The Veiled Empress:

Book excerpt: Aimée du Buc de Rivéry was a French heiress who went missing at sea as a young woman. There is an unsubstantiated legend that she was captured by Barbary pirates, sold as a harem concubine, and was the same person as Naksidil Sultan, a Valide Sultan (Queen Mother) of the Ottoman Empire. The strangely romantic story—heretofore a baffling mystery—of the lovely French girl who became Crown of the Veiled Heads reveals an unknown chapter of history and throws a new light upon the revolution in Turkey, the destruction of the Janissaries, the downfall of Napoleon. How it came about that the young Sultan Mahmoud broke the power of Napoleon is told for the first time. An unacademic biography, the author presents first a pageant of Martinique, the enchanted little island where the Veiled Empress and Josephine, Empress of the French, were born. The paintings give a vivid glimpse of the joyous clash of color in the costumes, a flower of eighteenth century France run riot in tropical soil. In this Land of Ghosts there is a curious reflection of the life of the past in the light of the present.