Eugénie: The Empress & her Empire Read online

  Soon after Eugenia’s birth the restrictions of house arrest came close to ruining Cipriano. Worn out by vice – and probably syphilis – his elder brother Don Eugenio, Count of Montijo, had married a prostitute, installing her in the Montijo Palace at Madrid, the Casa Ariza in the Plazuela del Angel. The lady then announced she was pregnant. Since Eugenio was by now paralysed, this was clearly a plot to steal his fortune. It was vital for Cipriano or his wife to visit Madrid, but the police refused to allow them.

  Hearing that King Ferdinand would be at a ball at Valladolid, Maria Manuela decided to attend, knowing that as the wife of a Spanish grandee she had the right to dance in the same quadrille as the king. Ferdinand asked for the good-looking countess to be presented and she made such an impression that he gave her leave to visit Madrid. Here she found what she had suspected: her sister-in-law had brought a baby boy into Casa Ariza, intending to pass him off as the Count of Montijo’s son. Having thought Maria Manuela was imprisoned in Granada, when confronted by her the woman collapsed, admitting that she had never been pregnant and claiming she had merely wanted to adopt a child.

  Liberal politics came into vogue in Spain, however, after Ferdinand’s fourth marriage in 1829 to Maria Cristina of Naples. The king and his new queen hated the heir to the throne, his brother Don Carlos, and when Maria Cristina gave birth to a daughter, the king decided to abolish the Salic Law (introduced from France) that prevented women from succeeding to the throne. As Don Carlos was the white hope of the reactionaries (henceforward known as Carlists), the Liberals warmly supported its abolition and Ferdinand appointed Liberal ministers.

  Cipriano was freed from arrest in 1830, moving to a larger house on Granada’s Calle del Sordo and making frequent visits to his estate at Teba nearby. Eugenia and her sister Paca rode with him as soon as they could manage their ponies. They also visited Madrid, staying at Casa Ariza or at Casa de Miranda in the country outside, a much-loved house with beautiful gardens that had belonged to the Guzmán since the fifteenth century. Maria Manuela began to entertain at the Calle del Sordo. Among her guests was Washington Irving, living in the ruined Alhambra to write his book about the palace, who told stories to her daughters. Another was a young French writer whom Don Cipriano met on the stagecoach between Granada and Madrid, Prosper Mérimée, the future author of Carmen, who was fascinated by Spain. Long after, he reminded her of the ‘beautiful tales’ she had told him about Andalusia.

  Meanwhile, Cipriano made his children wear the same linen dresses winter and summer, and would not buy them silk stockings for parties. Nor would he keep a carriage, making them go everywhere by pony. It did them no harm – a sketch shows two tough, sturdy little girls. Eugenia adored her father, who shared her colouring (white skin, pale face, red hair and blue eyes) and never forgot her rides with him to Teba. Cipriano talked a good deal to her, especially about his hero Napoleon. He may even have spoken of his pleasure at the news that Charles X of France had been overthrown and replaced by Louis-Philippe.

  Ferdinand VII died in 1833, bequeathing Spain a two-year-old Isabella II and civil war. Don Carlos soon raised his standard, supported by every reactionary and true son of the Church – there were risings in the Basque country, Navarre, Catalonia and Valencia. Outside the cities the Carlists made alarming progress, the widowed queen proving a disastrous regent. Don Cipriano strongly supported Isabella’s cause, but Maria Manuela had a sneaking sympathy for ‘Carlos V’ – because at first his troops appeared to be winning.

  Cipriano’s brother died the year after, on 16 July. In the Spanish way the house was draped in black with the coffin left open for a last farewell. On seeing her dead uncle’s face, Eugenia tried to jump out of a window, but next day she saw something even more frightening. For some time a Carlist army had been marching on Madrid, preceded by reports of massacre. Worse still, hundreds of men and women were dying from cholera, which killed within twenty-four hours – there were rumours that Franciscan friars, who were Carlist sympathisers, had poisoned the wells. On 17 July shouting was heard in the small square outside Casa Ariza and Eugenia opened one of the closed blinds to see what the noise was about. Screaming and struggling, a brown-robed friar was being dragged out of the church opposite, which had been set on fire – knives flashed, then they were kicking a dead body.

  Don Cipriano became Count of Montijo, inheriting great estates. The prostitute countess was pensioned off, Maria Manuela adopting the baby, and the family were free to move into Casa Ariza. Yet Madrid was too unsafe. Eighty priests had been murdered during the riot in which Eugenia saw the friar knifed, while people were still dying from cholera. Cipriano decided that his wife should take the girls to Paris. He himself would stay behind.

  It would not be an easy journey. The Saragossa road was blocked by Carlist guerillas while towns on the road up the coast would not admit travellers from Madrid for fear of cholera. But among Maria Manuela’s friends was a famous bullfighter, Francisco Sevilla, who was due to fight at Barcelona. He refused to enter the ring there unless they let the Countess of Montijo pass through the city and helped her reach the frontier. The authorities gave in – postponing Francisco’s corrida would mean a riot. She and her children set out on 18 July, without waiting for Don Eugenio’s funeral, travelling in a slow, mule-drawn coach.

  During the last two days Eugenia, only eight, had seen a dead man’s face for the first time and another man murdered. She and her sister sensed their mother’s anxiety, but with the bullfighter’s help everything went off smoothly and they reached France on 29 July. She wrote to her father, ‘None of us is dead, which is what really matters.’ After a short stop at Perpignan, they went to Toulouse where they spent several nights, then on to Paris, riding in one of the unwieldy public diligences that trundled along the new, straight, Napoleonic roads, spending each night at an inn.

  The Paris at which they arrived was that of Balzac, Alexandre Dumas and Victor Hugo, of Chopin and Berlioz, an untidy city of narrow, winding old streets with about a million inhabitants. Many of today’s landmarks were there – the Place de la Concorde, the Madeleine, the Palais de Luxembourg, the Bourse, the rue de Rivoli, the column of melted cannon in the Place Vendôme. Already, buses ran regularly, crowded in the rush hour and stinking of cigar smoke inside, while the main streets were gaslit. As always, it was cheerful, with well-attended theatres and wonderful restaurants.

  Yet the Orleanist monarchy, established four years earlier, was undeniably dull. So were the policies of its ministers such as M. Guizot, to whose clarion call, ‘Enrichissez-vous!’, fellow bourgeois were responding by creating the hellish world of Les Misérables for French workers while making their own fortunes. The régime’s drabness also owed a good deal to King Louis-Philippe, who made a point of walking through Paris in a top hat and with an umbrella, pretending he belonged to the bourgeoisie. He forbade gentlemen to wear court dress or knee-breeches at the Tuileries while, en bon bourgeois, he carved a joint of meat when the royal family dined together. The only colourful note was the red of the troops’ trousers and kepis.

  Doña Maria Manuela sent her girls to the most fashionable school in Paris, the Convent of the Sacré Coeur in the rue de Varennes, whose pupils came mainly from the aristocratic Faubourg Saint-Germain. Mornings were spent in not too demanding lessons; afternoons in learning the manners of a lady and how to help the poor; evenings in prayer and reading the lives of the saints. It was a very limited education, but at least Eugenia was taught to write proper French while the nuns instilled in her a compassionate Catholicism that stayed with her for the rest of her life.

  Don Cipriano joined them in the summer of 1835. If he had become a rich man, he was as austere as ever: once again, Eugenia and Paca could only wear linen dresses and cotton stockings, and were not allowed to carry umbrellas or go for carriage rides. He had plenty to tell them about Paris, no doubt showing them the site of the battery at Montmartre where in 1814 he had given the last order for cannon to fire in defence of the Empero
r Napoleon. Perhaps, too, he told them how after Waterloo the emperor’s troops had hidden him in their barracks from the Bourbon police.

  He made the girls read the Mémorial de Sainte-Hélène. A brilliant piece of propaganda from the grave, this was a book that cast an extraordinary spell over their generation. ‘I have given France and Europe new ideas that will never be forgotten’, claimed Napoleon, boasting ‘My enemies will find it hard to make me disappear.’

  By the mid-1830s Napoleon’s legend had become a cult. ‘Toujours lui. Lui partout’, sang Victor Hugo. He dominated the memoirs of every great man and painters vied at producing Napoleonic battle scenes, while there were portraits, busts or prints of him in countless drawing-rooms. Hoping to attract a few rays of reflected glory for his own lacklustre régime, Louis-Philippe restored the emperor’s statue to the top of the column in the Place Vendôme and ordered the completion of the Arc de Triomphe.

  In November 1835 Cipriano, who was Senator for Badajoz, returned to Spain where the Liberals had split into two squabbling factions. The confiscation of Church lands was outraging Catholics and the Carlists were far from beaten. It would have been madness to bring his family home. Maria Manuela told a friend that if the Carlists won they would certainly shoot her husband.

  Eighteen months later, she and her daughters crossed the Channel, landing in the England of The Pickwick Papers. She wanted them to learn English – they had had an English governess in Paris, Miss Cole – so they were sent to a boarding school in the recently built watering place of Clifton, a small, Regency town overlooking the River Avon near Bristol. Eugenia was miserable. The English girls called her ‘Carrots’ because of her red hair; and she tried to change the colour with a lead comb. She wrote to her father, however, that she would be his interpreter if he came to England. With a little Hindu friend, she decided to run away to India, the two eleven-year-olds sneaking down to the Bristol quayside and clambering on board a ship, but luckily a mistress saw them.

  After only a few weeks Maria Manuela decided that a governess could teach them English and in August they returned to Paris, accompanied by a Miss Flowers. A timid young woman, she had difficulty controlling her charges – when she tried to make Eugenia rise at seven, her pupil would hold out five fingers from under the blankets, meaning another five minutes in bed, and when they had passed would hold out five more. The girls went back to the Sacré Coeur. On their father’s instructions, they also attended a physical training school, run on Pestalozzi methods by a Spaniard, Colonel Amoros, who like Cipriano had fought for Napoleon. This was probably the first strenuous exercise that Eugénie had ever taken, apart from riding her ponies, and she enjoyed it.

  Don Cipriano reappeared in Paris in autumn 1837. The war still dragged on in northern Spain, but the enemy’s best general had died and they had failed to capture any of the major cities. Ostensibly for reasons of health, his visit may have been because he feared that his marriage was in danger. His wife had more or less stopped writing to him, and he knew she was entertaining lavishly. Although they lived together until his departure in January 1838, afterwards Maria Manuela sent him very few letters.

  In a report of autumn 1838 Colonel Amoros tells Eugenia’s parents that their daughter enjoys physical exercise, that her character is ‘good, generous and firm’ and her temperament ‘sanguine and nervous’. This fits with what we know from other sources. She was very highly strung, almost hyperactive, never able to keep still or stop talking, even during meals, in an age when children were not supposed to speak unless spoken to, often having long conversations with herself, and obsessively fond of her father – one biographer comments that her letters to him sound like ‘an impatient woman in love’. When only nine, she wrote, ‘I’m so looking forward to your coming here that I think you’re going to arrive every day, although it’s three weeks since I asked you if you were coming soon.’ In other letters she says, ‘Dear Papa, I want to throw my arms around you’; ‘Dear Papa, when are you coming, my heart is sighing for you?’

  Sometimes she seems very grown up. ‘It’s just not possible to live in Paris any more as they’re always trying to kill the king’, she complains early in 1837. ‘Yesterday the gas blew up, breaking lots of windows, and we were told it happened because people had set light to it. What was so funny was how all the soldiers came running with their guns, afraid that it was a revolution.’ This is written by a girl not yet twelve, who in the same letter tells her father that she is looking forward to reading Robinson Crusoe and The Swiss Family Robinson. She also mentions Napoleon, reminding Cipriano he has told her to read a book about Napoleon, and that what happened to him on St Helena made her cry.

  Meanwhile, Doña Maria Manuela was meeting as many of the great as possible, including Legitimist diehards such as the Duc de Richelieu and Orleanist leaders like the Duc de Broglie, and also a young Bonaparte, Princesse Mathilde. Nor did she neglect literary lions, renewing her acquaintance with Prosper Mérimée, by now the author of several successful books and recently appointed Inspector General of Historic Monuments. A trim, birdlike man, very well dressed, with black hair starting to go white, a high forehead and a nose that enemies called ‘snout-like’, if not a grandee he had polished manners and a marvellous sense of humour. Lonely despite his constant party-going, he was grateful for her friendship, writing regularly to her for the rest of his life, while she valued someone so scholarly and amusing, who knew everyone worth knowing. It is unlikely that he slept with her, however – he told Stendhal, his closest male friend, that the countess was definitely not his mistress.

  Mérimée played games with Maria Manuela’s daughters, took them for walks – buying cream cakes – and even to shooting galleries where they learned to use pistols. He admired Eugenia’s high spirits, calling her ‘a lioness with a flowing mane’ (une lionne à tous crins), referring to the red hair that still embarrassed her. He helped them with their homework – they were day girls at the Sacré Coeur, not boarders – and improved their rather Spanish French. It was his idea that they should make a first visit to the theatre and in September 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 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.’