Grasse’s strange attraction to Pauline Bonaparte

Pauline Bonaparte (1780-1825), Napoleon's younger sister by eleven years, made a few fairly short visits to Grasse at the height of the First Empire. Were it not for her brother, she would undoubtedly have lived and died in total obscurity. Yet Grasse commemorates her with a park and a copy of a famous statue of her in one of its most important gardens.

Napoleon made three of his brothers kings, but Pauline had to make do with being Duchess of Guastalla, a small town near Parma in Italy. She was regarded as a beauty in her time.

Portrait of Pauline Bonaparte by Robert Lefèvre, painted in 1806 when she was 26 years old

She was married twice, the second time in 1803 to Camillo Borghese, a Roman prince who fought quite successfully in Napoleon’s armies. Not being very keen on Camillo, who was in any case absent most of the time, Pauline took a string of lovers from around 1805 onwards.

Between then and Napoleon’s abdication in 1814, she moved around restlessly between Paris, south western France and Italy. She seems to have been particularly keen on ‘taking the waters’ at Gréoux-les-Bains in the Verdon.

To be fair to Pauline, she was the only one of Napoleon’s siblings to remain loyal to him after his fall. She accompanied him to Elba and even tried to help him in St Helena. She also returned to Camillo Borghese in later life and died in his palace in Florence in 1825.

Staying in Grasse

In 1807, her lover was the head of her household, one Auguste Forbin, when she decided to spend the winter in Nice. But she took a strong dislike to the house found for her by the local prefect and for the autumn decided to go to the home of her lover’s mother, the Countess Forbin, which was in Grasse.

Hotel particular de Pontèves, today the MIP, with its impressive gateway to the right. It has just been refurbished and very smart it looks!

The house in which she stayed was the hotel particular de Pontèves, which is today the major part of the Musée International de la Parfumerie (MIP).

At the time, the maire of Grasse was Joseph Court de Fontmichel, and he made a huge fuss over the arrival of the Emperor’s sister, calling out the national guard and telling all the householders on her route to drop everything and put their roads and gardens to rights. Pauline returned to Nice in December, the prefect having found better accommodation for her. Perhaps she was influenced by the enforced desertion of her lover, whom Napoleon, alerted by Camillo Borghese, had sent on a military mission to Portugal.

Pauline seemingly liked Grasse and she returned to Grasse in other years, notably 1811. One of the other houses which claims her presence is the Manoir de Blanchissage in St Francois. The eminent people of Grasse found it expedient to make much of the Emperor’s sister, but she spent less than six months in total here. Despite that, Grasse remembers her more than most of the famous people who have been residents or visitors.

Princess Pauline's Garden

The most obvious link is the Jardins de la Princesse Pauline on bd de la Reine Jeanne.

During her sojourns here, Pauline is said to have loved walking at the top of the Malbosc hill, where the garden is today. Leaving aside the fact that the av Thiers did not exist, making the hill more than a little inaccessible, and that ladies of Napoleon’s time were not exactly well known for walking as an exercise, it’s a good story. Still, it is possibly true that she liked to be able to see the island of her birth, Corsica, which, on a good day, is visible from up there. She and her family (other than Napoleon himself) had been expelled from the island in 1793 when Corsican nationalists allied themselves with the British to expel their French rulers.

View over Cannes and Mediterranean from Jardin de la Princess Pauline (Grasse town visible to the right)

But how the garden came to be established there is quite a tale. In 1905, the location fell victim to the rapacious desires of Alice de Rothschild to expand the gardens of her Villa Victoria. She had owned the land to the east of the plot since 1891 and to the north since 1892 and she acquired a parcel of about 4 hectares immediately to the west in 1898. Buying another 6 hectares in two more plots, one from the local Girard family which included the future public garden, removed a salient into her land. The purchases were virtually her last: she bought one final area in 1908. In total she paid 2,450 million francs for her 135 hectares of land, maybe €20m today.

After Alice’s death in 1922, an unholy saga unfolded. Her heir, Edmond de Rothschild, basically didn’t want his aunt’s expensive investment, while the town of Grasse wanted to unblock the huge area of the domaine immediately to its east which had stopped its development in that direction. It should have been an easy deal, but a combination of incompetence on the part of the town authorities who didn’t know how to handle the opportunity, political wrangling between right and left, and the intervention of a Danish lawyer of doubtful character, Johanes Lykkedal Møller, created chaos.

Rothschild sold the land to a development company effectively controlled by Møller for not much more than a tenth of what Alice had paid. Møller ended up sentenced to prison and the domaine was eventually sold by auction in 1938 to a Russian financier, Alexandre Klaguine – shades of today? He gradually sold off the area piecemeal over several years, which had the benefit of creating an interesting townscape between the av Victoria and bd Président Kennedy, since virtually every villa is different. But the town retained part of the plot bought by Alice in 1905 and laid out the garden there.

Jardins de la Princesse Pauline today

The garden is worth a visit. It is nicely laid out, well maintained and the view over the town and down to Cannes and the sea is exceptional.

Bust of Bunin; Two views of the garden

Ironically, its most significant sight is the bust of a resident who was far more distinguished than Pauline and lived here for 22 years, compared to Pauline's few months. He was the Russian poet and novelist Ivan Bunin (Bounine in French). He lived in Grasse successively in three different houses, two of them very near the Jardin, from 1923 until 1945.

Bunin was awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1933.

The Statue of Pauline

Between 1804 and 1808, the great Italian sculptor Antonio Canova created, at the request of her husband and with the considerable help of his studio assistants, a statue of Pauline as Venus Victrix ('Venus Victorious'). Scandalously, it is semi-nude, although whether Pauline actually posed naked for the artist is in doubt (it is said that when she was asked whether she had posed nude for the artist, her reply was that she didn’t mind because there was a brazier in the room).

Statue of Princess Pauline Borghese as Venus Victrix, Borghese Gallery, Rome (Wikimedia image)

The statue was on relatively public display between 1809 and 1820, when Pauline and her ex-husband mutually decided, in the cause of decency, to hide it away. Today, the original is displayed publicly in the Galleria Borghese in Rome.

From 1977 to 1995 (with a gap 1977-83), the maire of Grasse was Hervé Court de Fontmichel, a direct descendant of the maire Joseph de Fontmichel of 1807. Hervé was very concerned with the history of Grasse, on which he published a short book, ‘Le Pays de Grasse’ in 1963. As maire he decided that Grasse needed to commemorate Pauline’s visits, so ably assisted by his own great-great-grandfather, by having a reproduction of the famous Canova statue made.

Copy of Canova statue of Pauline in the Orange Garden, Musée International de Parfum

Today, after a restoration in 2015 initiated by our current maire, Jérôme Viaud, it is still located in the Orange Garden in front of the MIP (although at the time of writing, the garden is closed because of ongoing refurbishment). It prominently displays not only the name of the subject but also that of Hervé de Fontmichel!