Rueil-Malmaison is the hometown of General Napoleon Bonaparte before he became Emperor of France.
Napoleon married his first wife Josephine de Beauharnais in 1796. She bought the Château de Malmaison in Rueil-Malmaison in 1799, a run-down manor house on 150 acres of woods and meadows, for 300,000 francs. However, it was near Versailles and only 12 kilometres (7 miles) from the centre of Paris.
She commenced renovations to the manor and turned it into a castle. She also established a garden with an orangery, greenhouse, and an extensive rose section with 250 different varieties.
Josephine stayed in the Château after their divorce in 1810 until her death in 1814.
MARTINA NICOLLS
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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009).
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