A pony?

Time for some more aristocratic hilarity. This edition is devoted to France (focusing on the imperial, rather than royal or - God forbid - republican episodes though).

The surprising dynastic ties of the First Empire:

One curious detail: his marriage to Joséphine linked Napoleon to the reigning house of Osman, in Turkey. A young cousin of his wife, Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, had been carried off by Barbary pirates during a sea-crossing, sold as a slave in Constantinople and had then become the Sultana Validé, mother of the future Sultan Mahmud II.

Queen Hortense of Holland:

The marriage of Louis Bonaparte and Hortense de Bauharnais, the daughter of Joséphine, was very happy but inexplicably blessed by heaven. The queen, although she always lived as far away from her husband as possible, still gave him numerous and beautiful children. King Louis, who was horrified by such shameless behavior, had confessed his marital disappointments to the pope, and in one of his vehement epistles had compared his wife to Messalina. In fact Queen Hortense was no more than a charming flighty girl who was the first to be surprised by her pregnancies and confused those responsible. 'Hortense always gets muddled over the fathers of her children,' said Napoleon, not without indulgence, for some suspected that he was the father of her eldest son

And the reigning couple of the Second Empire:

The empress' well-known coldness soon extinguished the ardour of Napoleon III's passion, but she retained her hold over his mind. As General du Barrail subtly remarked: 'She dominated him not so much by her charms as by the memory of the numerous occasions on which he had failed to appreciate them.'

Napoleon III had only one son by his marriage, the prince imperial. His birth in 1856 had been greeted with the same demonstrations of joy as that of the king of Rome, but neither of them ascended the throne for which their births had been so ardently desired. The anxiety and joy of Napoleon III were so great at the moment of the birth that he could only reply 'no' by a shake of his head when the empress, anticipating the worst, asked him if it was a daughter. 'It's a boy!' she cried, relieved. But the emperor, becoming more and more emotional, again replied 'no'. 'Then what is it?' she moaned, completely panic-stricken.

Next up: the German countries, which is where the real fun begins.