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Memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans
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General SummaryDR. THOMAS A. EVANS, an American dentist, settled in Paris in 1847 and there became acquainted with Prince Louis Napoleon, who five years later ascended the throne as Napoleon III. Their professional relations soon ripened into a firm friendship, which lasted as long as the emperor lived. Dr. Evans also became well known to and much liked by the empress. It was to his house that she fled on September 4, 1870, after quitting the Tuileries forever, and it was he who managed her escape from France to England. At his death in 1897 Dr. Evans left his Memoirs uncompleted. They have since been competently edited, thus forming a very valuable contribution to the history of the Second French Empire.
CHAPTER XXXI
The Second French Empire1
145. Napoleon III2
Queen Hortense and the empress Joséphine — the mother
and the grandmother of Louis Napoleon — were each of them
famous beauties; but the emperor Napoleon III was not a
handsome man in the sense commonly given to these words.
His head was large, usually slightly inclined to one side, and his
features were strongly pronounced. The forehead was broad,
the nose prominent, the eyes small, grayish-blue in color, and
generally expressionless, owing to a somnolent drooping of the
lids; but they brightened wonderfully when he was amused,
and, when he was aroused they were full of power; nor were
those likely to forget it who had once seen, through these windows
of the soul, the flash of the fire that burned within. His
complexion was blond but rather sallow; the lower part of the
face was lengthened by a short "goatee" — called in honor of
his Majesty an "imperial" — and broadened by a very heavy,
silky mustache, the ends of which were stiffly waxed. His hair
was of a light brown color, and, when I first knew him, was
abundant and worn rather long; at a later period it was trimmed
short and was habitually brushed in the style made familiar by
the effigy on the coinage of the empire. In complexion, in the
color of his hair, and also in the shape of his head, Napoleon III
was a Beauharnais,1 not a Bonaparte, and a Frank, not a Corsican.
He was a little below the average height; but his person
was marked with dignity and distinction, and his deportment
with ease and courtliness. No one seeing him could fail to
observe that he was not an ordinary man. Late in life, he
inclined to stoutness; at the time I first met him, his figure was
not large but his body was compact and muscular.
He was always carefully dressed, and in public, when in plain
clothes, usually wore a black frock coat tightly buttoned. But
whatever the fashion of the day might be in hats, rarely could
he be induced to wear any other than a "Count d’Orsay,"2 or a
very subdued type of the style in vogue, in which respect he
exhibited his good taste — to those of us who remember the
tall, flat-brimmed, graceless "stovepipes" with which the
Parisian hommes du monde covered their heads under the empire.
When a young man, the emperor was fond of athletic sports,
hunting, fencing, and military exercises of all kinds. He was a
strong swimmer — an accomplishment to which he may have
owed his life, on the failure of the expedition to Boulogne,3 and a
fine rider. In fact, he never appeared to better advantage than
when in the saddle; and during the years of his presidency he
was often seen on horseback in the parks and suburbs of Paris,
accompanied by only one or two attendants. A little later, and
after his marriage, he liked to go out in a carriage and to drive the
horses himself. When staying at St.-Cloud, he was to be seen
almost daily in the park or its neighborhood, riding with the empress
in a phaeton, behind a span of fast trotters, handling the
reins himself, and entirely unattended.
During the latter part of his life, owing to increasing infirmities,
he became more and more disinclined to physical exertion.
Horseback exercise was now almost impossible, and his out-of-door
excursions were limited, with rare exceptions, to carriage
drives and walks. He could be seen in these last years almost
any day, when in Paris, on the terrace of the Tuileries overlooking
the Seine, always moving slowly, and frequently leaning
on the arm of an attendant, or stopping occasionally, as he was
fond of doing, to look down upon the merry groups of children
at play in the garden, whose clamorous happiness, careless and
unrestrained, like a breath of fresh air from another world, was
an inspiration and a delight to him.
1 , edited by
E. A. Grane. New York, 1905. D. Appleton and Company.
2 , pp. 33–34.
1 Joséphine’s first husband was the vicomte de Beauharnais, who perished during
the Jacobin Terror. Napoleon married her in 1796.
2 Named after a celebrated dandy of the time.
3 In 1840 Louis Napoleon had landed with a little band of followers at Boulogne,
hoping to provoke a revolution in his favor. The attempt failed, and its author was
condemned to life imprisonment in the fortress of Ham. He escaped to London six
years later.
Contents:
Chicago: E. A. Grane., ed., "Napoleon III," Memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans in Readings in Modern European History, ed. Webster, Hutton (Boston: D.C. Heath, 1926), 336–337. Original Sources, accessed November 23, 2024, http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=9TLCJGYNTJC7VQN.
MLA: . "Napoleon III." Memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans, edited by E. A. Grane., in Readings in Modern European History, edited by Webster, Hutton, Boston, D.C. Heath, 1926, pp. 336–337. Original Sources. 23 Nov. 2024. http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=9TLCJGYNTJC7VQN.
Harvard: (ed.), 'Napoleon III' in Memoirs of Dr. Thomas W. Evans. cited in 1926, Readings in Modern European History, ed. , D.C. Heath, Boston, pp.336–337. Original Sources, retrieved 23 November 2024, from http://originalsources.com/Document.aspx?DocID=9TLCJGYNTJC7VQN.
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