Excerpt from The Empress Eugenie and Her Son
"History has only learned of late to dispel the mists both of glamour and of prejudice, and to study in the true mood of human sympathy and impartial insight the amazing years of the Second Empire."
Prosper Merimee, the intimate friend of the Empress Eugenie, her sister and their mother, the Comtesse de Montijo, said the only things in histories which interested him were the anecdotes. This being so, Merimee, who, I suppose, "the skilled gentry of the "Times " Literary Supplement permitting, may be termed a French classic, might possibly have smiled a qualified approval of the twelve hundred pages which I have now devoted to the Empress, Napoleon III., the Prince Imperial (" Napoleon IV.") and many of the most prominent personages and events of the Second Empire and after.
I have not attempted to pen cut-and-dried "biographies." Such things are to be found in bulky tomes containing amazing views of Emperors and Empresses - and Kings. (By "biographies" I do not, needless to say, mean "lives" such as those by Lord Fitzmaurice of Lord Granville, by Lord Morley of Mr Gladstone, and by Sir Edward Cook of "Delane of the 'Times" - all brilliant and accurate, unsurpassable.) To write ordinary biographies is as easy as planting cabbages, and less useful.
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