Napoleon was not brilliant by any means; but he was certainly clever, though sometimes lacking in initiative. It is not likely that he would ever have had the courage either to escape from Ham, or to overthrow the second Republic, had he not been emboldened in the first of these attempts by Conneau, and in the second by Morny and Fleury, together with the active Maupat. He lived under the spell of the Napoleonic tradition, and being before everything else a fatalist, he thought himself destined to ascend the throne which his uncle had conquered. He never fought against destiny, and so acquired an apathy which totally unfitted him for any unexpected struggle. At Sedan he surrendered with hardly a murmur, as, though he well knew the step to be a fatal one, he had tolerated MacMahon’s fatal occupation of that fortress. He had lost all faith in his future, and he had given up the game long before he handed his sword to the conqueror.
The Emperor’s was essentially a kind nature. During the eighteen years of his reign he did an enormous amount of good, and certainly France owes to him a good deal of her present prosperity. He thought about his people’s welfare more than had any previous Sovereign; the economic question was one to which he had given his most earnest attention. He wanted his country to be strong, rich, an example to others in its energetic progress along the path of material and intellectual development. He was a lover of art; he was a keen student, an admirer of literature; and he appreciated clever men. Catholic in his tastes, he had the rare faculty of forgetting the wrongs done to him, in the remembrance of the many proofs of affection he had experienced. Gifted with a sweet and sunny temperament, he had been brought up in the school of adversity. Amidst all the grandeur that he enjoyed later on, he never forgot the lesson; and when misfortune once more assailed him, he was never heard to murmur, or to reproach those whose incapacity had destroyed his life’s work.
Socially, Napoleon never forgot that the first duty of a monarch is ever to appear to be amiable. Whenever he swerved from that axiom it was always for some very good reason. He had great tact, and possessed to perfection the art of invariably saying the right thing in the right place. Yet he knew very well how to differentiate between persons, and to accord the exact shade of behaviour towards an Ambassador or to an Attaché, to a simple tourist, or to a foreign personage entrusted with a mission of some kind.
He was entirely interesting in all his remarks, and always conversant with the subject about which he spoke. Though he had pretensions to scientific and historical knowledge, he was not at all a well-read man in the strict sense; but he had a wonderful faculty of assimilating all that he read, and after having quickly run through a book, was at once acquainted with its principal points or defects. Sceptical in his appreciations, and perhaps in his beliefs, he had the utmost respect for the convictions of his fellow creatures, and though by no means a religious man, reverenced religion deeply. His faults and errors, in the political sense, proceeded more from the influence of his immediate entourage than from his own appreciation of right and wrong. In many things he deserves to be pitied, and in many of his mistakes he was the scapegoat of those who threw their blame upon his shoulders—a blame that either from indifference or from disdain he accepted without a murmur.
Paradoxical as it may seem to say so, he knew humanity, but not the people with whom he lived. He never expected gratitude, and yet he believed that the men upon whom he had showered any amount of benefits would feel grateful to him. To the last hour of his life he thought that his dynasty had some chance to recover the throne; and he remained convinced of the fidelity of his partisans in spite of the many proofs that he had to the contrary. His many illusions proceeded from the kindness of his nature, a kindness that never failed him, either in prosperity or in disaster.
I was introduced to Napoleon III. at Compiègne. I had been invited there, together with the Russian Ambassador, in the course of the month of November that had followed upon my appointment in Paris. We assembled before dinner in what was called the Salle des Gardes, a long apartment panelled in white, to which a profusion of flowers, scattered everywhere, gave a homely look. We were a very numerous company, and it was on that evening I became acquainted with many leading stars in the Imperial firmament. We did not have to wait long before a door was opened and an huissier called out in a loud voice: “L’Empereur!”
The Sovereigns entered the room, the Empress slightly in front, Napoleon following her with the Princess Clotilde on his arm. He began at once to talk with the members of the Corps Diplomatique, whilst his Consort approached the ladies gathered together at one end of the vast hall. When my Ambassador presented me, Napoleon asked me whether I was the son “of the lovely Countess Vassili” he had known in London, and when I replied to him in the affirmative he at once began to talk about my mother, and the many opportunities he had had to meet her. “I am glad to see you here,” he added, “and I hope you will enjoy your stay in France.”
The Empress on that day, when I beheld her for the first time, did not strike me as so absolutely beautiful as I had been led to expect. Later on I found out that her greatest attraction was in the varying charm of her expressive face. The features were quite lovely in their regularity, but a certain heaviness in the chin robbed them of what otherwise would have been absolute perfection. The mouth had a curve which told that on occasion the Empress could be very hard and disdainful, but the eyes and the hair were glorious, the figure splendid, and she had an inimitable grace in her every movement. With the exception of the Empress Marie Feodorovna of Russia, I have never seen anyone bow like Eugénie, with that sweeping movement of her whole body and head, that seemed to be addressed to each person present in particular and to all in general. On that particular evening she was a splendid vision in evening dress. Her white shoulders shone above the low bodice of her gown, and many jewels adorned her beautiful person. But though she excited admiration she did not at first appeal either to the senses or to the imagination of men. At least, so it seemed to me, whatever might have been said to the contrary. Later on, however, when one had opportunity to see her more frequently, and especially to talk with her, her personality grew upon one with an especial charm that has never been equalled by any other woman. She was not brilliant; she held strong opinions; she was very much impressed by her position, though, it must be owned, not in the least dazzled by her extraordinary success; she was impulsive; she was not overwhelmingly tactful; had much knowledge of the world, but little knowledge of mankind; she wounded sometimes when she had no intention of doing so; she was romantic, though unsentimental; there were the strangest contradictions in her nature, the strangest mixtures of good and bad; but with all her defects she completely subjugated those who got to know her, whatever might have been the first impression. Her glances had something of Spanish softness blended with French coquetry. In a word, she was a most attractive woman—one of the
