- 1978 edition, 308 pages
- Published by Book Club Associates
- Hardcover with dust jacket, brown boards
- Very good condition, some fading to dust jacket and spine edge, minor tanning, minor foxing to page edges.
Illustrated and Index included. Pictures inside both covers.
The fortunes of few, if any, royal couples have fluctuated as wildly, as improbably or as picturesquely as those of Napoleon III and his Spanish wife, Eugenie.
It was rumoured that Napoleon III was not merely Bonaparte's nephew, but in fact his son. As a young man, his attempt to win France by invading it from England, in a single steamboat, led to prison and exile. His later election as President of France in 1848 was financed by one of his innumerable mistresses, a beautiful Englishwoman. Not long after, now Emperor, he courted the ravishing Eugenie de Montijo, who admired his political ambitions but resisted his more personal ones until after their marriage in Notre Dame.
There followed the twenty glittering years of the Second Empire during which Eugenie and Napoleon wond the friendship of Victoria and Albert, defeated the Austrians at Solferino, rebuilt Paris and launched the Great Exhibition of 1867, but failed to elude the stell trap which Bismarck was so craftily preparing for them. When it snapped shut on Napoleon III at the battle of Sedan, Eugenie herself contrived a breath-taking escape with her American dentist through Parisian crowds calling for her blood. Together they found sanctuary on a yacht at Deauville and sailed through a storm to the Isle of Wight.
It is against an English background that the end of the story unfolds: Napoleon, exiled once more, dying in Kent; his son falling in love with Queen Victoria's daughter, but facing a hero's death at the hands of Zulus in South Africa: and Eugenie, surviving triumphantly until 1920.
David Duff with his wide knowledge of so many dynasties, is a superb chronicler of these extraordinary figures who played for the highest stakes and nearly destroyed France, and Europe itself, before the game was over.
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