Prince Napoleon occupied, along with his pious catholic wife Clotilde of Savoy, daughter of Victor-Emmuanel II whom he married in 1859, a large and lavish section of the Palais-Royal.

They projected the image of a nice family with their children, their friends and important guests in their main residence that was also a small museum with a gallery and works of arts as well as furniture worthy of their social rank.

The Palais-Royal has the particularly of never having been actually « royal » as it was meant to be inhabited by Louis-Philippe and his family during the Restauration. Plon-Plon, by changing its arrangement, turned it back to what it once was, a liberal inner sanctum where a prince from a secondary branch of succession received artists and favored innovation, set next to the Comédie-Française with shops under the arcades, near the garden where the French Revolution got started – challenging the protocol and etiquette edicted by the monarch sitting in the Palace of the Tuileries.