The story
Each autumn from 1856, Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie filled the Château de Compiègne with guests. These were the "séries", batches of 80 to 100 ministers, diplomats, scientists, writers and painters invited for eight days at a time. By day they hunted in the surrounding forest and rode out in open carriages, and at night they danced, gambled and acted in charades and amateur plays in the salons.
The building is older than the empire that loved it. Louis XV had his architect Ange-Jacques Gabriel rebuild it in a sober classical style from the 1750s, and the first Napoleon restored it, receiving his second wife, Marie-Louise of Austria, here in 1810. Under Napoleon III it became the court's autumn residence, and Eugénie, whose romance with the emperor had begun during a stay here, kept a lasting affection for it.
Today the palace shows its historic apartments and houses the Musée du Second Empire and a national museum of carriages and early motor cars. The Second Empire rooms are the place to meet Franz Xaver Winterhalter, the German-born court portraitist. His large canvas of Eugénie surrounded by eight of her ladies-in-waiting, seated in pale silks in a woodland clearing, hangs here. He painted it in 1855, and it was shown that same year at the Exposition Universelle in Paris.
