+ − Am Hist R 26:360 Ja ’21 320w
“A misleading title, for there is proportionately little from the pen of the empress herself and her personality is often lost in the flood of details of diplomacy and court life, but the author has been able to add some fresh information to the history of the second empire.”
+ − Booklist 17:153 Ja ’21
“He who hopes to find romance in the two volumes of the ‘Memoirs of the Empress Eugénie’ will be disappointed. What are we to say of a writer who omits both the drama of her rise and the pathos of her closing years, who robs the history of all its picturesque character and concentrates his attention upon her official routine? What are we to say of him? We are to say, of course, that he is an ‘official’ biographer and that, as such, is so anxious to present nothing which will detract from an impression of perfect propriety and dull royal respectability, that he has deprived her of all character.” J. W. Krutch
− Bookm 52:78 S ’20 600w + Boston Transcript p8 O 2 ’20 1050w Dial 70:107 Ja ’21 190w
“The most valuable and important things are the reports of intimate conversations and sayings of the Emperor and Empress and others, which picture forth their characters and, without description or character analysis, place them in a different light than they have been placed by other memoir writers and historians.”
+ N Y Times 25:1 Jl 25 ’20 4650w
“Being a great admirer of Napoleon and Eugénie, Comte Fleury naturally gives a picture which is highly favorable to them. But he has also attempted to take into consideration the work which has been done by historical scholars on this period. The point at which the reader must be on his guard is in accepting without question Napoleon’s views as given in the conversations which the author quotes.” S. B. Fay
+ − Review 3:421 N 3 ’20 400w R of Rs 62:446 O ’20 200w Springf’d Republican p8 Jl 24 ’20 180w
“Memoirs are often disappointments, either containing nothing worth saying, or running to the Margot Asquith type. These memoirs have something to say, and it was not, in the saying, found necessary to surround them with bits of scandal or incidents better left untold.”