Lord Lyons by Jenkins Brian;

Author:Jenkins, Brian;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 3332805
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ambassador to a Liberalizing Empire

Lyons arrived in the French capital early in the evening of 25 October. Built in 1722, the embassy had an impressive pedigree and shared with the neighbouring Hôtel d’Évreux (Élysée Palace) the distinction of being the only substantially unaltered mansion of that era on the fashionable Faubourg Saint-Honoré. It was sold in 1803 by the widowed Duchesse de Charost to the widowed Pauline Leclerc, the first Napoleon’s favourite sister, who sold it in 1814 to her brother’s military nemesis, the Duke of Wellington, now the British ambassador to France. Much of the furniture dated from her ownership, which may explain why Lyons considered it “shabby.” His almost obsessive concern with the embassy’s appearance was yet again a matter of national pride, but the miserly Treasury advanced a mere £1,245 for its redecoration and the purchase of new furniture. The clerk of works was another problem, making in Sheffield’s words “a dreadful hash of things from employing his own creatures who are described as drunkards, incompetents, and rogues.” He had to be removed. As work progressed Lyons was only tolerably satisfied because not a single room was completely redecorated and the new furniture accentuated the shabbiness of the old.1

Lyons reserved the afternoons for making calls and gathering material for his dispatches, which he drafted in the two hours before dinner at 7 p.m. He also wrote privately and at length to the foreign secretary and more occasionally to Bloomfield in Vienna, Paget in Florence, Odo Russell in Rome, Crampton in Madrid, Elliot in Constantinople, and Erskine in Athens. Surprisingly absent from the list of regular correspondents was Lord Augustus Loftus in Berlin, perhaps because he was “pompous, conceited, indiscreet,” “perfectly ridiculous,” and “personally disagreeable.” But disagreeableness invaded the embassy. Malet grew irritated with Sheffield’s low tolerance of pain whenever his gout flared up, and he began to liken Lyons’s demands upon his time to a form of servitude. After a day’s labour in the chancery, he was expected to accompany Lyons on afternoon drives, dine with him and Sheffield most evenings, sit with him until he retired, or accompany him to one of the café chantants on the Champs Élysées, where the singing and dancing by the “outrageously overdressed” performers were often “of a coarse nature,” and the refreshment “usually of an inferior quality.”2

During his first fortnight in Paris, Lyons paid three visits to the Great Exhibition, becoming one of its more than 13 million visitors. The venue was a huge iron-framed oval structure designed by Jean-Baptiste-Sébastien Kranz, assisted by a younger engineer, Gustave Eiffel, who was later to utilize the metal to greater dramatic and enduring effect. Of the 50,000 exhibits, one-third were French artifacts illustrative of the nation’s industrial progress and culture. Among the eye-catching inventions on display, appropriately on the Champs de Mars, was the breech-loading chassepot rifle and the breech-loading rifled steel artillery which the Prussians had used to such devastating effect during the recent Austrian war. Yet what most impressed Lyons was the statue depicting the first Napoleon during his last days on St Helena.

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