Prince Albert II of Monaco hosted Prince Napoleon for a tribute to Empress Eugenie
Prince Albert II of Monaco unveiled, on Saturday in his Principality, a bust paying homage to Empress Eugenie, wife of Napoleon III.
Homage to an illustrious neighbor. This Saturday, October 9, 2021, Prince Albert II of Monaco inaugurated, in the Gardens of the Rock, a sculpture depicting the Empress Eugenie. The wife of the Emperor Napoleon III is represented there in a bust, adorned with a diadem and a small crown from which a lace knot emerges. This is a copy of a work made in 1860 by the sculptor Georges Diébolt – famous for his statue of the Zouave from the Alma bridge in Paris – and kept at the Château de Compiègne.
Albert II unveiled the plaque, Jean-Christophe Napoleon and his wife the bust
The Monegasque sovereign did not work alone. The husband of Princess Charlene – who, still in South Africa, had been operated on the day before – a pull on the cord to drop the white fabric that covered a large plate fixed to a low wall. On it, we could read that the last Empress of the French, born in 1826 and died in 1920, was a “friend of Monaco and its princes” and “neighbor of the Principality in her Villa Cyrnos at Cap Martin”. But he left Prince Jean-Christophe Napoleon – Bonapartist pretender to the throne of France – and his wife Princess Olympia, whom he had invited for the occasion, to unveil the sculpture itself.
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This event, which was intended to commemorate the centenary of the death of Empress Eugenie, should have been held last year. But the Covid-19 epidemic signaled its report in October 2021, a few months before the centenary of the death of Prince Albert I of Monaco, who disappeared in 1922, and to whom she was close, recalled “Nice morning», Relating this inauguration. The Mediterranean daily also stressed that the location of the bust had been chosen so that it considered its port towards Cap-Martin. There where, in 1892, she had erected a small palace on land acquired the previous year, to come for the winter vacation.
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