Napoleon and Josephine

He conquered the world, she conquered him. They met before his meteoric rise and she was the widow of a slain royalist who had lost his head during the French Revolution. She was from Martinique and had two small children, and her teeth were so rotten they were described as looking like cloves! She was slightly older than he was and he was utterly smitten with her. "Do not wash until I return," Napoleon famously wrote to her during one of his campaigns. She had excellent taste in clothes and furnishings, her impeccable grace in dealing with others and boundless charm. Alas, she had an affair with a man named Hippolyte Charles and Napoleon heard about it and was forever after broken hearted and hurt. He did have her crowned the Empress of France though and only "put her aside {divorced her}" after it was indisputable that she could not give him an heir. Shepainted the walls of Malmaison (her house) with musk so that it always smelled lovely, and had one of the most famous rose gardens ever established. Napoleon's last word was supposed to have been,"Josephine!".

Strong Egyptian musks are crushed under a teeming cascade of roses. First the hybrids with their sharper but short lived perfume, they give way to the sweeter smaller but longer lasting "antique" roses like the centerfolias and polyanthas. A goodly dose of the Chinese rose, and a drop of sweetbriar. This is a complex fragrance for a roseate one and it uses all the wiles the rose can express.