Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Court Life of the Second French Empire
Tuileries, and it' is not surprising, perhaps, that it should have occurred to him to pen a record of the last years which he spent there - the chequered years of the Second Empire. The Little Red Man does not claim to have witnessed personally everything which then occurred (he was never ubiquitous), but during his years of leisure he has cultivated a taste for reading, and, naturally enough, he has peeped into virtually everything that has been written about his old surroundings. He has come upon no little absurdity, no small crop of errors, garnered by outsiders, but he has also noted many interesting facts emanating from Court gentlemen and ladies whom be well remembers, though, as he himself usually remained invisible, they were not aware of his presence beside them. Briefly, piecing together his own personal recollections and those of the more reliable men and women of the time, and adding thereto a number of little-known facts and documents, and sketches of the notable people whom he once knew, he has written a book on the Tuileries Court as it was during the last years of his residence at the Palace. He has described the Court's organization, manners, and customs; he has endeavoured to depict both its magnificence and its darker side; he has dealt, neither too harshly nor too indulgently, he hopes, with its fu'volities; he has not forgotten to include some account of its sojourns at such places as Compiegne, Fontainebleau, and St. Cloud; and he has made a few excursions into the realm of politics in order that certain incidents may be the better understood. He here offers the result of his labours to the courteous critic and the indulgent reader; and as on most occasions his appearance in proprid persaud is, unfortunately, a foreboding of trouble, he sincerely trusts that he will never have reason to visit them otherwise than in this present guise of print and paper. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
