This article appeared
in Volume 19: No. 1 of the Orient
Express magazine.
Josephine’s garden
Princess Michael of Kent visits Château de Malmaison and discovers
Empress Josephine’s passion for flowers.
There are few figures from the past who continue to have an uplifting
effect on our daily lives. And yet, whenever we look at a garden
or flowers in a vase, we may not know it, but we are admiring the
heritage of Napoleon’s first Empress, Josephine. It was she
who was the first to import and distribute many of the species that
are so familiar to us today—gathering together plants from
captured ships sailing between the New and Old Worlds, and bringing
others from her native Martinique to her home in Rueil-Malmaison,
just outside Paris. From there, she generously sent cuttings to her
friends—and eventually the plants spread to enthusiasts in
surprisingly far-flung places.
Rousseau was responsible for the fashion in France of English “natural” gardens,
and it was at Château de Malmaison that Josephine planted her
famous gardens. Another touch of Rousseau: Josephine and her ladies
were all uniformly dressed in white. The late queen, Marie-Antoinette,
had already made the wearing of simple, white muslin fashionable,
playing at country maid in her dairy at Versailles. In fact, it was
the Creole ladies who brought the fashion of muslin to France (Creole
was a term universally applied to white persons born in the French
colonies—and at least half the great families at the French
court were married to Creole ladies). Muslin was easy to wear and
light in their hot climates, and it was claimed it only remained
truly white if washed in the Caribbean: great ladies therefore, sent
their laundry to Santo Domingo.
When researching the life of a historical personage, I always try
to enter into the circumstances of their lives as much as possible.
My first visit to Malmaison took place one spring. It was an evening
reception and I wore white muslin, gold sandles with leather ties,
and flowers in my hair. Appropriate to the house and respecting the
traditions of its famous chatelaine I may have been, but I was so
cold my teeth chattered, despite a woollen shawl. Surrounded by portraits
of Josephine and her daughter, bare-legged and elegant in similar
dresses, I wondered how it was possible, in those days before central
heating, to have survived indoors without
catching pneumonia. Did they only set foot in the gardens in high
summer?
Josephine was born in 1763, at the family’s sugar plantation
on the French Caribbean island of Martinique. The exotic, lush setting
of her childhood, enervating air, long siestas and slow pace of life
in the Caribbean all contributed to her native indolence—which
she called “nonchalance”. Later she would become famous
for the intoxicating languor of her walk, her natural elegance that
was so imitated, so admired and so typical of the Creole. Certainly
it was there in Martinique that she acquired her taste, at the time
quite unusual among the French, for gardens and flowers.
Josephine was christened Marie-Joséphe Rose Tascher de la
Pagerie and she would be known as “Rose” from her birth
until the day when the young General Bonaparte (who made a habit
of changing women’s names) began a letter with: “Sweet
and incomparable Josephine. I awake full of you and of the memory
of our intoxicating night...” From that moment she would enter
history as Josephine.
At 14 she was sent home to France to marry the young Vicomte Alexandre
de Beauharnais, a most unpleasant young man who was less than enchanted
with his arranged bride. (Marriages among the upper classes were
traditionally arranged: there was more shame attached to infidelity
to a lover than to a husband.)
But the Revolution intervened and Alexandre went to the guillotine.
A few days later, mercifully for Rose, the Terror ceased and she
was one of the first condemned prisoners to be released. Hearing
the news, she fainted (elegantly), thanked her fellow prisoners for
their kindness to her, and stepped, blinking, into a new world. Survival
was the name of the game and, using one of her prison friendships,
she met the young (and considered unpromising) soldier, Napoleon
Bonaparte. Napoleon was thin, unkempt, a snob and wildly ambitious.
He was also looking for a wife who would advance him socially and
militarily. He reckoned that Josephine had the right connections.
Later he wrote in his memoirs that he was struck by “her extraordinary
grace and irresistibly sweet manner”. This southern misogamist
melted under Rose’s subtle flattery and “her calm and
dignified bearing of the society of the ancien régime”.
Josephine, however, was not at all sure she was making the right
move when, after much persuasion, in 1796 she married Napoleon—insisting
on a civil ceremony because it could easily be dissolved. It was
not until Napoleon’s coronation that they were married in church
as the Pope refused to crown a couple who were “living in sin”.
In 1799, before Napoleon’s departure for Egypt, they together
purchased the Château de Malmaison near Paris. For the rest
of her life, Josephine would find a personal haven in this modest
but ravishingly beautiful house.
Napoleon was a keen naturalist who responded to the beauty of Malmaison,
announcing that, in the open air, his ideas were “loftier and
larger”. He added 5,000 acres to the estate, built stables
and even turned a blind eye when Josephine broke the law by asking
that English seeds and plants be brought to her from captured ships.
Her informal plantings had already been christened “jardins à l’anglaise”,
and her greenhouses, designed by Pierre Joseph Redouté, were
modelled on those at Kew Gardens near London.
I went in search of these fabled glasshouses, immortalised in paintings
showing Tsar Alexander I visiting Josephine after Waterloo—vast,
elegant rooms for entertaining among the lush, tropical foliage.
Malmaison’s garden, when I saw it, was so reduced as to be
unrecognisable. Where were the lakes, the charming bridges over meandering
streams, the Greek temple and follies? And no black swans anywhere.
A busy road cut the park in half to form the small area where finally
I found the glasshouses. They had been transformed into a large,
private house.
It was in these gardens that Josephine had begun to grow every known
species of plant. She had already introduced the camellia, phlox
and jasmine to France. Now, for her gardens at Malmaison, huge sums
were spent and, no matter how much money she had, Josephine managed
always to be in debt. Tulips were ordered from Holland, lilies from
the Nile. She especially loved her namesake, the rose, and invested
heavily in its cultivation. It was a small, even unimpressive, flower
when she started, and the modern, perpetually flowering rose can
be said to be her creation. In England, Josephine’s rose was
developed into the hybrid tea variety so familiar to us today. Her
most famous commission—a series of watercolours, Les Roses
by Redouté—would sadly be published only after her death.
Even during the war with England, when the continent was under blockade,
Josephine continued to buy huge quantities of plants from a London
nurseryman and went so far as to obtain a passport for him so that
he could travel back and forth with her acquisitions.
In her years as Empress, Josephine grew, for the first time in France,
200 new plants, flowers and trees. She introduced tree peonies, dahlias,
a purple-flowered magnolia, pelargonium and many more varieties.
She hoped to create botanical gardens all over France along the lines
of her gardens in Malmaison and kept up correspondences on the subject
of her seed and plant collections. Australia had recently been discovered
by Captain Cook and many new species were sent to her—often
from captured British ships.
On that visit to Malmaison a number of years ago, I was hot on the
trail, not only of the inimitable Josephine, but of her rival in
love, Marie Walewska. This very young Polish countess had caught
Napoleon’s eye in Warsaw just before his disastrous Russian
campaign. Beautiful, blonde and discreet, Marie Walewska bore Napoleon
a son, thereby disproving his impotence. He divorced Josephine and
crushed Marie’s hopes by going on to make a dynastic marriage
with the Austrian Archduchess Marie-Louise.
Sweet Josephine never resented Marie Walewska and so longed to see
Napoleon’s son that she invited Marie to visit her at Malmaison
with the boy. Despite her natural misgivings, Marie agreed. The visit
was a success and several more followed. While researching Marie’s
life, I returned several times to Malmaison, hoping to find a fragment
of her there. On a glorious spring day, I imagined Josephine and
Marie, both elegant in white muslin, playing with a golden-haired
boy. But there was nothing tangible to recall such a moment.
Months later I returned, still determined. Once again I found nothing.
But surely, I pleaded with the curator, there must be some trace
of Marie here? He recalled something in the basement, a miniature,
not very flattering. He returned with it a few moments later, small,
oval, in a worn, dark-blue velvet frame. As he placed it in my hand,
the frame fell to pieces, leaving me holding the tiny oval painting.
It was not made at her best moment—she was already ill with
kidney disease, her eyes slightly protruding, yet still young, blonde
and appealing. I turned the pieces over to reveal a small scrap of
paper. In an elegant hand was written, in ink faded to brown: “Found
by Prussian soldiers in Napoleon’s carriage at Waterloo”.
Napoleon had rejected Marie, the woman he called his “Polish
wife”, in order to marry, as he said, “a (dynastic) womb”.
He had, nevertheless, taken her with him to his final conflict.
Later, on St Helena, Napoleon’s final destination, he kept
miniature portraits of Josephine and also of Marie, the two women
who loved him and who found friendship through that love at Malmaison.
--
Château de Malmaison is situated at Rueil, 8km from central
Paris, towards St-Germain-en-Laye. Its museum features furniture
and artworks relating to the Imperial family, while its park contains
the rose garden and many rare, old trees. Château de Malmaison,
Avenue de Château
de Malmaison, 92500 Rueil-Malmaison, France. Tel: +33 1 41 29 05
55.
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