EX-EMPRERS EUGENIE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXXII, Issue 878, 13 August 1910, Page 3

EX-EMPRERS EUGENIE.

Paris, August xi. Among the visitors to France this summer is the ex-Empress Eugenie, widow of Napoleon 111., who has been living in England since the downfall of the Second Empire forty years ago. The ex-Empress, who is now eighty-four years ot age, and has long outlived the splendours and prolusion of the Court of which she was the central figure, revisited the one-time Royal Chateau of Compiegne, now a public museum. Mixing among the sightseers, the frail old lady wandered through the halls of the palace, the scene of her courtship with the Emperor, and for many years the resort of her Court during the revelry of the hunting season. On inspecting the pictures in the rooms occupied by her only sou, the Prince Imperial, during his youth, the ex-Empress was overwhelmed with memories of the past and deeply affected. The ex-Empress Eugenie has lived at Farnborough, Hampshire, since the death of Napoleon 111. She is extremely active considering her age, and last summer, for instance, visited points so widely separated as the Riviera, Madrid, Versailles, Dublin, and finally was at the Cowes regatta in her yacht the Thistle. The ex-Empress is the daughter of the Count of Moutijo, of Spain, who had married Miss Kirkpatrick daughter of the United States Consul at Malaga. Her youth was spent in Paris, and at the balls given at Elysee she made the acquaintance of Louis Napoleon, then Prince President. In November, 1852, mother and daughter were invited toFouutainbleau, and in the picturesque hunting patties the beautiful young Spaniard, who showed herself an expert horsewoman, was greatly admired by all present, and by her host in particular. Three weeks later the Empire was proclaimed, and during a series oi fetes at Compiegne the Emperor became more and more fascinating. On New Year’s Eve at a ball at the Tuiieries, Mdlie de Moutijo, who had necessarily excited much jealousy and hostility in the female world, had reason to complain that she had been insuited by the wife of an official personage. On hearing of it, the Emperor said; "I will revenge you,” and within three days he had made a formal proposal of marriage. The marriage, which some people considered was a mesalliance, was celebrated with great pomp at Notre Dame. On the fall of the empire, seventeen years later, she settled with the Emperor and her son at Chislehurst, England. The Prince Imperial was killed in the Zulu War at the age of twenty-three, and in the following year the ex-Empress visited the spot and brought back the body.