A Garden for Eugénie (Un Jardin pour Eugénie)

 
 
From the publishers:
 
“…With seventeen years of rule and fifty years of exile, Empress Eugénie was France's last female sovereign. One of history's survivors, she died almost a century ago at the age of 94. Having established herself in England after the fall of the Second Empire, Napoleon III's widow – with her Spanish origins and familial ties to Italy – epitomized the federated Europe for which she worked tirelessly in the hope of preventing the First World War.
 
In 1895, Eugénie built a villa at Cap Martin, near to Menton and opposite the Rock of Monaco. She held this summer home until her death in 1920. In this remote, wild and arid region of the south of France, which had become the number one spot for wealthy winter visitors, the first pleasure gardens appeared in the ground of magnificent villas, inspired by the English aristocracy and German gardening know-how. The antique garden was thus reinvented and a touch of exoticism perfected the harmony of these new spaces and radically transformed the southern landscape.
 
Created in the image of its illustrious patron, the garden of the Villa Cyrnos served as the backdrop to the Empress's social life and allowed her to get closer to both her household and to the princely, intellectual and artistic personalities who passed through the Riviera. Queen Victoria, Empress Elizabeth of Austria (known as Sissi), Tsar Nicholas II, Prince Albert I of Monaco, King Alphonse XIII of Spain, the Shah of Persia, the sculptor Rodin, the famous Coco Chanel and even the young Jean Cocteau were amongst her guests.
 
Thanks to the first-hand accounts of the select few who were invited into the inner circle of this “court” and the memoirs of Eugénie's gardener, this book lifts the veil on the last years of one of the most famous women in France's history. It captures, too, the atmosphere of this extraordinary space, which was witness to the beginnings of the cultural and social life for which the Côte d'Azur would become the stage…”

 
Translated from the French by FWC, November 2014.