Adventurer and Emperor
THE sixty-four years of the life of Napoleon HI should attract the dramatist as well as the historian. They offer an extraordinary contrast of light and-shade. They were spent in obscurity, notoriety, international fame and again obscurity ; and, perhaps, if they had been three score and ten, they might have ended in fame. Napoleon III had the prestige of royalty and the attraction of the adventurer ; though- he was a Bonaparte, he was a self-made sovereign. He possessed such dignity that he-might have been a " king's son " and brought up for a throne (and, recorded by Queen Victoria, that was praise indeed). Yet in his coups d'etat, both abortive and successful, in his fervent belief in his destiny, his love of conspiracy, he suggests the conscious actor. He should have inspired another Hernani, not Les Cluitiments ; he had a little in common with Hugo besides the years in exile on British soil. One quality he possessed, however, of which there is small trace in Hugo's work, a love of and knowledge of England. It was in England that he spent some of his youth ; in English society, at the breakfast-parties of Richard Monckton Milnes, the soirees of Lady Blessington, at the Eglinton Tournament, that he early distinguished himself. He knew d'Orsay and Faraday, Gabriele Rossetti and Landor, and, long before he entertained Disraeli at- the Tuileries, he had run him into a mud-bank in rowing him up the Thames. It was from Ramsgate that he set out on the expedition which brought him six years' imprisonment in the fortress at Ham ; and it was the streets of London that he patrolled as a special constable : " Et que diable fait Monsieur Napoleon dans cette galere ? " " Sir," he answered the friend who had recognised him, " London must be preserved from the Chartists." Napoleon III had an abiding respect for English institutions, among them Queen Victoria : " We shall take back with us to France," he told the Lord Mayor, on his state visit, " the lasting impression of the very imposing spectacle which England presents, where virtue on the throne directs the destinies of a, country . without danger to its grandeur." " Last night at dinner," noted Queen Victoria, " he said : C'est bien que nous ne restons pas plus longtemps en Angleterre, autrement nous finirions par tout a fait oublier la France.' " The remark did not only show his gift for the right phrase ; and one feels that the entente established by Edward VII was built upon a basis of long standing.
There is a pathetic contrast between the state visit of 1855 and the arrival at Chislehurst in 1871, between the gala performance at Covent Garden and the days when Mr. Sullivan came to play the piano. The most original and moving chapter is not the most spectacular. I warmly recommend Napoleon III in England. It may not be good prose, but it is meticulous and largely original, The author, after a slow start, moves gradually nearer to his subject, and the final portrait is one of a character strange, endearing and
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