Her fancied resemblance to Marie Antoinette has already been mentioned; indeed, there were many points of similarity between the Spanish Countess and Maria Theresa’s unfortunate daughter. Both possessed remarkable beauty, charm, energy, and strength of character. Both were boundlessly extravagant and open-handed, as both in their younger days allowed the pursuit of pleasure to banish all serious occupations. Eugénie avoided the imprudences of which Marie Antoinette was guilty, and instead of risking her popularity, did all in her power to preserve and strengthen it; yet she too was powerless to escape calumny. There were but too many evil tongues ready to suggest that a woman who owed her sovereignty to beauty alone was scarce likely to remain a pattern of virtue, and we have seen how even in her own family she had enemies who tried to undermine her reputation.
The court of the Second Empire was full of corruption and was abandoned to a life of pleasure and luxury. But it is ever the way of aristocratic society to seek amusement; and if at the courts of Berlin and London a more serious tone prevailed, those of Vienna, St. Petersburg, and Madrid were scarcely less frivolous than that of France under the Second Empire.
The Empress’s daily life was very different from this; intermixed with the feverish pursuit of pleasure were many days of weariness and ennui. At eight o’clock she rose and devoted an hour regularly, sometimes two or three, to her favorite occupation, the study of her _toilettes_. At half-past eleven she breakfasted alone with the Emperor and the Prince Imperial, after which Napoleon would smoke a cigarette in his wife’s apartment, chatting and playing with his little son. Kindness of heart was one of the Emperor’s most marked characteristics. Indeed he was often over-indulgent with the child—a weakness Eugénie continually struggled against, with the natural result that the little Prince preferred his father to his mother. At one, every day he went for his drive in the Bois de Boulogne, and the Empress retired to her study, back of the audience chamber, where no one was allowed to enter. Here her tastes and habits were best displayed, for in this room she had surrounded herself with all her most precious possessions, portraits of her family and intimate friends, busts, vases, statuettes, and all sorts of personal souvenirs, and a small set of bookshelves containing the works of French, Spanish, English, and Italian writers. Every day Eugénie wrote to her mother, a sacred duty with which neither _fête_ nor illness, travel nor court entertainment, was ever allowed to interfere. Among others with whom she also kept up a lively correspondence were Queen Victoria and the Queen of Holland. After the Empress’s personal letters were finished she summoned her secretary, Damas Hinard, with whom she went through the vast number of begging letters and appeals of all kinds she received daily, to each of which she gave her personal attention.