Napoleoni sometimes spoke in such leaps that his listeners had no idea what he was talking about.
They had been discussing the wedding of the Naples princess. Georgiana had asked who the groom was, but Napoleoni had then asked whether he could replace him.
A normal person would have assumed he meant replacing the princess's groom, Prince Ferdinand of Spain.
Normally, marriages between princes and princesses were decided by their parents or Parliament. Prince Ferdinand had married Maria Antonia of Naples-Sicily, who had been named after her mother's favorite sister, Marie Antoinette. The Queen of Naples was also an Austrian princess and Marie Antoinette's sister. When Maria Antonia married Ferdinand, the Spanish princess Maria Isabel married Maria Antonia's brother, Francesco. Her mother, Maria Carolina, had developed an intense hatred of France after her sister Marie Antoinette and brother-in-law Louis XVI were executed during the French Revolution. This influenced both her son and daughter. It was easy to imagine what turmoil would result from such an anti-France princess marrying into the pro-France Spanish court.
Spain's current queen, Maria Luisa, disliked this daughter-in-law and often had people search through her personal belongings, further intensifying the hatred between them. Ferdinand did not feel caught in the middle at all; he firmly supported his wife. It was easy to imagine what the future king of Spain's relationship with Napoleon would be like.
The marriage alliance between Naples and Sicily was part of "tradition." Charcoal was easy to obtain, but saltpeter and sulfur for making gunpowder required far more trouble. Sulfur was usually found in volcanically active regions, such as distant Northern Europe. As early as the fourteenth century, people had been mining sulfur there to supply the musketeer corps of kings across Europe.
Sicily also had many volcanoes. From the seventeenth century onward, it