Pauline's regular travels between, and extended stays in, Paris and Vienna, permitted her to act as a cross-cultural transmitter of the many trends that interested her in music, political ideas, and sport.

She was a close friend and confidante of French Empress Eugénie, and, with her husband, was a prominent personality at the court of Emperor Napoleon III.

She was acquainted with many composers and writers, including Charles Gounod, Camille Saint-Saëns, Prosper Mérimée and Alexandre Dumas), and corresponded with them.

One of her protégés was the leading Czech musician of that time, Bedřich Smetana, whom she introduced to the music circles of Vienna and Paris.

She also organised salon performances of abridged versions of many famous operas, including Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, in which she took part both as a stage director and singer.

Later she aided the Empress' escape from Paris to Great Britain by secretly sending Eugénie's jewels to London in a diplomatic bag.

After Elisabeth's death in 1898, Pauline together with Princess Eleonora Fugger von Babenhausen took the leading role of grand dames of the Vienna society.

[4][5] The supposed duel involved the participants stripping to the waist to reduce the risk of a wound becoming infected; the image of two topless nobles captured the imagination of artists and scandalized Victorians.

She was one of the last aristocratic patrons of the pre-World War I era, a personality who combined both refined taste and finances to spread contemporary progressive culture.

The first, Gesehenes, geschehenes, erlebtes, in German, honored her grandfather, Chancellor Metternich, and father, Count Moritz Sándor, and the second, Éclairs du passé, in French, recalled her life and times in the court of Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugénie.