Ambition and Desire: The Dangerous Life of Josephine Bonaparte (27 page)

Josephine established connections with influential figures across the globe, sending off letters bursting with botanical knowledge and showcasing a meticulous attention to detail. The year she moved into Malmaison, she wrote to General Lefebvre, “I would therefore be delighted to receive some of the magnolias and the bushes which you possess in significant quantity. But I attach a condition: that is that you make use of me with the same freedom and that you demand from me just as unreservedly any of the plants which I possess which you desire.”
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She wrote to Monsieur Cazeaux in November 1803, playing on his “patriotic zeal” and asking for some of his plants and “seeds from America.”

I wish to multiply the production of plants from this continent in France, since its temperature is similar to our own. In order to achieve this goal, of which I have no doubt you will recognize the value, I am dedicating a section of the grounds adjoining Malmaison to a nursery. Exotic trees and bushes which thrive in our climate are cultivated here. The First Consul is observing the development of this establishment enthusiastically. It is a new source of prosperity for France.
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Josephine was presenting her garden as the glory of France. In a letter to the prefect Thibaudeau, she thanked him for the “wonderful collection” of seeds he had sent.

It brings me such inexpressible joy to see these foreign plants multiplying in my gardens. I hope that Malmaison will soon offer a model of good culture and that it will become a source of riches for the departments. It is to this end that I am growing a large quantity of trees and bushes from Australian and American territories. In 10 years time, I want every department to possess a collection of precious plants from my nurseries.
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Josephine delighted in exchanging seeds, ideas, and cuttings, pressing all the owners of fine gardens to give her the plants she desired.
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The grounds of Malmaison were her empire. As the botanist Étienne Pierre Ventenat wrote to her in the foreword to
Le Jardin de la Malmaison
in 1803, she had created “an impressive reminder of the conquests of your illustrious husband.”
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She had gathered “the rarest plants growing on French soil,” which had never before left “the deserts of Arabia or the burning deserts of Egypt.”
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She even bought from the enemy, spending her husband’s gold at the Hammersmith nursery Lee & Kennedy. “Some plants have arrived for you from London,” Napoleon wrote in 1801—only a few years after the Battle of the Nile.
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She begged the ambassador in Britain to see if the king would sell her some of his plants. Even in times of war with Britain, when the rest of Europe was blocked from trade, much to the detriment of their economies, Josephine still imported plants from Britain. Napoleon even allowed one nurseryman safe passage to bring over a particularly delicate tree.
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In 1800 he authorized the explorer Nicolas Baudin to undertake an expedition to Australia, instructing him to bring back plants and animals. He returned with thousands of treasures for the consuless, including hibiscus, mimosas, and other flowers from New South Wales and Tasmania, as well as eucalyptus trees. Josephine then wished for an expert in Australian horticulture and appointed Felix Delahaye, who had restored Marie Antoinette’s garden at Versailles and traveled with an expedition to southwest Australia in 1791 during which he collected two hundred plants.
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Malmaison became a little Australia, and all the sea captains were told to bring back flora for Josephine. In 1809 Napoleon sent over eight hundred plants and seeds from Schönbrunn in Austria.

“My garden is the most beautiful thing in the world,” Josephine said in 1813.
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Malmaison was a fiefdom of rare and exotic plants, many grown for the first time in Europe, some of which are now common in our gardens, including cactuses, rhododendrons, tulips, dahlias, and double jacinths. “There are so many rare plants from all parts of the world, that one might believe oneself to be in the tropics,” pronounced Comtesse Potocka.
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Josephine also cultivated roses and would eventually produce fifty varieties. She spent thousands on specimens and nurtured her own, using names that evoked beauty and sensuality, including
cuisse de nymphe emue
(or “thigh of an affected nymph”). She had an exceptional collection of heather and grew jasmine from her native Martinique. She spared no expense, once spending three thousand francs on a single bulb. By 1813, she could inform Eugène proudly that her grounds were “more visited by Parisians than my salon, since at this very moment that I am writing, I am told that there are at least 30 people walking in the garden.”
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Malmaison had something of the fairground or theme park atmosphere about it. In 1802 Josephine built an exotic orangery full of pineapples and other fruits, which she served at her table. The following year she bought a fleet of pretty cows and opened a dairy, staffed by a cowherd imported from Switzerland and a team of dairymaids in Swiss costume. Marie Antoinette’s Petit Trianon had been mocked and derided; now Josephine made one that was even grander and kitschier, even taking the bas-reliefs by Pierre Julien, along with the marbled furniture and porcelain from the Petit Trianon, to furnish it. Morel built a Swiss chalet on the edge of the Saint Cucufa pond as a house for the herders, with cattle sheds next door. Josephine delightedly served the butter, milk, and cheese at her table. In 1808 the king of Spain sent a present of two thousand prime merino sheep, and she set them wandering over her grounds. Parisian high society loved playing farm with Josephine, as they had with Marie Antoinette.

In 1805 Josephine opened her hothouse, designed by Jean-Thomas Thibault and Barthélemy Vignon. “Vast and magnificent,” as one visitor said, it was a 165-foot-long tropical paradise full of plants from around the world.
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Huge trees over fifteen feet tall touched the glass ceiling, and dahlia, amaryllis, and fruit trees perfumed the air. In the midst of it all was a bust of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His notions of freedom, emotion, and feeling were in absolute opposition to the stiffness of the consul and the mannered formality Napoleon desired—but in her hothouse and gardens, Josephine could be as romantic and liberated as she wished. In a letter to one of her gardeners, she wrote to say that she would like her bust of Rousseau to be displayed so that the tendrils of the surrounding plants would trail around his head.
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Rousseau, ornamented with greenery, was the king of her domain.

The biggest attraction of all was her zoo. Her animals roamed freely
on the grounds at Malmaison, and it was the most exotic menagerie in Europe. Few ships arrived in France from foreign climes without an animal for Josephine. Kangaroos hopped around the verdant gardens, and emus nuzzled at the soil as the country neighbors gaped at Peruvian llamas. She had the first zebra in Europe, as well as a gnu, a chamois, and golden pheasants from China. Gazelles trotted around and nibbled from the hands of guests, and flying squirrels swooped through the trees. Talleyrand gave her a monkey who liked sealing letters with wax.

After surviving lengthy sea journeys, her animals flourished at Malmaison, unless Napoleon felt like using them for target practice (fortunately, he was a poor shot). Peacocks stalked the flower beds while her prized Australian black swans swam on Malmaison’s canal and lake. They were the first to be seen in Europe, and she was incredibly proud of them. Such were the spoils that came back from the 1800 Australian expedition that the Natural History Museum demanded a share, but the minister of the interior told them that Josephine came first.

Her most cherished animal was a female orangutan possessed of a remarkably sweet nature. The little lady strolled about the house fully dressed, and when anyone approached her, she pulled her coat over her legs and would “assume a modest, decent air to welcome the visitor.” She always ate at the table, using a knife and fork, and was particularly fond of nibbling on turnips. After dinner, she loved to cover her head with a napkin and then pull funny faces. When she fell ill and was put to bed, she lay with the cover drawn up to her chin and her arms outside it, completely hidden by the sleeves of the dressing gown. If anyone she knew came into the room, she greeted him with an appealing look, shaking her head gently and pressing his hand affectionately.
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Nowhere else in France, or indeed Europe, could one see a llama grazing or an orangutan eating turnips. Josephine’s visitors were delighted by the great forests, lawns, beautiful waterways, and long canal full of boats and black swans. The whole place was a museum of curiosities. Josephine also collected stuffed animals and birds and placed them in cabinets all over Malmaison.

Troupes of gardeners, landscapers, designers, botanists, and horticultural specialists followed Percier and Fontaine, throwing their hands up in dismay over the demands of the consuless. Louis-Martin Berthault,
who began work there in 1807, best understood Josephine’s tastes. He created a temple of love, a monument to melancholy, a grotto made of rocks from Fontainebleau, and an ornamental lake with a statue of Napoleon at its center. Berthault positioned classical and Renaissance sculptures all around the park (perfect for the guests to play hide-and-seek). He also widened the river to create another lake and added a salon to the side of the huge greenhouse that housed Josephine’s tropical plants.

Decorated in the antique style, adorned with vases, and heated by wood-burning stoves, her “greenhouse” salon was an intimate place to talk with her guests. The centerpiece featured two “beautiful
brèche violette
marble columns, 12 feet in height, with gilt capitals and bases,” procured by the founder of the Musée des Monuments Français.
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Before long, Josephine became inseparable from her garden. Botanists even named plants after her: The
Lapageria rosea, Josephinia Imperatricis,
and
Amaryllis Josephinae
were all tributes to her. Trading on the idea of her garden as a reflection of her husband’s battles, she said that three of the plants she grew—lily of the Nile, Parma violets, and Damietta roses—were in honor of Napoleon’s military conquests.
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She planted a cedar tree on the property to commemorate the Battle of Marengo.

Creating a beautiful garden was often seen as the role of the consort. Maria Carolina, queen of Naples, had caused her British envoy, Sir William Hamilton, endless headaches in her quest for a truly British garden at her palace. But Josephine prided herself on knowing more about horticulture than Marie Antoinette or Catherine the Great, and she used portraiture to advertise her knowledge. In Baron François-Pascal-Simon Gérard’s watercolor
An Allegory of Empress Josephine as Patroness of the Gardens at Malmaison
(c. 1805–1807), she stands in front of Malmaison’s famous hothouse. Similarly, Pierre-Paul Prud’hon’s
Empress Josephine at Malmaison
(1805–1809) shows her looking relaxed and ethereal in the gardens, and it even depicts a
Josephinia Imperatricis
in the bottom right-hand corner. Eager to show off her excellence as a botanist, she took as her symbol the cornucopia, the icon of abundance, prosperity, good fortune, peace, and good government, and had it carved into many of her possessions.
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The British caricatured her as an amateur
botanist, with George Cruikshank producing
The Imperial Botany,
showing a bosomy Josephine displaying her sunflowers to the beau monde—all have faces of powerful men, and the Napoleon flower is much less healthy than the Wellington. The French snapped up pictures of her next to her plants and bought trinket cornucopias.

Josephine sought to publicize and record her gardens.
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She asked Pierre-Joseph Redouté, formerly Marie Antoinette’s drawing master, to produce 120 color plates in a two-volume work entitled
The Garden of Malmaison
(1803–1805), as well as eight volumes of
Liliaceous Plants
(1802–1816) by the botanist Étienne-Pierre Ventenat. She gave away copies of the books in an attempt to promote her gardens, and encouraged Redouté to publish a survey of the roses in Malmaison. His
Roses
(1817–1824) would make her gardens famous after her death. She covered her bedroom walls with flower pictures by Redouté and used them to decorate a giant bed she bought in 1812.

The gardens were her pleasure and her consolation, but they were also an elaborate form of imperial propaganda, as well as her stake at immortality and a reflection of the quest for power that her husband conducted with her at his side. Her plants were also for her guests to admire, setting them at ease while they wandered the grounds, talked politics, planned love affairs. Josephine might have claimed for herself the position of supportive consort, and the role of the woman without intellect or political awareness, but it was an act: Few could have created such an imaginative and truly unique home. Informal, beautiful, welcoming, and all ease and grace on the surface, Malmaison
was
Josephine. As Napoleon observed: “Without you, Malmaison is too sad a place.”
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In the early days of the consulate, Malmaison was practically the seat of government. Josephine and Napoleon traveled to their country retreat whenever they could, and were always there for Saturday evening, all of Sunday, and part of Monday. After meetings held to decide the civil code and foreign policy, Josephine would host grand receptions and fabulous dinners. As a hostess, she meant, above all, for her guests to enjoy themselves. “We chose our hour of rising,” recalled Madame Junot.
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Breakfast was informal, around eleven at the earliest, and guests could spend the afternoons as they pleased, with music, reading, or
games in the garden, or simply wandering the grounds, gossiping about politics. The company would gaze at the paintings and admire the incredible mosaic pictures from Florence, bronzes, and Sèvres vases in the reception rooms. At dinner, Josephine always provided a sumptuous spread, with her own butter, milk, fruits, and meat, the table decorated with flowers and candles softly illuminating the young faces of Napoleon’s court.