THE LATE MARQUISE DE VILLENEUVE
(née PRINCESSE JEANNE BONAPARTE, ONLY SISTER OF PRINCE ROLAND, AND AUNT OF H.R.H. PRINCESS GEORGE OF GREECE).
Photographed “for her friends” by Reutlinger, Paris, and lent for this work by H.H. Prince Roland Bonaparte.
Prince Roland Bonaparte (only son of Prince Pierre), who espoused a daughter of the late M. François Blanc, of Homburg and Monte Carlo fame; the recently deceased Princesse Jeanne Bonaparte (Prince Pierre’s only daughter), who married the Marquis de Villeneuve; Princesse Lætitia (sister of the Pretender), the widowed Dowager Duchesse d’Aoste, who married as her second husband her uncle, the late Duc d’Aoste, the sometime King Amadeus of Spain; and Princesse Marie Bonaparte, the only child of Prince Roland, the consort of H.R.H. Prince George of Greece, a nephew of Queen Alexandra.
On April 2, 1910, at St. Paul’s, Grove Park, Chiswick, Miss Gertrude Crowther married Mr. Napoleon Gerald Bonaparte-Wyse, youngest son of the late Mr. C. W. Bonaparte-Wyse, of the manor of St. John’s, Waterford, and grandson of the late Right Hon. Sir W. T. Wyse, K.C.B., and Princesse Lætitia Bonaparte, daughter of Prince Lucien, brother of Napoleon I. There is a species of relationship—very remote, it is true—between Madame Sarah Bernhardt and one branch of the Bonaparte family. Prince Lucien, brother of Napoleon I., married as his second wife a Mlle. de Bleschamp, mother of Prince Pierre Bonaparte, Prince Roland’s father. Her daughter, by her marriage with a M. Maurice Jablonowski (her second husband), had a son, who, in 1860, married an American lady, Miss Mohr. The daughter of that union, Marie Terka Virginie Clotilde, married in 1887 M. Maurice Bernhardt, son of the famous actress, one of whose most successful parts is that of the “Aiglon” (the Duc de Reichstadt).
The marriage at Moncalieri revived general interest in the period of the Second Empire. The “great year” of the régime was that of 1867, when the Emperor and Empress of the French entertained foreign Sovereigns, Heirs-Apparent, Princes and Princesses, Generals, diplomatists, and the fine fleur of European society.
In 1911 there are still surviving several distinguished personages who were among the imperial guests in the summer and autumn of the most brilliant days of the Napoleonic reign. These include the Emperor of Austria-Hungary, whom the Empress Eugénie visited at Ischl in 1906; the King of Denmark; the King of the Hellenes; the King of Montenegro; the ex-Sultan of Turkey; Duke of Connaught; Comtesse de Flandre, Princesse Clémentine’s aunt; Prince Murat; the Duchesse de Mouchy (née Princesse Anna Murat), the most cherished friend of the Empress; the Princesse de Metternich, who in 1910 was relating her recollections of Second Empire days to a select audience in her salon at Vienna; and the Comtesse Edmond de Pourtalès, who hastened to Chislehurst in 1870 to assist the Empress in a very practical way, and in 1911 is the valued friend of Prince Napoleon and his consort.