reference to the title of Emperor or ex-Emperor, or the names of Napoleon or Bonaparte, which he was pleased to remark were 'inadmissible,' and could only serve to wound the heart of Her Majesty the Duchess. It had therefore been arranged that the mighty conqueror, before whose prowess all Europe had once trembled, should have a funeral service held in his honour under the style and title of Il Serenissimo! a conveniently vague term which, according to Neipperg, might be indiscriminately applied to any degree of princely gradation."
"Nothing could be more delicious than this Napoleon's name masked under the alias of Il Serenissimo! Perhaps the irony is even greater that his death gave his widow welcome relief, allowed her first to marry Neipperg, and afterwards to descend, after Neipperg's death, on Count Bombelles, a French officer in the Austrian service. To Bombelles she left the greater part of her fortune when she died in 1847, at the age of fifty-six. Meantime, 1840 had come, and the second funeral of Napoleon; the apotheosis that ended in that tomb in the Invalides, at which I stood gazing the other day. And so even Neipperg and Marie Louise and the Gazette de Parme proved of no avail. Napoleon's name is still spoken. Il Serenissimo! It was sublime!"
