The World полностью

Further south, the other Napoleonic protégé, Marshal López, was convinced he had triumphed against Brazil and Argentina, while his lover Eliza Lynch commanded her own battalions of female warriors, Las Residentas. López’s first offensive into Brazil’s Mato Grosso was successful but the second against Argentina was disastrous. Emperor Pedro declared himself Volunteer Number One and rushed to the front. Brazilian ironclads advanced up the Paraná River as the Triple Allies attacked. Brazil had a tiny army of 18,000, but Pedro recruited more, offering slaves their freedom in return for service: ‘More and more strength should be given to [General Baron] Caxias; speed up the buying of slaves and increase our army.’ Twenty thousand slaves joined up.

In May 1866 an allied army invaded and destroyed most of López’s forces in a series of routs in which Paraguayans were mowed down as they charged artillery. Soon the marshal was so short of men, he too had to recruit slaves, and his men went into battle ‘semi-nude without shoes or boots, covered with shoddy ponchos – even colonels go barefoot’. As Paraguay starved and suffered epidemics, the invading army of the Brazilian general Caxias besieged the massive fortress of Humaitá unaware that it was virtually empty – until it finally surrendered in August 1868. Now López was doomed: despite terrible Brazilian losses, Emperor Pedro insisted on hunting down ‘the tyrant’ as the cast changed in Europe.

Napoleon and Palmerston had directed European affairs for twenty years. At eighty, still riding every day, Old Pam finally went into decline. On 18 October 1865, as he sank into a coma, he imagined he was still negotiating treaties: ‘That’s Article 98; now go on to the next.’ Victoria had always been unsure about the old rogue, who ‘often worried and distressed us, though as Pr. Minister he behaved very well’. Palmerston, granted a rare state funeral, had shaped the British century. ‘Death,’ wrote Gladstone, ‘has indeed laid low the most towering antlers in the forest.’

As his partner Pam was exiting, Napoleon, tired, unwell and chastened by Mexico, was holidaying at Villa Eugénie in Biarritz. There he entertained a giant German visitor who ate and drank Brobdingnagian quantities: at one session he downed ‘a glass of madeira, ditto of sherry, one whole flask of Yquem and a glass of cognac’, and he so enjoyed the turbot that he exclaimed, ‘For a sauce like that I’d give twenty banks of the Rhine.’ Napoleon and his entourage mocked his hulking Prussian coarseness – but, learning from Napoleon’s success and exploiting his own remorseless virtuosity, he was about to reorder European power. ‘They treat me like a fox,’ Bismarck said later. ‘A cunning fellow of the first rank. But the truth is that with a gentleman I am always a gentleman and a half, and when I have to deal with a pirate, I try to be a pirate and a half.’ The Prussian pirate planned to create a new power: Germany.

* Since British abolition, the prices for slaves were higher, so that the cost of compensating owners for their 240,560 slaves was even higher, totalling 120 million francs.

* The idea of socialism had been developed by a French aristocrat, Henri, comte de Saint-Simon. After fighting for the Americans at Yorktown at the age of twenty with his friend Lafayette, Saint-Simon had supported the French revolution, was arrested and almost guillotined under Robespierre, then planned with Talleyrand to dismantle Notre-Dame and sell the lead from its roof. Living splendidly during Napoleon’s reign, he lost his money and started to study the industrial world. In 1817, at the age of fifty-seven, he wrote L’Industrie, in which he declared two principles: ‘The whole of society rests upon industry’ and ‘Politics is the science of production.’ He grew so depressed by the lack of support that he shot himself six times in the head, but only lost the sight in one eye. A decade after his death, the word socialism was coined.

* Lola was graceless in her narcissism, turning on the heartbroken king. ‘After all I’ve suffered for you, chased from Munich for my devotion to you, your conduct appears strange and heartless,’ she wrote to him. Ludwig died in exile. She went on tour in America.