Louis Napoleon reached the culmination of his fame and of real or supposed greatness—­I mean his external power and grandeur, for I see no evidence of real greatness except such as may be won by astuteness, tact, cunning, and dissimulation—­when he returned to Paris as the conqueror of the Austrian armies.  He was then generally supposed to be great both as a general and as an administrator, when he was neither a general nor an administrator, as subsequent events proved.  But his court was splendid; distinguished foreigners came to do him homage; even monarchs sought his friendship, and a nod of his head was ominous.  He had delivered Italy as he had humiliated Russia; he had made France a great political power; he had made Paris the most magnificent city of the world (though at boundless expense), and everybody extolled the genius of Hausmann, his engineer, who had created such material glories; his fetes were beyond all precedent; his wife gave the law to fashions and dresses, and was universally extolled for her beauty and graces; the great industrial exhibition in 1855, which surpassed in attractiveness that of London in 1851, drew strangers to his capital, and gave a stimulus to art and industry.  Certainly he seemed to be a most fortunate man,—­for the murmurs and intrigues of that constellation of statesmen which grew up with the restoration of the Bourbons, and the antipathies of editors and literary men, were not generally known.  The army especially gloried in the deeds of a man whose successes reminded them of his immortal uncle; while the lavish expenditures of government in every direction concealed from the eyes of the people the boundless corruption by which the services of his officials were secured.

But this splendid exterior was deceptive, and a turn came to the fortunes of Napoleon III.,—­long predicted, yet unexpected.  Constantly on the watch for opportunities to aggrandize his name and influence, the emperor allowed the disorders of civil war in Mexico—­resulting in many acts of injustice to foreigners there—­to lead him into a combination with England and Spain to interfere.  This was in 1861, when the United States were entering upon the terrific struggles of their own civil war, and were not able to prevent this European interference, although regarding it as most unfriendly to republican institutions.  Within a year England and Spain withdrew.  France remained; sent more troops; declared war on the government of President Juarez; fought some battles; entered the City of Mexico; convened the “Assembly of Notables;” and, on their declaring for a limited hereditary monarchy, the French emperor proposed for their monarch the Archduke Maximilian,—­younger brother of Francis Joseph the Austrian emperor.  Maximilian accepted, and in June, 1864, arrived,—­upheld, however, most feebly by the “Notables,” and relying chiefly on French bayonets, which had driven Juarez to the northern part of the country.