Page 156 - Collecting and Displaying China's Summer Palace in the West

Empress Eugénie’s Chinese Museum 141
several plans by the architect Alexis Paccard, was the subject of a quotation at the
end of 1861, but it was only executed, in a substantially modified form, in early
1863. In the intervening time, Empress Eugénie had effectively decided to incorporate
in these new rooms a place dedicated to the display of her collection of Chinese and
Siamese objects. Thus was born the empress’s Chinese salons and museum.
The installation of these salons and museum necessitated some renovations. They
were led by Paccard, the palace architect, and began in March 1863, whereas the
court’s arrival, which necessarily marked the end of the works, was fixed for the
beginning of June in the same year. The time for completing major construction and
the installation proper was thus extremely short. The whole was to include an ante -
room, a salon-gallery with mid-day light on the side of the English garden, a grand
salon with numerous windows facing south and east, and finally the Chinese Museum
itself facing the Fountain Court. Creating the huge space of the grand salon, also
called the Salon of the Lake due to its proximity to the carp pond, required combining
two rooms that previously occupied this location and led the architect to incorporate
a metal structure in the ceiling to support a wall on the floor above.
However, it was furnishing and decorating that would become the most important
work, and responsibility for this task fell to the Garde-meuble impérial (Department
of Imperial Furnishing). A letter from an inspector in this department, Mr. de La
Fontinelle, addressed to the steward of Fontainebleau, gives a sense of the feverish
ambiance that hung over the construction site in the spring of 1863:

Everyone is working on the famous Chinese room . . . The empress, who just
paid us another four-hour visit, insists that everything be completed and in place
by May 25. Some daring people are making promises. Rest assured I’m not one
of them; I believe on the contrary that there will be plenty to keep her busy, and
us too, during the visit. 9

But it seems the schedule was followed because on June 1, 15 cases of Chinese objects
were delivered to Fontainebleau, with the empress herself arriving the following day
to supervise their installation in the cases that were already in place. Thus was it
possible on June 14, 1863 to organize an opening of these new salons and the Chinese
Museum, a private event that was nevertheless mentioned in the July 4 edition of the
Monde illustré.
From this date until the imperial couple’s last visit in 1868, guests of the emperor
and empress would most often gather in these rooms to spend the evening. In letters
to his wife, Octave Feuillet, the palace’s librarian at the end of the Second Empire,
evokes on several occasions the informal atmosphere that reigned there. Yet on his
first visit, he was impressed enough by the setting for these receptions to write to his
wife: “We entered the Chinese room to have tea. Its curios are magnificent: pagodas
of gold and enamel, huge idols, gigantic vases shimmering in the light of the
chandeliers and candelabra.” 10 In effect, the decoration created at the instigation of
Empress Eugénie could not fail to impress aesthetic judgments of the Second Empire
any more than those of the twenty-first century.
The anteroom, which visitors entered from a vestibule, was simply hung with a
red velour paper. But one was transported straightaway into a distant Orient because
the two sedan chairs, spears, drum, and painting of the emerald Buddha—gifts of
the Siamese ambassadors—were installed on either side of this passage leading to the