I have spoken of the birth of the prince imperial. It may perhaps interest the reader to know how much this auspicious event cost the French nation. Not less than nine hundred thousand francs (one hundred and eighty thousand dollars), of which twenty thousand dollars were paid for the young gentleman's first wardrobe. The whole amount expended at the birth of the Comte de Paris did not exceed this latter sum.
The details of the scenes at the Tuileries after the downfall of the Empire, and those of the flight of the empress, are well known. It is now generally conceded that after Sédan the fate of the imperial dynasty was in the hands of Eugénie. Had she withdrawn to Tours or to Bourges, summoned the Assembly to meet there, and called around her the partisans of the Empire, she might have saved the heritage of her son. But her essentially feminine and frivolous nature was not fitted for deeds of high resolve or for heroic determinations. A morbid dread of following in the footsteps of Marie Antoinette had pursued her in the later years of her prosperity. She knew that she was unpopular, and visions of the fate of the Austrian queen or of the still more horrible one of the Princesse de Lamballe must have risen before her as the shouts of the Parisian mob, exulting in the downfall of her husband, met her ear. In that hour of disaster and of woe no Frenchman, for all the boasted chivalry of the race, was at hand to aid or protect the fair lady who had so long queened it at the Tuileries. The Austrian ambassador, the Italian minister, the Corsican Pietrio planned and managed her escape from the palace. She took refuge in the house of an American, her dentist, Dr. Thomas W. Evans. He it was who got her out of Paris and accompanied her to the seacoast, placing his own carriage at her disposal. She crossed the Channel in the yacht of an English gentleman. Thus guarded by aliens, she passed from the land of her queenship to that of exile.
To-day, in her abode at Chiselhurst, the widow of Napoleon III. attracts scarcely less of the world's interest and attention than she did as throned empress and queen of Fashion. Unfortunately, the supreme tact that once was her distinguishing quality seems to have deserted her in the days of her decadence. She, the most graceful of women, has not learned the art of growing old gracefully. She had played the part of a beauty and the leader of fashion for years. Now that she is past fifty that character is no longer possible to her. But she might have assumed another--less showy, perhaps, but surely far more touching. With her whitening hairs she might have worthily worn the triple dignity of her widowhood, her maternity and her misfortune. She has chosen instead, with a weakness unworthy of the part that she has played on the wide stage of contemporary history, to clutch vainly after the fleeting shadow of her vanished charms. A head loaded with false yellow hair, a face covered with paint and powder, a mincing gait and the airs and graces of an antiquated coquette,--such to-day is she who was once the world's wonder for her loveliness and grace, a bewigged Mrs. Skewton succeeding to the dazzling vision that swerved the calculating policy of Napoleon III. and won his callous heart, and that still smiles upon us from the canvas of Winterhalter.