An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections

by Albert D. Vandam

I did not meet with Louis-Napoléon until he was a candidate for the presidency of the Second Republic, and while he was staying at the Hôtel du Rhin in the Place Vendôme. Of course, I had heard a great deal about him, but my informants, to a man, were English. While the latter were almost unanimous in predicting Louis-Napoléon's eventual advent to the throne, the French, though in no way denying the influence of the Napoleonic legend, were apt to shrug their shoulders more or less contemptuously at the pretensions of Hortense's son; for few ever designated him by any other name, until later on, when the nickname of "Badinguet" began to be on every one's lips. Consequently, I was anxious to catch a glimpse of him; but before noting the impressions produced by that first meeting, I will devote a few lines to the origin of that celebrated sobriquet.

Personally, I never heard it in connection with Louis-Napoléon until his betrothal to Mdlle. Eugénie de Montijo became common "talk;" but I had heard and seen it in print a good many years before, and even as late as '48. There was, however, not the slightest attempt at that time to couple it with the person of the future Emperor. Three solutions have made the round of the papers at various times: (1) that it was the name of the stonemason or bricklayer who lent Louis-Napoléon his clothes to facilitate his escape from Ham in June, 1845; (2) that it was the name of the soldier who was wounded by the Prince on the 5th of August, 1840, at Boulogne, when the latter fired on Captain Col-Puygellier; (3) that about the latter end of the forties a pipe-manufacturer introduced a pipe, the head of which resembled that of Louis-Napoléon, and that the pipemaker's name was Badinguet.

The latter solution may be dismissed at once as utterly without foundation. With regard to that having reference to the stonemason, no stonemason lent Louis-Napoléon his clothes. The disguise was provided by Dr. Conneau from a source which has never been revealed. There was, moreover, no stonemason of the name of Badinguet at Ham, and, when Louis-Napoléon crossed the drawbridge of the castle, his face partially hidden by a board he was carrying on his shoulder, a workman, who mistook him for one of his mates, exclaimed, "Hullo, there goes Bertoux." Bertoux, not Badinguet.

The name of the soldier wounded by Louis-Napoléon was Geoffroy; he was a grenadier, decorated on the battle-field; and shortly after Napoléon's accession to the throne, he granted him a pension. There can be no possible mistake about the name, seeing that it was attested at the trial subsequent to the fiasco before the Court of Peers.

The real fact is this: Gavarni, like Balzac, invented many names, suggested in many instances by those of their friends and acquaintances, or sometimes merely altered from those they had seen on signboards. The great caricaturist had a friend in the Département des Landes named Badingo; about '38 he began his sketches of students and their companions ("Étudiants et Étudiantes"), and in one of them a medical student shows his lady-love an articulated skeleton.

"Look at this," says the former; "this is Eugénie, the former sweetheart of Badinguet—that tall, fair girl who was so fond of meringues. He has had her mounted for thirty-six francs."

The connection is very obvious; it only wanted one single wag to remember the skit when Napoléon became engaged to Eugénie de Montijo. He set the ball rolling, and the rest followed as a matter of course.

At the same time, Gavarni had not been half as original, as he imagined, in the invention of the name. Badinguet was a character in a one-act farce entitled "Le Mobilier de Rosine," played for the first time in 1828, at the Théâtre Montansier; and there is a piece of an earlier date even, in which Grassot played a character by the name of Badinguet. In 1848, there was a kind of Jules Vernesque piece at the Porte Saint-Martin, in which Badinguet, a Parisian shopkeeper, starts with his wife Euphémie for some distant island.

To return to Louis-Napoléon at the Hôtel du Rhin, and my first glimpse of him. I must own that I was disappointed with it. Though I had not the slightest ground for expecting to see a fine man, I did not expect to see so utterly an insignificant one, and badly dressed in the bargain. On the evening in question, he wore a brown coat of a peculiar colour, a green plush waistcoat, and a pair of yellowish trousers, the like of which I have never seen on the legs of any one off the stage. And yet Lord Normanby, and a good many more who have said that he looked every inch a king, were not altogether wrong. There was a certain gracefulness about him which owed absolutely nothing either to his tailor, his barber, or his bootmaker. "The gracefulness of awkwardness" sounds remarkably like an Irish bull, yet I can find no other term to describe his gait and carriage. Louis-Napoléon's legs seemed to have been an afterthought of his Creator—they were too short for his body, and his head appeared constantly bent down, to supervise their motion; consequently, their owner was always at a disadvantage when compelled to make use of them. But when standing still, or on horseback, there was an indescribable something about the man which at once commanded attention. I am not overlooking the fact that, on the occasion of our first meeting, my curiosity had been aroused; but I doubt whether any one, endowed with the smallest power of observation, though utterly ignorant with regard to his previous history, and equally sceptical with regard to his future destiny, could have been in his company for any length of time without being struck with his appearance.

When I entered the apartment on the evening in question, Louis-Napoléon was leaning in his favourite attitude against the mantelpiece, smoking the scarcely ever absent cigarette, and pulling at the heavy brown moustache, the ends of which in those days were not waxed into points as they were later on. There was not the remotest likeness to any portrait of the Bonaparte family I had ever seen. He wore his thin, lank hair much longer than he did afterwards. The most startling features were decidedly the aquiline nose and the eyes; the latter, of a greyish-blue, were comparatively small and somewhat almond-shaped, but, except at rare intervals, there was an impenetrable look, which made it exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to read their owner's thoughts by them. If they were "the windows of his soul," their blinds were constantly down. The "I am pleased to see you, sir," with which he welcomed me, holding out his hand at the same time, was the English of an educated German who had taken great pains to get the right accent and pronunciation, without, however, completely succeeding; and when I heard him speak French, I detected at once his constant struggle with the same difficulties. The struggle lasted till the very end of his life, though, by dint of speaking very slowly, he overcame them to a marvellous extent. But the moment he became in any way excited, the f's and the t's and the p's were always trying to oust the v's, the d's and the b's from their newly-acquired positions, and often gained a momentary victory. There is an amusing story to that effect, in connection with Napoléon's first interview with Bismarck. I will not vouch for its truth, but, on the face of it, it sounds blunt enough to be genuine. The Emperor was complimenting the German statesman on his French.