The spiteful talk of society, and also a natural instinct, threw the Empress among this cosmopolitan society, which only asked to be officially received. The salons of the Tuileries overflowed with people who felt themselves all the more at their ease because nobody troubled about their antecedents or their morality.
To the Empress Exoticism was like a palliative for the disdainful attitude of Royalist society, and it seemed as if she surrounded herself by these crazy people, who transformed the Palace into a sort of Babel, to revenge herself for the aloofness of the Royalists. Thus she was surrounded by a throng of women throwing glances all round, and sometimes their lips—women with hoydenish ways, eccentric tastes, feverish desires, amorous and tempting laughs, like an assembly of foreign and French Sultanas, whose nationality and difference of blood disappeared in the supreme object, pleasure. In the chroniques these women were qualified by the word “Cocodettes”; in history they are classified as “Femmes de l’Empire.”
The latter have left a special reputation. They remain as the absolute representation of an epoch of voluptuous aspirations, of pleasures of the flesh, of feverish passions. The men were merely “supers.”
The greater part of the responsibility fell upon the women. The sensualism which filtered through their bodies, the thrills of passion which animated their bosoms, captured men. In those days they loved readily and madly.
Young men, dominated by the intoxication of the flesh which stole into their brains, forgot the things of the heart; the “male” replaced the “man.” They had not to look far for their ecstasies, when women concealed their souls to show their beautiful limbs. It was an orgy—a perfumed, coquettish, gracious orgy, all the more seductive because it was veiled, because it was full of caresses; élégance was everything.
Some of these women, overcome by a thirst for orgies and by the vertigo impelling them to seek the unknown, roamed the boulevards by night in quest of an adventure, or betook themselves to the Opéra masked balls, finishing their Odyssey in a cabinet particulier.... Roman history was fashionable under the Empire, and people played at being Romans.
Others, of a more poetical temperament—perhaps less ardent, certainly more sober outwardly—found pleasure in intrigues with clerics. Louis XV. abbés are not rare in Paris, and more than one priestly hand could write interesting memoirs. These men who live with Christ have a magnetic influence over some women. They do not understand the ordinary priest—the priest of the people. They want to find in their priest a man of fashion; he must have a perfumed stole, just as they demand, at the altar, a gold or an ivory crucifix to kiss. Were it of wood it would kill their unreasoning faith, and they would fly from it; a plain, severely-cut soutane would be a terrible blow to their senses.
There were certainly radiant and pure women who passed serenely through this cohue. Protected by their virtue—or, what is better, for virtue is relative, protected by some chaste dream, some wifely or motherly love—there were some who emerged immaculate from this whirlwind. Like those hastily-scribbled messages which shipwrecked sailors put in a bottle and confide to the waves, these women, after being shaken by the storm of passion which growled around them, returned to the hearth, to the conjugal bed, with all their grace and all their charm of female purity; and to the mad shouts of the mondains, to the sterile hymn of the fevered throng, they answered with the sweet and simple murmur of the song of songs of fruitful and infinite love.
But there is another side to the medal. In those Second Empire days it was not a case of the abject degradation of a society which, rotting, engulfs itself. All these men, all these women, these Don Juans and these Ninons de l’Enclos’, had healthy blood in their veins, and fire under the skin. They bore themselves proudly. The men were brave; the women were beautiful—some intelligent. There were women who exercised a sovereign rule over the arts and politics. There were salons which had at their head some feminine aristocratic personality; others, swayed by some radiant bourgeoise beauty. With their slender fingers, bourgeoises or patricians, they led the grand farandole of the lazy. They sought out the poets, the artists, who work in the shade. A smile, a flower taken from a palpitating corsage, for a sketch; a kiss—more still, sometimes—for a sonnet. “With very little alteration, I would write this page, if it had to be rewritten, just as it is given here.”[69]
Among these ladies, two especially—“Exotics”—are noted by M. de Lano as having preoccupied the Empress by their actions in various ways—the Princesse de Metternich and the Comtesse de Castiglione. The first of these was apparently the Empress’s friend; the second openly hostile to her Majesty, posing to her face as her rival, at one time the Sovereign’s successful rival. “On one side [that of the Austrian Princess] was an affection which, perhaps, still continues; on the other, a hatred which ended only in death.”