An Englishman in Paris: Notes and Recollections

by Albert D. Vandam

In a council held at the Tuileries these conditions were unhesitatingly declined. "That was, if I am not mistaken, on a Saturday," said De Persigny; "and it was taken for granted that everything was settled. On Monday morning the council was hurriedly summoned to the Tuileries, and having to come from a good distance, Walewski arrived when it had been sitting for more than an hour. What had happened meanwhile? Simply this. Don Gutierrez had been informed of the decision of the Emperor's advisers, and Maximilian had been communicated with by telegraph to the same effect. On the Sunday morning the Archduke telegraphed to the Mexican envoy that unless his conditions were subscribed to in toto he should decline the honour. Don Gutierrez, determined not to return without a king, rushed there and then to De Morny's and offered him the crown. The latter immediately accepted, in the event of Maximilian persisting in his refusal. The Emperor was simply frantic with rage, but nothing would move De Morny. The only one who really had any influence over him was 'the other prince of the blood,' meaning Walewski, for, according to him, the real and legitimate Bonapartes counted for nothing. Walewski was telegraphed for, as I told you, early in the morning. When he came he found the council engaged in discussing the means of raising a loan. The Empress begged him to dissuade De Morny from his purpose, telling him all I have told you. Walewski refused to be the first to speak to De Morny. I think that both Walewski and De Morny have heaped injury and insult upon me more than upon any man; I would have obeyed the Empress for the Emperor's sake, but 'the two princes of the blood' only consulted their own dignity. I need not tell you what effect the elevation of De Morny to the throne of Mexico would have produced in Europe, let alone in France. Rather than risk such a thing, the money was found; Bazaine was sent, and that poor fellow, Maximilian, went to his death, because M. Bacciochi had sown dissension between the brother and the cousin of the Emperor about an opera-box. Such is history, my friend."

I repeat, De Persigny was a better man at heart than De Morny, or perhaps than Walewski, though the latter had only fads, and never stooped to the questionable practices of his fellow "prince of the blood" in the race for wealth. The erstwhile sergeant-quartermaster refrained from doing so out of sheer contempt for money-hunters, and from an inborn feeling of honesty. The son of Napoléon I., though illegitimate, felt what was due to the author of his being, and absolutely refused to be mixed up with any commercial transactions. He was never quietly insolent to any one, like the natural son of Hortense; he rarely said either a foolish or a wise thing, but frequently did ill-considered ones, as, for instance, when he wrote a play. "What induced you to do this, monsieur le comte?" said Thiers, on the first night. "It is so difficult to write a play in five acts, and it is so easy not to write a play in five acts." Among his fads was the objection to ladies in the stalls of a theatre. In 1861 he issued an order forbidding their admission to that part of the house, and could only be persuaded with difficulty, and at the eleventh hour, to rescind it. In many respects he was like Philip II. of Spain; he worried about trifles. One day he prevailed upon M. de Boitelle, the Prefect of police, a thoroughly sensible man, to put a stop to the flying of kites, because their tails might get entangled in the telegraph wires, and cause damage to the latter. I happened to meet him on the Boulevards on the very day the edict was promulgated. He felt evidently very proud of the conception, and asked me what I thought of it. I told him the story of "the cow on the rails," according to Stephenson. Napoléon, when he heard of Walewski's reform, sent for Boitelle. "Here is an 'order in council' I want you to publish," he said, as seriously as possible. It was to the effect that "all birds found perching on the wires would be fined, and, in default of payment, imprisoned." Curiously enough, though a man of parts, and naturally intelligent, satire of that kind was lost upon him, for not very long after he prevailed upon M. de Boitelle to revive an obsolete order with regard to the length of the hackney-drivers' whips and the cracking thereof. It was M. Carlier, the predecessor of M. de Maupas, who had originally attempted a similar thing. He was rewarded with a pictorial skit representing him on the point of drowning, while cabby was trying to save him by holding out his whip, which proved too short for the purpose.

Walewski had none of the vivacity of most of the Bonapartes. I knew him a good many years before, and after the establishment of the Second Empire, and have rarely seen him out of temper. I fancy he must have made an admirable ambassador with a good chief at his back; he, himself, I think, had little spirit of initiative, though, like a good many of us, he was fully convinced of the contrary. He was, to use the correct word, frequently dull; nevertheless, it was currently asserted and believed that he was the only man Rachel ever sincerely cared for. "Je comprends cela," said George Sand one day, when the matter was discussed in her presence; "son commerce doit lui reposer l'esprit."

It is worthy of remark that during the reign which succeeded that of Louis-Philippe, the man who wielded the greatest power next to the Emperor was, in almost every respect but one, the mental and moral counterpart of "the citizen king." I am alluding to M. Eugène Rouher, sometimes called the vice-emperor.[54] I knew Eugène Rouher some years before he was thought of as a deputy, let alone as a minister—when, in fact, he was terminating his law courses in the Quartier-Latin; but not even the most inveterate Pumblechook would have dared to advance afterwards that he perceived the germs of his future eminence in him then. He was a good-looking young fellow, in no way distinguished from the rest. He was a not unworthy ornament of "La Chaumière," and did probably as much or as little poring over books as his companions. Still, there could be no doubt as to his natural intelligence, but the dunces in my immediate circle were very few. He was not very well off; but, as I have said elsewhere, the Crœsuses were also rare. At any rate, Eugène Rouher had entirely passed out of my recollection, and when, eleven or twelve years later, I saw his name in the list of Odilon Barrot's administration as Minister of Justice, I had not the remotest idea that it was the Eugène Rouher of my Quartier-Latin days. I am certain that a great many of our former acquaintances were equally ignorant, because, though I met several of them from time to time on the "fashionable side" of the Seine, I do not remember a single one having drawn my attention to him. It was only at one of the presidential receptions at the Élysée, in 1850, that I became aware of the fact. He came up to me and held out his hand. "Il me semble, monsieur, que nous nous sommes déjà rencontrés au Quartier-Latin," he said. Even then I was in the dark with regard to the position he was fast assuming; but the Prince-President himself enlightened me to a great extent in the course of the evening. "It appears that you and Rouher are old acquaintances," he said in English; and on my nodding in the affirmative, he added, "If you were a Frenchman, and inclined to go in for politics, or even an Englishman in need of patronage or influence, I would advise you to stick to him, for he is a very remarkable man, and I fancy we shall hear a good deal of him within the next few years." I may, therefore, say without exaggeration that I was one of the first who had a trustworthy tip with regard to a comparatively "dark political horse," and from a tipster in whom by that time I was inclined to believe.

Though I was neither "a Frenchman inclined to go in for politics," nor "even an Englishman in need of patronage or influence," my curiosity had been aroused; for, I repeat, at the time of our first acquaintance I had considered Eugène Rouher a fairly intelligent young fellow; but his intelligence had not struck me as likely to make a mark, at any rate so soon, seeing that he was considerably below forty when I met him at the Élysée. It is idle to assert, as the republicans have done since, that he gained his position by abandoning the political professions to which he owed his start in public life. Among the nine hundred deputies of the Second Republic, there were at least a hundred intelligent so-called republicans ready and willing to do the same with the prospect of a far less signal reward than fell eventually to Rouher's lot.

My curiosity was doomed to remain unsatisfied until two or three years later, when Rouher had already become a fixture in the political organization of the Empire. It was De Morny himself who gave me the particulars of Rouher's beginnings, and I have no reason to suppose that he painted them and the man in deliberately glowing colours, albeit that in one important crisis they acted in concert. Clermont-Ferrand was only about twelve miles from Riom, Rouher's native town. I have already remarked that De Morny, at the time he met with his brother for the first time, was at the head of an important industrial establishment. It was at the former place; De Morny, therefore, was in a position to know.

Eugène Rouher, it appears, like a good many men who have risen to political eminence, belonged to what, for want of a better term, I may call the rural bourgeoisie—that is, the frugal, thrifty, hard-headed, small landowner, tilling his own land, honest in the main, ever on the alert to increase his own property by a timely bargain, with an intense love of the soil, with a kind of semi-Voltairean contempt for the clergy, an ingrained respect largely admixed with fear for "the man of the law," to which profession he often brings up his son in order to have what he likes most—litigation—for nothing. Rouher's grandfather was a man of that stamp; he made an attorney of his son, and the latter established himself in the Rue Desaix, in a small, one-storied, uninviting-looking tenement, where, in the year 1814, Eugène Rouher was born.[55] Rouher's father was not very prosperous, yet he managed to send both his sons to Paris to study law. The elder son, much older than the future minister, had succeeded in getting a very good practice at the Riom bar, but he died a short time before Eugène returned from Paris, leaving a widow and a son, who, of course, was too young to take his father's place. The young barrister, therefore, stepped into a capital ready-made practice, and being exceedingly amiable, bright, hard-working, and essentially honest, soon made a host of friends.

"I have frequently found myself opposed to Rouher," said De Morny; "but his unswerving loyalty to the Empire and the Emperor is beyond question. I should not wonder but what he died poor.[56]

"As you know, Eugène Rouher was really very handsome. Mdlle. Conchon—that is Madame Rouher's maiden name—thought him the handsomest man in the world. True, her world did not extend beyond a few miles from Clermont-Ferrand; but I fancy she might have gone further and fared worse. You know old Conchon, and the pride he takes in his son-in-law. Well, he would not hear of the marriage at first. Conchon was a character in those days. Though he had but a poor practice at the Clermont bar, he was clever; and if he had gone to Paris as a journalist, instead of vegetating down there, I am sure he would have made his way. He was very fond of his classics—of Horace and Tibullus above all—and turned out some pretty Anacreontic verses for the local 'caveau;' for Clermont, like every other provincial centre, prided itself on its 'caveau.'[57]

"A time came, however, when Conchon's fortunes took a turn for the better. You can form no idea of the political ignorance that prevailed in the provinces even as late as the reign of Louis-Philippe. Any measure advocated or promulgated by the Government was sure to be received with suspicion by the populations as affecting their liberties, and, what was of still greater consequence to them, their property. The First Republic had given them license to despoil others; any subsequent measure of the monarchies was looked upon by them as an attempt at reprisal. In 1842 a general census was ordered. You may remember the hostility it provoked in Paris; it was nothing to its effect in the agricultural and wine-growing centres. The Republican wire-pullers spread the report that the census meant nothing but the thin end of the wedge of a bill for the duties upon wine to be paid by the grower. There was a terrible row in Clermont-Ferrand and the neighbourhood; the 'Marseillaise' had to make way for the still more revolutionary 'Ça-ira.' Conchon was maire of Clermont-Ferrand, and he who was as innocent of all this as a new-born babe, had his house burned over his head. The Government argued that if the mob had burned the maire's dwelling in preference to that of the prefect, it was because the former was a more influential personage than the latter; for there could be no other reason for their giving him the 'Legion of Honour,' and appointing him to a puisne judgeship on the bench of Riom, seeing that he had neither made an heroic defence of his property, nor endeavoured to carry out the provisions of the census bill by armed force. In fact, the latter step would have been an impossibility on Conchon's part. You and I know well enough how difficult it is to make Frenchmen hold their tongues by means of troops; to endeavour to make them speak—in distinction to yelling—by similar means is altogether out of the question. You cannot take every head of a family, even in a comparatively small town like Clermont-Ferrand, and put him between two gendarmes to make him tell you his name, his age, and those of his family. I fancy, moreover, that Conchon was not at Clermont at all when the mob made a bonfire of his dwelling; it was on a Sunday, and he had probably gone into the country. At any rate, as I told you, they gave him the cross and a judgeship. It never rains but it pours. Contrary to the ordinary principles of French mobs of hating a man in proportion to his standing well with the Government, they started a subscription to indemnify Conchon for the loss of his house, which subscription amounted to a hundred thousand francs.