The Queen of the Night

This is one of the significant locations of the novel.

11 December 1866
Chesneau came to see us today. We talked about the veiled but obvious hostility between the Empress and the Princess and the trouble this causes Nieuwerkerke.
He told us that on the Empress’s last visit to the Bank, noticing the bare panels between the windows, she had asked Rouland if there had not been [...]

The empress Eugenie is pictured cutting the talons of the emperor. She was the only woman to refuse to have sex with him on meeting him and it fascinated him. After their marriage, he would continue to have affairs, but she, out of the many women who tried, was empress.

This is a favorite caricature of the queen.  She was the idol of the Empress Eugenie, and  she and Napoleon the III tried to use the trappings of Louis the XVI to legitimize their reign.

The design here is by Karl Friedrich Schinkel.  My friend Shauna Seliy sent me this, as a postcard, back in 1999, and I used to stare at it on my desk.  It was like I was listening to it, when I looked at it.  This was before there ever was a novel.  It feels a [...]