
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.