Napoleon III is our furthest
pylon of reported memory -
one man’s great-aunt saw him at Chislehurst
I a foetus grew in the seminary
of my great-grandma’s home - and she saw light
while he still reigned and opened Suez -
then Proust’s Swann dreamt of him walking heights
above the Atlantic - before U.S.
might was thinkable - and houses in flames -
this sad Minos starts the series
of the West’s declension - the trains
to Sedan and Compiègne - and theories
of balance deterrence and containment -
remembering his age a dead attainment
Blackwell’s
Oxford
25 November 2018
It is true - I spoke with a man the other day, whose great-aunt told him in 1966 how she witnessed Queen Victoria call on Napoleon III and the Empress Eugenie in their exile at Chislehurst. And yes my great-grandmother was born in 1870, and came from that era while my life was beginning under the same roof in Blenheim, New Zealand in 1961. I also recall from my pre-school years a great-uncle of the family, who had been born in the 1870s.
It was the Empress Eugenie who opened the Suez Canal in 1869 and was the first to sail through it officially, but it had been her husband’s policy was to support de Lesseps’ project.
The railway carriage that took the Emperor to the front in 1870 was used to convey the German representatives to Compiègne in 1918 for the Armistice negotiations and signing, in another carriage. That latter carriage was where the Armistice was signed in 1940.
Swann’s dream can be found on p.513 ff of the Gallimard edition of Proust’s ” Du Côté de chez Swann”. Even for Proust’s generation, Napoleon III marked a significant relay in time. His reign is the memory at the start of ” A la Recherche du temps perdu “. There was a lady of his court who dined out on what Louis XIV had said to her husband. There was obviously a marked discrepancy in age between that couple.
Napoleon III attracts sonnets. Arthur Rimbaud wrote ” Rages de Césars” and Robert Lowell had a go, too. He appears in the fiction of Zola and is a presence in Proust. I would make it 10 syllables in the last line.