The Eagle in Splendour: Inside the Court of Napoleon

"When I think of the great Emperor, in my mind´s eye it is summer again, all gold and green." Heine The court of Napoleon I, in its grandeur and extravagance, surpassed even that of that the Sun King. Napoleon´s palaces at Saint-Cloud and the Tuileries were the centres of his power, the dazzling reflection of the greatest empire in modern European history. Napoleon´s military conquests changed the world and dominate most portraits of him, but it was through the splendour of his court - a world fashioned beyond the battlefield - that Napoleon governed his empire. Using the unpublished papers of the Emperor´s leading courtiers, and his second Empress Marie Louise, Philip Mansel brings to life the intoxicated world of a court ´devoured by ambition´ as Stendhal called it : its visual magnificence and rigid hierarchy; mistresses, artists and manipulators. The life of the court illuminates the life of Napoleon himself and the nature of a personality that conquered half the world yet, in the end, was abandoned by his dynasty and his courtiers, his past glories fading into lonely and ignominious exile.