FOR upwards of sixty years has France exhibited to the world the spectacle of a phantasmagoria - wild, fitful, and incoherent as a nightmare-dream. The horrible and the pathetic mingled with the grotesque; things incongruous and unexpected succeeding each other with transformations as rapid as legerdemain; massacres and festivals; miseries and orgies; reckless license and stringent despotism; strange visions of murdered sovereigns, and ephemeral consuls and dictators. Dynasties changing like the slides in a magiclantern; an emperor rising from the chaos of revolution, as from a surging sea; sinking, re-appearing, then again sinking. A long-guarded captive seating himself on the throne of his captor; a Republic with the anomaly of Equality for its motto, and a Prince-President at its head; and Absolutism established in honour of Liberty and Fraternity.

Party colours glance on the sight like the tints of a quick-shaken kaleidoscope; the white of the Bourbon lilies, and the blue of the Napoleon violets; imperial purple, tri-coloured cockades, and Red Republicanism. Another

shake of the kaleidoscope, and again the purple predominates. But the present resume of the empire has not the prestige of its original, whose birth was heralded by glittering trophies, and the exciting strains of martial music. No! Here is an empire created by slight of hand amid no prouder minstrelsy than that of the violins of fêtes.

With a new slide of the magic-lantern we behold an imperial wedding, surpassing in brilliant externals even the nuptials of the Napoleon and Maria

VOL. XLI.-NO. CCXLIII.

Louisa. But the bridegroom is not Napoleon the Great, nor is the bride a daughter of the Cæsars. We must give the bridegroom due credit for proving that he still possesses some freshness of feeling, not yet wholly scared by coups d'etat and diplomacy, and that he amiably prefers (for the time, at least) domestic affection to self-interest and expediency. But how long will he be permitted by the most changeable, the most uncertain people on earth, to enjoy his love-match in peace? With the populace it may be acceptable, so long as it gives them pageants to "assist" at, to gaze upon, and to talk about; but the alliance of an emperor of France with a Spanish countess, the subject of another sovereign, is not glorious enough for the other classes, who are really aristocratic in their hearts, notwithstanding occasionally short freaks of democracy. Republican governments have never governed the French; they are only impressed by the opposites of democracy, by the prestige of rank, titles, and distinction. Louis XIV., a far more mighty sovereign than Napoleon III., and who, on his firmly established throne, was servilely worshipped as the "Grand Monarque," never dared to avow his clandestine marriage with Madame de Maintenon. Napoleon I. showed how well he understood the genius of the French people, when he replaced his really beloved Josephine by the daughter of an emperor, and required his brother Jerome to put away his first wife, Miss Patterson, for a German princess.

Louis Napoleon himself seems to have had his misgivings as to the effect the step he contemplated would

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have on the mind of the nation; and the fall of the French funds, from the time the marriage came on the tapis, was full of significance. Instead of following the usual example of monarchs, and simply announcing his intended marriage, he proceeded to make his notification a piece justificative, full of explanations and apologies, in which his anxiety betrayed him into inconsistencies and errors of judgment. At variance with his hereditary pretensions as Napoleon III., he rejoiced in the character of parvenu, and then boasted the "high birth" of his consort. He endeavoured to frame his speech, as though he had taken for his text Ovid's maxim...

"Non bene conveniunt nec in una sede morantur Majestas et Amor."

Metam. lib. ii. 846.

Yet he has laboured to overload love with the most far-fetched and dazzling majesty. He complacently instanced his grandmother, Josephine, as beloved by France, though not of royal blood; seemingly oblivious that Napoleon I. had not stooped from the throne to raise her (she had been his wife ere men dreamed of him as a monarch)— and that his policy soon compelled her to descend from the throne, and give place to a prouder bride. Louis Napoleon has promised that the Empress Eugenia will revive the virtues of the Empress Josephine: far wiser had he not touched on the topic, to remind his bride that the reward the earthly reward of those virtues was divorce and a broken heart; and to remind his people how easily the non-royal wife could be moved aside, whenever the interests of the crown or the nation should require it. He who has declared that the empire is peace," has dropped ominous words of "the hour of danger," in which the good qualities of his Eugenia will shine forth; in contrast, he evidently meant, with the incapacity and selfishness of Maria Louisa, when France was invaded by the allies; but how utterly distasteful to the French public must that ill-judged reminder be! He spoke, in his ante-nuptial speech, of the unhappy fates of the illustrious ladies who had worn the crown of France-a suggestive theme, in which we are about to follow his lead; but from his lips the subject seemed peculiarly ill-chosen and ill-timed. Verily, his Imperial Majesty has been singu

larly infelicitous in his selection of topics. In every country of Europe there are still men whose hearts can respond to the sentiment

"Dulce et decorum est PRO PATRIA mori."— Hor. Such men would have esteemed it more judicious to have avoided any mention of the deceased father of Eugenia de Montijo, than to have announced him as one who, in the struggle of Spain for independence, fought against his own countrymen, and with the invaders of his native land. The unnecessary allusion to the bereaved Duchess of Orleans is in such bad taste, that to comment on it would be a continuation of the fault.

But we must excuse the inconsistencies of a man too much in love to see the import of all he said: and we must not, in common courtesy, omit for his bride the customary compliment to all brides, the expression of our good wishes. We wish her happiness, and the more willingly for the sake of the good blood in her veins the blood of worthy, sagacious, and patriolic Scotland (derived, not from her father, but from her mother, a Kirkpatrick). May the " canny drop" be allowed free circulation through her heart! Yes, we wish her happiness willingly, but very doubtfully; not because she has wedded a Buonaparte, for the men of that name have not the reputation of unkind husbands (even to the wives they repudiated), and she might be very happy with Louis Napoleon in another sphere; not merely because her position is trying, and apparently insecure, but because she places on her head the crown matrimonial of France a circlet with which some dark fatality seems connected: for, among the many fair brows on which it has rested, there are very few that it has left without a blight or a wound.

When our memory passes in review the royal and imperial wives of France, we are surprised to see how many have been divorced, how many brokenhearted, how many have left a disgraceful name behind to posterity. And among the smaller number, the innocent and the happy, how many have been snatched away by a premature death, or have been early and sadly widowed. The crown matrimonial of France has been borne, by the majority of its wearers, unworthily, unhappily, or too briefly. For some it

has been imbued, as it were, with a disfiguring stain; for others, lined with sharp, cruel thorns; for others, wreathed with the funereal cypress. If history, holding her mirror to our view,

"Bids us in the past descry
The visions of futurity,"

with such a history of French queens and empresses before our eyes, it is but natural that good wishes for the bliss of Empress Eugenia should be damped by doubts and fears. By casting with us a quick and comprehensive glance over the memoirs of the royal ladies to whom we have alluded, the reader will be convinced of the great preponderance of cares, crimes, and sorrows, over peace, innocence, and felicity, in their lives.

We will commence our summary with the reign of Charlemagne, as a remarkable era, and sufficiently early for our purpose.

Charlemagne, A. D. 768 (date of his

accession).

His first wife was HERMENGARDE (daughter of Desiderius, King of the Lombards), whom he had been persuaded by his mother, Bertha, to wed, contrary to his inclinations, and whom he divorced in two years after his accession, on the plea of her ill health. She had the grief to see her father dethroned by Charlemagne, whose prisoner he died. The desolate Lombard princess died in obscurity.

The second wife, HILDEGARDE, a noble Swabian, was fair, wise, and good, but was calumniated by Taland, a half-brother of Charlemagne, who (in revenge for her disdain of his own proffered addresses) accused her of criminality with a foreign knight during the king's expedition against a German tribe. Obliged to conceal herself from her incensed husband, she lived in great poverty, till her accuser, struck with remorse after a dangerous illness, declared her innocence. In memory of her restoration to her home and her good fame, she founded, in Swabia, the Abbey of Kempsten; in the annals of which religious house is written the history of her patience and her suffer

ing (during her concealment), and her noble forgiveness of her persecutor. But her recovered happiness was brief; she was snatched by death from her numerous children at the early age of twenty-six, in 784.

FASTRADE, the third consort, daughter of Raoul, Count of Franconia, so disgusted the people by her arrogance, that a conspiracy was formed to dethrone her husband on account of her influence over him. This plot, though abortive, caused Fastrade much mortification and anxiety; and she died very young, in 794, as much hated as her predecessor had been lamented.

LUTGARDE, a German, the last consort of Charlemagne, handsome, generous, and literary,† loved her husband; and to enjoy his society, usually accompanied him to the chase. But he was faithless to her, choosing for his favourite one of the ladies of her train. Whatever mortification Lutgarde might have felt was soon terminated by death. She died young and childless (in A. D. 800), after an union of little more than four years.

Louis I. (le Debonnaire). 814.

His first wife was HERMENGARDE, daughter of Ingram, Count of Hesbay.‡ She has left an unenviable reputation as cruel and despotic. When Bernard, a petty Italian king, who revolted against Louis had been conquered, Hermengarde sentenced him and his adherents to death; and though the sentence was commuted by Louis, she caused the eyes of Bernard to be pulled out, and such tortures to be inflicted on him, that he expired in consequence. She herself died soon after her victim; having, however, been more fortunate in her lot than her predecessors, for she had enjoyed a peaceable wedded life for twenty-one years.

Her successor JUDITH, daughter of Welf of Bavaria, was an artful and licentious woman, whose bad conduct caused her step-sons (children of Hermengarde), to revolt, filling the kingdom with trouble. They published her profligacy with Bernard (the son of her husband's tutor), whom she, by her influence over Louis, caused to be created

In the country of Liege.