Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Read Online Free Page A

1838 he and Maria Manuela took them to a production at the Comédie-Française of Corneille’s Horace , in which Camille’s role was played by the sixteen-year-old Rachel (who was to become one of the century’s greatest classical actresses). He brought Rachel to some of Maria Manuela’s receptions, where she thrilled everybody with recitations from Racine. Eugenia was dazzled, announcing that when she grew up, she too would be an actress.
    ‘Mr Mérimée’ also became a trusted ally of their governess, the dismal Flowers, calming her down after the girl’s unending attempts to run away and roam the streets of Paris. On one occasion, inspired by the nuns’ teaching on the need to be kind to outcasts, the two children walked after a hearse because the sole mourners were its coachman and two mutes – ‘not a wreath, not a single lily, not even a dog’, recalled Eugenia. They followed it all the way to the Père Lachaise cemetery, where they attended the lonely funeral.
    Among Mérimée’s outings with the children was a walk to see the recently completed Arc de Triomphe at the end of the Champs Elysées, on which was inscribed a roll-call of the emperor’s victories, while in 1836 he introduced their mother to a fanatical Bonapartist, a shy, burly man with a round face fringed with thick black whiskers. This was the novelist Henri Beyle, better remembered as ‘Stendhal’. Painfully aware that he had not had the success he deserved, the novelist liked the handsome Spanish countess who talked about his books to him. He began to call on her every Thursday evening.
    He told the girls about his hero the emperor, who on one glorious occasion had seized him by the lapel and actually spoken to him. Despite having nearly died on the retreat from Moscow – surviving on a lump of tallow – he thought Napoleon’s return from Elba ‘the most romantic and beautiful enterprise of modern times’, and when it was dangerous to do so had dedicated a book to ‘His Majesty Napoleon the Great, Emperor of the French, detained on the island of St Helena’. Convinced that Spanish blood flowed in his own veins, he felt he had found a worthy audience in these children from Spain.

    ‘He came in the evening and sat us on his knee to tell us about Napoleon’s campaigns’, Eugenia remembered. ‘We couldn’t eat our dinner, we were so eager to hear. Every time the bell rang, we ran to the door. Finally we brought him in triumphantly, each one holding him by the hand, and sat him in his armchair next to the fire. We wouldn’t even let him draw breath, reminding him of which of our Emperor’s victories he had told us about last time, since we’d been thinking about it all week, waiting impatiently for the magician who knew how to bring Napoleon back to life.’ Part of the magic came from his treating the girls as grown-ups. ‘We wept, we groaned, we went crazy’, recalled Eugenia. Sometimes their mother told the girls to stop bothering ‘Monsieur Beyle’ with their questions, but he encouraged them. Eugenia never forgot their evenings with Stendhal. In 1840 she would write from Spain to tell him how pleased she was that the emperor’s body was being brought back to France for reburial at the Invalides.
    Another friend to whom Mérimée introduced Maria Manuela was his mistress’s husband, Gabriel Delessert, the Prefect of Police. Delessert sent his daughter Cécile to Colonel Amoros’s gymnasium where she became Eugenia’s best friend. In November 1836 Mme Delessert took Cécile and the two Montijo girls to catch a glimpse of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the emperor’s nephew, when he was imprisoned in the Conciergerie after a farcical attempt to mount a coup d’état at Strasbourg. This was the first time that Eugenia saw her future husband, shortly to be deported to the United States. No doubt she was disappointed, as he did not look in the least like his uncle. Nevertheless, everything was conspiring to make Eugenia a