PRINCESS CAROLINE MURAT.*
ANY one who may take up Princess Caroline Murat's Memoirs with the hope of finding a string of new scandals of the Second Empire will be disappointed. Beyond a few coarse jokes of the time and slightly risky descriptions of Court amusements, with something more of the old familiar gossip about the Emperor and Madame de Castiglione and the eccentricities of Princess Metternich and other great ladies, there is nothing startling, nothing at all to deepen received impressions. Indeed, the Princess herself, who had every opportunity for knowing facts, declares that " much that has been written in irresponsible Memoirs is either wholly false or grossly exaggerated.. The Empress Eugenie," she adds, "was herself too strict and circumspect to permit any loose- ness of talk or of conduct, and scandal was rigidly discouraged even if it could not be suppressed."
Circumstances make Princess Caroline's witness worth having. In spite of the near family connexion, she was never one of the Empress's intimate friends. She had indeed her grievances, and it was not to her that one would naturally have gone for a kindly appreciation of that much. discussed great lady. But it must be said that any revelations here made are—even if unintentionally—rather to the Empress's credit than otherwise, or at least suggest that her motives may have been right where her judgment has seemed most fallible.
Princess Caroline—daughter of Prince Napoleon Murat, and granddaughter of the King of Naples—was born in the
• My Memoirs. By the Princess 6villaskarat. LOttaon: Eieleigh Nash. [13a. net.]
United States, her exiled father having married a Miss Fraser, of Scottish origin and American birth. Her childhood was spent in America, and she was still a very young girl when the Revolution of 1848 brought her family back to France. Her affectionate devotion was always given to the Bonaparte side, especially to Princess Mathilde and to the Emperor Napoleon III., who had a talent, as every one knows, for inspiring such a feeling in his immediate friends. After his fall and his death, which was perhaps the deepest sorrow Princess Caroline ever knew, and of which she writes with a painful frankness that might almost have delayed the publication of her Memoirs a little longer, she seems to have transferred the loyal love which was personal as well as dynastic to the unhappy Prince Imperial. His story too is told with a certain lack of discretion, and though there is nothing, or very little, in a rather unsubstantial book that need really hurt any living person, it is impossible not to feel that the Princess, as a woman of the world, would certainly have rewritten parts of her Memoirs before she gave theta to the public.
Still, we are obliged to Mr. Leighton, the book's godfather, who publishes it with an interesting preface, for his decision to leave it as its author laid it down. Recollections of the Bonaparte family and the Imperial Court are not its only points of interest. Even though Princess Caroline's second husband was an Englishman, and though all her later years were spent in an English country home, it is a remarkable fact that the Memoirs are written in fairly good and lively English. Also in their frank candour, their freely expressed prejudices, they are the autobiography of a woman whose qualities were as characteristic as the fortunes of her life were varied.
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