From the Gentleman’s Magazine.
NOW that the weapon of a naked savage has struck down in a nameless skirmish the last of the eldest branch of the Bonapartes, and the first of the race who ever fell upon a field of battle, men’s eyes are not unnaturally turned again upon one who often commanded their gaze before, but who seemed of late days to have passed from their notice forever,—the man whom strange chance has placed at the head of the Napoleon family. It seems in keeping with the pitiless irony of fate which has always pursued the Bonaparte dynasty—a fate as stern as the fabled destiny of the Pelopids—that the death of Prince Louis Napoleon should place whatever remains of succession at the feet of the man whom neither he nor his mother loved overmuch, at the feet of the Esau or rather the Ishmael of the house, Prince Napoleon Joseph Charles Paul Bonaparte (Jérôme), better known as Prince Napoleon, better known still in the argot of history as Plon-Plon. Prince Napoleon is the son of that somewhat feather-headed king of Westphalia who is chiefly conspicuous for his marriage with Miss Patterson of Baltimore—she who died but the other day—and for his exclamation at the battle of Waterloo: “Brother, here should perish all who bear the name of Bonaparte!” an heroic exclamation which did not prevent him from escaping from the field and living till 1860. Westphalia Jérôme was the youngest brother of the first Napoleon; but as the great Napoleon did what he liked with the succession, and set aside his other brothers when they displeased him, the year 1852 saw his son the heir presumptive to the imperial crown. The birth of the poor lad who died last June in Zululand took away from him the succession to a great and apparently firmly established empire; his death has given him the headship of a fallen house, and put him nominally in command of a powerless party.
Prince Napoleon is one of the strangest figures of modern history. His career has been one long riddle unexplained as yet. No man in Europe has been more misunderstood, and few have been more disliked; no man had better chances of success than he, and no man ever made less use of his chances. To-day finds him as much a puzzle alike to his friends and his enemies as he was thirty years ago when he first swore allegiance to a French Republic. He has been described by a witty critic as a Cæsar out of place. But the epigram would have been much truer which described him as an unemployed Antony. The marvelous capability for doing the right thing at the right time which characterized Cæsar never was the property of Prince Napoleon. He has rather been conspicuous all his life for doing the right thing at the wrong moment. And now, close to his sixtieth year, he, the strangest evolution of the race Bonaparte, remains just where he was when he started, having succeeded in convincing the world first that he was a fool, then that he was a man of genius, without winning any success either from his folly or his intellect. Among the many witty and bitter things that the Prince Napoleon has said about the members of his own family, one saying deserves especial remembrance—his epigrammatic observation that his cousin the Emperor took in the world twice: first, when he made the world believe that he was an idiot; and secondly, when he made it believe he was a statesman. The epigram would apply almost as well to its author as to its object.
This is his portrait, drawn by the hand of a bitter enemy:—“He is of a tall form, but with his neck sinking between his shoulders; his waist is fast disappearing before the irruption of corpulency; his gait is heavy and undignified; he is short-sighted, and his glance is an oblique one. His general appearance reminds you of the elder Bonaparte, the one whom MM. Thiers and Marco Saint-Hilaire, Troplong and Havin, and likewise M. Prudhomme style ‘le Grand Homme,’ but it reminds you still more of Otho or Vitellius, and somewhat also of the common mask of ‘Punch.’” Such a description as this gives no real idea of the appearance of the man or of the quality of character to be inferred from a study of his face. Flandrin’s famous portrait gave another and a truer view of his nature. Strangely like the first Napoleon was it, so like that it would have passed in the eyes of most spectators as a picture of the Little Corporal. A more attentive observer would have assumed it to be a study of the Great Emperor after Leipsic or Waterloo, for there was stamped on the sensuous face a look of sullen discontent, of a disappointment that did not often belong to the features of the first of the Bonapartes. It was the face of a Napoleon without success, of a Napoleon who had not found his chance, who had waited too long for his Marengo. It was the face of a Napoleon compelled by strange fate to inaction; it was the face of Prince Napoleon….
There can be little doubt that his genius, his far-sighted political intelligence, and his power of appreciating the relative values of nations, might have made his assistance of great service to Napoleon III., if Napoleon III. had seen fit to profit by it more often. It is true that Prince Napoleon’s political judgment generally led him to different conclusions from those evolved from the Tuileries, and it must be admitted that his opinions generally ran counter to those of the majority upon most great questions; but events have almost invariably justified Prince Napoleon, and showed that his Imperial cousin would have done wiser in listening to his single voice than to any clamor of public opinion. When Prince Napoleon went over to America during the Civil War, to judge the question on its native ground, hearing the cause discussed in New York salons, in reunions of Boston Abolitionists, and in the not altogether impartial atmosphere of General Beauregard’s tent, he had the sense to see that the North was sure to win in the end; and he saw this at a time when the Emperor was moving heaven and earth to induce England to aid him in supporting by arms the cause of the South and slavery. Prince Napoleon was also strongly opposed to the Mexican intervention. He knew the temper of the American people too well to fancy that they would suffer Napoleon to carry out his dearly cherished infringement of what has come to be called the Monroe Doctrine, but which is really the doctrine suggested to and impressed upon President Monroe by George Canning. The sequel of that most disastrous undertaking thoroughly justified his views. Upon all the great European questions, too, he showed a shrewd and foreseeing mind. He believed in Italy, he supported the cause of Poland, he foresaw the downfall of Austria, and we have it on his own authority that he strongly objected to the action of the French government with regard to Rome, and attributed to that action the result of the war with Prussia. Moreover, he was a free-trader long before the Emperor could be induced to believe that the doctrine was an essential law of political economy. It may be asked why a man who showed such capacity for statesmanship as to foresee the result of all the great political crises during his time should yet have received such little honor for his prophecies, not only in his own country, but everywhere else. The truth doubtless is that Prince Napoleon’s character is marred not only by his bad temper and his proverbially bitter tongue, which make it impossible, or next to impossible, for him to get on with any one or for any one to get on with him—faults which caused him to fling up the Algerian administration, and brought him back to France from so many important missions—but by a worse defect than either of these, a fatal want of energy. He lacks the proud patience which is so essential to true success, and he is disposed, when people decline to see things as he sees them, to give up in disgust, and let them learn by experience the wisdom of councils he had not himself the energy to do battle for. There is in him a great deal of the nature of Byron’s Sardanapalus who, while having no small share of the stuff that heroes are made of, fritters away his life in purposeless inaction and aimless pleasures. In aimless pleasures, indeed, a good deal of Prince Napoleon’s life has been passed. Witness his purposeless wanderings in his yacht all over the world, wanderings which made wits inquire if the prince was qualifying to be a teacher of geography in case of any unexpected reverse to the Napoleon family. Witness, too, his endeavor to live the life of a Roman in modern Paris. Hence the villa, Diomede, which most visitors to Paris have seen, and where, according to rumor, the Pompeian walls saw scenes Roman enough to have satisfied the taste of the Arbiter Elegantiæ. But the Pompeian dwelling was not a success. The Prince attempted baths after the Roman fashion, and they made the house too damp to live in; and gradually he got tired of his toy and of playing at being a Roman, and the villa Diomede was abandoned. Those who saw the Palais Royal when it was Prince Napoleon’s might well have wondered why a man with such a house should want to be anything better than a Bonaparte prince in an Orleanist palace. To do justice to the Prince, the palace showed that its temporary owner was a man of refined taste and high culture, both in art and letters. I quote an account of the Palais Royal written while the Bonaparte dynasty still swayed the fortunes of France:—
| “His Palais Royal is one of the most tasteful and elegant abodes belonging to a European prince. The stranger in Paris who is fortunate enough to obtain admission to it—and, indeed, admission is easy to procure—must be sadly wanting in taste if he does not admire the treasures of art and vertu which are laid up there, and the easy graceful manner of their arrangement. Nothing of the showplace is breathed there; no rules, no conditions, no watchful, dogging lackeys or sentinels make the visitor uncomfortable. Once admitted, the stranger goes where he will, and admires and examines what he pleases. He finds there curiosities and relics, medals and statues, bronzes and stones, from every land in which history or romance takes any interest; he gazes on the latest artistic successes—Doré’s magnificent lights and shadows, Gérôme’s audacious nudities: he observes autograph collections of value inestimable; he notices that on the tables, here and there, lie the newest triumphs or sensations of literature,—the poem that every one is just talking of, the play that fills the theatres, George Sand’s last novel, Renan’s new volume, Taine’s freshest criticism; he is impressed everywhere with the conviction that he is in the house of a man of high culture and active intellect, who keeps up with the progress of the world in arts, and letters and politics.”… |
Some slight solution of the enigma of the Prince’s life is perhaps to be found in the following lines, written by him in the Revue des deux Mondes a few years back:—
| “I have always had for the Emperor, my cousin, a thorough devotion, of which I think I have given him sufficient proofs by the frankness of my conduct, even by the very opposition I have shown to many acts of his government—a thankless rôle, which rarely confers power and influence, and which exposes its supporter to every kind of calumny. I found my only satisfaction in the sentiment of duty accomplished. My personal rôle, sometimes effaced, sometimes preponderating, has always had the same aim,—the greatness of France, to be obtained by the alliance of the Napoleons with democratic ideas.” |
Prince Napoleon has always been persistently disbelieved; it never seems to have entered into the minds of his enemies that he could possibly speak the truth. Yet the course of his life has been generally in accordance with his own statements, and his declaration that the aim of his life has ever been the greatness of France, to be obtained by the union of Bonapartism and Democracy, has never been belied by any action of his career. Indeed, it is to this strange faith in an impossible combination that his unsuccess might very fairly be attributed. His Bonapartism has injured him with the Democrats, his Democracy with the Bonapartes. The result has been that want of power and influence over which his deeply disappointed ambition was compelled to utter one cry in the confession of faith we have quoted.
