Of the imperial baby in his nurse's arms, on whom the father looked with a face radiant with pride and joy, Von Moltke remarks: "Truly, he seems a strapping fellow."
The little prince grew up a very promising lad. He was his father's idol. Louis Napoleon never could be brought to give him any sterner reproof than "Louis, don't be foolish,—ne fais pas des bêtises." Discipline was left to his mother, and it was popularly thought that she was much less wrapped up in the child than his father was. His especial talent was for drawing and sculpture. Some of his sketches, of which fac-similes are given in Jerrold's "Life of Napoleon III.," are very spirited, and when he could get a lump of wet clay to play with, he made busts of the persons round him which were excellent likenesses.
The emperor's rooms at the Tuileries were rather low and dark, but he selected them because they communicated with those of the empress in the Pavillon de Flore, by a narrow winding staircase. Often in the day would she come down to him, or he ascend to her.
His study was filled with Napoleonic relics, and littered with political and historical papers. He kept a large room with models of new inventions, which were a great delight to him and to his son. He was fond of wood-turning, and Thélin and he would often make pretty rustic chairs for the park at Saint-Cloud.
For some years before his overthrow he was growing very feeble, and always carried a cane surmounted with a gold eagle. Commonly too some chosen friend, generally Fleury, gave him his arm, but he always walked in silence. In the afternoon he would drive out, and sometimes horrify the police by getting out of his carriage and walking alone in distant quarters of the city.
On one occasion he had a difference of opinion with one of his friends, who assured him that if he insisted on planting an open space in the Faubourg Saint-Antoine with flowers, and protected it by no railing, the flowers would very speedily be destroyed. His pleasure and exultation were very great when he found he had been right, and that not a flower had been plucked or broken.
The emperor was generally gay and ready to converse at table, but he made it a rule never to criticise or discuss living persons himself, or allow others to do so in his hearing.
There was much decorum at court so far as his influence extended in the imperial circle, but there were plenty of scandals outside of it; and as to money matters, even Persigny and Fleury—one the friend of the emperor for five-and-twenty years, and the other devotedly attached to him—could not restrain themselves from cheating him and tricking him whenever they could.
EMPEROR MAXIMILIAN.