The Montgomery advertiser., 1906-05-06
HALF FORGOTTEN EUGENE IS EIGHTY TODAY; ONCE WAS EUROPE'S MOST BRILLIANT QUEEN
The Romance Which Made Splendid The Spaards Seventeen Years of Power, and the Cruel Contrast Since Drawn by Exne
 Tragedy and Deepest Grief.

Among the immemorial elms of an unpretentious estate on the English countryside. is being closed today the last chapter in a story of love, riches, honor and power, though exile and bit ter grief have blurred the latter pages of the record whose opening was so suspicious. Surrounded by her be- loved dogs and a few faithful com opinions of her days of splendor, she who was once the Empress of the French-the most beautiful woman in all Europe, most courted and most feted--is now, half-forgotten, entering the Valley of the Shadow.
 Marie Eugenie de Guzman Porto Carrero, Countess of Teba, Marchioness of Moya, and widow of the Third Ma poleon, completed yesterday her sOth year.
 The present-day world hears but It, tie of her--once the source and center of its most brilliant courti Still active, in spite of her four score years, she Is now briefly reported as off for another cruise on her yacht, The Thistle, now a passing paragraph in a London daily chronicles an expedition of the some what whimsical- looking old lady among the shops of dingy Oxford Street, to buy a shawl for herself and sweetmeats for her young friends; or again the so- cial column speaks of a visit made by the Princess Beatrice and her daugh- ter Princess Ena, (Queen-to-be of Eu- genies own Spain), down to the Villa Cyrnos at Cap Martin, where rules in quietest simplicity the woman who forty years ago. reigned in the splendid Tuilleries.
 Memorable Memories.
 It is a unique place which the ex- Empress holds in The hearts of such as still find time to look back upon the romance and tragedy of her life. Men think less now of the unwise meddling with dangerous politics which put so sudden a period to her Gays of gran deur, than of the bravery which she since has shown in the face of heaviest sorrows; less of the indiscretions and worldly frivolities which marked her early career than of the quiet, blame lessness in which 1t now is closing.
 Few other lives have held such ex- tremes. Born in Grenada, of a Scotch adventurer and hArum-scarum daugh- ter of a Spanish grandee; educated scantily in various convents, and rather too carefully in the ways and wiles Of that gay world which held the carpet at Madrid when Isabella the Bad was queen; raised suddenly to the acme of success Tn dazzling court. and as sud denly cast out, after seventeen years of glory; robbed by death, first of her husband and then of a son in whom her very life and soul were wrapped-cer- tainly there is here much matter of deepest interest to put into those mem ories which she now Is writing.
 As, page by page. these "reminiscences are completed, they are locked away; the volume is not to be published until the venerable writer has been dead twenty-five years. Nor is 1t without interest to add that the writing is done with the diamond-set penholder with which the representatives of the Powers signed the Treaty of Paris. on the last day of March. 1856. when the war in the Crimea was officially brought to an end. In those days Eugenie was Elm press. powerful and very, very beauti- ful
 The strange beauty of the "Eueenie eyes" conquered Europe in day. as itI were: eyes violet blue. with lids droop-