The Court of the Empress Josephine

by Imbert de Saint-Amand

There were two distinct elements in the Emperor's household: the military, and the aristocratic. Some men owed their position entirely to their merit; others entirely to their birth; these were both patriots of 1792 and émigrés, but it must be confessed the Imperial Almanack shows that the aristocratic element was the more prominent. Napoleon, though certain writers persist in representing him as the crowned champion of democracy and the emperor of the lower classes, had a more aristocratic court than Louis XVIII. He was more impressed by great manners than were the old kings. Even after he had been betrayed, abandoned, denied, insulted by the aristocracy, he had a weakness for it. In 1816 he said: "The democracy may become furious; it has a heart; it can be moved. The aristocracy always remains cold and never pardons." Yet even after this, he blamed himself for not having done enough for the French nobility. "I see clearly," he went on, "that I did either too much or too little for the Faubourg Saint Germain. I did enough to make the opposition dissatisfied, and not enough to win it to my side. I ought to have secured the émigrés when they returned. The aristocracy would have soon adored me; and I needed it; it is the true, the only support of a monarchy, its moderator, its lever, its resisting point; without it, the state is like a ship without a rudder, a balloon in mid-air. Now, the strength, the charm of the aristocracy lies in its antiquity, the only thing I could not create." It must be confessed that from an old Republican general, for the man who had sent Augereau to execute the coup d'état of the 18th Fructidor, and who the 13th Vendémiaire, from the steps of the Church of Saint Roch had crushed the Paris conservatives, this was a very aristocratic way of talking, reminding one of the old régime. In 1816 Napoleon said again: "Old and corrupt nations cannot be governed like the virtuous peoples of antiquity. For one man nowadays who would sacrifice everything for the public welfare, there are thousands who take no thought of anything except their own interests, pleasures, and vanity. Now to pretend to regenerate a people off-hand would be madness. The workman's genius is shown by his knowing how to make use of the materials under his hand, and that is the secret of the restoration of all the forms of the monarchy, of the return of titles, crosses, and ribbons."

The old Republicans of 1796, who used to denounce kings, "drunk with blood and pride," would not have readily recognized their old general under the golden canopies of the Tuileries, where he dined in state. His table stood on a platform, beneath a canopy, and there were two chairs, one for himself, the other for the Empress. As he entered the banquet-hall, he was preceded by a swarm of pages, masters-of-ceremonies, and prefects of the palace; he was followed by the colonel-general on duty, the Grand Chamberlain, the Grand Equerry, and the Grand Almoner. The Grand Almoner advanced to the table and blessed the dinner. A general of division, the Grand Equerry Caulaincourt, offered a chair to Bonaparte. Another general of division, Duroc, the Grand Marshal of the Palace, handed him his napkin and poured out his wine. Not merely high dignitaries, but the Princes of the Empire themselves, deemed it an honor to wait upon him as servants. If a Prince of the Imperial family happened to be in the Emperor's room, any article of dress that he asked for was given by the chamberlain-in-waiting to the Prince, and by the Prince to the Emperor. The time of the Sun King seemed to have returned.

The Imperial apartment at the Tuileries consisted of two distinct parts, the grand state apartments and the Emperor's private apartment. The state apartment contained the following rooms: 1, a concert hall (the Hall of the Marshals); 2, a first drawing-room (under Napoleon III. called the Drawing-room of the First Consul); 3, a second drawing-room (that of Apollo); 4, a throne room; 5, a drawing-room of the Emperor (afterwards called that of Louis XIV.); 6, a gallery (of Diana). The private apartment was itself composed of the apartment of honor, containing a hall of the guards and a first and second drawing-room, and an interior apartment containing a bedroom, a study, an office, and topographic bureau. The ushers had charge of the apartment of honor; the valets de chambre of the other. A rigid etiquette determined the right of entrance into the different rooms composing the state apartment, according to a carefully studied system. The pages were authorized to enter the Hall of the Marshals; members of the household of the Emperor and Empress could enter the first and second drawing-rooms; the Princes and Princesses of the Imperial family, the high officers of the Crown, the presidents of the great bodies of the state, had admission to the throne room. Men and women had to bow to the throne whenever they passed it. The Emperor and the Empress alone had the right of entering the Emperor's drawing-room. No one else could go in except by the Emperor's summons.

An absurd importance was attached to these trivialities, to these empty nothings, to the right of entering this room or that, of walking before this or that person, of handing the Emperor this or that article of dress. "An honest, reasonable man," said Madame de Rémusat, "is often overcome with shame at the pleasures and pains of a courtier's life, and yet it is hard to escape from them. A ribbon, a slight difference of dress, the right of way through a door, the entrance into such and such a drawing- room, are the occasion, contemptible in appearance, of a host of ever new emotions. Vain is the struggle to acquire indifference to them…. In vain, do the mind and the reason revolt against such an employment of human faculties; however dissatisfied one is with one's self, it is necessary to humiliate one's self before every one and to desert the court, or else to consent to take seriously all the nonsense that fills the air and breathes there."

Vanity of human events! What has become of these drawing-rooms of the Tuileries, which it was such an honor to enter, which were trod with such respectful awe? Look at the lamentable ruins of this ill-fated palace. There may still be seen, blackened with petroleum and stained by the rain, some of those drawing-rooms, once so brilliant, once thronged with an eager and showy crowd. What an instructive spectacle! When is one more urgently reminded of the emptiness of human glory and greatness? This nothingness fills the soul with melancholy when one thinks that soon these crumbling fragments will be razed and that soon one can say with the poet: The ruins themselves have perished, Etiam periere ruinae! [Footnote: The ruins have since been removed.—TR.]

IX.

HOUSEHOLD OP THE EMPRESS.

We have just studied the civil and the military household of the Emperor in 1805; let us now study the Empress's household at the same period.

The Empress's First Almoner was a bishop, a great lord, Ferdinand de Rohan. Her Maid of Honor was a relative of her first husband, the Duchess de La Rochefoucauld, called in the Imperial Almanack of 1805 simply Madame Chastulé de La Rochefoucauld. She was short and deformed, but distinguished, for her intelligence, tact, and wit, void of ambition, with no taste for intrigue, who only reluctantly accepted the position of Maid of Honor, and often wanted to hand in her resignation. The Lady of the Bedchamber was Madame de Lavalette, a Beauharnais, an able and affectionate woman, who immortalized herself, in the early days of the Restoration, by saving her husband's life by her heroism.

To the four Ladies of the Palace at the beginning of the Empire, Madame de Luçay, Madame de Rémusat, Madame de Talhouët, Madame de Lauriston, were added thirteen other ladies: Madame Duchâtel, Madame de Séran, Madame de Colbert, Madame Savary, Madame Octave de Ségur, Madame de Turenne, Madame de Montalivet, Madame de Bouillé, Madame de Vaux, Madame de Marescot.