Читать книгу The Comedy & Tragedy of the Second Empire - Edward Legge - Страница 5

It is August, 1840, and from the balcony of the Delesserts’ house a fair-complexioned, golden-haired girl of fourteen looks down on a man escorted by two gendarmes. Dishevelled, unkempt, in his shirtsleeves, the prisoner, who has been fished out of the salt water, passes out of sight, unaware of the child’s wistful looks and the sympathetic glances of her sister and their mother. Perchance he sees Goldenhair wave her handkerchief.

Mme. Delessert’s husband is Préfet of Paris. The ladies on the balcony are the Comtesse de Montijo and her daughters. The man in custody is Prince Louis Napoleon, the derided, but unabashed, hero of the Boulogne “attempt”; and he is two-and-thirty.

The daughters of the Comte and Comtesse de Montijo made their acquaintance with Paris when they were not more than four or five. It was about 1830 or 1831 when the family went to reside there for a while. Prosper Mérimée, whose name can no more be kept out of the history of the Empress than could Mr. Dick suppress the mention of King Charles’s head, was there, and his friend of the British Museum, Dr. Panizzi, was kept informed of the strolls on the boulevards of the little Eugénie, and of her liking, not only for the author of the story of “Carmen,” which Bizet was later to set to music, but for the sweets given to her by Mérimée.

The Montijos seem to have been then in only fairly easy circumstances. Three or four years later their fortunes improved, the head of the family having died.

Eugénie’s education begins at a celebrated convent school, on whose books she figures as Eugénie Palafox, a name used by her for a score of years.

At the Sacré-Cœur, Rue de la Varenne, the little Montijo is supremely happy. Her holidays and those other days when she is allowed “out” she spends with her mother’s friend, the Comtesse de Laborde, at a country house at Passy, where a park runs down to the Seine. Mme. de Laborde has promised Madame mère to make Eugénie’s school life as pleasant as possible, and she fulfils her promise to the letter. The Comtesse de Laborde has three daughters, all well married, all charming mondaines: Mme. Delessert—who, as the wife of the Préfet, is a personage—Mme. Bocher, and Mme. Odiar. Eugénie is in the good graces of this captivating trio. But the lady to whom she is particularly attached is the Comtesse de Nadaillac, daughter of Mme. Delessert, and grand-daughter of the Comtesse de Laborde.

At the age of eleven (in 1837) she makes the vows imposed upon communicants, in the stereotyped phrase, “La fille de la Comtesse de Téba (Montijo) fit sa première communion,” in the chapel of the convent school. Soon—in March, 1839—there comes a hurried departure for Spain, whither her parents had returned a short time previously. Her father has died, and the child’s Parisian “schooling” is over. For some little time before the loss of their father Eugénie and her eldest sister, Francisca, familiarly “Pacca,” had been in the charge, in Paris, of an English governess, Miss Flowers,[17] who accompanied them to Madrid at the time of the Count’s death. Mérimée wrote: “No one would credit the regret I feel at their departure” (from Paris). I will note only in passing that Eugénie’s education was “finished” in this country at a school at Clifton, Bristol.

Having ceased to be a schoolgirl, the Señorita Eugénie de Montijo undergoes a transformation. She is, and for some years will remain, in her teens. At fifteen she is bewitching. In the saddle, what a charming and picturesque figure! Madrid has no such fearless rider. There is no particular evidence that now and then she gallops through the streets riding à califourchon; but legend has it so, and in this case legend may possibly not wholly err. In the forties she is heedless of criticism, perhaps because only her rivals can find it in their hearts to malign her. As yet she is not seen in the hunting-field. She little recks that ten years or so later she will be arousing the undisguised hostility of her sex at the imperial chasses at Compiègne.

The Señorita would hardly be Spanish were she not much in view when all Madrid foregathers at the bull-fights. Like her companions, she has her favourite toreadors, and is lavish of her rewards—gold and flowers. Matadors and picadors do her homage. She is coquette to her little finger-tips. A smile from that sunny face and a word from those rosebud lips are eagerly contended for, and she is not slow in according both. Meanwhile the élégants group themselves around her as thick as bees round the tulips and honeysuckles. In those Southern climes, if anywhere, flirtation is one of the fine arts. The Señorita Eugénie—“Ugenia” in her own language—is not the least ardent disciple of the genus flirt. She coquettes with this Duke and that Duke. He of Ossuna and he of Sesto (Alganices) are rivals. There is yet a third Duke—Alba—over whom she essays to cast a spell; but, alas! the course of true love is diverted—perhaps unconsciously—by Pacca, the beautiful sister, and she it is who becomes Duquesa. Around this episode of unrequited love how many “histories” have been woven, mostly apocryphal! “Ugenia,” some would have us believe, resorts to what she thinks is a phial of poison, and awakes from her torpor to discover—oh, horror!—that she has swallowed a portion of the disgusting, but harmless, contents of a blacking-bottle!

No salon in Madrid was more frequented than the Comtesse de Montijo’s. The daughters were not the only magnets. Madame mère was a woman of esprit, and had a genius for making friends and keeping them. “Theatricals” drew all Madrid to the house. Eugénie was seen in De Musset’s “Caprice,” with the enamoured Duc de Sesto in the cast. The summers—or a portion of them—were passed on the Montijo property at Carabanchel.

Every great lady in Madrid has her circle of young and middle-aged men, known as “pollos”—literally, chickens. Among the Comtesse de Montijo’s “pollos,” all more or less smitten by the radiant Señorita Eugénie, was General Espartero’s successful rival, General Narvaly, Duke of Valencia, short, dark, a stern soldier, as supple in the young lady’s hands as the youngest and most impressionable of her “pollos.” A lady well known in social London, the wife of a foreign diplomatist, and gifted with the pen of a ready writer, drew this somewhat caustic portrait of the future Empress when she was the most-discussed personage in Madrid:

Hardly a week passed without some fresh anecdote being circulated of which Eugénie de Montijo was the heroine. She justified curiosity and courted censure by her disregard of conventionalities; and she certainly possessed the Alcibidian temperament which craves for notoriety. She wielded her sceptre of society queen with no light hand, and her favourites of to-day were discarded by to-morrow’s caprice. In her own house she was seen devoting herself for the whole evening to the entertainment of some obscure musician, hanging on his arm, speaking to no one else, and finally dropping the curtains over a window recess to which she had led him; but the following week, if the poor infatuated wretch came confidently to bask in the intoxicating favour that had bewitched him, he was received with a supercilious arching of the lovely eyebrows. This idol could look at him as if he were a total stranger, and glide away from him with the coldest inclination of her head.

The variegated life of the Spanish girl who was destined to become Empress of the French—her life between the ages of fifteen and twenty-six—has never been, and never will be, described in detail. They were “Wanderjähre,” years of travel, visits to modish Continental resorts, and one or two sojourns in England. Once, in the summer of 1851, she and her mother (but not “Pacca”) attended a Court ball at Buckingham Palace—an incident which Queen Victoria may have recalled in one or other of her numerous meetings with the imperial lady, but not recorded by the Queen in her “Leaves” or her “Letters.” The presence of the Spanish ladies among the Queen’s guests was, however, noted in the official list, the compiler of which, or the printers, effectually mangled the names of both. A week later Lord Malmesbury saw them at Cambridge House, Piccadilly, the town residence of Viscount and Viscountess Palmerston, now, and for many years past, the Naval and Military Club. Mlle. de Montijo struck Lord Malmesbury as being “very handsome”; with the “flair” of a modern journalist, he noted her auburn hair and her “beautiful skin and figure.” He would have earned our thanks had he given us the names of the social sponsors of the Montijos in London. It was our Great Exhibition year, and we may be certain that the ladies were among the hundreds of thousands who flocked to Paxton’s huge glass palace in Hyde Park, the exact site of which is probably unknown to all but the fogies of 1911.[18]

A resort which found much favour with the mother and daughter was Eaux-Bonnes, in the Pyrenees. At the hotel honoured by their presence was an observant gentleman who for a full fortnight had the felicity of dining in the company of the fair Spaniards. He was therefore, according to one of his friends, who made attractive “copy” of it for a Belgian paper, able to “coldly study” the younger lady. “C’est une très belle et très jolie femme, qui tiendra fort bien sa place, attendu qu’elle a, comme on dit, le physique de l’emploi.”[19]