Princess Mathilde Cor­sage Orna­ment This six-inch rose was crafted in 1855 for Princess Mathilde, daugh­ter of Napoleon’s brother, Jerome. 2,637 sparkling Brazil­ian dia­monds. © Siegel­son Collection

about roses, that is. And there is some proof. It involves Joséphine de Beauhar­nais, wife of Napoleon, and her once glo­ri­ous estate, Malmaison.

Among the things I like best about being a writer is research. Ho-hum, you might say, but wait a minute, hear me out first.

Research can be a wind­ing road that almost always appears promis­ing. Taaa-da… your not there yet…and we don’t know when you’ll arrive, but keep going, there is light. And really, no, there’s not. All you see are the shad­ows cast from your own headlights.

Yet more often than not, there are moments when I am com­pletely trans­ported. You could even say hijacked. Fly­ing across cen­turies, hob­bling over cob­ble­stones, dirt roads, through forests so thick that slen­der shafts of day­light are as wide as your index fin­ger. Along these high­ways, you find intox­i­cat­ing lev­els of social strata, royal stand­ing, his­tory, and per­sonal style, revealed often by infer­ence or with such sub­tlety that mys­tery can be found within enigma.

I have been study­ing var­i­ous sub­jects for my next book. One was jew­elry of sur­pris­ing or secret prove­nance or ori­gin. One day, in speak­ing with a col­league at Siegel­son, she men­tioned Mal­mai­son, the home of Joséphine dur­ing and after her mar­riage to Napoleon (when they divorced, the estate became her per­ma­nent res­i­dence), and the rose beds that even­tu­ally became the most renowned in the world. This was part of a con­ver­sa­tion about the rose cor­sage orna­ment illus­trated above. She won­dered aloud where the motif came from, and what was its inspi­ra­tion. It’s owner was Princess Mathilde Bona­parte, daugh­ter of Napoleon’s brother Jerome. Would it be pos­si­ble to some­how con­nect Mal­mai­son to the cor­sage ornament?

I had the occa­sion to pose a ques­tion to old rose expert, author, and his­to­rian, Brent C. Dick­er­son about Mal­mai­son. This was his response, “In bring­ing together as many of the dif­fer­ent sort of roses obtain­able at the time, Joséphine gave rose breed­ers an impe­tus to cre­ate new roses and to start cross-breeding these new exotic sorts with more usual kind.” In quot­ing Jean-Pierre Vib­ert, the cel­e­brated rose-breeder of the first half of the nineteenth-century, Dick­er­son said, “Who doesn’t know that she brought together at Mal­mai­son one of the rich­est col­lec­tions of plants and shrubs…Fanciers, min­gle some­times with your plea­sures the mem­ory of a woman on whom Virtue imposes silence from all cliques, and whose name was as dear to Flora as it was to Mankind.”

Prior to com­ing across Mr. Dick­er­son, I had casu­ally combed the web for clues. Find­ing noth­ing, I moved on — jot­ting down my talk­ing points for my guest appear­ance on Martha Stew­art radio’s Mornin­ing Liv­ing, which was this morn­ing at 7 am EST. The show is repeated, in case you missed it. Check the sched­ule online. I was the first inter­view of the day.

And just like a tired lit­tle one pulling on your sleeve, and your heart­strings, some­thing about the cor­sage orna­ment and Mal­mai­son was tug­ging at my thoughts. The answer was there, I just had to find it. Some jew­els do that. There was one from Frances Klein, an Edwar­dian pen­dant done in plique ajour enamel, its cen­tral motif a Star of David with green foliage sur­round­ing it. A col­league con­tacted me and asked in half jest if the leaves were mar­i­juana. Look­ing at it by con­tem­po­rary cul­tural per­spec­tives, this expla­na­tion almost seemed plau­si­ble, and mar­ketable, just not in a good way. So I gazed at it longer, did some research and voila, the answer jumped through my com­puter screen. The pen­dant sym­bol­ized valiant national resis­tance, hon­ored great men, and showed sup­port for Israel’s nascent inde­pen­dence. David Ben-Gurion, Israel’s first prime min­is­ter, took his Hebrew last name from one of Bar-Kokhba’s gen­er­als in 1914, just about the time the pen­dant was made.

And now back to the cor­sage orna­ment and Malmaison…well, I did query Mr. Dick­er­son again about the rose. He in turn asked about its color — some­thing I hadn’t con­sid­ered since I assumed that Theodore Fes­ter, the jew­eler who cre­ated it, used the white dia­monds he could source at the time. Well, it turns out that the color of our rose was pos­si­bly sig­nif­i­cant. It seems that, as per the rose expert, there was a white Tea rose cre­ated in 1847, and its name? Princesse Mathilde. Now to muck things up a bit, Mr. Dick­er­son did say orig­i­nally that he thought the rose was what he called a Hybrid Per­pet­ual (HP) which dom­i­nated the rose world from 1845 to 1885. The form of the flower, the lush­ness of the leaves, and the fat buds and wide sepals as cre­ated by Fes­ter were con­sis­tent with an HP. But what about its color. Ah, it is here where the hue of the story turns a whiter shade of pale, as the song goes. HP are light pink to the deep­est black-red, red-purple. The rose Princesse Mathilde, accord­ing to Mr. Dickerson’s expla­na­tion, “…was described as being white with orange/yellow.” Another inter­est­ing tid­bit: the Princesse Mathilde rose was released by breeder Giraud d’Haussy of Neuilly, France — a for­mer gar­dener at Mal­mai­son dur­ing the time of Joséphine. Of course, more research to ver­ify the facts is nec­es­sary and the rose clas­si­fi­ca­tions need to be clar­i­fied, but taken as I was back to the edge of Paris — I arrived at the doorstep of Mal­mai­son and could almost smell the heav­enly scent in the air.

A rose is a rose is a rose — unless it the one of the rarest exam­ples of royal French jew­elry extant today. The orna­ment is cur­rently on dis­play in The Nature of Dia­monds exhi­bi­tion at The Field Museum in Chicago.