Life
In 1782, on her parents' request, she married erbprinz Anton Aloys, Prince of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen. Her new home city was not to her taste, however, and three weeks after the birth of her son Karel she returned in 1785 to her native city of Paris. There her brother, who would become prince Frederik III, was busy with the building of the Hôtel de Salm as the Paris residence of the Salm-Kyrburg family and a gathering place for many members of the high nobility. During the French Revolution, her brother Frederick III and her lover Alexandre de Beauharnais were guillotined, but Amalie Zephyrine knew how to survive the Revolution. In 1797, she bought the cemetery in which her brother and lover had been buried in a mass tomb. Despite everything, the princess maintained good relations with a number of influential figures of the Revolution, as Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand and Joséphine de Beauharnais, widow of her lover Alexandre and later wife of Napoleon Bonaparte.
A few years later Amalie Zephyrine successfully used her contacts at the court of Napoleon to broker the Mediatisation of Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen and Hohenzollern-Hechingen. She also became guardian to her nephew Frederick IV of Salm-Kyrburg (1789-1859) during his minority, who had become the prince of Salm-Kyrburg in 1794 after his father's downfall.
After twenty years in Paris the princess returned in 1822 to Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen, where she first lived in an annex of the former monastery Inzigkofen and later on in a residence called Prinzenbau, that her husband had built for her at Sigmaringen. A cliff face in the Donautal in Hohenzollern-Sigmaringen is named the Amalienfelsen after her.
Read more about this topic: Princess Amalie Zephyrine Of Salm-Kyrburg
Famous quotes containing the word life:
“It is a momentous fact that a man may be good, or he may be bad; his life may be true, or it may be false; it may be either a shame or a glory to him. The good man builds himself up; the bad man destroys himself.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“He did not live, he observed life from a window, and too often was inclined to content himself with no more than what his friends told him they saw when they looked out of a window.... In the end the point of Henry James is neither his artistry nor his seriousness, but his personality, and this was curious and charming and a trifle absurd.”
—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1965)
“I would like you to understand completely, also emotionally, that I’m a political detainee and will be a political prisoner, that I have nothing now or in the future to be ashamed of in this situation. That, at bottom, I myself have in a certain sense asked for this detention and this sentence, because I’ve always refused to change my opinion, for which I would be willing to give my life and not just remain in prison. That therefore I can only be tranquil and content with myself.”
—Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937)