Two emperors face each other across the smoking rubble of Austerlitz in this magnificent sepia art postcard after Baron Antoine-Jean Gros's celebrated canvas — Napoleon, poised and almost casual, extends his hand toward the defeated Francis II of Austria, their meeting on 4 December 1805 (the card caption reads "14 Décembre 1895," a printer's error on the original caption that has fascinated collectors for decades) crystallising the theatrical grandeur that Gros poured into every Napoleonic commission. The dramatic landscape behind them — silhouetted troops, a storm-torn sky, a distant horseman on the ridge — gives the scene an almost cinematic sweep that made this painting one of the defining images of the First Empire. Published by Lévy et Neurdein Réunis as card no. 79 in their LL Versailles series, this unused example retains crisp detail in the halftone reproduction, the card stock showing only the gentlest age patina.