After Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo, his siblings were in a bind. Each—there were seven of them—had been elevated by their illustrious brother into the European nobility, and all of them, in their own way, suddenly found themselves personae non gratae in most of Europe.
Pauline, Napoleon’s younger sister who’d married the Italian prince Camillo Borghese, retreated to the Borghese Palace in Rome for a little while, and then, miserable, began to search for a more suitable location to while away her later years in relative obscurity.
