Villa Torre Clementina, Roquebrune-Cap-Martin

Villa Torre Clementina

Floating dreamily above the Sentier Littoral which joins Cap-Martin on the French Riviera with the fabled Principality of Monaco is the wonderful Belle Epoque Villa Torre Clementina which this year celebrates its 106th Birthday. Cap-Martin, within the commune of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, is a beautiful wooded peninsula on the Mediterranean, just below the perched Roquebrune village. The train station is down here, along with the beach, some campsites and shops. The peninsula itself is largely covered with very expensive walled estates, some dating back to the 19th century and the Belle Époque.




Roquebrune

To inhale the atmosphere of that era head along the Avenue l'Imperatrice Eugenie or on the costal footpath to Monaco down below. The Sentier Littoral offers an invigorating two hour walk around the length of Cap Martin all the way to Menton. En route you will catch just the barest glimpse of the superb villas whose estates cover the main area of the Cap. Somewhere above is the ravishing Villa Torre Clementina restored by Frederick R. Koch, an American collector and philanthropist. Designed in 1904 by the architect Lucien Hesse for Ernesta Stern, 1854-1926 (who is buried in Menton churchyard) this neo-Romanesque confection and superb gardens with pavilions and a pergola are on the French register of historic monuments. Born in Trieste (then Austrian) in 1854 she married the wealthy Parisian banker Louis Antoine Stern (1840-1900) in 1874.The Villa Torre Clementina was named after the setting of a villa the Hierschel family built in the Veneto, Villa Hierschel dei Minerbi, which had in its grounds an ancient 15th Century refuge tower for sailors and villagers from marauding Ottoman corsairs, the Torre Clementina. The family were Jewish traders who had originally settled in Trieste.


Ernesta Stern

The villa was designed by the Parisian society architect Lucien Hesse shortly after 1904 (date of allotment of the private estate of Cap-Martin) for Ernesta Stern who as a writer published stories under the name Venetian Maria Star. The interior of the villa, inspired by the Orient and the gardens are the work of Raffaele Mainella, a painter of landscape and genre, born in Benevento (Italy) in 1858 and who worked mainly in Venice. The garden is characterised by a long path through which the three parts of a geometric garden listed in the pine forest and featuring a dozen display areas. The entire villa with its interiors, doorways, and gardens with paths, fountains and ornamental lakes, plants, sculptures, ornaments and other lapidary is inscribed on the French register of Historic Properties and is protected by law since 1974. It was used as a backdrop and set by film director René Clément for the movie Les Félins.


Maria Star


Palazzetto Stern, Grand Canal, Venice

Ernesta Stern husband’s wealth paid for extravagant homes in Paris, Côte-d'Azure and a rebuilt Palazzo in Venice. The life of Ernesta de Hierschel, whose married name was Stern, and that of Palazzetto Stern, on the Grand Canal beside the Calle del Traghetto di San Barnaba were closely connected for a number of years: between 1909 and 1912, Ernesta Stern, who attended the most fashionable literary salons in Paris and who herself presided over a salon that drew such names as Proust, Reynaldo Hahn, Fauré, Paul Bourget, D'Annunzio, Madeleine Lemaire, Lina Cavalieri, Marchesa Casati Stampa and Princess de Polignac, decided to build, on the ruins of another building, the neo-gothic palazzo that still bears the name of her husband. She entrusted the architect Giuseppe Berti and the painter-architect-decorator Raffaele Mainella with its construction and decoration, down to the tiniest details. The friendship between Ernesta Stern and Raffaele Mainella was dominated by the genius of the latter, but it was also strongly influenced by the new cultural movements that Ernesta saw burgeoning in Paris and which she wanted to introduce into Italy.


Villa Hierschel dei Minerbi with the Torre Clementina in the grounds

This cultural exchange between Venice and France reached its height when Ernesta Stern decided to «bring Venice to France», entrusting Mainella, who continued to work in a «Byzantine-Veneto» style, with the decoration of her homes and parks both in Paris and on the Côte-d'Azure. The vitality of this exchange did not last long, however, since the First World War stifled many initiatives, but the traces it left are rich and important for this history of Venice and its cultural exchanges with Europe at the time. The Palazzetto Stern is now an expensive Venice hotel. Their Paris house was Hôtel Stern, a hôtel particulier at 68, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré which was demolished around 1920 but some of its contents are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.





Frederick Robinson Koch (born 1933) is an American collector and philanthropist, the eldest of the four sons born to American industrialist Fred C. Koch, founder of what is now Koch Industries, and Mary Robinson Koch. Unlike his father and brothers, all three of whom studied chemical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and pursued business careers, Frederick studied humanities at Harvard College (B.A. 1955), following which he enlisted in the U.S. Navy serving in Millingham, near Memphis and then on the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga. Upon return to civilian life Koch enrolled at the Yale School of Drama where his focus was playwriting and from which he received an M.F.A. degree in 1961.




Villa Torre Clementina

Through personal and foundation acquisitions Koch assembled large and important collections of rare books and literary and musical manuscripts, fine and decorative arts and photographs, with works of the nineteenth and twentieth century’s predominating. His Frederick R. Koch Foundation is a major donor in New York to the Pierpont Morgan Library, and the Frick Collection and, in Pittsburgh, to The Carnegie Museum of Art. Of particular note are The Frederick R. Koch Collections at the Harvard Theatre Collection, Houghton Library at Harvard University, and at Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library that Yale president Richard C. Levin describes in the Beinecke's collection catalogue as "one of the greatest collections to come to Yale since the year of its founding." In 1986 Koch funded the full reconstruction of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Swan Theatre in England, from its 1879 remains. In 1990, according to the New York Times, the Frederick Koch Foundation auctioned at Christie's the original manuscript of Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh, along with 150 other books and manuscripts by Oscar Wilde, Somerset Maugham, A.A. Milne, and others. The Waugh manuscript was said to be the last manuscript by the writer still in private hands. Koch also owns among his private collections the archival estate of George Platt Lynes and a vast archive of society photographer Jerome Zerbe.


Villa Torre Clementina

Since the 1980s, Mr. Koch has bought, restored and maintained a number of historic properties in the United States of America and abroad, including a Woolworth mansion in Manhattan; the Habsburg hunting lodge, Schloss Blühnbach (near Salzburg), the Romanesque Villa Torre Clementina in Cap Martin, France and Elm Court, a Tudor Gothic manse in Butler, Pennsylvania. In 2005 Koch sold Sutton Place near Guildford (Surrey, England), the former residence of J. Paul Getty and the legendary meeting place of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn (purchased from another art collector, Stanley Seeger) which Koch restored and operated as the Sutton Place Foundation, open to the public, for more than 25 years.


Elm Court, Butler,Pennsylvania.

Public records confirm Koch's extensive property ownership: in Manhattan at 825 Fifth Avenue and 6 East 80th Street, a grand townhouse commissioned by Frank W. Woolworth as a wedding gift to his daughter, Jessie Woolworth Donohue, and designed by C.P.H. Gilbert; a sprawling mansion in Butler, Pennsylvania north of Pittsburgh, called "Elm Court"; the stunning "Villa Torre Clementina" facing the French riviera just outside Monaco; and, "Schloss Bluhnbach", a 70,000 square foot castle near Salzburg which was the summer residence of Austria's Archduke Franz Ferdinand until his death at Sarajevo which triggered the start of WWI.



Unlike his three brothers, who are fairly well known for their business, philanthropic, political and sports endeavours, little is known about the apparently more reticent older Koch brother, Frederick R. Koch, Jr., who was named after his father, Fred C. Koch. In addition to his various collections of houses, art, photography, books and manuscripts, Koch is known as an avid theatre and opera lover who is spotted regularly in front rows of New York and London theaters, frequently with long-time companion, John Olsen, a former advertising executive for Ralph Lauren.


Schloss Blühnbach, Salzburg the former Krupp Family Estate where Gustav Krupp died

Koch served for many years on the boards of directors of the Spoleto Festival and The Royal Shakespeare Company, and remains an active, long-serving board member of the Metropolitan Opera and the Film Society at Lincoln Centre.


Frederick R. Koch


Woolworth Mansion, New York City

His brothers, Charles G. Koch, chairman of the board and chief executive officer, and David H. Koch, executive vice president, are principal owners of the company. Charles and David Koch each own 42% of Koch Industries, and Charles has stated that the company will publicly offer shares "literally over my dead body". From 2005 to 2008, Koch industries donated $5.7 million on political campaigns and $37 million on direct lobbying to support fossil fuel industries. Greenpeace says that Koch Industries donated nearly $48m to climate opposition groups between 1997-2008. According to Greenpeace, Koch Industries is the major source of funds of what Greenpeace calls "climate denial". Koch Industries and its subsidiaries spent more than $20 million on lobbying in 2008 and $12.3 million in 2009, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group.

The four Koch brothers have a history of conflict and dissension resulting in spectacular court battles. CNN news tells the story here of how money does not buy you happiness;

http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1997/02/17/222188/index.html

The dispute over the value of Koch Industries at the time of buyout was settled in 2001 with Bill and Frederick Koch receiving a joint payout of $1.5 Billion in addition to the initial payout of $430 million dollars Fred Koch was estimated to have received in 1982. At the time of the payout Frederick Koch was resident in Monaco which doesn't have Capital Gains or indeed any personal taxes. Taxes in the immortal words of Leona Helmsley are obviously for the little people?




Frederick Koch & Vilma Soler at a society event in Washington D.C.

In 1925, Fred C. Koch joined an MIT classmate Lewis E. Winkler at an engineering firm in Wichita, Kansas, which was renamed the Winkler-Koch Engineering Company. In 1927 they developed a more efficient thermal cracking process for turning crude oil into gasoline. This process threatened the competitive advantage of established oil companies, which sued for patent infringement. Temporarily forced out of business in the United States, they turned to other markets, including the Soviet Union, where Winkler-Koch built 15 cracking units between 1929 and 1932. During this time, Koch came to despise communism and Josef Stalin's regime. In his 1960 book, A Business Man Looks at Communism, Koch wrote that he found the Soviet Union to be "a land of hunger, misery, and terror." According to Charles Koch, "Virtually every engineer he worked with was purged." According to Jane Mayer's article in The New Yorker, Koch "wrote admiringly of Benito Mussolini's suppression of Communists in Italy, and disparagingly of the American civil-rights movement. He and his wife Mary were associated with and founder members of the stridently right wing John Birch Society.



Roquebrune Cap Martin is situated 2 kilometres from Menton and Monte Carlo, this seaside resort rises to 300m. altitude starting at the water's edge and going all the way up to its perched village. The luxury of the villas, some of which resemble palaces remind us that here, in Roquebrune, statesmen, royalty, writers, and artists all came looking for inspiration and rest: Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Sacha Guitry, Jacques Brel, Silvana Mangano et al. Today the atmosphere is more Euro trash with Russian Oligarski and good time girls from Kiev and Wolverhampton on the make or as Somerset Maugham tellingly remarked about neighbouring Monte Carlo “A sunny place for shady people” ! However the fabled part of the Riviera between Monaco and the Italian border is still a place of some allure with its clement micro climate, alluring coastline and vistas and the historic towns of Menton, Eze, Roquebrune and Cap-Martin with their dramatic backdrop of the Alpes-Maritimes contrasted by the azure sea which gives the coast its name. No doubt like Ernesta Stern and her Villa Torre Clementina it will continue to attract the rich and famous (and their hired help) and be a place apart into the 21st Century.




See also;

E-1027 Roquebrune Cap Martin

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/e-1027-roquebrune-cap-martin.html

W B Yeats

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/04/w-b-yeats.html





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E-1027 Roquebrune Cap Martin

One of the most intriguing Irish designers was Eileen Gray (1878 – 1976), an Irish aristocrat who inhabited a bohemian world and who was neglected for much of her career but whose work and achievements has been greatly appreciated with hindsight, particularly in Ireland where she was largely unknown in her lifetime as she mainly lived and worked in France. Eileen Gray is regarded as one of the most important furniture designers and architects of the early 20th century and the most influential woman in those fields. Her work inspired both modernism and Art Deco. Her design style was as distinctive as her way of working, and Gray developed an opulent, luxuriant take on the geometric forms and industrially produced materials used by the International Style designers, such as Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Mies Van Der Rohe, who shared many of her ideals. Her voluptuous leather and tubular steel Bibendum Chair, and clinically chic E-1027 glass and tubular steel table are now as familiar as icons of the International Style as Le Corbusier and Perriands classic Grand Confort club chairs, yet for most of her career she was relegated to obscurity by the same proud singularity that makes her work so prized today. From her early laquer work to design classics like the Bibendum chair and her architectural masterpiece, E-1027, Eileen Gray's work was as individual as it was exciting. The Dutch magazine, Wendingen, declared in 1924: "Eileen Gray occupies the centre of the modern movement. In all her tendencies, visions and expressions she is modern."




E-1027


E-1027 Frontage

Le Corbusier, arguably the greatest architect of the 20th century, was obsessed and haunted by E-1027, the seaside villa Eileen Gray built at Roquebrune Cap Martin in 1929. Over the decades, he sought to possess her "maison en bord de mer" in a multitude of ways. It may have been the last thing he saw before dying of a heart attack while swimming off the rocks beneath E-1027 in 1965. After he died, the footpath serving the area was designated Promenade Le Corbusier. In time, as Gray's reputation faded, some would even credit him with the design of her villa.

In 1907 Gray - the only Irish person wholly immersed in the pioneering work of the modern movement - moved to Paris, taking an apartment at 21 rue Bonaparte, which she maintained until her death on October 31, 1976, at the age of 98. The furniture from her Paris apartment now forms the centrepiece of the Eileen Gray exhibition at the National Museum, Collins Barracks in Dublin.


Rue de Lota apartment designed by Eileen Gray with her Pirogue sofa

Eileen Gray was born Kathleen Eileen Moray Smith in Brownswood near Enniscorthy, County Wexford on August 9, 1878. The family changed their name to Gray in 1893, after her mother, Lady Eveleen Pounden, inherited a peerage from an uncle in Scotland and claimed her title, Baroness Gray. Interested in art and wishing to live beyond the boundaries of conventional expectations, Eileen left home for Paris in 1902. She had already attended art school in England, and in Paris she continued her education, developing her talents as a painter and ultimately as a great designer. Gray was first to become know for the lacquer technique she developed, a technique that combined the Asian lacquer tradition and its motifs with a contemporary modernist aesthetic. By 1912-1913 she was already becoming a name, and her luxurious screens, tables, and door panels sold well and were exhibited. Throughout this time she was also designing striking rugs decorated with geometric shapes and patterns. Like her early lacquer work, these rugs, and later her famous chairs - particularly the Transat chair, the non-conformist chair, the Lota sofa, and the Bibendum - secured Eileen Gray's place as one of the most influential designers of the 20th century.


Bibendum chair on the left of the living room


Nonconformist chair, designed for E-1027

In 1922 Gray opened her own shop, Jean Désert, where she exhibited her furniture and designs as well as those of her contemporaries. At around the same time she met Jean Badovici, a Romanian architect and editor of the influential journal "l'Architecture Vivante," with whom she formed a very close personal and professional relationship. Her friendship with Badovici was to dramatically affect the course her artistic practice was to take, for it was he who suggested to Gray that she try her hand at architecture, and it was for him that she built her first house and one of her most enduring achievements, the Villa E-1027. Later in her life she explained: "Badovici said to me: why don't you build? I laughed in his face. I had always loved architecture - more than anything - but I didn't think myself capable of it."

E-1027, First Floor Plan


Rug for E-1027

In 1925, the pair began to explore the area around Saint-Tropez, seeking an appropriate site on which to build a summer refuge for Badovici. She subsequently discovered an isolated plot - inaccessible by car, but within walking distance of both a railway station and a sandy beach - along a rocky stretch of coastline. Gray bought the site and spent three years in Roquebrune, taking prime responsibility for both design and construction, while Badovici visited frequently to assist in technical matters. The name of the villa, E-1027, is a cipher for the architects' intertwined initials: following the E, the numbers 10, 2 and 7 represent the alphabetical order of the letters J, B and G, respectively. Built between 1926 and 1929, E-1027 was a unique experiment in architecture and design. Eileen Gray combined built-in furniture with ingenious spatial planning to engage the user with the building and site, incorporating the sun and the sea into the very experience of the house.


Maison en bord de mer E.1027 - Roquebrune Cap Martin

Gray declared: "This house has been built for a person who likes work, sports and receiving friends." E-1027 looks much bigger than it is. It has two bedrooms, a maid's room, utility rooms and a large space, partitioned with screen furniture that could serve as a living room, dining area and cloakroom or guest room. The main living area overlooks Monte Carlo harbour and the bedrooms face the rising sun. Service spaces are isolated: the kitchen, adjoining an outdoor cooking space, is separate from the rest of the house. Gray felt that each room should remain independent of the others, arguing that "everyone, even in a house of restricted dimensions, must be able to remain free and independent. They must have the impression of being alone, and if desired, entirely alone." Each room has a balcony and access to the garden.


Fauteuil aux Serpents

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2009/02/eileen-grays-armchair.html

In the most intricately detailed portions of the house - the bathroom, stairway, and the passage linking the dining alcove and bedroom - Gray filled every surplus cubic metre with concealed storage compartments, each designed to accommodate a specific item. The villa provided what she called the "minimum of space, maximum of comfort."


Bedroom


Bedroom dressing table

Her Transat "deck chair" (inspired by transatlantic liners), tubular steel bedside table and Bibendum (Latin for "now is the time to drink" but named for its resemblence to the "Michelin Man", a motoring icon with a drink in one hand and a cigar in the other!) armchair - all designed for E-1027 - have become timeless items of furniture that are still manufactured. She produced a second furniture type for the house, which she termed "le style camping." These items are flexible, light and portable, capable of assuming different configurations to accommodate a range of activities. Cabin-like furniture, conceived as a series of extrusions from the wall that break down the boundaries between architecture and furnishings, contained pillows, mosquito netting, books, a reading light and tea things.

Gray admired Le Corbusier's architecture, even if she remained unconvinced by his polemical assertions. Responding to his well-known maxim, she concluded: "A house is not a machine to live in. It is the shell of man, his extension, his release, his emanation." She used Corbusian stencils to inscribe admonitions on the walls of E-1027 - "entrez lentement" (enter slowly) by the main entrance and "defence de rire" (no laughing) on the foyer partition.


Eileen Gray Side table


Eileen Gray Satellite Mirror

A friend of Badovici's, Le Corbusier visited E-1027 on numerous occasions and admired it very much, so much so that he was moved to add his own touch to the clean white villa, painting a series of murals on its walls between 1937-39. This intrusion onto her design infuriated Gray, who considered the murals outright vandalism. Whether he painted these murals out of admiration for her work or jealousy of her accomplishment, Le Corbusier became intricately tied with the future of the house. Failing to purchase it himself, he eventually bought a piece of properly just east of E-1027, where he built a small, rustic cabin, "Le Cabanon." Here he would go for work and quiet contemplation, taking daily swims on the beach outside the house. After he died in those very waters, the whole area was declared a "Site Moderne," or "Modern Site," and deemed an area of cultural and historical importance and international interest. Today E-1027 is recognized as the founding element of this site.


Le Corbusier mural at main entrance,1938-39

Jean Badovici lived in the house until his death in 1956. In 1960, fearful for the future of E-1027 and his murals, Corbusier persuaded Madame Marie-Louise Schelbert of Zurich to buy the villa. He took an active interest in preserving both the house and its contents, retaining Gray's furnishings and restoring some of his paintings in 1961. When Schelbert died in 1982, the villa was left to her doctor, Peter Kägi, who removed Gray's furniture to Switzerland and eventually sold it through Sotheby's in Monaco on October 13, 1991, for the equivalent of €390,000. The Pompidou Centre pre-empted the sale of several lots - a common practice in France when a state body wishes to buy a particular item at auction. Most of the 29 lots went to France and Germany. Kägi died a few years later, unfortunately before any of the restorations began. After his death the house remained empty and susceptible to vandals and squatters who incurred serious damage onto the already ailing edifice, leaving it in dangerously precarious shape.


Eileen Gray in her rue de Bonaparte apartment with a Block Screen, 1970

Today, after years of neglect and vandalism, the house is in a serious state of disrepair. Friends of E-1027 is cooperating closely with the French government and the township of Roquebrune-Cap Martin, who have recently purchased the villa in partnership with the Coastal Conservancy, on both the exterior and interior restoration of this important work of modern architecture. The first phase of the renovation is already underway, supported in part by funds raised by Friends of E-1027. Once the house is fully restored and refurbished with copies of its original furniture and decorations, it will be maintained as a museum with a study and exhibition center for contemporary design near the site.


E-1027 in 2001

There is another Irish connection with Roquebrune as the poet William Butler Yeats was buried there just after the outbreak f the Second World War. W.B. Yeats was born in Sandymount, Co. Dublin in 1865 and educated in London but he spent his childhood holidays in Sligo and developed a deep affinity for the area.

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2007/10/first-female-member-of-parliament.html

Yeats died in Menton, France in 1939 and was buried in Roquebrune-Cap-Martin after a private funeral but according to his wishes his body was moved after the war in 1948 to Drumcliffe, Co. Sligo. In his poem "Under Ben Bulben" Yeats outlined how and where he was to be buried and even included the epitaph he wanted inscribed on his gravestone:

Under bare Ben Bulben's head
In Drumcliff churchyard Yeats is laid.
An ancestor was rector there
Long years ago, a church stands near,
By the road an ancient cross.
No marble, no conventional phrase;
On limestone quarried near the spot
By his command these words are cut:
Cast a cold eye
On life, on death.
Horseman pass by.



Today Roquebrune Cap Martin is not just the retreat of the idle rich and their servants but is easily accessible by road and rail from Nice Airport where there are frequent budget flights by the likes of easyJet who we travelled with. By road head along the A8 from Nice (16km.) take exit Menton La Turbie. If you are coming from Menton take exit Monaco Roquebrune. By the cliff roads take Grande Corniche (D2564), Moyenne Corniche (RN7), Basse Corniche (RN98). But the easiest way is on SNCF from Nice on the costal railway which passes by Bono’s back garden as it goes through Eze-bord-de-Mer!




Roquebrune

Situated 2 kilometres from Menton and Monte Carlo, this seaside resort rises to 300m. altitude starting at the water's edge and going all the way up to its perched village. The luxury of the villas, some of which resemble palaces remind us that here, in Roquebrune, statesmen, royalty, writers, and artists all came looking for inspiration and rest: Winston Churchill, Coco Chanel, Sacha Guitry, Jacques Brel, Silvana Mangano et al. Today the atmosphere is more Eurotrash with Russian Oligarski and good time girls from Kiev and Wolverhampton on the make or as Somerset Maugham tellingly remarked about neighbouring Monte Carlo “A sunny place for shady people” !













Villa Torre Clementina

Cap-Martin, within the commune of Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, is a beautiful wooded peninsula on the Mediterranean, just below the perched Roquebrune village. The train station is down here, along with the beach, some campsites and shops. The peninsula itself is largely covered with very expensive walled estates, some dating back to the 19th century and the Belle Epoque. To inhale the athmoshere of that era head along the Avenue l'Imperatrice Eugenie or on the costal footpath to Monaco down below. The Sentier Littoral offers an invigorating two hour walk around the length of Cap Martin all the way to Menton. En route you will catch just the barest glimpse of the superb villas whose estates cover the main area of the Cap. Somewhere above is the ravishing Villa Torre Clementina restored by Frederick R. Koch, an American collector and philanthropist. Designed in 1904 by the architect Lucien Hesse for the writer Ernesta Stern (who is buried in Menton churchyard) this neo-Romanesque confection and superb gardens with pavilions and a pergola are on the French register of historic monuments.

See; Villa Torre Clementina

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2010/12/villa-torre-clementina-roquebrune-cap.html

Further along the path you come to the viewing gallery built onto the rocks at the end overlooking Monaco for the magnificent Villa Cyranos, the Residence de l'Imperatrice Eugenie.


Villa Cyranos


Imperatrice Eugenie

The Empress was the ravishing young aristocratic Spanish wife of the Emperor Louis Napoleon and she was Empress of France from 1853 – 1870 when Louis Napoleon was deposed and took refuge in England as a result of France’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War. He died there in 1873. His son, also Louis, is commemorated by the pub “The Prince Imperial” in Chislehurst in Kent where they lived in exile, their mansion in exile is now the rather spendid clubhouse of the local golf club. He was a cavalry officer in the British Army and was rumored to have been friendly with Princess Beatrice, youngest daughter of Queen Victoria, and there was much speculation of a marriage between them. That did not have a chance to occur as the Prince Imperial was killed when fighting for the British in South Africa in the Zulu Wars on June 1, 1879. Beatrice sent a beautiful wreath for his grave at Farnborough, which fueled the speculation that she had been hoping for a match. She went on to marry Prince Henry of Battenberg in 1885 who coincidentally also died in Africa. Ten years into their marriage, on 20 January 1896, Prince Henry died of malaria while fighting in the Anglo-Ashanti War in what was the Gold Coast, now modern Ghana. Her daughter married the King of Spain and is Juan Carlos's grandmother. The Empress Eugenie returned in time to France where she lived in some magnificence to the ripe old age of 95, a testament to the clement marine climate of Roquebrune Cap Martin. She is buried beside the Emperor and the Prince Imperial in a specially constructed crypt at the Monastery of St. Michael in Farnborough, England.


Roquebrune village



Today Roquebrune Cap Martin is still a beautiful place which reposes gracefully on the Riviera and in W.B. Yeats and Eileen Gray’s remarkable E-1027 it has two significant Irish connections.

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