⚠️THIS STORY WILL BE IN THE READER'S POV/POINT OF VIEW⚠️
This is for male readers. If you are a girl, it's fine, nothing's stopping you. Just informing.
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This story; The Righteous Heir, is an alternate history I made based on one small change: France won the Battle of Waterloo in 1815, and Napoleon retained his throne as Emperor of the French. In this alternate history, instead of dying imprisoned in 1821, he dies in 1835 of natural causes, age 66.
In real life, Napoleon Francis, the Prince Imperial (also known as Franz, the Duke of Reichstadt), never left the custody of his Austrian relatives and died in 1832 at the age of 21 under mysterious circumstances. He was seen as a threat rather than an opportunity for Austria.
Alexandre Walewski is also a real person. He, too, was imprisoned by the czar, but escaped at the age of seventeen and took up residence in Paris. He served in the French Foreign Legion for several years before becoming a diplomat. After the Revolution of 1848, he served as ambassador to Florence and the Kingdom of Naples before becoming ambassador to Great Britain, where he was indeed Queen Victoria's "favorite ambassador." He was then a senator and held several other offices, including Minister of Foreign Affairs. He died of a stroke at the age of 58, leaving a number of descendants, including a son by his affair with the famous actress Rachel.
Marshal Ney, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Conroy, and others are all real people as well, whose lives diverge from history at the Battle of Waterloo.
Madame St. Elme is also real—adventuress, courtesan, and spy. While she seems to have been Napoleon's secret agent and to have been involved in his escape from Elba, she was never his spymaster. Instead, under the Restoration, she was an unrepentant Bonapartist who never ceased scheming. She became a noted author and memoirist, whose scandalous books about the First Empire were for a while banned in France.
Thank you for joining me in this fascinating exploration of 'mystery', a visit to the many possible futures so near to the one we live in. I can't say that I am completely satisfied with the ending though. While I was in the process of writing and trying to complete this story, I never reviewed or read it back since I had so many other stories to write. I might write a better ending, I will tell my ideas in the chapter before the epilogue, no spoilers here.
-Ivan
Enjoy
YOU ARE READING
𝐓𝐇𝐄 𝐑𝐈𝐆𝐇𝐓𝐄𝐎𝐔𝐒 𝐇𝐄𝐈𝐑
Historical Fiction*̠C̠̠O̠̠M̠̠P̠̠L̠̠E̠̠T̠̠E̠̠D̠* Your place in this world is by the side of Alexandre, the elder of Napoleon's two living sons, born unfortunately out of wedlock. Alexandre's half-brother, Franz, is the legitimate heir to Napoleon's throne, but he's sp...
