Dumas fils was not sympathetic to such women. If La Dame aux Camélias found him in the preaching mode, then Le Demi-Monde revealed a savagery toward such women, whom he described as adventuresses—a kind of female whom any decent man must be prevented from marrying. In an early version of the play, he goes so far as to have the lead male character proclaim to the female character: “That kind of love which lays siege to another man’s wife and forces her to adopt the low shifts of adultery and condemns her to an existence of daily lies . . . that kind of love I could never feel, especially not for you.” He then adds, “It is from seeing you so pure, so loyal, so trusting that I have come to realize the terrible harm that such a love can do to a woman.”
Still, while Dumas fils was moralizing on the stage, offstage he did the very thing he condemned and fell in love with a married woman, who left her husband for him. The woman was Nadejda von Knorring, an attractive young Russian princess then living apart from her husband in Paris. Dumas had already dallied with another married Russian aristocrat and come off the worst in the affair, having fruitlessly pursued her across Europe for almost a year. He wrote a novel based on the lady (his 1852 The Lady of the Pearls), but he claimed that adultery now disgusted him. Yet when the opportunity arose, he fell headlong into an affair with Nadejda. “What I love in her,” he wrote family friend George Sand, “is that she is so completely a woman from the toes of her feet to the depths of her Slav soul.” He told himself that he was improving the lady: “I delight,” he told Sand—herself an adventuress by his standards—“in re-making this lovely creature who has been flawed by her country, her upbringing, the company she has kept, by coquetry, and above all, by idleness.”13
Unfortunately, the prince refused to divorce Nadejda, and the czar stood behind him. Nadejda escaped with her jewels and her daughter, going to live in a villa in the south of France, where Dumas fils joined her.
Her mother paid for the villa.
The Exposition Universelle opened and closed with assassination attempts on the emperor. In late April, an Italian from the Papal States fired two shots at Louis-Napoleon while he was walking along the Champs-Elysées. The emperor had remained calm and kept walking, while his potential killer was arrested, tried, and executed on the exposition’s opening day. Another attempt on the emperor’s life, in September, ended safely enough for Louis-Napoleon when the would-be assassin’s shots went wide.
That September, as the Exposition Universelle was winding down, the French—after a siege of 322 days—finally succeeded in capturing the fort of Sebastopol. Czar Alexander II struggled on for a time, but at length he agreed to peace negotiations, to be held early the following year in Paris. The emperor commemorated the long-awaited event with a Te Deum of thanksgiving at Notre-Dame, while the Boulevard du Centre now became the Boulevard de Sébastopol. Another major new thoroughfare, in northeastern Paris, would take the name Rue de Crimée.
All for the moment seemed well. Even though the war had been a disaster in terms of loss of life, the year ended in triumph, as French troops returning from the Crimea entered Paris.
Yet trouble was already brewing for France on the Italian peninsula, where—as in the German principalities—the tide of national unification was rising.
Empress Eugenie and her son, the Imperial Prince. Anonymous photographer. Private collection. © Jean Bernard / Bridgeman Images
CHAPTER SIX
What Goes Up . . .
(1856–1857)
Peace negotiations for ending the Crimean War were held in March 1856 in Paris—a tremendous coup for Louis-Napoleon, who was the first French ruler in many a year to host such an international gathering. The war had been a huge drain on France financially, and it had imposed a high cost in human terms as well (some 115,000 Allied soldiers were said to have died in the siege of Sebastopol alone). Nor could it be chalked up as a success in settling the tumultuous areas of the Balkans and eastern Mediterranean. Yet basking in popularity at home, and newly enjoying recognition and prestige abroad, the emperor now dreamed dreams—not of international conquest, but as supreme arbiter of Europe.
Louis-Napoleon’s popularity received an even greater boost that March with the birth of the Imperial Prince, Napoleon Eugene Louis Jean Joseph Bonaparte. His father was ecstatic, rushing around and hugging everyone, while appropriate celebrations—including a 101-gun salute and the illumination of the grands boulevards—spread the emperor’s joy throughout the city. He now had a son, and his dynastic future was assured.
Eugenie, who survived a grueling twenty-two hours of labor, had grimly done her duty and produced an heir. “You and the little one, you are everything for me,” her grateful husband wrote her several months later, from the small spa town in the Vosges where he had gone to take the waters for his rheumatism. Yet, despite his devotion, Louis-Napoleon remained as unfaithful as ever, now taking a new mistress, the beautiful young Countess of Castiglione, who had recently arrived in Paris as wife of the ambassador from the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia in northern Italy. Their affair lasted long enough to produce an illegitimate son (in time apprenticed to Louis-Napoleon’s dentist), and it certainly reinforced Louis-Napoleon’s connections with the Kingdom of Piedmont-Sardinia—which, unknown to him, had been the entire point.
What Louis-Napoleon had not known was that the Countess of Castiglione, despite her mere eighteen years of age, had already been the mistress of Victor Emmanuel, the King of Piedmont-Sardinia, whose prime minister (and the countess’s cousin), Count Camillo Cavour, was determined to unite the Italian peninsula under Victor Emmanuel. This meant ousting the Austrians from northern Italy, which in turn required outside help, most particularly from the French. Enrolling the young countess in the service of Piedmont-Sardinia, Cavour sent her off to seduce Louis-Napoleon, who for his part thought that he had seduced the countess. “I have need of little distractions,” he later told his cousin, the Princess Mathilde.1
Whether or not the Countess of Castiglione was bright enough to influence Louis-Napoleon (history has duly recorded that she was as empty-headed as she was beautiful), Louis-Napoleon was already favorably inclined toward Italian unification when he encountered her undisputable charms. In the end, Louis-Napoleon tired of the young lady and replaced her with the far more intelligent Countess Marianne de Walewska. As for Italian unification, it would not take much more to persuade the emperor of the French to get involved.
While the emperor was rejoicing in his young offspring and dallying with lady friends, his capital was throbbing with the excitement of new wealth and the lure of profit.
The Pereire brothers’ Crédit Mobilier reached its peak in 1856, when it handed out a breathtaking dividend of two hundred francs per share. By this time, the Bourse had become (in the words of Alexandre Dumas fils) “what the cathedral had been in the Middle Ages.” A deputy in that year’s Legislature agreed, adding that “the Bourse has become a sort of temple for the worship of stock gambling.” Speculation on the market was all-absorbing—a new form of betting with the prospect of incalculable winnings. Nothing was sure, but everyone knew someone who had made a killing on the market, much like Zola’s Saccard in La Curée, who took his loot from the expropriations game and dived into market speculation.
Some decried the influence of money in this new age, but money was also the root of productivity, taking the form of investment capital, whether in securities or joint stock companies. “Business,” as Dumas fils famously put it, “is quite simple: it’s other people’s money.”2 The Pereire brothers had struck first with their Crédit Mobilier, which achieved huge success and now was spreading to other countries. But the Rothschilds were at last getting into the game, organizing a syndicate called the Réunion Financière and waging what amounted to a war on Crédit Mobilier.
Still, warnings of an economic slowdown were beginning to appear. All the demands for capital, whether from new banks or railway companies, could not be sustained, especially given the impact of the Crimean War
on government borrowing. The first great wave of railway investment, and the prosperity that came with it, was already coming to a close. In 1856, the Banque de France, facing a shortfall of gold and silver, contemplated suspending the convertibility of the currency—something that the Rothschild regent, Alphonse, adamantly opposed. Instead, he and his father, James, succeeded in persuading the other regents to increase the discount rate and make larger purchases of gold and silver to maintain cash payments. Happily for the Rothschilds, its Paris house would provide the Banque de France with much of this gold—some 751 million francs of it—at a hefty rate of around 11 percent.
As the decade continued, the Second Empire continued to bring in wealth for many but brought suffering for many more. Wages were increasing, but so was the cost of living—especially rents.
Louis-Napoleon continued to believe that his role was to do good for those in need—a belief reinforced by his recognition that the workers of Paris and of France, now possessing the vote, constituted a significant portion of his support. Altruism and self-interest combined, and the emperor sent a considerable sum to the chief of police to open up a large number of soup kitchens, which in the span of a month distributed more than a million meals—not free of charge, but at a very low price.
The empress also joined in with her concern, using the 600,000 francs that the City of Paris had voted to purchase a valuable necklace for her, as a wedding gift, to establish a foundation to provide occupational training for poor girls.
Some, however, continued to do well. Gustave Eiffel was one of these, having had the luck to stumble upon a career in the railways at a time when they were the most dynamic industry around.
Until then, his life in Paris had been lackluster, largely because he had no idea of what he wanted to be or do. But then he chanced to visit the workshop of Charles Nepveu, near the Gare Saint-Lazare. Eiffel was making the rounds of several potential employers when he met Nepveu, who was a respected designer and maker of steam engines, rolling stock, and track. The two men hit it off, and Nepveu offered Eiffel the job of private secretary, with a great deal of freedom to become familiar with the company’s extensive activities. It was now that something inside Eiffel suddenly ignited, and the young phenomenon rapidly emerged. Eiffel tore into the work, fascinated by what he saw and learned and eager to learn more. Unlike his previously easygoing approach to life, he now embarked on a routine that kept him at work for long hours, followed on Sundays by private lessons in economics at the Ecole des Mines (School of Mines).
Unfortunately Nepveu was not a good businessman, and he soon had to close his firm after suffering what appears to have been a breakdown. But he found a good position for Eiffel with the Pereire brothers’ La Compagnie des Chemins de Fer de l’Ouest (by this time the Pereire brothers also owned the Gare Saint-Lazare as well as many of the principal French railway lines). The company immediately gave Eiffel considerable responsibilities, including the opportunity to work with its chief engineer, Eugène Flachat, who had just completed the first sheet-iron bridge in France (at Clichy), pioneering the use of sheet iron fixed by rivets rather than by pins and bolts.
By this time, Baltard’s use of an iron framework for the construction of the iron-and-glass pavilions at Les Halles3 had led the way for the use of iron in a wide range of structures in France, although it was not yet commonly used in bridges (Paris’s Pont des Arts, dating from 1803, and the first Pont d’Austerlitz, from 1806, were some of the earliest French examples). Eiffel’s own first design for his new employers was for a small (seventy-two-foot) cast-iron and sheet-iron bridge for the Saint-Germain Railway, which was quickly accepted.
While Eiffel was finding his footing with his new employer, Nepveu sold his own company to a larger Belgian one and was placed in charge of his own renamed firm. Late in 1856, he brought Eiffel back into the fold and gave him a senior position. When Nepveu won the contract for building a railroad bridge across the wide and turbulent Garonne river at Bordeaux, he made Eiffel (now age twenty-five) his assistant in the project. When the older man suddenly resigned, Eiffel was left with a bear of a project and a two-year deadline.
Eiffel brought many talents to the table, but one of his greatest was the recognition that iron as a building material required radically new design and construction methods. Wood and stone could accommodate an ad hoc approach to building operations, and throughout the centuries, cathedrals and castles alike had been argued over and reevaluated as they went up, sometimes surprisingly far into the process. But Eiffel completely rejected this trial-and-error approach, insisting that every component of his projects come ready for assembly, without any on-site adjustment or alternation. This revolutionary method, founded on exact mathematical calculations, may not have won instant converts, but Eiffel’s iron bridges and buildings soon became renowned for their precision and reliability, even as they won admirers for their astonishing lightness and grace.
Eiffel began at the Garonne River by rising magnificently to the challenge, introducing new techniques (including hydraulic pile-driving into the riverbed) and demonstrating remarkable management abilities. He completed the project on time and without incident—an extraordinary accomplishment.
More would soon follow.
While Georges Haussmann’s north-south artery continued to push southward across the Left Bank, other young men besides Eiffel were making their way in Paris. The Goncourt brothers, despite their wealth and privilege, were miserable as usual, thanks to the world’s refusal to acknowledge their genius. Given the tension between their avant-garde literary production, with its unrelenting realism, and their politics, which were unabashedly conservative, they found themselves increasingly cynical observers of life around them. “At the present moment,” they wrote in May 1856, “the world of petty journalism, the freemasonry of publicity reigns and governs and bars the way to any gentleman.” And in October, they commented, with fashionable ennui: “Time cures one of everything—even of living.”4
Twenty-four-year-old Edouard Manet, who also was blessed with family money and position, was considerably more optimistic as he left the studio of Thomas Couture to work on his own. He quickly installed himself in a studio in an untrendy area near the Gare Saint-Lazare, which he shared with Count Albert De Balleroy, another young painter of elegant taste, good family, and means. When they were not painting, the two frequented the Paris cafés together, both of them impeccably dressed as they strolled the boulevards, giving no evidence of the radical group of young artists to which they belonged.
Nadar, on the other hand, while he did not neglect the cafés, had to hustle to make a living, especially with his ingrate brother stealing his name and clients. In February, he registered his new company, Société de photographie artistique Nadar et Cie, with the Pereire brothers as his principal backers. Modestly located on the Rue Saint-Lazare, Nadar’s studio would benefit over the years from his growing art and antiques collection, and it soon became the heart of a successful business—especially as Nadar charged high prices and paid little rent, even while photographing some of the most important cultural figures of the day.
His brother, Adrien, continued to use the name “Nadar,” much to Nadar’s dismay, which a court in April ruled that he could do. Adrien was maddening, displaying photos by his brother in his own studio windows and telling clients that he was the true Nadar. At last, deciding that he could take no more of this, Nadar launched a formal appeal, organizing a campaign in the press to promote himself and his own studio as the true Nadar. It would take the better part of a year, but in late 1857, Nadar won his case. After that, his own career would continue to soar, as he established himself as the greatest portrait photographer of his age. Adrien and his studio disappeared from history.
With a world’s fair just ended and a glittering international congress held to mop up after the Crimean War, not to mention the birth of the imperial prince, Paris by 1856 had seen more than its share of spectacle. Evidence of splendor was everywhere,
as Louis-Napoleon was careful to provide the hoi polloi with plenty to occupy it. His concern with social issues and educational reform may have been real, but at the top of his agenda was retaining his position in power. And this meant maintaining order.
Order trumped everything else, as Maxime Du Camp was about to find out. Late in 1856, the Revue de Paris, which he and three others (including Théophile Gautier) had revived in 1851, was set to continue publishing a serialized version of Gustave Flaubert’s remarkable new novel, Madame Bovary. The Revue de Paris, now under the leadership of Du Camp, Léon Laurent-Pichat, and Louis Ulbach, had established itself on the Paris literary scene, having published works by Gautier, Lamartine, Musset, and George Sand as well as by Baudelaire and the Goncourt brothers. But early in November, one of Du Camp’s friends—who was in a position to know—informed him that the Revue was about to be placed under police ban. Du Camp, who was well aware that the Revue was under close surveillance, having already received several cautions, knew that “censure might mean suppression.” At this point, he tried to encourage Flaubert to self-censure, leaving out any passage “which might be dangerous, or, at least, bear the semblance of danger.”
Madame Bovary, as Du Camp explained in his memoirs, “is a novel of extraordinary power.” As a result, “it startled people, and they were scandalized by what they thought improper.” Flaubert, however, was adamantly opposed to changing anything. As Du Camp put it, “To help those he loved he would not have hesitated had the effort meant his own ruin, . . . but rather than change a sentence long pondered over . . . he would have broken with his dearest friend.” In response, Flaubert argued, “You’re prosecuting details, but it’s the whole of it that offends. The work’s brutality lies at its heart, not at its surface.”5
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