Malmaison

The purchase was an expensive impulse: over 300,000 francs for a country house, decided without waiting for the consent of a husband absent for a year. Bonaparte, back from Egypt, paid up and adopted the place. Within months Percier and Fontaine invented the Consulate style there: the bedroom shaped like a military tent, the mahogany-and-bronze library, the council room hung with stripes like a campaign marquee. The décor was as much staging as comfort.

From 1800 to 1802, Malmaison governed. The First Consul held council there two or three days a week, argued articles of the Civil Code, received ministers between rounds of prisoner's base in the park. No etiquette yet, no throne: power worked in civilian dress. The move to the Tuileries closed that parenthesis.

After the divorce of December 1809, Joséphine withdrew there, keeping the title of Empress and a considerable pension. She built what remains her true masterpiece: the hothouses, the two hundred varieties of rose painted by Redouté, a menagerie of kangaroos, emus and black swans shipped from Australia. She died on 29 May 1814, aged fifty, days after walking in the park with Tsar Alexander.

Napoleon returned one last time from 25 to 29 June 1815, after the second abdication. He waited for passports that never came, visited the room where she had died, then left for Rochefort and the Bellerophon. Saved in the nineteenth century and given to the State in 1904 by the patron Daniel Iffla-Osiris, the house is now the best-preserved museum of imperial private life.