An Image, an Idea

THE INNOCENT EMPRESS--Erna Barschak--Duffon ($3.50).

Women remember the late Eugenie Montijo as a certain Empress of France who wore a tilted wren's-nest hat which achieved a brief renascence in the '30s.

Refugee Erna Barschak presents her in this compassionate and entertaining "intimate study" as a rich sheaf of sorrows and symbols, a difficult but by no means unsympathetic human being.

"I should have lived," Eugenie wrote when she was 17, "a century earlier. The ideas that are dearest to me are now ridiculous. ... I have a mixture of dreadful passions in me. ... I fight against them, but I lose the struggle and in the end my life will end miserably, lost in passion, virtue and foolishness." Eugenie was almost a textbook image of ambitious and dislocated womanhood, tinged with the dread occupational diseases of hysteria and frigidity. But in her flaming devotion to an idea, she was magnificent. Her 93 years were one long, un-flickering act of faith in the Napoleonic legend. The intensity of this faith brought her marriage to Napoleon III, and helped make history, and helped unmake it.

Passion. Eugenie was born during an earthquake. Her father, a Spanish count who had served under Napoleon, was a sort of primitive Pavlov. He used to seat the nervous little girl astride a cannon and fire it off again & again while, with the one good eye the wars had left him, he studied her reactions. Eugenie became a Napoleon-cultist, a frenzied romantic. After the death of her father, Eugenie and her mother wintered in Paris, where the new emperor, Louis Napoleon, fell passionately in love with her. But her marriage (in 1853) was no love match; she was infatuated by a symbol, and managed to trap it.

Erotically, she was a child. As for the Emperor, less complicated women dropped in his lap like plums, but he had neither the skill nor the patience to make a good wife of Eugenie.

Virtue. The paper-chases, parlor games and mechanical pianos of the most bourgeois Court, barring Victoria's, of a bourgeois century, did not make Eugenie a happy woman. So, like many another disenchanted housewife, Eugenie went in for good works with her sleeves up. She was a tremendously energetic, genuinely intrepid woman, and her conduct during a cholera epidemic endeared her to the public. And at a time when Frenchwomen were 80% illiterate, she did work of permanent value for the education of her sex.

Foolishness. Politics interested her more. Although her astute husband was not overimpressed with her political qualifications--"You never get an idea," he told her, "the idea gets you"--his sense of guilt towards her made him yielding. Out of this stock suburban situation, a good deal of the fate of France took shape.

Eugenie can be fairly accused of profound "moral complicity," if not worse, in the quick, awful, fumbled war with Prussia which shattered the regime.

The Flames Were Dimmed. Exiled in England, Eugenie hoped by thrifty housekeeping to finance a restoration. Louis Napoleon had no such delusions during the two years he lived. Their 17 -year-old son, Prince Louis, would make no play for public affection, by which alone a restoration might have been conceivable; it was a Napoleon's business, he insisted, to be a soldier. He was killed in Zululand.

A year later, Eugenie made a pilgrimage to Africa. The night before the anniversary of Louis' death she spent in prayer at the spot where he had been killed. All night, curious but not hostile, the natives watched her where she knelt. "Toward morning," Eugenie wrote, "a strange thing happened. The flames of the candles were dimmed, as though someone had almost blown them out, and I wanted to ask: 'Are you there? Do you want me to go?' " As women do, she lived 40 years longer.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.