" ...On the steps of the palace" - l'impératrice Eugénie et sa cour sur les marches du palais de Compiègne, 1856

(Note: This post, with its title taken from Sondheim's "Into the Woods", was finished and scheduled well before the great artist's death... a strange and poignant coincidence.)

Photograph by the comte Olympe Aguado de las Marismas.

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 Photograph by Édouard Delessert.

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Photograph by comte Olympe Aguado de las Marismas.

October 1856, the Empress is holding her son and only child, the Prince Imperial, born the previous 16 March.

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Comte Olympe Aguado (Olympe-Clemente-Alexandre-Auguste Aguado de las Marismas; 3 February 1827, Paris – 25 October 1894, Compiègne), Franco-Spanish amateur photographer and socialite, active primarily in the 1850s and 1860s, he was a founding member of the influential Société française de photographie in 1854. Both fervent Spanish Bonapartists, the Aguado family had long been close with that of the empress; the comte's sister-in-law, the lovely marquise de Las Marismas, figures prominently in Winterhalter's famous group portrait of the empress and her ladies.

An annotated print of the above, listing most of those pictured.