In the sixteenth century such a personality as is here depicted was called Marie Stuart; in the seventeenth, Henrietta Maria, daughter of Henri Quatre, and wife of Charles I.; in the eighteenth, Marie Antoinette. With an incontestable moral superiority over all these, the Empress Marie Eugénie lengthens this list by the purity of her name, and will remain the touching symbol of that part of the history of France known as the Second Empire.
Writing one day to Napoleon III., the Empress said: “My life is finished, but I live again in my son, and I believe I shall find the truest happiness in that which comes into my heart from his.” Never was the maternal sentiment more beautifully expressed than in those pathetic words. Into the heart of this mother entered many joys and ineffable happiness. Who, looking upon that son of Cæsar, whose visage had all the sweetness of his mother’s united to the virility of his father’s, could fail to have believed that he, too, would be the hero of a new and great chapter of history? Who was not tempted to apply to him the phrase of Virgil: “Tu Marcellus eris”? They had no presentiment of the invasion, the defeats, the captivity, the vanishing of the father, the tragedy in the mealie-fields.
In the broad ways of the once beleaguered city there reappears ever and anon the silhouette of the woman who aforetime filled it with her grace, her splendid beauty, her charity, and her solicitude.
Her letters to the Emperor before their marriage displayed so much more literary skill than Mlle. Eugénie de Montijo was supposed to possess that ill-natured people asserted they were written by that attached friend of the Montijos, Prosper Mérimée. This is to charitably suppose that Napoleon III. invited his friends to peruse the letters addressed to him by “the beautiful Spaniard” during the period of his ardent wooing—a course which would have been entirely foreign to his loyal nature. The Emperor probably destroyed his fiancée’s letters; if not, they must be among the mass of papers preserved at Farnborough Hill, to remain unpublished until the expiration of fifty years after the Empress’s death.
From her own chaplet of memories I cull these few blossoms:
Neither the mother nor the child is responsible for the faults of the father.
We should practise a policy of ideas, not of expedients.
Is it not too absurd to say that on September 4 (1870) I was afraid? What woman, what Sovereign, seeing her husband betrayed by fate, a prisoner; her son wandering about, perhaps dead; her country invaded and devastated; her crown lost—who would have thought at such a moment of her personal security, and who would not have preferred death a hundred times to so many sorrows?
I have an absolute confidence in the power of truth. I summon with my whole strength all that can hasten its coming. It will appear—it appears already. Calumnies arise from time to time, like the unhealthy vegetation of the tropics; but the sun kills the one, the light of truth destroys the others, and their ephemeral and evil life leaves no traces.
I cannot die. And God, in His clemency, will give me a hundred years of life.