Special envoy to Ajaccio
It is a child's chair, with a high backrest where the famous little cockade hat is embroidered in cross stitch. The embroiderer? Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Joséphine, wife of Louis Bonaparte, who adds her son's initials: LNB. Louis Napoleon, future Napoleon III, is 8 or 9 years old:
"You will be emperor my son"
, says this little throne intended for an improbable heir who is above all the son of a legend. By discovering under the eaves of the castle of Arenenberg, on the shores of Lake Constance, one of the exile residences of the Bonapartes, this fascinating object, placed by Napoleon III in the room of his son, Philippe Costamagna, the director of the Palais Fesch -Musée des beaux-arts d'Ajaccio, knew that it had the subject of its exhibition: to show the story in twists and turns of a mythical construction.
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