Rising dramatically from a rocky promontory deep in a pine forest in the Burgundian village of Fixin, François Rude's bronze masterpiece "Le Réveil de Napoléon" — Napoleon's Awakening — shows the Emperor emerging from beneath a shroud as an imperial eagle tears the cloth away, a ferocious allegory of undying glory commissioned in 1847 by a devoted Napoleonic veteran named Claude Noisot who wanted his idol's spirit to live forever in the landscape he loved. This superb sepia-toned postcard, no. 95 in the Fixin local series published by Lerys Baver of Nuits-sur-Vougeot, captures the sculpture with atmospheric forest light filtering behind it, the iron fence enclosing the monument lending it the air of a sacred shrine — which to Bonapartists, it very much was. The verso is unused and carries the Lerys Baver printer's seal, a small Burgundian publisher whose cards are scarce and desirable to regional collectors. The vertical-format composition is unusual for the era and gives the card additional visual strength.