A phrase uttered by the Empress provoked some harsh criticism at the time, and has been, even to this day, quoted against her. It was ungraciously and unjustly assumed that she had special ideas on virtue. But there is really nothing in her remark to justify the implication that she took advantage of that moral freedom which she sometimes apparently seemed disposed to favour.
It was at the Tuileries that, in the early years of the reign, she was credited with saying:
One cannot guard young girls too closely, cannot keep them too far from danger and evil. I constantly watch over them and their surroundings. As to married women, that is another matter, and I admit that I am indifferent about them. Their virtues and their weaknesses are to me perfectly equal: that is their business. They can look after themselves. And, besides, have they not their husbands to protect and watch over them?
Brought up in a milieu quite foreign to any Court (that of Spain always excepted), the Empress, as Sovereign, sometimes lacked that overpowering gravity which women destined to reign are taught from the cradle. She believed sincerely, and without arrière pensée, that it was open to her to enjoy life as she found it. She saw no harm in causing the hearts of men to beat with sentiments which really only flattered her. She was curious to read the souls of others; and the adulation bestowed upon her interested and moved her as a powerful romance would have done. In a word, she was the popular idol. She knew that she was adored, and, receiving all this homage in a perfectly passive manner, felt that she was surrounding herself by friends and devoted admirers, whose sole object was to serve her and to love her. Besides, she was very fond of discussion and argument, and consequently sought the society of men capable, by their esprit, of entertaining her.
Fully aware that a person cannot charm and fascinate people without taking some little trouble over it, the Empress, before talking to a politician, a savant, an author, or an artist of any kind, “got up” her subjects, and made up her mind as to what she must say in order to take the man captive. Moreover, she was as careful to conquer him by the attractions of her person as by those of her conversation; and when she had captured him, when she felt assured that he belonged to her--“when,” in her own phrase, “she found his homage agreeable and amusing,” when she knew that she had stirred his heart, then, and only then, she checked the pretty poem or the half-finished sketch, and wrote with her own fair hand at the bottom of the page which she had read the one word “Fin!” All this was, no doubt, imprudent, and not in conformity with the gravity which ought to have been hers: it may even have been cruel; but what pretty (and virtuous) woman will rise to blame the Empress? What pretty (and virtuous) woman will dare to say that she has never acted in the same way in the drawing-rooms which she frequents? And what man, not entirely virtuous, but amoureux, has not been the victim of similar feminine perfidies? “Le péché veniel des unes, les bourgeoises; deviendrait-il le péché mortel des autres, les reines?” Shall we be wrong in answering the question in the negative?