They identified her in the morning by the diamonds embedded in what remained of her breastbone. She had gone back inside to save her daughter. Napoleon and his wife had survived.
The ball on the first of July 1810 was given by Prince Karl Philipp von Schwarzenberg, the Austrian ambassador, to celebrate the marriage of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Archduchess Marie Louise of Austria, which had taken place in April. The embassy's ground floor was not large enough for the occasion, so a temporary ballroom had been erected in the garden: a timber-planked structure raised on wooden piles, connected to the main house by a wooden gallery, its interior hung with gauze curtains and garlands and lit throughout by candles. Between twelve hundred and fifteen hundred guests had arrived. The evening opened with the Muses singing in the garden, a Temple of Victory had been erected on the grounds, and a grotto produced harmonious sounds for the entertainment of the court. It was, by every account, the most magnificent private entertainment Paris had seen in years.
At midnight a wax candle drooped from its fitting and touched one of the garlands. The garland caught. The flame reached a gauze curtain. In less than three minutes the fire had spread to the ceiling. The alarm was raised but the civilian fire guards stationed outside did not respond with sufficient speed. Outside the building, fifteen hundred guests had arrived by carriage. The street was packed with waiting horses and vehicles. When the guests flooded out, the carriages made it impossible for anyone to move quickly in any direction. The civilian fire guards who finally arrived found the street impassable and the structure already beyond saving. The wooden ballroom, built for one night in a garden, had become a furnace.
Napoleon was across the room from Marie Louise when he was told. He crossed to her immediately and led her out through the smoke and back to the Château de Saint-Cloud. Not everyone found a clear path. Prince Kurakin, the Russian ambassador, was caught in the press of fleeing guests. His court uniform, so heavily embroidered with gold thread that it had been designed to project the wealth of imperial Russia, caught and held the flame as he moved. He escaped but was badly burned. He had been known as Le Prince aux Diamants, the Diamond Prince, but afterward was renamed by some as the Prince of Lanterns.
Princess Pauline of Schwarzenberg, the ambassador's sister-in-law, had escaped the burning building. She was in the garden. She was thirty-five years old and the mother of nine children. She called for her daughter Eléonore among the survivors and could not find her. She was told her children were safe but she could not see Eléonore and did not believe it. She ran back in through the flames to find her. The ceiling collapsed on her as she searched. She was identified in the ruins the following morning not by her face or her clothing but by the diamonds embedded in a charred fragment of her breastbone. Eléonore had been safe in the garden the entire time.
Caroline Murat, who had been at the ball, wrote to her husband the following day. "The unfortunate sister-in-law of the Austrian ambassador was the victim of her love for one of her children, whom she believed in danger," she wrote. "She rushed into the midst of the flames, the ceiling collapsed on her, and it was only this morning a shapeless form was discovered under the rubble, recognised to be her by her diamonds."
Napoleon did not treat it as an omen. He treated it as an administrative failure. Napoleon made his intentions clear on the night, and the Prefect of Police Dubois was dismissed by October for being absent from his post when the Empress was in the building. Napoleon then directed his fury at the inadequacy of the civilian fire response more broadly. On the eighteenth of September 1811 he established the Brigade de Sapeurs-Pompiers de Paris, a military fire brigade under military discipline, the only one of its kind in the world. It still exists. It still protects Paris.
The temporary ballroom built for one night in the garden of the Austrian embassy burned to its foundations. The fire brigade Napoleon built because of what failed that night is still there.
