"PLON-PLON."

Evening Star, Volume 8505, Issue 8505, 2 May 1891, Page 4

"PLON-PLON."

DEATH OF PRINCE NAPOLEON. REMINISCENCES. [From Our Special Correspondent.] London, March 21. It seems to be generally conceded that with the death of Prince Napoleon the last hopes of the Imperialists have crumbled to ashes. Prince Victor is a cub about whom even the most ardent believers in the dynasty would find it difficult to enthuse. If the father were impossible, the son is ten times more so. Mrs Crawford reminisces as follows in the ‘ Daily News ’ concerning the deceased: — Prince Napoleon’s death has almost made him popular, it now being known that be went to Rome on an errand which showed his patriotic feeling be superior to his resentment. A Florentine by taste and early education, he hated Rome, w bich he associated with his severe and parsimonious grandmother Madame Mere, and with the lawless violence of his uncle Lncien’s family. He never went there unless compelled by circumstances ot to see his numerous relatives and connections. Though an enemy of tho Pope, he did not see why Rome and its ruins should not be left to His Holiness and the Catholic world, and Florence be made the perpetual seat of the Italian Government. His last visit to Rome was undertaken to accomplish a great public object, and I am told by French Royalists a rather curious family one. As has already been stated, he wanted to open King Humbert’s eyes to the dangers with which the Triple Alliance is fraught to the House of Savoy, and to bring him at once to decide whether the Princess La titia is or is not to marry the Prince of Naples. Such a match has been a good deal talked about and seriously thought of. _*-he Duchesse d’Dzes was very anxious for King Humbert to make up his mind rapidly, her plan being to bring the Prince of Naples to marry the Princess Helena of Orleans, and the Due d'Or't-ins to a union with Priuccss Lietitia. If the latter match should take place the Bonapartists, as Prince Victor is discredited and penniless, and Prince Louis of too easy-going a disposition, might be expected to rally to the House of France. The fact of Prince Napoleon having come under the influence of the Duchesse d Uzei s most intimate friend, the Comtesse Dc Saint Paul, made this matrimonial scheme feasible. The poet Pope spoke of want of decency being want of sense. Want of decency was what made Princ-3 Napoleon’s career such a failure, with want of duo consideration for the ideas, feelings, or prejudices of those with whom he was thrown. He was as rude os hU uncle, whom he greatly resembled, but was wholly devoid of the great Napoleon s subtlety, cunning, or histrionic instinct. He hod rude German honesty derived through his mother from the House of Wiirtemburg and the House cf Brunswick, from which she was descended on the maternal side, being a daughter of Charlotte of Brunswick, eister of Caroline, the repudiated wife of George the Fourth of England. Prince Napoleon never knew when he was sayiug or doing an unseemly thing, and never stopped to consider faow anyone he was with might take it. Prince Napoleon was, perhaps, the only man who had frequent access to the Emperor, and who really exercised over him the power of mental suggestion. He never went into finance of the company - promoting kind, or made use of his opportunities to inflate or depress the public stocks. He was parsimonious, and his bands were absolutely clean in regard to money matters. He waa always preaching to the Emperor that his strength could only be in honest budgets and sincerely democratic government. If after the roup d'etat, when he thought himself a democratic Republican, he had followed Louis Blanc and "Victor Hugo into exile, he might now be regarded as greater than his unde, because he hated war, understood the needs of his time, and the requirements of France as a nation. Thongb he was incapable of understanding the French character, his intellect was prodigious, and he was all his life a plodding student of history and science. His lore was universal, tnd his judgment on a book, a theory, or a doctrine sound, strong, and always given in a few brief and lucid phrases. His conversation was strikingly original, and often amusingly so. His invective in public was fierce, in private it was never without a vein of rough and ready drollery.

Prince Napoleon might probably have beaten Carlyle in calling names. This talent was lavished on the Empress and her friends, who—he having opposed her marriage with the Emperor, and her clerical policy—were his bitter enemies. Unfortunately, the crudity of his language was such that his epithets, all of which were graphic, do not bear to be repeated. Stories not more seemly were told about him in the circle of the Empress. His treatment of his wife was brought up against him. She was of a melancholy disposition, ohy, proud, conscientious, and narrow-minded, and her conventual breeding did not qualify her to bandy rude jests with him. She lived in prayer and penitence, and he gathered round him the Freethinking littcrati of Paris, whom he entertained at banquets, often on Friday, not to shock Lia wife, but to show his disregard for the Empress Eugenie. MM. Sainte - Beuve, Taine, Renan, Edmond, About, the SaintSimoniena, and the Pereires, _ who were also disciples of Saint-Simon, attended these feasts. They were really fond of the Prince, who was always ready to ask favors of the Emperor for his friends. After the birth of the Prince Imperial Prince Napoleon became a wanderer, but more by sea than land, as he had the use of the Emperor’s yachts, La Reine Hortense and L’flirondelle. The newspapers of the towns he visited spoke of the Princess Clotilde as being with him, but this was a mistake. The Princess was a sedentary person, attached to her habits, and wrapped up in her children when they were in the nursery. Prince Napoleon urged the Emperor strongly after Sadowa to withdraw the army of occupation from Rome, and leave the Pope and Victor Emmanuel, Austria being no longer able to interfere, to settle the Roman question. He was in favor of letting Prussia do what she pleased in Germany, on condition of her letting France have Luxemburg and the Walloon provinces of Belgium. In 1870, when he was starting on a trip to Norway, Prince Napoleon told Emile De Girardin that he was playing a dangerous card in calling upon the Emperor to obtain through war the Quadrilateral of the Rhine. “That lot at the Tuileries,” he said, “are not very intelligent; but 1 do not think them fanatics enough to follow your advice. ” He heard on landing in Norway not only that war was declared, but that MacMabou was defeated. He telegraphed to his father-in-law not to forget the services France bad rendered to him personally and to Italy. The message was stopped in Germany. Prince Napoleon hastened home. On his return he had a conference with the Emperor at Chilons. Confusion reigned. Victor Emmanuel knew not what to do. The Prince went to implore him to come to the aid of France. The Prussian envoy at Florence advised the King openly to profit by his opportunity to take back Savoy and Nice; and this he might have done if a republic had not been proclaimed iu Paris. This threw all the Garibaldiana and Mazzinians on the French side, and made it impossible. Prince Napoleon was a member of the Versailles Chamber of Deputies, and was at one with Thiers and Gambetta in calling on the conntry to send back the 363 deputies whom MaoMahon wanted to be rid of. Gambetta once said to me in speaking of the Prince: “ He would overtop us all if his extraordinary gifts were directed by mood taste. Though he looks so much the Cesar, he is prone to buffoonery, and cannot keep down this inclination. In the Tribune his want of dignity shocks one.” Fearing his will might be suppressed by hb family for political reasons, Prince Napoleon had several copies of it made and in several hands. Hb memoirs, which hb whole life, are not to be publbhed while the Empress Eugenie lives. Each chapter has its appendix, and there are eir parts, In three of which the whole foreign Klicy of Napoleon 111. b treated of from i b, when an army of ooonpatioo was sent to

Rome, to 1870. Lest these memoirs should be mutilated manifold copies were also made'and given for safe keeping to trusty friends. The Abbe Pujol administered extreme'unction to enable Humbert, without giving a shook to Piedmontese Catholic feeling, to give a state funeral to Prince Napoleon’s remains, and place them in the vault of the House of Savoy.