ÉMILIE DE LA VALETTE, UNE LÉGENDE BLESSÉE by Gilbert SCHLOGEL

ÉMILIE DE LA VALETTE, A WOUNDED LEGEND by Gilbert SCHLOGEL - Éditions France Loisirs (123 boulevard de Grenelle, Paris) - 1999 - 415 pages - Black & White photographic illustrations at the end of the volume - Hardcover with dust jacket. Émilie de Beauharnais, born in 1781, is the niece - almost the adoptive daughter - of Empress Joséphine. Tall and pretty, she is seventeen when Bonaparte, without asking her, marries her off to his loyal aide-de-camp, Antoine de Lavalette, to thank him for the services he rendered during the Italian campaign. When in 1815, he is sentenced to death along with other opponents of Louis XVIII, Émilie devises and executes a spectacular escape. She refuses to join her husband in exile. In destroying archives she wanted to keep from the police, she discovers her husband's extramarital affairs. She falls in love with her caretaker: Guillaume Dupuytren, perhaps the most famous surgeon of his time. Alongside this scandalous love story that made headlines at the time, an astonishing mystery of a vanished treasure emerges. Lavalette wrote in his Memoirs that the Emperor, in 1812, before the Russian campaign, had asked him to hide a fortune in his castle of La Verrière, near Rambouillet: one million six hundred thousand gold francs….