neath
a moody silent manner. He visited France in 1840 and tried to gain the
throne, but was unsuccessful, for he was committed to the fortress of
Ham, a state prison. He escaped in the disguise of a workman, and made
a second {208} attempt to stir the mob of Paris to revolution in the
year 1848, when Europe was restless with fierce discontent. The King
fled for his life, and a Republic was formed again with Louis Napoleon
as President, but this did not satisfy a descendant of the great
Buonaparte. He managed by the help of the army to gain the Imperial
crown, never worn by the second Napoleon, who died when he was still
too young to show whether he possessed the characteristics of his
family. Henceforth Napoleon III of France could no longer be regarded
as a mere adventurer. The Pope had come to depend on French troops for
his authority, and the Italians had to pay a heavy price for French
arms in their struggle against Austria.

Paris renewed its gaiety when Napoleon married his beautiful Spanish
wife, Eugenie, who had royal pride though she was not of royal birth.
There were hunting parties again, when the huntsmen wore brave green
and scarlet instead of the Bourbon blue and silver; there were court
fetes, which made the entertainments of Louis Philippe, the honest
Citizen-King, seem very dull in retrospect. The Spanish Empress longed
to rival the fame of Marie Antoinette, the Austrian wife of Louis XVI
who had followed that King to the scaffold. Like Marie Antoinette, she
was censured for extravagances, the marriage being unpopular with all
classes. The bourgeoisie or middle class refused to accept the
Emperor's plea that it was better to mate with a foreigner of ordinary
rank than to attempt to aggrandize the new empire by union with the
daughter of some despotic king.

Yet France amused herself eagerly at the famous fetes and hunts of
Compiegne, while the third Napoleon craftily began to develop his
scheme for obtaining {209} influence in Europe that should make him as
great a man as the Corsican whom all had dreaded. The Emperor's
insignificant appearance deceived many of his compeers, who were
inclined to look on him as a ruler who would be content to take a
subordinate place in international affairs. He dressed in odd,
startling colours, and moved awkwardly; his eyes were strangely
impenetrable, and he seemed listless and indifferent, even when he was
meditating some subtle plan with which to start