“ He now resumed his financial speculations, and when in 1854 he became president of the Corps Législatif, a position which he filled with consummate dignity and tact for the rest of his life, he used his official rank to assist his schemes.
Politics and high finance with Morny went hand in hand. In 1856 he was sent as special envoy to the Coronation of Alexander II. of Russia; he executed his mission with prodigal splendour, and brought home a wife, Princess Sophie Troubetzkoi, who by her Connexions greatly strengthened his social position. ”

“ After a brilliant school and college career he received a commission in the army, and next year entered the staff college and became lieutenant. The comte de Morny, as he was called by a polite fiction, served in Algeria in 1834–35 as aide-de-camp to General Camille Alphonse Trezel, whose life he saved under the walls of Constantine. When he returned to Paris in 1838 he secured a solid position in the business world by the establishment of a great beetroot-sugar industry at Clermont in Auvergne, and by writing a pamphlet Sur la question des sucres in 1838. ”

“ He supported the government of Louis Philippe, because revolution threatened his commercial interests, but before the catastrophe of 1848, by which he was temporarily ruined, he meditated conversion to the legitimist cause represented by the comte de Chambord. ”