Empress EUGÉNIE / Signed Autograph Letter / Death of Napoleon III / Grief

  

Signed autograph letter "Eugénie" to an unknown recipient [Camden Place, Chislehurst], February 4th, 1873, 1 p. 1/2 in-8° on mourning letterhead from the imperial family's exile residence. Old trace of a paperclip, trace of a central fold from the period. Touching response from the empress to the condolences sent to her following the death of Emperor Napoleon III, which occurred less than a month earlier. "I am very grateful for your sympathy and the regrets you express for the one we mourn, and I thank you for transferring your affection to my son [the Prince Imperial].

Believe in all my feelings." On January 9, 1873, at 10:45, Napoleon III dies at the age of sixty-four in his residence at Camden Place.

Nearly sixty thousand people, including a tenth of French people including a delegation of workers led by Jules Amigues, come to pay their respects to the body and participate in the burial on January 15, 1873, in Chislehurst. Subsequently, his widow, Eugénie de Montijo, has a mausoleum built for him at Saint-Michel Abbey, which she founded in 1881. To this day, the couple rests there alongside their only son, the Prince Imperial Louis-Napoléon, who was killed at the age of twenty-three during a patrol in the Anglo-Zulu War. Former collection of Jean-Claude Lachnitt.