On the day of the departure from St. Cloud of the Emperor and the Prince Imperial for “the front” (July 28) gloom prevailed at the château. “One would believe there was a coffin in the house,” said a lackey. But the aides-de-camp who were accompanying the Emperor were in boisterous spirits. They were inclined to say, as Pandore said to his brigadier, “Majesté [Brigadier], vous avez raison.”[133] The Emperor wore the uniform of a General of Division de petite tenue; the Prince Imperial that of a Sous-Lieutenant of Voltigeurs of the Guard. As the boy strolled about, taking farewell of everybody—his pretty cousins, the Empress’s nieces, daughters of the Duc and Duchesse d’Albe, were there—he tapped the scabbard of his sword and gave himself airs, to the delight of the admiring group. Tears were in his mother’s eyes when, as the train moved out of the special station, she exclaimed, “Do your duty, Louis!” “We shall all do it,” answered the Emperor; and to the Prime Minister he shouted, “Ollivier! Je compte sur vous!” It was their last meeting.
As the imperial party left the château on their way to the station there was a shout of “À Berlin!” “Don’t say that,” exclaimed the Emperor reproachfully; “the war will be a very long one, in any case.” And one remembers that, a few days before, when the streets of Paris were paraded daily and nightly by crowds yelling “To Berlin!” the Emperor had written to the Duc de Gramont, “Enthusiasm is a fine thing, but sometimes very ridiculous.” If the Empress had illusions, her consort had none.
We must take it, however, that he had allowed himself to be, I will not say actually deluded, but, to a certain extent, led away by General Frossard, the Prince Imperial’s inflexible “governor”—a man of many “plans.” Plan No. 1 was to “take” Saarbrücken, and five days after the Emperor left St. Cloud Saarbrücken was duly “taken,” Napoleon III. assisting (was he not Commander-in-Chief?), and the Prince Imperial being “baptized” by shells and bullets.
Frossard (we are told by M. Émile Ollivier[134]) was to cross the Saar on August 2 at daybreak, and take possession of Saarbrücken, supported by portions of the 2nd and 3rd corps d’armées, while the 4th corps watched the débouchées of Saarlouis. Bazaine was to command three corps destined to co-operate in the scheme. As the event proved, Bazaine was against the occupation of Saarbrücken, and “thus revealed the fatal inertia which lost himself, the army, and France.”
Even thus early the “hauts chefs,” to fill up time, had sent for their wives. “The camp was full of them.” Prince Napoleon wrote in his notes, “Trop de femmes d’officiers.”[135]
M. Émile Ollivier’s exposure of the “désillusion diplomatique” is, it goes without saying, very illuminating. Prince Napoleon attributed the check of the alliance “to our wish to save the Temporal Power. It has become a historical commonplace to say that if we had given Rome to the Italians we should have had with us Italy and Austria, and we should not have sacrificed the country by protecting a decrepit Sovereignty.” M. Ollivier continues:
It was the “Spanish fanatic,” the Empress, who determined our resolutions. “I prefer,” she is reported to have said, “to see the Prussians in Paris rather than the Italians in Rome.” De Gramont is reported to have said: “I could do nothing. I was tied by the Empress.”
The Empress never used the abominable words attributed to her, and De Gramont never made the unjust accusation against her that was put in his mouth. She approved the Cabinet’s refusal of Beust’s suggestion to give Rome to Italy, but she did not originate that refusal. The initiative was taken apart from her by De Gramont and me. If she had been the Ultramontane fanatic she was said to be, she would not have supported the protestations of Mackau[136] and his friends that it was necessary to maintain our occupation of Rome. It was, on the contrary, upon her eloquent demonstration that the Council of Ministers, taking no heed of the representations of so many of the Catholic nobility, approved the evacuation of the Pontifical territory.
In the matter of alliances, as in other matters, the Council did not adopt the opinion of the Empress, except when it was in accord with its own Opinion. The Council never submitted to an influence which the Empress never had over any of its members, and which she never attempted to exercise. It was the Cabinet, not the Empress, which must be held responsible for the course followed in this negotiation.
All this will come as a pleasurable surprise to the Empress’s friends, and as a disagreeable shock to her critics—or would vilipenders be the better word? Moreover, the venerable Minister’s clear-cut, incisive, unanswerable statements amply confirm the Empress’s assertions in her “Case,” which, in the light of M. Ollivier’s pronouncements, is immeasurably increased in importance. What is printed above concerning the precise relations which existed between the members of the last Imperial Government (for Palikao’s “scratch” Ministry is of little, if any, account) and the Empress is, I allow myself to say, particularly satisfactory to one who has been considered, in a few quarters, to have unduly “bolstered up” the consort of Napoleon III. The American critic who desired something more than the assertion of a journalist to make the Empress’s “Case” thoroughly acceptable now has his not unnatural desire gratified—he has the word of honour of the historian of “L’Empire Libéral” that the imperial lady’s vehement assertions (which, until 1910, had been buried in the columns of a newspaper) are true in substance and in fact, and may no longer be questioned.