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

dedicated Bonapartist. Her father’s example was almost enough to do so, while Stendhal completed the process. In her words, ‘He gave us his fanaticism.’
    Late in 1839, Don Cipriano’s doctor sent an urgent message from Madrid. He was dying, unlikely to last long. A coach journey across the Pyrenees in midwinter might give the girls pneumonia so, never worried about her own iron health, Maria left them with Miss Flowers and hurried back to Spain. She did not tell Paca or Eugenia how ill their father was – perhaps she did not even realise it herself. Travelling on the fastest coaches available, it took her ten days to reach Madrid and on arrival she found him beyond recovery. He died on 15 March.
    Meanwhile, the girls thoroughly enjoyed their mother’s absence. The normally gentle Paca became fiendish, tormenting the spineless Flowers so dreadfully that the latter appealed to ‘Mr Mérimée’ for help. He seems to have restored order, giving Paca a good scolding.
    Mérimée guessed that Maria Manuela would stay in Spain. He wrote, ‘I have been so fond of those children that I simply can’t get used to the idea of not seeing them again for such a long time. They are leaving at a time in a woman’s life when a few months can change them completely, and I know I’m going to lose them. If one parts from a friend like you, one is fairly sure of finding her again one day, just as she was, but instead of our two little friends, I’m afraid that I shall meet two prim and haughty young ladies who have quite forgotten me.’
    Stendhal, too, was depressed at the departure of the girls, whom he had not seen for several months as he was busy writing. Wondering how to give them a really exciting account of the battle of Waterloo, he had suddenly become inspired, producing his greatest novel, La Chartreuse de Parme . ‘Monsieur Beyle has disappeared,’ Eugenia had reported indignantly to Don Cipriano early in November. ‘He’s told the porter where he lives to say he’s gone shooting if anyone asks for him.’ He dedicated chapter three of La Chartreuse to them, in a cryptic footnote – the letters ‘ P y E ’ – but never saw them again, dying before they returned to France.
    As the weather had improved, Doña Maria Manuela wrote to Miss Flowers, telling her to bring her daughters to Madrid. She did not say that Don Cipriano had died. The three left Paris on 17 March. En route , snow blocked the road over the Pyrenees, so that they were held up for nearly a week on the frontier, at Oloron Sainte-Marie beneath the mountains. When they reached Madrid, the children were at last told that their father was dead. Paca collapsed in hysterics. Without a tear or a word, Eugenia went upstairs and shut herself in her room for two days.
    S PAIN
    The next few years transformed Doña Eugenia. If a Parisian childhood had given her a lasting command of French and a love of France, now she developed traits traditionally regarded as Spanish – a harsh pride and a rigid sense of honour, an elaborate courtesy, a boundless generosity and a deep religious faith, together with an incapacity for moderation. ‘She became used to living inside a world she had created for herself’, says Lucien Daudet, who knew her when she was an old lady. ‘She steeled her soul, that Spanish soul, toughening it ruthlessly, ignoring human weakness and despising compromise, to such a degree that she became unyielding and unconquerable in her determination, blindly, unswervingly straightforward.’
    Don Cipriano had left her mother very rich indeed, with an income equivalent to £20,000 a year in contemporary English money and those two fine houses at Madrid, Casa Ariza and Carabanchel. Extravagant and ambitious, no longer held in check by an austere husband, Doña Maria Manuela began to entertain lavishly, her receptions becoming a popular feature of Madrileño social life. Eager to obtain a high appointment at court, she ran after influential statesmen.