Queen Victoria and the Bonapartes by Aronson Theo

Author:Aronson, Theo [Aronson, Theo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Thistle Publishing
Published: 2015-01-07T22:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER TEN

Decline and Fall

1

Although, throughout these first years of the Queen's widowhood, Victoria exchanged occasional letters with the Emperor and Empress, the three of them never met. The Queen had last seen Napoleon during that disturbing visit to Cherbourg in 1858 and Eugenie on her sudden flight to Scotland a couple of years later. Not until the summer of 1867 was there any personal contact between them: in July that year the Empress Eugenie spent three days with the Queen at Osborne. She had been invited to attend the Naval Review at Spithead, but as the imperial Court was in a month's mourning for the death of Napoleon III's puppet Emperor—Maximilian of Mexico—the visit was changed to a private one.

Since their last meeting, the rôles of Victoria and Eugenie had been dramatically reversed. In the winter of 1860, the Empress had been the tragic figure; now it was a widowed, retiring Queen who welcomed an Empress in the full tide of her beauty and assurance. The contrast between the two women was now more noticeable than ever. The forty-eight-year-old Queen had grown stouter during her long period of mourning; her face, turning yearly more florid, had settled into a permanently disgruntled expression; she was always dressed in black, with her greying hair hidden by a widow's cap. Eugenie, on the other hand, Victoria considered 'but little altered'. If anything, the forty-one-year-old Empress was better looking than she had ever been; to her beauty had been added an almost theatrical aura of majesty. Her figure was well-proportioned, her bearing superb, her clothes magnificent. Her enormous skirts had their fullness drawn to the back in the fashion of the late 1860s; on her elaborately coiffured head would be perched a small, sharply tilted hat. 'But it was the way she wore her clothes, and not the silks themselves, that impressed the beholder . . .' wrote a young Englishman who saw her at this time, 'the Empress was a commanding figure'.

Of course, in Queen Victoria's company, the Empress tended to temper her self-assurance a little. Of the pride, the arrogance and the impetuosity for which Eugenie was—somewhat unfairly—criticized, there was very little evidence to be found in her manner towards Queen Victoria. The Empress had never really mastered her awe of this imperious little sovereign and she remained grateful for the friendship which had meant so much to the imperial regime in its early days. Moreover, Eugenie was obliged to tread rather carefully during this visit: not only was she conscious of the Queen's disenchantment with the Emperor, but there were several subjects on which the two women could not hope to agree. Victoria was thus able to refer, albeit with a little less rapture than before, to Eugenie's kindness, amiability and discretion.

One of the questions on which they did not see eye-to-eye was the Empress's scheme for the rebuilding of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre at Jerusalem. About two years before, the Empress had suggested that all the queens and

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