It is August, 1840, and from the balcony of the Delesserts’ house a fair-complexioned, golden-haired girl of fourteen looks down on a man escorted by two gendarmes. Dishevelled, unkempt, in his shirtsleeves, the prisoner, who has been fished out of the salt water, passes out of sight, unaware of the child’s wistful looks and the sympathetic glances of her sister and their mother. Perchance he sees Goldenhair wave her handkerchief.
Mme. Delessert’s husband is Préfet of Paris. The ladies on the balcony are the Comtesse de Montijo and her daughters. The man in custody is Prince Louis Napoleon, the derided, but unabashed, hero of the Boulogne “attempt”; and he is two-and-thirty.
The daughters of the Comte and Comtesse de Montijo made their acquaintance with Paris when they were not more than four or five. It was about 1830 or 1831 when the family went to reside there for a while. Prosper Mérimée, whose name can no more be kept out of the history of the Empress than could Mr. Dick suppress the mention of King Charles’s head, was there, and his friend of the British Museum, Dr. Panizzi, was kept informed of the strolls on the boulevards of the little Eugénie, and of her liking, not only for the author of the story of “Carmen,” which Bizet was later to set to music, but for the sweets given to her by Mérimée.
The Montijos seem to have been then in only fairly easy circumstances. Three or four years later their fortunes improved, the head of the family having died.
Eugénie’s education begins at a celebrated convent school, on whose books she figures as Eugénie Palafox, a name used by her for a score of years.
At the Sacré-Cœur, Rue de la Varenne, the little Montijo is supremely happy. Her holidays and those other days when she is allowed “out” she spends with her mother’s friend, the Comtesse de Laborde, at a country house at Passy, where a park runs down to the Seine. Mme. de Laborde has promised Madame mère to make Eugénie’s school life as pleasant as possible, and she fulfils her promise to the letter. The Comtesse de Laborde has three daughters, all well married, all charming mondaines: Mme. Delessert—who, as the wife of the Préfet, is a personage—Mme. Bocher, and Mme. Odiar. Eugénie is in the good graces of this captivating trio. But the lady to whom she is particularly attached is the Comtesse de Nadaillac, daughter of Mme. Delessert, and grand-daughter of the Comtesse de Laborde.
At the age of eleven (in 1837) she makes the vows imposed upon communicants, in the stereotyped phrase, “La fille de la Comtesse de Téba (Montijo) fit sa première communion,” in the chapel of the convent school. Soon—in March, 1839—there comes a hurried departure for Spain, whither her parents had returned a short time previously. Her father has died, and the child’s Parisian “schooling” is over. For some little time before the loss of their father Eugénie and her eldest sister, Francisca, familiarly “Pacca,” had been in the charge, in Paris, of an English governess, Miss Flowers,[17] who accompanied them to Madrid at the time of the Count’s death. Mérimée wrote: “No one would credit the regret I feel at their departure” (from Paris). I will note only in passing that Eugénie’s education was “finished” in this country at a school at Clifton, Bristol.
Having ceased to be a schoolgirl, the Señorita Eugénie de Montijo undergoes a transformation. She is, and for some years will remain, in her teens. At fifteen she is bewitching. In the saddle, what a charming and picturesque figure! Madrid has no such fearless rider. There is no particular evidence that now and then she gallops through the streets riding à califourchon; but legend has it so, and in this case legend may possibly not wholly err. In the forties she is heedless of criticism, perhaps because only her rivals can find it in their hearts to malign her. As yet she is not seen in the hunting-field. She little recks that ten years or so later she will be arousing the undisguised hostility of her sex at the imperial chasses at Compiègne.
The Señorita would hardly be Spanish were she not much in view when all Madrid foregathers at the bull-fights. Like her companions, she has her favourite toreadors, and is lavish of her rewards—gold and flowers. Matadors and picadors do her homage. She is coquette to her little finger-tips. A smile from that sunny face and a word from those rosebud lips are eagerly contended for, and she is not slow in according both. Meanwhile the élégants group themselves around her as thick as bees round the tulips and honeysuckles. In those Southern climes, if anywhere, flirtation is one of the fine arts. The Señorita Eugénie—“Ugenia” in her own language—is not the least ardent disciple of the genus flirt. She coquettes with this Duke and that Duke. He of Ossuna and he of Sesto (Alganices) are rivals. There is yet a third Duke—Alba—over whom she essays to cast a spell; but, alas! the course of true love is diverted—perhaps unconsciously—by Pacca, the beautiful sister, and she it is who becomes Duquesa. Around this episode of unrequited love how many “histories” have been woven, mostly apocryphal! “Ugenia,” some would have us believe, resorts to what she thinks is a phial of poison, and awakes from her torpor to discover—oh, horror!—that she has swallowed a portion of the disgusting, but harmless, contents of a blacking-bottle!
No salon in Madrid was more frequented than the Comtesse de Montijo’s. The daughters were not the only magnets. Madame mère was a woman of esprit, and had a genius for making friends and keeping them. “Theatricals” drew all Madrid to the house. Eugénie was seen in De Musset’s “Caprice,” with the enamoured Duc de Sesto in the cast. The summers—or a portion of them—were passed on the Montijo property at Carabanchel.