His “Explanation”: Written by Himself.
The whole House was on its feet, threatening, shaking its fists at a man with a waxen face who protested against this last humiliation inflicted on his master. Like the Jews demanding of Pilate that he should deliver Jesus to them, we cried to posterity at the top of our voices: “Crucifige, crucifige eum!”
I do not know which of the two attitudes has left the more painful impression on my mind—that of Conti [the Emperor’s former Secretary], surrounded, almost struck, but meeting these threats with the most magnificent coolness; or that of the seven hundred and fifty representatives of the French nation, raging against a man who for six months had been little more than a corpse. He had been very guilty; but we, in our turn, were very cruel.[114]
The visit of the Emperor and Empress to Queen Victoria and the Prince Consort in 1855 was heralded by the issue of a placard thus conceived:
England’s disgrace. The Real Day of Humiliation.[115] Louis Napoleon, the Murderer, the Oath-Breaker, is coming to England.
Englishmen, do your duty!
The Empress had, we know, complained to Queen Victoria of the bitter attacks rained upon the Emperor by our newspapers, and was scarcely comforted by the Queen’s assurance that the English Press was free and could not be censored.
Bismarck, who, when he was Prussian Minister to France, professed the warmest friendship for Napoleon III., and became a favourite of the Empress and the Court, soon turned against the Emperor, speaking of him slightingly, if not contemptuously, and deprecating Napoleon’s suggestion of a Franco-Prussian alliance.
To Vambéry Napoleon III. was “this thick-set man, with his flabby features and pale, faded eyes.” Vambéry[116] could not discern in the Emperor a trace of the greatness of which he had heard so much. “His pale eyes and artificial speech soon betrayed the adventurer who had been elevated to his exalted position by the inheritance of a great name and the wantonness of the nation.”