Rambouillet

Bought by Louis XVI in 1783, the estate passed to the imperial civil list. Napoleon liked it for its hunts and for the national sheepfold, where merinos brought from Spain had been bred since 1786 — one of the few agronomic legacies of the Ancien Régime the regime continued unchanged. The queen's dairy, the gardens, the long avenues of tall timber: the château was an official country house, without court display.

On 13 April 1814 the Empress arrived there from Blois with her three-year-old son, the Treasury carriages and an escort thinning by the hour. Napoleon, at Fontainebleau, begged her to join him. On the 16th her father Francis I reached Rambouillet; Tsar Alexander appeared too. The game was over in three days: on 23 April she left for Vienna. She would never see her husband again, and Napoleon would never see his son again.

Fourteen months later the circle closed. On 29 June 1815, coming from Malmaison and heading for Rochefort, Napoleon stopped at Rambouillet for one night. He slept there alone, without a court, with a reduced escort; it was the last time he slept under a roof of his own.

The château survived everything: a royal residence, then a presidential one until 2009, it is now open to the public with its Empire apartments, its dairy and its still-working sheepfold. Few places bring together so tightly the two endings of imperial history: that of the dynasty and that of the man.