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Cixi launched a ‘Self-Strengthening Movement’, commissioning modern warships, steamers and railways. But her power had its price. As a widow, in her early thirties, Cixi was not allowed to wear make-up nor bright reds, instead favouring orange robes, pale-blue waistcoats and, as she got older, a toupee. It was hard for her to have friends, let alone lovers, her companions being eunuchs. Cixi fell in love with a young, sensitive eunuch, An Dehai. When she rashly commissioned Little An to direct the selection of a wife for her son Tongzhi, he proudly set out with an entourage – breaking a rule that eunuchs were not allowed out of Beijing. The princes Gong and Chun ignored Cixi’s authorization. Little An was arrested with six other eunuchs; he was then beheaded and exposed naked. One of Little An’s friends, a fellow eunuch, criticized Cixi for failing to support him. She had him strangled, then collapsed into bed for a month of insomnia and vomiting. She always chose power over love. When her only son Tongzhi died in 1875 just two years after assuming full powers, she adopted and enthroned her baby nephew, the Guangxu emperor, removing him from his father, her enemy Prince Chun, whom she humiliated. Taking the title empress mother she made the emperor call her Papa Dearest. She would now dominate China into the twentieth century.

Napoleon had won wars against Russia and China, had secured Algeria and expanded into Senegal and Indochine. Now a beautiful countess turned his focus on Italy.

IF NECESSARY, SEDUCE THE EMPEROR: NAPOLEON, QUEEN OF HEARTS AND THE RISORGIMENTO OF ITALY

Contessa Virginia ‘Nini’ di Castiglione was no ordinary diplomat. ‘I’ve enrolled the beauteous countess in the diplomatic service of Piedmont,’ said Conte Camillo Cavour, premier of Piedmont, the north Italian kingdom. In order to bring about the unification of Italy, she was ‘to flirt and if necessary seduce the emperor’, obtaining Napoleon III’s support against the Habsburgs. Green-eyed and jet-haired, ‘a miracle of beauty, Venus descended from Olympus’, in the words of the Austrian ambassador’s wife Paulina Metternich, but also insouciant and saucy, Castiglione was a Florentine aristocrat recently married to an older count with whom she had a son before a short affair with the Piedmontese king, Victor Emmanuel II. ‘An imbecile’, concluded Lord Clarendon, but Cavour, a long-haired playboy with flying moustaches and six mistresses, believed she was his secret weapon. ‘Succeed, my cousin, by any methods you like.’

Paris was already filled with ambitious beauties, but Castiglione made herself the cynosure and was swiftly noticed by Napoleon, who had her smuggled into the Tuileries. While Empress Eugénie was pregnant, Castiglione appeared at a ball as Queen of Hearts in a costume ‘entirely open at the sides from hips downwards, her hair flowing loose over neck and shoulders’, with a heart strategically positioned over her pubis.

‘Your heart seems a little low,’ observed the empress. Yet ‘every movement was contrived and she began to get on one’s nerves’, said Paulina Metternich.

‘Very beautiful,’ Napoleon told his cousin Princess Mathilde, ‘but she bores me to death.’ Napoleon moved on to Marie Anne, wife of his foreign minister, Comte Alexandre Walewski, who was the son of Napoleon I with his Polish paramour Marie Walewska. Once when the imperial train was chuffing along to Compiègne, a door slid open to reveal the emperor kissing Marie Anne, in full view of her husband. In the Tuileries, when courtiers caught Napoleon en bonne fortune, he simply saluted and continued; when the empress surprised him, she would snap, ‘Sortez, mademoiselle,’ and the girl would dress and leave fast.

Where sex had failed Italy, murder succeeded. In January 1858, Italian nationalists, disgusted by Napoleon’s neglect of their cause, tossed bombs at Napoleon and Eugénie on their way to the theatre, killing eight. The monarchs, lightly wounded, bravely watched the play, but the near-death experience made Napoleon recall his youth as an Italian patriot. Now, combining his romantic nationalism, compulsive plotting and military ambitions, he backed Cavour and Italian risorgimento, provoking war with Austria.