ated Napoleon, then on his campaign
in Egypt. Josephine set in motion ambitious schemes to make Malmaison
the most fascinating house in France.
In her orangery, heated by twelve coalburning stoves she raised 300 pineapple plants and imported some two
hundred exotic plants. Her famous
rose garden���which earned her the
epithet ���Patroness of Roses������contains 250 varieties of roses, memorialized in prints by the artist Redoute.
But it is the interior furnishing scheme,
masterminded and executed by Percier and Fontaine, twice restored in
the twentieth century, which astonishes us in the twenty-first. Malmaison is
HYLAND
