The Empress Eugénie, then a young wife, and one of the most beautiful women of Europe, lived at the Château. And the Park, though thrown open to the people, was kept trim with jealous care. Roads generously sanded, lawns watered and mown with systematic care, parterres ever bright with flowers, all was marvellously different then from the present day shabbiness.
I seem to see again, even with almost a lifetime’s experience intervening, the vivid scene impressed on the observant and eager eyes of the child. The gay-hued crowds of ladies in all the then elegance of scuttle bonnets and crinolines; the bevies of children, of every class, but all joyous and noisy; the bands of marching youths, buzzing the popular airs of the year on the euphonious Mirliton; the siege of every “kiosk” where the wafers hot from the mould, or the cool lemonade, were dispensed; the swans, stately but voracious, being fed upon the great pond; the bright coloured beribboned nourrices squatting with the nurslings on the circular benches within sound of the musique militaire, and the inevitable giant bearded sapeur in flirtatious attendance; the quite too beautiful officers with tight waists, waxed moustaches and swaying gold epaulets—what not?
Before the great gates, solemnly walking to and fro, or standing picturesquely sentinel, there never wanted a party of veteran grenadiers in their towering brass-fronted bearskins and white cross-belts to produce the desired “Old Guard” effect. Or it might be heavy-moustached troopers, Guides, with sweeping plumes over the huge colback; with pelisses of fur and eagle-embroidered sabretaches, copying, on their side, the grim appearance of Napoleon’s ‹the real one’s› body guard.
The whole place, indeed, was pervaded with the “immense” uniforms of those pretorians: those long service professional soldiers for whose showy maintenance the Imperial Government stinted an otherwise dwindling national army—disastrous army, destined, despite its gallantry, to be so soon decimated, swept away, by the legions of das Volk in Waffen wielded with the ruthless mastery of German generalship!
FORGOTTEN BRILLIANCIES
For such as have only known France since the strictly utilitarian days that followed the great débâcle; days when the notion that any kind of smartness is incompatible with “republican efficiency seems to have become an obsession” it is difficult to realize the gilded magnificence of the Garde Impériale. Still less, perhaps, in these anti-militarist times, the idolatry of the people for its beaux militaires. Of a truth, on a sunny day, they brightened the park walks almost as much as the Geraniums in the great stone urns, or the forbidden golden fruit in the orange tubs!
The authorities were sedulous, especially in such places as St. Cloud, to keep the pleasant side—the pride, the pomp and circumstance—of soldiering in evidence. The happy little town was awakened in the morning, was apprised of noon and again of sundown, by the incredibly joyous “sonneries” of the Lanciers de l’Impératrice, whose trumpeters specially gathered from far and wide, could sound all tuckets and points of war in an admirable harmony of high overtones blended with the noble, grave sounds of the ordinary calls.... Entrancing music to the little boy, in the glycine-clad house of the rue du Château, who would start awake, hearken, and then turn round and go to sleep again in great content. The drums of the garde montante, headed by the olympian tambour-major, sedulously tossing and twirling his cane, daily rattled the window panes as in great pomp it ascended the hill, palace-wards. It never failed to draw the same crowd to the same doorsteps. Estaffettes clattered hourly along the narrow paved streets, on their way to and from Paris; glittering, clinking, full of official importance, and with an eagerness no doubt wholly uncalled for by any existing necessity.
All that colour and bustle and pleasant make-believe of strength and “tradition,” was typical of all one has since learned to associate with that Empire on the high road to ruin. But it had its attractive side for those who had not found it out; and, seen through the prism of distance, a picturesqueness that modern France, so systematically democratized, is scarce like to know again.