Château de Pourtalès

This guide to Chateau de Pourtales in Strasbourg opens with a rumor staff still repeat, that Melanie de Pourtales never really left. She inherited the house in the 1860s and rebuilt it into a miniature Versailles ringed by an English-style park. Between 1870 and 1914, Franz Liszt played here, and Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie, whose lady-in-waiting Melanie was, crossed the threshold alongside European princes. She was famed for her beauty, once compared by a government minister, in front of a room, to a figure in a painting by Ingres.