my.
His ministers, and especially MM. Troplong and Baroche, begged of him
not to do so. Even Queen Victoria, to whom the idea was broached while
on her visit to Paris, threw cold water upon it as far as was possible.
But the Empress encouraged it to her utmost. "I fail to see," she said
to our sovereign, "that he would be exposed to greater dangers there
than elsewhere." It was the prospect of the regency, not of the glory
that might possibly accrue to her consort, that appealed to the Empress;
for in reality she had not the least sympathy with the object of that
war, any more than with that of 1859. Russia was ostensibly fighting for
the custody of the Holy Sepulchre; and the defeat of Austria, she had
been told by the priests, would entail the ruin of the temporal power of
the pope. And Empress Eugenie never attained to anything more than
parrot knowledge in the way of politics.

However, in 1859 she had her wish, and, before the opening of the
campaign, she declared to the Corps Legislatif that "she had perfect
faith in the moderation of the Emperor when the right moment for peace
should have arrived." Her ladies-in-waiting and the male butterflies
around her openly discounted the political effects of every engagement
on the field of battle. The Emperor, according to them, would make peace
with Austria with very few sacrifices on the latter's part, for it was a
Conservative and Catholic power, which could not be humiliated to the
bitter end, while Italy was, after all, but a hotbed of conspiracy,
revolutionary, anti-Catholic, and so forth.

And I know, for a positive fact, that the Emperor was, as it were,
compelled to suspend operations after Solferino, because the Minister
for War had ceased to send troops and ammunitions "by order of the
regent." The Minister for Foreign Affairs endeavoured by all means in
his power to alarm his sovereign.

Nevertheless, in 1865, when he went to Algeria to seek some relief from
his acute physical sufferings, Napoleon III. was badgered into confiding
the regency once more to his wife. There is no other word, because there
was no necessity for such a measure, seeing that he did not leave French
territory. We have an inveterate habit of laughing at the "henpecked
husband," and no essayist has been bold enough as yet to devote a
chapter to him from a purely historical point of view. The materials are
not only at hand in France, but in England, Germany, and Russia also;
above all, i