Article first published in Bonjour Paris , 10 October It is an attractive little town with a market, a good brasserie next to the church and a total absence of tourists. You could end the trip with a short bus ride to Bougival to take a beautiful 3 km walk along the Seine at a spot made famous by the Impressionists, past the house of Georges Bizet to the RER station at Rueil-Malmaison, 25 minutes from central Paris. Josephine de Beauharnais was a year old widow with two children, from a minor aristocratic family in Martinique, living on her beauty and her wits in the precarious world of the Directory which governed France from to She was six years older than the rising but socially unpolished young general when he met and fell in love with her.
They married a few months later in despite the opposition of his family, who felt that he could have done much better. It seems that she was not in love with him and that Napoleon was furious when he found out about at least one lover soon after their marriage. The divorce in was reluctantly arranged so that he could marry again when it was clear that she could not provide the Emperor with an heir. He made a generous settlement on her, including Malmaison and its valuable contents, insisted that she keep the title of Empress, and continued to support her financially despite her extravagance.
He once remarked that the only thing that ever came between them was her debts. They stayed good friends until her death at Malmaison, aged 51, in After his abdication on 22 June Napoleon spent a final few days at Malmaison before leaving France for exile on St Helena.
He employed two young architects to do major renovation work on it between and although he curtailed their more ambitious plans to remodel it completely. Between and the government known as the Consulate , of which Napoleon was the leading member, met there frequently, in a more informal atmosphere than that of the Tuileries.
Her lifelong interest was botany and the hothouses at Malmaison were filled with at least plants unknown in France before then, dahlias, lilies and particularly roses, of which there were more than varieties by She employed an English landscape gardener and kept up a correspondence with the director of Kew Gardens in London.
