The Girl with the Moneybags

Miss HOWARD AND THE EMPEROR (224 pp.)--Simone Andre Maurois--Knopf ($5).

Into Lady Blessington's London salon one evening in 1846 marched "a little man, four and a half feet high . . . with huge moustaches and pigs' eyes." He was Prince Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Bonaparte, pretender to the French throne and newly escaped from the French fortress of Ham, where he had been dumped by King Louis Philippe for' trying to nab the throne. Exiled Louis was in search of a treasure chest from which to subsidize a fresh coup. One of Lady Blessington's guests, a beautiful "tenth rate" Shakespearean actress known as Miss Howard, had just the chest Louis was after.

The destined pair exchanged confidences. Blushing Miss Howard confessed that her life was not free from stain: an evil man had taken advantage of her sweet nature--with the result that, though only 23, she had one illegitimate son in the fashionable London district of St. John's Wood and at least -L-1,000,000 in the kitty. His eyes sparkling, Prince Louis forgave Miss Howard. He himself, he confessed, was not without sin. While incarcerated at Ham, he had fathered two sons of the jailer's daughter--"the fruits of captivity," he murmured. Then he threw himself at Miss Howard's feet and knocked her off her bank balance.

Simone Andre Maurois, wife of the famed French biographer, tells the full, fabulous story of Miss Howard and Louis Napoleon for the first time. It has not been told accurately before because Actress Howard, with understandable shyness, told lots of little fibs and falsified lots of little registers.

Emotional I O Us. To begin with--as Author Maurois has diligently discovered --Miss Howard was not, as she said, an "orphan" from Dover named Harriet Howard. She was Elizabeth Ann Haryett, daughter of a Brighton bootmaker. Seduced at 15 by a jockey named Jem, she became an excellent horsewoman and later an actress at London's Haymarket Theater. At 18 she became the mistress of a wealthy Guards officer, who poured a fortune into her purse. At 19 she bore him a son. When she took the infant to be baptized, she named her own father and mother as the parents, and when asked the father's profession, replied with simple spontaneity: "Plumber." All this has made accurate biography difficult.

Louis Napoleon, himself an inveterate liar, was not told about all these girlish pranks, nor was he interested in them. For two idyllic years Miss Howard sheltered Louis in her London house, financed his exile's finaglings and plottings. When Louis Philippe was deposed and France became a republic again, Miss Howard followed her lover to Paris, backed his successful campaign to make himself President. In 1852, after "throwing everything she possessed into the fray," she heard her Louis proclaimed Emperor.

The new monarch, notes Author Maurois, "owed her five million gold francs" (about three million modern dollars). In her desk, "tied with the thin silk ribbon known as a 'favour,' " Miss Howard cherished the dear evidence--a huge collection of signed receipts, along with impassioned love letters, proposals for "tightening such dear links" (marriage?), promises to "raise her to the position she deserved" (empress?).

In the Field. Miss Howard waited patiently for fulfillment of the imperial promises. Instead, one day the Emperor begged his "dear and faithful Harriet" to undertake a special embassy to England. Trustful Miss Howard got as far as Le Havre where, stormbound overnight, she opened a newspaper and read an official announcement of Louis' betrothal to Spain's Eugenie de Montijo, Countess of Teba and sister-in-law of the Duke of Alba. Bounding furiously back to Paris, poor Miss Howard got a second blow. All the locks in her boudoir had been smashed, the contents of her wardrobe thrown on the floor, her desk's secret drawer torn out. The secret police had done such a thorough job that she "no longer possessed a single letter from the Emperor Napoleon III."

He came in person to bargain with her. He promised to repay all the money and drew up the draft of a document creating her Comtesse de Beauregard--she had bought the huge chateau and park near Paris bearing that name. "The duel over," says Author Maurois, "there was a reconciliation upon the field."

Good Name at Last. Empress Eugenie so detested sex ("disgusting," she said) that the Emperor reportedly continued for some time to find reconciliation upon the broad fields of Beauregard. But as time passed, the "countess" (her title was never confirmed) devoted more and more of her life to good works, flowers and tapestry. For convenience sake she married an Englishman named Trelawny, thus acquiring at last a good name, but still, out of old habit, using phony ones. She died in 1865--and her tombstone carries incorrect dates.

What sort of woman was Miss Howard? "Intriguer," "courtesan," "creature," "English chain," are some of the unkind names she has been called. Gallant, Gallic Mme. Maurois will have none of these. At the end of a biography that lacks her husband's professional brilliance but is highly competent in its own right, Author Maurois tenderly quotes the description of Miss Howard given to an interviewer by an aged servant of Beauregard: "I shall never forget Milady descending the stairs in the Chateau on the tick of seven in a great crinoline and wearing all her pearls. Ah, Monsieur, how beautiful she was! I promise you that she was a most respectable person and fairy-godmother."

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