An episode in the private life of the palace, in 1859, created considerable friction in Paris, and provoked remonstrances from the emperor’s ministers.[1] This was the admission to the circle of intimates who surrounded the empress of the mesmerist and medium Home.  This man gave himself out to be an American; but many persons suspected that his native land was Germany, and some said he was a secret agent of that court, which had emissaries all over France, in search of useful information.  The empress, having heard of Home’s strange feats of table-turning and spirit-rapping in fashionable salons of the capital, was eager to witness his performances.  The women in the high society of Paris were greatly excited about them.  Spiritualism was the fad of the season, and the empress caught the infection.  The emperor, who was present at many of the exhibitions at the Tuileries, was also, it is said, much impressed by some of them, especially by a mysterious invisible hand laid firmly on his shoulder, and by an icy breath that passed over his face.  But although the emperor, always indulgent to his wife, resisted at first the advice of his counsellors to get rid of Home, he was forced at last to put an end to the seances at the Tuileries, Fontainebleau, and Biarritz.  The spirits “summoned” had had the imprudence to obtrude upon him their own views of his policy.  When the alliance with Italy and a probable war with Austria were under discussion in the cabinet, the spirit-inspired pencil at the Tuileries scrawled these words:  “The emperor should declare war and deliver Italy from the Austrians.”  Not long afterwards, the vulgar presumption of Home, who had accompanied the court to Biarritz, provoked the emperor, and caused him to give ear to the earnest remonstrances of his Minister for Foreign Affairs.  He gave orders that Home should appear at the Tuileries no more.

[Footnote 1:  Pierre de Lana.]

Home died not long after in Germany, forgotten by the world of fashion, but leaving behind him a little circle of ardent believers.

The story of the emperor’s later life seems to me to be one full of pathos and of pain.  It is the record of a man who knew himself to be slowly dying, whose physical strength was ebbing day by day, but who was bearing up under the vain hope of accomplishing the impossible.  One admires his extreme patience, his uncomplaining perseverance, as he tried to roll the stone of Sisyphus, yet with unspoken misgivings in his heart that it would escape from him and crush the hopes of his life, as it rolled back out of his hands.

“Poor emperor!” says the eye-witness who beheld him in his hour of triumph, before the grand-stand, in 1867, at the great review.  “He was a friend to all, and he fell through his friends.  He was very true to England, whatever he may have been to other countries; but England failed him, unfortunately in Denmark, fortunately in Mexico, and fatally in 1870."[1]