...and then there's the english woman that NIII bought a chateau for and then made her a countess to go with it (i refer to the comtesse de Beauregard....i can't recall her english name. for her part, if i'm not mistaken, she would one day return the favor, in a way. when the Second Empire began to falter, she loaned and/or gave him vast sums of money when he found himself & his empire "strapped for cash".)..,to be more precise, this english woman was called Elisabeth-Ann Haryett. She became an actress under the name of Miss Harriet Howard and she was very rich when Louis-Napoleon, escaped (1846) from french jail (Fort de Ham) and arrived in London... They lived together and she gave him 2 millions Francs-or (gold french money of the time) to organize his next (and successfull) march to the power. Also he asks her to look at the 2 sons he had had from the daughter of his guardian in the gaol... and so she did, also loving tenderly those boys.
He repaid her 4 millions of francs, but not immediately after his politic success ... for a while he let her think that she could be an empress !!! Only when he decided to marry Eugenie, he sent Harriet to London and sent the chief of his secret service to the house of Harriet in Paris to break any furniture where it could be a letter of him or a proof of their financial links... then he married Eugenie, and he paid Harriet...
After that he returned to her bed for a while... She married an english "kind" gentleman named Trelawny, and became, only for courtesy, comtesse de Beauregard (the title was never registred). She died rather young, at 43 years, on 1865, and so was unabble to help him when the empire collapsed... His castle was bought by herself, and I do not think it was a gift of N III.
