She is better than this

I'm about one third through Secrets of the Gotha - a slightly outdated who's who of European royalty, mostly focusing on the anecdotal and scandalous. It's a book that got referenced a lot in the stuff I'd read for my thesis, so I was very pleasantly surprised to find it at that huge NYC bookstore... damn, forgot the name already. Oh well, nevermind. The style is nauseatingly pretentious at times, but that's probably to be expected, given the subject matter. And there are some pretty priceless bits too, like this letter from Napoleon Bonaparte to Eugène de Beauharnais:

Cousin, I have arrived in Munich; I have arranged your marriage with the Princess Augusta and I have already announced it. This morning the princess came to see me and I had a long conversation with her. Enclosed is her portrait on a cup. She is better than this.

Or this one, about the daughters and the mistress of Leopold II, King of the Belgians, all cheated out of an enormous inheritance (Leopold was one of the richest monarchs of the 19th century, due to the fact that the Congo was his personal property - as opposed to being a colony of the Belgian state):

In order to occupy her time as she grew older and earn some money [Princess Louise] began to write her memoirs. They appeared as Autour des trônes que j'ai vu tomber (Thrones I have seen collapse), and are a long plea 'pro domo' in which she takes up again all her grievances against her husband, the Hapsburg-Coburgs and her own family. Shortly afterwards her sister, the Princess Stephanie, published her regrets for a throne which had escaped her under the nostalgic title Je devais être impératrice (I should have been empress). As for [the late King's mistress] Baroness Vaughan, who did not want ot be left out, she gave to the world a little book of recollections modestly entitled Presque Reine! (Almost a Queen!)

More to come, probably.