Before she decided to leave St. Cloud, she went for a walk in the park with one of her ladies in waiting. On the last evening she gave way to the apprehensions that were torturing her soul. The sun was setting after a glorious day, and the Imperial residence had never seemed so beautiful, nor so peaceful; a peace in such contrast to the agitation of the country, that the Empress could not refrain from remarking upon it. Her companion tried to cheer her with words of hope and encouragement: “No,” replied Eugénie, “I have no hope left, and if I could still wish for something, it would be to stop the course of time; to have a few more hours to look upon St. Cloud and its gardens; but see,” she added, and pointed with her hand towards the sun that was slowly disappearing below the horizon, “see, this is how our prosperity is also setting, and who knows what will happen in the night that is falling upon us!”
And covering her face with her hands, she who was still Empress of the French sobbed bitterly.
CHAPTER VI
The Disaster
When the war broke out, I had just obtained a long leave which I intended to spend in Russia, and immediately after my return to Paris began to make preparations for my departure. The situation, however, was getting so very interesting that I kept putting off my vacation from day to day, especially after the first reverses had proved to every impartial observer that the days of the Bonaparte dynasty were numbered.
No one, however, imagined that the campaign would so very quickly decide the momentous questions that were hanging in the balance. The government was doing its very best to prevent news from leaking out and to hide from Paris, as well as from the country in general, the extent of the first reverses that the French army had encountered. This was a great mistake in more senses than one, because it allowed the wildest rumours to get about, which would not have been possible had the truth been made known at once. Had she only shown frankness and decision, the Regent might still have succeeded in rallying around her a considerable proportion of the people desirous of maintaining public order. To secure that, her best course would have been to appeal publicly to the whole nation; to point out that the refusal of the Chambers to grant the necessary military credits the government had asked for a year before had contributed to the disaster that had overtaken France; and then to declare that she was going to do her best to negotiate an honourable peace. Above all things she should never have convoked the Chambers, the more so that constitutionally she had no real right to do so. The Emperor himself pointed this out later on, in a memorandum which he wrote for one of his great friends, Le Comte de la Chapelle, and he very justly remarked that by doing it a pretext was given for revolution to break out. But the impulsive Empress only thought that the return of Napoleon, vanquished and defeated in his capital, would expose him to insult, and endanger the dynasty; therefore, she urged him to keep away.
Émile Ollivier, who had judged differently, entreated her to insist on Napoleon’s return to Paris, but Eugénie, instead of listening to his advice, did her best to thwart it, under the mistaken idea that with another Cabinet she had more chances to meet the difficulties of the situation. From some strange reasoning she interfered with MacMahon’s plan to draw his army back towards Paris in order to defend the capital, and gave him peremptory command to join Marshal Bazaine’s army. Stranger still, MacMahon, who, being responsible for his troops, should not have allowed politics to interfere with his plan of campaign, acceded to her request, and marched to his destruction in the direction of Sedan.
That initial mistake of the Regent was the principal cause of the revolution which followed upon the surrender of the French army to the Prussians. I do not mean to say that this revolution might have been averted in the long run, but certainly it might have been delayed, and some attempts might have been made to save the dynasty. Unfortunately the Empress thought she was acting very cleverly by seeming to give no thought to that dynasty, and affecting indifference as to its fate. She allowed the romantic side of her character to take the upper hand even in that supreme disaster of her life, and refused to give the necessary orders that might, perhaps, have averted a catastrophe not only where the Imperial regime was concerned, but also to the country. She refused to defend the Tuileries; she refused to defend the cause of order which she represented; she refused to defend her throne and that of her son; she refused to act energetically, in order to subdue the insurrection that was already making itself heard under her windows; she refused to meet the mob that was invading the palace; and ultimately she fled.
It has been said that she was betrayed by those upon whose devotion she had the right to count. It is not to be contested that the conduct of General Trochu was cowardly, but the misfortune of Eugénie was that she had never succeeded in inspiring any other feeling than admiration for her beauty.
It is extraordinary, when one remembers all that happened at that time, to realise how each and all lost their heads. There was still a government in Paris on the 4th of September, there was an army, a responsible ministry that might have appealed to it, and yet no one seemed to have thought it possible to resist the demands of the mob—and such a mob, too. I think I may affirm that none were more surprised at the easy way the Empire was overturned than the members of the government that succeeded to the administration of the country. As a proof of this, I may mention a remark made to me many years later by Gambetta in the course of a conversation which we had on the subject: “I did not know when I left the Hotel de Ville after the proclamation of the new government, whether I should not find the police waiting to arrest me when I reached my home,” was what he said.
Had the Empress personally gone to the Corps Législatif and given orders to sweep away the mob about to invade it, and to arrest Trochu, it is probable that the Parisians, cowed by her personal courage, would have acclaimed her, and cried out: “Vive l’Impératrice!” It is certain that no one would have harmed her, but Eugénie lost her presence of mind upon finding herself so utterly abandoned, and fled from the Tuileries, forgetting everything in the disorder of that moment.