3-000-255 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

His Excellency Count Flahaut de la Billarderie, Ambassador from the Emperor of the French to the Court of St. James, 1860. 'His intimate relations with the Emperor [Napoleon III], and his connection by marriage with Great Britain, offer a guarantee that [his] sojourn amongst us will be characterised by a conciliatory conduct tending to cement still more closely the interests of the two countries...Born under the tottering regime of the Bourbon Monarchy, he must have heard with a child's passionate sorrow that his father - a General in the French Army, had perished by the revolutionary guillotine. His mother...fled with him to England, and here, like many eminent Frenchmen of that generation, he received the rudiments of his education. At the age of fifteen he entered the French Army...and accompanied the first Consul in the Marengo campaign. He was...Aide-de-Camp to Napoleon himself. In a single year, 1813, he received the rank of Brigadier-General, of General of Division, and the title of Count...The resignation of his rank in the French Army was not an act of political retribution, but the consequence of his marriage with Miss Elphinstone, subsequently Baroness Keith, daughter and sole heiress of Lord Keith, the distinguished Admiral'. From "Illustrated London News", 1860.