Part 16 (1/2)
After the pa.s.sage of this measure it was submitted by another _plebiscite_ to the people. The _plebiscite_ is a universal suffrage vote of yes or no, in answer to some question put by the Government to the nation. The question this time was: Shall the prince president become emperor? There were 7,800,000 ayes, and 224,000 noes.
When the news of this overwhelming success reached the elysee, Louis Napoleon sat so still and unmoved, smoking his cigar, that his cousin, Madame Baiocchi, rus.h.i.+ng up to him, shook him, and exclaimed: ”Is it possible that you are made of stone?”
Having thus secured his elevation by the almost universal consent of Frenchmen, the new emperor's next step was to insure his dynasty by a marriage that might probably give heirs to the throne. He chose the t.i.tle Napoleon III. because the son of the Great Napoleon had been Napoleon II. for a few days after his father's abdication at Fontainebleau in 1814. The next heir to the imperial dignities (Lucien Bonaparte having refused anything of the kind for himself or for his family) was Jerome Napoleon, familiarly called Plon-Plon.
He was the only son of Jerome Bonaparte and the Princess Catherine of Wurtemberg. But Prince Napoleon, though clever, was wilful and eccentric, and made a boast of being a Red Republican; moreover, his father's Baltimore marriage had made his legitimacy more than doubtful,--at any rate, Louis Napoleon was by no means desirous of pa.s.sing on to him the succession to the empire; and being now forty-four years old, he was desirous of marrying as soon as possible.
When a boy, it had been proposed to marry him to his cousin Mathilde, and something like an attachment had sprung up between them; but after his fiasco at Strasburg he was no longer considered an eligible suitor either for Princess Mathilde or another cousin who had been named for him, a princess of Baden. Princess Mathilde was married to the Russian banker, Prince Demidorff; but when Louis Napoleon became prince president, he requested her to preside at the elysee.
The new emperor, or his advisers, looked round at the various marriageable princesses belonging to the smaller courts of Germany.
The sister of that Prince Leopold of Hohenzollern whose selection for the throne of Spain led afterwards to the Franco-Prussian war, was spoken of; but the lady most seriously considered was the Princess Adelade of Hohenlohe. She was daughter of Queen Victoria's half-sister Feodora; and to Queen Victoria and Prince Albert, as heads of the family, the matter was referred. A recent memoir-writer tells us of seeing the queen at Windsor when the matter was under discussion.
The queen and her husband were apparently not averse to the alliance, hesitating only on the grounds of religion and morals; but it is doubtful how far the new emperor went personally in the affair.
His inclination had for some time pointed to the reigning beauty of Paris, Mademoiselle Eugenie de Montijo.
This young lady's grandfather was Captain Fitzpatrick, of a good old Scottish family, which had in past times married with the Stuarts.
Captain Fitzpatrick had been American consul at a port in southern Spain. He had a particularly charming daughter, who made a brilliant Spanish marriage, her husband being the Count de Teba (or Marquis de Montijo, for he bore both t.i.tles). The Montijos were connected with the grandest ducal families in Spain and Portugal, and even with the royal families of those nations.
The Count de Teba died while his two daughters were young, and they were left under the guardians.h.i.+p of their very charming mother.
The elder married the Duke of Alva; the younger became the Empress Eugenie.
Eugenie was for some time at school in England at Clifton. She was described by those who knew her there as a pretty, sprightly little girl, much given to independence, and something of a tom boy,--a character there is reason to think she preserved until it was modified by the exigencies of her position.
Mr. George Ticknor, of Boston, frequently mentioned Madame de Teba to his friends as a singularly charming woman. In 1818 he wrote home to a friend in America:
”I knew Madame de Teba in Madrid, and from what I saw of her there and at Malaga, I do not doubt she is the most cultivated and interesting woman in Spain. Young, beautiful, educated strictly by her mother, a Scotchwoman,--who for this purpose carried her to London and kept her there six or seven years,--possessing extraordinary talents, and giving an air of originality to all she says and does, she unites in a most bewitching manner the Andalusian grace and frankness to a French facility in her manners and a genuine English thoroughness in her knowledge and accomplishments. She knows the chief modern languages well, and feels their different characters, and estimates their literature aright. She has the foreign accomplishments of singing, painting, playing, etc., joined to the natural one of dancing, in a high degree. In conversation she is brilliant and original, yet with all this she is a true Spaniard, and as full of Spanish feelings as she is of talent and culture.”
Was.h.i.+ngton Irving, in 1853, thirty-five years later, writing to his nephew, speaks in equal praise of Madame de Teba.
”I believe I told you,” he says, ”that I knew the grandfather of the empress, old Mr. Fitzpatrick. In 1827 I was in the house of his son-in-law, Count Teba, at Granada, a gallant, intelligent gentleman, much cut up in the wars, having lost an eye and been maimed in a leg and hand. Some years after, in Madrid, I was invited to the house of his widow, Madame de Montijo, one of the leaders of _ton_.
She received me with the warmth and eagerness of an old friend. She claimed me as the friend of her late husband. She subsequently introduced me to the little girls I had known in Granada, _now_ fas.h.i.+onable belles in Madrid.”
In some lines of Walter Savage Landor, Madame de Montijo was addressed as a ”lode-star of her s.e.x.”
The Marquis de Montijo had been an adherent of Joseph Bonaparte while the latter was king of Spain, and his eye had been put out at the battle of Salamanca. He was a liberal in politics, and his house was always open to cultivated men.
Such was the ancestry of the beautiful young lady who, tall, fair, and graceful, with hair like one of t.i.tian's beauties, was travelling with her mother from capital to capital, after the marriage of her sister to the Duke of Alva, and who spent the winters of 1850, 1851, and 1852 in the French capital. Mademoiselle Eugenie had conceived a romantic admiration for the young prince who at Strasburg and Boulogne had been so unfortunate. Her father had been a stanch adherent of Bonaparte, and she is said to have pleaded with her mother at one time to visit the prisoner at Ham and to place her fortune at his disposal.
This circ.u.mstance, when confided to the prince president, disposed him to be interested in the young lady. She and her mother were often at the elysee, at Fontainebleau, and at Compiegne. Mademoiselle de Montijo was a superb horsewoman, and riding was the emperor's especial personal accomplishment. On one occasion they got lost together in the forest at Compiegne, and then society began to make remarks upon their intimacy.
The emperor was indeed most seriously in love with Mademoiselle de Montijo. It is said, on the authority of M. de Goncourt, that in one of their rides he asked her, with strange frankness, if she had ever been in love with any man. She answered with equal frankness, ”I may have had fancies, sire, but I have never forgotten that I was Mademoiselle de Montijo.”[1]
[Footnote 1: Pierre de Lano. La Cour de L'Empereur Napoleon III.]
Such a project of marriage was not approved by the emperor's family, it was not favored by his ministers, and the ladies of his court were all astir.
At a ball given on New Year's Day, 1853, by the emperor at the Tuileries, the wife of a cabinet minister was rude and insulting to Mademoiselle de Montijo. Seeing that she looked troubled, the emperor inquired the cause; and when he knew it, he said quietly: ”To-morrow no one will dare to insult you again.” There is also a story, which seems to rest on good authority, that a few weeks before this, at Compiegne, he had placed a crown of oak-leaves on her head, saying: ”I hope soon to replace it with a better one.”[2]
Like the Empress Josephine, she had had it prophesied to her in her girlhood that she should one day wear a crown.
[Footnote 2: Jerrold, Life of Napoleon III.]