The emperor was fond of literature, and when drawn into a literary discussion, his half-closed eyes would gleam with sudden light, and his criticisms would be both witty and valuable.  During his later years, harassed by sickness and perplexities of all kinds, his greatest pleasure was to shut himself up in his study, and there work upon his “Life of Caesar.”  He wrote it entirely himself, though he had many learned men in France and Germany employed in looking up references and making extracts for him.  The book was considered a work of genuine merit.  To its author it was a labor of love.  He threw into it all his experience of life, all his theories, all his Napoleonic convictions; for in Caesar and Napoleon he found many parallels.  He hoped to be admitted as a literary man into the French Academy, and he meant to base his claim upon this book.

I have said nothing of the cares that oppressed the emperor in connection with the war in the Crimea, which was prolonged far beyond his expectations; of the campaign in Italy, broken short off by threats of intervention made by the king of Prussia, and followed by feelings of disappointment and revenge on the part of the Italians; of the intervention of the emperor in 1866, after the battle of Sadowa, to check the triumphant march of the Prussian army through Austria; nor of the bombs of Orsini, which led to a rupture of the friendliness between France and England, breaking up the cordial relations which existed between the two courts in 1857, and reviving that panic about French invasion which seems periodically to attack Englishmen ever since the great scare in the days of Bonaparte.  These subjects belong rather to historical reminiscences of England, Italy, or Germany; but the emperor had anxieties besides in France, and often found it hard to regulate with discretion even the ways of his own household.

The empress, who after she had governed France as regent in 1859, during her husband’s absence in the Italian war, had been admitted to councils of state, by no means approved either her husband’s domestic or foreign policy.  We have seen that her influence was strongly exerted to bring about the unfortunate attempt to give an emperor and empress to Mexico; but on two other points that she had at heart she failed.  She could not persuade her husband to undertake the reconstruction of the kingdom of Poland, nor to assist Queen Isabella of Spain when her subjects, exasperated at last by her excesses, drove her over the French frontier.  The empress disliked many of the coterie who enjoyed her husband’s intimacy, especially his cousin, Prince Napoleon.  She resented the prince’s opposition to her marriage; she disliked his manners, his political opinions, his aggressive opposition to all the offices of religion; and she succeeded in detaching him from the emperor’s confidence, and in hindering his taking part in public affairs.  To his wife—­the Princess Clotilde—­she was deeply attached; but that did not serve to reconcile her to the prince, her husband.  Both ladies were opposed to any diminution of the pope’s temporal power in Italy; but the private circle of the friends of the empress was too gay for the chastened nature of the Princess Clotilde, and by degrees her intimacy with the empress became less close and affectionate than it had been in the early days of her unhappy marriage.