Stop 5: Dinner on a tabletop covered in green grass
Bonjour! How lovely to escape the city rat race and retreat to the country estate of Malmaison. Worries will fade away in this beautiful place. The Château de Malmaison was Josephine and Napoleon’s country house, which did indeed become a peaceful country retreat – but not before suffering a very rocky start. And that was partly the fault of Hippolyte Charles. 
Hippolyte Charles was a dashing young Parisian with whom Josephine began an affair while Napoleon was in Egypt. Charles was nine years younger than Josephine but she evidently enjoyed his waggish humour and his good looks.  Affairs were not uncommon for the time – Napoleon had even encouraged his wife to seek out company to amuse herself while he was away. However, when news of this liaison reached him on the battlefield, he was deeply wounded. In a letter to his brother he wrote that was it, the marriage was over:
… I am undergoing acute domestic distress’ he wrote, ‘for the veil is now entirely rent … I am disgusted with human nature. I have need of solitude and isolation. … My emotions are spent, withered. … At the age of 29, I have exhausted everything; life has nothing more to offer. 
To add insult to injury, the English got hold of this deeply personal letter and leaked it to both the French and English press. 
The marriage, then, seemed doomed. When Napoleon returned from Egypt he was indeed too angry to see her and locked Josephine out of his room. Josephine – and her children – had to work desperately hard to try to restore his affections. In this tense atmosphere, her decision to buy Malmaison made Napoleon livid. He felt that the place was a ruin and would cost them a fortune – and he was right, on both accounts. After some placating, emotions simmered down, the marriage was reunited and Napoleon agreed to buy the house. 

He also continued thereafter to fund an extensive building process that lasted 15-years and cost about 3.5 million francs. Speaking of his relationship with Josephine he once said, ‘I generally had to give in’. 
Over time the Château de Malmaison was transformed into an exquisite property. Josephine had the gardens landscaped in the romantic and informal English style, despite the fact that her husband would have preferred the more formal ‘parterre’ style customary to French garden design. Josephine did, however, defer to Napoleon’s taste in architectural matters, agreeing to commission the leading architects of the day, Charles Percier and Pierre-Francois-Léonard Fontaine, to redevelop the interiors in the more formal French neoclassical style and to design the main château’s interiors in a manner evoking the glory of ancient Rome. You can see a handsome portrait of Charles Percier in this room. 
Josphine was extremely ambitious for Malmaison. She imagined the property as a kind of Arcadian backdrop for the crème de la crème of French society. Gatherings at Malmaison included amateur performances staged in the little theatre, games enjoyed on the lawns, or lavish Sunday night balls. Josphine had a great sense of derring-do and a prodigious imagination. She was famous for her parties, such as a notorious formal dinner in which she made her esteemed guests eat off grass! An Englishman, Sir Charles Blagden, described how he and 150 other guests had been seated on a long table at the Tuileries Palace that had been marvellously decorated as a spring meadow. It had been, he said, ‘covered with fresh green turf, [and] bordered with natural flowers interspersed with pots and baskets of flowers’. For the French, who were used to nature being forced into very stiff garden designs, this display of fanciful foliage at the Tuileries may have been a little scandalising! Nouvelle cuisine indeed!
While Josephine was enthralled by high society her husband, regrettably, was often not. 
Despite his initial hesitance, Napoleon became deeply fond of Malmaison. When he became First Consul in 1800, Malmaison along with the Tuileries Palace became the unofficial seat of government. He frequently summoned his ministers to Malmaison for meetings, which were often held outdoors. This practice enraged Minister Talleyrand, who despaired of the grass stains on his white breeches. His exasperation is evident in the following quote:  
I arrived at Malmaison … where I found the First Consul had established his office on one of the bowling greens. Everyone was sitting on the grass which Napoleon did not mind in the least as he was wearing leather boots and kid breeches – and he is used to camping. But as for me in silk breeches and silk stockings – can you imagine me sitting on the lawn? I am full of rheumatism! What a man! It was as if he was in a camp!