TUILERIES SCANDALS.

Grey River Argus, Volume X, Issue 824, 18 March 1871, Page 2

TUILERIES SCANDALS.

[from a paris correspondent's letter.

It is but fair to say that the name of the Emp.ess has never been associated with the disorders of the palace. She passed a youth of somewhat discursive flirtation in the society of Madrid before she went with her judicious mother to Paris to ensnare with her mature fascinations the phlegmatic parvenu Emperor. But the golden-haired Andalusian's flirtations ended with this enormous success. To all the left-handed offers of her sighing swain she replied in language, doubtless prompted by her spiriktelle mamma, ' ' For your wife I am too little ; for your mistress lam too much." He was safely hooked, and she soon landed him high aud dry before the altar. Her life before marriage has been set down with the malice of a she-devil in the infamous book of Madame Rattazzi, called Le Manage dune Espagnole. This witty lady, who is comin to the Emperor, and wife of the First Minister of Italy, has snatched a grace beyond the reach of art, and gilds refined gold of Bonapartist scandal in this libellous romance. We do not think so ill of the Bonapartes as to believe what they say of each other. But whatever may have been the amiable indiscretions of Miss Montijo, it cannot fairly be denied that Madame Bonaparte, as Rochefort and the Bappd style her, has been a good wife and mother. It would indicate, perhaps, too naive a credulity to imagine her in love with her husband ; but ahe has always treated him with decorous respect and official fidelity.

On the other hand, he married her in a blind and unreasoning access of passion, and has never ceased to love her with something near idolatry. And yet his infidelities have been gross and numerous. The enforced respect for public opinion, which has become necessary in this age of discussion, prevented a renewal of the lively scenes of the reign of the Fifteenth Louis, but in his sly, furtive way the late Emperor, Louis le Sedantaire, has proved himself the true son of his true parents.

This hereditary tendency to twilight adventures has long been known in the clubs of Paris, but, in consequence of the rigid censorship maintained over the Press, has never been the subject of general comment. Recently, however, a commission of the Provisional Government, in ransacking the private cabinets of the Tuileries, came across a package of documents tied with ribbon, and indorsed in the Emperor's handwriting. Lettres a garder, which contain sufficient written evidence to enable the fair mistress of Chiselhurst to sue before Lord Penzance with an absolute certainty of divorce. The two names most frequently met with in this gallant chronicle are those of Madame Howard and Marguerite Bellanger. The former lady is said, on the esoteric authority of Madame Bonaparte-Wyse-Rattazzi, to have been barmaid in a London dance-house of evil report, where the exile Prince met her in his shabby English days. She followed him to Paris, and was finally discarded with a magnificent endowmeni and the title of Countess of Beauregard not long after the coup d'etat, and rehabilitated herself socially by a marriage with Captain Trevelyan, in whose eyes her rent-roll covered a multitude of memories.

Marguerite Bellangev was, if the term be not obsolete, a grissette of the Empire. Born of the lowest grade of the Paris proletariat, she grew up among her mother's washtubs a frail, delicate, beauty, with that air of aristocratic langour that comes rather from deficient vitality than high birth. One evening his Imperial Majesty was promenading with a single aide-de-camp by the border of the lake in the Bois de Boulogne, aud this pale, pretty creature caught his eye— -the well-known eye of Badinguet, the cold, sleepy, vicious eye of a dead shark. He accosted her with his own inimitable manner, where

. I Jacques Strop tried so har4_to be Robert j Macaire. She did not recognise Casar in ' her impertinent admirer, and answered with the ready candour of the Latin Quarter, " Laisse-moi traiupiUU, petite canaille." Let me be, little blackguard. Common people can .never know the delight which an honest insult can give to the jaded senses of a deSpot. This brutality from the carmined lips of a girl of the gutter completely fascinated the autocrat of France. He felt the joy which Browning's queen declares she would know if the sentinel at the palace should some day throw away his halberd, and, seizing her in his rude arms, kiss her breath away. This street Arab treated him with natural scorn, and the Emperor was charmed and enslaved. Of course, as soon as Jupiter came in his glory, this Semele yielded, and positively seemed to have acquired a certain regard for her munificent protector. " What female heart can gold despise ? What cat's averse to fish?" As for the Emperor, he seemed to be completely infatuated with what Balzac calls cette effroyahle passion des vieittards corrompus. Among the documents found in his private cabinet is one showing the remarkable trust and confidence hereposed in this girl of the people — selecting .- her as the putative mother of. a child born in the Tuileries under shady circumstances. Two scandals in rapid succession broke up the relations between them. The Emperor was one day prostrated by an epileptic attack in Marguerite's house. The frightened girl called in the nearest doctor, and he, with a commendable desire of making the best of the windfall, hailed a passing cab, and took the stricken potentate home to the Tuileries. The story was too appetising to be kept from general currency, and Mademoiselle Bellanger was requested by an agent of the Empress to leave Paris. She politely declined, saying she found the air of the capital remarkably, good for her lungs. Her airy insolence saved her from farther molestation. But shortly after her empty head being turned with her success, she had the indecent effrontery to drive across the head of the Empress' horses in the Bois, and this time the Prefect of Police packed her out of the city to Belgium, where she remained a year, and on her return, fresh fields and pastures new had allured her fickle shepherd, and their relations never were resumed.