en vain ') ; it might even 
 be possible to reduce the burden of military service. 
 The conclusion had a restrained eloquence : 
 
 ' D'ailleurs, quand on a Vhonneur d'etre a la tete du 
 peuple frangais, il y a un moyen infaillible de faire le 
 bien, c'est de le vouloir.' 
 
 The Prince stood upon one side. Against him 
 on the other (there were other candidates, but they 
 barely signified) was General Cavaignac. He had 
 won a great victory in June ; but men could not 
 forget that he had won it over Frenchmen. The 
 agony of the barricades was recorded in the tortured 
 perspective and hectic colouring of popular prints, 
 and France had no wish to see a perpetual reminder 
 of it in the President's chair. His honest figure 
 had become almost forbidding, and his republican 
 virtue received, as it had merited, the reward of 
 Aristides. On December 10, 1848, Louis Napoleon 
 was elected by a majority of four millions in a poll 
 of seven millions, and the strange figure whom the 
 world addressed indifferently as Prince, Altesse, 
 Monsieur, Monseigneur, and Citoyen was President 
 of the French Republic. 
 
174 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 m 
 
 France had a new master ; but the statesmen were 
 too clever to know it. Little M. Thiers tittered 
 discreetly about ' notrejeune homme,'' and Lord John 
 Russell sagely informed his sovereign that 'Bonaparte 
 may probably play the part of Richard Cromwell ' 
 and clear the stage for a more sober Restoration of 
 the dear good Orleans people at Claremont. Queen 
 Victoria invited her uncle Leopold to rejoice with 
 her at the election of Louis Napoleon although ' that 
 one should have to wish for him is really wonderful ' ; 
 but she showed a better judgment than many grave 
 people in Europe in the reflection that ' it will, how- 
 ever, perhaps be more difficult to get rid of him again 
 than one at first may imagine.' Stupid provincials 
 felt vaguely that they had elected an Emperor ; but 
 in Paris, where they knew everything, he was only 
 a President. M. Louis Bonaparte (it was an effect 
 of his English reticence and his expressionless stare) 
 seemed to the wise man of the Chamber so mild, so 
 stupid, such a good listener, a patient, backward 
 pupil. Ten days after his election they sat round 
 solemnly on a winter afternoon to watch him take 
 the oath. The austere Cavaignac sat with his hand 
 in the breast of his coat, as someone announced the 
 figures. The General said a few words of resignation, 
 and there were some tears among his audience. 
 Then the President was proclaimed, and ' the citizen 
 Charles Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, born at Paris ' 
 
THE PRESIDENT 175 
 
 was invited to take the oath to the RepubHc. He 
 followed it with a short speech, and General Cavai- 
 gnac folded his arms. The President spoke of his 
 duty to the nation and his detestation of usurpers ; 
 his French accent gave entire satisfaction. He was 
 dressed exactly as he had been for his trial eight 
 years before, in black and wearing the Legion. As 
 he left the tribune, he turned with a gesture which he 
 might almost have learnt in London (although 
 M. Thiers claimed credit for suggesting it) and held 
 out his hand to Cavaignac. Then he left the 
 Chamber ; the officers of the Assembly proposed 
 to escort him to his official residence, M. Victor Hugo 
 shouted something, and the ceremony was over. It 
 was about half-past four of a December evening. 
 There was a bitter wind blowing and a queer flicker 
 of winter lightning, as the Dragoons trotted across 
 the bridge and the Prince came home to the Elysee 
 with the Lancers behind him : it was thirty-three 
 years since the Emperor had driven out of that gate 
 and taken the road for Malmaison and St. Helena. 
 
 The Presidential Court in 1848 had a delightful 
 air of impromptu. Persigny and Mocquard wrote 
 the letters ; and a young captain of Spahis named 
 Eleury, whom he had met at the Hotel du Rhin 
 before his election, formed the nucleus of the Prince's 
 personal staff. It already contained a Ney and a 
 Meneval, and the reminiscence of the First Empire 
 was to grow stronger as his own gestures became more 
 Napoleonic. There was a little dinner at the Elysee 
 on the first Saturday of his term. The workmen 
 were still in the building, and behind the flowers on 
 the great staircase one could feel the indefinable 
 atmosphere of a recent removal. There was a Murat 
 
176 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 and a Ney at the table, and M. Victor Hugo with 
 poetic licence was half an hour late for dinner. The 
 President was inclined to be apologetic about his 
 new estabhshment, and the china was deplorable ; 
 but the band from the Opera played during the 
 evening, and his guests had the felicity of listening 
 to the Mar die repuhlicaine and a pot-po2irri of the 
 favourite airs of Queen Hortense. One or two 
 people came in after dinner, and the President, 
 after telling M. Victor Hugo how he saw the last of 
 the Emperor in the large room downstairs, had a 
 few words with the British ambassador. On the 
 next day (it was the first Simday of the Presidency) 
 the Prince rode out to his first review. The troops 
 marched past on the Place de la Concorde opposite 
 the Tuileries, and someone in the crowd flew a kite 
 in the shape of a great eagle over Louis Napoleon's 
 head : General Changarnier with a sudden remini- 
 scence of the constitution had the string cut. The 
 Prince wore a general's uniform in spite of his purely 
 civil position in the state and the advice of M. Thiers 
 (which was not unconnected with his own sartorial 
 possibilities) that the President should always dress 
 as a civilian. 
 
 The Presidency opened in a mild round of official 
 visits ; and the Bourse, some hospitals, and a few 
 works had an opportunity of receiving with pohte 
 applause the short gentleman with a heavy mous- 
 tache who was the anodyne substitute for monarchy 
 provided by the Constitution of 1848. Early in the 
 New Year he heard Rachel at the Fran9ais ; and 
 there were a few evening parties at the Elysee, where 
 the names of the Second Republic — Cavaignae, 
 Thiers, Changarnier, Marrast, Montalembert — were 
 
THE PRESIDENT 177 
 
 mixed with faint echoes of the First Empm 
 Bassano, Camerata, Otranto — and the scene was 
 set by the slowly advancing men of the Second 
 Empire. Twice he called on Beranger at Passy ; 
 but the old man was out. Concerts and balls 
 afforded an opportunity of exhibiting the President 
 to the great world, and in a more systematic succes- 
 sion of engagements he was displayed to the army. 
 The Dragoons were visited in their quarters on the 
 Quai d'Orsay ; the reviews went on ; and there was 
 even an interesting negotiation in which the President 
 contracted with the proprietors of a panorama for 
 the troops of the Paris garrison to see the battle of 
 Eylau at wholesale prices. At an infantry camp 
 in the Luxembourg Garden he was found in a still 
 more Napoleonic attitude, tasting the rations and 
 demonstrating to the army that it was no longer 
 the servant of a disembodied committee of politicians. 
 French poUtics in the early months of 1849 were 
 in an agreeable state of confusion. Constitutionally 
 the President had entrusted the government to an 
 impressive array of those elder statesmen of whom 
 M. OdUon Barrot was the most solemn representa- 
 tive and M. Thiers the private inspiration. But his 
 affections were with the more adventtu-ous group 
 of his personal adherents ; and, on the proposal of 
 the President, Persigny, Conneau, Laity, Vaudrey, 
 and Bouffet de Montauban were decorated by a 
 Government which gravely disapproved of them. 
 His ministers constituted what would have been 
 considered under Louis Philippe a progressive ad- 
 ministration. But their principles were at once too 
 conservative for the Republic and insufficiently 
 monarchical for the President. He complained to 
 
178 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Ney that they wished to make him 'the Prince 
 Albert of the Repubhc,' and he refused the part 
 in a peremptory letter to the Minister of the Interior 
 demanding the files of 1840 relating to his own sedi- 
 tion at Boulogne and insisting on the submission of 
 all telegrams to the Elysee. There was an indignant 
 flutter among the statesmen, and the President 
 apologised poUtely ; but it was obvious that he was 
 disinclined to confine himself to purely ceremonial 
 duties. Towards the end of January there was a 
 vague threat of disorder in Paris, and the Prince 
 supported his ministers in a vigorous display of 
 force. The centre of the town was occupied by 
 troops, and the forts were taken over by the regular 
 forces. In the afternoon the Prince showed himself 
 in the streets, and there were some shouts of 'Vive- 
 Napoleon ! ' in the ranks. Queen Victoria, to whom 
 (as his official ' Tres chere et grande Amie ') he had 
 written a polite letter on entering ofi&ce, paid him 
 the comphment of informing her uncle at Brussels 
 that ' everybody says Louis Napoleon had behaved 
 extremely well in the last crisis — full of courage and 
 energy, and they say that he is decidedly straight- 
 forward, which is not to be despised.' The Prince- 
 President was beginning to take his place in the 
 European hierarchy. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 179 
 
 IV 
 
 On an April afternoon in 1849 twelve hundred men 
 marched through a cheering crowd down the Corso 
 into Rome. They swung along in the spring sun- 
 shine wearing green cloaks, and at the head of them 
 went a bearded man on a white horse; he rode 
 slowly in a white poncho with a great mane of golden 
 hair that hung to his shoulders, and a tall negro 
 rode behind him on a black horse with a lasso at his 
 saddle-bow, wearing a blue cloak. His officers 
 marched in red shirts, and in the ranks men wore 
 those tall Calabrian hats which are inseparable 
 from the picturesque calhng of operatic brigandage 
 and dehghted the assembled artists of Rome, who 
 had almost exhausted the pifferari and contadine 
 of the Campagna. The Uttle column marched away 
 to bivouac in an empty convent, and all Rome knew 
 that Garibaldi and his Legion had come in from the 
 north to defend the Repubhc. 
 
 He was a queer, spectacular figure, whose patriot- 
 ism was of that pecuhar intensity which a man 
 derives from being born on the extreme hmit of 
 his country and passing most of his life outside it. 
 As a boy he had lived at Nice, which owed an inter- 
 changeable allegiance to France and Piedmont, spoke 
 a Provengal patois, and regarded both the Italian 
 and the French languages as genteel affectations ; 
 and as a young man he saw as much of the world 
 and as little of any single part of it as a captain in 
 
180 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the merchant service may, working mostly in the 
 Mediterranean and Levantine trades. Once he com- 
 menced tutor in an Italian f amUy at Constantinople. 
 But he went back to the sea, and in a sailors' inn 
 at a Black Sea port he found a young man from 
 Genoa who told him that there were men in the 
 world hoping to build up a strong and single Italy 
 from the welter of kingdoms and duchies over which 
 the Pope and the Bourbons and the white coats of 
 the Austrians kept guard. Then at Marseilles, in 
 the house where EmUe OUivier was a boy, he met 
 Mazzini and vanished into the twilight of false 
 names and secret societies in which that spare, 
 gaunt figure flitted vaguely beckoning to young 
 men to follow, follow round the world and into 
 prison and to the galleys the faint Hght which might 
 one day dawn on Italy. The masters of Italy had 
 reduced patriotism to a conspiracy, and Garibaldi 
 took service in the Piedmontese navy with the simple 
 object of permeating the fleet with the ideal of in- 
 surrection. The movement failed, and a court- 
 martial in Genoa sentenced to death as a bandit 
 of the first class ' Garibaldi, Giuseppe Maria, son of 
 Domenico, aged 26, captain in the merchant service 
 and sailor of the third class in the Royal service.' 
 He did not wait for the sentence to be carried out, 
 but bolted to Marseilles, went two voyages under 
 the French flag, and sailed for South America. For 
 twelve years he was half seen across the great dis- 
 tances, buccaneering on the Rio Grande, commanding 
 gunboats against the Emperor of Brazil, riding across 
 the great plains of Uruguay to dine at an estancia on 
 beef and mate with the capataz, and charge with the 
 sword or the whirhng bolas as the army thundered 
 
THE PRESIDENT 181 
 
 out the battle hymn of the Republic and the negro 
 lancers crashed home. It was a queer life of long 
 marches and sudden fights, and the little towns of 
 Italy must have seemed very far away as the great 
 moon came up over Corrientes and the gauchos off- 
 saddled in the long grass. He found a wife by a 
 Brazihan river, falling in love (as few men do) through 
 a telescope and opening his first conversation with a 
 proposal in Italian, which was fortunately overlooked, 
 since the young lady spoke only Portuguese. But 
 he lived mostly among Itahans ; and when Rosas 
 marched against Montevideo, he raised an Italian 
 Legion for the defence of the Repubhc. They 
 marched behind a black flag emblazoned, for re- 
 membrance of Italy's mourning and her hope, with 
 a burning mountain ; and since a shipper had failed 
 to find a market for some scarlet wooUens imported 
 for wear in the Argentine slaughter-houses, they 
 wore red shirts. They fought well with the bayonet ; 
 and sometimes Garibaldi served in command of the 
 young Repubhc' s younger navy. But as the guns 
 boomed across the River Plate, men from Venice 
 and Genoa began to remember Italy. Their leader 
 had kept touch with Mazzini ; and when a new 
 Pope seemed about to lead his people out of cap- 
 tivity, they offered their swords to the Holy See. 
 An embarrassed Nuncio rephed politely with his 
 prayers. Five months later the Speranza sailed from 
 Montevideo with Garibaldi and sixty-two Italians ; 
 they had learnt to fight, and their desire was to fight 
 for Italy. They brought with them into European 
 warfare a queer flavour of South America, with their 
 great saddles and their lassos, sitting their horses in 
 long ponchos and rounding up cattle under the heights 
 
182 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 of Palestrina as though the Anio had been the Rio 
 Grande. 
 
 Italy in 1848 was a seething cauldron. There was 
 a Pope at Rome to whom men looked for Hberty ; 
 Piedmont, Tuscany, even Naples found their rulers 
 growing apprehensive and almost constitutional ; 
 the Milanese rose and swept the Austrians behind 
 the four great fortresses of the Venetian border, 
 whilst in Venice Manin and his men made a repubhc 
 once more among the lagoons. Piedmont drifted 
 nervously into war with Austria ; but Radetzky 
 was too strong for the Itahans, and they were 
 driven westwards out of Lombardy. There was a 
 flicker of insurrection among the mountains in the 
 north, where Garibaldi and his Legion hung on the 
 Austrian flank. On the road to Como he met 
 Mazzini marching with a great banner, and for a 
 few weeks he fought an ingenious rearguard action 
 among the lakes. Then he passed the Swiss frontier 
 and Italy seemed to he helpless again before ber 
 masters. There was a vague stirring in the south, 
 and in Rome the Pope was drifting with nervous 
 protests towards Liberalism. But there is a stage 
 in political history at which Liberals are more dis- 
 tasteful to a people than the frank reactionaries. 
 Measured progress is a poor substitute for revolu- 
 tion, and its Liberal exponents owe their frequent 
 unpopularity to their judicious and exasperating 
 blend of moderation and enlightenment. The Pope 
 took a minister who had learnt the art of govern- 
 ment in Paris ; but the reforms which would have 
 satisfied opinion under Louis Philippe were an 
 ineffectual gesture under Pius ix. ; and Rossi, who 
 might have organised the States of the Church in 
 
THE PRESIDENT 183 
 
 a year, was murdered after a month in a Roman 
 crowd. There was a yell of triumph, and a yoimg 
 lady from Boston, who was honoured with the 
 acquaintance of Mr. Emerson and Mr. Carlyle, sat 
 down to convey her satisfaction in terms which 
 must have startled her mother in New England. 
 The Pope was disinclined to preside over a chaotic 
 democracy ; and after a few days of disorder, he 
 dressed as a parish priest and drove (railways had 
 been prohibited by his predecessor) down the Appian 
 Way into the Kingdom of Naples, whilst behind him 
 the peo;^e of his capital settled down in the last 
 weeks of 1848 to the confused experiment of the 
 Roman Republic. 
 
 The ItaUan nature and the unexampled splendour 
 of the Roman background invested the affairs of 
 this strugghng commonwealth with an irresistible 
 atmosphere of charade. The great mass of the 
 Colosseum and the broken columns of the Forum 
 were a constant temptation to impressionable poli- 
 ticians, and they would have been less than human 
 (and far less than Latin) if they had omitted to 
 strike classical attitudes against the Roman sky. 
 The fasces, the wolf of the Capitol, the civic crown 
 were conscientiously produced as properties on the 
 crowded stage ; and when the austere Mazzini was 
 called to save the little state, he found himself 
 draped with the impressive title of a Triumvir. 
 A Mr. Ai'thur Clough of Rugby, Balliol, and (until 
 recently) Oriel was worrying the dictator for a 
 permit to see the Vatican ; but the principal pre- 
 occupations of the new government related to its 
 foreign policy. From the first the Republic Uved 
 under the shadow of foreign intervention. Even 
 
18-1 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 wlien Pius was playing gently with reform, Metter- 
 nich had lamented at Vienna that he should live 
 to see a Jacobin Pope and discussed intervention 
 with the French, and Louis PhUippe in his last weeks 
 of power mobilised a few thousand men in the 
 Mediterranean ports to sail for the Tiber. But 
 when the Pope sufiered the final indignity of flight 
 and appealed to the world in the cold eloquence of 
 Papal Latin, there was a touching rivalry between 
 the competing defenders of the faith. Naples was 
 his host at Gaeta ; and the NeapoHtan army was 
 massed on the Roman frontier, ready to retreat 
 with alacrity from any enemy and observed across 
 the border by Garibaldi and his Legion, who were 
 drifting southwards through Italy in search of 
 insurrection. Austria was putting troops into 
 Romagna from the north, marching with an un- 
 accustomed air of victory, since Piedmont had 
 flung convulsively into war in the spring days of 
 1849 and crashed into disaster at Novara. Even 
 Spain was fumbhng with her army in her own fashion, 
 as though time stood still and PhiHp was still king 
 and Olivares and his heavy infantry were taking 
 the road again for Italy. But France was too quick 
 for them, and three brigades and a few guns were 
 moved on Toulon and Marseilles to form (it was an 
 ominous name) the Mediterranean Expeditionary 
 Force and bring the Pope to his own again. It was 
 a singular Crusade. The motive, apart from a desire 
 in the new Government to please the Catholic masses 
 of the French countryside, was a simple jealousy of 
 Austria, a fear that France might be forgotten in the 
 world if Radetzky's armies, which had struck down 
 Piedmont at Novara, became the masters of Central 
 
THE PRESIDENT 185 
 
 Italy, a sudden return of the old desire to porter haut 
 le drapeau de la France. So it was that Louis 
 Napoleon, and not Franz- Joseph or King Bomba 
 or Queen Isabella became defender of the faith, 
 and a French fleet anchored off Civitavecchia on 
 an April afternoon in 1849, and the Legion came 
 marching into Rome with Garibaldi riding at its 
 head to defend the Republic. 
 
 An embarrassed French general (he bore, with a 
 faint flavour of old battles, the name of Oudinot) 
 was instructed to occupy Romagna and to settle the 
 dispute, to protect the Romans from the Austrians, 
 from the Spaniards, from the Neapolitans, from them- 
 selves : there was no reference in his instructions to 
 the course to be followed in the event of any reluc- 
 tance on the part of the new Repubhc to have its 
 destinies decided at French headquarters. His 
 troops were landed, and there was a friendly air 
 in the port. But at Rome the murmurs swelled 
 into a roar. The Garibaldians marched in with 
 Masina's lancers ; and two days later the Bersa- 
 gHeri from the north, nine hundred strong, sent their 
 cocks' plumes waving through the streets. So 
 Rome would defend itself, and on an April morning 
 the French marched up the white road from the sea. 
 They marched for two days, and in the dawn they 
 moved against the Vatican hill. There was a great 
 wall round the city, and the Chasseurs d pied went 
 with sloped arms against, the gates. Two guns 
 spoke from the waU, and the French artfllery un- 
 limbered. Their infantry went at the old fortress 
 with the bayonet ; but the Italians shot from 
 behiud their ramparts, and the attack failed. 
 Mr, Clough walked up the Pincio and saw the 
 
186 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 smoke ; then he went home to write a letter, and 
 the sound of gunfire drifted across Rome. 
 
 There was a flutter in Paris when the news came. 
 The Chamber began to ask questions about the use 
 of repubhcan guns for the suppression of young 
 repubhes. But there was a Bonaparte at the head 
 of the state, and his inherited tradition after a 
 defeat was to issue a mendacious communique and 
 send more troops. In the month of May, whilst 
 General VaiUant of the Engineers was considering 
 whether to make his breach in the walls of Pope 
 Urban or to trace his parallels against the line of 
 more interesting antiques which the Emperor AureUus 
 had built beyond the Tiber, France was assured that 
 the flag would not be dishonoured; and the siege-guns 
 were slung on board at Toulon. Meanwhile there 
 was an odd attempt to end the war : an energetic 
 person named de Lesseps, who had graduated in a 
 course of civil disorder at the French consulate in 
 Barcelona, was sent from Paris with instructions to 
 please aU parties, from the Roman RepubHc to the 
 exiled Pope, and to co-ordinate with more than con- 
 sular ingenuity the general in command before Rome, 
 the French ambassadors in Italy, and a European 
 conference which was in intermittent session round 
 the Pope's door at Gaeta. He hurried cheerfully 
 from Paris to Toulon and from Toulon to Rome. 
 He made an armistice and drove busily up and down 
 between Mazzini and the French camp, while 
 Mr. Clough hovered round the Sistine Chapel and 
 Garibaldi moved out into the Campagna and drove 
 the NeapoHtans ofi the Alban HiUs. The Legion 
 rode out with its lassos and its queer American habits 
 of indiscipline ; but King Bombd's army displayed 
 
THE PRESIDENT 187 
 
 its customary ingenuity in sudden and silent with- 
 drawals, and the armies were rarely in contact. 
 At Rome Mazzini was negotiating at the Quirinal 
 with the fascinating M. de Lesseps, and a treaty was 
 even drafted between the two republics. But the 
 busy consul from Barcelona found it easier twenty 
 years later to reconcile Suez to Port Said than to 
 align Mazzini with French headquarters in 1849. 
 His treaty was denounced by General Oudinot ; 
 Garibaldi's raiders swept into the city after their 
 easy victories in the south ; and the war went on. 
 
 Rome was besieged en regie through the month of 
 June. The French rushed an advanced post in the 
 still dawn of a Sunday morning ; the Italians went 
 running through the empty streets and Garibaldi 
 was brought out of bed by the sound of the guns ; 
 there was an early parade of the garrison on the 
 great square before St. Peter's with every bell in 
 Rome reeling and clanging in its belfry, and in the 
 early light the young men went charging up the hill 
 against the French. The red shirts went shouting 
 at the double, and Garibaldi sat his horse in his 
 great white cloak; there was a sound of bugles 
 coming up the hill from Rome, and the Bersaglieri 
 drove at the French hne. But it held firm, and the 
 young men on the hiUside learned to die for Italy. 
 The sun came up over the city, and the Italians spent 
 themselves up the slope against the Villa Corsini in 
 wild, attacking waves. At last, in the full blaze of 
 afternoon, forty men from the great meres beyond 
 Ravenna rode madly on horses against the French 
 entrenchments and galloped unbehevably up the hill, 
 up the steps, into the battered house. Half Rome 
 surged cheering after them. But the place could 
 
188 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 not be held, and the French swept back into the 
 position. It was almost night, and the guns were 
 still booming on the Janiculan ; Garibaldi's white 
 cloak was vaguely seen in the darkness, and half 
 the night they served the guns by moonUght. Then, 
 for three patient weeks, the siege went on. The 
 French trenches crept slowly towards the city, and 
 their shells went singing over the Trastevere. 
 Mr. Clough heard the muskets ' at it, at-at-at it ' 
 and the dull slam of the mortars, as he walked about 
 and pohshed his hexameters about 
 
 ' a great white puff from behind Michel Angelo's 
 dome, and 
 
 After a space the report of a real big gun — not the 
 Frenchman's ! ' 
 or perfected a smoother elegiac 
 ' in a Roman chamber. 
 
 When from Janiculan heights thundered the cannon 
 of France.' 
 The long June days passed slowly, and in the last 
 week of the month the French developed their 
 attack. There was a long roU of firing for eight 
 days, and the besiegers broke into the town. For 
 a week and two days the Italians fought across the 
 slope of the Janiculan, over a fragment of the old 
 Imperial wall, through houses and up gardens, until 
 the houses melted into ruins and the ruins faded 
 into the dust of Rome. Then, in the dark hours 
 of the night after a flare of illuminations (it was 
 St. Peter's day) had died away from the black 
 roofs, a great storm of rain swept down on the city, 
 and the French moved silently to the last attack. 
 Garibaldi stood sabring the besiegers in the dark- 
 ness ; and as the dawn broke, the Bersaglieri died 
 
THE PRESIDENT 189 
 
 grimly in a reeling house. Slowly the firing died 
 away ; Rome had fallen. 
 
 Garibaldi rode desperately across the city under 
 the midday sun ; his sword was bent, and his great 
 negro was dead. He offered to march out into the 
 Campagna carrying the Republic with him, as he 
 had seen the RepubHc of Rio Grande years before 
 go out into the great plains of South America in 
 the bullock-waggons of a retreating army. But the 
 Assembly surrendered to the French. Two days 
 later, before Oudinot's M'pis could march down the 
 Corso, there was a vast crowd in the great square 
 between St. Peter's and the sweep of Bernini's 
 columns ; Garibaldi rode slowly through the roar- 
 ing throng and sat his horse by the obelisk in the 
 centre of the square ; then, in a great voice, he 
 called for volunteers, offered them ' fame, sete, marcie 
 forzate, battaglia e morte,' and turned his horse through 
 the massed faces and the tears of Rome. That night 
 four thousand men formed Tinder the Lateran and 
 marched slowly out of the city. They marched 
 through the night, and they saw the sun in Tivoli. 
 For four strange weeks they toiled across the hills 
 by Orvieto and Arezzo and Macerata, while the 
 blind armies of France and Spain and Austria 
 fumbled on their tracks and the paths climbed the 
 Apennine and trailed down eastwards into the 
 Marches. Garibaldi went in his white cloak, and 
 Anita rode with him ; and the waggons and a great 
 herd of bulls had an air of the Rio Grande as they 
 came down to San Marino under the ItaHan sun. 
 In an August night he rode out again, and the 
 Austrians were close behind. Then he came down 
 to the sea and put out in the moonlight. The 
 
190 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Austrian fleet took some of his ships at sea ; but 
 he ran for the shore, and where the waves break 
 along the sandhills by Cesenatico he waded through 
 the surf with a dying woman in his arms. There 
 was a little farm by a great mere, and its windows 
 looked across to the long forest of sad pines by 
 Ravenna, On a bed there in his arms Anita died, 
 and Garibaldi was left alone in Italy. The hunt 
 was after him, but he hid and wandered and marched 
 once more across the mountains, until on an autumn 
 morning he put out to Elba with a loud cry of ' Viva 
 V Italia / ' 
 
 In Rome the French marched in, and Mr. Clough, 
 who had been at Rugby under Arnold, commented 
 unfavourably on the vivandieres. Mazzini and Gari- 
 baldi had helped the young men of Italy to dream 
 a great dream. But the Pope had come to his own 
 again, and the French bugles sounded the diane 
 down the long Italian streets until a day in August 
 of 1870, when the red trousers marched away to the 
 sea and the great guns were booming above Metz. 
 The siege of Rome was the prelude of the Second 
 Empire, and in its queer melody one may catch the 
 dull roU of the last movement. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 191 
 
 The comedy of French politics proceeded briskly 
 through 1849. The President continued to take the 
 air in cheering crowds and to scandahse his ministers 
 by appearing in Council with the unauthorised mag- 
 nificence of striped military trousers, whilst the 
 judicious pohticians of Paris began to regard their 
 new acquisition a trifle dubiously, to wonder vaguely 
 whether they had really made the wisest choice, 
 to feel, as they contemplated that mild-mannered, 
 mysterious figure, a faint unconfessed apprehension. 
 But the elderly gentlemen who were the rising young 
 statesmen of the Second E/cpublic and had occupied 
 the same promising position under Louis Phihppe 
 (and, in some cases, Charles x.) were very sure of 
 themselves. At first they regarded their President 
 with amiable contempt ; the young fellow had been 
 so very ridiculous in his youth, and M. Barrot talked 
 of ' notre jeune homme ' with the benevolence of an 
 indulgent pedagogue, whilst the blameless M. ffhiers 
 appeared in the unusual character of a man of the 
 world with his debonair declaration : ' Nous lui 
 donnerons des femmes et nous le conduirons.^ General 
 Changarnier was even heard to refer to the chief 
 magistrate of the Republic as ' a dejected cockatoo.' 
 The President went quietly about his business, 
 presenting colours, visiting schools, inspecting troops. 
 One day he went to mass at the Invalides ; it was 
 the Emperor's anniversary, and as he knelt under 
 
192 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the great dome, he saw* in the crowd a line of tall 
 old men wearing the great boots and braided coats 
 and swinging capes which they had carried through 
 Europe under the Empire. But in the streets out- 
 side he lived in the grey hght of the Repubhc. 
 France was electing a new Assembly, and the post 
 was filled with the conflicting eloquence of circulars. 
 The wise men in Paris were nervous of a victory for 
 the revolutionary socialism which Cavaignac had 
 blown off the streets in 1848, and the active Persigny 
 was sent into the country to consult the greatest 
 soldier of the day. Marshal Bugeaud was in com- 
 mand at Lyons, and the Prince's young man went 
 by the new railway to its termiaus and finished his 
 journey by boat. The Marshal was prepared to 
 concentrate eighty thousand men round Lyons and, 
 if the socialists won too many seats for his taste, to 
 march northwards and join hands with Changarnier 
 in the Paris command. AU one night he sat with 
 Persigny as the results came in, and in the morning 
 they could see that the country had voted against 
 socialism and there was not yet a need for the 
 army to save (as the expression went) society. In 
 Paris the elder statesmen were still more mUitant. 
 There were a few arrests, and when a respectful 
 crowd shouted ' Vive Napoleon / ' Changarnier 
 thought his President a fool for postponing a coup 
 d'etat : it was an opinion which the General was to 
 revise. There had been a vigorous campaign by 
 the Bonapartists ; a committee of old soldiers 
 demanded a Chamber of true believers; an enter- 
 prising banker urged in a circular that the Presi- 
 dency should be prolonged into a Consulate of ten 
 years; and the loyal group which had fought the 
 
THE PRESIDENT 193 
 
 Prince's elections in 1848 took the field again. 
 The results were a singular rebuff for the Bona- 
 partists. Five million voters had sent the President 
 to the Elysee. But they were not equal to the 
 mental effort of sending his supporters to the 
 Chamber, and he was only represented in the 
 Assembly by a small group ; the rest of the Chamber ' 
 was preponderantly conservative, but it was com- 
 pletely out of sympathy with the Prince. A majority 
 could more easily have been obtained in the Assembly 
 of 1849 for a Bourbon restoration than for any 
 concession to Bonapartism ; and M. Bonaparte 
 presided imperturbably over Ftance with an ex- 
 ecutive which he did not control and a legislature 
 in which his views were barely represented. 
 
 But the Prince was not, was never in a hurry. 
 He had waited for forty years to return to France. ^ 
 Now he was in France, he was President of the 
 Republic ; and if his friends were beaten at the 
 polls, if poUcy was controlled for the moment by 
 an hierarchy of solemn old gentlemen, he could 
 afford to wait. It was enough for him in 1849 
 that the country had accepted the Prince ; one 
 day, if all went well, it would accept Bonapartism 
 as well. But the socialists were in no such easy 
 mood. They, like the Bonapartists, had been sub- 
 merged in the conservative flood at the elections. 
 But they were disincHned to accept the decision 
 and invoked once more the democratic argument 
 of the barricades. In the second week of June, 
 while the guns were booming on the Janiculan and 
 Paris was fighting dismally against the cholera, they 
 used shrill language in the Chamber, printed wild 
 abuse of the Government, and invited Paris to 
 
194 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 demonstrate by a great procession against the war 
 on Rome. It was a manifestation of the famLliar 
 type which had made history twelve months before. 
 Under the Provisional Government men in thou- 
 sands would have marched shouting through the 
 streets and M. de Lamartine would have addressed 
 them (eloquently or inaudibly, according to their 
 position in the crowd) on the great square before 
 the Hotel de Ville. The Presidency was less sym- 
 pathetic. As the procession passed down the bou- 
 levards (it was a little before one o'clock in the 
 afternoon of June 13, 1849), the Dragoons came 
 riding up the Rue de la Paix from the Place Vendome. 
 The great crowd was crossing the end of the street ; 
 and the troops took it sideways, cut the procession 
 in two, and cleared the streets. The manoeuvre 
 was an unheroic but welcome substitute for the 
 more familiar forms of street-fighting. Across Paris 
 at the Conservatoire there was a faint attempt at 
 insurrection. A few deputies, with the loud voice 
 of M. Ledru-RoUin at their head, startled the curator 
 and seized the empty building. But four companies 
 of infantry and a few shots scattered the defenders ; 
 and when the President with a staff of generals and 
 a squadron of Lancers rode out in the afternoon, 
 the crowd stood cheering in the Place de la Concorde. 
 It was about six o'clock when he stood in the Elysee 
 again, and he turned with a significant laugh to the 
 trim Changarnier, saying : ' Yes, General, it has 
 been a good day, a very good day. But you rode 
 me very fast past the Tuileries.' 
 
 France had once more a government which could 
 
 X keep order in the streets of Paris, but it was not yet 
 
 the government of the Prince. He seemed content 
 
THE PRESIDENT 195 
 
 in that first year of the Presidency to make cere- 
 monial gestures before provincial audiences. Whilst- 
 the Chamber was asserting its devotion to authority 
 and his ministers were curtailing the freedom of the 
 press, the Prince was deferring amiably to his 
 advisers (he never was heard to say ' Je veux,^ but 
 always ' Ne vous semble-t-il pas ? ) or touring the 
 provinces with a repertory of blameless speeches. 
 At Chartres he opened a railway and spoke of 
 Henri iv. ; at Amiens he presented colours and 
 spoke of the blessings of peace ; at Ham he pro- 
 posed a toast and spoke of the wickedness of pre- 
 tenders. With practice and in spite of an excellent 
 education he was acquiring that air of happy 
 commonplace which among pubUc speakers distin- 
 guishes reigning princes. The summer went on, 
 and the President went mildly up a royal avenue 
 of foundation stones. Railways, which had so 
 recently been the speculative rage in England, 
 were spreading irregularly across France, and each 
 new section of the system was opened by a dull-eyed 
 President with a large moustache. At Angers a 
 bishop blessed him as the protector of the Pope ; 
 all down the Loire to Nantes he steamed between 
 cheering crowds and clanging belfries ; and at Tours 
 he struck an attitude of injured innocence and denied 
 the malicious imputation that he was an ambitious 
 man. His hearers were gravely adjured to observe 
 his modesty and to dismiss all suspicions as to his 
 intentions. But this effective display of political 
 virtue was marred, in official circles, by an unfortun- 
 ate question as to his private behaviour. The blonde 
 Miss Howard had followed him to France. In Paris, 
 by a concession to romance more familiar under the 
 
\ 
 
 196 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 monarchical than the republican form of govern- 
 ment, she occupied an equivocal position as his 
 unofficial wife, and he was even accompanied on 
 tour by this unusual consort. At Tours she was 
 accommodated, by some official indiscretion, in the 
 house of an irritable public servant, then on leave ; 
 in a temper of prudery or patriotism he resented 
 the intrusion of the blonde lady from Berkeley 
 Street ; a complaint was made to Paris, and the 
 President was called to account by his elderly 
 preceptors. He repUed in a romantic vein, lament- 
 ing his loneliness in France without friends, without 
 family, without (it was the sad fate of princes) a 
 wife, and taking a tone of proud apology (' Je m^avoue 
 coupable de chercher dans des liens illegitimes une 
 affection dont mon cceur a besoin '). It was queer 
 to see the chief magistrate of a Repubhc, who was 
 holding great audiences in Champagne and Nor- 
 mandy, pleading to his ministers hke a nervous 
 nephew before a tribunal of inexorable uncles ; 
 but it was a clear sign that the old gentlemen still 
 held him captive. 
 
 Slowly, in his patient way, the Prince turned to 
 the government of France and began gently, blandly, 
 without hurry, to lay hold on the executive. He 
 seemed inclined at first to secure a control of foreign 
 policy through the embassies ; his explosive cousin 
 Napoleon was sent to Madrid and rocketed through 
 that solemn gloom in a blaze of indiscretions, whilst 
 Persigny went o& into Germany and startled Berlin 
 and Vienna with a vivacious course of lectures on 
 the mission of the Bonapartes. French diplomacy 
 was controlled officially by the judicious M. de 
 Tocqueville and a discreet personnel. But the 
 
THE PRESIDENT 197 
 
 President seemed to give it a more lively turn 
 when he urged an ambassador bound for Rome 
 to look up his old Italian friends in the Carbonari. 
 Gradually he took a hand himself ; and as the Pope 
 fumbled suspiciously with the resettlement of Rome, 
 Louis Napoleon accelerated the deliberations of the 
 Cardinals with a calculated indiscretion. An officer 
 was sent from Paris with a letter stating the Presi- 
 dent's views ; they were lucid and Liberal, with a 
 firm injunction to the Pope to secularise the public 
 services and confer upon the Romagna the modern 
 blessings of the Code Napoleon. The letter drifted 
 about Rome, got into print, and came echoing back 
 to France. The Pope nervously withdrew to the 
 more restful neighbourhood of Vesuvius. The Car- 
 dinals fluttered apprehensively about Rome. But 
 the agitation was greatest in the solemn shades of 
 M. Barrot's ministry, where the elder statesmen were 
 startled into vivacity by the spectacle of their gentle 
 President in an unaccustomed attitude of command. 
 The rash young man had formed a policy ; he had 
 sent a curt order to the Pope through a Colonel 
 Edgar Ney ; and, worst of all, he had spoken in 
 the name of France, which the Constitution had 
 put so scrupulously into commission. If France 
 was to be found anywhere, it was believed in poHtical 
 circles to reside in M. Thiers' drawing-room when a 
 number of old gentlemen were present sufficient to 
 form a quorum. There was a genteel explosion in 
 Paris when the President's demarche became known, 
 and the level tones of his advisers rose an octave. 
 They defended him without enthusiasm in the 
 Chamber ; and as the autumn went on, he persisted 
 steadily in his independence. A fresh instalment 
 
198 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 of the veterans of Strasburg and Boulogne received 
 decorations, and the paladins of Bonapartism were 
 enrolled in a Friendly Society. An urbane figure 
 was brought to the Prince's table by a friend, and 
 Louis saw for the first time his mother's other living 
 son, M. de Morny, who was to personify so much 
 of the Second Empire with his elegant patronage of 
 the stage-door and his faint flavour of the Bourse, 
 was an adroit person, something in the taste of one 
 of Balzac's heroes : he would have known the 
 Nucingens and married well. He had started (since 
 he was Flahaut's son) in the cavalry. But he drifted 
 from Algeria into business and then (since politics 
 were business also) into the Chamber under Louis 
 Philippe. He had his mother's charm, pleased all 
 the world, and smoked cigars, with a great reputation 
 for political sense. The Elysee was slowly develop- 
 ing a party of its own ; and as the President stiffened 
 his grip upon policy, his ministers withdrew to their 
 studies and waited for the bowstring. Suddenly, on 
 an October afternoon, he sent a message in the 
 American fashion to the Assembly. It announced 
 with perfect assurance that there had been a change 
 of government ; the President felt that control of 
 the executive should be undivided and had appointed 
 ministers ' who had as much regard for his re- 
 sponsibfiity as for their own.' Their policy was 
 simple : 
 
 ' Le nom de Napoleon est a lui seul tout un 'programme. 
 II veut dire : d I'interieur, ordre, autorite, religion, 
 hien-etre du peuple ; d I'exterieur, dignite nationale. 
 C'est une politique, inauguree par mon election, que je 
 veux faire triompher avec Vappui de V Assemblee et celui 
 du peuple.' 
 
THE PRESIDENT 199 
 
 The President was master of the executive ; and his 
 elderly advisers observed his gesture of authority 
 with something of the bewilderment with which hens, 
 in Persigny's pleasing image, observe the first naviga- 
 tion of a duck whom they have unintentionally 
 helped into the world. 
 
 The ministry with which Louis Napoleon faced 
 the world at the end of October 1849 was unim- 
 pressive ; but it was his own. There was no Prime 
 Minister, since the Prince intended to preside at 
 his own Council ; and amongst the names there 
 were some — Rouher, Parieu, Fould — which have the 
 metallic ring of the S^ond Empire. One was a 
 banker ; two were lawyers from the provinces whom 
 Morny had recruited for the Elysee. Rouher, who 
 was under forty, was a persistent young man from 
 Auvergne, who had come to Paris from his country 
 town with high professional abilities and that 
 appetite, with which they are so often accompanied, 
 for public employment. His affections were trans- 
 ferred with a rapidity which kept pace with the 
 movement of affairs from the King to Lamartine, 
 and from Lamartine to Cavaignac, and from Cavai- 
 gnac, when his time came, to the President. In an 
 age of fanatics he was a political agnostic and, if he 
 beheved anything, beHeved only that men required 
 to be governed since they could not govern them- 
 selves. He possessed as a speaker and a thinker 
 the fatal facihty of a good advocate, and there was 
 something of the successful lawyer in his almost 
 total illiteracy. Untouched by the great movements 
 which had set young men brawling over the perspec- 
 tive of M. Delacroix or the verses of M. Victor Hugo, 
 he was to be found in his early days roaring choruses 
 
200 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 or dancing in uncritical quarters where Classics and 
 Homantics met on equal terms, and as a minister 
 declining to claim for the state the copyright of 
 Saint-Simon's Memoires because the state could have 
 no use for ' the Memoirs of that fool of a sociahst.' 
 In the Chamber and in administration he was as 
 efficient as any other mechanical device, and he 
 began in 1849 an association with the Prince which 
 was hardly to end until the German cavalry rode 
 round his great house at Cergay. 
 
 The President had formed his ministry, and it 
 remained to govern France with it. He had absorbed 
 the executive, and the world, which had known him 
 as ' M. Bonaparte,' was learning to call him ' Louis 
 Napoleon ' and sometimes ' the Prince.' At first he 
 seemed to be supported by the Assembly. His 
 ministers stood firm in the rising tide of socialism, 
 and their firmness was appreciated by politicians 
 who were increasingly alarmed by the waning 
 popularity of government and its symptoms in the 
 emergence of M. Victor Hugo as the organ-voice of 
 democracy and the election of M. Eugene Sue for 
 Paris on a platform artfully combined of socialism 
 and serial stories. Public meetings were restricted ; 
 journahsm was supervised ; the franchise was re- 
 duced. It almost seemed in the first months of 
 1850 that the President, having mastered the ex- 
 ecutive, would live in peace with the Chamber. 
 The elder statesmen resumed their consultations 
 and talked interminably with a wealth of historical 
 parallel and good advice : perhaps the prodigal 
 President would repent of his independence, recall 
 them to office, or at least act on their advice. But 
 gradually, in the steadily growing uproar of Bona- 
 
THE PRESIDENT 201 
 
 partism, their voices grew fainter and died away, 
 and the noble figures who had once posed as a Roman 
 Senate became the twittering chorus of a Greek 
 tragedy, recording in a minor key the course of 
 events, upon which their ululations produced not 
 the sHghtest effect. M. Thiers was torn between 
 the duties of a parhamentary Opposition and the 
 increasing royalties of the Consulate and Empire. 
 But when the tone of the Bonapartists rose and 
 distinguished journaHsts began to write openly of 
 the Empire, the politicians took fright. It seemed 
 slowly to dawn on the Orleanists that the Presidency 
 was unlikely to end in a Bourbon restoration, and 
 the republicans began to be uncertain whether, when 
 it ended, the Republic would still survive. This 
 queer mixture of motives aligned the Assembly 
 against the President, and French pohtics in 1850 
 became a duel between the executive and the 
 legislature. 
 
 /Whilst the Chamber gave an exhibition of its peev- 
 ishness in a puerile attempt to limit the President's 
 expenditure, Louis Napoleon continued to cultivate 
 his popularity in the provinces. Wherever a new 
 line of railway was to be found, the Prince was at the 
 station in a cheering crowd. In the summer he went 
 into the north with the bataillon sacre of Bonapartism, 
 Conneau, Vaudrey, Ney, and Fleury. At every town 
 the bells rang, the fire brigade was inspected, and 
 there was a speech about the President's love of his 
 country. Then he turned southwards, and the 
 shouting rolled away down France. At Sens he 
 fought his way through a battle of flowers ; at 
 Dijon there was a great ball, and two days before 
 the Prince drove in, there was not a pair of gloves 
 
202 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 to be bought in the town and a single tailor had 
 taken more than 5000 francs in dress coats : it was 
 an inelegant function for a friend of Lady Blessing- 
 ton. The provincials stood in the sunshine roaring 
 ' Vive Napoleon / ' and sometimes ' Vive VEmpereur ! ' 
 and the President scarcely heard the name of the 
 Republic until he was on the steamboat between 
 Macon and Lyons, when the official cortege on the 
 paddle-boxes was scandalised by the sudden pro- 
 trusion from the river of a hygienic sociaUst wearing 
 the simple uniform of Eden and shouting ' Vive la 
 Bepublique sociale ! ' At Lyons, which French ad- 
 ministrators have always regarded with a nervous 
 eye, the cheers were louder than ever. But at 
 Besangon, as the Prince moved up towards the 
 eastern frontier, there was a mutter of hostility. 
 Then, by way of Belfort and Colmar, he came to 
 Strasburg : it was fourteen years since he had 
 driven in by the Colmar road to a lodging taken in 
 a false name. The cheers, the flowers, and the 
 speeches went on in the summer weather of 1850. 
 Alsace and Lorraine ran shouting by his carriage ; 
 at Metz the King of Prussia sent his respects, 
 and on the bare hill of Gravelotte (the war and the 
 Prussian guns were twenty years away) they had 
 made a Httle triumphal arch. Then the cheers roUed 
 westwards beyond Paris, and he went into Normandy. 
 The quiet man seemed suddenly to catch their 
 meaning, to see that France wanted something 
 further of him. His tone rose, and at Caen he 
 spoke of his new duty to the state : 
 
 ' Bi des jours orageux devaient reparaitre et que le 
 peuple voulut imposer un nouveau fardeau au chef du 
 
THE PRESIDENT 203 
 
 gouvernement, ce chef, a son tour, serait bien coupable 
 de deserter cette haute mission.' 
 
 He had appealed from the Chamber to the country, 
 and the crowds had answered him. Parisian poHti- 
 cians might gesticulate angrily at his name. But 
 before larger audiences he was remembered by 
 churchmen as the defender of the Pope and by the 
 mass of Frenchmen as the nephew of the Emperor. 
 It remained only to captivate the army. The 
 Napoleonic incantation had a strange power over 
 the troops, and the President had taken every 
 opportunity to make himself known in the service. 
 But the Chamber, in its duel with the Prince, clung 
 to the hope that it would retain the aifections of 
 the armed forces of the Republic. Armies are rarely 
 enamoured of parhaments ; but the dominant figure 
 of the French army in 1850 was a Parliament man. 
 General Changarnier, who held the Paris command 
 and was at the head of the National Guard, was a 
 trim military gentleman with a supreme sense of 
 his own importance. In an age when a Mexican 
 profusion of generals abounded in French politics, 
 he carried himself with the air of France's only 
 soldier. There were moments when he was half 
 inchned to yield to the Prince's vague offers of a 
 golden future and a Marshal's baton ; but they 
 came to him mostly when he was on horseback with 
 the thundering cheers of an army in his ears. In 
 his great headquarters in the Tuileries he decided, 
 under his brown wig, to maintain an impassive 
 exterior (they caUed him the Sphinx) and to become 
 the chosen soldier of the Assembly. The salons, 
 which were still Bourbon territory, abused their 
 
204 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 master and tittered more divertingly than ever 
 about the ' perroquet malade ' under whose Presi- 
 dency they Hved. At the autumn reviews of 1850 
 the President tested the feehngs of the army. The 
 guns and the Line passed the saluting base in silence ; 
 but the cavalry went by with a great roar of ' Vive 
 Napoleon ! Vive VEmpereur ! ' There was an issue 
 of treble pay and extra rations, and anxious politi- 
 cians began to complain that the RepubHc's reviews 
 at Sjiint-Maur and Satory had been turned (there 
 was a considerable consumption of cold ham and 
 stimulants) into al fresco Bonapartist picnics. A 
 dithyrambic gentleman of the press was inspired to 
 an ode in one hundred and twenty verses, terminat- 
 ing with an apocalyptic invocation to Napoleon as 
 ' Empereur Messie ' and ' Christ- SoldaV But Chan- 
 garnier openly expressed his disapproval of the 
 demonstrations and stood boldly between the Presi- 
 dent and the control of the army. 
 
 Bonapartist enthusiasm rose to a shriller pitch. 
 Someone pubHshed a historical study of the blessings 
 of military dictatorship ; questions began to be 
 asked about the great Societe du Dix-Decemhre, and 
 a minister (he was Baroche, a name of the Second 
 Empire) explained the harmlessness of Friendly 
 Societies ; but there was a growing throng round 
 the Elysee of gaunt, hungry figures wearing long 
 buttoned coats in the image of Ratapoil, avid for 
 employment and ready to flourish their great mus- 
 cadin sticks and shout for ' — poleon ' on the streets 
 of Paris. The executive made a move against 
 Changarnier in the transfer of his best subordinate 
 to a provincial command. The General retorted 
 with elaborate discourtesy in Council and a prohibi- 
 
THE PRESIDENT 205 
 
 tion in army orders of demonstrations on parade. 
 The politicians stared suspiciously at every act of 
 the Elysee ; and the demand for a plot, to which 
 Titus Gates had reacted so sympathetically in his 
 own generation, stimulated an obliging official to 
 produce a fantastic story that the Bonapartists had 
 drawn lots for the murder of Changarnier. The 
 conception was too garish even for the leaping 
 imagination of Persigny, and the feud proceeded 
 through the winter of 1850 without ever deepening 
 into melodrama. Early in the new year the dapper 
 Changarlot, whose imagination was haunted by Crom- 
 well and Monck and the other soldierly figures 
 famihar to French historical analogy, assured a 
 cheering Chamber of his devotion ' durant le combat.' 
 Morny and Persigny caught the menace of his tone 
 and slipped out to warn the President. But Louis 
 Napoleon was not easily alarmed by the General's 
 heroics. It was only a few weeks since he had said 
 in his quiet way to Rouher : ' Vous etes bien jeune, 
 monsieur Rouher. Si Von venait m'apprendre a 
 r instant meme que le general Changarnier marche 
 sur V Ely see avec les troupes qu'il commande aux 
 Tuileries, firais au-devant de lui avec les chasseurs 
 a pied qui me gardent, et ses soldats se reuniraient 
 immediatement aux miens. Monsieur Rouher, ma 
 destinee n'est pas encore accomplie ; je serai empereurf 
 In the same level tone he informed his ministers in 
 the first week of 1851 that Changarnier must go. 
 This intimation was repeated with courtesy to the 
 elder statesmen who shortly bore down upon the 
 Elysee to discharge a heavy cargo of good advice. 
 There was a nervous shower of resignations, and 
 the President was left to search for a ministry with 
 
206 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 courage to dismiss the General. Persigny ran round 
 Paris ; and one cold morning when M, de Momy 
 was out in his phaeton, his energetic friend met a 
 general in the street who felt equal to the effort. 
 The government was hastily reconstituted ; but its 
 nerve was uncertain. They sat half the night in 
 Council, and before dawn the Prince was offering to 
 replace them with a ministry of mihtant Bonapart- 
 ists. But the threat sufficed, and with the consent 
 of his ministers the President removed Changamier 
 from his command : the heavens, in spite of all 
 predictions, did not fall, and the judicious M. Thiers 
 remarked that the Empire had come. 
 
 The executive had struck the last weapon from 
 the hand of the legislature ; and as the duel moved 
 to its end, the focus of French pohtics shifted to a 
 fresh problem. The Constitution of 1848 prohibited 
 the re-election of the President for a second term. 
 The Prince was disinclined to return to private life 
 in 1852, and sane parliamentarians were unwilling 
 to drive him to extremes by maintaining the prohibi- 
 tion. The amendment of the Constitution was 
 debated through the spring and summer of 1851 
 to a running accompaniment of threats upon either 
 side. The Chamber denounced the slow dawn of 
 the Empire in every tone from the falsetto invective 
 of M. Victor Hugo to the more studied chest-notes 
 of General Changarnier's ' Mandataires de la France, 
 deliberez en paix.' The President repHed, wherever 
 there was a railway to be opened or a statue to be 
 unveiled, with the grave resignation of a reluctant 
 man accepting fresh responsibilities. And the streets 
 of his capital rang with an appropriately. Parisian 
 chorus, of which the refrain was : 
 
THE PRESIDENT 207 
 
 ' Rivieion ! 
 Revision ! 
 Des lampions ! 
 
 Polkm 
 
 Nous Vaurons ! ' 
 
 The Assembly was forced to make an embarrassed 
 choice between the distasteful alternatives of in- 
 stalling Louis Napoleon in the Presidency for a 
 second term or driving him to prolong his power 
 by an act of violence, and about midsummer it 
 chose wrong. The Constitution stood unamended, 
 and the Chamber decided that in 1852 the Prince 
 must leave the Elysee : since he was a Bonaparte, 
 he could only leave it for the Tuileries. 
 
 The struggle had become inevitable, since the 
 purists of the Assembly insisted that there could be 
 no legal prolongation of the Prince's term ; and on 
 an August day in 1851 Morny, Persigny, and Rouher 
 met the President and his Prefect of Police at 
 St. Cloud : their business was to arrange a cowp 
 d'etat. Opinion had been prepared for the shock in 
 the long weeks of the Prince's tours. He was the 
 greatest figure in the country, and his emergence 
 was favoured by a vague fear of social revolution. 
 The Church was friendly, the crowds would cheer, 
 and the army obeyed orders. It remained only to 
 make the plan and to select (since poHtics had be- 
 come a military problem) the soldiers, France had 
 lived for twenty years in the shadow of military 
 reputations made in the Algerian wars of Louis 
 Philippe. Cavaignac, Changarnier, and Lamorciere 
 filled something of the position held in the later 
 reign of Queen Victoria by Lord Roberts, Lord 
 Wolseley, and Sir Evelyn Wood. The French public 
 
208 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 had lost the habit of European warfare, but its 
 patriotic appetite found an agreeable substitute in 
 the more picturesque operations in Algeria. The 
 public imagination was obsessed by the hot African 
 glare, the slow march of the French armies across 
 the sand, and the pounding drums of the Turcos 
 as they went in shouting with the bayonet. It had 
 its Rorke's Drift at Sidi-Brahim, and the Algerian 
 razzia became the favourite background of French 
 heroism. The Caucasian races have always pre- 
 ferred their heroes slightly bronzed, and the vieux 
 Africains stood high in the favour of that great mass 
 of civilians whose vicarious mihtarism is the main- 
 spring of wars. But the senior generals were, with- 
 out exception, Parliament men ; and the Prince 
 turned for his collaborators to a younger group. 
 Reputations had been won on the frontier since the 
 older generals went into politics, and in 1851 Fleury 
 was sent to explore the African garrisons for a likely 
 team ; his excursion was financed with some diffi- 
 culty on borrowed money. On the way up to Setif 
 he stayed at Constantine with a brigadier named 
 Saint-Arnaud. He was a queer, raffish figure who 
 had commenced life in the army, abandoned it for 
 a mysterious interlude behind the footlights or a 
 counter, and returned to the service to make a 
 name under Bugeaud. The man was past fifty; 
 but his ambitions remained. He was still hungry 
 and, like all ambitious men outside the circle, he 
 hated politicians. The disorder of democracy dis- 
 gusted him ; and (he had seen the streets in 1848) 
 he could write ' Je ne me laisserai jamais dominer 
 par la rue.' Fleury reported to Paris that he had 
 found a man for the work ; but his discovery was 
 
THE PRESIDENT 209 
 
 short of laurels, and the President took the singular 
 step of fabricating a reputation for him with an 
 unnecessary war. The Republic gravely took the 
 field against the Kabyles ; Saint- Arnaud was in 
 command and his operations were followed breath- 
 lessly by the Parisian press. He marched into the 
 interior, startled the tribes, and restored the peace 
 which he had interrupted. There was an impressive 
 fanfare of bulletins, and France had a new hero. 
 Late in the summer they brought him to Paris. 
 The President had found in the jeune Afrigue his 
 counterpoise to the older reputations. Saint- Arnaud 
 was given a division, and he brought with him a 
 Colonel Espinasse who was well quaUfied to purge a 
 parhament by his three failures at the Staff College. 
 There were likely men among the Paris brigadiers, 
 Forey had a command (the Empire was to send him 
 into Mexico), and with him a colonel of Zouaves 
 named Canrobert. Slowly in the African sunshine 
 the soldiers of the Second Empire seemed to be 
 taking their places for the piece. Pelissier, a Crimean 
 reputation, commanded at Oran ; Vinoy (one seems 
 to hear in the name the slow booming of the Prussian 
 guns over Paris) was still in Africa, and the Turcos 
 marched behind a dark young colonel, whilst aU the 
 
 world sang : 
 
 ' Ce chic exquis 
 Par les Turcos acquis, 
 lis le doivenl a qui ? 
 A Bourhaki ! ' 
 
 It was a man who was to see the running fights 
 across the snow of 1871 and the slow, trailing march 
 of a beaten army over the Jura into Switzerland. 
 And somewhere in the shadow there was (the 
 
 o 
 
210 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 names are growing ominous) a Colonel Fran9ois 
 Bazaine. 
 
 The cast for the coup d'etat was almost complete. 
 General Magnan, who had refused a Bonapartist 
 bribe at Lille in 1840, was brought to the Paris 
 command : he asked no questions. Saint- Arnaud 
 began to study his part hastily, and the plan grew 
 into cold precision under the quiet hands of the 
 President. In the autumn the piece was ready. 
 Opinion was duly alarmed by a lurid pubUcation 
 on the Spectre rouge, and it was thought that society 
 was wiUing to be saved. The date of the production 
 was fixed for a day in September ; but Saint- Arnaud 
 declined to proceed until the Chamber was sitting. 
 There was a shulHe of ministers. An energetic 
 official named de Maupas was promoted Prefect of 
 Police, and Saint-Arnaud went to the Ministry of 
 War. The Assembly met in a nervous mood. Paris 
 was full of odd stories, and the President was to be 
 seen in the autumn mist riding in the Champ de 
 Mars to have a word with General Canrobert and 
 watch his men on parade. Whilst the Chamber was 
 drifting into a wrangle as to its own authority to 
 command the army, the Prince told half the truth 
 of his design in a public speech : 
 
 ' Si jamais le jour du danger arrivait, je ne ferais pas 
 comme les gouvernements qui m'ont precede, et je ne 
 vous dirais pas : "Marchez, je vou^ suis." Mais je vous 
 dirais : " Je mar die, suivez-moi / " ' 
 
 The days grew shorter and colder. The Paris streets 
 
 began to sing : 
 
 ' Nous Vaurons ! 
 Nous Vaurons ! 
 — Louis Napoleon I ' 
 
THE PRESIDENT 211 
 
 The President was challenged daily by his Parlia- 
 ment, and in his slow way he prepared to answer 
 the challenge. His reply was conveyed curtly in 
 a December night by three divisions and some heavy 
 cavalry. That evening M. de Morny was seen at 
 the theatre. After the play he looked in at the 
 Jockey Club, and two hours later they had changed 
 the history of France. 
 
212 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 VI 
 
 On the night of December 1, 1851, there was a winter 
 mist over Paris. At the Elysee there were lights in 
 the windows, and a sound of dance-music drifted 
 into the night. It was one of the Prince's Monday 
 evenings, and the President moved slowly among 
 his guests, smihng vaguely under his heavy mous- 
 tache. He said a few words to a young Prefet named 
 Haussmann ; and as the dance went on, he stood 
 by the fire and talked to a colonel of the National 
 Guard. The elegant M. de Morny came on from a 
 first night at the Opera Comique, and after ten he 
 walked through the rooms with the President on 
 the way down to his study : in the last room there 
 was a portrait of their mother. Saint- Arnaud and 
 the Prefect of Police had sHpped out of the party, 
 and some one fetched Persigny. In the study six 
 men talked quietly whilst the band in the ball-room 
 was playing a cotillon. Maupas and Saint-Arnaud 
 went through the time-table of the night. The 
 Prince took up a file of papers and gave out the 
 draft of a decree and some proclamations : on the 
 outside of the packet he had written the word 
 Rubicon. Then he handed 10,000 francs to Saint- 
 Arnaud for issue to the troops. Morny said some- 
 thing apt, and the President took each of his men 
 by the hand. Before eleven the carriages drove 
 away in the darkness, and the lights went out at 
 the Elysee. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 213 
 
 Across Paris in the winter night the printers were 
 setting up the proclamations with armed men stand- 
 ing at every door. Saint- Arnaud sent his orders to 
 General Magnan for the troops to move before dawn, 
 and then (he was a desperate man of fifty-three, but 
 he had once been on the stage) he yielded to the 
 conventions of French drama and wrote eloquently 
 to his mother. At the Prefecture of Police M. de 
 Maupas sat writing by his lamp in the night ; it 
 was two o'clock when his men were fetched out of 
 their beds by an order to report to the Prefect, and 
 between then and half -past four they filed through 
 his room to get their orders. One by one he in- 
 structed them to arrest the party-leaders of the 
 Chamber in their beds before dawn, and at five in 
 the morning his men began to move across Paris : 
 it was the Prince's answer to the Assembly. At 
 the Chamber itseK Colonel Espinasse slipped in 
 through a gate ; some officials were arrested, and 
 the 42nd of the Line marched in. An early train 
 from the south steamed into the Gare de Lyon, and 
 M. Emile OUivier went quietly home across Paris. 
 It was still dark when the police began to knock at 
 the doors of the statesmen. Changarnier came out 
 with two pistols in his hands ; Cavaignac banged 
 a table and relapsed into gloomy indifference ; 
 M. Thiers sat on his bed in a night-shirt and delivered 
 a considerable speech. But by seven o'clock they 
 were all at Mazas, and the collective wisdom of the 
 Chamber had been transferred by a simple operation 
 to the courtyard of a prison. Outside in Paris the 
 troops were marching through the empty streets in 
 the grey light ; six brigades moved silently into 
 position, and in barracks forty thousand men were 
 
214 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 under arms in support. Before dawn bill-posters 
 under police escort had covered the town with 
 proclamations by the Prince, and at the Ministry 
 of the Interior M. de Morny was explaining to a 
 startled minister that he was his successor. The 
 Prince had struck his blow ; and as the sun came 
 up over Paris, the Deux-Decembre passed into history. 
 It was broad dayHght when the town began to 
 read the news on the hoardings. They found a curt 
 decree by the President dissolving the Assembly 
 and proclaiming martial law. It was accompanied 
 by a more reasoned appeal to ' the one sovereign 
 that I recognise in France — the people.' The fac- 
 tious opposition of the Chamber was denounced ; 
 the Prince's high mission — ' to end the age of revolu- 
 tion ' — was proclaimed ; and the country was asked 
 to vote upon a new Constitution with a head elected 
 for ten years. It was a Consulate on the Napoleonic 
 model. In the streets they stared at the proclama- 
 tions and hurried on to work. Scared Deputies 
 began to get the news, and someone brought it to 
 M. Victor Hugo as he was working in bed. On the 
 Place de la Concorde a captain of Chasseurs a pied 
 was reading a proclamation to a circle of his men. 
 It was addressed to the army, reminding the troops 
 of their humiliation by the crowds in 1830 and 1848 ; 
 it spoke of their common interest with the Prince 
 (' Voire histoire est la mienne. II y a entre nous, dans 
 le passe, communaute de gloire et de malheur . . .') 
 and it made a grave appeal : 
 
 ' Aujourd'hui, en ce moment solennel, je veux que 
 I'armee fasse entendre sa voix.' 
 
 The men cheered : Paris was indifferent, but the 
 
THE PRESIDENT 215 
 
 army was with the President. At the Elysee there 
 was a great coining and going of mounted men, and 
 about ten o'clock the Prince rode out of the great 
 gate to a shout of ' Vive VEmpereur ! ' from the 
 Cuirassiers in the courtyard. He trotted out into 
 Paris with his staff behind him, riding clear of the 
 escort without turning to speak. Saint-Arnaud, 
 Magnan, Fleury, Excelmans, and Ney rode with him 
 and the old King of Westphalia : it was a queer 
 procession of the two Empires. On the Place de 
 la Concorde there was a roar of ' Vive VEmpereur ! ' 
 and then they fell to shouting ' Aux Tuileries ! Aux 
 Tuileries ! ' The great gates swung open and the 
 Prince went in at a gaUop. But the old King said 
 a word in his ear ; and before they reached the 
 palace he turned his horse. Then they rode through 
 the streets for an hour and more. The troops 
 cheered steadily, but sometimes there was a shout 
 of ' Vive la Republique ! ' from the pavement. Paris 
 had not quite lost its taste for politics. 
 
 There was a feeble gesture by the poUticians. 
 Their leaders were in prison ; but there was still, 
 there was always, M. Odilon Barrot. At his house 
 and others breathless statesmen held little meetings 
 in the morning. There was even an abortive sitting 
 of the Chamber itself, where a few Deputies slipped 
 in through an unguarded door. But a peroration 
 is an unhandy weapon against the bayonet, and 
 these gatherings pursued a uniform and unheroic 
 course of striking Roman attitudes until the arrival 
 of the military and then dispersing under protest. 
 Even M. Victor Hugo caught the infection of futihty. 
 When someone asked him at a meeting, ' Hugo, que 
 voulez-vous faire ? ' he replied in his best staccato 
 
216 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 vein, ' TouV But since time was not available for 
 this comprehensive programme, he confined himself 
 to a more limited proposal that one hundred and 
 fifty Deputies of the Left should march ' procession- 
 nellement ' through the streets decorated with tri- 
 colour sashes and ejaculating at regular intervals 
 ' Vive la Repuhlique / Vive la Constitution / ' It 
 was a strange expedient ; and his colleagues, who 
 were less habituated to the theatre, refused their 
 parts. They preferred to spend a confused morning 
 in drawing-room meetings, in the street, arguing 
 with soldiers, with passers-by, with one another, until 
 they were headed oS by a chance suggestion and 
 tramped hopefully down the road to a Mairie near 
 the Chamber. A polite crowd began to shout ' Vive 
 V Assemhlee ! ' and about eleven in the morning, 
 when the President was riding on his rounds, more 
 than two hundred Deputies met in a large first-floor 
 room for the last sitting of the Chamber. After an 
 agreeable interval for the exchange of anecdotes 
 they settled down under the direction of M. Berryer 
 to an orgy of rapid legislation comparable to the 
 best efforts of governments in war-time. They 
 decreed that the President was deposed ; they 
 decreed that executive authority was vested in the 
 Assembly ; they decreed that the National Guard 
 should be called out ; they decreed that their col- 
 leagues should be released from prison ; they decreed 
 the transfer of the miHtary command to General 
 Oudinot, and even that someone at the door should 
 refrain from obstructing the entrance. But their 
 proceedings were closured by the arrival of the 
 mihtary, and General Forey's infantry cleared the 
 room. The Deputies filed out under arrest, and 
 
THE PRESIDENT 217 
 
 the Chasseurs a pied marched them in the grey 
 December afternoon between fixed bayonets to the 
 barraqks on the Quai d'Orsay. The President had 
 made his reply to the Chamber. 
 
 There was a little shouting in the streets, but Paris 
 did not move. Constitutions in 1851 seemed made 
 to be violated, and the outrage left no impression 
 on the public mind. Loud-voiced men sang the 
 Marseillaise with an air of defiance, and M. Victor 
 Hugo startled an omnibus on the boulevards by 
 protruding suddenly from its window to convey 
 to a passing regiment of Cuirassiers his opinion of 
 their degradation. But the scattered sounds seemed 
 to echo in a dismal silence. The church bells were 
 not clashing in alarm, and there were no drums 
 beating to call out the National Guard, because a 
 cautious executive had stove them in. The town 
 was still ; and as the evening closed in after the short 
 December day, there was a fine rain falling and the 
 streets were filled with the clank and jingle of heavy 
 cavalry on the move. 
 
 The President had devised a singular celebration 
 of the anniversary of Austerlitz, and his capital 
 seemed strangely indifferent. Paris on that Tuesday 
 night was almost quiet. The great vans rumbled 
 out of the barracks on to the Quai d'Orsay taking 
 the Deputies to prison, and up on the boulevards 
 some men hooted a regiment on the march. M. Victor 
 Hugo hurried down back streets pullulating with 
 laconic eloquence, and there were a few sketchy 
 attempts at barricades. But the great town lay 
 silent under the night mist, and M. de Maupas' 
 discreet agents, in their anxiety for public repose, 
 took the belfries under police protection and cut 
 
218 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the bell-ropes. M. Victor Hugo spent the night on 
 a sofa and slipped out in the dawn to pursue the 
 agreeable pastime of tearing down the President's 
 posters. In the morning there was a sputter of 
 insurrection. The troops were out after sunrise, 
 and before ten they were shooting at three carts 
 and an omnibus which lay across the street : a 
 Deputy named Baudin struck a brave attitude and 
 was shot dead. But the barricades were cleared, 
 and M. Victor Hugo was left shouting abuse out of 
 a cab at a general on the Place de la Bastille. A 
 few Deputies flitted about Paris legislating in little 
 rooms, abounding in republican eloquence, mutter- 
 ing to workmen, gesticulating obscurely in the 
 shadow of a city which declined to revolt. The 
 troops marched back to barracks, and the streets 
 were left to the crowds ; General Magnan was in- 
 disposed to fumble with the barricades, and his plan 
 was to withdraw his men, to let the insurrection 
 gather and take form, and then to return in force 
 and break it. All that night Paris was filled with 
 strange stories of revolt : Reims had risen, Lyons 
 and Marseilles were up, the army was marching on 
 Paris, and, strangest of all, the Comte de Chambord, 
 who reigned in theory as Henri v., was at Saint- 
 Germain in the uniform of a trooper of Dragoons. 
 They were all false. Nothing moved in Paris on 
 the night of December 3 except the torches, where 
 they were building barricades in the darkness, and 
 two prison vans which turned into the Gare du Nord 
 between midnight and dawn behind a Lancer escort 
 to set down Cavaignac and Changarnier. The cowp 
 d'etat consigned them, by a pleasing irony, to Ham. 
 When the sun came up on December 4 (it was a 
 
THE PRESIDENT 219 
 
 Thursday morning), there were no troops in the 
 streets of Paris. The barricades were up, and the 
 police were busily tearing down the placards of the 
 insurrection. The morning was uneasy, and it was 
 after one o'clock when the barrack gates swung back 
 and the army of Paris came marching out into the 
 town. The infantry went in silence without bands 
 or bugle-marches, and the field-guns clanked down 
 the streets past the shuttered shops ; sometimes a 
 crowd on the pavement shouted ' Vive la Bepublique ! 
 Vive la Constitution ! A has les pretoriens ! ' The 
 columns formed up, and before dark the army had 
 broken the barricades. At one point it had done 
 worse and fired, with an evil sense of power which 
 was never forgiven to the soldiers of the Second 
 Empire, into the crowd. By the evening of Decem- 
 ber 4 the coup d'etat was over ; and the Constitu- 
 tion, which the Chamber might have amended by a 
 majority of three-quarters, had been forcibly revised 
 with a loss of something more than one hundred and 
 less than five hundred civihans. The Prince was 
 still President of the Republic, and in a few days 
 M. Victor Hugo stepped out of a train in Brussels 
 dressed with some care as a workman whose luggage 
 consisted almost entirely of the first draft of Les 
 Miserahles. 
 
 France was still a Republic, and the electors were 
 invited in the third week of December 1851 to 
 approve the new Constitution outlined by Louis 
 Napoleon in his proclamation, with its decennial 
 Presidency and its Senate and Conseil d'etat and 
 its strong flavour of the Consulate. Since Paris 
 was under control and the provinces had been 
 systematically captivated by the President in his 
 
220 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 official peregrinations, it was thought that society 
 would signify its willingness to be, as they said in 
 1851, saved. The Prince had promised to interrupt 
 the long course of revolutions in France, and the 
 vague menace of an outbreak in 1852 seemed to 
 reconcile the country to his claims. He was assisted 
 further by a strange flicker of revolution on the eve 
 of the plebiscite. As the news of the coup d'etat ran 
 through France, there was a stir among the advanced 
 parties, and with that rare ineptitude which is the 
 surest indication that men are following their natural 
 instincts they flung suddenly into insurrection. Up 
 and down the country wild-eyed men cursed the 
 allied institutions of property and the police ; the 
 red flags came out, and there was some hoarse singing 
 of the Marseillaise. A little kilUng in the south 
 flung across France the long shadow of the Spectre 
 rouge, and the Prince-President alone seemed to stand 
 for social security. The army, which was the natural 
 guardian of order and property, was in his hands, 
 and rehgion (had he not sent the troops to Rome ?) 
 seemed safe under his authority : even M. de Morny 
 was lecturing his Prefets on the observance of the 
 sabbath. It was not surprising that on December 20, 
 1851, the French electorate affirmed by plebiscite the 
 conversion of the Second RepubHc into the Second 
 Consulate ; and when they did so by seven million 
 votes, the Second Empire was not far distant. 
 
THE PRESIDENT 221 
 
 VII 
 
 In its last phase, through which it passed in the year 
 1852, the Presidency became without affectation the 
 prelude of the Empire. The news of the cowp d'etat 
 reverberated impressively in the high places of 
 Europe. Baron Stockmar composed a memorandum 
 which proved conclusively that it could not succeed, 
 and Queen Victoria took almost the gleeful tone of a 
 schoolgirl with a novelette when she wrote to her 
 dismal uncle at Brussels about ' the wonderful pro- 
 ceedings at Paris, which reaUy seem like a story 
 in a book or a play ! ' Firm government was 
 such a comfort in these days of Radicals and Red 
 Republicans, even though one owed it to one of Lady 
 Blessington's pecuhar friends. But that dreadful 
 Lord Palmerston quite spoiled it all with his irrespon- 
 sible confidences to the French ambassador when he 
 called with the news. The cowp d'etat might be a 
 blessing ; but it was intolerable that the French 
 Government should be told so by Lord Palmerston, 
 and his sovereign (with the assistance of several 
 memoranda by her Consort) insisted that Lord John 
 RusseU should demand explanations. Palmerston, 
 who had gone a little far, explained nothing. Some- 
 one had told him at dirmer that the Orleans family 
 was packing its trunks at Claremont for a raid on 
 France, and Mr. Borthwick of the Morning Post had 
 been offered exclusive narratives of a civil war which 
 the Prince de Joinville and the Due d'Aumale were 
 
222 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 about to initiate at Lille ; Joinville got as far as 
 Ostend, and Aumale posted overland from Italy. 
 But the President got his cowp in first, and the 
 Orleanist rendezvous was never kept : the Queen 
 confessed to a ' fear that poor Joinville had some 
 mad idea of going to France,' and his BraziUan 
 princess was left lamenting to her ambassador — 
 4/. ' ' ef 'pauvre moi qui dev&is etre d Paris Ze 20 ! ' Orleans 
 princes and French statesmen were equally distaste- 
 ful to Lord Palmerston, and their double defeat by 
 the Deux-Decembre evoked from him that candoiu" 
 which is fatal to Secretaries of State. The Queen 
 pressed her advantage ; Lord John was taught from 
 Windsor to be firm, and before the year was out she 
 was writing to Brussels almost in falsetto that ' Lord 
 Palmerston is no longer Foreign Secretary,'' whilst that 
 bland old gentleman explained to his friends that 
 state papers were sometimes ' written in anger by 
 a lady as well as by a Sovereign and that the differ- 
 ence between a lady and a man could not be forgotten 
 even in the case of the occupant of a throne,' and 
 clever Mr. Disraeli summed it all up in his enigmatic 
 way on the stairs at the Russian embassy (one really 
 met him everywhere) with the queer epitaph : 
 ' There was a Palmerston ! ' 
 
 But in Paris the Prince- President was imperturb- 
 ably installed. He had become a European fact ; 
 and Prince Albert, who was a student of facts, was 
 patiently reading the Idees Napoleoniennes to find 
 out, if he could, what it all signified. The meaning 
 became increasingly obvious as the new government 
 developed : it was the Empire in that queer pre- 
 liminary phase through which the first Napoleon 
 had put upon his coins the two contradictions 
 
THE PRESIDENT 223 
 
 Napoleon Empereur and Bipublique Frangaise, The 
 Republic still existed, but it had found a master. 
 Since he was to rule according to a constitution, he 
 was a constitutional monarch ; but he had the rare 
 advantage that he was to draft his own constitution. 
 The churches prayed for his name — Domine, salvum 
 fac Ludovicum Napoleonem — as though he was al- 
 ready a king ; M. Barre of the Mint was modelling 
 his profile for the new coinage in place of the 
 heavy features of the RepubUc ; and the eagles, 
 which in the years of victory had grown to be 
 the crest of his family in the eyes of Europe, 
 reappeared by his decree on the standards of the 
 French army. 
 
 Repression, since he had saved society, was the 
 first business of his ministers. The prisons of the 
 Republic were fuU of its supporters. The elder 
 statesmen were in their cells at Ham ; Mazas, Mont- 
 Valerien, and Vincennes were fiUed with Deputies 
 of the late Chamber ; and arrested democrats over- 
 flowed from the gaols of Paris and the provinces into 
 half the barracks in the country. The politicians 
 were carefully classified by M. de Morny's officials ; 
 statesmen were deported with permission to return 
 to Erance, agitators (of whom Victor Hugo was one) 
 were exiled from the territory of the Republic, and 
 innocuous persons were shown politely to the prison 
 gates. But a larger problem was presented by the 
 common prisoners. Four thousand men in Paris 
 and five times that number in the provinces were 
 still in custody ; their offences varied from active 
 sedition to unpopularity with the police, and a hasty 
 investigation was conducted by ad hoc committees 
 without the technical distractions of evidence, pro- 
 
224 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 cedure, or appeal. The decisions of the Commissions 
 mixtes, on which a general sat with a lawyer and an 
 official, cleared the prisons. There were no death 
 sentences ; but three hundred men were transported 
 to Cayenne, the guillotine, a sec of the Directoire. 
 Less than two thousand were exiled, and ten thou- 
 sand more were shipped to Algeria. The rest were 
 sent to prison or set at large, and by the spring of 
 1852 society was as good as saved. 
 
 It had for long been the tradition of French revolu- 
 tions that the brisk, decisive days of insurrection 
 should be followed by a grey period of constitutional 
 debate in which a National Assembly travelled slowly 
 up the long road back to first principles, formulated 
 interminably the Rights of Man, and drafted with 
 statesmanHke deHberation a constitution which 
 should be (unlike its three or four predecessors) 
 indisputably final. The Prince-President was dis- 
 inclined for these solemn exercises. Three com- 
 petent lawyers were requested to produce a draft. 
 But since they failed to reach finaHty in a fortnight, 
 the circle was narrowed, and the industrious Rouher 
 retired for twenty-four hours with the Constitution 
 of 1800 and a quantity of paper : he emerged with 
 a constitution in eight sections and fifty-eight 
 articles which became by a simple process the law 
 of France. With a queer ingenuity it combined 
 an omnipotent electorate with a paralytic legislature. 
 The voters would choose their master by plebiscite ; 
 but, as he said to the Austrian mi\iister, ' Je veux 
 hien etre baptise avec Veau du suffrage universel, mais 
 je u'entends pas vivre les pieds dans Veau.'' The 
 President, who was elected for ten years, absorbed 
 every power of the executive and even exercised a 
 
THE PRESIDENT 225 
 
 remarkable control over the Chamber, It met at 
 his discretion to debate legislation introduced on 
 his behalf ; its amendments were to be submitted 
 for the approval of his Conseil d'lStat, and it had no 
 power to consider Bills of its own. Its debates 
 were to be unreported except for an official minute ; 
 and since their only subject-matter was to be official 
 legislation, it was unlikely that the reading public 
 would feel the loss. There was a Senate with vague 
 powers of interpreting the Constitution (its meaning 
 seemed clear enough) ; but the Chamber had become 
 a debihtated debating-society, and it was hardly 
 surprising that ministers of state were not required, 
 were even forbidden by statute, to waste time in 
 that futile precinct. 
 
 Until an election could provide France with this 
 noble organ of legislation, the Prince-President 
 governed the country without further assistance. 
 Legislating by decret-loi, he rapidly cleared the 
 ground for the new system by elaborate measures 
 of police ; trade unions were dissolved, publicity 
 was controlled by an ingenious press law under 
 which newspaper offences were tried without the 
 embarrassment of reporters or a jury, and the 
 President's ministers displayed a complete apprecia- 
 tion of their own policy by directing the removal 
 from all buildings of the unfashionable words Liberie, 
 Egalite, Fraternite : it was time. Their social pro- 
 gramme wore an expression of despotic benevolence. 
 Governments which annihilate the political rights 
 of their subjects are normally solicitous as to their 
 creature comforts, and the decrees of the Presidency 
 displayed a laudable anxiety as to the material 
 prosperity of France. Railways, electric telegraphs, 
 
226 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Friendly Societies, land banks, pawnshops, and all 
 the apparatus of economic efficiency in the year 
 1852 were poured from the President's cornucopia 
 upon the country whose institutions he had silenced. 
 But he was disinclined to permit at this early stage 
 a free expression of opinion as to the blessings which 
 he had forced upon his countrymen. The election 
 of the muted Deputies of the new Chamber caused 
 grave misgivings, and the discreet Momy coached 
 his Prefets in the use which should be made of their 
 ' legitimate influence.' Those anxious men had 
 already been promoted by the new system to a 
 position of black-coated local omnipotence com- 
 parable to Darius' satraps or Cromwell's Major- 
 Generals ; their duties included the control of public 
 opinion by every form of censorship and delation, 
 and they were now invited to l^amper discreetly with 
 the exercise of the suffrage, to mobihse their sub- 
 ordinates in defence of the existing order, and to 
 give official support to candidates of a becoming 
 docility in the name of ' ce gouvernement loyal et 
 paterneV Preference was to be given to successful 
 business men whose practical knowledge was believed 
 to be more valuable to the state than the less rehable 
 activities of ' what are generally called poHticians ' : 
 the new Chamber was to be (the ideal has survived) 
 a parhament of experts supporting (the conception 
 is familiar) a business government. This simple- 
 minded manipulation of the electorate became a 
 standing feature of the Empire ; but within a few 
 days of his contribution to poUtical science Morny 
 left office. His retirement was accelerated by a 
 regrettable aptitude for applying official informa- 
 tion to Stock Exchange transactions ; but a more 
 
THE PRESIDENT 227 
 
 dignified pretext was found in his objection to the 
 predatory policy which confiscated by decree the 
 property of the late dynasty. There was an un- 
 pleasant flutter in Paris ; a few ministers resigned, 
 and someone made a joke about ' le 'premier vol de 
 raigle.' But whilst the susceptible consciences of 
 M. de Morny and (it seemed at Windsor ' too dreadful 
 and monstrous') Queen Victoria received a simul- 
 taneous shock, the Prince-President's government 
 was carried on by the less tender intelligence of 
 Persigny. Absorbing with a heroic gesture the 
 Ministries of Commerce, Agriculture, and the In- 
 terior, he bluntly urged his Prefets to assist their 
 Departments to return ' deux - cent - soixante et un 
 deputes, animes du meme esprit, devoues aux mimes 
 interets et disposes egalement a completer la victoire 
 populaire du 20 decembre." 
 
 The elections took place in a queer silence. It was 
 not easy for mahgnants to find printers to multiply 
 their detestable opinions or workers to distribute 
 them, and Persigny' s wishes were respected by the 
 constituencies almost to the letter. The new 
 Chamber contained eight Deputies of the Opposi- 
 tion ; the rest were sealed with the approval of 
 the Prefets. In the spring they travelled up to 
 Paris. The President received them at the Tuileries 
 and took a high tone : 
 
 ' Depuis trop longtemps la societe ressemblait d une 
 pyramide qu'on aurait retournee et voulu faire reposer 
 sur son sommet ; je I'ai replacee sur sa base.' 
 
 But in 1852 the Prince had passed beyond metaphors, 
 and he warned his legislature that if his authority 
 was questioned, if society was once more in its 
 
228 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 perennial need of being saved, why then he would 
 make a change : 
 
 ' II pourrait etre raisonnable de demander au peuple, 
 au nom du repos de la France, un nouveau litre qui 
 fixdt irrevocablement sur ma tete le pouvoir dont il m'a 
 revetu.' 
 
 There was a nervous silence, and the assembled 
 nonentities went dismally about their legislative 
 duties in the shadow of the Empire. 
 
 That shadow grew longer as the summer drew on. 
 The Prince-President began to take the airs of a 
 reigning monarch, drove to great functions at the 
 TuUeries, stood in the Champ de Mars as the 
 Emperor had stood, giving eagles to the army. 
 Paris, in the intervals of seeing the Dame aux 
 Camelias at the Vaudeville, was learning to line 
 the streets and cheer, to make its bow in a new 
 court dress to the Prince-President, to step im- 
 perceptibly out of the Republic into the Empire. 
 In the provinces Imperiahst petitions were being 
 signed, and local authorities passed loyal resolutions. 
 In the summer the President opened his last railway 
 line at Strasburg ; with an eye to the Queen at 
 Windsor he decorated the judicious Stockmar, and 
 a Colonel von Roon of the Prussian service watched 
 him drive standing and bare-headed through the 
 streets. Then for the last time he took the road 
 again with his suite and his speeches to test the 
 temper of his subjects. He said at the Elysee that 
 his tour was a question asked of France. He knew 
 the answer and would perhaps have been content 
 to let it come unassisted. He believed in stars and 
 destiny ; but Persigny was not above assisting his 
 
THE PRESIDENT 229 
 
 faith with works. Preferring art to nature, he 
 prepared a demonstration with the instruction to 
 his Prefets : ' " L' Empire ! Vive VEmpereur ! " et ne 
 nous trompons pas.'' The cheering crowds, the flags, 
 the arches overhead were ordered for Son Altesse 
 (M. Bonaparte was rising in the scale), whom one 
 circular abbreviated by a felicitous anticipation of 
 the Empire into ' S. A. /. ' ; and when he faced his 
 first audience at Bourges, a general (after a word 
 with the discreet Maupas) took the troops by with 
 a roar of ' Vive VEmpereur ! ' The cry went on 
 into the south, and at Lyons the Prince-President 
 made it his text, spoke thoughtfully of his uncle, 
 hesitated to decide ' sous quel nom je puis rendre les 
 plus grands services.^ Down the river to the sea 
 the shouting grew louder ; all Avignon was roaring 
 on the walls; Aries, Marseilles, MontpeUier joined 
 the dance and set their flags waving in a flutter of 
 Bonapartism. He was Caesar Imperator, protector 
 Franciae, lapsed into the vernacular as sauveur de la 
 propriete and ' le bienvenu dans ce pays oil Charle- 
 magne et Saint Louis ont regne.^ Then, as the cheer- 
 ing died away, he stood up in October to make his 
 last speech at Bordeaux. For a month he had Hved 
 in roaring crowds, and slowly, in his quiet way, he 
 explained the lesson. France, as it seemed, was 
 grateful for its salvation, tired of revolution, eager 
 beyond aU else for confidence and security. ' Voild 
 pourquoi la France semble vouloir revenir d F Empire. 
 II est une crainte a laquelle je dois repondre. Par 
 esprit de defiance, certaines personnes se disent : 
 r Empire, c'est la guerre. Moi, je dis : U Empire 
 c^est la paix.'' 
 
 Within seven weeks the President of the Republic 
 
230 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 was Emperor of tlie French. His Senate petitioned 
 for the Empire. There was a faint protest from the 
 exiles ; but on November 21, 1852, a plebiscite 
 approved the change by a majority of seven miUions 
 and a half on a poll of eight millions : ' Le paysan,' 
 in Jules Favre's phrase, ' voulut couronner sa legende.' 
 On a December night (it was the first of the month, 
 and the Prince kept as an anniversary the eve of 
 AusterHtz and the coup d'etat) the sentries stood in 
 the mist outside St. Cloud. Some mounted men 
 rode up with torches, and a long line of carriages 
 set down the men who were to tell Louis Napoleon 
 that he was Emperor. The Presidency was over. 
 If it had run its term under the Constitution, it 
 would have left him in 1862 with victories to his 
 name and success for his reputation ; Maximilian 
 would never have gone to Mexico or Bazaine to 
 Metz, and the world would have missed the gas-ht 
 tragedy of the Second Empire. 
 
THE EMPEROR 
 
THE EMPEROR 
 
 When the curtain went up on the Second Empire 
 and M. Bonaparte became in 1852 the bon Frire of 
 Queen Victoria, the stage seemed hardly set for the 
 tableau. France had an Emperor, and he came 
 riding down into Paris through the Arc de Triomphe 
 on a winter morning. Saint- Arnaud and Persigny 
 rode with him, and they trotted down the long hill 
 to inspect the troops on the Carrousel where the 
 Emperor had once taken the salute on his white 
 barb, and the old King had walked his horse with 
 M. Thiers at its head on a wild morning in 1848. 
 Then he dismounted and passed into the Tuileries ; 
 on the Place de la Concorde Persigny was proclaim- 
 ing his Emperor to the National Guard. That 
 evening Napoleon in. walked through the rooms 
 of his new palace ; they were full of bowing uniforms, 
 and the ofl&cial world turned gently on its axis to 
 take the first beams of the risen sun. 
 
 France had an Emperor ; but as yet the rest of 
 the Empire seemed hardly to exist. One might 
 improvise a Court from the dinner-table at the 
 Elysee. Saint- Arnaud and Magnan were promoted 
 Marshals, and the fountain of honour played in a 
 steady drizzle of decorations over the public services. 
 It was entertaining enough to make a bishop into 
 one's Grand- Almoner and to call Vaillant, who had 
 trained the guns on Rome, Grand-Marshal of the 
 
 233 
 
234 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Palace. The active Fleury might seem more 
 picturesque as Premier Ecuyer, and the Imperial 
 hunt derived an added dignity from the appoint- 
 ment of Marshal Magnan to be Grand Veneur. The 
 titles had all been worn under the First Empire, and 
 they returned with the eagles and the bees and the 
 crowned N, Even D'Orsay appeared in a sinecure 
 having some relation to the fine arts. But the scene, 
 as the players were redressed for the new tableau 
 and the lights were centred on the throne, seemed 
 haK unreal, a great charade staged by a single player 
 and hanging on his life, an Empire without a dynasty. 
 Whilst the Emperor drove bowing through his 
 streets, twisted a long moustache, and thought of 
 marriage, Europe was looking on. Anxious gentle- 
 men in Vienna argued that the second Emperor 
 could not be Napoleon m., turned up the Treaty, 
 and puUed long faces over his recognition, whilst the / 
 Czar declined to be the hon Frere of a Bonaparte. ' 
 But the Empire had retm:ned, and the Emperor sat 
 wondering before the Almanack de Goiha where he 
 should find an Empress. One could hardly, if one 
 was the eldest son of the Church, found a dynasty 
 with the blonde Miss Howard : she must be titled, 
 repaid her loans, and (if the revenue would run to it) 
 pensioned. There had been an offer under the 
 Presidency to a young lady in Germany ; she was 
 called the Princess Vasa, and Napoleon had de- 
 throned her grandfather for Bernadotte. But her 
 hand was promised, and in Paris they went back to 
 the pedigrees. The Duke of Cambridge had a 
 daughter ; there was a Braganza girl ; and a dis- 
 creet ambassador in London was perpetually asking 
 Lord Malmesbury for the address of Princess Adelaide 
 
THE EMPEROR 235 
 
 of Hohenlohe-Langenburg. The young person was 
 a Protestant ; but she was niece to the Queen of 
 England, and a sudden conversion might carry an 
 alliance with it. The subject trailed away into 
 courtesies, and by a queer chance the Emperor half 
 considered a Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. He never 
 married her, and she lived to see Count Bismarck 
 almost make her brother King of Spain, and in the 
 attempt bring down the Empire in the dull thunder 
 of its last war. 
 
236 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 n 
 
 Paris was an Imperial city once again, and the 
 French army was the army of the Empire. It 
 re-entered the long tradition which had ended at 
 Waterloo, and the trumpets which rang out in the 
 dawn of the Second Empire were a faint, retarded 
 echo of the trumpets of Austerlitz. The new govern- 
 ment was in its beginnings a mihtary government, 
 and the army remained throughout the course of 
 the Empire the most brilliant symbol of the iri- 
 descent transformation which France had undergone. 
 In its jaunty reminiscence of the First Empire, its 
 elegant protest against the dowdy age of Louis 
 Phihppe, in the swagger of its easy victories and the 
 sudden downfall of its last defeat it expressed the 
 whole temper and career of the Second Empire. 
 
 The soldiers of the First Empire had been equipped 
 with a heavy magnificence ; tall bearskins, great 
 helmets of Dragoons, and the long lines of shakoes 
 had been the background of Napoleon. 
 
 ' Void les Mamelucks ! — Tiens, laje reconnais 
 Les plastrons cramoisis des landers polonais I 
 Void les eclaireurs culottes d'amarante / 
 Enfin, void, guttris de couleur diffirente 
 Les grenadiers de ligne aux longs plumets iremblants 
 Qui montaient a Vassaut avec des mollets blancs, 
 Et les conscrits chasseurs aux pompons verts en poires 
 Qui couraient d la mart avec des jambes noires ! ' 
 
 That pageant had ended in 1815, and the Restora- 
 
THE EMPEROR 237 
 
 tion hastily redressed the French army in uniforms 
 which avoided so far as possible aU risk of dangerous 
 reminiscences. The cavalry assumed an appearance 
 that was positively British, and even in the infantry 
 the rigid propriety of the Napoleonic tradition was 
 gradually modified by the exigencies of service in 
 North Africa. The inelegance of the reign of Louis 
 Philippe had found immediate expression in mihtary 
 uniform, and the army was disguised in a rather 
 lumbering gaudiness. At a time when the surround- 
 ings of society were swathed dustily in red rep, the 
 classical red trousers became universal in the French 
 service and the slatternly hefi crept into use from 
 Algeria. Strange units of Zouaves and Spahis and 
 Turcos were beginning to appear along the African 
 border ; but Paris knew httle of the burnous and 
 the fez, and the prosaic flavour of the age was neatly 
 conveyed by the bourgeois shakoes of the National 
 Guard. 
 
 With the second advent of the Empire the lights 
 were turned up on the military scene, and the French 
 soldier reappeared in a scintillation of new decora- 
 tions. A twisted moustache and a fierce imperial 
 united with an ideal of wasp-waisted elegance to 
 give him a fresh character, and he took the stage with 
 panache. The eagle reappeared on the standards of 
 France, and the bearskins mounted guard once more 
 at the Tuileries. The Line swung past in red and 
 blue, and the green epaulettes of the Chasseurs a 
 pied went by at the quick step behind a clanging 
 bugle band. Rossini was asked to compose a new 
 trumpet march for the dandy gentlemen of the 
 Guides ; they lounged in green and gold with blue 
 Hussars, and the dull gleam of the Cuirassiers sent 
 
238 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the mind back to the pounding charges of the First 
 Empire. Light cavaky dangled an eagle sabretache 
 or trailed a braided dolman ; there was a galaxy of 
 helmets, busbies, shakoes, colbacks, schapskas. But 
 it culminated in the blue and silver magnificence of 
 the Cent-gardes, and the military ideals of the Second 
 Empire found complete expression in the tall, rigid 
 figures which lined the stairs of the Tuileries on 
 grand occasions. Their great helmets with the 
 Imperial cypher towered over a sea of rustling 
 guests, and with the elegance of the age of Offenbach 
 they wore a uniform of the age of Murat. 
 
THE EMPEROR 239 
 
 III 
 
 On a May morning in Granada the dull mutter of 
 an earthquake brought the people into the streets. 
 It was the year 1826, and Ferdinand vii., who dis- 
 played a perfect appreciation of his time and place 
 by closing a University and endowing a school of 
 bull-fighting, was king in Spain. Andalusia lay in 
 the spring sunshine, and at Granada in a house in the 
 Calle de Moret opposite Santa Maria Magdalena the 
 Countess of Teba was suffering. Because the house 
 was not safe, they took her out to a tent in the garden, 
 where a child was born. They named it Eugenia 
 after an uncle, and the father succeeded a few years 
 later to the title of Montijo. 
 
 The Count had followed the tradition of his country 
 and was a man of family. He fought with some dis- 
 tinction on the French side in the wars of the First 
 Empire, and with the elegant pluralism of the 
 Spanish nobility he bore the surnames of Guzman, 
 Portocarrero, and Palafox. His Countess, who was 
 painted by Goya, had been addressed by the honour- 
 able but simpler name of Kirkpatrick. As his politics 
 were a trifle advanced, he found it necessary to leave 
 Spain. A kindly government detained his property, 
 and when he removed his lady and his little girls to 
 Paris, their lodgings seemed small after the arid 
 magnificence of a Spanish house. But they had 
 friends in France ; there was a M. Merimee who 
 came to talk about Spain and had from the Countess 
 
240 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the story of a Gitana who fascinated a Dragoon, left 
 him for an esjiada of Seville and died by the knife - 
 outside a bull-ring ; and more than once he brought 
 with him his friend M. Beyle, who knew so much 
 history. Sometimes, when they were not learning 
 their lessons from the sisters of the Sacre-Coeur, 
 M. Beyle called and told them stories about the wars 
 of Napoleon which he illustrated with the brightest, 
 most military little pictures ; and once M. Merimee 
 took Eugenie down the Rue de la Paix to have a cake 
 when King Louis Philippe was living in the great 
 palace at the end of the street. 
 
 Whilst they were all in Paris, there was a change in 
 Spanish politics and the Count went back to Granada. 
 But he died before his girls had grown up into young 
 ladies ; and his Countess brought them back across 
 the Pyrenees to complete their education in the sterner 
 air of New Castile. The Enghsh conversation of 
 Miss Flowers was substituted for the more casual 
 ministrations of M. Beyle and the sisters of the Sacre- 
 Coeur, and she even added to the repertory such 
 literary amenities as ' Lalla Rookh and the Irish 
 Melodies of Tomas Moor.' But there was a steady 
 correspondence with Paris in which M. Merimee sent 
 dresses from Palmyxe and Chinese lanterns and seeds 
 for the garden by the embassy bag (which only 
 reached the limits of its capacity when he en- 
 deavoured to insert a barouche), receiving in return 
 mantillas for his friends and Spanish bread and 
 fosforos which put all French matches to shame and 
 really lit. After the Paris lodgings their life in 
 Spain was a period of greater magnificence. Espar- 
 tero was still pounding the Carlists in the north ; but 
 one could dance and go to Court and sing all the airs 
 
THE EMPEROR 241 
 
 from Norma. Paca, the eldest girl, married the 
 Duke of Alba ; and M. Merimee's commissions at the 
 dressmakers increased. The Countess was a fine lady, 
 with her culture and her French friends and her 
 daughter the duchess ; and when Eugenie began to 
 go into the world, her mother had a great place at 
 Court and was Camarera mayor to Queen Isabella. 
 The girl was taU and had white shoulders, but her 
 beauty (since she had beauty) was the red gold of her 
 hair. Once, when they were at Pau, she heard a dark 
 lady sing operatic airs in a French drawing-room. 
 Deep songs were always so romantic ; but the con- 
 tralto had her own romance, since all the company 
 knew that she had once plotted with a Prince — ' mon 
 prince ' as she always called him — and had been 
 carried off to prison. Now she was singing for them, 
 while her Prince was a captive in a distant tower. 
 The Gordon, who had once fascinated Colonel 
 Vaudrey, spoke to the tall girl and her Spanish 
 mother, told them that the Prince was lying helpless 
 at Ham and that she was going to him. The girl, 
 whom M. Beyle had told about the Emperor, pitied 
 his nephew ; it was sad to fall so low ; it would be 
 exquisitely romantic to visit him ; it could, it must 
 be arranged for her. The diva was gracious, and the 
 Countess (was she not a woman above prejudice ?) 
 consented to the trip. But Spanish politics swerved 
 once more towards revolution ; the Montijos posted 
 back across the mountains to Madrid, and Eugenie 
 never saw her Prince behind his bars. 
 
 The young Countess of Teba was twenty-one when 
 Europe reeled through the first months of 1848, and 
 in the next year at a turn of the wheel in Madrid 
 (Narvaez went out of power, and there was a change 
 
 Q 
 
242 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 in the Ladies of the Bedchamber) her mother re- 
 moved once more to Paris. Her Prince, if she still 
 thought of him, was President of the Republic, and 
 one evening a friend presented them at the Elysee. 
 She made her reverence and startled her host with 
 an allusion, unusual in the polite world, to the faith- 
 ful Gordon. Followed a little dinner on a summer 
 evening at St. Cloud. It was laid for four at a small 
 lodge in the park ; but when the President offered 
 his arm for a stroll in the evening, Eugenie held back 
 and bowed him to her mother. The invitation was 
 not repeated ; but the Spanish girl was seen about 
 Paris under the Republic ; and when society resumed 
 after its salvation, she was asked to Fontainebleau and 
 Compiegne for the hunting. The girl looked well on 
 horseback, and the Prince began to ride by her side, 
 to watch her in the evenings, to talk to her sometimes 
 about his future. The ladies of his circle used their 
 tongues, and in the dawn of the Empire a spiteful 
 word sent her almost sobbing to the Emperor at a 
 supper-table in the Tuileries. That night Eugenie 
 and her mother packed their trunks for Italy ; but 
 in the morning a letter from the palace asked for 
 an Empress, and before the month was out, they 
 married at Notre Dame. The doubts of Princess 
 Adelaide, who had been fluttering at Langenburg 
 in a delightful uncertainty, were sharply solved. 
 The Emperor had eluded a bride of the indeterminate 
 nationahty affected by German royalty, and in Lord 
 Palmerston's view he had chosen well since ' he had 
 no chance of a political alliance of any value, or of 
 sufficient importance to counterbalance the annoy- 
 ance of an ugly or epileptic wife whom he had never 
 seen till she was presented to him as a bride.' France 
 
THE EMPEROR 243 
 
 was informed early in 1853 that the Emperor had 
 made his choice ' en conservant son caractere propre 
 et en prenant franchement vis-d-vis de VEiirope la 
 position de parvenu, titre glorieux lorsqu'on parvient 
 par le libre suffrage d'un grand peuple." Miss Howard 
 withdrew into the nobihty of the Empire as a countess, 
 and the costumiers settled down to the agreeable 
 preparations for an Imperial wedding. M. Merimee 
 drafted a wonderful marriage contract with an inter- 
 minable recital of his young friend's dignities and 
 quarterings, and Fehx wrestled with the problems 
 of coiffure presented by a veil, a wreath of orange 
 blossoms and an Imperial crown. On a clear day 
 of winter sunshine they drove across Paris to Notre 
 Dame. The Empress looked pale in the great vault 
 hung with velvet and banked with flowers. There 
 was a blaze of gold and candle-light, a band crashed 
 out the march from the Prophete, and it all seemed 
 to Lady Augusta Bruce ' like a Poet's Vision.'. That 
 night they drove to a Uttle house at St. Cloud, and 
 in the morning two people rode out in a phaeton on 
 the road to Trianon. The lady beside the driver 
 had a queer taste for memories of Marie Antoinette, 
 and her husband drove happily along in the frosty 
 sunshine. He had found a leading lady for his 
 strange play, and the cast for the Second Empire 
 was complete. 
 
244 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 IV 
 
 It is the tragedy of Napoleon ni. that he did not 
 die until twenty years after his life had lost its 
 purpose. He had lived, since he came of age, by 
 the Ught of a single star which shone above the 
 Tuileries and would make him, as he beheved, 
 Emperor of the French. The steady gleam of it, 
 j&rst seen above the hills in Switzerland, then dancing 
 bright above Strasburg, faintly visible in the night 
 sky over New York, then lighting a room in London, 
 and shining through a barred window at Ham, had 
 drawn him across the world to France. He followed 
 it ; and at forty-five, a paUid man with dull eyes, he 
 was Emperor of the French and the husband of a 
 beautiful woman. But the star flickered and failed, 
 since on attaining his purpose he had lost it : it was 
 the tragedy of an arriviste who arrived. 
 
 In his odd, silent way, behind the duU mask and 
 the great moustache, the man had known he would 
 be king. Since it was pre-ordained, his actions were 
 unhm-ried, and he said always, ' II ne faut rien 
 hrusquer.'' He had seen a man follow his destiny out 
 of exUe, out of prison, to a predestined throne ; and 
 he was left with a queer faith in predestination. He 
 had followed a star ; and a King, a Republic, and 
 seven milhons of men had gone down before the 
 inevitable event. But he knew nothing more of the 
 future. It was written, and a wise man would watch 
 the slow movement of events without thrusting 
 
THE EMPEROR 245 
 
 rashly across the stream. His attitude was always 
 that of a man who, in his own phrase, ' attend un 
 evenement,^ ' I never form distant plans,' he once 
 told a king's secretary, ' I am governed by the 
 exigencies of the moment.' It was an odd con- 
 fession ; yet it was the wisdom of a man who had 
 seen one thing happen -inevitably and was left with 
 a belief that all things were inevitable. The world 
 thought him designing. Palmerston warned Glad- 
 stone that he was ' an able, active, wary, counsel- 
 keeping but ever-planning sovereign.' An ambassa- 
 dor in Paris was even informed by his jaunty 
 minister that ' the Emperor's mind seems as full of 
 schemes as a warren is full of rabbits.' But he made 
 few plans ; he was indifferent in the choice of men to 
 act for him, because he believed that without plans 
 or men that which was written would come to pass ; 
 and when it came, he faced it quietly saying, as he 
 had said to a Carhst prince, ' Qiiand le vin est tire, 
 il faut le boire.^ So it was that for twenty years he 
 seemed to drift, since it was useless to strive against 
 the stream ; a sphinx, since he answered no ques- 
 tions ; an enigma to the world, since his own 
 intentions were an enigma to himself. 
 
 He had been a man of one idea ; and when it was 
 accomplished, he was left without one. It was as 
 though a man should climb a ridge of high hills 
 and then have no direction for the great walk along 
 the summits. Yet there was one principle which 
 seemed to gleam vaguely through his opportunism. 
 He still believed, as he had written in 1839, that the 
 world should be made up of free nations, and he was 
 haunted through his policy by a half-formed idea 
 (had he not trained Itahan guns against the Papalini 
 
246 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 in 1831 ?) that Italy must be freed by a Bonaparte. 
 ' Tell them,' he had said to a woman in 1848, ' that 
 my name is Bonaparte, and that I feel the responsi- 
 bilities which that name implies. Italy is dear to 
 me, as dear almost as France, but my duties to 
 France passent avant tout. I must watch for an 
 opportunity. For the present I am controlled by 
 the Assembly, which will not give me money and men 
 for a war of sentiment, in which France has no 
 direct immediate interest. But tell them that my 
 feehngs are now what they were in 1830, and repeat 
 to them that my name is Bonaparte.' 
 
 But Italy was not in play in 1853, and the Empire 
 drifted into its first war without even the guidance 
 of a sentimental instinct. The polite world of Paris 
 was busy table-turning (and the Austrian ambassador 
 was gravely confiding this outbreak to his diary) 
 when the long cloud of the Eastern Question showed 
 above the horizon and climbed slowly up the 
 European sky. The Nineteenth Century, which was 
 in so few respects an age of faith, believed passion- 
 ately in the power of Russia. This singular faith, 
 which was handed on unimpaired to deceive a later 
 generation, found various expressions. At St. 
 Petersburg it produced an exaggerated truculence ; 
 in Paris, where oriental affairs had been a French 
 hobby ever since the Most Christian King had sought 
 the alliance of the Grand Turk, it set men watching 
 the Near East with a jealous eye ; and in London, 
 since Leadenhall Street was in London and India 
 was governed from Leadenhall Street, it sent a 
 shudder through patriotic statesmen at every lurch 
 forward in that sprawling advance which was 
 described in serious circles as the expansion of 
 
THE EMPEROR 247 
 
 Russia. The new master of French policy was 
 indisposed to take the Russian side, since he valued 
 English friendship and could strike a Napoleonic 
 attitude by defying the Cossacks. He might even 
 appear in his favourite character of a son of the 
 Church by supporting the Catholics of Palestine 
 against the Orthodox priests ; and a slow debate 
 developed in which judicious Moslems at Constanti- 
 nople held the scale between the French and Russian 
 conceptions of Christian duty at the Holy Places. 
 But t^'e issues were sharply broadened. Early in 
 1853 the Czar was at an evening party, and he spoke 
 mysteriously to the British ambassador about 
 Turkey in the metaphor (there is something deeply 
 impressive about the birth of a cliche) of a sick 
 man — ' no^ls avons sur les bras un homme malade, 
 ce serait un grand malhcur s'il devait nous echapper 
 avant que les dispositions necessaires fussent prises.' 
 It was his amiable intention to absorb the Balkans, 
 whilst England was to be satisfied with Egypt. But 
 the ministers of Queen Victoria were unequal to this 
 dramatic conception of haute politique as an intrigue 
 of highly placed persons carried on in whispers at a 
 soiree. It might have flattered the richer imagina- 
 tion of Mr. Disraeli to partition Turkey in an exchange 
 of metaphors with a Romanoff. But he was out of 
 office ; and the colder intelligence of Lord John 
 Russell was unimpressed by the prospect. A little 
 stiffiy the EngUshmen refused the invitation to 
 conspire, and the Czar was left alone in the sick- 
 room. As the year drew on, he became assiduous 
 in his attendance at the Turkish bedside. Two 
 army corps were mobilised in South Russia, and a 
 truculent ambassador appeared in Constantinople 
 
248 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 with instructions to find a casus belli. At the French 
 Embassy a nervous charge d'affaires named Benedetti 
 (one can see moving in the clear dawn of the Second 
 Empire the Uttle figiu-e which was to cast so long a 
 shadow as the evening sun went down over Ems) 
 sent long reports to Paris, whilst bland Russians 
 demanded from the Sultan a protectorate over his 
 Christian subjects. The Turks refused, and Europe 
 was alarmed. In the summer a Russian army passed 
 the Turkish frontier, and with a vague gesture of 
 protection a Franco-British fleet anchored in Besika 
 Bay. The ikons were brought out in St. Petersburg ; 
 harassed gentlemen posted across Europe with clever 
 drafts ; and there was a slow drift towards war, 
 while Princess Lieven was left lamenting among her 
 screens in Paris, ' Mais c'est embetant, Qa ; c'est 
 detestable, et tout pour a few Grik Prists ! ' But in 
 the heat of the larger questions the world had for- 
 gotten the Httle issue about Palestine. It was 
 settled or adjourned, and France was aligned with 
 England in defence of Turkey against the sudden 
 aggression of the Czar. The Sultan seemed so help- 
 less, and men began to feel almost chivah-ous about 
 the Bashi-Bazouks. Late in the year a Russian 
 fleet used its guns in the Black Sea, and the AlUes 
 passed the Dardanelles. Lord Palmerston scandal- 
 ised Mr. Bright with a jaunty speech at the Reform 
 Club ; Napoleon curtly ordered the Russian troops 
 out of Tm-kish territory ; and in March 1854, the 
 diplomatists were hurried into the wings and the 
 curtain went slowly up on the Crimean War. 
 
 Whilst the Queen was enjoying the spectacle of her 
 departing Guards from a balcony at Buckingham 
 Palace, the Army of the East formed unhurriedly in 
 
THE EMPEROR 249 
 
 the southern ports of France. It was unmistakably 
 the army of the cowp d'etat, since Cam'obert had a 
 division and Saint- Arnaud was in command. But 
 there was a faint omen of the future in the name of a 
 Colonel on the Staff : he was a dark man called 
 Trochu, and he waited for sixteen years until in the 
 last scene of all he commanded a starving city against 
 the Prussians and had, had always (and never acted 
 upon) a plan. In the summer weather of 1854 the 
 white sails of the transports went eastwards beyond 
 Italy and the headlands of Greece and faded into the 
 Levant. At Paris the Emperor was conversing 
 gravely with the Duke of Cambridge and impressing 
 that ripe intelHgence that he ' never would say what 
 he did not mean.' At the turn of the year the armies 
 began to sUt slowly into the Black Sea by way of 
 GaUipoU and Varna, and the Queen desired her 
 Prime Minister to convey to the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury her view that a special form of prayer 
 for the cholera was ' not a sign of gratitude or con- 
 fidence in the Almighty ' and was distinctly undesir- 
 able. The Prince Consort was considering an in- 
 vitation to visit the Emperor of the French in his 
 camp behind Boulogne ; Baron Stockmar was 
 favourable to the idea ; and on a fine morning in the 
 first week of September Mr. Dickens listened to the 
 French salutes, as the royal yacht steamed up the 
 harbour, ' the Prince, in a blazing uniform, left alone 
 on the deck for everybody to see — a stupendous 
 silence, and then such an infernal blazing and bang- 
 ing as never was heard.' The two men met at the 
 foot of the gangway, and Prince Albert was hurried 
 off into a round of inspections and reviews which 
 were all narrated to the Queen in letters written in 
 
250 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the intervals of changing uniforms. The Imperial 
 entourage alarmed the Prince a little by its ' ton de 
 garnison, with a good deal of smoking,' and even the 
 Emperor took part in these excesses after dinner, 
 when ' I withdrew with him to his sitting-room for 
 half an hour before rejoining his guests, in order that 
 he might smoke his cigarette, in which occupation, to 
 his amazement, I could not keep him company.' 
 But in spite of this indulgence (and a bed that was 
 too short for his guest) Napoleon made a favourable 
 impression. He was examined viva voce upon every 
 branch of royal accomplishment from reformatories 
 to finance, and his answers in the French and EngHsh 
 languages satisfied his examiner and left him 'im 
 ganzen recht zufrieden mit ihm.^ The Prince was 
 charmed to detect a German accent in his speech and, 
 almost, in his thought. The Emperor won his heart 
 with reminiscences of the Gymnasium at Augsburg 
 and a recitation from Schiller ; he even confessed 
 with emotion that the sight of Queen Victoria open- 
 ing Parhament in 1837 had been one of the great 
 impressions of his Hfe. At the same time the 
 judicious host, controlling his raptures sufficiently 
 to commit them to paper, informed the proud wife 
 at Windsor of his happiness in the company of ' un 
 Prince aussi accompli, un homme doue de qualites si 
 seduisantes et de connaissances si profondes.^ The 
 charm, of which Lord Beaconsfield was one day to 
 learn the secret, began to work. The royal meeting, 
 which provoked leader-writers to moralise on the 
 strangeness of Napoleonic courtesies at the Camp of 
 Boulogne, was a profound success. Punch, with that 
 ineptitude which had not yet become a tradition, 
 depicted a convivial scene between the two princes 
 
THE EMPEROR 251 
 
 en gargon ; and the strange friendship grew, as the 
 Allied armies landed in the Crimea to begin the war 
 which had been six months declared. 
 
 Winter shut down on the trenches before Sebas- 
 topol, and in Jersey M. Victor Hugo made a bitter 
 sneer at ' VEnvpire qui recommence 'par 1812.' Saint- 
 Arnaud had died almost in the saddle at the Alma, 
 and Canrobert was in command ; Lord Raglan's 
 army had fought its way into popular recitation at 
 Balaldava, and the Guards went in with the bayonet 
 at Inkerman. The Emperor (had he not studied 
 siege- warfare in his cell at Ham ?) became critical ; 
 his observations were much admired at the Tuileries, 
 and Imperial hints on gunnery followed one another 
 by every mail to the Crimea. General Mel went 
 out as his deputy ; perhaps, if the Allies could agree, 
 the Emperor would follow to take the command 
 himself. Then, as the winter mist hung over the 
 starving, freezing camps, there was an odd revival 
 of diplomacy ; statesmen got out their orders and 
 took their red boxes to Vienna ; couriers came post- 
 ing in from St. Petersburg with clever arguments from 
 Prince Gortschakoff ; and Piedmont, which had no 
 interest in the war except as a means of publicity 
 for a new power, joined the Allies, whilst Canrobert 
 was fumbling round the outworks of Sebastopol. 
 
 In the spring of 1855, as the guns were still playing 
 on the Russian lines. Napoleon resumed his inter- 
 national courtesies and steamed into British waters 
 at Dover through a fog believed by his subjects to be 
 perennial in those latitudes. The Empress was with 
 him ; and as they drove across London to Padding- 
 ton, he showed her the corner of King Street where 
 his house had been. At Windsor the cheers died 
 
252 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 away, and they passed into the domestic sUence of the 
 royal circle, ' Vicky with very alarmed eyes making 
 very low curtsies.' Upstairs there was a panic before 
 dinner, because the Imperial trousseau had not ar- 
 rived. But someone had a blue silk dress ; it might 
 be made to fit, and wild-eyed women knelt stitch- 
 ing round the Empress. Half England was standing 
 uneasily in its best, when Eugenie swept down to 
 dinner in her plain blue dress with a single flower in 
 her pale bronze hair : it was a French victory. The 
 Emperor was charming to his hostess, smiling vaguely 
 and speaking low. It was the first time in all her 
 acquaintance with countless half-educated, clanking, 
 mihtary persons from the Courts of Europe that she 
 had met a monarch who was also a gentleman, and 
 the encounter left her strangely fascinated. He was 
 odd, of course. There was that queer ' reUance on 
 what he calls his Star, and a behef in omens and 
 incidents as connected with his future destiny, which 
 is almost romantic,' a strange faith ' in the reahsation 
 of hopes entertained from his very childhood, which 
 borders on the supernatural.' But he was a most 
 attractive person; and he spoke, one feels that he 
 took care to speak so charmingly of the dear country 
 to which neither he nor his hostess owed ofificial 
 allegiance : ' the Emperor is as unlike a Frenchman 
 as possible, being much more German than French 
 in character ... he is very well read in German 
 literature, to which he seemed to be very partial.' 
 The sharp httle pen seemed to lose all its primness 
 when it summed him up in an ecstasy of underLinings : 
 
 ' That he is a very extraordinary man, with great 
 qualities there can be no doubt — I might almost say a 
 mysterious man. He is evidently possessed of in- 
 
THE EMPEROR 253 
 
 domitahh courage, unfiinching firmness of purpose, self- 
 reliance, perseverance, and great secrecy . . . and at the 
 same time he is endowed with wonderful self-control, 
 great calmness, even gentleness, and with a power of 
 fascination, the effect of which upon all those who 
 become more intimately acquainted with him is most 
 sensibly felt. 
 
 How far he is actuated by a strong moral sense of 
 right and vrrong is difficult to say. . . .' 
 
 The Queen sat wondering at her writing-table. 
 And yet 
 
 'My impression is, that in all these apparently 
 inexcusable acts, he has invariably been guided by the 
 belief that he is fulfilling a destiny which God has im- 
 posed upon him, and that, though cruel or harsh in 
 themselves, they were 'necessary to obtain the result 
 which he considered himself as chosen to carry out, and 
 not acts of wanton cruelty or injustice ; for it is im- 
 possible to know him, and not to see that there is 
 much that is truly amiable, kind, and honest in his 
 character. . . . 
 
 How could it be expected that the Emperor should 
 have any experience in public affairs, considering that 
 till six years ago he lived as a poor exile, for some years 
 even in prison, and never having taken the slightest 
 part in the public affairs of any country ? It is there- 
 fore the more astounding, indeed almost incomprehens- 
 ible, that he should show all those powers of Government 
 and all that wonderful tact in his conduct and manners 
 which he evinces, and which many a King's son, 
 nurtured in palaces, and educated in the midst of affairs 
 never succeeds in attaining.' 
 
 It was a strange, dazzled verdict with its doubts and 
 its excuses and its little gasps of admiration. But 
 
254 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 then Napoleon was a gentleman, and amongst her 
 equals the Queen had met Uttle except royalty. 
 
 For a week Napoleon and Victoria, Albert and 
 Eugenie walked a ceremonial minuet at Windsor. 
 There was a review in the Great Park and a ball in 
 the Waterloo Room. The Emperor of the French 
 danced a quadrille with the little Queen, and Mr. 
 Disraeh enjoyed the rare delight of making seven 
 reverences in his Court suit, each time to a diiBEerent 
 royal personage. Then they held a council of war 
 in the Emperor's room to dissuade him from going 
 to the Crimea and imposing that unity of command 
 which is so distasteful to AUies ; and afterwards the 
 Queen came knocking at the door, and there was an 
 investiture of the Garter, with Napoleon wearing the 
 blue ribbon on his wrong shoulder and saying ' Enfin 
 je suis gentilhomme.'' One evening they all went to 
 the opera and heard Fidelio, and in the morning 
 someone said it was the Emperor's birthday : his 
 hostess crowned her hospitality with the gift of a 
 pencil-case and took him to see the Crystal Palace 
 in its new home at Sydenham. His lady had been 
 charming, and the children loved her. Sometimes 
 (her origin might have led one to expect it) she was 
 found sitting on the edge of a table. But the Queen 
 thought her ' very pretty and very uncommon- 
 looking,' although Mr. Disraeli confided to one of his 
 old ladies his disappointment with her ' Chinese eyes 
 and a perpetual smile or simper which I detest.' 
 But the week came slowly to an end : the Emperor 
 recorded in the Queen's album ' les sentiments qn'on 
 eprouve pour une reine et pour une soeur ' ; and as the 
 escort jingled off, she was left ' quite wehmiithig.^ 
 
 Eastwards across Europe the guns were booming 
 
THE EMPEROR 255 
 
 before Sebastopol. Canrobert resigned to Pelissier ; 
 but the Russians still held Malakoff and the Redan, 
 and in August the Itahans paid their footing in the 
 war on the Tchernaya. Two days later the Emperor 
 stepped out into the sunlight on the balcony of a 
 hotel at Boulogne. Queen Victoria and her Consort 
 were at sea, and their host stood looking for the 
 British colours above the skyline. Then he rode 
 up to the high ground behind the town and down 
 again ; the yacht came steaming into harbour, and 
 a royal train went up the line to Paris. It was 
 evening before they drove into the roaring streets ; 
 and the bells and the crowds and the AUied flags 
 and the bands playing God save the Queen all seemed 
 ' quite feenhaft ' to the Httle lady in the open carriage. 
 Then there was a blaze of Ughts, and the new Im- 
 perial Guard was presenting arms at St. Cloud ; the 
 Empress was at the door, ' the dear and very charm- 
 ing Empress (whom Albert likes particularly),' and 
 the Second Empire seemed canonised into dynastic 
 respectability by the approval of its solemn guests. 
 There were drives to Neuilly — ' poor Neuilly ' — 
 where the Queen sat beside a Bonaparte and saw 
 the ruins of an Orleans palace, and an excursion 
 through the streets of Paris, with the Emperor there 
 to point out the Conciergerie and say so romantically 
 ' Voild oiifetais en 'prison.'' Or one could sit sketch- 
 ing the Zouaves at Versailles, whilst a military band 
 played its very best ; and one day there was a 
 fascinating visit to Paris incognito to see the sights, 
 with Vicky in a bonnet and mantilla, and her mother 
 recognisable by every Parisian in her white English 
 dress and her green parasol and sandals tied with 
 black ribbons across the ankle. In the evenings 
 
256 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 they heard Alboni at the Opera, or went to great 
 parties, where the Queen wore the Koh-i-noor in her 
 hair, or sat next to General Canrobert in her geranium 
 dress and could ask him about the war and tell him 
 all about Albert in his green uniform ; and once in 
 the Galerie des Glaces she was introduced to a tall 
 gentleman from Prussia named von Bismarck, who 
 said behind his great moustache that Paris was 
 ' sogar schoner als Petersburg.'' But sometimes they 
 were quite alone in the evening to a ' nice vertrau- 
 liches Uttle dinner ' with the Emperor, and after- 
 wards he ' repeated with Albert all kinds of old 
 German songs, and Albert repeated some to him.' 
 Then there was the Exhibition to be visited, and a 
 great review in the Champ de Mars with ' Bertie 
 in his fuU Highland dress,' and a queer evening visit 
 to the Invalides where tall old men held up torches 
 and the thunder rolled outside, as the organ muttered 
 its way through God save the Queen, and the Emperor 
 of the French stood with the Queen of England hy 
 Napoleon's grave. One day it was Albert's birth- 
 day, and his sovereign presented him with a pictorial 
 set of ' AlUance and Crimean studs, the third button 
 having a blank, I hope, for Sebastopol,' whilst his 
 host avenged the pencil-case of Windsor with the 
 gift of a Meissonier called ' La Rixe.' It was all 
 wonderful ; the Emperor was ' very fascinating, 
 with that great quiet and gentleness ' ; and when 
 it was over and they were back again at Osborne, 
 Baron Stockmar was informed of his ' power of 
 attaching those to him who come near him and know 
 him, which is quite incredible.^ Was he not ' quite 
 The Emperor, a.nd yet in no way playing it ? ' Had 
 he not gone over old German airs with Albert ? 
 
THE EMPEROR 257 
 
 Were not the children devoted to their kind new 
 friend ? It was the first and the most unexpected 
 conquest of the Empire. In a few days it had its 
 second, as the Russians marched out in the faUing 
 dusk over the long bridge to the north, and in the 
 seventh month the firing died away round Sebastopol, 
 
258 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Tbte Second Empire was essentially Parisian ; and as 
 the war with Russia trailed away into incoherence, 
 Paris once more became the centre of the world. 
 The crowds went by in the Champs Elysees to see 
 the Exhibition, and the billowy proliferation of the 
 crinoline was beginning to undulate in the imagina- 
 tion of M. Constantin Guys, whilst the harassed 
 bourgeois of the comic papers stepped warily round 
 its outer edges. The sightseers stood staring at the 
 marvels of science in the Palais de 1' Industrie ; but 
 it was all a shade more modish, a thought less 
 improving, than the gleaming monument of good 
 intentions with which Prince Albert had obUterated 
 Hyde Park four years before. It was a rustling age 
 of miUinery and dance-music. At Fontainebleau 
 some one turned the handle of a mechanical organ 
 as the couples swung round the ball-room, because, 
 as the Emperor said, an orchestra is so awkward : 
 ' lis racontent ce qu'ils ant vu ou ce quHls n'ont pas vu.^ 
 They danced at Court or posed in fancy dress for 
 M. Gavarni to draw them. They danced at the Bal 
 Mabille and Valentino, and the town was beginning 
 to sway to the measure which swung and quickened 
 and rose until the Second Empire danced to an air 
 of Offenbach out of the gasHght into the cruel 
 sunshine of 1870. 
 
 At the Tuileries a lovely lady with sad, sloping 
 eyebrows and a strange smile sat at innumerable 
 
THE EMPEROR 259 
 
 angles to M. Winterhalter, whose kindly imagination 
 had peopled the thrones of Europe with a race of 
 beauties. But Eugenie had not inherited the 
 accumulated ugliness of a dynasty ; and as she sat 
 amongst her ladies, he hardly needed, he almost 
 forgot to jflatter. She was still beautiful, and as her 
 husband saw her on a great staircase, all in white 
 with leaves of grass on her ball dress and a glitter 
 of diamonds on the tour de corsage, he could say loud 
 enough for the Queen of England to hear : ' Comme 
 tu es belle ! ' 
 
 Even the Emperor was a man of fashion, as he 
 drove his curricle through the streets and smiled 
 behind his great moustache. He had held his own 
 at Lady Blessington's; and now the world began to 
 study the cut of his beard, until Mr. TroUope was 
 exasperated by ' that mould into which so large a 
 proportion of Parisians of the present day force 
 their heads, in order that they may come out with 
 some look of the Emperor about them. Were there 
 not some such machine as this in operation, it would 
 be impossible that so many Frenchmen should appear 
 with elongated, angular, hard faces, all as like each 
 other as though they were brothers. The cut of 
 the beard, the long, prickly-ended, clotted mous- 
 tache, which looks as though it were being continu- 
 ally rolled up in saliva, the sallow, half-bronzed, 
 apparently unwashed colour— these may all perhaps 
 be assumed by any man after a certain amount of 
 labour and culture. But how has it come to pass 
 that every Parisian has been able to obtain for 
 himself a pair of the Emperor's long, hard, bony, 
 cruel-looking cheeks, no Englishman has yet been 
 able to guess.' The mystery was deepened for all 
 
260 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 readers of Punch by the diverting fun which Mr. 
 Leech and Mr. Tenniel, who ideahsed no sovereign 
 but their own, poked week by week at the queer, 
 foreign figure of their new ally. But the Emperor 
 continued to dominate his capital ; and as he took 
 his drives abroad, respectful tourists, fresh from the 
 Dover packet, stood up to raise their hats. One 
 afternoon he passed an open cab and bowed vaguely 
 to an Admiral Swinburne and his lady ; the 
 Admiral's hat came smartly off as the Emperor 
 drove by, but there was a white-faced under- 
 graduate on the box whose hat remained sternly 
 perched on a great pyramid of red, republican 
 hair. 
 
 But the town where Napoleon took the air was 
 changing under his touch. Fine gentlemen with 
 tUted hats still sat outside Tortoni, and the carriages 
 went up and down between the Place de la Concorde 
 and the Bois. M. de Viel Castel, in whose irritable 
 little books the age found its Mr. Pepys, might sit at 
 table between Sainte-Beuve and de Musset or dine 
 with M. Houssaye to meet M. Theophile Gautier, 
 whose style was so preposterous, and M. Diaz, 
 whose pictures were so bad. But round them Paris 
 was fading into something new and bright and 
 regular. An ungainly man named Haussmami had 
 come to town and was remaking it in his own image. 
 Great avenues were hewn through the old quarters, 
 and nervous citizens walked every Sunday to note 
 the progress of the week. Sometimes he cleared a 
 rookery round a great building ; sometimes he linked 
 the outer barracks with the centre of the town ; 
 always he left an excellent field of fire. Militant 
 democracy had loved to buUd barricades in old. 
 
THE EMPEROR 261 
 
 crooked corners. But M. Haussmann favoured 
 straight vistas, and he remodelled Paris with a 
 queer blend of town-planning and measures of police. 
 The broad, new streets which drove through the 
 town were beautifully accessible to light, air, and 
 infantry. No insurrection could live for an hour 
 in those long, open avenues ; and on the barricades 
 of the future it would be difficult to do anything but 
 die. The work went quickly on ; and there was a 
 pleasant stir among the building contractors, whilst 
 claims for compensation provided a new and 
 fascinating field for speculation. 
 
 Yet in the iridescence of its new decor the Empire 
 did not forget its origins. Piety was perpetually 
 devising fresh embellishments for the shrine of 
 Bonapartism at the Invalides. A reverent Commis- 
 sion, established by Imperial decree and protecting 
 by its discreet omissions Imperial reputations, was 
 searching Europe for the twenty thousand letters of 
 Napoleon i. to include them in a monument twenty- 
 eight volumes high to the First Empire. There was 
 even a strange echo of old wars when the troops 
 marched in behind Canrobert from the Crimea and 
 the Emperor took the salute in the Place Vendome. 
 In the shadow of the Column twenty-five old men 
 stood in the winter light : it was forty years since 
 Waterloo, and they were in their own person the 
 Grande Armee, two of them in red with the great 
 two-foot plume above the battered schapska of the 
 Red Lancers, and on the right of the line an old man 
 in a tall, rusty bearskin with black gaiters buttoned 
 up the thigh as they wore them, when the bugles 
 sounded for Wagram, in the Grenadiers of the 
 Guard. 
 
262 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 On this bright Parisian scene, with its vivid new 
 beginnings and its faint suggestions of an earlier past, 
 there entered in the first months of 1856 an assembly 
 of gentlemen all talking in different languages and 
 intended to constitute a European Congress. They 
 proposed to terminate the Crimean War and to settle 
 beyond dispute the Eastern Question. Since the 
 Crimean War had ended itseH by the exhaustion of 
 the Russian^ and the tedium of the French (only 
 Great Britain was still interested, because the British 
 public in their queer way had discovered the war in 
 its third year), it was not difficult to record its close 
 in a treaty. But their settlement of the Eastern 
 Question, which did not survive its next time of 
 asking, was of less value. They assembled with 
 gravity under the presidency of M. Walewski. He 
 had a charming wife and was reputed to be Napoleon's 
 son by a Polish countess ; he denied the distinction, 
 but the rounded profile which he kept clean-shaven 
 seemed to confess his parentage. Lord Clarendon 
 came from London, and the Russians sent a tall old 
 man in green and gold who wore three miniatures of 
 his Czars set in diamonds among his decorations. A 
 small man in a fez and a black frock-coat represented 
 the gorgeous East, and someone in spectacles named 
 Cavour came from Turin. M. Benedetti, with his 
 smooth head and his big, black bow, acted as 
 Secretary ; and the Congress went solemnly about 
 its labours, whilst Count Cavour, with the vigorous 
 irrelevance invariably displayed at Peace Confer- 
 ences by the delegates of new nationalities, ' deposited 
 the Italian Question upon the green cloth of the 
 Congress table.' They dined with Lord Cowley ; 
 they dined at Court ; they conferred upon the closing 
 
THE EMPEHOE 26S 
 
 of the Black Sea and the navigation of the Danube ; 
 they drafted and re-drafted with exquisite skill ; and 
 they inquired discreetly after the health of the 
 Empress. Then one Sunday morning (it was March 
 16, 1856) Paris heard twenty-one guns from the 
 Invalides, and a pause, and eighty more. There was 
 a prince born in the Tuileries, and the Emperor was 
 half running, half crying through the rooms of the 
 palace. Eugenie had suffered all one day and night, 
 and when she turned to him to ask faintly : ' Cest une 
 fille ? ' he had said ' Non ' ; then she asked again : 
 ' G'est un gargon ? ' and he said again, because he 
 feared the shock for her, ' Non ' ; and she asked, 
 ' Mais alors, qu'est-ce que c'est ? ' The Empire had 
 an heir ; the crowds were cheering outside the railings, 
 and M. Gautier was scanning his lines to the Prince 
 Imperial. Two weeks later the clever gentlemen at 
 the Quai d'Orsay gave peace to Europe, and they 
 signed the Treaty of Paris with the quill of an eagle 
 (was not France once more an Empire ?) from the 
 Jardin des Plantes. 
 
 The reign went slowly on in the shining days of 
 1856, The Emperor danced at the British Embassy 
 ' dressed quite a VAnglaise : blue evening coat, with 
 gilt buttons, and velvet collar ; a white waistcoat ; 
 black breeches ; black silk stockings ; and buckled 
 shoes : his only decoration that of the Garter ; the 
 blue ribbon crossing his waistcoat ; the Star on the 
 left breast ; and the Garter below the left knee.' 
 All the world danced or dined or strolled at Com- 
 piegne or saw, with Mr. Henry James and his brother 
 WiUiam, ' the incomparable passage, as we judged it, 
 of the baby Prince Imperial borne forth for his airing 
 or his progress to Saint-Cloud in the splendid coach 
 
264 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 that gave a glimpse of appointed and costumed 
 nursing breasts and laps, and beside which the cent- 
 gardes, all light blue and silver and intensely erect 
 quick jolt, rattled with pistols raised and cocked.' 
 That was the Empire in the good days. 
 
THE EMPEROR 265 
 
 VI 
 
 It was a queer, silent France that drifted contentedly 
 into tlie year 1857. Public life had been paralysed 
 by the coup d'etat, and the nation's affairs were trans- 
 acted by an autocracy in which the absolutism of 
 the Emperor was barely tempered by the authority 
 of his ministers. In the silence of the country there 
 was hardly a sound beyond the steady running of the 
 Imperial machine. A faint reverberation of re- 
 publican eloquence floated in from somewhere across 
 the frontier, and there was an audible titter of 
 genteel amusement from the salons whose Orleanist 
 ex-ministers displayed their superior wisdom to 
 sympathetic caUers. But an odd silence hung over 
 the public places from which the great voices of 1848 
 had once governed France ; and whilst M. de Morny 
 presided gracefully over a parliament of nonentities, 
 the dismal and unreported debates of an undis- 
 tinguished Chamber were little more than a hollow 
 echo in an empty room. 
 
 Yet for the majority of Frenchmen prosperity was 
 an agreeable substitute for politics, and in the first 
 phase of the Empire France passed out of a romantic 
 period of insurrection into the more substantial 
 blessings of the Nineteenth Century. The sporadic 
 railways of the Forties were linked up into a national 
 system ; commerce was startled by the marvels of 
 the electric telegraph ; the seaward horizons were 
 smudged by the unlovely evolutions of steamboats ; 
 
266 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 there was even a proliferation of banking facilities 
 which developed large enterprises and produced a 
 type of industrialist that was akeady famihar in 
 Lancashire. It was an age of material activity in 
 which men were disinclined to dwell unduly on the 
 starvation of their political aspirations, a comfortable 
 period in which a young man named Flaubert was 
 charged before a criminal court with aiding and 
 abetting the editor of a weekly magazine to subvert 
 religion and moraHty, and sent a lean-faced pro- 
 fessional gentleman with bushy whiskers into agonies 
 of forensic propriety with the adventures of Emma 
 Bovary. 
 
 The atmosphere was unfriendly to politics. There 
 was a pubhc funeral or so, with a few speeches at Pere 
 Lachaise; and the police enjoyed the occasional 
 diversion of detecting a plot against the Emperor. 
 But although the Empire was without serious com- 
 petitors, it was disincUned to take risks ; and at the 
 elections of 1857 opinion was carefully manipulated 
 in the manner which had become traditional. 
 Prefects were instructed by their ministers to employ 
 the machinery of government in support of the 
 official candidates, and their opponents were reduced 
 to the predestined futility of an unauthorised cam- 
 paign. The regimentation of opinion was almost 
 uniformly successful. There was a flicker of inde- 
 pendence in Paris, which had never quite lost a taste 
 for poHtics. But the provinces voted stolidly for 
 the Emperor's nominees, and republicanism sat in 
 the new Chamber only five members strong to con- 
 front the serried mass of Bonapartists. The little 
 group seemed insignificant enough in the autumn of 
 1857 ; there was a dark young man in spectacles 
 
THE EMPEROR 267 
 
 named Ollivier and a strange shaggy creature called 
 Jules Favre, who seemed to have been left over from 
 1848 into a pleasanter, less rhetorical period. But 
 their advent into Imperial politics was a shade 
 ominous. Hitherto the republicans had confined 
 themselves to a statuesque refusal to take the oath 
 of allegiance, an obliging, if dignified, attitude which 
 had completely relieved the Empire from the un- 
 pleasantness of an Opposition. But les Cinq, after 
 a vast deal of heart-searching, correspondence, con- 
 sultation of republican oracles, and debate, took a 
 more enterprising view and presented themselves in 
 the Chamber as an active party. It was a strange 
 intrusion of reahty into the parliamentary charade 
 of the Empire, and nervous Deputies shuddered as 
 the shadows of three lawyers, one journalist, and a 
 gentleman from Lyons fell across the bright Imperial 
 scene. 
 
 The year faded out without any movement in 
 pohtics. Mr. Disraeli came to Paris, dined out 
 eleven nights running, and failed to impress the 
 Emperor ; an exchange of hospitality brought to 
 Napoleon and his Empress the felicity of a few days 
 at Osborne with ' a little dance in a tent on Saturday 
 (which was very successful) and additional carriages 
 and ponies ' ; the Prince Consort was gravely recep- 
 tive as usual whilst the Emperor talked at large about 
 Europe and the partition of North Africa ; but when 
 Albert ' expatiated a little on the Holstein question,' 
 the topic ' appeared to bore the Emperor as tres- 
 complique,' and the Queen found it all ' very quiet 
 and gemilthlich ' ; there was an informal return visit 
 to the naval works at Cherbourg, which startled 
 Prince Albert and his patriotic wife ; then came 
 
268 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 autumn manceuvres at Chalons and a meeting with 
 the Czar at Stuttgart which set the world talking 
 but left Europe precisely where it had been since 
 the Peace of Vienna. But a bearded man from 
 the Romagna named Orsini was flitting about the 
 Continent with an admirable specification for the 
 manufacture of bombs and a fixed obsession that 
 the liberation of Italy was only to be achieved by 
 the death of the Emperor and the inauguration of 
 a revolution in France. His reasoning was confused, 
 but it followed closely the teaching of Mazzini and 
 the normal course of political conversation in back 
 rooms in Soho. An order for six bombs was executed 
 at a reasonable price in Birmingham ; they passed 
 the Belgian customs in the luggage of a Swiss waiter 
 who declared them as gas-fittings ; Orsini received 
 them in Brussels and left for France with a British 
 passport in a false name ; the bombs followed him to 
 Paris in charge of a simple-minded ostler, and in the 
 second week of 1858 the parties to the attempt con- 
 verged on the scene. All four were Italians ; and 
 their conversations, in a code which was rendered 
 faintly convincing by Orsini' s alias of ' Allsop,' ran 
 principally upon the manufacture and sale of beer. 
 In the failing light of a winter afternoon (it was 
 January 14, 1858) they met in a little room, and each 
 of them pocketed something wrapped in black silk. 
 Then they walked out into Paris and waited in the 
 cold for the Emperor to drive up to the Opera. One, 
 by a queer chance, was arrested ; but three remained 
 in the crowd. There was a sound of distant cheering 
 and the clatter of oncoming horses. The cheers came 
 nearer, and the Lancers of the Guard jingled into the 
 gaslight by the Opera. Then, as a closed carriage 
 
THE EMPEROR 269 
 
 drove up, the bombs crashed into the roadway. The 
 Ughts went out, and the street was filled with cries 
 and broken glass and men and horses, as the Italians 
 faded back into the crowd. There was a vague 
 gleam of drawn swords, and the Empress, muttering, 
 ' Les poignards maintenant,'' put herself between her 
 husband and the street. Inside the Opera they were 
 playing William Tell, and a few moments later the 
 whole house stood up to cheer, as Napoleon and 
 Eugenie 'firalked into their box : her dress, after the 
 dreadful street, was no longer white. There was a 
 confused evening of arrests and congratulations. 
 Orsini was taken in his bed that night, and the 
 Emperor drove back to the Tuileries through the 
 roaring streets ; while the police were raking Paris 
 for the murderers, he knelt with Eugenie in the half 
 Hght of a nursery beside the child who was so nearly, 
 never more nearly, Emperor of the French. 
 
 As the echoes xiied- a3a^a:s:^Jbhe .attfim.pt-.xm- the 
 Emperor left its markon French policy. The new 
 Chamber was lectured on the need for firmness ; the 
 Empire turned sharply_a way fr om the path of parlia- 
 mentary JLiPerahsmT^M id emergency powers "we re 
 caitf ^Te3 "up on~t !i ^'*'p!^ by a Loi de surete 
 
 generale, which enabled the Impgij^l, authon^^^ ^ ^ to 
 detam^ or ({e;^£tili£!U^en£ffiie^, w^ Since 
 
 the soldierly illegality of this procedure was felt to 
 be unsuitable for exercise by a civilian, there was a 
 change at the Ministry of the Interior and General 
 Espinasse was appointed to administer the new 
 powers. Son Excellence le general-ministre was a 
 simple-minded absolutist who had served his ap- 
 prenticeship in the coup d'etat, and he performed his 
 duties by the unsubtle expedient of exacting a stated 
 
270 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 quota of arrests from every Department in France. 
 Society was to be saved once more ; but it acquiesced 
 less readUy in its salvation than in 1851, There was 
 a faint protest from les Cinq, and in the Senate 
 General Mac-Mahon stood up alone to speak against 
 the system. But it passed into law ; and when fou r 
 h undred arrests were made under it, the Empire 
 
 Stranger still was the effect which the attempt had 
 on foreign policy. There was a natural tirotest to 
 
 tErowersT^But the real resentment was against 
 England, where one oi the conspirators, wno had 
 Teinained,ini the peace of Bayswater, waa. .acauitte c 
 by" a Mi(Jdleaex.Ju:py ; and it was express ed i n a 
 ^demand on^London that Great !6ritain s£jQ.]2ESstoct 
 t^ rigbt of asylum which had enabled jOrsi ni to meet 
 his men HeHind Leicester Square. Lord ]^imerstori 
 was sympathetic and proposed to deal in the Con- 
 spiracy to Murder BiU with persons conspiring to 
 commit crimes outside the British jurisdiction. But 
 he had taught his countrymen for too long to deride 
 the ridiculous demands of foreign potentates, and 
 British opinion was rendered more British still by 
 the tone of falsetto militancy in which patriotic 
 French officers had protested their resentment of 
 foreign assassins and their haunts in London among 
 the victors of Waterloo and the associates of Sir 
 Hudson Lowe. The question passed from the sphere 
 of intelligence to that of patriotism. Excited men 
 made speeches in Hyde Park ; Punch depicted its 
 late allies as a crowing cock in a M'pi ; and this dis- 
 cerning mood communicated itself to the House of 
 Commons, where Mr. Kinglake (who had once 
 
THE EMPEROR 271 
 
 admired the white shoulders of Miss Howard) struck 
 patriotic attitudes whilst the author of Ten Thousand 
 a Year filled thirteen and a half columns of Hansard 
 with a full statement of the law, several Latin 
 quotations, and a peroration on the subject of King 
 Edward ni. On the second reading an amendment 
 was carried against the Government by a queer 
 cojnbination of Tory speeches and Liberal votes. 
 Mr. Gladstone and Mr. Disraeli walked into the same 
 lobby, and Lord Palmerston was defeated. It wa s 
 a blow t o t he. AndiJ a^jenGLalUance which. 1^ 
 Europe since 1855 : and even a royal visit to Cher- 
 b't5u3c^mTHesummer did little to restore the old 
 tone, although Eugenie wore her best lilac and white 
 silk dress and white and black lace bonnet and 
 ' Albert, who is seldom much pleased with ladies or 
 princesses, is very fond of her.' The Queen spent an 
 evening in finishing ' that most interesting book 
 Jane Eyre,' dined on board a French battleship, and 
 suffered those peculiar agonies which are reserved 
 for the wives of after-dinner speakers — ' the dreadful 
 moment for my dear husband, which was terrible to 
 me, and which I should never wish to go through 
 again. He did it very well, though he hesitated 
 once. I sat shaking ' (the poor lady took no coffee, 
 and even the Emperor was quite pale) ' with my eyes 
 cloues sur la table.' But Englishmen came increas- 
 ingly to regard the Emperor as a military ,m^U,9-CP,, a 
 persistenF^congtructor of ironclads, the master of 
 great armies whose bayonets troubled old ladies' 
 sfeep at Dover , and impelled young gentlemen to 
 defend their country by quoting Mr. Tennyson's 
 patriotic lyric and joining the Rifle Volunteers. 
 ♦But the strangest echo of Orsini's bombs was in 
 
272 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Paris, where the conspirators were tried in that air of_ 
 eloquent inconsequence which is the atmosphere oL 
 French jiu'lsprudence."" The defence was conducted 
 By^OuIes Eavre ; and since his cHent was indefensible, 
 he defended the far better cause of Italian nation- 
 alism. The Court listened to a letter from the 
 prisoner in which he begged the Emperor to Hberate 
 Italy (' Qu'Elle delivre ma patrie, et les benedictions de 
 25 millions de citoyens la suivront dans la posterite''), 
 and Maitre Favre followed it with a pleading refer- 
 ence to the nationalist tradition of Bonapartism. In 
 the grey light of a French law-court that queer 
 haunting voice rose and fell and died away in the 
 cry which Vittoria sang to the dark, Ustening tiers 
 from the great stage of La Scala at Milan, ' Italia, 
 Italia shall be free f ' It was a strange appeal, which 
 the Emperor had himself made possible by sending 
 the letter to the lawyer. It was made in the hearin g 
 of ay^JiaaiC(g„l_and^.aitei;Jcpn and sentence, 
 
 when the heads had fallen and the crime was^ Ealf 
 forgotten, the Emperor seemed to sit won3ering. 
 
THE EMPEROR 273 
 
 vn 
 
 On a summer morning in the year 1858 the Emperor 
 sat waiting in a room in Plombieres ; outside in the 
 little town his subjects took the waters, and to the 
 east the hills climbed up steadily through the trees 
 into the high Vosges which look down across Alsace 
 into Germany. , He was expecting a caller who had 
 come in overnight from Switzerland, and about eleven 
 in the morning the stumpy, unimpressive figure of 
 Cavour, with its ill-fitting spectacles and its fierce, 
 myopic stare, was shown in. The invitation had 
 come, a little mysteriously, from the Emperor, and 
 his guest interrupted a villeggiatura of elaborate art- 
 lessness in the Alps to enjoy the Imperial conversa- 
 tion in the milder surroundings of the Vosges. The 
 two men talked for five hours ; and when they rose, 
 the future of Italy had taken shape under their hands. 
 There was to be a war, of course ; but France must 
 have a reputable casus belli. The Austrians might 
 be goaded into war with Piedmont, and then it would 
 be simple for France to come in with a fine gesture of 
 protection. When the war was over, Italy could bo 
 remade. Piedmont might take the northern plain 
 from the Alps to Venice ; there would be a kingdom 
 of Central Italy for somebody ; one must leave the 
 Pope at Rome, since the faithful had scruples, but he 
 would hardly need his territory, and perhaps (he had 
 not had a change of title for centuries) he would care 
 to be President of a new Italian Confederation ; then 
 
274 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 there was Naples — the Russians were always so 
 peculiar about Naples, and one might safely leave it 
 to become Italian by a revolution of its own. The 
 quiet talk went on behind the Emperor's door at 
 Plombieres, and outside in the sunshine ladies in 
 crinolines walked up and down beneath the balconies 
 in the little street. There was stiU France to be 
 considered (the Emperor's level voice was speaking 
 again) ; France must have something. ; why not 
 Savoy and Nice ? His guest, who had been in the 
 corn trade, contested the price ; Savoy was too 
 valuable, and then since Nice was Itahan, it could 
 hardly turn French if the new doctrine of nationaHty 
 were sound. The Emperor sat twisting his long 
 moustache and never found (no one has ever found) 
 an answer. Questions of detail must wait ; it 
 was enough that in five hours of easy talk Cavour 
 and his host had changed the face of southern 
 Europe. 
 
 They met again, as the July afternoon wore on and 
 the trees began to cast long shadows. The Emperor's 
 phaeton was at the door, and he drove his guest 
 through the little town and out along a white road 
 into the hills. As the horses pounded along in the 
 sunshine and Count Cavoiu- hazarded the opinion 
 that the vicinity of Plombieres was among the most 
 picturesque portions of France, the Emperor turned 
 the conversation from politics to romance. He had 
 a fine young cousin of thirty-seven ; the King of 
 Piedmont had a daughter of fifteen. If France was 
 to unite with Italy, a union between the Courts might 
 serve a useful purpose. He pressed his cousin's suit 
 through the long afternoon ; the young man had 
 been wild perhaps, and the bride was a trifle young ; 
 
THE EMPEROR 275 
 
 but she might repose confidence in one so constant 
 (had he not left town to see Rachel on her death-bed 
 at Nice ?) to his mistresses. The two men talked of 
 the match without irony, as the hills grew dark along 
 the road; and lights were beginning to shine in 
 Plombieres, as the phaeton clattered home through 
 the streets with the strange allies. 
 
 The little man in spectacles slipped back across the 
 frontier, and the Emperor was left alone on the 
 European stage. He had pronounced, as he had 
 written nearly twenty years before, ' le nom si beau 
 d'ltalie,^ and he had taken almost the first construc- 
 tive step in Continental statesmanship which had been 
 known since the Peace of Vienna. His action was in 
 fine with the doctrine of nationality which he had 
 stated in the Considerations sur la Suisse and the 
 Idees Napoleoniennes, which had haunted him when 
 he took his men against Civita CasteUana in 1831 and 
 reminded an impatient friend of Italy in 1848 that 
 his name was Bonaparte. The doctrine was a 
 foreign pohcy in itself ; it was to earn him the 
 tittering commendation of a British diplomat upon 
 ' his professional pursuits as surgeon accoucheur to 
 the ideas of the nineteenth century ' ; but Sir Robert 
 Morier, who regarded Baron Stockmar's as ' the 
 noblest and most beautiful political life which this 
 century has seen,' was rarely appreciative of ideas 
 which were not Teutonic. The Emperor had found 
 his doctrine : it remained to apply it to the recon- 
 struction of Europe. 
 
 The name of Italy had been spoken in a whisper by 
 two men at a health-resort. Before it could sound 
 across the world, the quiet sentences of diplomatie 
 thermale must be translated into the terms of war and 
 
276 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 a peace-treaty, and the stage must be set for the final 
 tableau. As yet no one in France knew his part for 
 the new piece. The Emperor's ministers were told 
 nothing of the drastic nature of their sovereign's cure 
 at Plombieres, and M. Walewski continued to rotate 
 gravely in the solemn movements of the European 
 minuet. The customary exchange of courtesies con- 
 tinued through the year 1858, and the Austrians 
 mounted guard at Milan. But the Emperor was 
 taking the autumn sunshine by the sea at Biarritz, 
 and on a September morning he walked down from 
 the Villa Eugenie along the sands in sight of the great 
 rocks and the surf and the long line of mountains 
 which is Spain. He walked with his cousin, Prince 
 Napoleon, for whom he had found a bride in a royal 
 nursery ; and as they went, he trailed his stick in the 
 sand and told him of the future of himself and Italy. 
 The Empress knew nothing ; but that night the 
 Prince left for Russia. In a week he was at Warsaw, 
 and the Czar was asked to take a hand against 
 Austria. He need not go to war unless the Prussians 
 came in against France. All that was required was 
 a Russian concentration on the Austrian frontier, 
 which would draw off troops from Italy, and Russia 
 would be weU paid by a revision of the Black Sea 
 clauses of the Treaty of Paris. If the Germans gave 
 trouble and there was a general war, she might even 
 (the Emperor was a practising nationalist in Italy, 
 but one could hardly be sentimental about Poland) • 
 get Galicia. It was a queer transaction ; but the 
 isolation of Russia during the Crimean War had left 
 her with no love of Austria, and Prince Gortschakoff 
 stood amiably on one side to watch the blow fall on 
 Vienna. There was even an attempt to buy the 
 
THE EMPEROR 277 
 
 neutrality of Prussia ; but the HohenzoUern were 
 nervous of the Bonapartes — et dona ferentes, and on 
 that side nothing was arranged. Yet before the 
 year was out, Cavour was contracting for a rising in 
 Italy and something brisk beyond the Hungarian 
 border, the stray talk of Plombieres was written down 
 and signed in a treaty, and a girl was sobbing in a 
 room at Turin. On the day of the treaty, which 
 pointed straight to war, Lord Malmesbury assured 
 his Queen that no war ' is at present contemplated 
 by the Emperor Napoleon (who has just contradicted 
 the report officially), and Count Beust is of the same 
 opinion.' 
 
 Their illusions were respected for three weeks. 
 But at the New Year's reception of 1859 the Emperor, 
 with a rare mastery of that meaningless diction of 
 which royalty possesses the secret, startled the world 
 by addressing to the amiable widower who repre- 
 sented Austria in Paris an expression of hollow 
 solemnity : ' Je regrette que nos relations avec votre 
 gouvernement ne soient pas aussi bonnes que par le 
 passe ; maisje vous prie de dire a VEmpereur que w£s 
 sentiments personnels pour lui ne sont pas changes.^ 
 The sudden turn (it had happened to the British 
 ambassador in 1803) was in the Napoleonic manner, 
 and the poor gentleman was scared into despatches 
 of enormous length. Stocks fell, as the electric tele- 
 graph took the grave and empty words into every 
 town in Europe, and beyond the Alps Count Cavour 
 muttered, ' II parait que VEmpereur veut aller en 
 avant.' There was a nervous scurry among the 
 diplomats ; and the Prince Consort was left with 
 grave misgivings, shaking his head and writing to a 
 minister to warn him that the Emperor ' has been 
 
278 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 born and bred a conspirator, and at his present age 
 will never get out of this turn of mind, scheming 
 himself and suspicious of others.' The air was thick 
 with dementis and explanations. But the King of 
 Piedmont opened his Parhament with an impulsive 
 announcement that he could not hear unmoved the 
 bitter cry, the ' grido di dolore ' of Italy ; the French 
 Prince came to Turin to fetch his Itahan bride ; and 
 General Niel was working with the soldiers on the 
 miUtary details of the new aUianee. While the 
 masters of British policy were wringing their hands 
 and running up and down Europe in a frenzy of 
 good intentions and Prince Albert in interminable 
 memoranda was urging Prussia to ' be German, be 
 Volksthiimlich,'' the French were buying draught- 
 horses for their gun- teams and moving field-guns into 
 Algeria, which, oddly enough, never got past 
 Marseilles ; troop-ships were put into commission, 
 and French opinion was enhghtened upon the issues 
 by a pamphlet of which the Emperor saw the proofs. 
 At Turin the buccaneering monarch, who had im- 
 pressed Queen Victoria by his ' ganz besondere, 
 abenteuerliche Erscheinung ' as being ' more like a 
 Knight or King of the Middle Ages than anything 
 one knows nowadays,' was talking to Garibaldi, 
 strangely spruce and soon to appear in the sober 
 dignity of a Sardinian general's uniform. As the 
 winter faded into spring, Austria mobihsed five army 
 corps and Piedmont stood to arms. There was a 
 last whirl of diplomacy ; England offered mediation, 
 Russia proposed a Congress, Piedmont was asked to 
 disarm and argued, Cavour came posting to Paris to 
 hold the Emperor to his treaty. French policy 
 seemed to sway in the grasp of a minister who worked 
 
THE EMPEROR 279 
 
 for peace and Prince Napoleon whose desire was war. 
 The Emperor played for time ; time had been always 
 on his side, and he checked the Italians, pressed for 
 demobilisation and a Congress. At Turin Cavour 
 was burning papers in a locked room ; it was all to 
 end in talk and treaties, and he was half minded to 
 end Avith it. But the Austrians and their proud 
 young Emperor were bewildered and angry ; it 
 seemed intolerable that Piedmont should emerge 
 from its impertinence without humiliation, and they 
 pressed their advantage as they were to press it more 
 than fifty years away in a disastrous future, pressed 
 it with a conviction that Germany was behind them, 
 and pressed it too far. Someone in Vienna drafted 
 a curt ultimatum, and in the last days of April 1859, 
 two officers in white coats awaited on Count Cavour 
 to give Piedmont seventy -two hours to demobilise : 
 it was a challenge, and he had his war. The news 
 came upon Paris at Easter ; and as the crowds 
 poured out of the churches, the marching bugles went 
 sounding through the Sunday streets, as the troops 
 went off to the station. Southwards in the Italian 
 sunshine Austria tramped stiffly through the streets 
 of Lombardy, and little towns saw the great sight 
 which Vittorid's friends had seen ten years before, 
 ' when the crash of an Austrian regimental band was 
 heard coming up the Corso. . . . The regiment, in 
 review uniform, followed by two pieces of artillery, 
 passed by. Then came a squadron of Hussars and 
 one of Uhlans, and another foot regiment, more 
 artillery, fresh cavalry, . . . Further distracting 
 Austrian band-music was going by . . . came a regi- 
 ment of Hungarian grenadiers, tall, swart-faced, and 
 particularly light-limbed men, looking brilliant in the 
 
280 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 clean tight military array of Austria. Then a 
 squadron of blue Hussars, and a Croat regiment ; 
 after which, in the midst of Czech Dragoons and 
 German Uhlans and blue Magyar light horsemen, with 
 German officers and aides about him, the victorious 
 
 Austrian Field-Marshal rode Artillery, and some 
 
 bravely clad horse of the Eastern frontier, possibly 
 Serb, wound up the procession. It gleamed down the 
 length of the Corso in a blinding sunhght ; brass 
 helmets and hussar feathers, white and violet sur- 
 coats, green plumes, maroon capes, bright steel 
 scabbards, bayonet points — as gallant a show as 
 some portentously magnified summer field, flowing 
 with the wind, might be ; and over all the banners 
 of Austria — the black double-headed eagle ramping 
 on a yellow ground.' The men marched away in the 
 spring sunshine, and in nine days after Easter the 
 two Empires were at war. 
 
THE EMPEROR 281 
 
 VIII 
 
 It has been for two centuries the misfortune of 
 Austrian generalship to provide with victories the 
 armies of other nations, and in 1859 its traditions 
 were well maintained. Five corps fumbled slowly 
 along the Piedmontese frontier, as King Victor 
 Emmanuel drew back behind his fortresses and 
 waited for the French. Napoleon and his Empress 
 were driving through cheering streets in an open 
 carriage, and his men were moving slowly down into 
 Italy. The cavalry went between the mountains and 
 the sea by the coast-road beyond Nice, and long lines 
 of infantry wound slowly through the passes of the 
 Alps. Transports from Toulon came steaming into 
 Genoa, and in mid-May the army of Italy was march- 
 ing along dusty Itahan roads, ill-found, short of 
 supplies, but with a cheerful confidence founded 
 mainly upon the French comic papers that it was to 
 meet a grotesque and panic-stricken enemy who wore 
 preposterous head-gear and surrendered at the sight 
 of a single Zouave. The Emperor, with a supreme 
 gesture of Bonapartism, took the command ; had 
 not his uncle in his gaunt, lank-haired youth made 
 a campaign of Italy against the Austrians, and might 
 not one do the same with a kepi and a cigarette and 
 a long moustache and a Staff of names out of the 
 calendar of Napoleonic saints — Ney de la Moskowa, 
 Reille, Joachim Murat, Montebello, Cadore, Clary, 
 Tascher de la Pagerie ? Even the surgeon was called 
 
282 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Larrey, and it seemed almost, as the French swung 
 along between the rice-fields, as though the ghost of 
 the Grande Armee was walking Lombardy. Yet there 
 were other, simpler names in the lists of 1859 that 
 drifted up out of a dark future and seemed to hang 
 waiting round the Emperor — Forej'^ for Mexico, 
 Bazaine for Metz, Leboeuf for the last button of an 
 army's gaiters, tJhrich for the red sky over Strasburg, 
 Wimpffen for the green hills round Sedan. 
 
 But in the sunshine of 1859 the Emperor tilted his 
 kepi and rode out of his headquarters at Alessandria ; 
 somewhere across the river lay Marengo and the 
 Holy Places of Napoleonic strategy. He had 
 telegraphed, kept telegraphing to Paris for transport 
 and supphes ; Randon at the Ministry of War was 
 reading returns and saying, ' Tout manquait sauf le 
 courage.^ But General Bonaparte had once fought 
 a campaign of Italy without boots, and one could 
 always rely on the Austrians. They moved elabor- 
 ately against Tiurin, felt an enemy somewhere to the 
 south of them, and fell back to the frontier. There 
 was a scuffle with the bayonet at MontebeUo, and 
 the Emperor began to move his pieces on the board. 
 When a Napoleon took the field, it would be as well 
 for him to be Napoleonic ; and the Emperor, who had 
 consulted the oracles of mihtary orthodoxy in Paris, 
 brought with him an authentic plan by an old master. 
 Almost past eighty, living in the suburban peace of 
 Passy was a Swiss soldier of the First Empire named 
 Jomini, who had ridden with Ney's staff at Ulm and 
 Jena and left his master as the clouds gathered after 
 Moscow. The old man had made a plan for his 
 master's nephew, and he made it in the fuU tradition 
 of Soult and Berthier. The plan was palpable to 
 
THE EMPEEOR 283 
 
 connoisseurs as a perfect Empire piece ; one could 
 almost see the gleam of the brass gryphons on its 
 dark rectangular joinery. It ignored completely the 
 unauthorised innovation of railways, and it depended 
 for its success upon the obliging courtesy of an enemy 
 who would keep reasonably still. But since it was 
 for use against the Austrians, it was entirely success- 
 ful ; and the French enjoyed in 1859 the pleasing 
 experience of defeating with the methods of 1809 an 
 adversary whose military thought was that of 1759. 
 Jomini's plan, in the mode of the First Empire, was 
 victorious over generalship which had advanced no 
 further than the Seven Years' War ; but if the 
 Austrians had been Prussians or if General von 
 Moltke had ridden to Pavia with the Feldzeugmeister 
 Giulay, the French would have been swept against 
 the Alps. 
 
 In the last week of May the Emperor lay to the 
 south of his enemy. In a march of four days along 
 their front, he circled round them, passed danger- 
 ously up the Austrian line, and on June 4 came down 
 upon them from the north at Magenta. Contact had 
 been established almost by accident ; and strategy 
 seemed to have been replaced, as in the Middle Ages, 
 by mere coUision. Then, in a long summer day of 
 fighting, the issue was left without control or general- 
 ship to the bayonet. The Emperor sat his horse in 
 the sunshine, as the Guard and the Zouaves and the 
 Turcos went in with the bayonet and his generals 
 fought with swords up village streets. The Austrians 
 were shaken but held on. That night Napoleon sat 
 by candle-hght in a village inn : he had telegraphed 
 a victory to Paris, and when the world of modistes was 
 startled by the new chemical dye^, ladies were to 
 
284 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 name the colour of their garibaldis and polonaises 
 after Magenta. 
 
 In the morning the Austrians tramped heavily 
 eastwards across Lombardy, heading for the fortresses 
 of the Venetian border ; and whilst in Paris Eugenie 
 and the Italian princess were driving to bow right and 
 left down the Rue de Rivoh, the Allies, with a greater 
 aptitude for pageantry than pursuit, set their faces 
 towards Milan. The white coats had marched away, 
 and on a summer morning the bearskins of the 
 Guard were massed in the Piazza d'Armi as the tall 
 helmets of the Gent-gardes went by and the balconies 
 rained flowers on a King and an Emperor going up on 
 horseback through the roaring streets to the frozen 
 magnificence of the Duomo. The Emperor rode 
 slowly, and as lyric ladies ejaculated : 
 
 ' Shout for France and Savoy ! 
 Shout for the council and charge ! 
 Shout for the head of Cavour ; 
 And shout for the heart of a King ' 
 
 one seems to see bounding by his side, with a clash 
 of the cymbals and a shake of her dark ringlets, the 
 impulsive spirit of Elizabeth Browning ingeminating 
 her ardent, her unfortunate refrain : 
 
 ' Emperor 
 Evermore.' 
 
 The army spent a pleasant evening in the lighted 
 streets ; young ladies waved handkerchiefs from 
 windows. Lieutenant GaUifEet of the Spahis dined 
 with his friends, and there was a lively iteration of 
 the friendly syllables ' Liberatori ! Liberatori ! ' Far 
 away to the north Garibaldi in his dark Piedmontese 
 uniform was moving warily among the foothills of the 
 
THE EMPEROR 285 
 
 Alps, and from Osborne Queen Victoria was watching 
 the Emperor nervously and waiting until ' should he 
 thus have rendered himself the master of the entire 
 Continent, the time may come for us either to obey 
 or fight him with terrible odds against us.' There 
 was an unpleasant rise in the tone of Germany ; but 
 he stated the unselfish nature of his mission in a pro- 
 clamation to the Italian people and plunged heavily 
 after the Austrians across Lombardy. The advance 
 took him under the guns of the four strong places of 
 the Venetian Quadrilateral, where the Austrians, 
 reinforced and commanded by their Emperor, were 
 waiting dully. Once more collision took the place 
 of strategy, and the two armies drifted into contact 
 on the hills south of Lake Garda, where for three days 
 of August, 1796, the gaunt infantry of the Republic 
 and its young generals had faced the white coats. 
 They fought in the blazing sun of June 24 at Solferino ; 
 and once more the bayonets thrust and lunged in the 
 sunshine, as the Emperor sat watching on his horse 
 and smoked, gave an order, smoked again, and 
 watched, muttering ' Les pauvres gens ! les pauvres 
 gens ! quelle horrible chose que la guerre ! ' It cost 
 him more than fifty cigarettes to sit the day out ; and 
 when the shadows began to faU longer from the west, 
 a storm of rain and wind swept down between the 
 armies. As it drove away, the Austrians were filing 
 slowly eastwards behind the Mincio, and the Emperor 
 telegraphed to Paris ' Grande bataille, grande victoire ' 
 for a weary woman to read in bed at St. Cloud. 
 There was a flutter of flags in the Paris streets, and she 
 drove with a boy of three between mounted officers, 
 through a hail of flowers to the great cathedral. 
 The army moved slowly forward through the 
 
286 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Italian summer, and the Emperor rode on with his 
 doubts. Some infection was filling his hospitals ; 
 there was fever along the dusty roads, and at the end 
 of them Austria stood waiting behind the great guns 
 of the Venetian fortresses. The Empress wrote from 
 Paris that the Prussians were massing troops behind 
 the Rhine ; the French army was in Italy and the 
 road was open. It was not easy, if France was to 
 be protected on the eastern frontier, to thrust after 
 the Austrians into Venetia. If one succeeded, the 
 Germans would ' regard any serious defeat of Austria 
 in Italy, or anything that should seriously endanger 
 her position in the Quadrilateral, as a danger to the 
 left flank of the German position,' and they might be 
 in Paris in a month. If one failed, Lombardy was 
 lost and France would not be merciful to a defeated 
 Bonaparte — ' ce seraitfini,^ as the French ambassador 
 had told the Queen, ' avec la Dynastic.^ The risks 
 were too great, and on a summer evening Fleury 
 drove through the Austrian lines into Verona. In 
 the morning the dust of his carriage came back up 
 the white road : there was an armistice, and 
 Napoleon was teUing his generals in a garden that 
 France could not both besiege Verona and defend 
 herself. Four days later, on July 11, a house lay in 
 the morning sunshine on the road beyond Villafranca. 
 Some officers stood waiting in the road, and inside the 
 house two men sat talking in a hot room. One of 
 them was Emperor of the French, the other was a 
 tall young man of twenty-eight in a blue uniform : 
 he reigned in Austria as Franz- Joseph i., and he had 
 a young wife in Vienna and a boy of one named 
 Rudolph. Since he had hardly known defeat, he 
 carried himself well with his fair, bushy whiskers. 
 
THE EMPEROR 287 
 
 But half a century away he was to fade dismally out 
 of life in the thunder of a twilight of half the gods in 
 Europe, the bowed Emperor of a dwindling Empire, 
 husband of a murdered woman, and father of a son 
 mysteriously dead. Yet it was very far away in the 
 sunshine at Villafranca. The two men talked easily 
 in the little room ; and without maps or papers, as 
 the French Emperor frayed some flowers, they made 
 peace between France and Austria. Lombardy was 
 to be surrendered ; Venice would be reformed ; and 
 the Pope might preside over an Italian Confedera- 
 tion. After an hour they rode away, and before dusk 
 Franz-Joseph was signing the treaty in a room at 
 Verona. Prince Napoleon stood by ; and as he 
 signed, the Emperor said, ' Je souhaite, Prince, que 
 vous ne soyez jamais dans la necessite de ceder voire plus 
 belle province ' : the wish was not answered. But 
 the Peace of Villafranca became the law of Europe, 
 and the Emperor, who had promised to the Italians 
 their country from the Alps to the Adriatic, left his 
 work half done. Cavour was raving at his master ; 
 Queen Victoria was busily objecting to Foreign 
 Office drafts ; and Italian opinion was exclaiming 
 with Mrs. Browning : 
 
 ' Peace, peace, peace, do you say ? 
 
 What ! — with the enemy's guns in our ears ? 
 With the country's wrong not rendered back ? 
 What ! — while Austria stands at bay 
 In Mantua, and our Venice bears 
 The cursed flag of the yellow and black ? ' 
 
 Yet a good deed half done was better than no deed. 
 There was always time to resume ; il ne faut rien 
 brusquer, and the Emperor had only drawn back 
 within a week of war with Germany. Before the 
 
288 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 month was out he was back in France, riding through 
 the flowers and the cheers on a triumphal charger 
 from Anderson's in Piccadilly, or taldng the salute 
 as the army of Italy marched across Paris with 
 rolling drums and clanging bands and great wreaths 
 of laurel on the colours, whilst battle-painters in tall 
 studios laid on their reds and blues (with a flicker of 
 white for the retreating Austrians) or posed him in 
 attitudes of command for large, commissioned can- 
 vases. A Napoleon had led out the armies of France 
 and ridden home again from victory : his effigy was 
 wreathed on the coins and stamps of his victorious 
 country, and the Empire was at high noon. 
 
THE EMPEROR 289 
 
 IX 
 
 Europe in 1860 had a strange master. When the 
 scene was set, the Queen of England with her stoutish 
 husband, the Holy Father murmuring ' Caro mio 
 Russell ' to the British agent, a slim young man at 
 Schonbrunn, the mild, elderly moustache of Prussia, 
 a Czar, a comfortable Queen of Spain, and the comic 
 ferocity of the Re galanCuomo at Turin seemed to fall 
 apart and sidle into the wings, as Napoleon iii. took 
 the centre of the stage. He moved slowly, with his 
 cigarettes and his great moustache (it was at its 
 longest after the war of 1859) and the hair bunched, 
 after an earUer fashion, above his ears ; and before 
 he spoke, he seemed always to wait for a hint from the 
 prompter. It was a quiet figure. Yet his pre- 
 eminence was no less than his uncle's and as great as 
 Frederick's a hundred years before, when the world 
 had centred on that tight-lipped man with hunted 
 eyes. But they seemed, those earlier effigies, to cast 
 a sharper shadow in the hard light of an older time. 
 His was a vaguer outline, a milder, perhaps a more 
 inteUigent figure with its good manners and its taste 
 for modern ideas. ' Our friend,' as Lord Clarendon 
 wrote with a touch of the pitying characterisation of 
 Mr. Henry James, ' is an odd Uttle fellow.' He is 
 visible in the years after the Italian war moving 
 quietly about his Court among the trees at Fontaine- 
 bleau, or by the sea at Biarritz, or in the two square 
 palaces at St. Cloud and the Tuileries, which were 
 
 T 
 
290 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 caught up somehow in his fate and came crashing 
 down with him to a dull roar of flames. One seems to 
 see him, in those central years of the Second Empire, 
 with his long face bearded to look still longer and a 
 great waxed moustache, smoking among his papers 
 at the Tuileries (the heat in the Httle room was always 
 stifling, and it was filled with the dull gleam of Empire 
 furniture) or running upstairs with a cigarette when 
 ' Ugenie ' sounded her gong at the top of the little 
 staircase ; strolling on the terrace by the river in the 
 bourgeois solemnity of a vast top-hat, or driving a 
 phaeton in the Bois ; crossing the polished floor of 
 the great gallery at Compiegne, as the doors swung 
 back and the party saw the Emperor come slowly 
 into the circle, murmuring the meaningless coiui;esies 
 of royal conversation in his black coat and knee- 
 breeches with the shirt-front barred with the vivid 
 red of the Legion. One gets a sight of him walking 
 a little heavily on the sands at Biarritz, or driving 
 up hot Basque roads to the blue fine of the Pyrenees 
 in brakes full of smiling ladies ; sometimes Eugenie 
 wore her black mantilla, and they sat together through 
 a corrida in the little bull-ring at Bayonne, or they 
 all went out in boats into the Bay of Biscay or on the 
 milder waters of the lake at Fontainebleau. There 
 were dances, hunts, drives, shoots, reviews, recep- 
 tions. He had acquired, in all their fatal versatihty, 
 the multiple accomplishments of royalty, sometimes 
 a soldier in camp at Chalons, sometimes (in tactful 
 company) a savant, sometimes a mere gesture of 
 monarchy on a round-backed Empire throne, some- 
 times a sportsman with the fine, promiscuous bag of 
 foreign shooting or following the staghounds at Com- 
 piegne in a queer. Eighteenth Century masquerade of 
 
THE EMPEROR 291 
 
 three-cornered hats. But mostly he was a kindly, 
 aging man who inflicted parlour games upon his 
 circle or sat smiling a vague, sleepy smile through 
 the innumerable scenes of Imperial magnificence. It 
 was a strange figure. 
 
 Beside him sat the sad, perpetual smile of Eugenie, 
 as she bowed her way through the life of an Empress, 
 and the little head which Lulu bent above his toys. 
 Behind them there was the rustling, gleaming, shift- 
 ing scene of the Imperial Court with the faces 
 thrusting forward a little eagerly into the light. For 
 the most part it was the circle of 1850 which had 
 gathered round the President at the Elysee. But 
 under the Empire the circle seemed drawn into a 
 bolder sweep. One saw the old faces — M. de 
 Persigny with his solemn stare, the wry smile of 
 M. Merimee, Mocquard the secretary in his buttoned 
 coat, General Fleury, and the suave M. de Morny 
 _ with his bald head and his imperial. But they 
 appeared in the ampler dignity of more impressive 
 characters ; they were all ministers, ambassadors. 
 Senators of the Empire; there was a profusion of 
 decorations and gold braid, and the intimates of the 
 Elysee rotated gravely as an Imperial aristocracy. 
 Morny, who had been born without a name and was 
 to die a Duke, was the most elegant (was he not the 
 pious founder of Deauville and the Grand Prix ?) and 
 passed gracefully along ' dans son attitude,'' as young 
 M. Daudet saw him from a desk in his office, ' de 
 Richelieu- Briimmel,' with the plaque of the Legion of 
 Honour on his coat and a faint flavour of finance and 
 the Ballet, President of the Chamber and ex-ambas- 
 sador at the Court of St, Petersburg. Fleury had 
 risen from a captain of Spahis to be colonel of the 
 
292 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Guides and a grave person who conversed with foreign 
 Emperors ; Mocquard, who had once written the 
 Prince's letters in a hotel room in the Place Vendome, 
 drafted Speeches from the Throne ; and Persigny was 
 seen in Downing Street on his way to a conference 
 with Lord Palmerston. 
 
 Beyond the intimates there came the circle of the 
 ministers, solemn gentlemen in black suits who tilted 
 the great stove-pipe hats of 1860 and looked wise as 
 they came out of Council to their carriages at St. Cloud 
 or seemed a trifle out of place as they stood about 
 uneasily among the ladies on the broad steps at 
 Compiegne. M. Fould, who was so clever about 
 money matters, was of the group, and M. Billault who 
 made such splendid speeches, and M. Rouher spread- 
 ing his broad shoulders and looking burly, and 
 M. Walewski confronting Europe with the courage of 
 his master's convictions. 
 
 But the stir, the rustUng movement of the Court, 
 came from the ladies, from the tittering groups that 
 stood in corners, wives and daughters of the grave 
 gentlemen in knee-breeches. The Empress had her 
 ladies with the diamond monogram on the shoulder- 
 knot — two Murats, an Essling, a Bassano, a Monte- 
 bello, a Latoiu'-Maubourg (the list sounded like army 
 orders of the Eirst Empire), an Aguado for Spain and 
 a Bouvet for her heavy beauty. Most of the in- 
 timates were married ; Morny had brought back a 
 Troubetzkoi from St. Petersburg who had smaU 
 features and lived on talk and cigarettes, Madame de 
 Persigny was a Ney who carried so much of London 
 with her from her embassy that they called her in 
 Paris ' Lady Persington,' and the Countess Walewska 
 was a dark Italian. There was an exotic world of 
 Russians and bright-eyed, excited ladies from Italy ; 
 
THE EMPEROR 293 
 
 one repeated M. de Masea's elegant facetiae in three 
 languages, and the ministers' ladies seemed to stand 
 apart a little nervously in their great stiff skirts. It 
 was a shifting sea of smiUng faces with hair tortured 
 into the strange shapes of old fashions, swaying 
 gently to the new Viennese valses, posing a little 
 stiffly in the tableaux vivants, or taking the floor in 
 the fantastic dress which theatrical costumiers send 
 out for fancy balls or M. Worth (it was the dawn of 
 the grands couturiers) believed to represent the last 
 authentic voice of fashion. A little world of pretty 
 women believed (as they have believed so often since) 
 that it had discovered the true life of friendship with 
 their husbands and their husbands' friends ; and the 
 cocodes and their cocodettes (the Second Empire had 
 not learnt to talk of Souls) swung slowly round to an 
 air of Strauss. Solferino was avenged, and Pauline 
 Metternich — ' ce remuant petit monstre ' — ^with the 
 insolence of her ugliness and her great dark eyes and 
 her preposterously whiskered diplomat of a husband 
 set a' tune for the Tuileries to dance to. 
 
 Somewhere beyond, in the lighted city, a whole 
 town took its tone from its easy master and his 
 smiling servants ; and stranger, brighter figures 
 drifted into the flaring gaslight of the Second Empire. 
 He had been for so long, he was still one of Nature's 
 bachelors, and a closed carriage sometimes clattered 
 through the dark streets to a silent house. The 
 world whispered, and women were left with strange 
 memories, to fade miserably out of life with a codicil 
 so piteously asking for burial in old fragrance and old 
 fraflty, for ' la chemise de nuit de Compiegne, batiste et 
 dentelle, 1857,' when the lights were turned low, and 
 Madame de Castiglione was a tarnished recoUection, 
 and the Empire was thirty years in its grave. 
 
294 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The tinkling melody of the Second Empire was 
 played out to a deeper accompaniment from beyond 
 the frontier. Hostile opinion in France was still 
 an affair of nods and whispers ; the drawing-room 
 futilities of elegant irony went on behind the closed 
 doors of Orleanist salons, and a malicious ingenuity 
 of historical parallel enabled intrepid persons to elicit 
 sly laughter with the curious felicity of their denunci- 
 ations of Tiberius and Caligula. But in the freer 
 atmosphere of Brussels and Soho they took a higher 
 tone, and a long litany of disgust went up from the 
 ' proscrits barbus, crochus, moussus, poilus, bossus, et 
 obtus," who haunted the Channel Islands. For eighteen 
 years, until they crept one by one into amnesty or the 
 grave, they roared republican choruses ; and through 
 the steady beat of their song one could hear, like the 
 throb of lighter music through the song of Tann- 
 hduser's Pilgrims, the mounting notes of the Empire. 
 The centre of the little stage was held by a f amOiar 
 figure which had flitted about Paris in the grey light 
 of the coup d'etat, hurried across Belgium, and 
 stepped off the steamer at St. Helier with the dignity 
 of an operatic baritone confronting a stage thunder- 
 storm. He brought with him to British territory a 
 burning indignation, a pale, impending forehead, an 
 astonishing vocabulary, and a middle-aged seragUo 
 of two ; and he installed aU of them with an un- 
 seasonable air of holiday in the mild discomfort of 
 seaside lodgings. It was the astounding achievement 
 
THE EMPEROR 295 
 
 of Victor Hugo to contemplate the eternal verities 
 and to commune with the infinite from an address 
 in Marine Terrace; and on this exiguous pedestal 
 he posed that figure which was his masterpiece, his 
 unsurpassable, his own, muffled in the dark draperies 
 of exile and lit by the wild light of stormy seas. 
 
 His first winter was haunted by the memories of 
 the cowp d'etat, the streets, the running feet, the 
 gunshots in the Rue Tiquetonne ; and behind it all 
 he saw, like a row of grinning masks, the new masters 
 of France. All history seemed to begin and end on 
 the winter night when Paris lay silent under the mist : 
 
 ' Trois amis Ventouraient. C'etait d VMys6e. 
 On voyait du dehors luire cette croisee. 
 Regardant venir Vheure et Vaiguille marcher, 
 II etait la, pensif . . . 
 
 Comme Us sortaient tons trois de la maison Bancal. 
 Morny, Maupas le grec, Saint-Arnaud le chacal, 
 Voyant passer ce groupe oblique et taciturne, 
 Les cloches de Paris, sonnant Vheure nocturne, 
 S'efforgaient vainement d'imiter le tocsin.^ 
 
 The events of the three days of December were 
 embalmed in an elaborate and eloquent mythology, 
 and a bitter litany went up from the republican 
 dead: 
 
 ' O marts, I'herbe sans bruit croit sur vos catacomhes, 
 Dormez dans vos cercueils ! Taisez-vous dans vos tombes ! 
 UEmpire, c^est la paix.'' 
 
 The Emperor — ' pirate empereur Napoleon dernier ' — 
 appears through the flames of a new Inferno in every 
 attitude of infamy, 
 
 ' cassi de debauches, Voeil terne, 
 Furtif, les traits pdlis, 
 Et ce voleur de nuit alluma sa lanterne 
 Au soleil d'Austerlitz ! ' 
 
^96 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Sometimes he is almost a figure of comedy — ' ce 
 Cockney cTEglinton et d' Epsom ' or ' Tom-Pouce 
 
 Attila- ' or 
 
 ' une espece 
 De perroquet ayant un grand nom pour perchoir.' 
 
 But more often he wears a sinister air — ' ce vil masque 
 d moustaches,'' ' Vhomme louche de Vlillysee ' — as his 
 frantic showman waves an ironical pointing-pole 
 towards the cage of 
 
 ' Vhomme aux yeux etroits 
 
 Que Vhistoire appelle — ce drole — 
 
 Et Troplong -Napoleon trois — ' 
 
 or vociferates in a crescendo of invective : 
 
 ' ce gredin taciturne 
 Ce chacal d sang-froid, ce Corse kollandais, 
 ^tale, front d'airain, son crime sous le dais, 
 Gorge d'or et de vin sa bande scil6rate, 
 S'accoude sur la nappe, et cuvant, noir pirate. 
 Son guet-apens fran^ais, son guet-apens remain, 
 Mdche son cure-deyits tacM de sang humain ! ' 
 
 The onslaught is sustained, with the assistance of 
 Juvenal and the Apocalypse in equal parts, against 
 the friends of the Elysee — ' Canrohert Macaire ' and 
 the dying Saint- Arnaud — and the immoral spectacle 
 (so distasteful to a practising bigamist) of the nascent 
 gaiety of the Second Empire. The poet strains his 
 eyes from Jersey through the mist and sees the 
 whirling dance of an Imperial Brocken : 
 
 ' Bal a, VhStel de ville, au LAixembourg gala. 
 Allons, juges, dansez la danse de Vepie ! 
 
 • ••••■ • 
 
 Valsez, Billavit, Parieu, Drouyn, Leboeuf, Delangle ! 
 
 Danse, Dupin ! Dansez Vhorrihle et le bouffon / 
 
 Hyenes, hups, chacals, non privus par Buffon, 
 
 Leroy, Forey, tueurs au fer rongS de rouilles, 
 
 Dansez ! Dansez, Berger, d'Hauipoul, Murat, citrouilles ! ' 
 
THE EMPEROR 297 
 
 The invective rises to a shriek beside which the 
 Second Philippic must appear a piece of tasteless 
 flattery, and the poet strains his voice to breaking- 
 point in his search for more discordant notes. In 
 NapoUon-le-Petit, which went to the printer before 
 he left Belgium, he had harnessed history to the base 
 purposes of the pamphlet. Variations on the same 
 theme travelled with him to England in his luggage, 
 to appear twenty-six years later as Histoire (Tun 
 Crime. But his Muse was still distracted by the 
 obsession of the grey December days of 1851, and 
 in Les Chdtiments he made her drunk with words and 
 sent her to reel across Europe and crouch, mouthing 
 her detestation, on the doorstep of the Empire. 
 
 The dreary business of denunciation went on for 
 eighteen years. The scene shifted from the sea-front 
 at St. Heher to a corner house in Guernsey ; bulky 
 parcels came and went with the proofs of Les 
 Misembles ; the poet was caught by the watchful 
 camera in attitudes of profound reflection in which 
 the gloom of Lord Byron was artfully combined with 
 the expatriation of Ovid ; he thought ; he thought 
 more deeply still ; he grew a beard. But whenever 
 an anniversary came round in the republican calendar, 
 or a distant insurrection was detected in need of the 
 encouragement of a manifesto, or an exile died with- 
 out the consolations of a funeral oration, there was 
 an inexhaustible well of reverberating prose at 
 HauteviUe House, in which little groups of hearers 
 could see reflected the broad and beating wings of 
 human effort as it strove upward towards the fixed 
 stars of an eternal Republic. The great voice came 
 across the sea into England, where its angry iteration 
 exasperated the old and its deep melody obsessed the 
 
298 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 young. The English have always imported their 
 intellectual fashions from the Continent ; and young 
 gentlemen, who had turned Greek with Lord Byron 
 and Italian with Mr. Browning, found it picturesque 
 to make themselves French with M. Victor Hugo. 
 The attitude had an attractive air of defiance, and 
 the temptation to strike it was deepened by the 
 frisson of feeling oneself one with Danton and Marat 
 and the more freely gesticulating figures of M. Victor 
 Hugo and M. Ledru-RoUin. The cold intelligence of 
 Mr. Bagehot had scandahsed the readers of The 
 Inquirer by his approval of the coup d'etat. But it 
 was not surprising that on a May evening in 1857 the 
 Oxford Union met in the Society's room (the fine 
 new figures which Mr. Morris and Mr. Rossetti 
 painted for their young friends were soon to gleam 
 vaguely from the high ceiling) to warn the listening 
 nations ' that the Despotism of Louis Napoleon, as 
 at present exercised over France, is both prejudicial 
 to the progress of that country and to the true in- 
 terests of Europe.' Young Mr. Bowen of BalHol sat 
 on the President's left, and Mr. Dicey, unconscious 
 of his own longer but less vivacious walk down the 
 dreary avenue of jurisprudence, denounced the 
 tyrant. Someone from Brasenose moved, with that 
 feeling for very old institutions which is normally 
 experienced by very young men, a Legitimist amend- 
 ment ; and when the debate was resumed a week 
 later, the House enjoyed the engaging spectacle of 
 Mr. Swinburne of Balliol, whose room was decorated 
 with a portrait of Mazzini, urging upon it with aU the 
 inconsequence of true conviction (and in breach of the 
 Society's admirable rule that members may not read 
 their speeches) ' that although some benefits have 
 
THE EMPEROR 299 
 
 accrued from the rule of Louis Napoleon, the restora- 
 tion of the Bourbons to the Throne of France is much 
 to be desired.' The amendment received no support 
 outside the four members who spoke in its favour ; 
 and it may be supposed that the Bourbons, who 
 learnt nothing, were never aware that they had 
 engaged the momentary support of Mr. Swinburne. 
 
 The young gentleman, who ensured a successful 
 career of letters by competing unsuccessfully for the 
 Newdigate Prize, added an engraving of Orsini to his 
 republican gallery ; but his attentions were readily 
 diverted to the more attractive figures of Astarte and 
 Aholibah. Yet even in the intervals of his devotions 
 to Dolores he found time for a muttered prayer 
 to see 
 
 ' Buonaparte the bastard 
 Kick heels with his throat in a rope.' 
 
 A respectful review of Les Miserables was followed by 
 a gracious letter from Hauteville House ; and the 
 poet's craft, which was always a trifle rudderless, 
 was swept into the great stream of European insur- 
 rection which set from Guernsey against the coast of 
 Prance. Mazzini, Victor Hugo, Barbes, Garibaldi, 
 and a stray rebellion in Crete were all startled with 
 the tribute of mellifluous Ijn^ics, and the singer sent 
 up his denunciations of the Empire and ' the worm 
 Napoleon ' in a steadily mounting crescendo of in- 
 vective which seemed sometimes to rise into a 
 cracked falsetto. In imagery which stated the re- 
 pubUcan sentiments of Mr. Odger with a Dantesque 
 imagination and a Biblical vocabulary his readers 
 were invited to wait hungrily for the Emperor's 
 end : 
 
300 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 ' Death, a little more, and then the worm ; 
 A little longer, Death, a little yet, 
 Before the grave gape and the grave-worm fret ; 
 Before the sanguine -spotted hand infirm 
 Be rottenness, and that foul brain, the germ 
 
 Of all ill things and thoughts, be stopped and set.' 
 
 The exercise was pleasantly titillating to a young 
 man with friends whose appetite for recitation was 
 fortunately insatiable ; and he contributed (like his 
 friend Meredith) ' to the Song of French History ' a 
 metrical Philippic in which the Emperor appeared as 
 ' an evil snake-shaped beast ' and ' Judas ' and ' son 
 of man, but of what man who knows ? ' until a 
 winter day in 1873 when the little poet pranced 
 about with his ' funeral flowers ' for the grave at 
 Chislehurst and screamed over the man 
 
 ' Whose soul to-night stands bodiless and bare. 
 For whom our hearts give thanks who put up prayer. 
 That we have lived to say, The dog is dead.' 
 
 Equally apocalyptic in his inspiration but of more 
 uneven literary accomplishment was the Prophet 
 Baxter, who saw in the Emperor's career the fulfil- 
 ment of all prophecies and a plain indication (so 
 gratifying to true believers) of the approaching end 
 of the age between the years 1864 and 1873. A 
 vigorous pictorial treatment of the Beasts of the 
 Apocalypse demonstrated that, as the eighth head. 
 Napoleon might be expected to manifest himself 
 as Antichrist ; Apollyon faded imperceptibly into 
 Apoleon ; and the prophet argued with a wealth of 
 quotation and slightly feverish exegesis that the 
 Empire led inevitably to Armageddon, ' an un- 
 precedented Revival of Rehgion and of Missionary 
 effort among the Foolish Virgins,' a successful 
 
THE EMPEROR 301 
 
 invasion of Great Britain, the Resurrection, and 
 quite a number of other agreeable fixtures which 
 might be expected to take place at regular intervals 
 after the date of Mr. Baxter's researches. The 
 Emperor, described forcibly as ' this great Ante- 
 typical, Papistico - Infidel, Democratico - Despotic, 
 Personal Antichrist,' was to fall with the Pope into 
 a new volcano conveniently opened for the occasion 
 outside Rome after a crowded career including 
 campaigns in Eg5rpt and Palestine and the subjuga- 
 tion of America, to which references in the Apocalypse 
 are unaccountably vague but may be inferred from an 
 indication somewhere in the text of ' a wilderness.' 
 Mr. Baxter's programme was packed with pleasing 
 incident, and it was timed to end at latest in 1873. 
 In that year dutifully ended Napoleon in. ; but 
 the universe, which had been kept in ignorance 
 of Mr. Baxter's revelation, omitted to end with 
 him. 
 
302 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XI 
 
 The Second Empire in 1860 drifted into its last de- 
 cade at a characteristic tilt. Whilst the Emperor, 
 upon a somewhat Anglo-Saxon view that the com- 
 position of history forms an appropriate relaxation 
 for men of action, was beginning to collect material 
 for a hfe of Caesar and calling upon slightly em- 
 barrassed savants to produce ' documents inedit^s ' of 
 the period, Europe was fingering a little doubtfully 
 the Italian question. 
 
 This problem, which provided well-informed 
 persons with the agreeable form of intellectual dis- 
 traction subsequently derived from the Balkan 
 Peninsiila, was set for solution beyond all hope of 
 avoidance. Grave gentlemen considered the future 
 of Central Italy and its minor monarchies and 
 wrestled with the paradox of the French garrison 
 in Rome, whilst the prospects of the Papacy, the 
 continuance of Bourbon incompetence in the King- 
 dom of Naples, the obvious aggressions of Piedmont, 
 and a vague menace of Mazzinian repubhcanism 
 suppUed a shifting background before which the 
 Emperor held, in attitudes of Eleusinian mystery, 
 the centre of the stage. He had permitted the war 
 to end before it had solved its problems with the 
 satisfying completeness of a fait accompli, and it was 
 not simple to reconcile his divergent impulses in a 
 single poKcy. His word to Austria, his faith in Italy, 
 and an anxious eye upon French Catholic opinion 
 
THE EMPEROR 303 
 
 drew him in three directions, and he seemed to seek 
 refuge from an awkward choice in the imposing 
 attitudes of oracular immobility. His tendency in 
 the autumn of 1859, when the Peace of Villafranca 
 was embodied in the definitive treaties of Zurich, was 
 to impose a provisional adjustment of the Italian 
 question and to defer for solution by a European 
 congress the final reconstruction of Italy. His faith 
 in the collective wisdom of Europe, which never left 
 him, was pathetic and (in an observer familiar with 
 the congresses which followed the Peace of Vienna, 
 although necessarily debarred from acquaintance 
 with the more rococo series subsequent to the Peace 
 of Versailles) surprising. But upon the question of 
 Italy it was never tested, since the congress never 
 met. The sages displayed a marked disinclination 
 for one another's company, and the project faded. 
 
 It was an unfortunate by-product of this design 
 that Church opinion in France, to which aU logic had 
 been sacrificed in the protective occupation of Rome 
 by a French army, was profoundly shocked by an 
 intrusion of common-sense. A pamphlet had been 
 written to prepare the pubHc mind for the issues to 
 come before the congress ; it was known to have been 
 approved by the Emperor, and since it contained a 
 plain indication that the maintenance of the Pope's 
 territories in a reuniting Italy was a political absurd- 
 ity, the suspicion of enlightenment at the Tuileries 
 sufficed to scandalise clerical opinion. The Catholic 
 supporters of the Empire exchanged their loyalty for 
 a succession of hostile convulsions, and a section of 
 French journalism was devoted to solemn invective 
 whilst the pulpits rang with the grave eloquence of 
 admonitions to the Bjnpero.r. 
 
304 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 A more fortunate by-product of the Italian question 
 (although it resulted equally in the alienation of a 
 large body of French opinion) was the movement of 
 French policy closer to Great Britain. It was obvious 
 that if the Italian case was to be maintained in 
 Europe, it must rest on the support of France and 
 England. The subjects of Queen Victoria had been 
 startled by French armaments into the defensive 
 attitudes of the Rifle Volunteers, and the Emperor 
 was anxious to recover their esteem. By a fortunate 
 chance his Minister of Commerce was dining one 
 evening to meet the remarkable Mr. Cob den, whose 
 views upon fiscal matters were so original and (to 
 French opinion) so diverting. He had an odd notion, 
 which he had opened to a French economist in the 
 congenial air of the Great Exhibition, on the subject 
 of Free Trade between France and England, and he 
 was anxious to put his fantastic proposal before the 
 Emperor. On an autumn morning in 1859 he drove 
 out to St. Cloud for an audience, leaving Mrs. Cobden 
 at the hotel. Reflecting a trifle obviously on the 
 sumptuary differences between the President of the 
 United States and the Emperor of the French, he was 
 shown into a room, where he saw a short man with a 
 large moustache whose ' eye is not pleasant at first, 
 but it warms and moistens with conversation, and 
 gives you the impression that he is capable of 
 generous emotions.' They discussed the new archi- 
 tecture of Paris and the ineptitude of British 
 journaUsts ; Mr. Cobden said that Mr. Gladstone 
 would have a surplus in his next Budget and was 
 anxious to reduce duties on French imports ; the 
 Emperor was prepared to make similar concessions 
 but regretted the embarrassment of a Protectionist 
 
THE EMPEROR 305 
 
 majority in his own Chamber. Then, with a pleasing 
 irony, the elderly parliamentarian and his host 
 arranged to elude the Chamber of Deputies by a pre- 
 rogative use of the treaty-making power of the French 
 Crown. Something was said about Sir Robert Peel, 
 and the Emperor observed that he was ' charmed and 
 flattered at the idea of performing a similar work in 
 my country ; but it is very difficult in France to make 
 reforms; we make revolutions in France, not reforms.' 
 Mr. Cobden drove back to Paris and engaged in 
 conversations of detail with M. Fould. An invitation 
 to Compiegne was declined, and the electors of Roch- 
 dale were denied the pleasing spectacle of their 
 member and Mrs. Cobden displaying the urbanity 
 of Lancashire among the Imperial parterres. The 
 missionary of Free Trade returned to England and 
 found the imagination of the Prime Minister obsessed 
 by news of French orders for armour-plate and rifled 
 artillery and a sinister story, which prevailed in 
 British poHtics for half a century before and half a 
 century after it haunted Lord Palmerston in 1859, 
 that someone in a foreign port had seen by a failing 
 light a flotilla of {monstrum informe ingens horrendum) 
 flat-bottomed boats. But the negotiation went on ; 
 Mr. Cobden returned to Paris and saw something of 
 Napoleon in his home with his cigarettes and his tall 
 Empress ; angry French gentlemen on deputations 
 ran the traditional gamut of Protectionist argument ; 
 but in three months from that first morning at 
 St. Cloud a Commercial Treaty was signed, and whilst 
 his sovereign offered to Mr. Cobden the distinctions 
 of baronetcy or membership of the Privy Council, the 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer was enabled to refresh 
 his countrymen with Gladstone clarets. 
 
 V 
 
306 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The Emperor was smoking quietly over his life of 
 Caesar ; M. Merimee wrote notes for him on Roman 
 religion, and the lady whom he had sent round the 
 libraries when he was at Ham went on archaeological 
 errands into Germany. But the Italian question 
 continued to throw a long shadow. A new minister 
 was installed at the Quai d'Orsay who had demon- 
 strated his faith in the doctrine of nationaUty in the 
 unpromising instance of Roumania; but M. Thou- 
 venel was instructed in the danger of public adhesion 
 to general principles by the immediate necessity of 
 annexing some Italian territory. Nice and Savoy 
 had stood in the bond of Plombieres as the price 
 of French assistance ; and as Piedmont rapidly ex- 
 panded, the Emperor was disinclined to forego his 
 trifling honorarium. Europe was startled by an 
 announcement that by the exigencies of geography 
 (it was the old revolutionary doctrine of natural 
 frontiers) and by a treaty with Cavour the French 
 were entitled to advance their south-eastern frontier 
 to the watersheds of the Alps. Queen Victoria wrote 
 voluble despatches about ' spoHation ' ; Lord John 
 Russell made firm speeches ; the Prince Consort 
 wrote wise letters ; Mr. Eanglake denounced the 
 French annexations with aU the fire with which, 
 twenty years earlier, he had resented the appropria- 
 tion of the blonde Miss Howard ; and there was even 
 an odd little wrangle between the Emperor and the 
 British ambassador at a Tuileries concert. But the 
 world was reluctant to go to war for an ItaHan 
 province. Mr. Bright, whose appetite for a patriotic 
 casus belli was always of the faintest, said ' Perish 
 Savoy ! ' and M. Benedetti came back from Turin 
 with the Piedmontese consent. A plebiscite in the 
 
THE EMPEROR 307 
 
 new provinces welcomed the change of ownership. 
 Garibaldi was left staring at the tricolour over 
 
 ' The little house my father knew, 
 The olives and the palms of Nice,' 
 
 and before the year was out, M. Thiers was rejoicing 
 sotto voce that ' the worst humiliation of 1815 has 
 been wiped out,' whilst cheering crowds sent the 
 Emperor bowing through Savoy, and Napoleon and 
 Eugenie put out in a state barge from the Pont des 
 Amours under a night of stars into the Lake of 
 Annecy. 
 
 But Italy was never still. There was a queer thrill 
 in the south where Bombd's son, with what Queen 
 Victoria called ' an unfortunate Pietdt for the memory 
 of his father,' was shooting his prisoners ; and from 
 an inn at Genoa Garibaldi was beginning to look 
 southwards. A few cases of condemned muskets 
 came in by rail ; a little piracy secured two ships in 
 the harbour ; and on a May night he stood under the 
 great moon on the rocks at Quarto, as the boats put 
 out to sea and the Thousand faced towards Sicily. 
 The Neapolitans fumbled with the invasion ; and 
 whilst Queen Victoria discussed the ethics of revolu- 
 tion with Lord John Russell, the world looked on at 
 the hard fighting in the hills with the cold stare of 
 impartiality generally reserved by official Christen- 
 dom for successful insurrections against the Sultan of 
 
 Turkey, until 
 
 ' You 've seen the telegram ? 
 Palermo 's taken, we believe.^ 
 
 The mad march went on ; and Garibaldi drove up 
 Italy in a brougham, whilst Napoleon talked amiably 
 about non-intervention and permitted Italy to make 
 itself. His troops stood in Rome with grounded 
 
308 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 arms, as the Thousand reeled through the roaring 
 streets of Naples and the slow tide of the Piedmontese 
 advance washed over the Pope's territory in the 
 north. The judicious Leopold wrote feverish letters 
 from Laeken about ' le Filibustive movement at 
 Naples ' and scandahsed Queen Victoria with the 
 bitter contrast between the canonisation of Garibaldi 
 at Naples and the execution of General Walker in 
 Honduras. Anxious gentlemen from Turin posted 
 over the mountains to Chambery to consult the 
 impassive face behind the large moustache. The 
 oracle, as is the way of oracles, was silent ; but silence, 
 at a moment when the Garibaldians were destroying 
 the Kingdom of Naples and the Piedmontese army 
 had violated the Pope's frontier, was consent enough 
 for Cavour ; and soon all Italy believed that the 
 Emperor (though he was not above a hint to Austria 
 that the Italians might be checked) had muttered 
 his blessing — ' Failes, mais faites vite ' or ' Fatte, ma 
 fatte presto ' — and the queer Italian war went on. 
 The Pope's army, commanded by Lamoriciere, 
 whose name was a reproach to Napoleon, trailed 
 despondently into the Marches and broke at Castel- 
 fidardo. The Piedmontese marched into Naples 
 and Umbria, and before the year was out Victor 
 Emmanuel was proclaimed King of Italy. 
 
 The French attitude had exasperated the CathoUcs 
 and alarmed the English. Germany was nervous ; 
 and when the Emperor saw the Regent of Prussia at 
 Baden, ' le Prince Regent s^est conduit vis-d-vis de moi 
 comme une jeune fille pudique, qui craint les propos 
 d'un vert galant et qui evite de se trouver longtemps seule 
 avec lui.' It remained to emphasise the importance 
 of France by those operations against unarmed 
 
THE EMPEROR 309 
 
 aboriginal populations in distant quarters of the 
 world which were to be accepted in the last half of 
 the Nineteenth Century as an unfailing indication of 
 the status of a Great Power. Disorder in Syria 
 provoked a French expedition and an impressive 
 demonstration of the traditional interest of France 
 in the Levant (as well as the literal truth of the 
 Imperial anthem Partant pour la Syrie), and the 
 regrettable persistence of Chinese ideas in China 
 resulted in a Franco-British invasion. The Taku 
 Forts were stormed, and the aUies marched on Pekin. 
 The mission of western civilisation was amply de- 
 monstrated by the looting of the Summer Palace, 
 and honour was elaborately satisfied. On the road 
 to the capital the little army brushed aside forty 
 thousand Chinamen armed with bows and match- 
 locks. The engagement was grotesque,but the French 
 general took a title from its name. He was to be 
 (how far away it seemed in 1860) the last minister of 
 the Empire ; and when the name of a Chinese village 
 turned General Cousin-Montauban into Count Pali- 
 kao, a faint sound of the thudding guns of 1870 
 seemed to come up the wind. 
 
310 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XII 
 
 In the grey dawn of tlie Second Empire, by the cold 
 daybreak of 1852 the issues had been very plain. 
 The broad alternatives of Empire and revolution had 
 been sharply outUned in that clear light ; and it 
 seemed so easy to save society, so simple to strike 
 enlightened international attitudes on the European 
 stage. Slowly the day broadened, and under a 
 mounting sun the Empire moved towards high noon. 
 In the blaze of it there were French victories, an heir, 
 a smihng Empress, and the world seemed waiting for 
 Napoleon to remake it. But the day drew on, and 
 in the milder hght of afternoon the outlines blurred. 
 The old certainties seemed to lose something of their 
 sharpness and to fade, as doubts began to grow on the 
 slow minds of France and Europe, and the paths of 
 the Empire became less clear. The sun was still high, 
 and the Emperor paced slowly in the sunUght. Yet 
 it was past noon, and the shadows began to fall 
 longer on the ground. There were deaths round 
 the Emperor : Jerome, the old King of Westphalia, 
 faded unimpressively out of life into the legend of 
 the First Empire, and the Empress wore black for 
 her sister, the Spanish duchess. There was a faint 
 air of evening upon the Empire. Soon the Hght 
 would fade, and it would be night. 
 
 It had been simple enough in the first movement 
 of the Empire for a man not far past forty to govern 
 France. Centralisation was the administrative tra- 
 
THE EMPEROR 311 
 
 dition of Bonapartism, and a single will made all 
 decisions. They were transmitted to the nation by 
 the Imperial machine, and the functions of ministers 
 rarely exceieded the limited duty of supervising its 
 smooth running. Ability is not encouraged by 
 absolutism of this order ; his surroundings, as an 
 observer wrote of them,, were ' des outils et . . . pas 
 de compagnons,' and since the Emperor needed no 
 collaborators, he had found none. ' Le maitre,' as 
 M, Merimee saw him, ' n'admet pas trop, je le crains, 
 quHl y ait des hommes necessaires.^ But under the 
 pi^essure of a later phase he began to be conscious of 
 the need. His ministers had been little more than 
 a procession of self-seeking mediocrities, each willing 
 to subordinate his policy to the Emperor's, but all 
 consolable for their subjection by the gratifying 
 proximity of the public purse — M. Fould the banker, 
 who drifted into statesmanship after a financial career 
 that had been far, so very far, from exemplary ; the 
 grave Baroche pocketing sinecures for his unpleasant 
 son ; M. Walewski, whose policy was so apt to vary 
 with his investments ; the hungry Haussmann, whose 
 municipal finance inspired irreverent comments on 
 the Comptes fantastiques d' Haussmann ; and the 
 simpler appetites of the smaller men. Their master 
 had been indifferent in the choice of his servants since 
 
 ( 
 
 he disbeUeved in the efficacy of human action to 
 change the course of events and was content to rely, 
 for such action as he took, upon himself. But as the 
 scene darkened and the Emperor began to grope in 
 the gathering gloom, he needed (and never found) 
 a minister of the great tradition. There was no 
 Louvet and no Colbert ; and for ten years he was 
 left muttering, as he had said almost fretfully 
 
312 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 to the Prince Consort at Osborne : ' Ou trouver 
 Vhomme ? ' 
 
 His choice was cruelly limited by his circle. 
 Persigny, who alternated between the embassy in 
 London and the Ministry of the Interior, was loyal 
 to the point of tactlessness ; but he had been in- 
 delibly impressed by his early reading with the 
 ruthless absolutism of the First Empire. M. Rouher 
 had a lawyer's aptitude for detail and considerable 
 eloquence ; but his political ideals were those of a 
 policeman ; and when the Emperor's design drifted 
 towards an infusion of parliamentarism into the 
 Imperial system, the dilution of strong government 
 was repellent to his minister, and M. Rouher per- 
 mitted the fragile parliamentary experiment of the 
 later Empire to fail under his heavy hands. One 
 man perhaps might have made a minister of the first 
 order. M. de Morny possessed the airy accomplish- 
 ments of a diplomat of romance ; but he was rarely 
 employed abroad, since the Empire required all its 
 diplomacy at home. He was a strange figure, with 
 an aptitude for light comedy and the happy applica- 
 tion of official information to his private speculations 
 — ' un bandit,'' as someone saw him, ' tombe dans la 
 peau d'un vaudevilliste.^ His elegance (they called 
 his house in Paris ' le petit coin d' amour ') seemed to 
 date from an earher age of frivolity in high places ; 
 and when Flahaut was French ambassador in London 
 and the memory of Hortense was embalmed in the 
 aromatic sanctity of the Imperial legend, their son 
 sauntered gracefully through French politics, facing 
 the world with the well-dressed irony of Mr. Brummell. 
 One of his clerks at the Palais Bourbon was a young 
 man named Daudet — ' fantastique employe a criniere 
 
THE EMPEROR 313 
 
 Mirovingienne ' — and when the Duke offered him the 
 post, the solemn youth warned him, with all the 
 pomposity of an extremist, that he was a royalist. 
 There was a bland, slow smile, and Morny replied : 
 ' U Imperatrice Vest aussi.'' He lounged in his easy 
 way into French fiction ; and M. Zola's documents 
 compiled M. de Marsy, whilst M. Daudet's observa- 
 tion sketched the Due de Mora. It was an engaging 
 person ; but he had few beliefs. Democracy did not 
 alarm him, because one could always captivate the 
 democrats ; and in this mood he joined in the 
 Emperor's drift towards parHamentary government. 
 Yet he was never a minister, sitting always as Presi- 
 dent of the Chamber, standing between the Emperor 
 and the poHticians, holding himself perpetually in 
 reserve, until he died. 
 
 French opinion in 1860 was beginning to stir. Its 
 rest had been seriously interrupted, and the Imperial 
 lullaby was ceasing to soothe it. Moustachu was 
 still popular in the streets although they were some- 
 times disrespectful about his lady, la Reine Crinoline. 
 But Mr. Cobden's Commercial Treaty had roused the 
 manufacturing interests ; the desertion of the Pope 
 scandalised those numerous persons who confused 
 their religious beliefs with an adherence to the Tem- 
 poral Power ; and the unheroic gentlemen who sat at 
 the Palais Bourbon under the suave tutelage of 
 M. de Morny and his bell were beginning to lose (it 
 may have been due to the Emperor's policies or to 
 the dreadful proximity, the republican contamination 
 of the Five) their native docility. Morny observed 
 the need and responded with a modest plan for in- 
 creasing the liberties of the Chamber ; he said as 
 much to M. Darimon, one of the reckless Five. Some- 
 
314 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 one consulted M. Thiers as a retired expert on parlia- 
 mentary institutions, and one afternoon at Council 
 the Emperor informed his ministers that he proposed 
 to make a change. Two days later, on November 24, 
 1860, the decree was signed ; and true Bonapartist 
 opinion was scandalised by the intrusion of liberties 
 which approximated to those enjoyed by the Parlia- 
 ments of Queen Elizabeth. 
 
 Under the new system the two Chambers were 
 permitted to vote (and even to discuss) an Address in 
 reply to the Speech from the Throne ; the procedure 
 on amendment was simpUfied ; debates might in 
 future be reported in full ; and the Government 
 proposed to justify its proceedings to the Chamber 
 by the arguments of a new class of ministers without 
 portfolio, whose sole official duty was eloquence. 
 M. Billault, a harassed-looking gentleman with con- 
 siderable powers of speech, was appointed to wrestle 
 with the strange forces of democracy, and the Empire 
 passed into its new phase. M. de Morny asked 
 M. Ollivier whether he was satisfied, and the mild 
 eyes gleamed at him almost sternly behind the narrow 
 spectacles : ' Si c'est une fin, vous etes perdus ; si 
 c'est un commencement, vous etes fondes.^ It was a 
 strange admission for a republican. But the young 
 man (he was under forty) had travelled a long way 
 since he was a bewildered official of the Second 
 Republic. The treadmill of opposition (he was 
 perpetually delivering admirable speeches to a 
 mausoleum of indifference or an inferno of interrup- 
 tion) was beginning to impress its barrenness upon 
 his sensitive intelligence. The world is so much 
 simpler for bigots than for philosophers ; and a less 
 active mind would have found it easy to solve every 
 
THE EMPEEOR 315 
 
 problem with a republican cliche. All round him the 
 orthodox republicans were murmuring their incanta- 
 tions with religious monotony, and he met a bull- 
 necked young barrister at the Manets one evening 
 (the name was Gambetta) who was pounding the 
 table-tops of the Cafe Procope with a heavier fist, 
 as a new voice from the Midi sent the infamies of 
 the Empire vibrating among the chandeliers. Yet 
 OUivier saw too much of the republicans to believe 
 completely in the Republic ; perhaps Lamennais had 
 been right when he said in his bitterness, ' Les repu- 
 blicains sontfaits pour rendre la republique impossible.^ 
 One could not always strike Roman attitudes, and 
 repubUcan perorations were hardly in themselves a 
 substitute for good government. If only one could 
 beUeve that the Emperor's drift into constitutionalism 
 was sincere, was deliberate, was a step in a system, 
 then France might be governed in ordered liberty, 
 and M. OUivier might return from the husks of repub- 
 hcanismto take a prodigal hand in its government. 
 The solution had a tepid air of compromise ; it lacked 
 the devastating logic of revolutions. But M. OUivier 
 could write, ' Mieux vaut vivre dans une constitution 
 illogique que de mourir pour la logique.^ The senti- 
 ment was hardly French ; but it was forming 
 in the mind of at least one Frenchman, and one 
 can see beyond it the faint dawn of the Liberal 
 Empire. 
 
 The experiment, which began in 1860, was an odd 
 one. It was an attempt to govern France by the 
 collaboration of men who did not believe in liberty 
 with men who did not believe in the Empire ; and 
 the Emperor's circle stared a little when M. OUivier 
 opened the politics of 1861 with a speech in which 
 
316 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 he seemed to offer republican support to a parlia- 
 mentary Empire : 
 
 * Quant a moi qui suis republicain, fadmirerais, 
 j'appuierais, et mon appui serait d'autant plus efficace 
 qu'il serait completement desinteresse.' 
 
 There were debates in the Chamber upon real 
 issues, and M. Merimee, whose Liberalism was a trifle 
 rusty, wrote letters of grave concern to his friend 
 Mr. Panizzi of the British Museum. Controversy 
 centred on the perpetual problem of Rome; they 
 sold a puzzle named after it in the streets ; and as 
 the Pope became the leading figure in French politics, 
 the clericals began to give tongue against the Empire. 
 But stranger things than the new voices of the 
 Chamber were heard in Paris. Everybody was at 
 the Opera one evening in March to see the preposter- 
 ous new piece, all pilgrims and discords, which the 
 Emperor had imported from Germany. They called 
 it Tannhduser, and anyone could see that M. BerHoz 
 was right when he denounced the new barbarism of 
 Herr Wagner. One could hardly doubt, if one had 
 heard enough Rossini and Meyerbeer, that opera 
 was a succession of tinkling melodies punctuated 
 by a baUet, and persons of taste were outraged by 
 the sonorous anarchy of the new revelation. The 
 Emperor, who had no ear, might applaud as an act of 
 foreign policy ; Madame de Metternich clapped holes 
 in her gloves and broke a fan ; and M. Ollivier (he 
 was Liszt's son-in-law — it was just what one would 
 expect of a republican) must have felt quite at home 
 defying a hostile majority. But the house hooted, 
 and French culture was noisily upheld. 
 
 The drift of politics continued through the year. 
 
THE EMPEEOR 317 
 
 Italy toiled wearily through the maze of the Roman 
 question ; Cavour died as impulsively as he had 
 lived ; French clericals were dragged by their loyalty 
 to the Church into dislike of the Emperor ; and the 
 strange transformation of the Empire went on. Late 
 in the year (the decree was dated November 14, 1861) 
 Napoleon by a sudden gesture restored to the 
 Chamber the control of the public purse. Supply 
 was to be voted almost in the English fashion, and 
 M. de Morny met someone at a first night (the play 
 was by a young man named Sardou) and expressed 
 himself well pleased. The Empire was becoming 
 almost perceptibly parliamentary, and before the 
 recess of 1862 M. OUivier for the first time risked his 
 republican chastity in the compromising privacy of 
 Morny' s room. They talked vaguely of the future, 
 of a constitutional Empire, of a ministry in which 
 M. de Morny might lead and M. OUivier might serve, 
 until (it was a little ominous) M. Benedetti came in 
 from Turin. 
 
 Outside France the world lived in a succession of 
 problems, to each of which the Emperor seemed 
 anxious to apply a uniform solution consisting (it 
 seemed ridiculous in 1860, but it was the wisdom of 
 1918) of a congress and the principle of nationality. 
 The method had already been attempted in the case 
 of Italy, where its success seemed only to be delayed 
 by the illogical survival of the Papacy. The 
 Emperor appeared to desire a repetition of the experi- 
 ment when the Poles went out against their masters 
 in 1863. There was a spate of Notes and despatches. 
 But in a world which knew its lessons (and one could* 
 teach them as one sat smoking at the Tuileries) the 
 Polish question and the hovering problems of Rome, 
 
318 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Greece, the Elbe Duchies, and the Danubian Princi- 
 paUties would all be quite simple, because all Italy 
 would be Italian, Poland would be Polish, Germany 
 would be German, and even in the Baltic the little 
 kingdoms of the north would combine in a logical 
 unit. It was so easy to reconstruct Europe with a 
 blank map and a coloured pencil, and nothing but 
 the obstinate pretence that the settlement of 1815 
 was immutable prevented the reconstruction. The 
 imagination of Napoleon in. was haunted by the 
 malicious shadow of the Peace of Vienna. It had 
 degraded his country, insulted his family, and 
 cramped his projects. He was a Bonaparte, and to 
 revise it would be almost to reverse Waterloo. 
 Twice at least, to the blushing Prince Albert in 1857 
 and to the less easily scandalised Lord PalmerstOn 
 in 1863, he proposed a revision of the political 
 structure of Europe. The proposal was even em- 
 bodied in a general circular to the Powers. But the 
 Prince was stifHy discouraging and ' begged him,' 
 with a rare approach to gesticulation, ' to open the 
 book of history, which lay before him ' ; whilst Lord 
 Palmerston, who although he was a Liberal rarely 
 forgot that he was a landowner, felt that ' those 
 who hold their estates under a good title, now nearly 
 half a century old, might not be particularly desirous 
 of having it brought under discussion with all the 
 alterations which good-natured neighbours might 
 wish to suggest in their boundaries.' The project 
 was rendered still more ridiculous by a romantic 
 design that the agenda of the conference should 
 include the limitation of European armaments — 'des 
 armements exayeres entretenus par de mutuelles de- 
 fiances ' — and when it dropped, the Emperor was left 
 
THE EMPEROR 319 
 
 alone with his large intentions. His policy was 
 losing something of its old directness, and he seemed 
 to stray among the diplomats with the lost air of a 
 man of principle in a Peace Conference. His fiendish 
 cunning (even Mr. DisraeU alarmed his old ladies 
 with mysterious allusions to ' the great Imperial 
 Sphinx ') was one of the tenderest illusions of a 
 romantic age. But a Prussian ambassador, who 
 spent a few months in Paris, was more sceptical. 
 His name was von Bismarck, and he had already 
 epitomised Russia as Nitchevo. He found that 
 France contained ' deux femmes amusantes, Vlmpera- 
 trice, la plus belle femme que je connaisse, et la Wa- 
 lewska, mais pas un homme,' and of the Imperial 
 facade he said : ' De loin c'est quelque chose et de pres 
 ce n'est rien.^ 
 
 With a faint air of confusion the country drifted 
 into the elections of 1863. The Emperor was deep 
 in the career of JuUus Caesar ; archaeologists were 
 entertained by preposterous models of triremes, and 
 hallistae threw Roman projectiles about in the park 
 of St. Cloud, whilst his ministers concerted plans 
 with M. de Persigny for the regimentation of French 
 opinion. There was a vague stir of political ideas in 
 the country, and manipulation was obviously neces- 
 sary if the admirable unanimity of 1857 was to be 
 retained in the new Chamber. The work was con- 
 genial to Persigny, who circularised his Prefets in 
 language that was almost apocalyptic : ' Fort de son 
 origine providentielle, Velu du peuple a realise toutes 
 les esperances de la France.^ But in case opinion was 
 insufficiently informed of this axiom, the pubHc 
 memory was to receive official assistance at the 
 Prefecture : 
 
320 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Le suffrage est libre. Mais, afin que la bonne foi des 
 populations ne puisse etre trompee par des habiletes de 
 langage ou des professions de foi equivoques, designez 
 hautement, comme dans les elections precedentes, les 
 candidats qui inspirent le plus de confiance au Gouverne- 
 ment. Qus les populations sachent.' . . . 
 
 As the Minister of the Interior sat writing in his 
 room, a sound of voices seemed to drift across the 
 long silence of the Empire, like the first movements 
 of a dawning day. The republicans were renewing 
 their old incitements, and the royalists of every 
 shade were crying their old wares. The clericals 
 formed a strange opposition of the Right, and even 
 M. Thiers took a hand. There was a queer coalition 
 of republicans and bishops ; old gentlemen who 
 desired the Republic of 1848 combined with still 
 older gentlemen who desired the monarchy of King 
 Charles x., and gentlemen in middle life whose 
 simpler aspirations were satisfied by the monarchy 
 of King Louis Philippe, The language of the Govern- 
 ment became more violent ; the Prefets redoubled 
 their persuasions in favour of the official candidates ; 
 and Persigny, who seemed to a contemporary 
 ' enivre au cabaret de la puissance,'' dictated loudly to 
 his countrymen. In the provinces his orders were 
 obeyed ; but the republicans swept Paris, and the 
 elections of 1863 sent an Opposition of thirty -two 
 Deputies to the Chamber, of whom seventeen were 
 republicans. M. Ollivier sat with MM. Jules Favre, 
 Jules Simon, and Thiers ; and whilst their young 
 friends Ferry and Gambetta sat cheering behind 
 them in the gallery, one seems to see gliding into 
 place the men of the Third Republic. 
 
THE EMPEROR 321 
 
 XIII 
 
 On a winter day towards the end of 1861 the port 
 of Vera Cruz observed without enthusiasm the arrival 
 of a Spanish fleet in Mexican waters. The troops 
 were landed, and six thousand men in the uniform of 
 Queen Isabella marched of£ in the sunshine to the 
 empty forts. Early in the new year more ships 
 appeared on the skyline. A British admiral came 
 ashore, and a naval brigade swung up the narrow 
 street. On the next day there was more movement 
 in the harbour. A French squadron had put in, and 
 they were landing some marines. A battalion of 
 Zouaves went up into the town, and the adventure 
 of Mexico had begun. 
 
 The Mexican expedition was, in its first phase, a 
 bond-holders' war. The weakness of the Latin in- 
 telUgence for homicide as a form of political argument 
 has frequently endangered the security of foreign 
 investors, and it is rarely consistent with the regular 
 payment of interest. Mexico, which had enjoyed the 
 amenities of civil war for a generation, was a cause of 
 frequent anxiety. Each of its competing Presidents 
 (there were two) had misappropriated foreign funds 
 and responded to complaints with exquisite courtesy 
 and a receipt for the stolen money ; and the misgivings 
 of its European creditors had been recently confirmed 
 when President Juarez, who was at the moment in 
 control of the capital and the greater part of the 
 country, suspended for two years the payment of 
 
322 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 foreign debts. The simple directness of his financial 
 methods caused some alarm in London and Paris, 
 where Mexican securities were largely held. Spanish 
 interests were also concerned in the insolvency of 
 Mexico, and the wheels of diplomacy began slowly 
 to revolve. But from the first the motives of the 
 three Powers lacked uniformity. Great Britain 
 alone was actuated by the simple appetites of the 
 debt-collector. In Madrid there was a vague desire 
 to regild the glories of the Spanish flag, to castigate 
 these rebelHous colonists, perhaps (who knows ?) to 
 re-estabUsh across America the old belt of Spanish 
 domination ; whilst a stiU stranger project haunted 
 the brooding intelligence at the Tuileries. The 
 Emperor had once stayed at the Washington Hotel, 
 Broadway, and he suffered for thirty years from the 
 hallucination that he understood America. Its 
 problems had haunted him in his little room at Ham, 
 when gentlemen from Nicaragua waited on him and 
 he made sketch-maps of the Canale Napoleone ; and 
 the fascination remained with him. His facile 
 imagination was obsessed by the importance of 
 Central America ; it seemed to him to lie central to 
 the whole world, and with the control of it one might 
 even redress the balance of races and check with a 
 strong barrier of Latin culture the rising tide of 
 expansion, which seemed to set southwards from the 
 United States and to threaten the absorption of the 
 American continent by the mercenary and phleg- 
 matic Anglo-Saxon. The slow drift of his project (it 
 had other phases more intimately connected with the 
 affairs of Europe) was quickened by the political 
 exiles whom Mexican revolutions, like another Gulf 
 Stream, brought steadily to the coasts of Europe. 
 
THE EMPEROR 323 
 
 Paris was full of little men from Mexico with magnifi- 
 cent names and unimpressive appearances, who could 
 talk Spanish to the Empress and assure her husband 
 that their unhappy country (had he not written 
 eloquently on the subject in the days of his own 
 exile?) was thirstingfor good government,a monarchy, 
 and the kindly tutelage of the Church. The con- 
 versation of refugees is rarely a sound foundation for 
 poUcy. But the Emperor listened impassively and 
 went back to his old plan. As early as 1857 he had 
 discussed the romance of a European, even a Bourbon 
 monarchy in Mexico in the congenial company of 
 Mr. Disraeli. Sometimes he was less interested in 
 the Mexican monarchy than in its monarch. It 
 was becoming difficult to recruit for thrones. A 
 deputation of embarrassed Greeks even pursued 
 Lord Derby with a crown. But Archdukes were 
 always to be had ; and an offer of the new 
 Mexican throne in Vienna might please Franz- 
 Joseph. With Austrian goodwill the Emperor 
 could perhaps complete his work in Italy, carry 
 the new Kingdom ' from the Alps to the Adriatic ' 
 and restore Venetia. Le spectre de Venise erre 
 dans les salles des Tuileries. As it beckoned, the 
 Emperor went forward into Mexico and took with 
 him Maximilian. 
 
 The moment, late in 1861, was not iU chosen. 
 The Americans were certain to object ; but they were 
 deep in their own Civil War, and one might make a 
 new Mexico whilst their armies were busy fumbling 
 for one another on the Potomac. The Empress was 
 gratified by the atmosphere of royalism and ortho- 
 doxy in which one could chastise the erring republic, 
 and M. de Morny was friendly to the idea ; by a 
 
324 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 happy coincidence lie was entitled to one third of the 
 profits which would accrue to M. Jecker, a person of 
 the indeterminate nationality peculiar to bankers, 
 upon the expulsion of President Juarez. Shares rose 
 in Paris when men said ' Morny est dans Vaffaire.' 
 So the Emperor was sympathetic to the cause of the 
 French bond-holders ; and when a Spanish general 
 followed him to Vichy with proposals for a joint 
 expedition, his Catalan vehemence was well received. 
 The three Powers made an agreement in London, to 
 which the United States were invited to become a 
 party. But the State Department was disinclined 
 to involve Mr. Lincoln in a second war in the 
 American continent; and Secretary Seward, whose 
 urbanity had been severely tried by the Odyssey of 
 Messrs. Shdell and Mason, replied with a pious 
 reference to the father of his country and the dis- 
 tasteful nature of entangling alliances. The expedi- 
 tion proceeded without American approval, and two 
 admirals and General Prim sailed for Vera Cruz to 
 embody the mixed feelings of their Governments. 
 
 Their arrival, with one exception, was unimpres- 
 sive. But the spectacular disembarkation of General 
 Prim (he brought a considerable staff and a military 
 reputation obtained chiefly in Morocco) impressed a 
 local journalist with his marked resemblance to the 
 angel of death, a number of historical characters, and 
 almost all the more prominent figures of classical 
 mythology. He was an active little man with a 
 Mexican Avife ; and if there was to be a monarchy in 
 Mexico, he was not averse to being cheered in the 
 streets of Vera Cruz. But promiscuous equitation 
 and gratuitous reminiscences of heroic deeds on the 
 Tetuan road got the allies little further. The 
 
THE EMPEROR 325 
 
 Mexican government seemed politely indifferent to 
 the presence of an invasion at Vera Cruz. Immi- 
 grants in that region were offered the uninviting 
 alternatives of yellow fever and vomito negro ; and 
 as the expeditionary force began to evacuate its 
 casualties to Havana, the allies formulated their 
 demands. By agreement with the Mexicans they 
 moved forward from the fever zone into the more 
 tolerable hinterland, and a conference was arranged 
 in convenient proximity to a volcano. But it never 
 met. Allied relations had been chilled by the in- 
 clusion in the French claim of an immediate payment 
 for M. Jecker ; and as the political design underlying 
 the French demarche became gradually obvious, the 
 aUiance was resolved into its atoms. The knowledge 
 that Mexican emigres were approaching an Austrian 
 Archduke at Trieste extinguished General Prim's 
 interest in the expedition, and the British minister 
 was frankly hostile to the idea of disturbing President 
 Juarez for the furtherance of reactionary ambitions. 
 Trouble had already been caused by the appearance at 
 Vera Cruz of a rival President in partibus infidelium ; 
 and when the French insisted upon protecting a 
 Mexican of doubtful antecedents for no better reason 
 than his hostiUty to the government of his country, 
 their allies abandoned the expedition and the sails 
 of their transports faded away into the Gulf. 
 
 The French admiral was recalled, reinforcements 
 sailed from Cherbourg, and General Lorencez was 
 left looking for a royalist party in the hot distances 
 of the tierras calientes. As the spring of 1862 
 deepened into summer, Mexico lay unmoved in the 
 sunshine. The emigres at French headquarters grew 
 eloquent upon the approaching rising of their people. 
 
326 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 A few Mexicans trailed in with their sandals and their 
 brown women, and some generals came over in search 
 of further promotion. Lorencez clamoured for an 
 Archduke to proclaim and informed his government 
 that he was the master of Mexico : it was a strange 
 delusion. Late in April he moved up from the coast 
 to take possession of the country. Mexico City was 
 a hundred miles away, and he had six thousand men. 
 In the first week of May they reached La Puebla. 
 The local royalists were curiously silent ; there was 
 no loyal demonstration, and the beUs were not 
 ringing. The Mexicans misunderstood their kind 
 invaders ; it became necessary to force an entrance, 
 and in a scuffle for an outwork of the town the French 
 were beaten off. Lorencez fell back towards the sea, 
 and his name was tossed into the new grave of mili- 
 tarj^ reputations. 
 
 By a broad window on the Adriatic a tall young 
 man was watching the queer struggle in Mexico. 
 His name was Maximilian, and his brother was 
 Emperor of Austria. He had a dark young wife (she 
 was a Coburg from Brussels) and that diversity of 
 accomplishments which passes, in the case of royalty, 
 for culture. After a creditable career in the Austrian 
 navy (he looked well in uniform) and a brief, embar- 
 rassed interlude in the Governor's palace at Milan, he 
 had withdrawn to a castle by the sea where his good 
 manners, his botanical collections and the finest pair 
 of whiskers in Europe impressed his contemporaries 
 with his aptitude for kingship. But when vague 
 murmurs of an empire in Mexico floated down to 
 Miramar, he replied that the Mexican people must 
 first express their will. Such f amiHarity with modern 
 principles was highly creditable in a Hapsburg, and 
 
THE EMPEROR 327 
 
 he watched without enthusiasm the manifestation 
 of Mexican opinion which swept the French half-way 
 back to the coast. 
 
 Lorencez had stumbled into defeat before La 
 Puebla, and he dragged the Empire after him into 
 war in Mexico. The first, instinctive movement of 
 official opinion in France was an invincible feeling 
 that military honour must be retrieved by a victory 
 over the egregious subjects of President Juarez : 
 after that, it would be time enough to consider the 
 future of Mexico. As the French held their ground 
 at Orizaba between the Mexicans and the mosquitoes 
 of the fever zone, the Emperor from the cool shade 
 of Vichy abounded in telegraphic advice upon the 
 discomforts of the climate. He proposed a new 
 tropical uniform ; he suggested the construction of 
 a line of railway from Vera Cruz ; and he monopolised 
 the only good map of Mexico which his country 
 possessed. An army corps was concentrated at the 
 ports, and the command of the new expeditionary 
 force was transferred to General Forey ; his divi- 
 sional generals (the names were a trifle ominous) 
 were Felix Douay and Bazaine. Late in the year 
 they stumbled up to Orizaba, and in the first months 
 of 1863 Forey prepared with Mexican deliberation to 
 advance up-country. There was heavy fighting 
 outside La Puebla ; the town was fortified, and the 
 French settled down to a siege of nine weeks. A 
 relieving army hovered vaguely round ; but it was 
 beaten off by Bazaine, and La Puebla surrendered. 
 The road to Mexico was open ; and as the French 
 marched westwards. President Juarez trailed out of 
 the city to the north, taking the republic in his 
 waggons. Early in June Bazaine and the advance 
 
328 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 guard rode in ; and when General Foray made his 
 formal entry, the Mexicans, with that comi;esy which 
 the Latin races rarely refuse to the victor, received 
 him with clanging belfries and a hail of flowers. The 
 invaders were overwhelmed in a cataract of official 
 compliments, and the traditional superlatives of 
 Spanish courtesy so far affected the literal intelligence 
 of Forey that he reported to his Government that 
 the population was ' avide d^ordre, de justice, de 
 liberie vraie.' These laudable cravings were promptly 
 satisfied (since the climate was hardly favourable to 
 the full apphcation of the principles of 1852) with a 
 nominated assembly of notables, who indicated the 
 dawn of a new, monarchical day by voting the Empire 
 and appointing a Regency. Two hundred gentlemen 
 invited Maximilian to Mexico, and General Forey 
 enjoyed the pleasurable emotions of a king-maker. 
 Paris was mildly startled by the news. Ministers 
 who had regarded the monarchist intrigue as an 
 excuse for a brilliant razzia were chilled by the slow 
 march on Mexico. A treaty and a triumphant return 
 of the army was aU that they hoped for ; and when 
 Forey performed in 1863 the promises of 1862, he 
 was all but disavowed. Napoleon acquiesced politely 
 in the new Empire ; his general was thanked and 
 promoted Marshal ; but he was recalled to France, 
 and in his place Bazaine entered the melancholy 
 dynasty of the Mexican command. 
 
 While French society was deriving a pleasant thrill 
 from the spectacle of Captain de GaUiffet on his 
 crutches (his reminiscences of La Puebla became 
 classical) and Napoleon was presenting Mexican 
 trophies to the Guard on the steps of his new chalet 
 at Vichy, a picturesque deputation drove out from 
 
THE EMPEEOR 329 
 
 Trieste to Miramar and offered the Archduke a step 
 in the Almanack de Gotha. Bazaine was sweeping 
 the repubhcans into the corners of their country, and 
 the offer had quite an air of reahty. MaximiHan 
 and his wife made a gleeful tour of the Continent 
 and collected the half-hearted felicitations of their 
 relatives. At Brussels the judicious Leopold omitted 
 a unique opportunity for lugubrious foresight, and 
 in Paris Eugenie gave Maximilian a medal — ' Mon- 
 seigneur, elle vous portera bonheur ' — but the Emperor 
 seemed more concerned with limiting the liability of 
 France than with the prospects of his young 'protege. 
 Yet there was a definite agreement for the mainten- 
 ance of French troops in the country until 1867 ; and 
 if the claims of France precluded all possibility that 
 the Mexican budget would ever balance, the new 
 Emperor seemed almost assured of a sufficiency of 
 foreign bayonets. The mysterious transactions 
 which precede the displacements of royalty were 
 prolonged into the spring of 1864. Precise old 
 gentlemen exercised a wealth of conveyancing in- 
 genuity on the renunciation of Maximilian's rights as 
 a Hapsburg ; and as the drafts went backwards and 
 forwards between Miramar and the Hofburg, he 
 seemed to lose interest in the adventure. But a 
 French general brought him a curt reminder of his 
 pledges ; and his wife, whose mother had only been 
 a Queen, was wild to be an Empress. The Mexicans 
 became insistent, and Franz- Joseph came to Miramar 
 to sign the final document. The two men parted in 
 the station at Trieste, and on an April afternoon the 
 new Emperor sailed in an Austrian cruiser ; in four 
 years it brought him silently home again. 
 
 His ship went down the Adriatic in the sunlight, 
 
330 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 and in the long summer days they crossed the 
 Atlantic. A great mountain stood up out of the sea 
 behind the dismal port of Vera Cruz, and they went 
 ashore into the new Empire. The wind swept down 
 the wi'etched arches which were there to welcome them, 
 and that night the Empress wept. But they drove 
 into the capital in a clatter of Mexican lancers, and 
 far to the north Juarez and his republic were hunted 
 along the United States frontier. The censers swung 
 in the great Cathedral, and the new Empire was con- 
 secrated and installed with every recommendation 
 to Mexican confidence (including an obstinate refusal 
 on the part of the United States to recognise it). 
 
 The Imperial experiment in Mexico, which diverted 
 French investors during the years 1864 and 1865, 
 was a queer medley. Down on the coast, where the 
 great zopilotes flapped dismally over Vera Cruz, a 
 French base lay in the heat. The town was held by 
 a few Egyptians in white uniforms, and French drafts 
 hurried nervously through the fever zone into the 
 interior. A rudimentary armoured train steamed 
 warily up the little line to railhead, and the winding 
 roads led through the glare to Mexico. In the 
 capital a mild-eyed gentleman, whose profuse blonde 
 beard captivated native opinion and concealed a 
 deficiency of chin, discussed a perpetual insolvency 
 with his ministers or inspected strange units of 
 Hungarian hussars and Belgian legionaries. Some- 
 times he rambled vaguely through his sun-baked 
 territory. There was a dull blaze of civil war at 
 every point of the horizon ; but Maximilian's atten- 
 tion wandered easily from politics to botany ; and 
 what should have been an Emperor in the saddle was 
 too often an intelligent tourist. He even ordered 
 
THE EMPEROR 331 
 
 nightingales from Styria to moderate to his Austrian 
 ear the song of Mexican birds. Yet his part in the 
 queer piece was faintly supernumerary. Cast to 
 play Emperor of Mexico, he could hardly put his 
 name to a decree without French money to finance 
 the policy and French bayonets to enforce the 
 signature. The extent of his authority coincided 
 exactly with the area covered by the French flying 
 columns ; and the real master of the new Empire, 
 who could win or lose it a province by the movements 
 of his troops, was a heavy-eyed, burly man with a 
 good Spanish accent who lumbered into the palace 
 in a French Marshal's uniform and took from Mexico 
 to Metz the name of Bazaine. In the streets of the 
 capital staff officers rode up and down, and hands 
 went smartly up to French kepis as the carriages 
 went by behind the jingling mules and Mexican 
 brunettes bowed to their visitors on their evening 
 drive. There was an odd little world of Parisians in 
 exile who mitigated their transportation with an 
 intermittent opera season, whilst the faint sounds of 
 civil war floated down to the capital from the north. 
 Juarez and his phantom republic flitted along the 
 frontier, and an interminable war of guerrillas and 
 flying columns trailed on. French opinion was in- 
 sufficiently nourished upon an enervating diet of 
 victories without finality and casualties without 
 results, and gradually the glamour of the Mexican 
 adventure began to fade. Its finance, which had 
 opened with high promises and low interest, declined 
 upon the vulgar stimulant of lottery bonds ; and in 
 the Chamber a Mexican debate became a dismal 
 exercise in which M. Rouher displayed an uncon- 
 vincing eloquence and sardonic republicans made 
 
332 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Mexico a symbol of Imperial failure. The enterprise 
 had the distasteful air of an expedition to stifle a 
 republic ; if Juarez lacked the principles of the 
 Gracchi, he was at least capable of the mobility of 
 de Wet ; and even official members began to listen 
 sceptically when ministers asked for further votes of 
 credit. There was a new temper of economy in 
 France, and even at the Tuileries the call of distant 
 adventures was growing fainter. Eresh problems 
 were forming in the mists of Central Europe, and the 
 Rhine was nearer to Paris than the Rio Grande. 
 This tendency, which became marked towards the 
 end of 1865, was accelerated by the new tone of the 
 United States. The Civil War had flickered out, and 
 the French had concealed their preference for the 
 South behind the decencies of international law. 
 But the incidents of a long neutrality had put a 
 manifest strain upon American affections. The 
 Emperor had permitted his shadow to fall across the 
 American continent, and the violation of that repub- 
 lican sanctuary by a foreign monarch scandahsed 
 Mr. Lincoln and his successor. The presence of a 
 Hapsburg across the Mexican border was distasteful 
 to the vicar of George Washington upon earth, and 
 the tone of American diplomacy became audibly 
 sharper. The war sputtered along the Rio Bravo del 
 Norte ; and as the gunfire roUed round Matamoros, 
 the knowledge which American citizens had so 
 recently gained of the subtleties of neutrality was 
 exploited in favour of Mexican rebels, and Browns- 
 ville, Texas, took an obliging hand in the republican 
 game. There was a curt refusal to recognise 
 Maximilian, and a representative was even appointed 
 by the State Department to follow the peripatetic 
 
THE EMPEROR 333 
 
 government of Juarez. Napoleon lost interest in 
 the argument : he valued American goodwill, and 
 he valued more highly still the army which was 
 scattered across Mexico. Early in 1866 France and 
 the world were informed that French troops would 
 be withdrawn, and the Mexican adventure dropped 
 sharply to the haunting minor of its last movement. 
 The news came to Mexico in the summer heat, and 
 Maximilian knew that his Empire had begun to fade. 
 There was no money and no loyalty, and soon there 
 would be no troops. His Empress flung bravely out 
 of the country in a last effort to persuade the world 
 that Maximilian was betrayed. The crowds were 
 silent at Vera Cruz as she drove down, a little wild- 
 eyed, to the quay ; and she spoke little on the long 
 voyage home. At Paris (their trouble had come 
 from Paris, and she brought it back) they had sent 
 no one to receive her at the station. The carriages 
 were waiting somewhere else, and she drove o£E 
 miserably in a cab to a vast new hotel. Eugenie 
 called, and the visit left her shaken and wretched. 
 For a day she waited for the summons to the Emperor, 
 and then she drove to St. Cloud on an August after- 
 noon. The Emperor was ill, but he saw her ; and for 
 two cruel hours she begged him to support her hus- 
 band. It was, as Bazaine had called it, une agonie 
 dans Vimpossible, and the pale man with the large 
 moustache would not, could not help her. When 
 they brought her some naranjada, she looked oddly 
 at the glass ; and when she fainted and Eugenie gave 
 her water, she shrieked out a mad woman's fear of 
 poison. There was a dreadful drive back to Paris, 
 and she trailed ofE unhappily across the Continent 
 to see the Pope. At every hour, in every face 
 
334 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 murderers from Mexico flitted before her, and in the 
 Vatican she raved out her wretched fear. The old 
 Pope watched her with sad eyes. A Cardinal fetched 
 a doctor, and that night two women slept in the 
 Vatican. It was a dreadful end to her little reign ; 
 but it was kinder than the news from Mexico. 
 
 The Empire was crumbHng as the French marched 
 down to the sea, and Bazaine presided gloomily over 
 its disintegration. The new American cable brought 
 to Maximilian the ghastly news from Europe ; and 
 he wandered vaguely from town to town, wavering 
 between abdication and the hopeless gesture of resist- 
 ance. His luggage was sent to the coast ; but a 
 crowd had cheered his name in Vienna, Franz- Joseph 
 would hardly welcome his return, and his mother 
 wrote that his position at home would be question- 
 able. The French bugles died away down the long 
 road to Vera Cruz, and early in 1867 he was left alone 
 with Mexico. The republican tide crept slowly back 
 over the country, and he went out of the city by the 
 north road to Queretaro with fifteen hundred men. 
 There was a hopeless siege and a surrender, and the 
 repubUcans rode in. Maximilian was a prisoner, and 
 nervous diplomats fluttered round the new govern- 
 ment. A good deal was said about mercy and the 
 importance of the ex-Emperor's relations in Europe, 
 and considerable eloquence was displayed by two 
 members of the Mexican Bar. But there was no 
 change on the impassive, Indian face of Juarez : the 
 republic had come back out of the north, and mercy 
 was a new notion in Mexican politics. There was a 
 court-martial before the glaring drop-scene of a 
 provincial theatre, and a firing party ; and as the 
 smoke of an irregular voUey drifted across Queretaro, 
 
THE EMPEROR 335 
 
 the Mexican adventure ended. It was a morning of 
 bright sunshine, and the cracked bells were tolling. 
 
 Maximilian was dead ; Charlotte was mad ; Morny 
 was dead ; Jecker dragged on until the Commune 
 shot him ; the French dead lay in their graves ; 
 and to Napoleon the sudden fall of an Empire 
 in Mexico must have come with the vague menace 
 of Hghtning below the horizon. 
 
336 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XIV 
 
 The note of the later Empire (and in 1863 it began 
 to swing slowly into the last phase) was uncertainty. 
 New questions seemed to crowd upon it to which the 
 simple catchwords of the cowp d'etat provided no 
 answer. The Emperor was an aging man ; the long 
 moustache began to droop, and the hair hung 
 raggedly .above his ears. The mild manner was 
 becoming touched with hesitancy, and when pubHc 
 business forced him to decisions, he fumbled a little 
 with the problems of French policy. The slow drift 
 of the Empire seemed to be floating him into a new 
 world, among strange faces. But M. Merimee, who 
 had an eye for character, could see the truth : ' Le 
 mattre n^aime pas les visages nouveaux.' The old 
 personnel was hastily adapted to the new problems ; 
 an old minister (it was the secret of Napoleon's failure 
 to reconcile the Empire with democracy) was in- 
 structed to strike a new attitude ; and his sovereign 
 returned with obvious relief to the less exacting com- 
 panionship of Julius Caesar. 
 
 The elections of 1863 confronted the Empire with 
 the problem of a Parliament. Napoleon was dis- 
 inclined as yet to become a parliamentary monarch 
 of the English type. But although his ministers 
 continued to govern France without condescending 
 to explain themselves in the Chamber, its existence 
 was recognised by the appointment of a Ministre 
 d'etat whose functions, since he predominated in 
 
THE EMPEROR 337 
 
 Council and spoke for the Government in the House, 
 approximated to the duties of a Prime Minister. The 
 first nominee was M. Billault, whose talent for exposi- 
 tion had even found reasons for the earlier phases of 
 French policy in Mexico — ' pas un homme d'etat," in 
 M. Merimee's judgment, ' mais . . .un instrument mer- 
 veilleux entre les mains (Tun hommed' £Jtat.^ But he died 
 before the Chamber met, and with the nomination of 
 his successor the broad shadow of M. Rouher f eU across 
 the Second Empire. To the end of that long career 
 (and before it was over, the Empire itself had ended) 
 he remained, as he had begun, a successful lawyer 
 with a professional aptitude for detail and a forensic 
 profusion of second-rate reasoning. Never at a loss 
 for an argument and untroubled by the doubts which 
 oppress finer, if less professional, intelligences, his 
 burly figure dominated the Chamber, and in the steady 
 boom of his uninspired, his inexhaustible eloquence 
 the later Empire had found its accompaniment. 
 
 The session opened in a mood of mild Liberalism. 
 Imperial policy seemed to be passing into a tone of 
 English sobriety and M. Fould was effecting Glad- 
 stonian economies at the Ministry of Finance ; 
 indirect communications were even opened with 
 Hawarden through M. Merimee, who got his clothes 
 at Poole's, and Mr. Panizzi, who got his ideas from 
 Paris. M. Thiers, a pontifical little figure with 
 gleaming spectacles and a wintry smile, enhghtened 
 his countrymen in speeches of enormous length upon 
 the march of progress ; there were understood to be 
 five ' libertes necessaires ' — of the individual, the 
 press, the vote, the Deputy, and the Chamber. But 
 the real movement of the Empire towards constitu- 
 tionalism was determined less obtrusively. M. de 
 
338 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Morny continued his discreet conversations with 
 M. OUivier. Claiming credit for the dismissal of 
 Persigny, who had become a retired Duke and a 
 grotesque incarnation of reaction, he bluntly 
 requested his young friend to collaborate ' pour 
 organiser la liberie,^ and as evidence of his good faith 
 he put M. Ollivier in charge of a Government measure 
 which legalised trade unions and conferred upon an 
 ungrateful proletariat the right to strike. The result 
 upon M. Ollivier's relations with his repubHcan 
 colleagues was immediate : suspicions were aroused, 
 he parted from M. Jules Favre after one of those 
 pubHc quarrels which enliven French parliamentary 
 life, and through the year 1864 he drifted steadily 
 into the orbit of Morny. Republican pedantry was 
 distasteful to a practical intelligence, and if the 
 Empire could be reconstructed upon Liberal lines, 
 M. Ollivier was prepared to take a hand ia the work. 
 But it did not begin. Quite suddenly, early in 1865, 
 M. de Morny passed out of politics ; and when the 
 experiment was tried, it came too late. 
 
 The Duke (they were all dukes now) was not well. 
 A few nights earlier he had been in his box for the 
 premiere of M. Offenbach's Belle Helene ; M. Roche- 
 fort was LQ the house that evening, and his face (he 
 wrote impertinences in the Figaro) haunted Morny a 
 little. Doctor OUffe was beginning to look anxious, 
 and there was a consultation. His lady was seen at 
 a ball ; but he had forced her to go, and in his neat, 
 curt way he prepared for his ' depart.' They burned 
 his papers in the room, as he lay back and watched 
 them ; Flahaut, his father, came to take his hand ; 
 and on a winter evening the footmen were lined up 
 in the great hall, as a carriage drove up from the 
 
THE EMPEROR 339 
 
 Tuileries and two figures went up the broad staircase. 
 ' La femme montait droite et fiere, enveloppee de ses 
 noires mantilles d'espagnole ; Vhomme se tenait d la 
 rampe, plus lent et fatigue, le collet de son pardessus 
 clair remontant sur un dos un peu voAte qu^agitait un 
 sanglot convulsif.' The brothers parted ; and in the 
 parting Napoleon lost his shrewdest man. On a cold 
 March day (there was a little sunshine as they left 
 the Madeleine) the long line of bayonets went up the 
 road to Pere Lachaise, as the Empire wore mourning 
 for Morny ; but almost it might have worn it for 
 itself. 
 
 A little wearily the Emperor went back to his 
 papers, and the movement towards a Liberal Empire 
 was sharply checked. Morny was no longer there to 
 introduce M. Ollivier, and Prince Napoleon was an 
 inadequate advocate of progress. His manners had 
 never been good ; his political activity was normally 
 confined to resignations ; he had the air of an 
 ^galite presumptive, and when he startled an audi- 
 ence at Ajaccio with a radical speech, the Emperor 
 disavowed him and M. Rouher was left in charge of 
 his grateful countrymen. One could leave so much 
 to M. Rouher ; he found reasons for everything, and 
 if he hardly directed the Empire towards progress, 
 it was for the sufficient reason that there were so few 
 precedents for progress. If he were ever guilty (and 
 few lawyers are) of poHtical generalisation, he was 
 probably of the opinion expressed by King Louis 
 Philippe to a young inquirer : ' Soyez sans inquietude, 
 jeune homme ; la France est un pays quCon mene avec 
 des fonctionnaires publics.^ At any rate he left his 
 master to himself ; and in the days when the poHte 
 world was thrilled by Gounod's Mass and M. Theo- 
 
340 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 phile Gautier was seen at the Salon, ' a " shocking 
 bad hat " attached to the back of his huge head by 
 some process of adhesion known to himself alone, 
 masses of dishevelled hair hanging an3rwhere but in 
 the right place, and catalogue in hand, making and 
 destroying reputations by the glance of his eye or the 
 stroke of his pen,' Napoleon escaped from the tedium 
 of administration into the more distinguished leisure 
 of a historian. Early in 1865 his subjects were 
 rejoiced by the appearance of the first volume of his 
 Vie de Cesar. Its loyal readers were presented with 
 a doctrine of Caesarism which took a sHghtly 
 Messianic tinge and hinted at the resemblance (which 
 had escaped earlier writers) between the murder in 
 the Senate House and the darker crimes of St. Helena 
 and Calvary. Taking a longish run before delivering 
 his actual theme, he began his story with the founda- 
 tion of Rome and, noting the significant succession 
 of a monarchy, a repubhc and an Empire, travelled 
 sedately towards Caesar through regions hallowed by 
 the measured tread of Niebuhr and Dr. Arnold. 
 The margins displayed a creditable profusion of 
 erudite notes, and the text contained a reputable 
 range of historical analogy, although the learned 
 author was precluded by the exigencies of his foreign 
 policy from developing the comparison (so dear to 
 Continental scholars) of Carthage to Great Britain. 
 Caesar, when he appeared, had a faintly Napoleonic 
 manner ; something of a litterateur and more of a 
 fatalist, he was familiar with the principles of the 
 coup d'etat and had almost assimilated the doctrine 
 of nationality. The author's views were visible 
 beneath the scholarship of his collaborators. The 
 portrait of the artist was excellent ; but it was less 
 
THE EMPEROR 341 
 
 easy to reconcile it with the hard features of Juhus 
 Caesar. The Parisians of 1865 were less critical ; 
 there was something mildly entertaining in their 
 master's erudite diversions, and one could make little 
 jokes about Madame Cesar. MM. Emile Augier, 
 Octave Feuillet, and Jules Sandeau were honoured 
 with presentation copies, and the straining limits of 
 the French language barely sufficed to contain their 
 transports. Madame George Sand scandalised her 
 republican friends with the revelation that, as 
 literature, it was faultless, and only consoled them 
 with the prediction that it would not sell ; whilst 
 from beyond the Rhine came the solemn reverbera- 
 tions of academic courtesy, as Professor Ritschl and 
 his friends expressed their gratitude above signatures 
 that are more familiar among the staccato objurga- 
 tions of controversial footnotes. Archaeology even 
 filtered as far as the great house-party at Compiegne, 
 where the autumn charade (M. VioUet-le-Duc was 
 generally so clever about the tableaux vivants, but 
 this year M. de Massa had written a whole revue) was 
 called Les Commentaires de Cesar and Madame de 
 Metternich sang a song about the cab strike and the 
 Prince Imperial, as VAvenir, appeared as a Grenadier 
 of the Guard. A second volume followed early in 
 1866, in which the awkward question of assassination 
 was tactfully eluded by mterrupting the narrative 
 at the crossing of the Rubicon. The word had strange 
 memories for Napoleon, and his Caesar was provoked 
 to civil war in circumstances which bore a startling 
 resemblance to the December days of 1851, when a 
 Prince-President wrote Rubicon upon a file of papers 
 and handed them to his friends at the Elysee. 
 Caesar's campaigns in Gaul were patiently narrated, 
 
342 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 and the footnotes contained copious evidence of the 
 official taste for archaeology which had set exasper- 
 ated Engineer officers digging in tumuli and sent 
 Baron Stoffel of the Artillery, who was so soon to 
 have another, a more immediate mission beyond the 
 Rhine, on little errands of research round France in 
 quest of Caesar's camps. The book compelled the 
 blushing admiration of Professor Zumpt, and even 
 Mommsen complimented the Emperor on his scholar- 
 ship. All Germany, the international, scholarly 
 Germany of 1866 whose arid ingenuity Ues embalmed 
 in the apparatus criticus of every classic, poured its 
 gratitude into the Tuileries letter-bag, and from the 
 Emperor's correspondence it almost seemed as though 
 Europe from the Rhine to the Russian frontier was 
 populated by an impecunious race of scholars 
 animated by a single ambition to possess (without 
 paying for it) a copy of his book : a composer even 
 asked leave to dedicate a Julius Caesar march. 
 
 By the mild light of the later Empire Napoleon 
 sat writing in his study. M. EmUe OUivier was 
 struggHng with his conscience, and M. Rouher was 
 drowning democracy with the measured enunciation 
 of the obvious. But as they looked up, a long 
 shadow fell across the Eiuropean scene and Prussia 
 came slowly from the corner of the stage. Un formi- 
 dable realiste avait frappe les trois coups. His name 
 was Otto Eduard Leopold von Bismarck-Schon- 
 hausen. 
 
THE EMPEROR 343 
 
 XV 
 
 The appearances of Prussia in history have some- 
 thing of the suddenness, if not all the agility, of the 
 bad fairy. The polite pantomime of the Eighteenth 
 Century had been sharply interrupted in 1740 as 
 King Frederick the Great emerged from the trap-door 
 and crouched for his spring on Silesia. The Prussian 
 effort after Jena, which confronted Napoleon in 
 seven years with an unbroken front of German 
 resistance, was a performance of astounding rapidity. 
 And there was something of the same quality in the 
 sudden emergence of Prussia which filled the years 
 between 1864 and the end of the Second Empire. 
 
 Prussia in 1850, with a king whose exuberant 
 eloquence has been variously interpreted as a 
 symptom of Romanticism, dementia, alcoholism, and 
 the HohenzoUern manner, was a secondary state. 
 It had an unaccountable legacy of mihtary achieve- 
 ment ; but Bliicher and Ziethen had faded into 
 history, and Rossbach and Ligny seemed almost as 
 distant from contemporary Prussia as the broad 
 sweep of the operations of Gustavus Adolphus from 
 the mUd activities of Swedish policy. Its interests 
 werp, dissipated by a frontier of eccentric conforma- 
 tion, and the motives of Prussian pohcy seemed 
 mostly to be found in the will of Austria. It was a 
 dismal fate for the heirs of a great tradition. Old 
 gentlemen in lecture-rooms flavoured theii- scholar- 
 ship with politics, and a strong tide of patriotism 
 
344 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 began to set from the universities. But the world of 
 1850 seemed determined to exist without assistance 
 from Prussia. Even in Germany it stood for nothing. 
 There had been a flicker of nationaHsm in 1848, which 
 set Prince Hohenlohe complaining that a man ' could 
 not say abroad " I am a German," could not pride 
 himself that the German flag was flying from his 
 vessel, could have no German consul in time of need, 
 but had to explain " I am a Hessian, a Darmstadter, 
 a Buckebiirger : my Fatherland was once a great and 
 powerful country, now it is shattered into eight and 
 thirty spHnters." ' But Prussia had not yet mastered 
 the German idea. NationaHsm got involved some- 
 how with democracy, a Parisian import which (out- 
 side South Germany) was regarded with grave 
 suspicion, and Prussia settled down once more to 
 rotate demurely in the orbit of Vienna. 
 
 Gradually, as Europe drifted under the control of 
 Napoleon m., a change came. Discreet encourage- 
 ments of Prussia were wafted from Paris to Berlin, 
 as the Emperor, who based French policy upon his 
 maritime alliance with Great Britain, felt gently for 
 an aUy on the Continent. There was a show of 
 independence in some fiscal negotiations with Vienna; 
 and when Austria began to waver towards the Allies 
 in the Crimean War, a drinking squire in the Prussian 
 diplomatic service (the name was von Bismarck and 
 the drink was champagne and beer) manipulated the 
 minor German states, controlled the Diet, and 
 checked the drift of Austria by the insistence of 
 Prussia upon strict neutrality. His design, since his 
 imagination was obsessed by the crushing war on 
 two fronts which had broken Frederick in the Seven 
 Years' War, was to rest Prussian policy upon a firm 
 
THE EMPEROR 345 
 
 alliance with Russia ; and for the first time in 1855 he 
 earned for his government the gratitude of St. Peters- 
 burg. Berlin was slowly mounting in the scale, and 
 Germany passed under the joint control of Austria 
 and Prussia. When the march of the French across 
 North Italy alarmed German patriots in 1859, 
 Prussia caught and led the national drift ; Prussian 
 troop-movements on the Rhine checked Napoleon 
 after Solferino, and Prussian pohcy forced him into 
 peace. For the first time Prussia had stood for 
 Germany. Von Moltke and von Roon were taking 
 their places among the soldiers. But von Bismarck 
 was playing with his bear-cubs in the embassy at 
 St. Petersburg ; his master governed Prussia with 
 the precarious authority of a Regent ; and for a 
 few years longer Prussian policy lingered on in 
 incoherence. Then, when a new King brought in a 
 new minister, Bismarck became Prussia ; and in 
 eight years Prussia had become Germany. 
 
 In the first movement he put his own house in 
 marching order. Berlin in 1862 contained a Parlia- 
 ment which (such was the perilous infection of the 
 age) was in violent conflict with its King. His 
 wishes had been scandalously disregarded by the 
 electors ; and since they related to a vital, almost a 
 sacred (since it was a military) matter, he persisted 
 in them. The mobilisation of 1859, which had 
 checked the French on the Adige and made the Peace 
 of Villafranca, was an imperfect operation ; it had 
 revealed the weakness of the Prussian army, and the 
 King and his military advisers resolved upon a 
 drastic reorganisation of the forces. Military reform 
 is the most costly of all government activities, and 
 the bourgeois parliamentarians of Berhn had no 
 
346 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 enthusiasm for the high taxes which denote military 
 efiBciency or for the discomforts which accompany 
 military service. The resulting conflict aUgned 
 against King William almost the whole civilian 
 population of Prussia, and it became the congenial 
 business of Bismarck to restore to Prussian politics 
 the enviable simplicity of the drill-ground. A Junker 
 training had impressed him with the sanctity of royal 
 wishes, and he was coldly determined that Prussia 
 should have its army. The battaUons which his 
 master regarded with simple piety as the instruments 
 (if adequately armed) of the Most High were in 
 Bismarck's view the last and most useful branch of 
 the Foreign Office. War was a form of poUcy, and 
 without an army (since Prussia had not the pre- 
 posterous prestige which enabled Lord Palmerston 
 to dictate to Europe with a peace estabhshment of 
 100,000 men) Bismarck would find himself reduced 
 to the futUity of Alberoni or the expedients of Cavour. 
 It was a good cause ; and as he defied his Parhament 
 in attitudes which owed something to StrafiEord, he 
 exercised to the full his native gifts of insolence. 
 
 But the affairs of Europe found more useful em- 
 ployment for him. Beyond the frontier Russia was 
 at grips with a Polish insurrection, and French pohcy 
 precipitated St. Petersburg into the waiting embraces 
 of Berhn. In the years which foRowed the Crimean 
 War Napoleon had sedulously cultivated Prince 
 Gortschakoff and his Czar. But at the faint, far caU 
 of Polish nationahsm he seemed to sacrifice French 
 interests to modern principles. The Russian alliance, 
 upon which his uncle had built a new Europe, was 
 almost in his grasp. Sebastopol was half forgotten, 
 and the two Emperors seemed to control Europe 
 
THE EMPEROR 347 
 
 from either end. But somewhere in the mists of the 
 Vistula a nation was struggling to be free, and 
 Napoleon forgot all his statecraft in his theories. He 
 was the man of his age ; he could never forget (had he 
 not made Italy ?) that it was the age of nationalities : 
 'I think on Poland as I thought in 1831.' He 
 pestered the Russians with Notes, protests, circulars, 
 and special missions, as they entered with gusto upon 
 the congenial business of repression. But humanity 
 was an injudicious guide in 1863 (and possibly at 
 even later dates) for foreign policy, and the Emperor's 
 initiative chiUed Russian friendship and gave to 
 Bismarck his first opportunity. Whilst France 
 pullulated with generous emotions and British states- 
 men dispensed those heartening phrases which they 
 so rarely supported with British troops, the Prussian 
 frontier was closed to Polish rebels. Bismarck 
 abstained, since the master of Posen could sym- 
 pathise with the master of Warsaw, from the 
 despatch of humanitarian essays to St. Petersburg, 
 and there was a helpful cordon of Prussian frontier- 
 guards on the Polish border. His calculated kind- 
 ness had its reward : when Bismarck performed a 
 service, he made a friend. Napoleon, with a less 
 certain touch, had failed to grasp his allies. He had 
 shared a war with England ; but his friends in 
 London were startled by the doctrinaire flavour of 
 his policy and the aimless construction of armoured 
 warships, the futile gesture of the fortification of 
 Cherbourg. He had befriended Russia after the 
 Crimea ; but Gortschakoff was chilled by the Polish 
 aberration. He had created Italy ; but the annexa- 
 tion, of Savoy cost him half the credit of Magenta ; 
 and gradually, as the French sentries stood before the 
 
348 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Vatican, he let the bright waters of Italian gratitude 
 stray and vanish in the sands of the Roman question. 
 Bismarck was less impulsive in his benefactions, less 
 interested, perhaps, in the goodness of the deed than 
 in the richness of the reward. But in 1863 he had 
 served Russia well ; and until he left o£&ce a genera- 
 tion later in a changed world (and he, more than any 
 other man, had changed it) Prussia knew no fear for 
 the long line of her eastern frontier, and leaving 
 Russia in grateful inactivity behind her, tmrned 
 westwards upon Europe a bright, acquisitive gaze. 
 Late in the year it encountered a vague, familiar 
 outline, as a king died in Denmark and bequeathed to 
 Europe the tangled inheritance of the Elbe Duchies. 
 The problem of Schleswig-Holstein, which pro- 
 voked a volume of state-papers almost equal to the 
 area of the Duchies, had whitened the hair of 
 diplomats for fifteen years. Its complexities, which 
 could have been handled by any competent solicitor, 
 were publicly referred to in tones of amused awe. 
 Prince Albert was believed to have taken a thorough 
 knowledge of it to his grave at Frogmore ; and Lord 
 Palmerston, although still capable of a stirring speech 
 on it, had forgotten the point. But its elements 
 were strangely simple. Two Duchies lay between 
 North Germany and the Danish frontier. The King 
 of Denmark held them as Duke by a cession of 1460, 
 and in moments of Danish patriotism there was 
 always an effort to absorb the Duchies in the Danish 
 kingdom. German opinion was equally interested, 
 since ethnology came into fashion, in their fate ; and 
 German nationahsm was usually expressed in an 
 effort to resume for Germany the lost Duchies. In 
 1848, when tempers mounted in both countries, there 
 
THE EMPEROR 349 
 
 was a clash of these conflicting tendencies. A 
 pretender seized the Duchies in the German interest ; 
 the Danes contested the decision ; and in a queer, 
 half-hearted war, which swayed obscurely up and 
 down the peninsula for three years, Prussians and 
 Saxons and Holsteiners with Prussian officers 
 struggled in forgotten battles with the Danes for the 
 disputed lands. But Europe intervened ; there was 
 a conference in London, and in 1852 the Treaty of 
 London restored the Duchies to the Danish crown. 
 The pretender sold his claims for a generous remit- 
 tance of rixdalers, and under a clearing sky Denmark 
 re-entered upon its possession. But German patriots, 
 ' painfully conscious,' as Mr. Disraeli condescendingly 
 observed, ' that they do not exercise that influence in 
 Europe which they beUeve is due to the merits, moral, 
 intellectual, and physical, of forty millions of popula- 
 tion, homogeneous and speaking the same language,' 
 were still muttering about Holstein ; and when the 
 Danish king with obvious good sense (since Schleswig 
 was predominantly Danish in population and Hol- 
 stein predominantly German) incorporated Schleswig 
 in his kingdom of Denmark and granted local self- 
 government to his duchy of Holstein, German 
 opinion grew shrill in its resentment of this scandalous 
 partition of the Duchies. It was indehcate, it was 
 quite unpardonably crude, in the government of 
 Copenhagen to solve a cherished European problem 
 by a sudden application of common-sense; worse 
 stUl, it ignored a treaty of 1460, and the reckless 
 Danes were recalled from reality to politics by a curt 
 demand of the German Diet that their new constitu- 
 tion should be withdrawn. There was a mild flutter 
 in Europe, and even England caught the infection of 
 
350 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 excitement. It was barely four months since the 
 Prince of Wales had taken a Danish wife and 
 Mr. Tennyson, the Laureate, had informed the world 
 that the subjects of Queen Victoria were, in spite of 
 their mixed ethnological origins, aU of them Danes 
 in their welcome of Princess Alexandra. Lord 
 Palmerston spoke movingly in the House of Commons 
 of ' the independence, the integrity, and the rights of 
 Denmark,' and added with a menace which its 
 extreme famiharity deprived of none of its effect, 
 ' that if any violent attempt were made to overthrow 
 those rights, and interfere with that independence, 
 those who made the attempt would find in the result 
 that it would not be Denmark alone with which they 
 would have to contend.' The rosy gentlemen of 1863 
 cheered loudly ; but their favourite's prediction was 
 dismally unfulfilled. The Danish resistance was 
 stiffened by the brave language of Lord Palmerston ; 
 the Germans insisted and directed Hanover and 
 Saxony to enforce the decision of the Diet by an 
 occupation of Holstein ; and at that supreme 
 moment the King of Denmark died. His death 
 brought into the field a pretender to the Duchies, 
 the son of the former claimant, who gravely con- 
 tended that his father's sale of the claim could not be 
 taken to include the rights of a son. This solemn 
 nonsense was countenanced in Germany, and the 
 young man entered Holstein in the wake of the 
 Saxon army. But whilst the pretender was striking 
 ducal attitudes in Kiel, a colder intelligence surveyed 
 the problem from Berlin, and Bismarck resolved that 
 Prussia should take a hand. Troubled waters were 
 eminently congenial to his fishing, and he came 
 sharply to the conclusion that if the Duchies were 
 
THE EMPEROR 351 
 
 to change hands, Prussia could find a place for them. 
 His ruUng motive was rather a desire to exclude the 
 pretender, who would have created in Schleswig- 
 Holstein yet another minor German state that took 
 its tune from Austria, than any long prevision of a 
 Prussian navy with a base at Kiel. The diplomats 
 began to flit about between the capitals ; Fleury 
 brought good advice from Paris, and Lord Wode- 
 house urged Denmark to be gentle with the Germans. 
 British opinion, always so sympathetic to the 
 resistance of small nations to other empires, had been 
 prepared by Palmerston for heroic intervention ; but 
 the Government could hardly move without the other 
 parties to the treaty of 1852. Russia was silent, and 
 even Napoleon seemed strangely inactive. He had 
 a vague notion that the population of the Duchies 
 was predominantly German ; if that were so, inter- 
 vention on the Danish side would be a sin against the 
 doctrine of nationahty. But the true cause of his 
 inaction was more human. England had disap- 
 pointed him earher in the year when he sought 
 support against Russia in the cause of Poland, and 
 he was disinchned to oblige Lord Palmerston by 
 joining England in support of Denmark. ' He felt 
 himself ' (Mr. Disraeli could see the point) ' in a false 
 position with respect to his own subjects, because he 
 had experienced a great diplomatic discomfiture,' 
 and he was in no mood for fresh adventures. British 
 heroics dwindled into protests ; Lord Palmerston 
 was sobered into a cautious neutrahty ; and the tone 
 of Germany, when Denmark was deserted, rose 
 sharply, Prussia asked leave to enforce the decision 
 of the Diet ; the Austrians, unwilling that King 
 William should figure as the sole champion of German 
 
352 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 rights, joined in the application ; and the combined 
 forces of the two monarchies were authorised to 
 invade and occupy the Duchies in the name of 
 Germany. The result, since the Danish army had 
 a strength of only 40,000 men, was hardly doubtful. 
 Early in 1864 the troop-trains were rolling north- 
 wards across Germany. Three army corps, with von 
 Wrangel in command, were charged with the dismal 
 duty of crushing Denmark ; and the Prussian Guard 
 moved on Kiel, as the Austrians on their left crossed 
 the Elbe at Hamburg and went north. They 
 marched proudly forward past the Saxon canton- 
 ments in Holstein ; but there was little scope in a 
 narrow peninsula for brilUance against a retreating 
 enemy, and the Prussian verve of 1870 hardly 
 appears (although the Red Prince was a corps com- 
 mander) in the cautious operations of 1864. In the 
 first days of February they fumbled at the fortified 
 line of the Danevirke ; but the Danes slipped away 
 to the north, fell back before the invasion, and turned 
 at Diippel in the Sundevit to bar the road to Copen- 
 hagen and the Islands. The redoubts of Diippel, 
 which fined the Httle hills above Sonderburg, were a 
 faint reflection of the lines of Torres Vedras ; and as 
 the Prussians lumbered after them, the Danes stood 
 to their guns. Outside the lines of Diippel, Schleswig 
 was almost cleared. The invaders even exceeded 
 their authority by passing the frontier of the Danish 
 kingdom, pressing forward into Jutland, and reaching 
 Kolding. Europe vociferated its protests ; but no 
 Power moved. Bismarck was bland and the war 
 went on. As Earl RusseU drafted those clever Notes 
 of his and wrestled silently with the German sym- 
 pathies of his sovereign (Albert, she felt sure, would 
 
THE EMPEROR 353 
 
 have sided with Bismarck even though Albert 
 Edward's pretty wife was a Dane), the guns were 
 booming in the green fields before Diippel, The 
 Danish lines held for two months ; but in the last 
 week of April they feU, and Prussia came to a con- 
 ference in London with all the comfort of a fait 
 accompli. For two months more the collective 
 wisdom of Europe struggled with the Duchies. 
 The French (how amusing it seemed in 1864 and how 
 like the fantastic Emperor) proposed a plebiscite. At 
 one moment, after the Danes had beaten the 
 Austrians at sea off Hehgoland, Lord Palmerston 
 looked fierce and threatened Austria with the 
 Channel Fleet. ' I determined,' as he informed his 
 Foreign Secretary with sporting jocularity, ' to make 
 a notch off my own bat.' But he could hardly bom- 
 bard Vienna and Berlin from the sea ; the guns of the 
 Warrior did not range far into Central Europe. A 
 field-force of 20,000 men was useless without an ally 
 on the Continent ; and the Emperor, who might have 
 moved, was sitting gloomily in Paris, tracing new 
 frontiers on the map of Schleswig-Holstein. Diplo- 
 macy wrung its hands and withdrew once more, 
 and the war was resumed. There was a last flicker 
 of Danish bravery at Alsen ; but the pace was faster, 
 since von Wrangel had gone home and the Red Prince 
 was in command with Count von Moltke at his elbow. 
 The war died down ; there was an armistice, and by 
 the Peace of Vienna the King of Denmark ceded his 
 Duchies to the conquerors. 
 
 Diippel was the first part of the Prussian trilogy. 
 Bismarck had fought his war, and in the last months 
 of 1864 Schleswig-Holstein was the joint property of 
 Austria and Prussia : it was a queer result. But the 
 
 z 
 
354 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 stake in the game was not a few fields north of Ham- 
 burg or a port on the Baltic coast. He was playing 
 steadily for control of the German machine, of the 
 complex of kingdoms and duchies which regulated 
 their common affairs in the Diet at Frankfort under 
 a system which neatly combined the verbiage of 
 a parhament with the dehberation of diplomacy. 
 At present Prussia shared it with Austria ; but 
 Austria could be beaten in the field if one had an 
 army, an ally and a casus belli. Prussia had (General 
 von Roon had seen to it) an army ; and General Count 
 Helmuth von Moltke, who was always writing in his 
 room, had a sheaf of plans. The ally, since Russia 
 was always too late and (when she arrived) too power- 
 ful, must be Italy ; and the awkward condominium 
 in the Duchies could provide a quarrel whenever one 
 was wanted. The parts for the new piece were 
 obvious. Victor Emmanuel was to play Pylades to 
 King WiUiam's Orestes, while Napoleon was cast for 
 a thinking part in attitudes of dignified neutrality ; 
 and during 1865 Bismarck attended dihgently to the 
 rehearsals. The manipulation of Italy was easy, 
 since the direction of Itahan pohcy was determined 
 by an irresistible craving for Venice, and Prussia felt 
 no difficulty in promising this amputation from the 
 territory of her late ally. The Prussian ambassador 
 appeared in Florence with a discreet oSer for the 
 hand of Italy, who replied with becoming modesty 
 that the kind gentleman must ask the Emperor 
 Napoleon. So French neutrahty became the chief 
 essential in the new combination, and in the next 
 phase Bismarck devoted his ingenuity to obtaining 
 it. The Emperor on general principles had always 
 been favourable to Prussia ; as a statesman of the old 
 
THE EMPEROR 355 
 
 type he welcomed this sohd counterpoise to Austria, 
 and his private convictions were gratified by the 
 spectacle of a busy German state which might one 
 day do for Germany what Piedmont had done for 
 Italy. The revelation of St. Helena had included 
 ' r agglomeration, la concentration des memes peuples 
 geographiques ' ; Napoleon i. had prophesied a new 
 European order based upon ' V agglomeration et la 
 confederation des grands peuples.^ German unity was 
 a respectable cause over which an intellectual 
 Emperor might preside if he wished to keep abreast 
 of the times ; and he was always inclined to gracious- 
 ness when his caUers came from Berlin. King 
 WiUiam had displayed his excellent manners at 
 Compiegne ; M. de Bismarck was a most entertain- 
 ing person ; and when General von Roon came to 
 the French manoeuvres of 1864, there was a charming 
 scene at Chalons on a September day with the little 
 Prince Imperial stretching up to hand the Legion of 
 Honour to his father's guest — they made quite an 
 anniversary of it in Germany, since it was the second 
 of the month and six years later the Emperor spent it 
 at Sedan. With this amiable mood prevailing at the 
 Tuileries French diplomats were politely receptive 
 when Bismarck, in his expansive way, began to speak 
 casually of French advances on the Rhine or in 
 French-speaking countries. His poHcy commenced 
 to defer elaborately to the Empire, and his ambas- 
 sador in Paris professed an admiration of Eugenie 
 that was faintly grotesque. Late in 1865, when the 
 Court was at Biarritz, he came himself to consult the 
 duU eyes of the oracle. The big, bald man drove up 
 to the Villa Eugenie ; and as the great Biscayan 
 rollers broke along the coast, he talked interminably 
 
356 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 to the Emperor. There were no promises ; but as 
 theu" talk trailed slowly across the map, Bismarck 
 could see that Venice still haunted il muto Imperator, 
 that he would abet a war in which Venice might be 
 won for Italy. Le spectre de Venise erre dans les salles 
 des Tuileries. It had beckoned once ; and Napoleon 
 sent Maximilian to Mexico. It beckoned again ; he 
 stared and sent the Prussians to Sadowa. 
 
 That autumn there were storms along the Basque 
 coast. The waves thundered outside the Emperor's 
 windows, and Bismarck went back to Berlin. He 
 returned with persistent gallantry to the courtship 
 of Italy. But the Italians were unnaturally coy, fuE 
 of suspicion, nervous that their martial wooer had no 
 real intention of fighting Austria. Eager to prove 
 his sincerity (the situation had all the charm of 
 novelty) the Prussian minister hastened to pick his 
 quarrel with Vienna, and the invaluable Duchies 
 came in play once more. The condominium in 
 Schleswig-Holstein had ended in partition ; after a 
 mild course of medicinal diplomacy, with a royal 
 conference at Carlsbad and an inter-aUied convention 
 at Gastein, Austria had taken Holstein and left 
 Schleswig to Prussia. But such cures are rarely final, 
 and early in 1866 the effects of the treatment began 
 to wear off. The Austrian command in Altona per- 
 mitted a public statement of the claims, the forgotten 
 claims, of the pretender to the Duchies for which 
 Germany had gone crusading against Denmark in 
 1864. Bismarck was scandalised. After the war, 
 it seemed, his tender conscience had been tortured by 
 legal doubts as to the true ownership of Schleswig- 
 Holstein, and his torments had been allayed by the 
 opinion of some obliging jurists in Berlin, who advised 
 
THE EMPEROR 357 
 
 that the King of Denmark had been the rightful 
 owner after all. That might have seemed, in view of 
 the fact that he had been expelled by force of arms, 
 unfortunate. But Bismarck, haunted by few idle 
 regrets, derived infinite consolation from the fact 
 that the Danish title, which was above suspicion, had 
 been transferred by treaty to Austria and Prussia. 
 It followed that in tolerating the antics of the pre- 
 tender in the Austrian zone, von Gablenz was trifling 
 with sedition, and a solemn complaint was trans- 
 mitted to Vienna. The debate rapidly became 
 acrimonious, and Italy was invited to observe the 
 drift of Prussia towards war. The effect upon Italy 
 was immediate. Napoleon was hastily consulted as 
 to the propriety of a combination with Prussia 
 against Austria ; and when he blessed the union, 
 Italy yielded gracefully to the embraces of Bismarck. 
 An Italian soldier appeared in Berlin; his mission 
 related to the technical improvements in the Prussian 
 needle-gun, but his time was spent almost entirely 
 in the more enHvening company of Count Bismarck. 
 Their conversation strayed from the needle-gun into 
 haute 'politique. By a fortunate coincidence General 
 Govone was empowered to negotiate, and in April, 
 1866, they signed a secret treaty of alliance for a war 
 against Austria, provided (Italy was a trifle im- 
 patient) that it opened within three months. 
 
 The problem before Bismarck had passed from the 
 uncertainties of diplomacy into the more congenial 
 precision of arithmetic. If he could force Austria 
 into war within twelve weeks, he would have Itaty 
 for an ally. He steadied his hand, made a war in 
 nine weeks, and won it in seven weeks more. In the 
 spring days of 1866, when the Prussian artillery was 
 
358 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 buying horses and the Austrians were moving cavaky 
 up into the northern provinces, both sides turned 
 nervous eyes to Paris. The Emperor might throw 
 an army into either scale, and he was the master 
 of Itahan poHcy. Prince Metternich, whose lady 
 stood so well at Court, fluttered round with offers 
 from Vienna ; and the Prussian ambassador asked 
 Napoleon to name his price. He fumbled a little 
 with the maps (the Emperor was not well that year) 
 and muttered something about Belgium — or Luxem- 
 burg, perhaps — or was there a town or so in the Saar 
 basin ? It had been so simple to make one's terms 
 with Cavour in 1858. But somehow the world 
 seemed more crowded now ; the provinces which one 
 might have asked for were full of Germans, and it 
 would be awkward for the high-priest of nationalism 
 to transgress the sacred dogma of nationality. ' Ah ! 
 si vous aviez une Savoie ! ' said the Emperor a little 
 helplessly, and fell back into silence. He made no 
 terms with Prussia, because (it was a strange con- 
 fession for an Emperor, and his country never forgave 
 it) he was disinterested. He was asked to approve 
 the reconquest of Venice and the promotion ot 
 Prussia in Germany ; and since he approved already, 
 there was no need to purchase his approval. Be- 
 sides, the Prussians might not win ; one must wait 
 for the result ; as always, il ne faut rien brusquer. 
 Napoleon was ill that summer, and he had a sick 
 man's fear of sharp decisions. Anxious ambassadors 
 flitted in and out of his study ; but they saw little in 
 his dull eyes beyond the reflection of their own un- 
 certainty. Sometimes he dropped a hint about the 
 Rhine or seemed to promise Venice to Italy without 
 a war. Only once, as the troop-trains rumbled 
 
THE EMPEROR 359 
 
 slowly across Prussia and the Sild Armee stood to its 
 arms in the Italian sunshine, the veil seemed lifted at 
 the Tuileries, and the Emperor emerged from his 
 inaction. There had been a little trouble in the 
 Chamber, where M. Thiers, whose taste was always 
 for an active foreign policy, pointed a menacing finger 
 towards the lengthening shadow of Prussia and re- 
 proved the Empire for its half-hearted expedients. 
 Napoleon replied with a firm speech at a provincial 
 meeting, and a bucolic audience at an agricultural 
 show was startled and edified by an emphatic state- 
 ment of its sovereign's detestation of the treaty- 
 system of 1815. With a sudden recollection of his 
 responsibihties as the arbiter of Europe he invited 
 the world once more to bring its troubles to a con- 
 gress. Prussia and Italy had mobilised ; yet both 
 accepted the Emperor's invitation. The neutral 
 Powers consented to attend ; but Austria, with an 
 angry fling of the madness which had thrown her 
 into war in 1859, refused the congress unless it were 
 pledged beforehand to maintain the status quo. The 
 Emperor could do no more, and in two weeks Central 
 Europe was at war. 
 
 The war of 1866 was designed to secure for Prussia 
 the mastery of Germany, and Bismarck's objectives 
 were neatly combined in the casus belli. A promise 
 of Venice and the quarrel with Austria over Holstein 
 brought Italy into play. The German states were 
 still neutral. But when Prussian troops moved into 
 Holstein and challenged the Austrian garrison, 
 Austria went in quest of allies to the German Diet. 
 There was a vote in June upon Prussia's action, and 
 South Germany went into the war behind Austria 
 whilst Saxony and the blind King of Hanover waited 
 
360 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 for the first impact of the Prussian forces. Before 
 the month was out, the Hanoverians had fought at 
 Langensalza and were prisoners ; the Saxor^s were 
 falling back into Austria, and the Prussian armies 
 were feeling their slow way down through the hills 
 into Bohemia. Away to the south in Italy the Arch- 
 duke Albert had broken the Italians at Custozza ; 
 the Austrian cavalry went sabring down the road to 
 Villafranca, and the old taste of victory came back 
 to the white coats. But a victory less in Italy and 
 two corps more in the north might have saved Austria. 
 The Prussians trailed slowly down into Bohemia, and 
 von Benedek stood uneasily on the defensive. Gradu- 
 ally, as the needle-guns cracked in the green valleys 
 of the Riesengebirge, he was driven in upon the posi- 
 tion of Koniggratz. The Prussians began to feel 
 their advantage at Gitschin and Nachod ; and 
 although the Austrians held their ground at Trau- 
 tenau^ Benedek could see the slow converging of 
 defeat. He had lost heavily in the opening move- 
 ments, and he telegraphed desperately to Vienna for 
 an immediate peace. Franz-Joseph answered him 
 on July 1 with curt orders for a battle ; and twenty- 
 four hours later, when a royal train steamed into 
 Vienna in the dark hours of a summer night, the 
 King of Saxony found the station aU decorated with 
 flowers to receive him, and on the platform he could 
 see by the flaring lights an Emperor whose face was 
 as white as his uniform. Franz-Joseph had the 
 news of his battle, and its name was Sadowa. 
 
 As the Austrians stumbled back towards Vienna 
 and the astonished eyes of Europe followed them 
 down the dusty roads, the French Emperor made a 
 hesitating reappearance on the stage. It had been 
 
THE EMPEKOR 361 
 
 his design to let the war take its course and, when the 
 combatants were panting, to make a dazzling re- 
 entry as the deus ex machina whose neat adjustment 
 of the crisis would close the play ; and he seemed 
 to have his cue when the Austrians, in an adroit 
 attempt to disengage themselves from the war on the 
 southern front and throw all their weight northwards 
 against the Prussians, invited Napoleon to mediate 
 and surrendered Venice to the French to abide 
 the mediator's award. Prussia and Italv were 
 promptly notified of the Emperor's good offices, and 
 he waited with dignity to award the prizes. In his 
 old impetuous mood he might have struck a firmer 
 attitude. The Prussian armies were in Bohemia and 
 the western frontier lay open to the French ; mobilisa- 
 tion and a peremptory summons to Berlin would 
 have satisfied French vanity, which smarted a little 
 under the sudden revelation that other armies could 
 win victories in Europe. But there was an uneasy 
 feeling in Paris that supphes were low and munitions 
 which might have served on the Rhine had been 
 diverted to Mexico ; the Emperor dragged wearily 
 to Council in cruel pain ; and when he saw a diplomat 
 from Viejina, he could only mutter, ' Je ne suis pas 
 pret a la guerre.' The French mediation, since there 
 was to be no armed intervention, trailed ofE into 
 diplomacy ; and since Bismarck was disinclined to 
 be given prizes which he had already taken, the 
 Emperor was left making dignified gestures to an 
 empty class-room. Even the Italians marched into 
 Venetia without waiting for his permission, and the 
 French ambassador pursued the Prussian Govern- 
 ment with offers which were not required. The 
 adventurous Bismarck, who always derived an un- 
 
S62 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 natural enjoyment from wearing uniform, had the 
 habit, peculiar in a statesman, of accompanying the 
 Prussian army in the field. He had ridden wildly 
 about on the night after Sadowa, and it was his 
 practice to direct Prussian poHcy in a pickelhaube 
 and spurs from a wandering chancellery at the royal 
 headquarters. Napoleon communicated with him 
 through the tactful medium of (how the omens were 
 beginning to accumulate) M. Benedetti ; and the 
 French ambassador, a little scared and disconsolate 
 after traihng exhaustingly through the back areas 
 of an advancing army, came upon the Prussian 
 minister late at night in an empty house. The big 
 man was writing by candle-light, and a large revolver 
 lay on the table beside him. He played a little 
 brutally with the French offer of mediation, whilst 
 the Prussian armies came slowly within sight of the 
 tall spire of Vienna. The last embers of Austrian 
 resistance were stamped out or scattered eastwards 
 into Hungary, where the Uttle Rudolph was clinging 
 to his mother's sldrts and staring with round eyes at 
 the cheering Magyars ; the Itahans were beaten at 
 sea off Lissa ; but there was cholera in the Prussian 
 camp, and it was time to break off the war and count 
 the spoil. Whilst France stood waiting to crown the 
 victors, Bismarck borrowed a gesture from the first 
 Napoleon and crowned himself. Checking the 
 soldiers, who were anxious to march behind their 
 beating drums into Vienna, he signed peace with 
 Austria at Nikolsburg in the last week of July. 
 Franz-Joseph ceded Holstein and Venetia and paid 
 a trifling indemnity ; the German Diet ceased to 
 exist ; and in its place there was to be a new union 
 of Germany, from which Austria was now excluded. 
 
THE EMPEROR 363 
 
 The new unit would be dominated by Prussia, and 
 its members were warned by the annexation of 
 Hanover that submission to Berlin was the sole 
 condition of existence. It was a rich result. 
 
 The war was over, and France was left in a com- 
 manding attitude without the pride of having ended 
 it. The oracle had spokq|i, but there were no sup- 
 pliants in the temple. Chantecler had crowed, and 
 the sun had risen ; but there was an uneasy suspicion 
 that the sunrise owed little to his efforts. Paris was 
 suUen. French opinion had been stung by the 
 Prussian victory and the Emperor's failure to preside 
 over the readjustment of Central Europe ; and in 
 the next phase his policy was driven to a dismal 
 competition for a consolation-prize. It was the 
 poUcy, as Bismarck called it, of TrinJcgeld. The 
 positions were altered now ; where once a Prussian 
 minister had walked delicately on the sands at 
 Biarritz, deferential French diplomatists held out a 
 hat to Prussia for a trifle of the Rhineland, a cast-off 
 fortress, an old pair of German towns. The Emperor 
 had made no stipulation before the event ; but after 
 the war he came to ask for his reward, to present, as 
 they said in 1866, la note de Vauhergiste. It was a 
 poor-spirited expedient. But French opinion was 
 discontented in the pervading air of Prussian victory, 
 and M. Rouher (it was just one of his rouhereries, as 
 the Emperor called them) was so anxious to have 
 something to show in the Chamber. Parliamentary 
 management is an injudicious guide for foreign 
 policy ; but France seemed restive and the Emperor 
 was far from well, ' like a gambler,' as Mr. Disraeli 
 wrote, ' who has lost half his fortune and restless to 
 recover ; likely to make a coup, which may be fatally 
 
364 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 final for himseli.' He made the coup ; but in those 
 hot days of 1866 his hand shook a httle. 
 
 King William was riding through the cheers in the 
 Berlin streets, and Napoleon was huddled in pain, 
 sipping his water at Vichy, when the first demand 
 came to Bismarck. Mainz and the left bank of the 
 Rhine seemed a good deal to ask for ; but M. Bene- 
 detti was suave and did his best. Quite blandly, 
 with a vague hint that some other article might 
 perhaps take his customer's fancy, Bismarck refused. 
 Whilst Benedetti posted off to France for further 
 instructions, his offer became a useful card in Bis- 
 marck's hand. It was gravely reported to St. Peters- 
 burg as a disturbing indication of restless French 
 ambitions, and a calculated indiscretion to a journalist 
 informed the world of the rebuff to France and 
 alarmed good Germans with the news that Napoleon 
 was waiting hungrily beyond the Rhine. Napoleon 
 was sick with dumb pain at Vichy, and he seemed to 
 turn blindly like a weary bull as Bismarck planted 
 the banderillas. For a few days Imperial policy was 
 distracted by the sunlit tragedy of Mexico, as the 
 Empress Charlotte came to Paris for her audience 
 and the Emperor dragged back to meet her, sat 
 wearily through a bitter afternoon of heat and raihng, 
 and watched the slow drift of an Empire to disaster. 
 Then Benedetti was back at his post again with a 
 new proposal. One might take Luxemburg and 
 Belgium, if Bismarck would agree, with a free hand 
 to Prussia in Germany and an alliance between Paris 
 and Berlin if England took a pedantic view of 
 Belgian neutrality. It was a simple treaty, and 
 Bismarck took a draft of it in M. Benedetti' s writing. 
 Then he refused. The draft was useful, since he 
 
THE EMPEROR 365 
 
 showed it to Bavaria to prove that France had sold 
 South Germany for Belgium ; and one day he might 
 show it to England. Austria had signed peace in a 
 hotel at Prague ; Bavaria entered the Prussian 
 alliance ; and the new North German Confederation 
 was under construction. Bismarck had planted his 
 banderillas, and soon it would be time for the espada. 
 He had fought Diippel and Sadowa ; but the Prussian 
 piece was a trilogy, and he was waiting for Sedan. 
 
366 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XVI 
 
 It was the year 1867, and the brilliance of the 
 Empire (for it had still brilHance) was a glow of 
 evening, a vivid light upon quiet hills that face a 
 sinking sun. The sky was still bright ; but there 
 was a strange chill upon the Empire. The clear 
 dawn of 1852 seemed half a century away, and quite 
 suddenty the Emperor had become an old man. 
 Something in Eugenie's sad-eyed beauty was begin- 
 ning to fade, and the Court had aged. Where once 
 Bacciochi had played the barrel organ for the dancers, 
 there was a grave succession of distinguished visitors ; 
 and the only sounds about the palace were the young 
 voices of the Prince Imperial and his small friends. 
 Slowly the Emperor seemed to fade into the back- 
 ground, to smoke his cigarettes and speak low behind 
 the great moustache in that far-away voice of his, to 
 turn the regard vague et doux of his visage muet et triste 
 with the air de reve with which he drifts through that 
 story into which M. Bergeret has put so much of the 
 art of M. Anatole France. He was becoming the 
 shadowy figure of a second Napoleonic legend, and 
 Imperial policy turned increasingly to the prepara- 
 tion of a future in which an Empress-Regent should 
 govern France in the name of a pale young Emperor. 
 The boy was not strong ; but Eugenie was slowly 
 schooled to stand behind his throne, and gradually 
 the smiling figure of la Reine Crinoline faded into the 
 stiff outline of a Regent. She had governed with a 
 
 
THE EMPEROR 367 
 
 Council of Regency during the Italian war and later 
 when the Emperor was in Algeria, and M. Merimee, 
 who could see the change in her, had a faint, ironical 
 regret : ' II n'y a plus d' Eugenie, il rC^y a 'plus qu'une 
 imperatrice. Je plains etf admire.'' In earlier years 
 romantic critics of the Emperor's policy, who loved 
 to detect a hidden hand, to catch a low whisper in his 
 ear, had exaggerated her influence, her Spanish 
 prejudices, her distaste (which M. Merimee hardly 
 shared) for anti-clericals. But under the later Empire, 
 since the future belonged to her and to Lulu, she 
 played a larger part. 
 
 It was an uncertain future, since the old certainties 
 of 1852 seemed to have lost their hold upon the 
 generation of 1867. The Empire had been made 
 because France was haunted by the confused, ignoble 
 vision of 1848. But the men who had seen the great 
 crowds go roaring round the Hotel de Ville and heard 
 the dreadful silence as Cavaignac's infantry stormed 
 the barricades were in middle life now, and their sons 
 could remember little of the Empire except the police, 
 the censorship, and the heavy-handed Prefets who 
 seemed to have remade France in their own image, 
 as M. Haussmann had remade Paris in his. The 
 Revolution had been the raison d'etre of the Empire ; 
 and in 1867 the Revolution was half forgotten. It 
 was even regretted a trifle sentimentally by the 
 Parisian undergraduates, who displayed their apti- 
 tude for public life by shouting j okes about Badinguet 
 round corners at policemen and dreamed wistfully of 
 the past glories of the jeunesse des ecoles behind the 
 barricades. The Empire was faihng in its appeal to 
 youth. It had made few recruits ; le maitre n^aime 
 pas les visages nouveaux, and his ministries were 
 
368 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 dismal alternations of elder statesmen. Young 
 gentlemen preferred to write ingenious pamphlets in 
 which MachiavelH expounded the principles of Bona- 
 partism to a scandalised Montesquieu (and the 
 learned Nilus found forty years later the raw material 
 for his Protocols of the Elders — so far removed from 
 the Tuileries — of Zion). The glamour of the Empire 
 had begun to fade ; it had not made a lucky throw 
 since 1859 : Rome was a riddle, Sadowa was a shame, 
 and Mexico was a regret. The new generation 
 seemed to turn away, found small encouragement to 
 enter a service where all the rewards were earmarked 
 for M. Rouher, and preferred to snigger over the 
 ingenious side-hits of the Propos de Labienus at 
 Augustus and his simple enjoyment of the company 
 of Drusilla and Tertulla and Terentilla and Rufilla 
 and Silvia Titiscenia and even more. The Empire 
 persevered in its performance ; but it was beginning 
 in 1867 to find the public a trifle sceptical. 
 /It was the paradox of the Emperor's system that, 
 ''^like Lord Palmerston, he preached liberty to foreign 
 countries and maintained reaction in his own. But 
 although his Liberalism began abroad, there was no 
 reason (since he was not the leader of a Whig Party) 
 why it should end there, and he returned with some 
 vigour to the project, which Morny had let drop in 
 1865, for a Liberal Empire. It was the only hope, if 
 youth was to be reconciled to the Empire, if Lulu was 
 to inherit the future ; and M. Walewski, who had 
 followed Morny as President of the Chamber, seemed 
 to catch an echo of his views. There was still the 
 haunting question with which the Emperor was 
 always faced : ' Ou trouver Vhomme ? ' Perhaps the 
 legacy of Morny' s odd friendship with M. OUivier 
 
THE EMPEROR 369 
 
 would answer it. The dark young man in spectacles 
 had been once or twice at the Tuileries ; once he had 
 gone to an evening party when the Emperor was 
 away, and Eugenie discussed a cab strike and told 
 him that she was a socialist at sixteen, and once she 
 sent for him, and as they sat talking, a quiet door half 
 opened ; Eugenie made a sign, and the Emperor 
 walked in ; there were some courtesies and M. Ollivier 
 lectured his sovereign upon liberty. The movement 
 of parties in the Chamber was drifting him to the 
 leadership of a group which lay midway between the 
 stiff Imperialists and the repubUcans of the Left. 
 Now he was taken at his word ; the Empire was 
 inclined to take the plunge into constitutionalism, 
 although Eugenie felt that it was premature and 
 would have preferred to postpone it, with other fire- 
 works, for her son's accession ; and in the first days 
 of 1867 Walewski offered M. Ollivier the Ministry of 
 Public Instruction with duties as official advocate in 
 the Chamber. In the failing light of a winter after- 
 noon M. Ollivier slipped into the Tuileries and saw 
 his sovereign. The Deputy pointed the way to a 
 more constitutional Empire with parHamentary 
 ministers and freedom of public meetings and the 
 press, and Napoleon was anxious to do ' quelque chose 
 de resolu et de liberaV Only one must avoid ' Vair 
 de vouloir me faire pardonner mes echecs au Mexiquf. 
 et en Allemagne. Par des raisons qu'il serait trop 
 long d'expliquer je n'ai pas pu profiler des affaires 
 allemandes et je suis oblige de revenir du Mexique. 
 Dans cette sitvution de^concessions ne m' affaiUiraient- 
 elles pas ? ' M. OUivier thought not, and he went 
 out into the dark streets with a promise to come back 
 and talk to the Empress. He found her a shade 
 
 2a 
 
370 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 unfriendly to the movement, but the Emperor wrote 
 him a letter full of decision : 
 
 ' Pour frapper les esprits par des mesures decisives je 
 voudrais d'un coup etablir ce qu'on a appeli le couronne- 
 ment de V edifice ; je voudrais le faire, afin de ne plus y 
 revenir . . .' 
 
 Unfortunately M. Ollivier in 1867 clung to the virtuous 
 detachment of a private member ; his tender con- 
 science shrank from the indignity of office ; and his 
 sovereign, who might have gained a Liberal minister, 
 received only enhghtened advice. Napoleon's good 
 impulses remained in the official charge of M. Rouher, 
 and the coyness of M. Ollivier sentenced the whole pro- 
 ject to futility. The new programme was embodied 
 in a public letter from the Emperor to the Minister of 
 State, in which ' le couronnement de V edifice eleve par 
 la volonte nationale ' was to be achieved by a revision 
 of the press-law and the attendance of ministers in 
 the Chamber to debate and answer questions. It 
 was not easy to feel enthusiasm for the Imperial 
 manifesto of January 19, 1867, since the promises 
 which it contained were of the mildest, and even they 
 were to be performed by a ministry which profoundly 
 disbelieved in them. Once more the Empire had 
 made a vague gestm-e of LiberaUsm and relapsed into 
 the easier exercises of reaction. There was a faint 
 revival of parliamentary life ; M. Walewski brought 
 the tribune out of store, and after certain drastic 
 alterations required by the stature of M. Thiers it 
 was installed once again in the Chamber. The 
 sweeping toga of an earlier day seemed to have been 
 cut down to fit the frosty little gentleman in spec- 
 tacles, and from his new rostrum he delivered inter- 
 
THE EMPEROR 371 
 
 minable disquisitions upon the teaching of history 
 and the errors and imperfections of Imperial poHcy. 
 But in spite of the Liberal aspirations of the 
 Emperor's letter, France was not yet the mistress of 
 its own destinies. M. Rouher still governed in his 
 master's name, and M. Ollivier pointed the bitter 
 moral : 
 
 ' Les attribidions du ministere d'etat ont du s'accroitre 
 demesurement ; Vavocat des ministres est d'abord devenu 
 leur conseil, puis leur directeur, et aujourd'hui il est, 
 non pas comme on I'a dit, premier ministre, maire du 
 palais ou grand vizir, mais un Vice-Empereur sans 
 responsabilite.' 
 
 There was a roar in the Chamber ; and the Emperor 
 replied to his impulsive adviser with a gracious letter 
 to Rouher and the Grand Cross in diamonds. It 
 was a strange preparation for the future. 
 
 But Paris in 1867 was not conspicuously interested 
 in the future. Students of foreign policy were 
 vaguely disquieted by the sudden emergence of 
 Prussia, and they followed anxiously a queer 
 negotiation about Luxemburg in which M. de 
 Moustier, the new Foreign Minister, made a fresh 
 attempt to secure some small advantage for France 
 in the readjustment of European relations which 
 followed Sadowa. Prussia had absorbed Hanover 
 and one of the Hesses ; the North German Con- 
 federation — ' a congress of roaches presided over by 
 a very big pike ' — was a new commonwealth of 
 Germany north of the Main with BerHn for its capital ; 
 and the last hope of detaching South Germany from 
 Bismarck's combination was removed by his publica- 
 tion of treaties of alliance with Bavaria, Baden, and 
 Wiirttemberg. French jealousy burned bright, and 
 
372 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 the directors of French pohcy snatched eagerly at 
 any chance of a set-off. Luxemburg, by an eccentric 
 compHcation of past treaties, belonged to the King 
 of Holland, and in view of Bismarck's notorious 
 appetite for outlying Duchies, this isolated enclave 
 on the Franco-German frontier was regarded by 
 cautious persons at the Hague as an embarrassing 
 casus belli with Prussia. The French obhgingly 
 offered to relieve Holland of the Grand-Duchy, and 
 the Prince of Orange, who was a familiar figure on 
 the more frivolous side of Parisian life under the less 
 impressive appellation of Prince Citron, notified the 
 Emperor of his father's consent. Mr. Disraeli heard 
 of the offer from the Rothschilds, and there was a 
 nervous flutter of ' all the cousins ' round Windsor. 
 But at this stage Prussia intervened ; German 
 opinion was mobilised to demonstrate the Teutonic 
 origin of Luxemburg, and the Franco-Dutch trans- 
 action was sharply interrupted. With some adroit- 
 ness Moustier changed his ground and, abandoning 
 his claim to the Grand-Duchy, pressed for the with- 
 drawal of the Prussian garrison. There was an 
 uneasy pause, in which French agents bought re- 
 mounts in Hungary and Prussian engineers worked 
 by torchlight on the forts at Luxemburg. But 
 Austria assumed the exhausting functions of an 
 angel of peace ; the soothing ministrations of 
 diplomacy were invoked, and after a four days' 
 conference in London the destinies of Luxemburg 
 were settled by a treaty which dismantled the 
 fortress, withdrew the Prussian garrison, and con- 
 ferred upon the Grand-Duchy the questionable 
 blessings of neutrality. 
 
 Whilst French policy struggled a shade inade- 
 
THE EMPEROR 373 
 
 quately with its perennial problem to porter Tiaut le 
 drapeau de la France, expert opinion was gravely- 
 exercised as to the simpler exigencies of national 
 defence. Sadowa had set the soldiers thinking. 
 Man-power and the needle-gun had swept the 
 Prussians to victory ; and although the French 
 infantry was to be rearmed with the excellent Chasse- 
 pot, there was an uneasy feeling that the big battalions 
 would be on the German side. Prussia had adopted 
 a system of conscription which followed the formula 
 of the Volk in Waffen and brought the whole popula- 
 tion to the colours. The French, with a more 
 limited system which permitted the purchase of 
 substitutes, had a smaller estabhshment of higher 
 quaUty ; there was even a tendency towards pro- 
 fessionalism, and the Empire aligned against the 
 Prussian masses an army which had seen service in 
 Italy, Mexico, the Crimea and approximated more 
 nearly to the long-service soldiers of Mr. Cardwell 
 and Queen Victoria. There was a hasty move- 
 ment of reform ; the house-parties at Compiegne 
 became predominantly mihtary, and the soldiers sat 
 in committee with the Emperor. Randon, who had 
 been at the Ministry of War since Magenta, was 
 sceptical. But Trochu was voluble, and Ducrot sent 
 nervous reports from Strasburg upon the movements 
 of Prussian agents in the frontier provinces. The 
 country was informed that the first-line army would 
 be increased, exemptions cm-tailed, and the existing 
 forces supplemented by a Garde mobile modelled upon 
 the Prussian Landwehr. A new minister came to the 
 War Office ; and as Marshal Niel was settling down 
 to his papers, Napoleon stated in the Chamber that 
 a nation's influence must depend upon the size of its 
 
374 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 army. It was a strange termination of the age of 
 Congresses ; and when General Trochu published a 
 disturbing pamphlet on UArmee franQaise en 1867, 
 with its gloomy motto from Tacitus and its dismal 
 prevision that France might one day have a Benedek, 
 men bought it into its hundredth edition and began 
 to look nervously towards the eastern frontier. 
 
 But Paris in 1867 had more immediate interests. 
 Once again the Empire fell back upon the simple 
 expedient of government by Exhibition, and the 
 crowds stood in the Champ de Mars to see the miracles 
 of science — the steam locomotives, the marvellous 
 featherweight metal aluminium, and the new 
 American rocking-chair. Paris once more became 
 the capital of Europe ; and anxious couriers pro- 
 pelled their charges through the staring crowds, 
 whilst stupid foreigners talked broken French and 
 the provincials fumbled with then' purses. In the 
 Exhibition there was a baroque profusion of kiosks, 
 of gleaming show-cases, of strange, insistent salesmen, 
 and young ladies who waited upon their customers 
 in the outlandish costumes of their own countries. 
 Missionary societies amused an enlightened public 
 with trophies of heathen weapons, and Herr Friedrich 
 Kjupp of Essen exhibited a great gun which showed 
 its black muzzle to the French and won a prize. The 
 whole city was a lodging-house, and its lodgers 
 swung gaily into the Parisian dance. In the day 
 one tramped the Exhibition open-mouthed, and at 
 night one sat in the stalls to hear Carvalho sing 
 Juliet in M. Gounod's new opera or to see Ristori as 
 Queen Elizabeth, or (best of all) one nodded a respon- 
 sive head at the Alcazar to the lilt of Theresa's Cest 
 dans Vnez qu'^a me chatouille or raised an eyebrow 
 
THE EMPEROR 375 
 
 at her deep-voiced, her classical insistence that Rien 
 rCest sacre pour un sapeur, which had inspired Cham 
 to retort with a picture of scandalised Engineers 
 ejaculating Rien n'est sacre pour Theresa. Paris had 
 gone mad for the divine Patti when she sang Lucia 
 and Sonnamhula ; but the authentic Muse of the 
 Second Empire was Theresa. 
 
 It seemed in 1867 that the whole Empire had been 
 set to music ; and the maestro was a tall, lean-faced 
 man with drooping whiskers and perpetual pince- 
 nez who had come out of a synagogue choir at 
 Cologne and was named Offenbach. He drifted from 
 serious composition to ballet-music (with Taglioni to 
 arrange his dances), and then in the great days of the 
 Empire opera bouffe found its master. Orphee aux 
 Enfers had set all Paris humming ; and as Bazaine's 
 officers rode down to the hot, blue, sea at Vera Cruz, 
 their vision of home was Paris and a box for la Belle 
 Helene. The armies of the Second Empire went into 
 action to an air of Offenbach, and his leading lady 
 was a national, almost a European figure. In the 
 year of the Exhibition he gave her royal rank ; and 
 when Hortense Schneider played la Grande-Duchesse 
 de Gerolstein, it was an international event. The 
 librettists pointed fingers of French derision at a 
 minor German state ; and when the whole Almariach 
 de Gotha came to Paris to see the Exhibition, she 
 played, like Talma at Erfurt, to a parterre de rois her 
 travesty of German royalty. It was the last joke of 
 the Empire ; and since the Empire was to fall so 
 soon under German guns, it tastes a little bitter in 
 the mouth. 
 
 In the last years of the Empire the little figures of 
 Parisian gaiety jigged on a broad and lighted stage. 
 
376 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The scene, lit by the flaring gas-jets of the Second 
 Empire, was set by the tall buildings of M. Hauss- 
 mann's avenues ; and as the maestro Offenbach drew 
 a tinkling melody from the orchestra, one seems to 
 see them simpering prettily in their great skirts and 
 their little hats, the lost anonymas of the Second 
 Empire. They crossed the stage to a lively air, as 
 young M. Rochefort fought his duel with Prince 
 Achille Murat and the cocodes settled their great 
 cuffs into place — Cora Pearl, the Englishwoman, 
 with her fair curls (she once played Cupid in Orphee), 
 Mogador, Nana herself with her scarlet Hveries and 
 her pair of Russian trotters, and Marguerite Bellanger 
 whom an extensive public knew as Margot la Rigo- 
 leuse before discreet equerries transported her to Vichy 
 and Biarritz, where a Cher Seigneur was waiting and 
 grave officials laid before an Emperor the letters of 
 his Marguerite. ' Pourtant,'' as Fleury said, ' nous 
 nous sommes diahlement bien amuses.'' The Empire 
 in 1867 seemed to centre in Paris, and Paris in the 
 year of the Exhibition was at its most Parisian. 
 
 But there was a flutter of haute politique in the 
 streets when the kings of Europe drove by to see the 
 show. A Swede, a Jap, a Czar, a Prince of Wales, a 
 Sultan in his fez went past at the salute, and the 
 Emperor seemed always to be waiting in uniform at 
 the station to meet a royal train. King William came 
 from Berlin with his strapping Chancellor in Landwehr 
 uniform, and Bismarck sat laughing at the Grande- 
 Duchesse. One day in the summer (there had been 
 bad news from Mexico by the new American cable) 
 the Emperor sat by the Sultan of Turkey to award 
 the prizes ; there was a silence as he made his speech, 
 because it was known in Paris that Maximilian was 
 
THE EMPEROR 377 
 
 lying shot at Queretaro. But the greatest day in 
 the year was a June afternoon when the crowds 
 stood in the sunshine at Longchamps and the 
 Emperor sat his horse with the Czar and the King 
 of Prussia to watch Marshal Canrobert take the troops 
 by at the salute. It was the last pageant of the 
 Empire, and it passed with a gleam of helmets and 
 the flicker of sunhght on fixed bayonets. The 
 shakoes of the infantry went by and the green 
 Chasseurs and the great drum-majors and the little 
 vivandieres in their bright petticoats. There was a 
 great stream of red and blue as the Zouaves swung 
 past, and then the cavalry went jingling by — the 
 Guides in green and gold, the Lancers in their 
 schapskas with a flutter of pennons, and the tall 
 helmets of the heavy cavalry who were to pound so 
 soon across the hills at Mars-la-Tour and down into 
 the hollow at Reichshoffen. The little brass guns 
 went clanking past behind their gun-teams, and the 
 Emperor sat in the sunshine with his great moustache 
 between the tall Czar and the narrow eyes of Prussia. 
 As the sun dropped towards the west, they drove 
 back into Paris, and a Polish boy snapped a pistol at 
 the Emperor of Russia. The troops marched off 
 through the June dust, and Longchamps had seen 
 in the blaze and jingle of the great review the Indian 
 summer of the Empire. 
 
378 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XVII 
 
 As the shouting died away and the last flags hung 
 limply on the autumn air in the Exhibition grounds, 
 Napoleon was left alone again with his problems. 
 Paris and the younger generation were palpably 
 hostile to the Empire ; and new pieces with astound- 
 ing moves were beginning to appear on the European 
 chess-board. The old gambits had lost something 
 of their value. The game was ending, and the 
 Emperor seemed to fumble a little with the pieces. 
 His health had recovered partly from the breakdown 
 of 1866 ; but he remained an aging man, and he was 
 too often in pain to command a clear eye and a 
 steady hand. 
 
 The most pressing of his problems was the balance 
 of European power. Bismarck had tilted the scale 
 sharply, and French policy had found no means to 
 redress it. There was something a little sinister in 
 the silent progress of Prussia. The light was failing ; 
 and through the gathering dusk the North German 
 Confederation, to the imagination of Sir Robert 
 Morier, ' looms out like some huge ironclad from which 
 no sounds are heard but the tramp of men at drill, 
 or the swinging upon their pivots of monster guns.' 
 It was an uneasy spectacle for an Emperor without 
 allies ; and as it slowly took shape in the mist, he 
 seemed to stare a little helplessly. Foreign politics 
 had been like a bad dream since 1866 ; he had waved 
 his wand and made his passes; but nothing had 
 
THE EMPEROR 379 
 
 happened and his public was growing impatient. 
 The centre of European gravity was shifting to Berlin. 
 Napoleon still looked enigmatic and made significant 
 speeches ; but he no longer held the centre of the 
 stage. Once a respectful Continent had watched the 
 Tuileries to guess its future ; now it looked further 
 east, where something seemed crouching in the 
 shadows. 
 
 It was an obvious resource for France to seek 
 alliances, and Austria seemed the natural counter- 
 poise to the new power of Germany. A queer irony 
 sent Napoleon to make advances to Franz-Joseph ; 
 ten years of French policy had stripped him of his 
 Italian dominions, and Magenta, Solferino, the French 
 bayonets which had captured Milan, and the French 
 hint which had sent the Italians into Venice seemed 
 an odd prelude for the new friendship. But the two 
 Empires drew together, like tall ships under a stormy 
 sky ; they had need of one another, and statesmen in 
 difficulties have short memories. One could change 
 partners in the European dance with astonishing 
 rapidity, and Austria might care to take the floor 
 with France. It would be a brave repartee to 
 Prussia to set up once more the old Austro-French 
 alliance which had taken the field against Frederick 
 the Great in the Seven Years' War ; and the agile 
 Count von Beust, who had migrated from Dresden 
 to Vienna and entered Austrian politics from the top 
 as Chancellor, seemed just the man (had he not 
 brought Saxony into the war against Prussia in 
 1866 ?) to take the new, the daring turning. No 
 royalty from Vienna had visited the Exhibition, 
 since a Mexican firing-party at Queretaro had put 
 the Court in mourning. But at the turn of the year 
 
380 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Napoleon and Eugenie left France with elaborate 
 informality for a private visit to Franz-Joseph, As 
 the train wound through South Germany, the kings 
 stood bowing in their stations ; and at Augsburg in 
 Bavaria the Emperor showed Eugenie his school, his 
 mother's house, and the old streets where a German 
 schoolboy had once learnt to be Emperor of the 
 French. At the Austrian frontier the royal train 
 steamed into Salzburg, and Napoleon met on the 
 platform the tall young man whom he had last seen 
 on the white road to Villafranca in 1859. There 
 were five days of courtesy, of drives and visits ; and 
 one evening a thoughtful Court assisted nature to be 
 picturesque by lighting bonfires on the hills. Whilst 
 Eugenie dressed quietly and sat with her queer, 
 vivacious hostess, the two Emperors talked politics. 
 M. de Gramont, from the embassy at Vienna, was full 
 of plans. But Beust was cautious and Napoleon was 
 not, was never in a hurry. II ne faut rien hrusquer ; 
 and the visit closed upon a note of peaceful friend- 
 ship. The Emperor took the train again to France ; 
 and as it stopped at Lille, he seemed a little anxious. 
 His speech said something of the past glamour of the 
 Empire — ' T entrevoyais 'pour notre patrie une nouvelle 
 ere de grandeur et de prosperite ' — then, with a sudden 
 drop to the minor key, he peered uncertainly into the 
 future : ' des points noirs sont venus assomhrir notre 
 horizon. De meme que la bonne fortune ne m'a point 
 ebloui, de meme des revers passagers ne me decou- 
 rageront pas.'' It was an odd confession ; Napoleon 
 was a silent man, but he seemed for once to be thinking 
 aloud. His courtesy to Franz-Joseph was returned 
 a few weeks later, when the Austrian Emperor visited 
 him at Paris. The streets were crowded ; and the 
 
THE EMPEROR 381 
 
 young man, whom defeat and bereavement had 
 rendered interesting, was well received. The dip- 
 lomats took up the work of friendship ; and for a 
 year or more, as M. Rouher dabbled in haute politique 
 and M. de Gramont stroUed over to the Ballplatz to 
 talk ' academiquement ' to Count von Beust about a 
 European war, the correspondence trailed on. Drafts 
 passed from hand to hand ; solemn gentlemen ex- 
 changed significant nods ; the atmosphere was highly 
 confidential, and there were ' echanges d'idees et de 
 projets ' between Paris and Vienna. How much, how 
 little had been said came later into controversy. 
 But, although the bright perspective of alliance 
 kindled the warm imagination of M. de Gramont, 
 nothing was signed. There was a vague contact of 
 the two Empires ; but Austria, to an experienced eye, 
 belonged ' to the mollusc category,' and Napoleon's 
 initiative was little more than a tired gesture. There 
 was no treaty, and even the letters provided for little 
 beyond co-operation in diplomacy. An Austrian 
 army corps in Bohemia might one day save the 
 French ; but even M. Rouher might well doubt 
 whether the same results would attend an Austrian 
 Note. The Emperor had gone to Salzburg in search 
 of an ally ; he had found only a neutral. 
 
 His natural allies were in Italy, which was the 
 creation of his policy. But gratitude is an unusual 
 sentiment in statesmen; and Italy, with Venice 
 and Milan, had little more to hope from the French 
 alliance. An offer of the Trentino went to Florence 
 with a draft treaty of alliance. But the long fatality 
 of the Roman question had estranged the two 
 countries, and at the moment when France most 
 needed Italian friendship, it rose once more between 
 
382 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 them. For a few months in 1867, when the Italians 
 undertook to guard the Pope's territory and the last 
 French sentries sailed for home, it had seemed to 
 pass away. But before the year was out. Garibaldi 
 was on the move again. That incorrigible liberator, 
 whom Italian guns had already turned back from 
 Rome at Aspromonte in 1862, took the road once 
 more by way of a Peace Congress at Geneva attended 
 principally by belligerent revolutionaries, who waved 
 their international olive-branches a shade ferociously. 
 There was a nervous flutter in Italy, and the Legion 
 began to filter into the Papal States under the eyes 
 of grinning Piedmontese police. There was a crackle 
 of musketry ; and the Papalini fell back fighting on 
 the city, whilst France sent Italy a sharp reminder 
 of her duty to protect the Pope. The Itahans 
 wrung their hands, regretted, condoled, apologised, 
 explained. But the Garibaldians moved slowly on, 
 and France was insistent. An expeditionary force 
 was concentrated at Toulon and sent the Emperor's 
 mind back to the distant days when a President sat 
 at the Elysee and General Oudinot marched slowly 
 up the road to Rome. Garibaldi slipped out of 
 Caprera to take the field against the Pope, and the 
 Zouaves were marching down to the transports as 
 Napoleon struggled with his doubts. Orders to 
 Toulon went and were recalled. But the fleet sailed 
 at last, as the arms of the semaphores flapped out the 
 last hesitations of the Government from the coast- 
 guard stations of Provence ; and in the last weeks of 
 October the French were back in Rome. They 
 marched out by the Porta Pia before dawn, and at 
 Mentana on a Sunday they found Garibaldi and his 
 men. The Legion was broken in a running fight, 
 
THE EMPEROR 383 
 
 and General de Failly, proud of his new rifles, 
 reported to Paris in words which were never forgiven 
 in Italy : 
 
 ' Les fusils Chassepot ont fait merveille.' 
 
 The Pope was saved ; but France had saved him by 
 Itahan casualties, and Italy was less than ever likely 
 to ally herself with the Emperor. M. Rouher struck 
 an attitude in the Chamber and announced in his 
 big voice, ' au nom du gouvernement frangais, Vltalie 
 ne s^emparera pas de Rome ! Jamais, jamais la 
 France ne supportera cette violence a son honneur et a 
 la catholicite.^ His sovereign gently remarked, 'En 
 politique, il ne faut jamais dire " Jamais " ' ; and the 
 advice, for an Empire without allies, was wise. 
 Finality could hardly be attained in French policy 
 at a time when the first impression of a new ambas- 
 sador from London was that Napoleon had ' reigned 
 eighteen years, and they are getting tired of so much 
 of the same thing and want novelty.' 
 
 One other event in foreign politics had its influence 
 upon the Empire. Spanish affairs under Queen 
 Isabella had passed through rapid alternations of 
 stagnation and comic opera. Public life was 
 crowded with fierce military gentlemen who clanked 
 into office and out again with bewildering rapidity, 
 and the combined efforts of the entire corps of 
 generals had reduced the national finances to the 
 condition which induced Lord Macaulay to observe 
 to his banker : ' Active Spanish Bonds profess to 
 pay interest now, and do not. Deferred Spanish 
 Bonds profess to pay interest at some future time, 
 and will not. Passive Spanish Bonds profess to pay 
 interest neither now, nor at any future time. I 
 think that you might buy a large amount of Passive 
 
384 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Spanish Bonds for a very small sum.' A pronuncia- 
 miento of artillery sergeants was followed by a pro- 
 nunciamiento of sailors at Cadiz ; shiploads of 
 generals went into exile and returned with enlight- 
 ened views ; and gradually, in the later years of 
 the Second Empire, the country drifted towards 
 unanimity. The Queen's ministers had succeeded 
 in uniting Spanish opinion ; but unfortunately they 
 had united it against the Queen. In the late summer 
 of 1868 her villeggiatura at San Sebastian was inter- 
 rupted by four separate pronunciamientos ; she 
 looked wildly round the great curve of the bay and 
 scuttled across the bridge at Irun into France, 
 leaving a debt of fourteen millions and a cash 
 balance in the Treasury of something under five 
 shillings. One more ruler of Spain and the Indies 
 had justified Lord Clarendon's gloomy diagnosis : 
 ' Spanish dynasties go and come ; Spanish kings and 
 queens go and come ; and Spanish ministers go and 
 come ; but there is one thing in Spain that is always 
 the same — they never answer letters.' The Queen 
 passed the frontier, and the Uttle houses of St. Jean 
 de Luz slid by her carriage window. The Emperor 
 was at Biarritz for the autumn, and he had the 
 courtesy to come to the station as her train went 
 through. There was a vacancy for the throne of 
 Spain ; and before it was filled, it had made a gap at 
 the Tuileries. 
 
 In his own country the Emperor watched the half- 
 hearted execution of the programme of 1867. Whilst 
 his concessions to democracy were imposed upon a 
 suspicious public by sceptical ministers, army reform 
 was gravely debated in the Chamber, and Count von 
 Moltke was reported to be interesting himself in the 
 
THE EMPEROR 385 
 
 geography of the eastern frontier. But French 
 opinion was gratified by the devastating possibilities 
 of the mitrailleuse, and Marshal Niel's proposals were 
 steadily reduced in effectiveness by an Opposition 
 which never hesitated to reproach the Emperor for 
 supineness in face of Prussia but declined, with that 
 levity which is the privilege of Oppositions, to provide 
 him with the means of action. Colonel Stoffel 
 reported voluminously from the embassy at Berlin 
 upon the growing efficiency of the Prussian service ; 
 the French field-gun was outranged, the most careful 
 attention was being given to musketry, and even the 
 Court circular showed how assiduously the elderly 
 King devoted himself to his army. The tactful 
 attache alluded cautiously to the manifest superiority 
 of the Prussian higher command ; apart from the 
 genius of Count von Moltke, a Staff College presided 
 over the education of his officers in that art of war 
 which had lately become so complex. Railways and 
 rifles and steel artillery were making European war- 
 fare into something beyond the comprehension of 
 dashing French colonels in tight uniforms, and it 
 was no longer enough for a successful soldier to 
 combine a knowledge of the names of Napoleonic 
 victories with the display of personal courage in the 
 hinterland of Algeria. 
 
 The Liberal promises of 1867 were gingerly fulfilled 
 by M. Rouher. Whilst the public crowded to hear 
 Christine Nilsson as Ophelia, cautious legislators con- 
 ferred upon it the privilege of meeting to discuss 
 unpolitical questions and even (with official permis- 
 sion) to talk pohtics. The law of press-offences was 
 reformed, and there was a queer revival of public life 
 in France, The sudden resumption of activity was 
 
 2b 
 
386 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 almost convulsive. Once more, after the long 
 silence of the Empire, public speakers began to 
 gesticulate to public meetings, and journalists wrote 
 almost what they thought. The strait-waistcoat of 
 1852 had been relaxed, and the Empress, whom half 
 Paris regarded as an agent of reaction, was devoting 
 herself to the harmless pursuit of charity and the 
 posthumous reinstatement of Lesurques after the 
 long martjrrdom of his tragic confusion with Dubosc, 
 who robbed the Lyons mail in his own person and 
 fascinated a generation of British playgoers in some- 
 one else's. But there was little gratitude in France 
 for the new liberty. The Emperor drafted newspaper 
 articles in which the country was to be informed, 
 with a desperate homoeopathy, of its continued 
 devotion to his person, to ' la bienveillance extreme du 
 chef de V^tat, sa modestie et sa simplicite ' in spite of 
 the imperfections of his domineering subordinates ; 
 there was a queer admission that ' VEmpereur est reste 
 aussi populaire qu'il y a quinze ans, tandis qite son 
 gouvernement ne Vest pas.' He even interrupted his 
 j ournaKsm to sketch the scenario of a novel in which 
 an intelhgent traveller returned to France in 1868 
 and wandered open-mouthed through the rich per- 
 spective of the Empire — ironclads at Brest (' V inven- 
 tion de V Empereur. Revetus de fer, ils sont a Vahri 
 du boulet, et cette transformation a detruit jusqu'd un 
 certain point la suprematie sur mer de V Angleterre '), 
 railways, electric telegraphs, low prices and Free 
 Trade, a country at peace, and aU the beneficent 
 apparatus of a modern state. But French opinion 
 was restive and unimpressed. Paris seemed to want 
 a new toy, and Lamartine might have said once more 
 ' la France s'enmde,'' 
 
THE EMPEROR 387 
 
 The uneasy temper of 1868 reacted upon a cheerful 
 and crowded Opposition. Little remained of the 
 Five of 1857 ; M. Darimon was seen now at official 
 receptions, M. Emile OUivier was under grave sus- 
 picion of having permitted his reasonableness to 
 outrun his logic, and only M. Jules Favre seemed to 
 survive, with the gift of peevish invective which had 
 delighted French audiences for twenty years and an 
 appearance which came increasingly to suggest an 
 unsuccessful impersonation of Mr. Lincoln. But 
 M. Thiers had returned to the stage and was forget- 
 ting his Orleanism in the enjoyment of eliciting 
 republican cheers by the measured enumeration of 
 someone else's mistakes; and gradually the sedate 
 repubUcans of the early Empire were reinforced, were 
 superseded by a younger, more violent generation. 
 M. OUivier' s young friends at the Bar forsook him as 
 his views assumed the fatal caution of middle age ; 
 and since the claims of clients had not yet absorbed 
 their leisure, they were always available to speak at 
 meetings or to cheer in the Chamber, to write for the 
 papers or to publish pamphlets. One voice seemed 
 even then to carry above the rest, where the southern 
 verve of Numa Roumestan sent Leon Gambetta 
 rocketing volubly across the Parisian scene. But 
 there were grave elements in the Opposition ; suc- 
 cessive amnesties had released the exiles of 1852, and 
 they returned to France with aU the memories of the 
 Second Republic and all the bitterness of the cowp 
 d'etat. There was even a recrudescence of the old 
 ideal of the social revolution, of the Republique sociale 
 which Cavaignac had blown off the Paris streets in 
 the June days of 1848. Working-class opinion had 
 been gratified by the condescension of the Prince- 
 
388 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 President's early writings on V Extinction du Pawpe- 
 risme. But gradually, as the development of in- 
 dustrialism under the Second Empire huddled the 
 workers in the large towns, it was attracted by 
 Proudhon's more vigorous enunciation of the principle 
 La propriete c'est le vol. The system of Karl Marx 
 was largely unreadable and mostly unread ; but a 
 dangerous contact with the revolutionary movements 
 of Europe was established by the well-intentioned 
 institution of the Internationale. Designed by a 
 modest group of Parisian trade unionists to secure the 
 co-operation of organised labour in all countries, it 
 was assailed in France with the embarrassing atten- 
 tions of more experienced agitators, who seemed 
 anxious to embeUish its drab economic programme 
 with the more vivid attractions of republicanism, 
 irreligion, free love, and Niliilism. Their harmless 
 excursions to pass resolutions at international con- 
 ferences brought the delegates of the Internationale 
 in contact with the main stream of European revolu- 
 tion, and those simple-minded exponents of working- 
 class soUdarity were soon to be found murmuring the 
 deep-chested incantations of insurrection in unison 
 with the fuller voices of Mazzini, Garibaldi, and 
 Bakunin. French opinion in the industrial areas was 
 rapidly affected by the strange contagion, and one 
 more ingredient was added to the effervescence of 
 Paris. 
 
 There was a surge of journalism as the restrictions 
 came off, and anxious gentlemen sat at the Ministry 
 of the Interior scanning the new publications for 
 signs of lese-majeste. Their quest was amply satisfied 
 in the summer of 1868 when M. Rochefort, who had 
 made something of a reputation for seditious in- 
 
THE EMPEROR 389 
 
 nuendo in the newspapers, brought out a paper in a 
 bright red cover and called it La Lanterne. He was 
 a remarkable young man with black hair and a 
 piercing eye ; his gifts combined a rare genius for 
 burlesque with that verbal felicity which can main- 
 tain a steady flow of witticisms ; and he had not yet 
 discovered his total incapacity for living contentedly 
 under any form of government whatever. The bland 
 impertinence of his first number, of which he hoped 
 to sell four thousand copies, brought him a circula- 
 tion of one hundred thousand, and his malice set 
 Paris tittering every Saturday. Sheets of the same 
 type had circulated furtively in Madrid under the 
 late dynasty. The note was struck in his opening 
 sentence — ' La France contient, dit TAlmanach im- 
 perial, trente-six millions de sujets, sans compter les 
 sujets de mecontentement ' — and he ran easily through 
 every tone of derision from irony to abuse. The 
 ways of ministers, the Empress and her crinolines, 
 the Emperor and his dog made a weekly appearance 
 in his sardonic revue ; the accomplishments of Queen 
 Hortense and the paternity of her son, the dialectic 
 of M. Rouher, the antics of the pohce, the stale 
 flavour of old scandals about Mexico, and the whole 
 under-side of the Imperial scene were M. Rochefort's 
 stock-in-trade. But he was at his best in passages, 
 of sustained irony : 
 
 Commebonapartistejeprefere Napoleon II. . . . Per- 
 sonne ne niera qu'il ait occupe le trone, puisque son succes- 
 seur s'appelle Napoleon III. Quel regne J mes amis, 
 qvd regne ! Pas une contribution ; pas de guerres in- 
 utiles avec les decimes qui s'ens'uivent ; pas de ces ex- 
 peditions lointaines dans lesquelles on depense six cents 
 millions pour oiler redamer quinze francs, pas de listes 
 
390 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 civiles devorantes, pas de ministres cumulant chacun cinq 
 ou six fonctions a cent mille francs piece ; voila bien le 
 monarque tel queje le comprends. Oh ! oui, Napoleon II. 
 jef aime etje t' admire sans reserve. . . .' 
 
 The public reputation of French institutions, which 
 depended under the Empire upon a romantic venera- 
 tion, is pecuHarly susceptible to ridicule. Humour 
 is an innocuous weapon in British poHtics ; but in 
 the more sensitive Parisian milieu, in which the 
 Lanterne circulated, it produced a serious influence 
 upon the prestige of the Empire. M. Pinard, who 
 had conducted the prosecution of M. Flaubert for 
 the improprieties of Madame Bovary, was at the 
 Ministry of the Interior, and his sense of humour was 
 unequal to M. Rochefort's scurrility. He displayed 
 a laudable activity in persecuting the exasperating 
 pamphlet ; and the intemperate little paper, which 
 blushed scarlet in every suburban railway-carriage 
 on Saturdays in 1868 and lay in heaps along the 
 boulevards hke the autumn leaves of the Empire, was 
 suppressed after eleven issues. Whilst his facetiae 
 were gravely investigated by a court of law, Roche- 
 fort escaped to Belgium and settled down in the 
 congenial company of Victor Hugo to lampoon the 
 Empire from beyond the frontier. The Lanterne 
 continued to be printed in Brussels, but its sole con*- 
 tributor dated occasional issues from towns in 
 England, Holland and even Prussia (which he did not 
 visit) out of consideration for the responsibilities of 
 the Belgian Government to its neighbours. The tone 
 of his invective became progressively more violent, 
 and every artifice of comic opera was adopted 
 through the year 1869 to introduce copies of the 
 Lanterne into France. The paper was printed on a 
 
THE EMPEROR 391 
 
 reduced scale and posted to its subscribers in envel- 
 opes ; a consignment of fifteen plaster busts of the 
 Emperor was found to contain a whole edition — six 
 copies in each epaulette and seven inside the Grand 
 Gordon of the Legion of Honour ; and an antique 
 picture-frame was filled with sedition and despatched 
 to an art-dealer in Paris. The success of the Lanterne 
 came to depend less upon its contents, which were a 
 trifle monotonous, than upon the pleasing mystery 
 of its distribution. Even the dullest paper becomes 
 interesting, if it is delivered at the house by smugglers. 
 Its author, who had never cultivated anonymity, 
 gradually became a popular figure, and at a by- 
 election in 1869, M. Rochefort was returned to the 
 Chamber by a working-class constituency of Paris : 
 it was a strange symptom. 
 
 French opuiion, in the malaise which had prevailed 
 in public life since 1866, was becoming profoundly 
 sceptical as to the Empire, and the doubts in the 
 pubHc mind were expressed in a critical examination 
 of its tradition and its origins. The sanctity of the 
 First Empire had been an axiom of the reign of 
 Napoleon ni. ; but M. Lanfrey's handling of the 
 subject showed a strange departure from the reverent 
 attitude of earlier writers, and the indivisible collab- 
 oration of MM. Erckmann and Chatrian displayed a 
 scandalous indifference to the fascinations of senti- 
 mental militarism. The Emperor's own antecedents 
 were exposed to stiU more searching criticism, and 
 the shrill abuse of M. Rochefort was supplemented 
 by a revival of public interest in the dark circum- 
 stances of the coup d'etat. The exiles had employed 
 their leisure in constructing an elaborate mythology 
 of the crowded days of December, 1851 ; and since 
 
392 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 every cause requires a martyr, the republicans were 
 fortunate in a belated recollection of the part played 
 by M. Baudin. Shot gallantly (if a trifle super- 
 fluously) on a barricade and subsequently forgotten 
 by his supporters for seventeen years, this obscure 
 victim became in 1868 a symbol of insurrection. 
 Stray references to him began to appear in print ; 
 crowds learned to cheer his name ; the national 
 genius for poUtical funerals was thwarted by the 
 unfortunate circumstance that he was already buried, 
 but it was not, it was never too late for the post- 
 humous distinction of a monument, and some news- 
 papers opened a subscription-list. There was even 
 a notion that the Emperor might head the list of 
 subscribers. But his ministers foresaw the un- 
 pleasantness of an eloquent unveiling, and the papers 
 were prosecuted. A brief for the defence was 
 dehvered, by some fortunate chance, to Maitre 
 Gambetta ; and on a November day in 1868 France 
 heard for the first time the great voice that was to 
 reverberate through politics for fourteen years. 
 French procedure has rarely insisted upon the dis- 
 tinction, so dear to the arid formaHsm of British 
 jurisprudence, between a theatre and a couit of law ; 
 and the dramatic possibilities of a trial were never 
 more generously exploited. There was no defence ; 
 but with a hvely change of scene the defence became 
 the prosecution. The Empire was challenged in its 
 origins, and Maitre Gambetta launched with gusto 
 into a crashing denunciation of the coup d'etat. 
 Relevance and forensic courtesy were swept aside ; 
 he shook his mane ; he roared ; he quoted Sallust. 
 All the wild vigour of his southern verbiage came 
 together in a declamatory tornado of invective ; and 
 
THE EMPEROR 393 
 
 wlien he dropped, rumpled and panting, into his seat, 
 Paris had found a new sensation, and the vague 
 republican murmur of ' En voild assez ! ' which George 
 Sand seemed to catch in the earth and the trees 
 and the sky of 1868 was suddenly articulate. His 
 clients were convicted ; but an advocate's reputa- 
 tion rises superior to such trifles, and one talked 
 as much of M. Gambetta that autumn as one did 
 of Rossini's death and M. Dore's drawing of the 
 dead maestro and a clever young pianist named 
 Saint-Saens. 
 
 The evening of the Empire was unrestful, and 
 Napoleon moved uncertainly through the f aihng light. 
 He was more alone now than in the early days ; the 
 Imperial circle had grown old with him, and so many 
 of his men had died. A new mood of impatience 
 was growing on the pubhc mind ; Lord Lyons had 
 noticed it when he came to Paris, and the Empress 
 was to say bitterly in later years, ' En France, au 
 commencement, on pent tout faire ; au hout d'un 
 certain temps, on ne peut meme plus se moticher.^ The 
 country was a Httle wearied by the apparent oppor- 
 tunism of Imperial policy, in which dexterity seemed 
 to have been substituted for principle ; and the 
 Emperor had nothing new to offer. Early in 1869 
 he alarmed international opinion with an unfortunate 
 transaction in his later manner. A private negotia- 
 tion by a French railway company for running rights 
 over a Belgian system alarmed the Belgians. Lord 
 Clarendon instantly suspected ' a sneaking attempt 
 to incorporate Belgium by means of a railway 
 company and its employes.' There was a flutter at 
 Osborne, where the Queen had always felt a tender- 
 ness for her uncle Leopold and his subjects ; and 
 
394 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Mr. Gladstone stayed his axe at the foot of the Irish 
 upas tree for the composition of emphatic memoranda 
 upon Belgian neutrality. Anxious gentlemen hurried 
 from Brussels to Paris ; and when the Belgian atti- 
 tude seemed to resist the peaceful French penetration, 
 Napoleon and his ministers irritably suspected the 
 hand of Bismarck. M. Rouher stamped out of a 
 room proclaiming ' Tot ou tard, cette guerre est inevi- 
 table ; le 'prince imperial ne regnera pas si Sadowa n'est 
 pas efface ; eh hien ! s'ils la veulent, la guerre, soit ! ' 
 Even the Emperor made inquiries of Marshal Niel 
 about a campaign in Belgium and was answered ' Je 
 suis pret.' Mr. Gladstone was sounded by BernstorfE 
 as to his readiness to take the field with Prussia in the 
 sacred cause of Belgian neutrality, and Lord Claren- 
 don muttered angrily about ' sales tripotages ' and 
 ' all the jobbery and pots de vin that are passing.' 
 But the mood changed in Paris ; peace was main- 
 tained, and Mr. Gladstone went back to the Irish 
 Church Bm. 
 
 The Emperor turned an anxious eye upon France, 
 where an election was bringing all his enemies into 
 line. The new republicans were massed a shade 
 menacingly behind the elder statesmen of the 
 Opposition, and the Ministry of the Interior no 
 longer felt equal to the deliberate manipulation of 
 the electorate which had produced the unanimous 
 majorities of 1857 and 1863. Even his official 
 candidates spoke in the strange new dialect of 
 constitutionalism. Outside Paris the country re- 
 mained loyal to the Empire with Liberal reservations ; 
 but in the capital an impatient surge of advanced 
 opinion swept aside the sedate republicanism of the 
 older type and substituted the wilder gestures of 
 
THE EMPEROR 395 
 
 MM. Gambetta and Rochefort for the more measured 
 utterance of MM. Jules Favre and Garnier-Pages. 
 M. Ollivier was defeated in Paris, and even M. Thiers 
 found difficulty in retaining his seat. The election 
 was followed by a strange week of disorder. Crowds 
 hung about the streets on summer nights ; there was 
 some hooting and the sound of broken glass, and they 
 burnt a cabmen's shelter in Belleville. At the 
 Tuileries there were lights in the great windows, 
 and nervous guests looked out at a sea of surly faces 
 in the Carrousel. There was a ball at the palace 
 that evening ; but the floor was half empty as the 
 band swung to the gentle lilt of Waldteufel's valses, 
 and between the dances one could hear sharp voices 
 shouting orders and the angry surge outside as the 
 poUce charged the crowd. The rioting died down, 
 and when the Emperor drove out with Eugenie in an 
 open carriage, they were tolerably well received. 
 There was a coal strike in the provinces, and a legacy 
 of bitterness was left by an unfortunate collision with 
 the troops at La Ricamarie. The Emperor affected 
 to be satisfied with the results of the election. But 
 the country was uneasy, and Lord Lyons interpreted 
 its temper as weariness ' of the uncertainty and 
 disquiet in which they are kept by the fact that peace 
 and war, and indeed everything, depend upon the 
 inscrutable will of one man whom they do believe 
 capable of giving them surprises, and whom they no 
 longer believe to be infaUible.' The real verdict of 
 the country in 1869 was a condemnation of autocracy 
 and of its most prominent agent, M, Rouher. Even 
 Persigny admitted in public that the generation of 
 the cowp d'etat had played its part; and in his un- 
 hurried fashion, whilst the new Deputies took the 
 
396 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 road for Paris, the Emperor prepared to face the 
 new demand. 
 
 The Chamber met after midsummer, and Napoleon' s 
 incurable taciturnity permitted it to meet in total 
 uncertainty as to his intentions. There was a strange 
 failure on the part of the Emperor to put himself at 
 the head of the Liberal movement which was mani- 
 festly sweeping the country, and the British ambas- 
 sador reported gloomily on his dwindling prestige : 
 
 ' When one looks at the position in which things 
 stood, I will not say before the election, but between the 
 election and the meeting of the Chamber, one is as- 
 tonished at the rapid descent of the personal power and 
 the reputation. Whether concessions will come in time 
 to enable him to stop before he is dragged to the bottom 
 of the hUl, is even beginning to be questioned.' 
 
 The concessions came ; but they had an unfortunate 
 air of following rather than leading the political 
 tendencies of the day. There was a general promise 
 of constitutional reform, and the new era was con- 
 secrated by the sacrifice of M. Rouher. 
 
 The Vice-Empereur had ceased to reign ; but the 
 Emperor had a return of his illness in August, and 
 his resolution was unequal to the shock of a new 
 departiu-e into genuine constitutionahsm. Rouher 
 was out ; but the Liberals were not yet in, and when 
 an obviously transitional ministry was formed, 
 opinion was impressed that finality had not yet been 
 reached. The Constitution was amended by the 
 complete emancipation of the Chamber ; freedom 
 of debate and legislation, questions to ministers, and 
 financial control were restored to the Deputies, and 
 even the Senate caught a breath of the new air. It 
 was a strange celebration of the centenary of 
 
THE EMPEROR 397 
 
 Napoleon i. But the Liberal Empire had not yet 
 enlisted the support of the Liberals, and Lord 
 Clarendon was left with an uneasy ' instinct that they 
 wiU drift into a republic before another year is over.' 
 In the autumn the Empress went off to attend the 
 opening of the Suez Canal, after alarming Lord Lyons 
 with the suggestion of a visit to India. The Empire 
 seemed to be j olting uncomfortably through a period 
 of transition, with strikes in the industrial areas and 
 some incompetent rioting in Paris, when Eugenie 
 confided to her ' bien cher Louis ' her impressions of 
 a journey to Port Said by way of Constantinople. 
 Her spelling was not invariably faultless, but her 
 emotions were always genuine- — in Venice, ' cette 
 ville du silence, ou tout senible glisser,^ at ' Majenta ' 
 where she laid a wreath by torchhght, on board the 
 Aigle with a bora blowing down the Adriatic and 
 all the Turkish guns banging at the Dardanelles. 
 The Sultan was charming, and the Khedive '(Tun 
 galant a te faire dresser les cheveux.' The French 
 yacht steamed through the Canal at the head of the 
 line, and everybody went to see the wonderful new 
 Egyptian opera A'ida, which Ismail had ordered from 
 the maestro Verdi for the occasion. With startling 
 rapidity the electric telegraph brought to theComtesse 
 de Pierref onds (for Eugenie had acquired the supreme 
 royal afiectation of incognito) the news from home, 
 and the Egyptian campaign of the Second Empire 
 was crowned by a bulletin from Compiegne : 
 
 ' Tu as vu les Pyramides et les quarante siecles font 
 contemplee : nous t'embrassons tendrement. 
 
 Napoleon.' 
 
 But poUtics went on in France, whilst the Emperor 
 consoled his solitude by giving small dances at the 
 
398 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Tuileries for some American young ladies. Even 
 Eugenie seemed to advise an honest acceptance of 
 the new Liberalism : 
 
 ' Je pense malgre tout qu'il ne faut pas se decourager et 
 ■marcher dans la voie que tu as inau^uree, la bonne foi dans 
 les concessions donne.es . . . plus il est necessaire de 
 prouverau pays qu'onades idees etnon des expedients. . . . 
 Je n'aime pas les coups, et je suis persvudee qu'on ne fait 
 pas deux fois dans lememeregneun coup d'etat. . . .' 
 
 The autumn deepened in disorder, and Napoleon 
 seemed to drift for support towards the Liberals. 
 M. OUivier was discreetly approached in October and 
 responded in voluminous letters with a quotation 
 from MachiaveUi and an offer of service, ' fret a 
 prendre la responsahilite de la lutte et d prendre la 
 revolution corps a corps comme ministre.^ Judicious 
 intermediaries flitted up and down with messages, 
 and on a November evening he left by the Gare du 
 Nord for Compiegne ; a large muffler and the absence 
 of his spectacles lent him an unusual air of mystery. 
 At the country station a secretary tapped him on the 
 arm ; he was spirited to the Chateau in a closed 
 carriage, and the Emperor was waiting in his study. 
 They talked until midnight, and a night train took 
 M. OUivier back to Paris. Napoleon seemed to 
 hesitate, to shrink from the full logic of a Liberal 
 ministry, and to prefer an innocuous blend of Liberal 
 elements with his present ministers. There was an 
 interval of correspondence in which the Emperor 
 confided to M. OUivier ' la grandeur du role que vous 
 etes appele d jouer ' and M. OUivier imparted to his 
 sovereign his emotion at ' V elevation calme et douce . . . 
 la serenite simple qui respirent dans la lettre de voire 
 Majeste.' But in the intervals between his grace- 
 
THE EMPEROR 399 
 
 ful genuflexions he found time for sound advice. 
 
 ' Appelez d vous lajeunesse. Sire, elle seule peut sauver 
 voire fils, les vieillards egoistes qui vous entourent ne 
 songent qu'd eux. . . .' It was a wise diagnosis of the 
 failing powers of the Empire, of the creeping debihty 
 which nothing but the new Liberahsm could arrest. 
 Names were discussed and ministries were allocated. 
 Before the transaction was complete, the Chamber 
 met, and the Emperor publicly indicated his new 
 programme : ' La France veut la liberie, mais avec 
 Vordre ; Vordre fen reponds. Aidez-moi, Messieurs, 
 a sauver la liberie.^ It was Napoleon's reply to the 
 election of the egregious M. Rochef ort for a division 
 of Paris, and a month later he made his meaning 
 clear by inviting M. OUivier to form a parliamentary 
 ministry. The invitation was accepted ; solemn 
 gentlemen consulted their consciences and took 
 office from the highest motives ; there was a pleasant 
 flutter at the opening of a new year, and only one 
 shadow f eU across the bright hopes of M. OUivier and 
 his friends. It was the year 1870. 
 
400 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XVIII 
 
 The faint dawn of 1870 broke over France with a 
 pale gleam of hope, and the last winter of the Empire 
 had almost an air of spring. New men, new names, 
 new notions seemed to come crowding on the scene, 
 and the stiff outlines of autocracy were melting in 
 the rebirth of the Empire liberal into the simpler, 
 younger form of a modern monarchy. One could 
 see, like shadows on the bhnd of a Hghted room, the 
 Emperor's tired, gracious gesture of surrender and 
 M. OUivier standing erect to take up, in the name of 
 France, the burden of the Empire. And outside, in 
 the sky above them, the dawn of 1870 was breaking. 
 The year opened in the pleasant stir of the new 
 ministry. The decree which appointed it bore date 
 January 2, and for a few months it lived a busy hfe 
 of fresh endeavour. Someone had called it the 
 ministere des honnetes gens ; and the old, faded 
 figures of the Empire seemed to go back into their 
 corners, as the band struck up an air of good intentions 
 and M. OUivier and his colleagues took their blame- 
 less way down the centre of the stage. M. Rouher 
 was a retired grandee in the Senate ; M. Haussmann 
 faded inconspicuously out of pubhc life ; and even 
 M. Thiers seemed satisfied. The Emperor played 
 little games with the monkey which Eugenie had 
 brought from Egypt or sat at Council with his back 
 to the great fire, between M. OUivier and the fierce 
 moustache of General Lebceuf, drawing on his 
 
THE EMPEROR 401 
 
 papers and making tentative suggestions. That 
 winter there were great parties in Paris ; Madame 
 Ollivier wore the little dresses which made them 
 call her Sainte Mousseline at the palace, and among 
 the uniforms one saw queer, half-forgotten figures 
 where M. Guizot came out once more to hear the 
 talk and M. Odilon Barrot abounded with twenty 
 years' accumulation of good advice. There was a 
 strange, refreshing air of new beginnings, and the 
 older men seemed to stand aside to watch the slow 
 dawn of the Empire liberal. But it was the dawn of 
 a day that never came. 
 
 There was a flicker of disorder before the month 
 was out which showed the quality of the new 
 ministers. The Emperor had a faintly raffish cousin 
 named Pierre Bonaparte, who lived in the suburbs 
 after a somewhat violent career in the more congenial 
 air of the Balkans and South America. His private 
 life, in spite of an aptitude for minor poetry, was 
 ' mainly morganatic ; and his energies, which were 
 frequently offered to the Imperial service and in- 
 variably refused, were principally devoted to the 
 more dangerous forms of sport. By an unhappy 
 inspiration he had intervened with some violence in 
 a controversy with two republican newspapers ; and 
 having invited MM. Rochefort and Paschal Grousset 
 to challenge him to fight, he was waiting at home at 
 Auteuil on a January afternoon in 1870 with a bad 
 cold and (by an unfortunate mannerism) a large 
 revolver in his pocket. Two strangers were an- 
 nounced, and a young man named Victor Noir 
 walked in with his friend to convey to the Prince 
 a challenge from M. Grousset. The Prince was surly ; 
 M. Noir was an offensive young man in a new pair of 
 
 20 
 
402 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 gloves ; someone slapped someone's face, and there 
 was a shot. Victor Noir reeled dying into the street, 
 and his friend scrambled behind the chairs and tried 
 to get in a shot at the Prince. The young man in the 
 new gloves died outside, and hj six o'clock nervous 
 policemen were arresting Prince Pierre Bonaparte. 
 This Mexican interlude, if the repubhcans exploited 
 it, might shake the Empire. The grave news met 
 the Emperor at a Paris railway station, and he was 
 helped to his carriage. M. Pochefort devoted the 
 evening to the composition of a staccato invective 
 against the Emperor's family ' oit le meurtre et le 
 guet-apens sont de tradition et d^ usage, ^ and on the 
 next day his paper appeared with deep black borders. 
 The body of Victor Noir would afford an exquisite, 
 an unparalleled excuse for a political funeral, and 
 all Paris was invited to follow the hearse from 
 Neuilly. But M. OUivier and his mild-eyed col- 
 leagues were disinclined to submit to the violence 
 of the streets, and his spectacles had an unusual 
 gleam in the Chamber as he informed the excited 
 Deputies that ' nous sommes la loi ; nous sommes le 
 droit ; nous sommes la moderation ; nous sommes la 
 liberte; si vous nous y contraignez, nous serons la force.'' 
 The Liberal Empire was beginning to have an un- 
 comfortably metaUic ring, and the benevolent legal 
 gentleman who presided over it had a business-like 
 conversation with General Leboeuf, Marshal Can- 
 robert, and Marshal Bazaine as to the best disposition 
 of the troops. In the morning a huge crowd gathered 
 at Neuilly for the funeral ; and whilst eager spec- 
 tators hung in bunches from the trees outside, 
 M. Rochefort argued with his friends in a little room 
 as to whether the great procession should march 
 
THE EMPEROR 403 
 
 heroically across Paris to Pere Lachaise or withdraw 
 for speech-making to the safety of a suburban 
 cemetery. There was a scuffle at the horses' heads ; 
 but the driver of the hearse preferred the more 
 cautious route, and the crowd trailed obediently after 
 him towards Auteuil. M. Rochefort sat on the 
 hearse ; but he fainted before the burial-ground was 
 reached, and the funeral orations were dehvered 
 without his assistance. Late in the afternoon the 
 crowd marched back to Paris by the line of the 
 Champs Elysees, They were singing the Marseillaise, 
 and Rochefort drove with them in a cab. At the 
 Arc de Triomphe they clambered up and shouted 
 ' Vive la Republique / ' but the troops were out in 
 the broad avenue between the trees and the Emperor 
 was waiting in uniform at the Tuileries. The cavalry 
 trotted towards the crowd with drawn swords, and 
 its repubHcan principles evaporated before this dis- 
 turbing spectacle. The road emptied suddenly, and 
 the Liberal Empire had survived its first journee. 
 
 The ministry of good intentions pursued its 
 amiable way through the cold weather of 1870. 
 There was a generous proliferation of committees 
 to inquire into administrative and educational re- 
 form. But national discipline was maintained by 
 the arrest and prosecution of M. Rochefort ; he was 
 dining with Madame George Sand that evening, and 
 the police took him later on the way to a crowded 
 meeting. There was a little shouting in the streets ; 
 the troops were under arms in barracks, and the police 
 had a busy night. Someone made a stupid speech at 
 a dinner, proposing the health of a regicide bullet — 
 'dla petite balle liberatrice,d la petite ballehuTnanitaire, 
 d la petite balle de bon secours que le monde attendait ' — 
 
404 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 and there was some trouble in M. Schneider's works 
 at Le Creusot. But France found it possible to 
 conduct public affairs without the voluble assistance 
 of M. Rochefort, who passed his time in prison ; and 
 the mutter of insurrection died away like a distant 
 storm. 
 
 A mild glow of enlightenment even fell on the dark, 
 twisted mass of Imperial foreign policy. M. Ollivier 
 held conversations, quite in the modern taste, about 
 disarmament ; and Great Britain was invited through 
 Lord Lyons to approach the Prussians. The Liberal 
 ministers in both countries had no enthusiasm for 
 large armaments and high taxation ; Lord Clarendon 
 was full of distaste for ' a state of things that is 
 neither peace nor war, but which is so destructive 
 of confidence that men almost desire war with all its 
 horrors in order to arrive at some certainty of peace, 
 a state of things that withdraws milhons of hands 
 from productive industry and heavily taxes the 
 people for their own injury and renders them dis- 
 contented with their rulers ' ; Mr. Gladstone was 
 impressed that the object of the proposed demarche 
 was ' noble,' and even Queen Victoria was prepared 
 to write to the King of Prussia with her own hand. 
 The subject of disarmament was opened in Berhn. 
 Bismarck was in an idyUic mood. He wrote to 
 correspondents about unclouded skies and universal 
 peace. But when the British ambassador proposed 
 that Prussia should disarm 'pari passu with the 
 French, he seemed disinchned to include Germany 
 in the idyll. Mr. Gladstone in his happy island could 
 afford such dreams ; but for Prussia there was still, 
 there was always the haunting fear of French in- 
 vasion ; and then Napoleon was so incalculable. 
 
THE EMPEROR 405 
 
 The talk trailed on through the winter ; but it got 
 no further than ' a sort of opening as to a conference 
 between Powers as to proportionate reductions and 
 exchange of guarantees.' Bismarck would ' not 
 decline to share in any deliberations,' would ' care- 
 fully sift the question,' might even estimate the value 
 of the profiered guarantees. But when he thought 
 of Prussia's defencelessness in Central Europe, he 
 began to wring his hands ; France had been so 
 restless as recently as 1869 (one remembered the 
 disturbing transaction of the Belgian railways), and 
 though ' the inclinations of a Nation may be essenti- 
 ally peaceful . . . neither the most powerful Monarch, 
 nor the most influential Minister is able to estimate 
 or guarantee the duration of peaceful Inclinations.' 
 It was all infinitely distressing to a peace-loving 
 Chancellor, and in the outcome France was left to 
 show its good faith by a reduction of 10,000 men in 
 the conscription of 1870, which Count von Moltke 
 noted in his papers. But the work of the General 
 Staff went on, and Lord Clarendon's demarche had 
 failed. It was a queer interlude ; and after he had 
 died in the crowded summer weeks of 1870 ' in the 
 very act,' as Lord GranviUe said, ' of trying to arrange 
 a matter necessary to civilisation in Europe,' Bis- 
 marck told his daughter in the British embassy at 
 Berlin that if her father had lived, there would have 
 been no war. It may be doubted. 
 
 The bright prospect of disarmament faded, as the 
 politicians of the Empire settled down to the con- 
 genial task of debating a new Constitution. The 
 form and powers of the Senate were to be modified, 
 and the Constitution of 1870 was submitted to the 
 electorate for the final consecration of a plebiscite. 
 
406 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 There was a vigorous campaign, in which the army 
 was sedulously canvassed by the republicans, and the 
 orators of the Opposition explored the Apocrypha of 
 political invective in search of appropriate descrip- 
 tions of the Empire. But the tyranny which they 
 denounced blandly tolerated their declamations, 
 except when assassination was openly advocated. 
 M. OlUvier abstained from the use of official pressure, 
 and on May 8, 1870, the Liberal Empire was approved 
 by a majority of almost six millions on a poll of nine 
 millions. There was a little uneasiness about the 
 vote of the army ; but the Emperor and Eugenie 
 were well received in the Paris barracks, and the 
 Empire seemed refreshed by its new contact with 
 democracy. M. OUivier was radiant ; M. Gambetta 
 regarded the result as ' un ecrasement ' ; M. Jules 
 Favre advised a young friend to stay at the Bar, 
 because ' il n'y a phis rien a fairs en politique ' ; and 
 even the Comte de Paris (though pretenders are 
 rarely susceptible to changes of opinion) felt that 
 little remained for an Orleans prince beyond a dis- 
 creet withdrawal to America. 
 
 In the world beyond the French frontier the 
 Emperor had resumed his slow manipulation of the 
 aUiance with Austria. The Archduke Albert, who 
 had beaten the ItaHans at Custozza in 1866, came to 
 Paris in March ; the ministers saw little of him, but 
 he talked strategy to Napoleon. Nothing was put 
 on paper ; but the feeling grew that the two Empires 
 would stand together against Prussia, and when a 
 change of Foreign Ministers in May brought M. de 
 Gramont from the embassy at Vienna to the Quai 
 d'Orsay, he came with a simple faith in the-unsigned 
 Austrian alliance which he had pressed on the two 
 
THE EMPEROR 407 
 
 Emperors at Salzburg and discussed so eagerly with 
 Count von Beust. There was a talk in Paris, where 
 four generals sat round a table with the Emperor : 
 within four months all of them heard the thudding 
 German guns in the sunshine outside Metz or in 
 the echoing hollow of Sedan. But in May 1870, they 
 bent over their maps and catalogued the victories of 
 the new triple alliance over Count von Moltke. It 
 was to be a most enjoyable campaign : whilst the 
 Prussians were held in Lorraine, the French would 
 pass the Rhine and grateful South Germans would 
 observe theh meeting with the Austrians in Bavaria, 
 as eager Italians came pouring northwards through 
 the Tyrol and indignant Danes avenged, under the 
 guns of a French fleet, the defeats of 1864. It was a 
 noble plan, which required little for its success beyond 
 an alliance or so and the sympathy of South Germany. 
 There was a faint uneasiness about the opening weeks : 
 it would be awkward if the Prussians moved before 
 the Austrians were ready to strike at them from the 
 south. But the Archduke was so obliging, and in 
 June General Lebrun went off to Austria to seal the 
 bargain. He found the Archduke, in the less heady 
 air of his own country, a shade inclined to withdraw 
 from exciting realities into the shadowy sphere of 
 military theory ; and they discussed academic cam- 
 paigns according to the best principles of the art of 
 war. He saw the Austrian Emperor privately under 
 some trees in a great park. Franz- Joseph was full of 
 friendliness and highly confidential ; but there was 
 a disquieting tendency to postpone the Austrian 
 move until after the first French victory. Lebrun 
 came back to Paris in the hot June days. The world 
 seemed very still ; Mr. Hammond noticed the lull in 
 
408 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 foreign affairs, and M. Ollivier informed his colleagues 
 in the Chamber that at no time had European peace 
 seemed more assured. Three days later (it was a 
 Sunday, and M, Ollivier had gone to the country for 
 the day) a telegram from Madrid informed M. de 
 Gramont that Marshal Prim proposed to make Prince 
 Leopold of HohenzoUern-Sigmaringen King of Spain. 
 The news was unexpected, and on the Sunday 
 Gramont drove out to St. Cloud to see the Emperor. 
 But the idea was not an entire novelty at the Quai 
 d'Orsay. The Spanish throne had been in the 
 market for almost two years ; judicious king-makers 
 in Madrid ignored their own pretenders and thumbed 
 the Almanack de Gotha ; there were always Coburgs 
 to be had, and Austria would never miss an Arch- 
 duke ; the waiting list was fuU of Bourbons ; a taste 
 for novelty suggested an Italian prince, or one might 
 even ask Queen Victoria to spare a son — the Duke 
 of Edinburgh, who played the viohn so charmingly. 
 The notion of a Hohenzollern seemed to come from 
 the Prussian papers. The Cathohc branch was 
 obviously ehgible ; one son had aheady been placed 
 in Roumania ; and after a Prussian agent had 
 appeared in Madrid to appease his passionate interest 
 in the battle-fields of the Peninsular War, the name 
 of Prince Leopold was launched with touching spon- 
 taneity by a Spanish Deputy. The proposal had 
 alarmed Paris in 1869, and the acute M. Benedetti 
 was directed to make a complamt in Berlin. But 
 Count Bismarck had been blandly reassuring, and 
 the distmrbing notion of a Prussian colonel on the 
 throne of Spain seemed to fade away. The family 
 was mildly disappointed : it was never easy to pro- 
 vide for younger sons ; Charles seemed quite happy 
 
THE EMPEROR 409 
 
 as a sort of king at Bucharest, and a young man with 
 a fair moustache and a taste for adventure might do 
 far worse than go to Madrid. Napoleon had sup- 
 ported the Roumanian appointment ; he was always 
 kind (was he not urging Charles to marry in Germany 
 — ' les princesses allemandes sont si Men elevees ' ?) — 
 and perhaps he would put up with a younger brother 
 at Madrid. Bismarck knew better : Napoleon would 
 not, could not tolerate a second Prussia beyond the 
 Pyrenees, and the project meant war with France. 
 Since German unity required a German war, it was 
 not unwelcome. Moltke was ready, and one had 
 better fight the French before they found their allies ; 
 Beust's drift towards France looked dangerous, one 
 could never trust the Itahans, and Fleury, the new 
 French ambassador at St. Petersburg, was driving 
 about in the Czar's sleigh. It was a good moment, 
 and early in 1870 there was a solemn committee of 
 the Hohenzollern at Berlin. The Catholic branch 
 was informed that it was a national duty to accept 
 the Spanish crown ; they seemed to comply, and if 
 Leopold would not go to Madrid, an enterprising 
 father was prepared to send Fritz. Spanish gentle- 
 men began to appear in Germany, and Prussian 
 agents flitted about Spain. Prince Leopold con- 
 quered his doubts in June, and Prim was informed 
 that Bismarck had found a king for him. There 
 was a pleasant lull in Europe. The Emperor, who 
 was ill again, was resting at St. Cloud, and the King 
 of Prussia was at Ems to take the waters. The 
 statesmen were on holiday ; Count Bismarck was at 
 Varzin, M. Benedetti was on leave, and even the 
 indomitable Prim was in the hills behind Toledo. 
 But the news got out : the French ambassador at 
 
410 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Madrid asked questions ; and when his report 
 reached Paris on a quiet Sunday in July, the stage 
 was set hurriedly for the first act of a tragedy. 
 
 The French case was obvious, and it was promptly 
 stated in the language of diplomacy at Berlin and 
 Madrid and repeated in the fuller tones of journalism 
 by the whole French press. On the Tuesday the 
 Emperor asked Baron Rothschild to telegraph to his 
 London house for pressure to be put on Mr. Gladstone 
 to secure the withdrawal of Prince Leopold. Some- 
 one gave notice of a question in the Chamber, and on 
 a Wednesday morning the Council met at St. Cloud. 
 Leboeuf, who had succeeded Niel at the Ministry of 
 War, was asked whether he could face the prospect of 
 hostilities, and assented ; there was a vague talk 
 about alliances, and the Emperor took two letters 
 from a drawer and read them to his ministers. 
 The letters were from Franz-Joseph and Victor 
 Emmanuel ; they were a year old and expressed a 
 polite predilection for the French alliance. Gramont's 
 draft of his reply for the Chamber was revised in 
 Council, and before two o'clock the ministers drove 
 back to Paris. The question was answered by the 
 Foreign Minister in a firm statement : 
 
 ' Nous ne croyons pas que le respect des droits d'un 
 peuple voisin nous oblige a souffrir qu'une puissance 
 etrangere, en plagant un de ses princes sur le trone de 
 Charles-Quint, puisse deranger a notre detriment Vequilihre 
 actual des forces en Europe, et mettre en peril les interets 
 et I'honneur de la France.' 
 
 There was a roar in the Chamber, and M. OUivier 
 explained his colleague's pohcy to the excited 
 Deputies : ' Le Gouvernement desire la faix ! II la 
 
THE EMPEROR 411 
 
 desire avec passion, mais avec Vhonneur.' There was 
 a sudden jiutter in Europe. It was only the day 
 before that the permanent under- secretary had been 
 telling Lord Granville of the lull in foreign affairs, 
 and the new Foreign Secretary confessed a little 
 helplessly to Lord Lyons that the news, which 
 arrived whilst they were debating the Irish Land Bill, 
 ' took Mr. Gladstone and me hj surprise.' But the 
 expedients of British policy were unheroic : the 
 prescient Hammond drafted despatches for Lord 
 Granville, and the Queen might write a letter. 
 Russia was apathetic ; and Beust f eU back on good 
 advice proposing, with a rare instinct for comic 
 opera, that a French cruiser should intercept Prince 
 Leopold on his way to Spain. Whilst the streets of 
 Paris began to stir and mutter and excited men 
 opened their newspapers in the sudden enjoyment 
 of a bold foreign policy, the French sent messengers 
 in all directions. Someone might see Marshal 
 Serrano in Madrid and persuade him to withdraw 
 Prim's candidate for the throne ; a Roumanian came 
 to St. Cloud before dawn on a summer morning and 
 left the Emperor with a mission to Sigmaringen. 
 And Benedetti (his moment had arrived) went to 
 Ems. 
 
 Prussia had been elaborately unapproachable since 
 the crisis opened, Bismarck had gone to ground at 
 Varzin ; his subordinates in Berlin were studiously 
 obtuse ; and their innocuous sovereign was sipping 
 his water in the Kurhaus at Ems, French policy 
 appealed to the valetudinarian Caesar, and M, Bene- 
 detti unpacked his luggage at the Hotel de Bruxelles. 
 He saw the King of Prussia twice ; William declined 
 to put pressure on Prince Leopold. But suddenly 
 
412 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 relief came from an unexpected quarter : the Prince 
 and his father succumbed to the increasing volume 
 of grave advice, and after nine days of crisis the 
 Hohenzollern candidature was withdrawn. It was 
 a triumph for France ; Bismarck had come to town 
 to start his war, but he sat staring at the news in 
 Berlin, whUst M. OUivier, who had been handed a 
 telegram in the Tuileries Gardens and ran home to 
 tell his wife, was spreading the good news in the 
 Chamber. There was to be no war ; troop-move- 
 ments in Algeria stopped, and the King of Italy went 
 oS to shoot. That afternoon (it was Tuesday, July 
 12) the Emperor drove back from the Tuileries to 
 St. Cloud ; he was cheered on the road, but he found 
 the Court a shade sceptical of the latest triumph of 
 French poHcy. The Prussian government was not 
 a party to the renunciation, and Sadowa was still 
 unavenged. The Empress seemed gravely dis- 
 satisfied, and General Bourbaki of the Guard threw 
 down his sword and struck an angry attitude. 
 Gramont was there, and in the late afternoon a hasty 
 talk produced a fresh policy. The King of Prussia 
 was to be asked to join in the renunciation and to 
 guarantee that the Hohenzollern candidature would 
 never be resumed : then the angry ladies and 
 gentlemen at St. Cloud would be satisfied^ and the 
 Empire might claim a victory over the parvenu power 
 of Prussia. M. OUivier had said to M. Thiers at the 
 Chamber : ' Nous tenons la paix, nous ne la laisserons 
 pas echapper.^ He was wrong. 
 
 The new instructions were telegraphed to Ems 
 through the darkness of the summer night, while 
 M. OUivier tried to get some sleep and plaj^ed with 
 the notion of resignation ; and in the morning sun- 
 
THE EMPEROR 413 
 
 shine M. Benedetti was waiting under the trees at 
 Ems to see the King of Prussia. The old gentleman 
 had drunk his water and was strolling benevolently 
 along the Kurgarten on that Wednesday morning. 
 But Benedetti seemed to reopen the whole afEair 
 with his fresh demand for guarantees. The King 
 refused a little shortly, and they parted near the 
 bandstand. He asked three times to see the King 
 again ; but polite gentlemen came to the Hotel de 
 BruxeUes and informed the ambassador that the case 
 did not require . . . that no useful purpose . . . that 
 Majesty had nothing to add. That morning there 
 was a wrangle at St. Cloud over the French mobilisa- 
 tion ; M. OUivier insisted on delay, and the Empress 
 was rude to him at lunch. That evening Bismarck 
 dined in Berhn with von Moltke and von Roon. 
 Their casus belli had faded, and the three men sat 
 gloomily round the table. But a telegram came in 
 from Ems with the story of King WiUiam's morning. 
 The Chancellor altered it for publication, and in the 
 new version the King's attitude was represented as 
 a final dismissal of the French ambassador. Dinner 
 was resumed in a more convivial mood ; the frigid 
 Moltke became almost uproarious, and von Roon 
 vociferated his renewed faith in an old German God. 
 That night the news was known in Berlin, and a 
 great crowd was roaring ' Nach Paris ! ' outside the 
 Schloss. A belHcose Deputy was dining at St. Cloud, 
 and the Emperor was still fumbling with French 
 poHcy. 
 
 The news reached Paris on the next morning (it 
 was Thursday, July 14), and all that summer after- 
 noon the ministers sat in Council with the Emperor 
 at the Tuileries. About four o'clock they decided 
 
414 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 to call out the reserves, and Leboeuf went off to the 
 Ministry of War to give his orders. There was a 
 nervous silence at the Council ; one minister 
 muttered to Napoleon that a defeat would bring a 
 revolution, and someone with a last gleam of hope 
 proposed a Congress. The Emperor welcomed the 
 familiar expedient, and his eyes filled with tears. 
 M. OUivier drafted something eloquent for the 
 Chamber ; but it was too late to make a statement 
 that evening, and the Council adjourned. When it 
 met again after dinner at St. Cloud, there was a 
 change of tone ; Bismarck had sent the news from 
 Ems to every capital in Europe, and the French 
 ministers could not face their country with a com- 
 promise. They talked until nearly midnight, and 
 drove back to Paris under the summer stars. The 
 streets were full of men shouting ' a Berlin ! ' and 
 at the Opera, by special leave, for the first time in 
 eighteen years someone was singing the Marseillaise. 
 On the Friday morning the Council met early at 
 St. Cloud. Gramont read over the draft of a state- 
 ment for the Chamber, and the Emperor clapped his 
 hands. Leboeuf said that the army was ready and 
 that the chances in a war with Prussia would never 
 be better. Benedetti was waiting at the Quai d' Orsay, 
 a little mystified by the significance which the world 
 seemed to attach to his adventure with the King at 
 Ems ; and M. OUivier went down to the Chamber. 
 He made his statement in the proud tone of a minister 
 announcing war, and he was followed by M. Thiers. 
 By a singular irony this indomitable critic of Imperial 
 policy, who had reproached Napoleon since 1866 with 
 the rise and the menace of Prussia, became suddenly 
 reasonable. He was heard with impatience by an 
 
THE EMPEROE 415 
 
 excited House, and M. OUivier returned to the 
 tribune to make his meaning clear. He re-stated 
 the insulting publication of the report from Ems, and 
 having argued the soundness of his cause, he made 
 a sudden gesture : 
 
 ' Oui, de ce jour commence 'pour les ministres mes col- 
 legues et pour moi, une grande reponsabilite. Nous 
 Vacceptons, le cceur leger ! ' 
 
 The phrase rang later with a tragic ineptitude, and 
 the speaker passed forty years more of a long life 
 in arguing it away. But the Chamber was cheering 
 on that July afternoon in 1870. The debate trailed 
 on, and the House went into committee to hear the 
 ministers in camera. Leboeuf praised the Chassepot 
 and the mitrailleuses ; Gramont, when someone asked 
 about alliances, looked mysterious and mentioned 
 the Austrian ambassador and the Italian minister. 
 The day was almost over. In London a red box was 
 passed along the Treasury Bench to Mr. Gladstone, 
 and he said in such a strange tone, ' War declared 
 against Prussia.' There was an evening session of 
 the Chamber which voted credits and called up the 
 Garde mobile, whilst M. Rouher was felicitating his 
 sovereign at St. Cloud and the Emperor was walking 
 slowly round among his Senators and saying, ' Ce sera 
 long et difficile, ilfaudra un violent effort.^ They were 
 cheering in the streets of Berlin ; and whilst Paris 
 roared ' d Berlin ! ' in the failing light. Nana was 
 dying in her room on the boulevard, and in a garden 
 at Blackheath Mx. Morley was telHng the news to 
 Mr. John Stuart Mill. The war had come. 
 
416 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XIX 
 
 The sky was dull over Paris when the Emperor left 
 St. Cloud. There was a hint of thunder in the air, 
 and a few early leaves had fallen. He had a word 
 with his ministers about an offer of mediation from 
 the Pope and went gravely round the salon with a 
 cigar in his fingers to say good-bye. Then he took up 
 his Mpi and walked for the last time out of a French 
 palace. The carriages were waiting, and he stared 
 in front of him as they drove down to the little station 
 in the park. At the train he took Eugenie in his 
 arms : they never met again in France. The Prince 
 Imperial was with them, and in the silence she drew 
 the sign of the cross on the boy's forehead in the 
 Spanish fashion. As the train moved, she called out 
 ' Louis, fais bien ton devoir ! ' and the Emperor waved 
 his hand from the great window of his saloon. Hats 
 came ofi on the platform, and there was a faint cheer 
 of ' Vive VEmpereur / ' from the Httle crowd. The 
 Empress drove back in an open carriage with her face 
 hidden. The train clanked over a level crossing, and 
 some people cheered. That night the Emperor was 
 at Metz. 
 
 The French armies were strung out awkwardly 
 along the line of the frontier ; and there was an uneasy 
 pause before the great advance began, which was to 
 swing Mac-Mahon across the E/hine and stretch a 
 hand to Austria over the neutral kingdoms of South 
 Germany. A fleet was fitting out at Cherbourg for 
 
THE EMPEROR 417 
 
 the Baltic, and Trochu was to command an army 
 which would land under its guns, force Diippel, and 
 raise Hanover against the Prussians. But French 
 diplomacy was still piping to the Danes, and they 
 would not dance ; Italy and Austria had developed 
 a belated passion for peace ; and the South Germans, 
 who had been imperfectly rehearsed for their parts 
 in the Emperor's plan, were mobilising under von 
 Moltke's orders. Even the neutrals became faintly 
 hostile when Bismarck startled Mr. Gladstone's sus- 
 ceptibilities (and set him asking Mr. Card well ques- 
 tions about ' the means of sending 20,000 men to 
 Antwerp ') by pubhshing Benedetti's draft treaty of 
 1866 for the annexation of Belgium to France ; and 
 there was a sudden, tragic echo when the French 
 minister at Washington gave way in the great heat 
 and shot himself. The Cent-gardes were clattering 
 through the streets of Metz on a summer evening, as 
 the Emperor drove from the station ; and there was 
 a pleasing discussion among the foreign diplomats 
 in Paris as to whether, in view of the early prospect 
 of French victories, they should illuminate the 
 embassies. But on the frontier Lebceuf was tele- 
 graphing for ammunition, and Frossard was inquiring 
 a little helplessly for a few maps of France in place of 
 the copious issues of German sheets which he found 
 ' inutiles pour le moment ' ; recruits were trailing 
 about France in search of their units ; a brigadier 
 arrived in BeKort and failed to find his command ; 
 and Metz was calling hungrily for a million rations. 
 There was a hasty conference when the Emperor 
 arrived, and on the next day he was inspecting troops 
 at St. Avoid. Bazaine and Frossard met him, and 
 there was a casual talk about a raid on Saarbriick. 
 
 2d 
 
418 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The town had no importance ; but it was on Prussian 
 territory, and an advance into Germany would look 
 well in the French papers. Napoleon had written 
 home rather dispiritedly to the Empress ; he was 
 driving miserably round the cantonments outside 
 Metz, and in a letter to M. OUivier he made a dismal 
 confession : ' Nous avons tout interet a trainer la guerre 
 en- longuetir, puisquHl nous est impossible de la terminer 
 par ce qu'on appelle un coup de foudreJ' But after an 
 army corps, with bands playing the Marseillaise, had 
 driven in a screen of Prussian infantry and shelled the 
 railway-station at Saarbriick on August 2, his mer- 
 curial Parisians were invited to rejoice over the first 
 French victory, and a courtly communique informed 
 the nation that the Prince Imperial had received his 
 ' baptism of fixe.' The boy found it rather enjoy- 
 able ; he was allowed to keep a shot that fell near 
 them, and as they waited on the hillside under fire, 
 it almost seemed as though the four-leaved clover 
 which Eugenie had sent from St. Cloud had brought 
 them luck. But his father suffered cruelly on horse- 
 back ; he had been in pain all the morning and kept 
 his horse at a walk. The firing died away about one 
 o'clock, and the Emperor stumbled heavily to the 
 ground muttering to Lebrun, ' Je souffre horriblement 
 . . . je prefere marcher un peu ; cela me soulage.^ It 
 was a queer, pitiable ending to the long tale of 
 Bonapartes in the field which had begun with a 
 gaunt young general in the sunshine at Montenotte. 
 The sick Emperor fumbled with his armies round 
 Metz, and slowly in the first weeks of August von 
 Moltke's troop-trains began to pour his men along 
 the French frontier. Douay was caught at Wissem- 
 bourg; and on August 6, whilst Frossard was 
 
THE EMPEROR 419 
 
 driven in on the French masses in front of Metz, 
 Mac-Mahon eighty miles to the south-east was fight- 
 ing for Alsace among the trees at Worth. His field 
 guns were outranged, but the Zouaves went stumbling 
 forward through the hedges with the bayonet ; fresh 
 German troops came up to the sound of the guns ; 
 and as the Crown Prince sat watching on his horse 
 across the valley, the French were checked, were 
 held, were forced back up the slope. There was a 
 sudden drumming of hoofs, a gleam of tall steel 
 helmets, a flutter of waving horsehair as the Cui- 
 rassiers crashed into a charge and plunged forward 
 through the sunshine to be shot to pieces in a village 
 street. Somewhere to the left the Turcos were 
 yelling and lunging with bayonets among the trees ; 
 and as the sun dropped behind the blue line of the 
 Vosges, the French went trailing westwards in retreat. 
 When the news came to Metz, there was an evening 
 of dull confusion. The Emperor sat staring in the 
 Prefecture, and angry soldiers argued round him. In 
 Paris, where the Empress was turning over the pages 
 of her Bible in search of lucky passages, false news of 
 a victory had sent a great crowd surging into the 
 Place de la Concorde ; two figures stood above the 
 sea of faces and sang the Marseillaise from an open 
 carriage, and M. OUivier made a speech from a 
 balcony. But the news faded : and as the telegrams 
 came in from Metz, a sullen crowd began to trail 
 about the streets. It was a warm evening, and they 
 were shouting in time : 
 
 ' OUivier ! 
 OUivier I 
 Des nouveUes ! 
 Des nouvelles ! ' 
 
420 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Scared ministers were staring at a telegram with the 
 news of two defeats, and at St. Cloud a pale, hand- 
 some woman was fighting down her tears and saying, 
 ' La dynastie est perdue, il ne faut plus songer qu'd 
 la France.'' Someone broke down, and she turned 
 sharply on her : ' Ne ni'attendrissez pas, fai besoin de 
 tout mon courage.'' In the dark hours of the summer 
 night she drove into Paris for the last time, and a 
 Council met among the sheeted furniture at the 
 Tuileries. General Trochu was there, and he became 
 voluble about his colleagues' errors. He was still 
 speaking when the Council adjourned, and someone 
 stayed behind to listen to him. They had decided 
 to caU the Chamber, and in the dawn M. Olhvier 
 walked home through the silent streets. 
 
 That day (it was a Sunday) the Emperor drove by 
 the first light to his train at Metz. He was to join 
 the army at St. Avoid for a general advance ; but 
 at the station they gave him a telegram, and his 
 doubts returned. He showed it to Leboeuf and 
 drove back to the Prefecture. All that day they were 
 full of plans and good advice. Someone was bold 
 enough to urge that the Emperor should leave the 
 army and go back to Paris. A tactful general 
 referred to 1812, but the Emperor sat quietly on a 
 sofa and took the Prince Imperial on his knee. He 
 asked his heir : ' Je veux que tu sois juge de la 
 question.'' The boy was excited, and he rephed : 
 ' Cest impossible, rentrer avant de nous etre battus, ce 
 serait un deshonneur.^ The point of honour seemed 
 a trifle childish ; but French opinion would be 
 childish also, and it had been plainly stated by a 
 child. 
 
 For four days more, whilst Eugenie took chloral in 
 
THE EMPEROR 421 
 
 an empty palace and Paris stared at the news of 
 Worth, he fumbled with his armies. Metz seemed 
 full of plans and each one had its turn. Sometimes 
 they were to stand and give battle in Lorraine ; some- 
 times they were to fall back on Chalons and cover 
 Paris in the great plain of Champagne. The weary 
 columns tramped up and down in the driving rain 
 (the season had broken), and the armies of the 
 Empire wheeled interminably with the shifting 
 strategy of their master. One day a thin old man 
 came to headquarters and gave, with a queer flavour 
 of old repubhcan debates, the name of Changarnier ; 
 they found him a uniform, and he peered about to see 
 men whom he had known in Africa. But the 
 Emperor still trailed his doubts about the Prefecture ; 
 and when M. Ollivier begged Eugenie to bring him 
 back to Paris, she turned angrily : ' Avant une 
 victoire, c'est impossible ! . . . c'est le deshonneur ! ' 
 They pressed her to recall the Prince Imperial. She 
 said that he knew how to ride, and then, in a sudden 
 flare, ' II pent se faire tuer ! Oh I laissez-le sefaire 
 tuer ! ' 
 
 The Chamber met and helped, as is the way of 
 Chambers, to win the war by making a crisis. The 
 Empress had struggled helplessly with her ministers ; 
 but she found an excited crowd of Deputies to rid 
 her of them. The streets were full of angry men, 
 when M. Ollivier spoke for the last time in the 
 Chamber and then resigned : the hunt for scapegoats 
 had begun. His place was taken by an elderly 
 cavalry officer named Cousin-Montauban, whom the 
 campaign of China in 1860 had decorated with the 
 fantastic title of PaUkao ; and the last ministry of 
 the Empire (it was formed on August 10 and lasted 
 
422 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 for twenty-four days) was the familiar war-time 
 masquerade of reaction in the bright clothes of 
 patriotism. Paris was pleasantly excited by the 
 cheers in the Chamber and the shouts in the street. 
 But at Metz the days passed slowly. The Prussians 
 were feehng their way into France and Uhlans were 
 beginning to trot into startled villages, as the sick 
 man at the Prefecture fingered the cards uncertainly. 
 In the first movement the Emperor of the French 
 had commanded his armies, as he did in the days 
 when Berthier wrote out the orders and Murat rode 
 jingling with the cavalry. But Leboeuf had failed 
 him ; angry telegrams were pouring in from Paris ; 
 and Bazaine was given the command. The tired 
 battahons turned once more to fall back from Metz 
 on Verdun. There was a brisk rear-guard action 
 beyond the river, as the Emperor's escort clattered 
 through the empty Sunday streets and he drove out 
 of Metz saluting with a tired hand. That night he 
 lay at Longeville ; from his house they could see the 
 smoke drifting over Borny, and he was in bed when 
 Bazaine rode up to report. The Emperor was almost 
 cheerful — ' vous venez de rompre le charme ' — and he 
 was waiting, still waiting for an answer from Franz- 
 Joseph : one must be careful of the army and take 
 no risks which might discourage dubious allies. 
 Mac-Mahon had lost an army in Alsace ; but 
 there was still Bazaine and the Army of (how 
 far away it seemed) the Rhine. One must faU 
 back into France and then begin again — tout peut 
 se retablir. 
 
 Napoleon had been eighteen days at Metz, and on 
 the next morning (with the ghastly ineptitude of 
 anniversaries it was the fete of the Empire) he rode 
 
THE EMPEROR 423 
 
 slowly up the hill to Gravelotte. There was a village 
 on the bare ridge, and he rested at a little inn. All 
 day the troops went marching by ; there was silence 
 in the ranks, but sometimes they stared sullenly at 
 the Emperor's carriages by the roadside. Late in 
 the afternoon Bazaine rode up ; the burly man had 
 brought some flowers for his sovereign. That night, 
 as they slept in little houses at Gravelotte, the 
 Germans circled slowly round Metz to the south ; and 
 in the early light the Emperor took the road again 
 in an open carriage. Bazaine saluted, as Napoleon 
 said, ' Je vous confie la derniere armee de la France ; 
 songez au Prince imperial ' ; and when the artillery 
 drivers touched their team, the carriage went down 
 the long white road. A Une of vans went slowly 
 with it ; the servants wore the Emperor's livery of 
 green and gold, and one could see the chefs in their 
 white coats on top of a hearsry fourgon. The Lancers 
 of the Guard and some Dragoons rode with them. 
 But on the road he changed his escort. The heavy 
 cavalry seemed too slow. The Emperor (he was 
 wrapped in a long cloak and looking ill) said some- 
 thing faintly to a general, and he clattered out of 
 Conflans with the Chasseurs d'Afrique. They took 
 the road for Verdun, and behind them a plodding 
 company of infantry could hear the guns of Rezon- 
 ville. Scared faces watched the Emperor go by, and 
 they stopped at a little town to telegraph to Paris. 
 Napoleon's message was vague; but the Prince 
 Imperial confided to Eugenie his delighted experi- 
 ences of war : 
 
 ' Ma chere Maman, — Je vais ires bien, ainsi que papa ; 
 tout va de mieux en mieux. . . .' 
 
424 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 The dismal drive went on, back down the white 
 roads into France. At one o'clock they were at 
 Verdun. The streets were silent, and they waited 
 whilst a train was made up. Some third-class 
 carriages were coupled to an engine ; a few carriage- 
 cushions were laid on the wooden seat, and the 
 Emperor left for Chalons. Somewhere behind them, 
 on the slope of Mars-la-Tour, the long cavalry 
 trumpets were sounding the charge and mounted 
 men in red and blue and white went crashing forward 
 over the hills. The green trees of the Argonne shd 
 past the window, and at a little station in Cham- 
 pagne General Trochu came to the door. He had 
 travelled from Paris to take command of an army 
 corps, and the dazed man with the great moustache 
 asked him twice, a httle stupidly, for news of the 
 Eang of Prussia. It was evening when they reached 
 the camp of Chalons, and the Emperor drove to his 
 quarters in a cart. 
 
 For four days they waited at Chalons. The trains 
 came steaming in from the east with Mac-Mahon's 
 broken regiments from Worth, and disorderly young 
 mobiles from Paris bawled insults at Napoleon. On 
 the first morning, whilst Bazaine was falling back on 
 Gravelotte, there was a hasty talk in the Emperor's 
 room at Chalons. When they told him that his 
 place was either on the frontier or in Paris, he 
 replied : ' C'est vrai, fai Vair d'avoir abdique.^ 
 Someone pressed him to send Trochu back to the 
 capital as Governor, to follow him, and concentrate 
 the troops round Paris. He agreed, and Trochu 
 drove to the station ; he found the line blocked near 
 Epernay with trains full of material for the siege of 
 Mainz. But Napoleon was no longer master of his 
 
THE EMPEROR 425 
 
 movements ; the government was in Paris, and the 
 new plan was equally distasteful to the Empress and 
 M. de Palikao. The return of the Emperor seemed 
 a fatal admission of defeat ; the retreat of the army- 
 would isolate Bazaine. She made a scene with 
 Trochu and sent indignant telegrams to Chalons. 
 There was a desperate insistence that Mac-Mahon 
 should advance on Metz and, above all, that the 
 Emperor should keep away from Paris. But von 
 Moltke was tracing his circle round Bazaine ; the 
 French were locked in Metz by the long day's fighting 
 at Gravelotte on August 18, when Canrobert stood 
 in St. Privat and the Prussian Guard came storming 
 up the bare slopes which look down towards France ; 
 and when Mac-Mahon made a move from Chalons 
 three days later, the game was lost. He marched 
 on Reims, and the Emperor trailed after him. That 
 night M. Rouher came to headquarters to urge the 
 army forward towards Metz. The Marshal refused ; 
 but when a message came through from Bazaine that 
 he was breaking out of Metz to the north by way of 
 Montmedy, they marched uncertainly towards him, 
 and the fourgons of the Emperor rumbled in the 
 dust of the army. For eight days more, whilst 
 Mac-Mahon felt blindly for Bazaine, the Emperor 
 dragged after him into the north-east. The Prince 
 was sent away ; but the Cent-gardes still clattered 
 into villages with gleaming helmets, and scared 
 countrymen were half afraid to call out ' Vive 
 VEmpereur ! ' as a carriage went by with a dull-eyed, 
 weary man : his ragged hair was long and almost 
 white. They made little meals for him, but he would 
 not eat ; and at night someone outside his door 
 heard him crying out in pain. Once he mounted a 
 
426 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 horse to watch the fighting by the Meuse at Beau- 
 mont, He telegraphed the news to the Empress and 
 went to his quarters. But that night at dinner they 
 ordered him to take a train to the north ; the army 
 was falling back along the river, and he trailed 
 patiently after it. About eleven o'clock the train 
 stopped at a dark station. The platform was 
 almost empty as the Emperor got down, and he 
 walked out into the silent streets of a little town. 
 It was called Sedan. 
 
 On the next morning (it was the last day of 
 AugjList, and his faithful Parisians were hunting 
 Prussian spies) he stood on a tower and watched 
 the Germans shelling the last train which got through 
 the slow converging movement of von Moltke's 
 columns. The last army of the Empire was trapped 
 between the Germans and the Belgian frontier ; and 
 when a general said something about his safety, the 
 tired Emperor was almost curt : ' Je suis decide a ne 
 pas separer mon sort de celui de Varmee.' There was 
 a dark night ; and as the sun came up on September 1, 
 1870, the guns were thudding in the river mist at 
 Bazeilles. A captain clattered up to the Sous-pre- 
 fecture after dawn with word that the Marshal was 
 wounded. There were tears in Napoleon's eyes as 
 he took the news. But he rode out with his staff ; 
 his great moustache was waxed again, and he had 
 put colour on his white face. On the road he passed 
 Mac-Mahon, and for four hours he sat his horse under 
 the German gun-fire. All that morning he strayed 
 along the French line on horseback ; twice he dis- 
 mounted in pain; and once, as he sat behind a 
 battery in action, the men turned to cheer him. Near 
 Givonne he sent his staff to cover and waited for 
 
THE EMPEROR 427 
 
 death in the open. Yet it never came. One of his 
 men was killed and three were wounded. But the 
 painted Emperor galloped across the heights amongst 
 the falHng men, as his last army reeled into its last 
 defeat. Before noon he was back in the town, and 
 German shells were dropping in the streets. There 
 was no pause in the thunder of the guns, and M. de 
 GaUiffet took the Chasseurs d'Afrique in a last wild 
 charge at Floing. The little town was quivering 
 with the gun-fire ; there was a crash of falling roofs, 
 and the pale flames were licking broken houses in the 
 sunshine. They were urging him to break out of 
 Sedan in a mad sortie. But the Emperor took his 
 last decision. Someone was sent to the Citadel to 
 hoist a white flag. Still the guns went on, and the 
 tortured man turned helplessly to his officers : he 
 would see the King of Prussia, but firing must cease 
 — ' II faut absolument que le feu cesse . . . Ilfautfaire 
 cesser lefeu, ilfautfaire cesser lefeu. II n^y a que trop 
 de sang verse.' But shells were still bursting in Sedan 
 and angry soldiers on the hills outside drove at the 
 Germans in the last rush. Two Prussian officers 
 came through the fines and summoned the fortress 
 to surrender. The Emperor had his chance and 
 sent, in that fine writing of his, a letter to the King : 
 
 ' Monsieur monfrere, — N'ayant pu mourir a la tete de 
 mes troupes, il ne me reste plus qu'd remettre mon ipee 
 entre les mains de Voire Majeste. 
 
 ' Je suis de Voire Majeste le bon Frere, 
 
 Napoleon.' 
 
 A French general (the name, with a flavour of 
 old victories, was Reille) rode out to La Marfee with 
 the letter, and the firing died away round Sedan. 
 
428 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 There was a night of conferences ; the French 
 commander saw von Moltke by lampHght in a little 
 room, and Bismarck talked of peace with an in- 
 demnity and the surrender of Alsace-Lorraine. The 
 day came slowly, and at six in the morning of 
 September 2 the Emperor drove over the bridge and 
 out of Sedan in a pair-horse carriage. Some Zouaves 
 were lounging at the gate, and for the last time he 
 heard them call ' Vive fEmpereur / ' But down the 
 road some soldiers threatened him, as he drove 
 through the early mist between the trees to Donchery. 
 Bismarck rode up in uniform, and Napoleon took off 
 his kepi. The tall man did the same, and the 
 Emperor's tired eyes seemed to follow the movement 
 of his cap. As they came to a big revolver in his belt, 
 the sick man changed colour. There was a little talk 
 between the two men in a cottage by the road. 
 Something was said about terms ; and as they sat on 
 a bench outside, the Emperor struggled against the 
 surrender of his army. But Bismarck rode off, and 
 the carriage went down the road to a Httle house with 
 feudal spires and a conservatory. It was called the 
 Chateau de Bellevue ; and the Emperor went in. 
 They made him take some wine and a piece of bread ; 
 and he was reading Montaigne when the King of 
 Prussia came. The taU old man dismounted, and 
 the Emperor stood on the steps with a white face ; 
 his cheeks were wet with tears. There was a murmur 
 of courtesy as they went in together. That day he 
 wrote to Eugenie in his agony : 
 
 ' Ma chere Eugenie, — II m'est impossible de te dire ce que 
 fai soujfert et ce que je souffre. Nous avons fait une 
 marche contraire a tous les principes et au sens commun ; 
 cela devait amener une catastrophe. Elle est complete. 
 
THE EMPEROR 429 
 
 J'aurais prefers la mort a etre temoin d'une capitulation 
 si desastreuse, et cependant, dans les cir Constances, 
 c'etait le seul moyen d'eviter une boucherie de 60,000 
 personnes. 
 
 ' Et encore si mes tourments etaient concentres id ! Je 
 pense a toi, a, notre fits, a notre malheureux pays. Que 
 Dieu le protege ! Que va-t-il se passer a Paris ? 
 
 ' Je viens de voir le Roi. II a eu les larmes aux yeux 
 en me parlant de la douleur que je devais eprouver. II 
 met d ma disposition un de ses chateaux pres de Hesse- 
 Cassel. Mais que m'importe ou je vais ! . . . je suis 
 au desespoir. Adieu, je t'embrasse tendrement. 
 
 Napoleon.' 
 
 Outside he gave a hand to the Crown Prince, and 
 with the other he wiped away his tears. When the 
 King had gone, he said, ' Messieurs, nous allons a 
 Wilhelmshohe.^ The reign was over. 
 
430 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 XX 
 
 Three days later (it was September 5, 1870) the 
 Emperor came by train through the driving rain into 
 Cassel. There was a crowd at the station, and he 
 walked slowly at the salute past a Prussian guard of 
 honour. Then they drove off among the dripping 
 trees to Wilhelmshohe, and the cruel journey ended. 
 After a night at the Chateau de Bellevue (there was 
 a novel of Lytton by his bed) he had left Donchery 
 on an autumn morning in his carriage. The road 
 wound round Sedan among the halted German 
 infantry. People stared at him from the fields, and 
 sometimes a column of French prisoners shook fists 
 and hooted. In the last French village he gave his 
 money to some soldiers, and they drove quicldy 
 among the trees into Belgium. That night he lay 
 at Bouillon and sent word to Eugenie of his agony 
 — ' La marche d'aujourd'hui au milieu des troupes 
 prussiennes a ete un vrai supplice.^ But France lay 
 behind him, and he stared out at little Belgian towns. 
 Their next halt was at Verviers. In Neuf chateau he 
 took the train for Germany, and at Verviers a boy 
 went calling newspapers along the railway platform. 
 ' Chute de V Empire ! ' (he heard the news) ' Fuite de 
 r Im,peratrice ! ' That night Napoleon did not sleep. 
 The news had reached Paris on September 3. The 
 Empress faced it with a cold stare of horror. She 
 stood on the little staircase in the Tuileries where 
 Napoleon used to come up from his study with his 
 
THE EMPEROR 431 
 
 cigarette when he heard her gong, and she asked men 
 angrily whether it could be true. Her nights of 
 chloral and her days of coffee were ending in disaster, 
 and for one dreadful minute she was swept into wild 
 rage with her husband. Then she went off to Council. 
 They sat till dinner ; and when the Chamber met at 
 midnight, M. Jules Favre gave notice of motion to 
 depose the Emperor and his family. The House rose 
 before dawn ; but Paris did not sleep. A great 
 crowd was roaring round the dark palace half the 
 night, and they had found a chant of three syllables, 
 without which no Parisian riot can hope to be 
 successful : 
 
 ' Dich&ance ! 
 DkMance I ' 
 
 The shouts drifted across the dark garden into the 
 empty rooms where Eugenie was waiting. But the 
 new day came up brightly over Paris. Early the 
 next morning (it was a Sunday) she heard mass ; and 
 they were calling papers in the streets with cries of 
 ' Napoleon III. prisonnier.^ The last Council met 
 at eight, and they fumbled with plans for a new 
 Regency. But a crowd was gathering in the Place 
 de la Concorde, and the Empress telegraphed des- 
 pairingly to her mother at Madrid : 
 
 ' . . . Du courage, cMre mere ; si la France veut se 
 defendre, elk le peut. Je ferai mon devoir. Ta mal- 
 heureuse fille, EuoiiNiE . ' 
 
 Outside the sun was shining in the great square, and 
 the crowds were staring across the river at the Palais 
 Bourbon. There was a line of mounted police on the 
 bridge ; and Sir Charles Dilke strolled round to see 
 the sights, whilst his friend Mr. Labouchere made 
 
432 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 comic speeches to the crowd in the most amusing 
 characters. About mid-day the square was almost 
 empty (it was lunch-time, and the sun beat down on 
 the broad pavement between the fountains), and 
 some solemn gentlemen walked over from the 
 Chamber to persuade the Empress to abdicate. She 
 had few ambitions left ; but to desert her post in 
 face of a German invasion was distasteful. She 
 was quite calm and consented, with an unusual 
 respect for the Constitution, to act as her ministers 
 might decide. But the decision was taken elsewhere. 
 The streets were filling again, and the troops were 
 disincUned to fight. A disorderly crowd broke into 
 the Palais Bourbon, and about three o'clock in the 
 afternoon of September 4, 1870, M. Gambetta was 
 informing the Chamber in his great voice that the 
 dynasty had ceased to reign, whilst M. Jules Favre 
 said something encouraging about a Provisional 
 Government. They met General Trochu on his 
 horse outside and, with a quaint flavour of 1848, five 
 gentlemen went off once more to make a new world 
 at the Hotel de Ville. The streets were shouting 
 ' Vive la Bepublique / ' and M. Merimee was writing 
 his last letter at the Senate. Somewhere across Paris, 
 in the sunshine and the shouting, a Spanish woman 
 was waiting, like his Carmen outside the buU-ring, 
 for the blow. They came round her at the Tuileries 
 with terrified advice. Someone went out of the room 
 to fetch a revolver, and she slipped away with Prince 
 Metternich and the Italian minister. They got into 
 the Louvre, and their steps went echoing down the 
 great empty galleries ; there were bare spaces on the 
 walls where the best of the pictures had been sent 
 to Brest for safety. At the foot of a staircase she 
 
THE EMPEROR 433 
 
 came out into the sunshine. The street was full of 
 men ; they were all shouting ; but when a youth saw 
 'Sier face and turned to give the news, his voice was 
 swept away in the uproar of the crowd. They found 
 a closed cab, and she drove slowly through the press 
 in the Rue de Rivoli with her veil down and a hand 
 to her face. She could see them taking down the 
 eagles as she went ; it tasted bitter, and she said, a 
 Uttle ruefully, ' Dejd ! ' At the first house of refuge 
 no one was at home ; the cab had been sent away, 
 but they found another and drove to an American 
 dentist's in a quiet street. He was quite startled 
 when he came in and found her waiting. At the 
 Tuileries her adventurous cousin, M. de Lesseps, in 
 whose honour she had gone to Suez, was wrangling 
 with a tall young man in uniform named Sardou; 
 and outside the Palais Bourbon they were chalking 
 up the names of the Provisional Government on the 
 great pillars — Trochu, Jules Favre, Gambetta, and 
 a republican constellation which even included the 
 stormy star of Rochefort. On the next day the 
 enterprising dentist drove her to the coast. That 
 night the Emperor came to Wilhelmshohe. 
 
 The days passed slowly among the trees at Cassel. 
 There was a vague flavour of the First Empire about 
 the place ; Jerome had lived there when he was King 
 of Westphalia, and on the first morning Napoleon 
 found a portrait of his mother. It seemed to be 
 always raining; and they sat about and talked, or read 
 the letters which came in a slow trickle from France. 
 The Government of National Defence was striking 
 attitudes ; and Paris, the bright, bedizened Paris of 
 the Second Empire, was stripping for a siege. But 
 whilst the naval guns were mounted outside the city 
 
 2e 
 
434 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 and Eugenie and the Prince were staring out of the 
 bow-windows of the Marine Hotel at Hastings, 
 Napoleon was smoking in his little room at Cassel. 
 He wrote a pamphlet, Des causes qui ont amene la 
 capitulation de Sedan, and a second on Les relations 
 de la France avec VAllemagne sous Napoleon III. ; 
 they were pubUshed in Brussels without his signature. 
 The Prussian army seemed to fascinate him ; aU that 
 autumn, whilst he went for Httle walks in the park 
 and eyed the uniforms of the German sentries, he was 
 collecting technical material for a book on German 
 mihtary organisation ; and once in the barracks at 
 Cassel he was allowed to see a battery of the new 
 breech-loading field-guns. It was always hot in the 
 httle room where the Emperor wrote, and the group 
 of silent Frenchmen had a faint, despairing air of 
 St. Helena. General CasteLnau played Bertrand to 
 the Hudson Lowe of an obHging German count. 
 But Hesse-Cassel was less impressive than the South 
 Atlantic, and Bonapartist piety never compiled a 
 Memorial de Wilhelmshohe. 
 
 Politics seemed very far away ; the Russians were 
 quietly tearing up treaties in the confusion, and at 
 Rome the French had gone and the ItaHans were 
 marching in ; but the Emperor sat in the silence of 
 his provincial park, whilst the great guns began to 
 boom round Paris. At Hastings the Empress had 
 made a vague attempt to enhst Franz-Joseph and 
 the Czar in support of France, and an equivocal 
 gentleman named Regnier flitted about with a 
 strange project for a peace-treaty between the 
 Germans and the Empire. His credentials con- 
 sisted of an air of mystery and a photograph of the 
 sea-front at Hastings signed (under false pretences) 
 
THE EMPEROR 435 
 
 by the Prince Imperial. But he was received with 
 the utmost gravity at German headquarters. Bis- 
 marck had hoped to make peace with the Emperor 
 at Sedan, and he was half inclined to put his peace 
 terms up to auction between the Empire and the 
 Third Republic. Crushing victories are frequently 
 embarrassing to the victor when he comes to strike 
 his bargain ; and an Emperor with an army seemed 
 at once a more stable and a more congenial contract- 
 ing party than the incalculable rhetoricians who were 
 gesticulating in the Government of National Defence. 
 M. Regnier went off, under German auspices, to 
 Metz to ascertain whether Bazaine's army was dis- 
 posed to re-estabhsh the Empire. General Bourbaki 
 was permitted to run the blockade and came to 
 England ; he saw the Empress, but there was no 
 result. A few weeks later there was a queer attempt 
 to secure Eugenie's consent to an Imperiahst 'pro- 
 nunciamiento on the best Spanish model by the 
 garrison of Metz ; Bazaine was still holding out, and 
 the Germans seemed to countenance his incursion 
 into poHtics. But the Empress was unresponsive, 
 and Bazaine never played Monck in the new Restora- 
 tion. The fortress fell ; and as they burned their 
 flags, the last eagles of the Empire faded into history. 
 Napoleon was still watching the German sentries 
 at Wilhelmshohe. It seemed like the distant misty 
 days at Ham ; Conneau was there, and when an 
 American came to see him, he discussed the old 
 faded project of a Panama canal. But one quiet 
 Sunday a cab drove up from the station ; a young 
 man muttered something to Napoleon, who stared 
 and said, ' Est-ce 'possible ? Qu'elle vienne vite ! ' 
 He stood quite quietly on the steps, and Eugenie 
 
436 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 walked up. They had not met since that dull 
 morning at St. Cloud ; and when a door closed behind 
 them, he was sobbing in her arms. She stayed for 
 two days and slipped back across Belgium into 
 England. The war trailed on into the hard winter of 
 1870, when strange, impromptu armies took erratic 
 courses across France ; dramatic ministers alighted 
 from balloons, and admirals rode on horseback 
 commanding queer mixed units of gendarmes and 
 Spahis, whilst Garibaldi led francs-tireurs in Bur- 
 gundy and Chanzy's mohlots died in the snow outside 
 Le Mans to show that France was still unbeaten. 
 They skated a little at Wilhelmshohe, and' a galaxy 
 of Marshals arrived, fresh from the surrender of Metz. 
 Bazaine was there, looking a little dull, and Canrobert, 
 and Leboeuf , whom no one seemed to speak to. There 
 was a mild revival of politics ; Fleury and Pietri 
 were perpetually departing on mysterious errands 
 into Switzerland ; and there was even a fantastic 
 request to the King of Prussia that his captive Guard 
 should be interned round the captive Emperor. But 
 Paris was beginning to starve, and the war was 
 ending. The guns spoke slower now from Mont- 
 Valerien, and Bourbaki's army trailed across the 
 snow into Switzerland. Bismarck had made his King 
 an Emperor among the mirrors at Versailles, and once 
 more he seemed to play with the notion of a Bona- 
 parte restoration. Bewildered Frenchmen brought 
 their hopes to him ; but he signed peace with the 
 Republic, and Napoleon was left at Cassel, muttering, 
 ' Je suis desoleT In February 1871, he broke his 
 silence — ' ce frofond silence qui est le deuil du malheur ' 
 — with a manifesto to the French ; the iUegaUty of 
 the republican dictatorship was denounced, and there 
 
THE EMPEROR 437 
 
 was a grave appeal to the electorate. But the new 
 Assembly at Bordeaux confirmed the deposition of 
 the Emperor and proclaimed a queer Republic — ' la 
 Republique sans les republicains ' — under M. Thiers. 
 There was a faint protest from Wilhelmshohe ; but 
 the Empire went obediently into exile. On a March 
 day in 1871 Napoleon's carriages drove down to the 
 station. The place was crowded (it was a Sunday) ; 
 but as the train started, there was no sound from the 
 people. On the way to the frontier news reached 
 them of the Commune : Paris had gone mad ; but 
 Napoleon was smoking in a German railway-carriage, 
 and M. Thiers was left to deal with the pleasing 
 problems of repression. At Cologne the station was 
 decorated for the returning troops, and they could 
 read the great names of German victories on the 
 decorations. They reached Herbesthal in the dark, 
 and passed the frontier into Belgium. On the next 
 day Eugenie and the Prince were waiting at the Lord 
 Warden Hotel to see the Ostend boat steam into 
 Dover harbour. Napoleon met them ; his train ran 
 up the line through the little fields of Kent to Chisle- 
 hurst, and they were aU together once more at 
 Camden Place. It was the house where Miss Rowles 
 had lived, whom he nearly married in 1847 ; and by 
 way of the Tuileries and Sedan he had reached it at 
 last. 
 
 There was a mild glow of evening over the little 
 house in Kent. It seemed to stand under a quiet 
 sky among the trees. They had shelled St. Cloud 
 into ruins, and there were flames in the Tuileries as 
 the petroleuses ran crouching through the drifting 
 smoke and the troops marched in from Versailles. 
 But at Chislehurst the birds wheeled slowly over a 
 
438 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 silent garden, and Napoleon sat writing in his little 
 study or smoked in the big chair after dinner. He 
 was mostly writing ; there was a little pamphlet on 
 French policy — Les Principes — which its author signed 
 in a pitiably modest name — ' par un ancien dip- 
 lomate.' Later he wrote a fuller work on the war and 
 the military preparation of the Empire, Les Forces 
 Militaires de la France et la Campagne de 1870 ; it 
 was a mild strategic apologia for Sedan. Sometimes 
 they had visitors ; the Queen came, with Princess 
 Beatrice and Prince Leopold ; the county called ; 
 Mr. Borthwick of the Morning Post was often there, 
 and once Mr. Sullivan played the piano for hours 
 together. On Sunday mornings they walked across 
 the Common to church, and Napoleon raised his 
 great top hat, as little groups of loyal French from 
 London bowed and curtseyed by the road. There 
 were always callers at the house ; Lord Malmesbury 
 and old Earl Russell came, Archbishop Tait impressed 
 his new neighbours, and Christine Nilsson sang for 
 them all one afternoon. Sometimes busy gentlemen 
 called from France, and Napoleon almost became an 
 Emperor again ; M. Rouher was still, was always 
 faithfid, and one might yet (who knows ?) disturb 
 M. Thiers and his singular Republic. But life went 
 on quietly at Chislehurst. The little hall was full 
 of flowers for the fete of the Empire, and on fine after- 
 noons the ladies took tea on the lawn. It was a 
 quiet envoi. 
 
 Sometimes they went away. In the first autumn 
 Napoleon was at Torquay — ' charmant endroit quoique 
 triste ' — whilst Eugenie was in Spain with her 
 mother, and some of her jewellery was being sold in 
 London : it fetched good prices, because they were 
 
THE EMPEROR 439 
 
 buying diamonds for the Prince of Wales to give as 
 presents to the Indian princes on his travels. In 
 1872 they spent the summer in a little house at Cowes, 
 quite close to Ryde, where the Empress had landed 
 after her dreadful crossing from Trouville with Sir 
 John Burgoyne ; and once or twice Napoleon went 
 up to town to the photographer's. They even saw 
 the Prince of Wales drive to St. Paul's for the Thanks- 
 giving after his recovery from typhoid fever. That 
 year Napoleon was busy with vague beneficent plans 
 for improving the condition of the people ; he drafted 
 schemes for old age pensions and made little ingenious 
 drawings of economical stoves for working-class 
 dwellings. His mind strayed actively across in- 
 numerable problems, as he paced the long corridor 
 at Chislehurst. One might abolish the octroi ; one 
 might even (he was talking to a gentleman from 
 London) abolish war. Europe had been politely 
 amused by the Emperor and his Congresses ; but its 
 entertainment would have bordered on discourtesy 
 if it had fathomed his strange design — a Council in 
 regular session to settle the world's affairs and an 
 Assembly of the nations meeting to legislate in terms 
 of international law. The fantastic project pro- 
 voked incredulous smiles, which have scarcely faded 
 before its realisation at Geneva. 
 
 But his eye was fixed on a nearer future. The 
 Prince was at Woolwich now, and in France a throne 
 was waiting. Late in 1872 Napoleon made his last 
 plan. One might slip over to Ostend, by Germany 
 into Switzerland, and then to Annecy, past the great 
 lake where Eugenie had stood with him under a night 
 of stars, and by the dim hills above Aix where Hor- 
 tense had once sat sketching. Bourbaki commanded 
 
440 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 at Lyons ; he was always loyal, and one might march 
 his troops on Paris. But armies do not follow ill 
 men in carriages : one must ride again. He tested 
 himself bravely in the quiet drive at Chislehurst ; 
 and riding was not easy. Even the train was ex- 
 hausting now; and he faced the doctors quietly. 
 There must be an operation ; and the surgeons came 
 to Camden Place in the first week of 1873. They 
 seemed to be successful ; but he failed suddenly. It 
 was January 9, and Eugenie was with him. As he 
 drowsed into the last unconsciousness, he muttered 
 something to Conneau about Sedan : those thudding 
 guns under that leaden sky haunted him to the end, 
 and the story was over. 
 
THE EMPEROR 441 
 
 XXI 
 
 Six years later, on a South African June morning 
 (it was Whitsunday of the year 1879) Lieutenant 
 Carey rode eastwards out of Itelezi camp with six 
 troopers and the Prince Imperial. 
 
 For reasons which were a trifle mysterious to most 
 of her subjects the armed forces of Queen Victoria 
 were engaged in hostilities against the Zulus, and 
 Cetewayo's impis disturbed that Peace which (with 
 Honour) had been so recently promised by Lord 
 Beaconsfield to the British electorate. The war was 
 an unwelcome legacy from an active Colonial Sec- 
 retary, who had figured impressively in the Cabinet 
 as Lord Carnarvon but was rendered f aintlyridiculous 
 to his contemporaries by the nickname of ' Twitters.' 
 It had resulted immediately from the uncontrolled 
 policy of a bellicose High Commissioner, who earned 
 the obloquy of his countrymen but must be taken to 
 have derived consolation from his sovereign's prompt 
 gift of ' the fourth Volume ' : the work to which she 
 referred was Sir Theodore Martin's Life of His Royal 
 Highness the Prince Consort, and there is something 
 almost endearing in the Queen's assumption that his 
 first three instalments were universally in the pos- 
 session of public servants. 
 
 The military conduct of the Zulu War was in the 
 cautious but incompetent hands of Lord Chelmsford, 
 whom the Prime Minister retained in the command 
 from motives of delicacy, because he was the son of 
 
442 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 a distinguished lawyer whom the family incompet- 
 ence had compelled him to exclude from the Woolsack 
 eleven years previously. The cogency of the reason 
 will be readily apparent to any student of the British 
 system. His columns, shaken but reinforced after 
 the disaster at Isandhlwana, moved slowly towards 
 the Zulu concentration at Ulundi, and the Prince 
 Imperial rode with them, studying savage warfare, 
 designing field fortifications, and writing to his 
 mother. His inclusion had raised questions of some 
 difficulty at home, since Lord Beaconsfield regarded 
 without enthusiasm the addition to the British forces 
 in the field of a young man from Woolwich who was 
 a claimant to the throne of a friendly Power. But 
 his mother enlisted the support of the Queen. 
 Victoria and Eugenie in conjunction formed a 
 powerful constellation, which baffled even Disraeli's 
 remarkable capacity for influencing elderly ladies. 
 ' I did all I could to stop his going,' he grumbled 
 afterwards. ' But what can you do when you have 
 to deal with two obstinate women ? ' 
 
 The Prince vanished into Zululand on Lord 
 Chelmsford's staff, and rode out on a Sunday morn- 
 ing with Lieutenant Carey. Late in the afternoon 
 they off-saddled in an empty kraal by the Imbazani. 
 No guards were posted, and the Prince talked quietly 
 to Carey of the first campaign of the first Napoleon. 
 Then, at a vague alarm, the party was ordered to 
 remount. But before they were all in the saddle, 
 there was a volley from the long grass, and the Zulus 
 came at them with the assegai. One man went 
 down ; the horses bolted ; and Carey, who had only 
 served in a West Indian foot-regiment with un- 
 mounted officers, became too much absorbed in the 
 
THE EMPEROR 443 
 
 pressing problems of horsemanship presented by a 
 runaway horse to look behind him. Outside the 
 kraal the Prince was in tragic difficulties. His horse 
 was bolting after the retreating troop, and with the 
 enemy coming on he ran alongside in a desperate 
 effort to mount. The saddle swung round with him, 
 and he went down. 
 
 Then, as the galloping horses pounded away into 
 the distance, he walked slowly towards the Zulus 
 with a revolver in his left hand. Three shots were 
 fired, before the long spears flashed ; and they left 
 him stripped in the trampled grass. The sun which 
 had set over Longwood and Schonbrunn and Chisle- 
 hurst went down behind Itelezi. Only the Empress 
 lived on. . . . 
 
AUTHORITIES 
 BONAPARTISM 
 
 Bourgeois, !6mile. Manuel Historique de Politique Eirangere. 
 3 vols. 1909. 
 
 Cambridge Modern History. Vol. ix. 1907. 
 
 Fisher, H. A. L. Bona-partism : Six Lectures. 1908. 
 
 „ „ Studies in Napoleonic Statesmanship : Germany. 
 
 1903. 
 
 FouRNiER, August. Napoleon I. : a Biography. 2 vols. (Trans- 
 lated) 1911. 
 
 GuEDALLA, Philip. The Partition of Europe, a Textbook of European 
 History, 1715-1815. 1914. 
 
 Lavisse and- Eambaud. Histoire Generale. Vol. iv. 1905. 
 
 Rose, J. Holland. Life of Napoleon 1. 2 vols. 1903. 
 
 SoREL, Albert. U Europe et la Revolution Fran^aise. 8 vols. 1885- 
 1903. 
 
 Vandal, Albert. L'Av^nement de Bonaparte. 2 vols. 1902-1911. 
 
 II 
 
 GoNNARD, Philippe. The Exile of St. Helena (translated). 1909. 
 GouRGAUD, G. Sainte-Helene : Journal inedit de 1815 a 1818. 
 
 2 vols. 1899. 
 Las Cases, E. P. D. Memorial de Sainte-Helene. 4 vols. 1823. 
 Meredith, George. Odes in Contribution to the Song of French 
 
 History. 1898. 
 MoNTHOLON, C. J. Recits de la Captivite de VEmpereur Napoleon a 
 
 Sainte-HeUne. 2 vols. 1847. 
 Rosebery, Earl oe. Napoleon : the Last Phase. 1900. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Barthelemy and M^ry. Napoleon en Egypte, Waterloo, et Le Fils 
 de I'Homme. Illustrated by Horace Vemet and Hippolyte 
 Bellange. 1842. 
 
 BiiRANGER, P. J. DE. CEuwes. 2 vols. 1847. 
 
 Cambridge Modern History. Vol. x. 1907. 
 
 444 
 
AUTHORITIES 445 
 
 Dayot, Armand. Napoleon : Illustrations d'apres des Peintures, 
 
 Sculptures, Qravures, Objets du Temps. 1910. 
 Laurent, P. M. Histoire de Napoleon ler. Illustrated by Horace 
 
 Vemet and Hippolyte Bellange. 
 MussET, Alfred de. Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle. 1836. 
 NoRviNS, M. DE. Histoire de Napoleon. Illustrated by RafEet. 
 
 1839. 
 
 THE PRINCE 
 GENERAL 
 
 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoleon. (Euvres. 2 vols. 1848. 
 Bonaparte, Prince Napoleon-Louis. Des Idees Napoleoniennes. 
 
 1839. 
 Cheetham, F. H. Louis Napoleon and the Genesis of the Second 
 
 Empire. 1909. 
 GiRAUDEAU, F. Napoleon III. 1895. 
 Jerrold, Blanchard. The Life of Napoleon III. 4 vols. 1874- 
 
 1882. 
 Simpson, F. A. The Rise of Louis Napoleon. 1901. 
 Thirria, H. Napoleon III. avant VEmpire. 2 vols. 1895. 
 
 I 
 Napoleon Ier. Correspondance. Vol. xvii. 1865. 
 
 II 
 
 Bulloch, Willlam, M.D., F.R.S. Unpublished notes on illness and 
 
 death of Prince Napoleon-Louis-Charles. 
 Napoleon Ier. Correspondance. Vol. xv. 1864. 
 
 Ill 
 
 Sergeant, Philip W. The Empress Josephine. 2 vols. 1908. 
 
 IV 
 
 BouRGUiGNON, J. Les Adieux de Malmaison. L' Illustration. May 
 
 1921. 
 HoussAYE, Henry. 1815. 3 vols. 1903. 
 
 VIT 
 
 Persigny, Duo de. Memoires. 1896. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Jambs, Henry. Washington Square. 2 volfl. 1881. 
 
446 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 IX 
 
 Beaconsfield, Earl of. Endymion. 3 vols. 1880. 
 
 Gkeville, Charles C. F. A Journal of the Reign ofQiieen Victoria, 
 
 1837-1852. 3 vols. 1885. 
 MoNYPENNY, W. F. AND BucKLE, G. E. Life of Benjamin Disraeli, 
 
 Earl of Beaconsfield. 6 vols. 1910-1920. 
 WiKOFF, H. AND Grant, G. Biographical Sketches of Louis Napoleon 
 
 Bonaparte and Poetical and Prose Writings of Louis Napoleon. 
 
 1850. 
 
 X 
 
 Ceoker, J. W. Correspondence and Diaries. 3 vols. 1884. 
 
 XI 
 
 Briffault, F. T. The Prisoner of Ham. 1846. 
 
 THE PRESIDENT 
 GENERAL 
 
 Gorge, Pierre de la. Histoire de la Seconde Republique FranQaise. 
 
 2 vols. 1887. 
 Lebey, Andre. Louis-Napoleon Boiiaparte et la Revolution de 1848. 
 
 2 vols. 1907-1908. 
 Thirria, H. Op. cif. 
 
 I 
 
 Hugo, Victor. Choses Vues. 1900. 
 
 Senior, Nassau W. Conversations with M. Thiers, M. Guizot, and 
 
 other Distinguished Persons during the Second Empire. 2 vols. 
 
 1878. 
 
 II and III 
 
 Cha-M and Lireux, a. Assemblee Nationale Comique. 1850. 
 Dayot, Armand. Les Journees Revolutionnaires : 1830-1848. 
 Simpson, F. A. Op. cit. 
 Victoria, Queen. Letters. 3 vols. 1907. 
 
 IV 
 
 Clough, Arthur Hugh. Poems and Prose Remains. 2 vols. 1869. 
 Garibaldi, Giuseppe. Autobiography (translated). 2 vols. 1889. 
 Trevelyan, G. M. Garibaldi's Defence of the Roman Republic. 1907. 
 
 Ollivier, Emile. L'Empire Liberal. Vol. ii. 1897. 
 Persigny, Due DE. Op. cit. 
 
AUTHORITIES 447 
 
 VI 
 
 Casse, Baron A. du. Les Dessous du Coup d'Etat. 1891. 
 
 ). „ Histoire Anecdotique du Second Empire. 1887. 
 
 Hugo, Victor. Napoleon-k-Petit. 1852. 
 
 „ Histoire d'un Crime. 1877. 
 
 Maupas, M. de. Memoire sur le Second Empire. 1884. 
 Olliviee, Emile. Op. cit. 
 
 VII 
 
 Ashley, Hon. Evelyn. Life of Viscount Palmerston : 1846-1865. 
 
 2 vols. 1876. 
 GoECE, Pierre be la. Histoire du Second Empire. Vol. i. 1908. 
 Lachaud, E. Circulaires, Rapports, Notes et Instructions Confiden- 
 
 tidles: 1851-1870. 1872. 
 Maupas, M. de. Op. cit. 
 Persigny, Due de. Op. cit. 
 Victoria, Queen. Op. cit. 
 
 THE EMPEROR 
 
 GENERAL 
 
 Bourgeois, Smile. Op. cit. 
 
 Cambridge Modern History. Vol. xi. 1909. 
 
 Dayot, Armond. Le Second Empire : d'aprhs des Peintures, 
 
 Gravures, Sculptures, Dessins, Medailles, Autographes, Objet? du 
 
 Temps. 
 Gorge, Pierre de la. Histoire du Second Empire. 7 vols. 1908. 
 Jerrold, Blanchard. Op. cit. 
 
 Ollivier, Smile. L'Empire Liberal. 17 vols. 1895-1915. 
 Papiers Secrets et Correspondance du Second Empire. 1877. 
 Papiers Secrets hrules dans VIncendie des Tuileries. 1871. 
 Seignobos, C. Le Second Empire. 1921. 
 
 „ Le Declin de V Empire. 1921. 
 
 Victoria, Queen, Op. cit. 
 ViEL Castel, Comte H. de. Memoires sur le R^gne de Napoleon III. 
 
 6 vols. 1884. 
 
 I 
 
 Fleury, Comte, and Sonolet, Louis. La Societe du Second 
 Empire: 1851-1858. 1918. 
 
 II 
 
 Caran d'Ache. Nos Soldats du Siecle. 
 
 Detailj-e, Edouard. L'Armee Franoaise. 2 vols. 1885-1889. 
 
448 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 III 
 
 FiLON, A. Souvenirs sur VImperatrice Eugenie. 1920. 
 Fleuey, Comte, and Sonolet, Louis. Op. cit. 
 
 „ Memoirs of the Empress Eugenie (translated). 
 
 2 vols. 1920. 
 
 IV 
 
 Martin, Sir Theodore. Life ofH.R.H. the Prince Consort. 5 vols. 
 
 1871-1880. 
 Senior, Nassau W. Op. cit. 
 
 ,, ,, Conversations with Distinguished Persons during 
 
 the Second Empire. 2 vols. 1880. 
 
 Fraseb, Sir William. Napoleon III : My Recollections. 1896. 
 GossE, Edmund. Life of Algernon Charles Swinburne. 1917. 
 HuBNER, Comte de. Neuf Ans de Souvenirs d'un Amhassadeur 
 
 d'AutrichedParis: 1851-1859. 2 vols. 1904. 
 James, Henry. A Small Boy and Others. 1913. 
 Maxwell, Sir H. Life and Letters of the Fourth Earl of Clarendon. 
 
 2 vols. 1913. 
 Trollope, a. The Three Clerks. 3 vols. 1858. 
 
 VI 
 
 Darimon, a. Histoire de Douze Ans : 1857-1869. 1883. 
 Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary : Requisitoire, Plaidoirie et 
 
 Jugement. 1857. 
 Lachaud, E. Op. cit. 
 Martin, Sir Theodore. Op. cit. 
 
 VII 
 
 MoRiER, Sir Robert. Memoirs and Letters. 2 vols. 1911. 
 Orsi, Pietro. Cavour and the Making of Modern Italy. 1914. 
 Trevelyan, G. M. Garibaldi and the Thousand. 1909. 
 
 VIII 
 
 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett. Poems before Congress. 1860. 
 
 Cham. Les Zouaves. 1859. 
 
 Massa, Marquis Philippe de. Souvenirs et Impressions : 1840- 
 
 1871. 1897. 
 Vial, J. and C. Histoire Abregee des Campagnes Modernes. 2 vols. 
 
 1910. 
 
AUTHORITIES 449 
 
 IX 
 
 I'leischmann, H. Napoleon III. et les Femmes. 1913. 
 
 LoLiEE, F. Le Due de Morny et la Societe du Second Empire. 1909. 
 
 ,, Les Femmes du Second Empire. 1906. 
 
 „ La Fete Imperiale. 
 
 Zola, Emile. Son Excellence Eugene Rougon. 1875. 
 
 X 
 
 Bagehot, Walter. Literary Studies. 3 vols. 1878. 
 
 Baxter, Rev. M. Louis Napoleon the Destined Monarch of the 
 World, Foreshown in PropJiecy to confirm a seven years' Covenant 
 with the Jews about seven years before the Millenium, and {after the 
 Resurrection of Saints aiid Ascension of Watchful Christians has 
 taken place two years and from three to five weeks after the Covenant) 
 subsequently to becoine completely supreme over England and most 
 of America, and all Christendom, and to cause a great persecution 
 of Christians during the later half of the seven years, until he 
 finally perishes at the descent of Christ, at the end of the War of 
 Armageddon, about or soon after 1873. 1865. 
 
 Duclaux, M. Victor Hugo. 1921. 
 
 -CrOSSE, Edmund. Op. cit. 
 
 Hugo, Victor. Les Chdtiments. 1853. 
 
 Actes et Paroles : Pendant I'Exil, 1852-1870. 1875. 
 
 Swinburne, A. C. Songs before Sunrise. 1871. 
 „ Songs of Two Nations. 1875. 
 
 „ Posthumous Poems. 1917. 
 
 XI 
 
 jyiERiMEE, Prosper. Lettres a M.Panizzi, 1850-1870. 2 vols. 1881. 
 
 Morier, Sib Robert. Op. cit. 
 
 MoRLEY, J. Life of Cobden. 2 vols. 1881. 
 
 Life of Gladstone. 3 vols. 1903. 
 Senior, Nassau W. Op. cit. 
 Trevelyan, G. M. Garibaldi and the Making of Italy. 1911. 
 
 XII 
 
 Darimon, a. Op. cit. 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse. Le Nabab. 1877. 
 
 Fleury, Comte, and Sonolet, Louis. La Societe du Second Empire : 
 
 1858-1863. 1918. 
 J'raser, Sir William. Op. cit. 
 Hanotaux, Gabriel. Histoire de la France Contemporaine. Vol. i. 
 
 1903. 
 
 2f 
 
450 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Lachaud, E. Op. cit. 
 Merimee, Peospee. Op. cit. 
 Zola, '^uile. Op. cit. 
 
 XIII 
 
 Fleuey, Comte, and Sonolet, Louis. La Societe du Second Empire 
 
 1863-1867. 1918. 
 Massa, Marquis Philippe de. Op. cit. 
 Vial, J. and C. Op. cit. 
 
 XIV 
 
 BoEDiEE, H. L'Allemagne awi. Tuileries de 1850 a 1870. 1872. 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse. Op. cit. 
 
 LoLitE, F. Le Due de Morny, op. cit. 
 
 Meeimee, Peospee. Op. cit. 
 
 Napoleon ni. Eistoire de Jules Cesar. 2 vols. 1865-1866. 
 
 Peat, A. B. Noeth. Correspondence (1864-1869). 1903. 
 
 XV 
 
 Ashley, Hon. Evelyn. Op. cit. 
 
 Benedetti, Count. Studies in Diplomacy (translated). 1895. 
 Beust, Count von. Memoirs (translated). 2 vols. 1887. 
 Buedin d'Entremont, F. M. L'Armee Danoise et la Defense du 
 
 Sundevit en 1864. 1885. 
 Headlam, J. W. Bismarck and the Foundation of the German 
 
 Empire. 1904. 
 HoHENLOHE, Prince Chlodwig. Memoirs (translated). 2 vols. 
 
 1906. 
 HoziEE, SiE H. M. The Seven Weeks' War. 2 vols. 1867. 
 Klaczko, J. Deux Chanceliers : le Prince Gortchakof et le Prince de 
 
 Bismarck. 1877. 
 MoLTKE, Count von. Projects for the Campaign of 1866 against 
 
 Austria (translated). 1907. 
 
 XVI 
 
 Anonymous. The Truth about ' The Protocols.' 1921. 
 
 Caetiee, V. Le General Trochu. 1914. 
 
 Fleischmann, H. Op. cit. 
 
 Kahn, Gustave. Europas Fursten im Sittenspiegel der Karikatur. 
 
 LoLiEE, F. La Fete Imperiale, op. cit. 
 
 Rochefoet, H. Les Aventures de tna Vie. 5 vols. 
 
 XVII 
 
 Beust, Count von. Op. cit. 
 
 Clarke, H. Butler. Modern Spain : 1815-1898. 1906. 
 
 Daudet, Alphonse. Numa Romnestan. 1881. 
 
AUTHORITIES 451 
 
 Deschanel, Paul. Gambetta. 1920. 
 
 PlLON, A. Op. cit. 
 
 Xamy, ]&tienne. Etudes sur le Second Empire. 1895. 
 
 MoRiER, Sir Egbert. Op. cit. 
 
 Newton, Lord. Lord Lyons. 2 vols. 1913. 
 
 Peat, A. B. North. Op. cit. 
 
 EOCHEFORT, H. Op. cit. 
 
 „ Les Lanternes (reprinted). 3 vols. 1880. 
 
 vStoffel, Baron. Reports on tJie Military Forces of Prussia : 1868 
 1870 (translated). 1872. 
 
 XVIII 
 
 Maxwell, Sir H. Op. cit. 
 MORLET, J. Op. cit. 
 Newton, Lord. Op. cit. 
 Eochefort, H. Op. cit. 
 
 XIX 
 
 Bazaine, Marshal. L'Armee du Rhin. 1872. 
 
 Evans, T. W. Memoires. 1910. 
 
 PlLON, A. Op. cit. 
 
 Traser, Sir William. Op. cit. 
 
 Newton, Lord. Op. cit. 
 
 PiCARD, E. 1870 : Sedan. 2 vols. 1912. 
 
 EoussET, LiEUT.-CoL. Histoire General de la Guerre Franco- 
 
 Allemande. 2 vols. (Illustrated.) 1912. 
 'Trochu, General. CEuvres Posthumes. 2 vols. 1896. 
 VL4.L, J. AND C. Op. cit. 
 ZohA, :&MiLE. Le Debacle. 1892. 
 
 XX 
 
 3eust, Count von. Op. cit. 
 :Evans, T. W. Op. cit. 
 FiLON, A. Op. cit. 
 Eraser, Sir William. Op. cit. 
 
 •OlRAUDEAU, F. Op. cit. , T^ -77 o 1 
 
 •GwYNN, S. AND TucKWELL, G. M. Life of Sir Charles Dilke. 2 vols. 
 
 1917. 
 
 Hanotaux, Gabriel. Op. cit. 
 
 MoNTS, Comte. La Captivite de Napoleon III. (translated). iyu». 
 
 Napoleon hi. CEuvres Posthumes. 1873. 
 
 XXI 
 
 Blunt, W. S. My Diaries. 2 vols. 1919-1920. 
 Tilon, a. The Prince Imperial (translated). 1917. 
 
 IIONYPENNY, W. F. AND BuCKLE, G. E. Op. cU. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Aladbnize, 116, 120. 
 Alba, Duchess of, 242, 309. 
 Albert, Archduke, 360, 406-7. 
 Albert, Prince, 222, 249-50, 267, 
 
 271, 318. 
 Alboni, 256. 
 Alexander i., 53. 
 Alexander ii. , 377. 
 Alma, 251. 
 Augier, 341. 
 Aumale, Due d', 221. 
 
 Bagehot, 298. 
 
 Balaklava, 251. 
 
 Balzac, 157. 
 
 Baroche, 204, 311. 
 
 Barras, 7. 
 
 Barre, 223. 
 
 Barrot, Odilon, 138, 151, 155, 170, 
 
 215, 401. 
 Baudelaire, 157. 
 Baudin, 218, 392. 
 Baxter, 300-1. 
 Bazaine, 210, 282, 327, 331-5, 417, 
 
 423, 435-6. 
 Beauharnais, Eugene de, 55. 
 Beauharnais, Hortense de, vide 
 
 Hortense. 
 Beauharnais, Josephine de, vide 
 
 Josephine. 
 Beaumont, 426. 
 Bellang6, 30, 31-3. 
 Bellanger, Marguerite, 376. 
 Benedek, 360. 
 Benedetti, 247, 262, 306, 317, 362-5, 
 
 408, 411-14. 
 B^ranger, 26-8, 136, 177. 
 Berryer, 125-6, 174, 216. 
 Beust, 277, 379-81, 411. 
 Beyle, 240. 
 
 Billault, 292, 314, 337. 
 Bismarck, 256, 319, 343-65, 378, 
 
 408-15, 428, 435-6. 
 Blanc, Louis, 135, 150, 169. 
 Blessington, Lady, 103, 109, 118, 
 
 130, 141-2. 
 
 2f 
 
 Bonaparte, Carlo, 4. 
 
 Bonaparte, Charles Louis Napoleon, 
 vide Napoleon iii. 
 
 Bonaparte, Eugene, Louis Jean 
 Joseph Napoleon, vide Prince 
 Imperial. 
 
 Bonaparte, Jerome, 44, 55, 58, 93, 
 160, 215, 309. 
 
 Bonaparte, Joseph, 55, 82, 136. 
 
 Bonaparte, Letizia, 46, 58. 
 
 Bonaparte, Louis, character and 
 education, 38 ; marriage, 41 
 married life, 42-3 ; abdication, 51 
 retirement, 58-63, 124, 137-8 
 death, 141. 
 
 Bonaparte, Lucien, 55, 58. 
 
 Bonaparte, Mathilde, 78, 93. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon, vide Na- 
 poleon I. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon, Prince, 160, 
 196, 274, 276, 287, 339. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon Charles, 59, 64, 
 66. 
 
 Bonaparte, Napoleon-Louia-Charles, 
 41-3. 
 
 Bonaparte, Pierre, 401-2. 
 
 Bonapartism, evolution of, 3-33 ; 
 origins at St. Helena, 15-22 ; ele- 
 ment of martyrdom, 16 ; of demo- 
 cracy, 17-20 ; of nationalism, 21 ; 
 of peace, 22 ; Romanticism, 26 ; in 
 literature, 26-8 ; in art, 28-33 ; in 
 1830, 32; in 1836, 80; in IMes 
 NapoUoniennes, 105-7 ; in 1840, 
 111-14; in 1848, 162, 168. 
 
 Bomy, 422. 
 
 Borthwick, 221, 438. 
 
 Boulogne, attempt on, 115-23. 
 
 Bourbaki, 209, 412, 435-6. 
 
 Bright, 306. 
 
 Browning, Mrs., 284, 287, 307. 
 
 Bugeaud, 155, 172, 192. 
 
 Burdett, Miss, 144. 
 
 Buren, President Van, 94, 97. 
 
 Cambridge, Duke of, 234, 249. 
 2 
 
454 
 
 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Campan, Mme., 39. 
 
 Canning, Stratford, 62. 
 
 Canrobert, 209-10, 255-6, 296, 376, 
 
 425, 436. 
 Cardwell, 417. 
 Carey, 441-3. 
 Carnarvon, 441. 
 Carvalho, 374. 
 Castelfidardo, 308. 
 Castelnau, 434. 
 Caatiglione, Countess, 293. 
 Cavaignao, 167-8, 173-4, 213, 218. 
 Cavour, 262, 273-7, 287, 317. 
 Cham, 170, 375. 
 Changarnier, 169, 176, 191, 203, 205, 
 
 213, 218, 421. 
 Chanzy, 436. 
 Charles X., 25, 32. 
 Charlet, 30, 33. 
 
 Charlotte, Empress, 326-35, 364. 
 Ghasaepot, 373, 415. 
 Chateaubriand, 77, 94, 128, 135. 
 Chatrian, 391. 
 Chelmsford, 441-2. 
 Clarendon, 262, 289, 384, 393, 404-5. 
 Clough, 183-90. 
 Cobden, 141, 304-5. 
 Cochelet, Mile., 81. 
 Col-Puygelier, 120. 
 Commune, 437. 
 Conneau, 116, 118, 127, 129, 140, 
 
 144, 177, 435, 440. 
 Constitution of 1815, 13 ; of 1848, 
 
 168, 170, 206-7 ; of 1852, 224-5, 
 
 230 ; of 1870, 405. 
 Cornu, Mme., 135, 306. 
 Cottrau, 74. 
 Crimean War, 248-57. 
 Croker, 123. 
 Oustozza, 360. 
 
 Dabimon, 313, 387. 
 
 Daudet, 291, 312-13. 
 
 Daumier, 72, 170. 
 
 David, 28. 
 
 D^jazet, 135. 
 
 Diaz, 260. 
 
 Dickens, 249. 
 
 Dilke, 431. 
 
 Disraeli, 102-4, 141, 222, 254, 267, 
 
 319, 323, 349, 351, 363, 441-2. 
 Dor6, 393. 
 
 D'Orsay, 104, 110, 124, 141, 234. 
 Douay, 327, 418. 
 Doyle, 109. 
 Duboso, 386. 
 Duerot, 373. 
 
 Dumas, 77. 
 Diippel, 352-3. 
 Duroe, 41. 
 
 Eglinton, 107-8. 
 
 Ems, 411-14. 
 
 Erckmann, 391. 
 
 Espartero, 240. 
 
 Espinasse, 209, 213, 269. 
 
 Eugenie, Empress, birth and family, 
 239 ; education, 240 ; meets Na- 
 poleon III., 242 ; marriage, 243 ; 
 Windsor, 252-6 ; receives Queen 
 Victoria, 255-7 ; appearance, 259; 
 366 ; birth of Prince Imperial, 263 ; 
 Osborne, 267 ; Orsini attempt, 
 268-9 ; Anneoy, 307 ; enters 
 politics, 366-7 ; Ollivier, 369-71 ; 
 Suez Canal, 397 ; on democracy, 
 398 ; prospect of war, 312 ; 
 Regency, 419-32 ; flight, 433 ; 
 Hastings, 434 ; Wilhelmshohe, 
 435 ; Chislehurst, 437-40. 
 
 Evans, 432. 
 
 Failly, 383. 
 
 Favre, Jules, 125, 165, 267, 272, 320, 
 
 387, 406, 431-3. 
 Ferdinand VII., 37, 293. 
 Ferr^re, 163. 
 Ferry, Julea, 320. 
 Feuillet, 341. 
 Flahaut, 51, 338. 
 Flaubert, 154, 266. 
 Fleury, 175, 208, 234, 286, 291, 351, 
 
 376, 409, 436. 
 Forbach, 418. 
 
 Forey, 209, 216, 282, 327-8. 
 Fould, 292, 305, 311, 337. 
 Franz- Joseph i., 286-7, 329, 360, 380. 
 Frederick William iv., 159, 343. 
 Froasard, 417-18. 
 
 Gablbnz, 357. 
 
 Galliffet, 284, 328, 427. 
 
 Gambetta, 315, 320, 387, 392-3, 406, 
 
 432-3. 
 Garibaldi, 179-90, 278, 284, 307, 382, 
 
 436. 
 Garnier-Pag^s, 151. 
 Gastein, Convention of, 356. 
 Gautier, 260, 340. 
 Gavarni, 258. 
 Giulay, 282. 
 Gladstone, 305-6, 394, 404, 410-11, 
 
 415, 417. 
 
INDEX 
 
 455 
 
 Gordon, Mme., 85-6, 94, 112, 240, 
 
 242. 
 Gortsohakoff, 251, 347. 
 Gounod, 339, 374. 
 Govone, 357. 
 
 Gramont, 380-1, 406, 410-15. 
 Granville, 411. 
 Gravelotte, 425. 
 Greville, 104, 109. 
 Guizot, 24, 114, 118, 149, 153, 172, 
 
 401. 
 Guys, 258. 
 
 Hammond, 407. 
 
 Haussmann, 212, 260-1, 311. 
 
 Heine, 33. 
 
 Hertford, 123. 
 
 Hohenlohe, 244. 
 
 Hohenlohe-Langenburg,Prinoess Ade- 
 laide, 234, 243. 
 
 HohenzoUern, Prince Leopold, 408-14. 
 
 Hortense, Queen, education, 39 ; mar- 
 riage, 41 ; marriedUfe, 42-3 ; Baden, 
 43 ; separation, 41 ; Flahaut, 51 ; 
 the Hundred Days, 53-7 ; Geneva, 
 58 ; Aix, 59 ; Constance, 60 ; Augs- 
 burg, 61 ; Arenenberg, 62 ; Italy, 
 64-6; England, 68-9; Boulogne, 
 69 ; Malmaison, 70 ; Switzerland, 
 71-9; appeals to Louis Philippe, 
 90 ; death, 98. 
 
 Howard, Miss, 109, 143, 195, 234, 
 243. 
 
 Hiibner, 224, 277. 
 
 Hugo, Victor, Bonapartism, 27, 32 ; 
 in 1848, 153, 159 ; at Elys6e, 176 ; 
 as democrat, 200 ; cov/p d'4tat, 214- 
 220 ; exiled, 223, 224-7 ; Les Chd- 
 timents, 295-6 ; NapoUon-le- Petit, 
 297. 
 
 Imperiai, Prince, 263, 341, 355, 416, 
 
 418, 420, 423, 434, 441-3. 
 Intematicmale, 388. 
 Irving, Washington, 96. 
 Isabella, Queen, 383-4. 
 Isandhlwana, 442. 
 Ismail, 397. 
 
 James, Henry, 263-4. 
 
 Jecker, 324, 335. 
 
 Joinville, Prince de, 33, 115, 221. 
 
 Jomini, 282. 
 
 Josephine, Empress, marriage, 39-40 ; 
 divorce, 45, 47, 49-50, 77 ; at Mal- 
 maison, 52 ; death, 52. 
 
 Juarez, 321, 327. 
 
 KiNOLAKE, 109, 270, 306. 
 Koniggratz, 360. 
 Krupp, 374. 
 
 Labiinas, Propoa de, 368. 
 
 Labouchere, 431. 
 
 Laity, 84, 94, 100, 163, 165, 177. 
 
 Lamartine, 150, 157, 162, 165. 
 
 Lamoriciere, 207, 308. 
 
 Landor, 142. 
 
 Lanfrey, 391. 
 
 Langensalza, 360. 
 
 Lanteme, La, 389-91. 
 
 La Puebla, 326-7. 
 
 Lebceuf, 282, 410, 414-15, 417, 422, 
 
 436. 
 Lebrun, 407, 418. 
 Ledru-Rollin, 151, 194. 
 L6on, Count, 109. 
 Leopold I., 69, 307. 
 Lesseps, de, 186-7, 433. 
 Lesurques, 386. 
 Lieven, Princess, 248. 
 Lincoln, 324, 332. 
 Lorenoez, 325-7. 
 Louis XVIII., 24. 
 Lyons, Lord, 383, 396, 404. 
 Lytton, 104, 142. 
 
 Mac-Mahon, 270, 419, 425-6. 
 
 Magenta, 283. 
 
 Magnan, 116, 210, 233-4. 
 
 Malmesbury, 141, 234, 276, 438. 
 
 Manin, 182. 
 
 Marie Louise, Empress, 51, 54. 
 
 Marryat, Captain, 104. 
 
 Mars-la-Tour, 424. 
 
 Massa, 292, 341. 
 
 Maupas, 210, 212-20, 295. 
 
 Maximilian, Emperor, 323-35, 376. 
 
 Mazzini, 180, 182-90. 
 
 Mehemet Ali, 113-14. 
 
 Meissonier, 3, 256. 
 
 Mentana, 282. 
 
 M6rim6e, 239, 240, 306, 311, 316, 
 
 337, 366, 432. 
 Metternich, 159. 
 
 Metternich, Prince Richard, 358, 432. 
 Metternich, Princess Pauline, 292, 
 
 316, 341. 
 Mexico, 321-35. 
 Miohelet, 150. 
 Mill, 415. 
 
 Milnes, Monckton, 141. 
 Mitrailleuse, 385, 415. 
 Mocquard, 175, 291. 
 
456 
 
 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 MoW, 112, 154-5, 172. 
 
 Moltke, 118, 353, 384, 413. 
 
 Mommsen, 342. 
 
 Montauban, Bouflfet de, 102, 177. 
 
 Montebello, 282. 
 
 Montholon, 102, 118, 127, 129, 161, 
 169. 
 
 Montijo, Count, 239. 
 
 Montijo, Countess, 239, 240, 241-2. 
 
 Morier, 275, 378. 
 
 Morley, 415. 
 
 Morny, Duo de, origins, 51, 198 
 coup d'dtat, 212-20 ; President o: 
 Chamber, 265; at Court, 291 
 marriage, 292 ; ideas, 312-13 ; with 
 Ollivier, 317, 338 ; Mexico, 323-4 
 death, 339. 
 
 Moustier, 371. 
 
 Musset, A. de, 25, 260. 
 
 Napoleon i. , family, 4 ; education, 
 5 ; attitude to Revolution, 6-9 ; 
 ideas, 10; foreign policy, 11-13; 
 the Hundred Days, 13, 20; St. 
 Helena, 15-22 ; death, 22 ; second 
 funeral, 33, 115 ; birth of Napoleon 
 m., 37 ; on croup, 44 ; divorce, 
 45, 47-50, 77 ; with nephews, 51, 
 55, 56 ; at Malmaison, 57. 
 
 Napoleon ii. , vide Reichstadt. 
 
 Napoleon lii., birth, 37, 45 ; parents, 
 38-45 ; name, 4^-7 ; with Napoleon 
 I., 51 ; Malmaison, 52; the ^^gndred 
 Days, 53-7 ; Geneva, 58 ; Askg 59 ; 
 Constance, 60 ; AugsburgJ^61 ; 
 Arenenberg, 62 ; education, 60-3 ; 
 Swiss artillery, 63, 78 ; Rome, 63 ; 
 Romagna insurrection, 64-6 ; Paris, 
 67 ; England, 68-9 ; Boulogne, 69 ; 
 Malmaison, 70 ; Switzerland, 71-9 ; 
 Reveries Poliliques, 78-4 ; appear- 
 ance, 74, 75, 2S9, 289-91, 336, 366 ; 
 England and Belgium, 75 ; Con- 
 siderations sur la Suisse, 75-7 ; 
 Manuel d'Artillerie, 78 ; attempt 
 onStrasburg, 84-91 ; United States, 
 92-7 ; Switzerland, 98-101 ; Eng- 
 land, 102-10; Det Iddes NapoUo- 
 niennes, 105-7; attemptonBoulogne, 
 115-23; Conoiergerie, 123-4; trial, 
 125-7; Ham, 128-40; Fragments 
 Hialoriques, 131-2; Extinction du 
 Paupdrisme, 136; England, 141-5; 
 Etudes sur I'ArtiUerie, 142. 
 
 Paris in 1848, 160 ; Special Con- 
 stable, 161 ; elected Deputj', 164 ; 
 re-elected Deputy, 169 ; at the 
 
 Chamber, 169, 171 ; in Paris, 170 ; 
 elected President, 173 ; takes oath, 
 174; Elys^e, 175-6; reviews, 176, 
 204 ; Roman policy, 184 ; speeches, 
 195, 201-2 ; plan for cottp d'dtat, 
 207; coup d'Stat, 212-20; repres- 
 sion, 223 ; Bordeaux speech, 229 ; 
 Emperor, 230, 233. 
 
 Marriage projects, 234-5 ; meets 
 Eugenie, 242 ; marriage, 243 ; 
 character and ideas, 234-6 ; Rus- 
 sian policy, 247 ; Crimean War, 
 248-57; with Prince Albert, 249- 
 50 ; Windsor, 251-4 ; receives 
 Queen Victoria, 255-7, 271 ; birth 
 of Prince Imperial, 263 ; Osborne, 
 267 ; Orsini attempt, 268-9 ; Ita- 
 lian policy, 246, 272, 303, 308 p 
 war with Austria, 278, 288 ; Court 
 in 1860, 289-93 ; Histoire de Jules 
 C4sa/r, 302, 319, 340-1 ; with Cob- 
 den, 304-5 ; annexation of Savoy,_ 
 307 ; Syrian and Chinese expedi- 
 tions, 309 ; method of government, 
 310-12 ; parliamentarism, 314„317, 
 336-8 ; foreign policy, 317-19*; dis- 
 armament, 318 ; Mexico, 321-35 ; 
 Prussia, 343-65; Poland,. ?47 ;^ 
 Schleswig-Holstein, 348-53';" Bis- 
 ruarck, 355 ; Austria, 356-9 ; in- 
 teiStentions and compensations, 361- 
 36^fcealth, 333, 364, 378 ; Lux- 
 emBfflP^ 371-2; Austrian alliance, 
 378^Si; 406-7, 410 ; Salzburg, 380 ; 
 Italian alliance, 381,^410 ;- Men- 
 tana, 382 ; Belgian railways, 393- 
 394 ; Empire and democracy, 394- 
 395, 398-9 ; Ollivier ministry, 400- 
 404 ; Spanish crisis, 408-18 ( war 
 declared, 415 ; leaves St. Cloud, 
 416 ; Metz, 417-22 ; Saarbruck, 
 418 ; Chalons, 424-6 ; Sedan, 
 426 - 7 ; Donchery, 428-9 ; Wil- 
 helmshohe, 430 - 7 ; Chislehurst, 
 437-40 ; Council of Nations, 439 f 
 the last plan, 439 ; death, 440. 
 
 Neipperg, 54. 
 
 Ney, Edgar, 197. 
 
 Nicaragua Canal, 137, 144, 435. 
 
 Nicholas I., 234, 237. 
 
 Niel, 251, 373, 385. 
 
 Nigra, 432. 
 
 Nikolsburg, peace of, 362. 
 
 Nilsson, Christine, 385, 438. 
 
 Nisib, 113, 141. 
 
 Noir, Victor, 401-2. 
 
 No vara, 184. 
 
INDEX 
 
 457 
 
 OrrENBACH, 338, 375. 
 
 Oliffe, 338, 
 
 Ollivier, Emile, in 1848, 161 ; coup 
 d'itat, 213 ; the Five, 267 ; in 
 1860, 314-15; with Morny, 317, 
 338 ; with Napoleon and Eug6nie, 
 369-71 ; defeated, 395 ; becomes 
 Minister, 398-9 ; home policy, 401- 
 403 ; foreign policy, 404-5 ; Spaniali 
 crisis, 408-14; ' coiur Uger,' 415; 
 fall, 421. 
 
 Ollivier, Mme., 401. 
 
 Orleans, Due d', 89. 
 
 Orleans, Duchesse d', 157. 
 
 Orsini, 268-72. 
 
 Oudinot, 185, 216. 
 
 Pamkao, 309, 421. 
 
 Palmerston, 221, 242, 245, 248, 270, 
 318, 350, 353. 
 
 Panizzi, 316, 337. 
 
 Paris, Exhibition of 1855, 258 ; 
 Exhibition of 1867, 374; the con- 
 struction of, 260-1. 
 
 Paris, peace of, 262-3. 
 
 Parquin, 81, 87, 94, 102, 118, 123, 
 127, 138. 
 
 Pasquier, 125. 
 
 Patti, 375. 
 
 Pearl, Cora, 376. 
 
 P61isaier, 209, 255. 
 
 Persigny, Due de, origins, 81 ; Bona- 
 partism, 82 ; Arenenberg, 83 ; 
 before Strasburg, 84-6 ; attempt 
 on Strasburg, 87-91 ; London, 94, 
 102 ; Lettres de Londrea, 109 ; 
 attempt on Boulogne, 115-23 ; trial, 
 128 ; Paris in 1848, 161 ; defeated 
 for Chamber, 162-3 ; arrested, 
 165 ; Elys^e, 175 ; decorated, 177 ; 
 Germany, 196 ; coupd'dtat, 212-20 ; 
 proclaims Empire, 233 ; Ambas- 
 sador in London, 292 ; marriage, 
 292 ; ideas, 312 ; Minister of 
 Interior, 319-20. 
 
 Philippe, Louis, 32, 33, 67, 89-91, 
 111-14, 123, 152, 156, 158, 161. 
 
 Pinard, 266, 290. 
 
 Pius IX., 182-3, 197, 289, 334. 
 
 Plihiscite, Bonapartism and, 73; of 
 1851, 219-20; of 1852, 230; of 
 1870, 406. 
 
 Plombieres, 273-7. 
 
 Prim, 324, 409. 
 
 Proudhon, 170, 388. 
 
 QUERBTARO, 334, 376. 
 
 Rachel, 141, 176, 275. 
 
 Radetzky, 182. 
 
 Raflfet, 30, 33. 
 
 Raglan, 251. 
 
 Randon, 282, 373. 
 
 R6camier, Mme., 77, 124, 128. 
 
 R^gnier, 434-5. 
 
 Reichstadt, Due de, 26, 32, 58, 71,- 
 74. 
 
 Reille, 281, 427. 
 
 Revolution of 1789, 6 ; Napoleon K 
 and, 6-9 ; of 1830, 32 ; of 1848, 
 149-57 ; of 1870, 431-33. 
 
 Rezonville, 423. 
 
 Ristori, 374. 
 
 Ritsohl, 341. 
 
 Rochefort, 338, 376, 388-91, 399,. 
 402-3. 
 
 Rome, siege of, 185-9. 
 
 Roon, 228, 355, 413. 
 
 Rossi, 182. 
 
 Rossini, 237, 393. 
 
 Rouher, origins, 199 ; ideas, 312 ; 
 Miniatre d'Etat, 339 ; ' Vice-Empe- 
 reur,' 371 ; 'Jamais /' 382; policy,, 
 385 ; on war, 384 ; fall, 396 ; at 
 headquarters, 425 ; exile, 438. 
 
 Royer-Collard, 24. 
 
 Rudolph, Archduke, 286. 
 
 Russell, Lord John, 174, 222, 306,. 
 438. 
 
 Saarbeuck, 418. 
 
 Sadowa, 360. 
 
 Saint-Arnaud, 208, 210, 212-20, 233,. 
 
 249, 251, 295-6. 
 St. Privat, 425. 
 Saint-Saens, 393. 
 Sainte-Beuve, 260. 
 Sand, George, 136, 341, 393, 403. 
 Sandeau, 341. 
 Sardou, 217, 433. 
 Schleswig-Holstein, 348-53. 
 Schneider, Hortense, 375. 
 Sebastopol, siege of, 251-7. 
 Sedan, 426-7. 
 Serrano, 411. 
 Seward, 324. 
 Si6y63, 8. 
 Simon, Jules, 320. 
 Sismondi, 123. 
 Solferino, 285. 
 Stael, Mme. de, 53. 
 Stockmar, 228, 249. 
 Stoffel, 342, 385. 
 Strasburg, attempt on, 84-91. 
 Sue, Eugene, 150, 200. 
 
458 
 
 THE SECOND EMPIRE 
 
 Sullivan, 438. 
 Swinburne, 260, 298-300. 
 
 Tait, 438. 
 
 Talleyrand, 45, 48, 68. 
 
 Tennyson, 271, 350. 
 
 Th6r6sa, 374. 
 
 Thiers, 33, 113, 115-16, 172, 174, 
 
 201, 213, 307, 337, 370, 387, 414, 
 
 437. 
 Thouvenel, 366. 
 Tocqueville, de, 196. 
 Troohu, 373-4, 420, 424, 432. 
 Trollope, 259. 
 
 Uhkich, 282. 
 Ulundi, 442. 
 
 Vaillant, 186, 233. 
 
 Vasa, Princess, 239. 
 
 Vaudrey, 85-8, 94, 102, 162, 177. 
 
 Verdi, 397. 
 
 Vernet, 33, 152. 
 
 Victor Emmanuel, 278, 281, 308. 
 
 Victoria, Queen, on Revolution of 
 1848, 159 ; on Prince-President, 
 174, 178 ; on coup d'dtat, 221 ; 
 receives Napoleon, 251-54, 267 ; on 
 Napoleon, 253, 256 ; Paris, 255-7 ; 
 Osborne, 267 ; Cherbourg, 267, 271 ; 
 
 on Victor Emmanuel, 278 ; on 
 Italian annexations, 306 ; Schles- 
 wig-Holstein, 352 ; disarmament, 
 404 ; at Chislehurst, 438 ; and 
 Prince Imperial, 442. 
 
 Vieillard, 171. 
 
 Viel Castel, 260 
 
 Vienna, Peace of (1815), 18; (1864), 
 353. 
 
 Villafranoa, Peace of, 286-7. 
 
 Vinoy, 209. 
 
 Viollet-le-Duc, 341. 
 
 Wagnee, 316. 
 
 Wales, Prince of, 266, 350, 376, 439. 
 
 Walewska, Countess, 292. 
 
 Walewski, 262, 292, 311, 368-9. 
 
 Waterloo, 56. 
 
 William I., Emperor, 53, 308, 345, 
 
 364, 376, 411-14, 428, 436. 
 William iv. , King, 68. 
 Wimpfifen, 282, 428. 
 Winterhalter, 259. 
 Wissembourg, 418. 
 Worth, 293. 
 Worth, 419. 
 Wrangel, 252. 
 
 Zola, 313. 
 
 Zumpt, 342. 
 
 Zurich, Peace of, 303.