Rensselaer Republican, Volume 18, Number 20, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 January 1886 — Eugenie’s Sorrows Her Own Work. [ARTICLE]

Eugenie’s Sorrows Her Own Work.

Of all the mistakes made by Napoleon 111. in his imperial career, that of his marriage was "assuredly the most fatkk-i., It was Eugenie that wrecked the empire by bringing about the war with Prussia, prompted by her fervent Catholicism, that would not suffer her to brook the spectacle of the rise and prosperity of a Prqtestant power. It was she that drove by her narrowminded exactions her unhappy son out to the war in which he perished. Never came Nemesis to a sovereignty or a dynasty clad in a fairer or more alluring form, yet verily it was Eugenie that avenged' the victims of the coup d’etat. And it seems as though fate itself was leagued against the second empire, so strongly . did events shap& themselves to bring about the ruin of the last hopes of his adherents. Only eight months after the death of the Prince Imperial, the demise took place of an aged and wealthy lady, a Mme. Auban, which, had it occurred one year earlier, would have saved the life of the hapless young Prince, and might have brought about the restoration of the empire. This lady had made a will bequeathing her entire fortune, some 8,000,000 francs ($1,600,000). to the Prince Imperial. It is a well-known fact, and one not denied by the most ardent Bonapartists, that the poor boy entered the British army and undertook that fatal campaign into Zululand to escape from the intolerable existence to which his mother’s narrow-minded-ness and jealous fears had condemned him. She denied him an income sufficient to enable him to maintain the appearance necessary to a young man who associated on terms of equality with the princes of the blood royal of England. He was not able even to keep a second horse or to take rooms in London during the season. Often, when he was invited to some of the ducal or princely homes of England, he was forced to decline the invitation, because he could not afford to pay the fees to the servants. His mother’s dream was to keep him constantly at her side, going to mass and confession daily, and passing the remaindef“of his time between prayers and conspiracies. No youth not born a monk by nature could have long submitted to such a regime, and surely not one who had been born and bred the heir to a throne, and in whose veins flowed the fiery blood of the impetuous Hortense Beauharnais. The inevitable catastrophe arrived at last; the young man broke the leading-strings and rushed out into the world, only to meet death face to face, and to consolidate the republic of France beneath the spears of a horde of savages.— Lucy Hooper, in the New York World. ,