THE EX-EMPRESS EUGENIE.

Oamaru Mail, Volume I, Issue 255, 15 February 1877, Page 2

THE EX-EMPRESS EUGENIE.

Lucy Hooper writes from Paris to the JSTcw York World: —The pajDers announce that the lawsuit brought by Mme. de Montijo, the mother of the Empress Eugenie, against three Parisian newspapers — Les Droits de Le Tribune, and L'lndependence—for publishing extracts from the acte de naissauce of the late Empress, and drawing scandalous conclusions therefrom, is to take place on the 9th of November. To her great credit be it said that, after she became Empress of the French, though she presided over the most dissolute Courts of modern Europe, the breath of slander never dared assail her. Her married life was far from being happy. Like a true Spaniard, she was passionately jealous of her husband, who certainly gave her ample cause. A story once went the rounds respecting an altercation between the Empress and a certain noble Count who filled the honorable functions at the Imperial Court that the infamous Lehei did at that of Louis XV. The Empress one day desired to enter the apartments of the Emperor in great haste, being desirous of imparting to him some important piece of intelligence. She was stopped at the threshold by the functionary aforesaid, who impressively declared that she could not enter, as the Emperor was at that moment in conference with his Ministei's on a weighty affair of State. Prayers and threats having alike proved in vain, the irate lady withdrew and and posted herself at a window which commanded a full view of the private entrance to the apartments of the Emperor. She soon saw issue therefrom an individual who could scarcely have been the Minister —unless, indeed, Ministers are in the habit of wearing stylish silk dresses and tiny little boots and thick lace veils

over tiny little bonnets. Back flew thtfL fair Spaniard to her husband's door, where she first relieved her wounded feelings by soundly boxing the ears of the noble Count aforesaid, and then she made her way unquestioned and in triumph. And we trow that Louis Napoleon passed an " evil quarter of an hour," as the French idiom hath it, when once she got hold of him. It was after one of these scenes that she started off so suddenly on a trip to Scotland, attended only by a single lady-in-waiting, and though the matter was hushed up, and the story promulgated that she had gone to consult a celebrated physician in Edinburgh, the fact that a conjugal quarrel was at the bottom of the trip -was a well-understood fact at the Imperial Court.