“The Emperor also is no longer what he once was,” went on Nigra; “he is ill, broken down, either by disease or by worry, he has lost very much of his former elasticity, and is more than ever undecided in the resolutions he is called upon to make. The Empress, on the other hand, believes herself to possess political ability, and is encouraged therein by people who see a source of advantage for them in a Regency over which she would be called upon to preside. The death of the Emperor, which ten years ago would have been regarded in the light of a calamity, not only for France but for Europe, is no longer dreaded, because the feeling is that he has survived himself, that his lucky star has left him. The convinced Bonapartists think that a Liberal Empire is an anachronism; but the Emperor, who was always more or less a conspirator, dreams, on the contrary, of establishing his dynasty on new lines, in which his strong sympathies towards Liberalism will take the upper hand. When once his entourage realise this fact, which so far they do not yet suspect, they will do their best to bring matters to a crisis, and by means of a foreign war divert Napoleon’s mind from his present intentions. And that war——”
He stopped and looked at me significantly.
“That war won’t find Italy the ally of France,” I remarked.
“Certainly not, because there would be no necessity for it. Why should we lose either men or money when nothing could be gained by it? What we want is Rome, and Rome we shall get all the same, whether Napoleon allows it or not. One cannot stop the evolution of history.”
“But she—what will she do?” I asked, pointing up to the windows we had been looking at a few moments before, when, as if in reply to my question, the light suddenly went out.
Nigra shrugged his shoulders, as if this matter did not concern him at all.
“She will never resign herself to her fall, should such a thing occur,” I remarked.
“Oh yes, she will do so,” was the answer. “She will not even attempt to fight against her fate should it prove inimical to her,” he concluded philosophically.
It was during the last time the Imperial Court was at Fontainebleau that this remarkable conversation took place, and it impressed me so much that I noted it down at once when I reached my room. I was to think about it more than once subsequently, and many years later, meeting Count Nigra, as he had become then, in St. Petersburg, where he had been appointed Italian Ambassador, I reminded him of it, and asked him to tell me what had really been the conduct of the Empress Eugénie on that fateful 4th of September when he and Prince Metternich urged her to fly before the revolutionaries.
“She did exactly what I told you that night at Fontainebleau,” replied Nigra; “she declared that she would not go against the wishes of the country, and that, since it wanted her to leave Paris, she would do so. Mind, she knew nothing as to whether this was true or not; no one had told her that the country wanted her to go, one had simply drawn her attention to the fact that her life was in danger, and she believed it at once. Metternich at one moment asked her whether she would not take a few things with her, but she replied that it was not necessary, and she left the Tuileries without even taking a pocket handkerchief.”