Princess Mathilde

Once possibly to have wed her cousin Louis Napoleon, Princess Mathilde, a niece of Napoleon Bonaparte (her father Jerome was Napoleon's brother) which would have made her empress of France when Louis became Napoleon III, Princess Mathilde instead became on of the most prominent figures in French society. "...the woman who raised the French Salon to its point of greatest brilliance and entertained such men as the Goncourts, Flaubert, Gautier, Saint-Beuve, Saint-Saens, Bizet and Proust."