Word: napoleonism
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...debates that engross the international museum fraternity: how to light a painting. From the Renaissance to the 19th century, side-window lighting was the principal solution, with now and then a smoking torch to light a royal procession through a gallery. The Louvre's Grande Galerie, begun by Napoleon, introduced the skylight roof on a grand scale, and with it natural overhead lighting-but without bright success. In 1857 London's Victoria and Albert Museum experimented with fishtail gas jets, lighted by a traveling pilot light that was propelled along a track by a clockwork motor...
...second blow. All the locks in her boudoir had been smashed, the contents of her wardrobe thrown on the floor, her desk's secret drawer torn out. The secret police had done such a thorough job that she "no longer possessed a single letter from the Emperor Napoleon...
Into Lady Blessington's London salon one evening in 1846 marched "a little man, four and a half feet high . . . with huge moustaches and pigs' eyes." He was Prince Louis Napoleon, nephew of the great Bonaparte, pretender to the French throne and newly escaped from the French fortress of Ham, where he had been dumped by King Louis Philippe for' trying to nab the throne. Exiled Louis was in search of a treasure chest from which to subsidize a fresh coup. One of Lady Blessington's guests, a beautiful "tenth rate" Shakespearean actress known as Miss...
Simone Andre Maurois, wife of the famed French biographer, tells the full, fabulous story of Miss Howard and Louis Napoleon for the first time. It has not been told accurately before because Actress Howard, with understandable shyness, told lots of little fibs and falsified lots of little registers...
...Louis Napoleon, himself an inveterate liar, was not told about all these girlish pranks, nor was he interested in them. For two idyllic years Miss Howard sheltered Louis in her London house, financed his exile's finaglings and plottings. When Louis Philippe was deposed and France became a republic again, Miss Howard followed her lover to Paris, backed his successful campaign to make himself President. In 1852, after "throwing everything she possessed into the fray," she heard her Louis proclaimed Emperor...