And so we took great care with each dress before she wore it, as it was hers, and then great care afterward, in case it was to be one of ours.
The dressmaker’s forms were made just to the size of her and she was measured every season for them. One was sent up dressed, the other empty for the dress she’d take off. When the door to the lift opened, there were always the two dummies side by side, the one bare, the other in the recently quitted dress or gown. They looked to me like two headless women, and it always gave me pause. Given how much the Empress worshipped her forerunner, Marie Antoinette, I can’t imagine she didn’t think of it. But Eugénie was Spanish, and Louis-Napoléon not quite French, either. There was not much French in him or any other Napoléon, for that matter. That would mean many things in the course of their lives, but I think, most of all, it meant they didn’t entirely understand how it was with France and her rulers and how it had always been, how it might always be.
§
From my arrival, I was concerned almost entirely with Her Majesty’s furs. They were heavy, and even if well cured, the animal musk of them made the air of their room thick and close. This was where Pepa and the sisters refused to go most often. These were not given away like the gowns, and as if they resented this fact, Pepa and the sisters ignored them all the more.
My French was of a very odd kind at this time—I knew curses and sexual positions, and how to ask for a drink, and then a few more words from lyrics learned for the tenor. At the convent I had added prayers and psalms, but in written form only. Of what I learned here, I often knew neither how things were said nor what they sounded like, and I learned as I could by listening.
When I was presented to Pepa and the sisters on that first day, for example, I understood very little of what they said to me. Pepa’s French was thickly accented by her Spanish in a way I found charming; it would be the only thing I ever found charming about her. The very stout Spaniard and the two slender, quiet French women seemed at something of a loss when I only nodded to everything they said but, of course, this was the loss the chamberlain had in mind, had even hoped for; when the chamberlain indicated that I was mute, they stared, as if it were something they could see. They then walked me through the basement kingdom, showed me the dress dummies, the boxes of pins, the dumbwaiter, the bell that would ring for me, enunciating everything carefully. And then they brought me to the room where the furs were kept. Pepa gestured with a sideways grin to me. I couldn’t tell the source of her pleasure, exactly. I could only think it was because her time in this room was done as mine began.
A list of the furs the Empress abandoned when she fled the Tuileries was published in the British newspapers shortly after the end of the Empire.
One Swansdown cloak, lined with Silver Fox.
One black velvet mantle, trimmed with Marten Sable.
One black velvet circular cloak, lined and trimmed with Chinchilla
One black velvet pelisse, lined with Weasel, with Sable collar.
One otter skin cloak.
One blue Cashmere opera cloak, lined with Swansdown.
One black Cashmere opera cloak, lined with Swansdown.
One hunting waistcoat, lined with Chinchilla.
One black silk boddice, lined with Chinchilla.
One grey silk boddice, lined with Chinchilla.
One Marabout muff.
One Sable muff.
One Silver Fox muff.
One Ermine muff.
One Otter muff.
One Otter’s Head muff.
One Marten Sable boa.
One collar of Sable tails.
One collar of Marten Sable heads.
One pair of Chinchilla cuffs.
One pair of Silver Fox cuffs.
One green velvet wrap, lined with Canadian fur.
One carpet of Thibet Goat skin.
One white Sheepskin carpet.
One set of Otter trimming.
Two caracos of Spanish Lamb skin
8 ? yards of Chinchilla trimming.
27 yards of Sable tail trimming.
One front and a piece of Black Fox.
Four strips, a wrist band, two pockets, two sleeves and one trimming of Black Fox.
Two Swansdown skins, in pieces.
Fourteen Silver Fox skins.
Six half skins of Silver Fox.
Twenty Silver Fox tails.
One Otter collar.
Three tails of Canadian fur.
Two Marabout collars.
Some odd pieces of Chinchilla.
Four large carpets of black Bear skin.
Two small carpets of black Bear skin.
One brown Bear, with head.
One stuffed Bear.
One white Fox rug.
One caraco, one petticoat, and one waistcoat of chestnut coloured plush, trimmed with Otter.
19 ? yards of Otter trimming.
Two Pheasants’ skins
Three white Sheepskin stools.
One Sable dress trimming.
Three Sable skins.
Two squares of Chinchilla.
One Weasel tippet and two cuffs to match
Two pieces Swansdown.
Two Pheasant wings.
One stuffed Fox.
One pair of Otter gloves.
3 ? yards of Skunk trimming.
Two court mantles bordered with Ermine.
I knew they’d published this list to shame her; but as many furs as were found, I knew well there’d been many more.
As often as not, under one of those ermine court mantles, Eugénie wore only a flannel wrapper, brought with her from Spain. It made the Emperor quite cross when he would look over and see a bit of it showing. I sometimes wanted to explain to the Emperor that he had married a horsewoman, but if he didn’t know it, it wasn’t for me to tell him. He’d admired her horsewomanly ways, having fallen in love with her on a hunting party at the Chateau Compiègne, meant to be six days that became eleven. At the end of it, he gave her the horse she rode in the hunt and an emerald pin shaped as a cloverleaf and covered in small diamonds in memory of a moment when she’d paused to admire a clover after the rain. He had it made in Paris while the hunt went on, and it arrived in time to be his token to her.
For all any of us know, he had the hunt extended so as to give this to her before she left, all of them waiting while the jeweler did his work and the Emperor his.
She lives now outside London, having escaped the mobs that screamed for her death. A brave few of her loyal subjects had rushed her from the palace in the first moments after the Emperor’s capture and the fall of the Empire. Like Louis-Philippe before her, she was rushed from the palace to London in a disguise, on the yacht of a British dentist.