Featuring an aviary, a botanical hothouse for exotic plants, a summer pavilion, a tower, a ‘temple of love’, vineyard and fields adjoining the Seine, the Malmaison estate grew to three hundred acres of gardens, woods and fields, and a magnificent collection of statuary.
Josephine also kept there a menagerie of kangaroos, emus, flying squirrels, gazelles, ostriches, llamas and a cockatoo that had only one word (‘Bonaparte’) which it repeated incessantly. She would occasionally invite a female orang-utan dressed in a white chemise to eat turnips among her guests at table. Napoleon brought back gazelles from Egypt, to which he would occasionally give snuff. ‘They were very fond of tobacco,’ recalled his private secretary, ‘and would empty the snuffbox in a minute, without appearing any the worse for it.’
Although Napoleon kept a carbine in his study at Malmaison, with which he would sometimes shoot at birds through an open window, Josephine persuaded him not to open fire on her swans. (He would probably have missed; his valet Grégoire recalled that he ‘didn’t hold his gun properly on his shoulder, and as he asked for it to be tightly loaded, his arm was always black after he’d fired a shot’. He once took seven shots to kill a cornered stag.)
Source:
Roberts, Andrew. "Iberia." Napoleon: A Life. New York: Penguin, 2014. 468. Print.
Original Source(s) Listed:
Stuart, Rose of Martinique p. 284.
ed. Méneval, Memoirs I pp. 125-6.
ed. Park, Napoleon in Captivity p. 238 n. 3.
Bruce, Napoleon and Josephine p. 305.
Branda, Napoléon et ses hommes p. 208.
Further Reading:
Joséphine de Beauharnais (née Tascher de la Pagerie)
Napoleone di Buonaparte / Napoléon Bonaparte / Napoleon I
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