Three and a half years have passed since Le Géographe left France to explore the southern continent, and now, on 25 March 1804, she has returned. Two months after Le Naturaliste arrived at Le Havre, with its live cargo in good condition, including a pair of black swans for Josephine, Le Géographe drops anchor in the port of Lorient.
Captain Milius, like Baudin before him, had inconvenienced his men for the sake of the animals, housing them in the officers’ quarters and ordering the officers to bunk down in the dining cabin and the gun room. The move caused few ructions, however. Pierre Milius, unlike Nicolas Baudin, was a fair and popular commander, and the crew’s spirits were lifted by the knowledge that they were homeward bound at last.
The voyage from Isle de France took three months because Le Géographe broke the journey at the Cape of Good Hope. In three weeks at the Cape, Milius bought or was gifted some 30 more mammals and birds for the Paris museum and for Malmaison, including two lions, a wildebeest and three panthers.
On the dock at Lorient, François Péron takes charge of unloading the collection and packing it for the 440-kilometre journey to Paris. He is concerned to make sure that the crates of specimens are correctly labelled and match the descriptions in the research papers, and that there is a record of where each live animal was captured.
His motives are not purely scientific. Péron intends to take all the credit for the success of the expedition, and with those who might object either dead or deserted, there is no one to stop him.
Waiting on the dock as the collection is unloaded are representatives of the museum and of Josephine. Her representatives, mindful that not all animals are compatible with her ideal of an open-range zoo, are accordingly selective in their choices. Large carnivores, for example, are unacceptable. They have also been instructed by the Empress that the plants they choose must be from the animals’ native habitats.
The crates of specimens are loaded onto wagons, along with, in pens and cages, two kangaroos, two dwarf emus, a casso-wary, a secretary bird, an ostrich, two lions, four panthers, two monkeys, a zebra, a wildebeest, 32 tortoises, two mongooses, a hyena, a jackal, a civet cat, two deer, five lemurs, two porcupines, and assorted small birds including parrots, watercocks and crowned pigeons.
There are 73 live animals in all, of which 50 are claimed for Josephine. The lions, hyena, jackal and panthers are earmarked for the museum, including the panther sent as a gift to her by General Decaen, governor of Isle de France. It’s assumed the general will appreciate that the open-range philosophy at Malmaison does not stretch to nature, red in tooth and claw.
The kangaroos are for Malmaison, as are the emus, the casso-wary, the secretary bird, a dozen tortoises, the pair of lemurs, the crowned pigeons and watercocks, and one lonely wildebeest.
The journey to Paris, despite being directed by Péron’s able assistant Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, and escorted by gendarmes, is not without incident. One of the kangaroos and 16 tortoises die on the way, and a hyena escapes and terrorises a village until Lesueur lures it back into its cage with a slab of meat.
Meanwhile at Lorient, with Captain Milius taken ill, Péron seizes the opportunity to rush to Paris and be the first of the ship’s company to inform the naval authorities and the museum of the expedition’s success. He offers to write the official account of the expedition, for a hefty fee, of course, and sets about buttering up the museum and Josephine, begging them to open their purses for the greater glory of French science.
It helps sway potential sponsors Péron’s way when Antoine Jussieu, the eminent director of the Museum of Natural History, after inspecting the collection, reports, ‘Of all the collections which have come to us from distant countries at different times, those which Le Géographe and Le Naturaliste have brought home are certainly the most considerable.’1
Jussieu commends the work of botanist Théodore Leschenault, who has collected more than 600 plant species unknown to science, and credits François Péron with the collection of 18,414 specimens of Australian animals, comprising 3872 different species, of which 2592 had previously been unknown to science. And he is particularly impressed by Péron’s efforts in bringing to France alive seven kangaroos, an emu and a lyrebird, concluding that the expedition had ‘succeeded beyond all our hopes’.2 Nowhere in Jussieu’s report does Nicolas Baudin rate a mention, just as Péron intended.
It’s not just the Australian animals’ value to science that impresses Jussieu. He’s also keen to discover how they taste, and their value for their pelts. He notes with enthusiasm that, according to Péron, kangaroo has fine fur and tastes like rabbit but with a distinctive fragrance; that emu tastes much like turkey, lyrebird like peacock, and black swans are a source of tender meat and fine down. The possibility of developing a lucrative trade in kangaroo, emu and wombat meat has the professor licking his lips.
Josephine, too, though fond of her kangaroos, plans to breed them for their fur and meat. It would certainly help put the estate’s books back in the black, but her kangaroos simply refuse to reproduce. She exchanges her wildebeest for two of the museum’s kangaroos but still no luck. Another pair of roos, donated to her by Prince Friedrich of Württemberg, who had bought them from England for his private zoo, prove equally disinclined to breed. And when the only pregnancy results in the death of both mother and joey, Josephine abandons all hope of breeding kangaroos as domestic livestock.
But while kangaroos are notoriously difficult to breed in captivity, as Josephine has discovered, black swans, happily, are not. The cob and pen brought to Malmaison by Le Naturaliste quickly acclimatise to European weather, breed once a year and have soon produced more than 50 cygnets. These endearing creatures become Josephine’s firm favourites, and she entertains no thoughts of butchering them for their meat or killing them for their down, like geese and eider ducks.
Malmaison becomes a magnet not only for curiosity seekers but for zoologists and botanists. Alexander von Humboldt is a frequent visitor, as is his colleague Aimé ‘Bonpland’ Goufau, who becomes a devoted friend of Josephine. And her landscaped garden attracts artists and writers. One such, Alexandre de Laborde, a close friend of Josephine’s daughter Hortense, waxes lyrical about ‘the abundance and beauty of the most precious and exotic plants’ in the garden he dubs ‘the true Jardin des Plantes of France’, being more deserving of the title, in his opinion, than the Jardin des Plantes in the Museum of Natural History, formerly the royal garden of the Bourbon kings.3
Malmaison has come a long way from the run-down old manor house she spied across the Seine while living at Croissy, on the right bank, back in 1794. To roam its grounds then meant blundering through rough scrub and wading muddy streams to reach a chateau that had clearly seen better days. Now, visitors can follow paths lined with flowers, weeping willows, maples, chestnut and cypress trees, mimosas, lobelias and cassias, Chinese peonies and Siberian peonies, to the waterfall below Josephine’s Temple of Love, with its magnificent portico flanked by six red marble pillars.
On occasions, Josephine takes visitors down the serpentine river flowing through the estate, on elaborately decorated boats to an ornamental lake where black swans glide.
In her gardens she has propagated more than 80 new plant species, cultivated more than 200 Australian plants including eucalypts, banksia, paper daisies and golden wattle, and her rose gardens are so popular that her name will become synonymous with the plant. Over time, more than 250 varieties of rose will be cultivated at Malmaison, some of them, such as Josephinia imperatricis and Brunsvigia josephinae, named in her honour.
Her conservatory, the largest glasshouse in Europe, leaves visitors awe-struck. At the entrance is a fountain with bronze griffins spouting jets of water, and the rear of the building is tall enough to accommodate fully grown trees.
The Prussian nobleman and travel writer Carl Theodor von Uklanski, after visiting the conservatory in 1809, wrote, ‘Inside the hothouse I discovered, to my surprise, an entry of greenery, surrounded by mimosas in flower, fragrant lilacs, tulips, narcissi, hibiscus, anemones. At right and left were two green tunnels which revealed at each extremity two magnificent marble statues copied after the antique – the Medici Venus and the Callipygean Venus.’4
And wherever you might wander there are animals grazing contentedly: gazelles, llamas, antelopes, zebras, chamois deer and those most exotic of creatures – kangaroos.