Eugénie de Montijo, Empress, will sleep her last long sleep with her beloved Dead—Exiles all.
The historian who comes after us will find in this place of Napoleonic sepulture ample materials for a moving chapter. He will have to re-narrate, with the assistance of my modest records, the amazing rise and the more astounding downfall of an Emperor and the deplorable end of a Prince. But he will “use his best ink” in the endeavour to limn a faithful portrait of her who held the world in thrall by her beauty, who has endured her martyrdom with a resignation and fortitude so admirable as to have compelled the affectionate solicitude of the nation whose honoured guest she has been for forty-one sorrowful, yet not wholly gloomy, years.
As I write these closing lines the air is full of processional melody, the Town gay with colour. I think, not of the Empress, when she, like our own beloved Albert Edward and Alexandra, was the centre of adulation, but of the Woman, in the not unkindly winter of her life, kneeling before a tomb—her own. It is All Saints’ Day—the Jour des Morts[193]—and in the crypt she mingles her prayers with the Benedictines’ “pour tous les fidèles défunts.” So I had seen her aforetime, and some words I heard then will not be kept back when the sluices of memory are opened:
... And now, as in a strain of music, the theme comes back again, and we end with the first notes with which we began, so, if our thoughts have for a while run in another channel, they fall back into the great deep of sweet sorrow, and, I will say, of thanksgiving, for that noble, princely youth who has passed before our eyes with the brightness of a ray of light, and from this world has disappeared for ever.... What a morning in life it was when that beautiful youth entered into this world! What a mother’s joy! If ever son was worthy of a mother’s love, it was he. And if ever mother loved a son as an only son can be loved, it was she. What a desolation now! The solitary home. All alone. Yet not alone; for they who believe are never lonely. They have come unto “Mount Sion, and to the City of the Living God; to the company of many thousands of angels; to the Church of the first-born, who are written in the heavens; to God, the Judge of all; to the spirits of the just made perfect”; to the great cloud of witnesses ever about them. And as the Mother, who, when her Divine Son was in the grave, looked on with certain confidence to the glory of the Resurrection, to the future recognition in personal identity, and in the restored bonds of Mother and of Son in all the perfection of maternal and filial love glorified in eternity, so is it now. And this will be her consolation.... And what is the longest life of waiting but a little while at last?[194]
And she is passing to the floor of peace.
And Mary of the seven times wounded heart
Has kissed her lips ... the Light of Lights
Looks always on the motive, not the deed,
The Shadow of Shadows on the deed alone.
The time will come when we shall be able to unveil the whole truth to the world.
I shall continue to hope for a future of truth and of justice.
The Empress Eugénie.
THE PRINCE IMPERIAL
(THE POET LAUREATE’S SONNET)
Felix Opportunitate Mortis.
And made thee certain of thy changeless fate;
And thou no more hast wearily to wait,
Straining to catch the people’s tarrying shout
That from unrestful rest would drag thee out,
And push thee to those pinnacles of State
Round which throng courtly loves, uncourted hate,
Servility’s applause, and envy’s flout.
Twice happy boy! though cut off in thy flower,
The timeliest doom of all thy race is thine:
Saved from the sad alternative, to pine
For heights unreached, or icily to tower,
Like Alpine crests that only specious shine,
And glitter on the lonely peak of Power.
INDEX
A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, L, M, N, O, P, R, S, T, U, V, W, Z