I already mentioned that Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife Josephine grew up around here. Today we went to visit what remains of her old family home. Not much as it turns out.

That’s the foundations of the big house. The plantation sugar refinery still has some walls and a chimney, and the old kitchen building has been restored as a small museum.

They have a collection of portraits of Josephine…

… including the tragic, “Josephine signing the divorce papers after she failed to provide Napoleon with an heir”.

No christian martyr every rolled her eyes with such conviction.

They have a selection of memorabilia…

… including reminders of where the wealth of Josephine’s family came from. This was a sugar plantation with a hundred and fifty slaves on it. So the museum has slave collars and chains…

… and a whip sitting on a side table.

Pride of place goes to Josephine’s bed…

… and underneath it the imperial pisspot.

I’m not sure of the authenticity of any of these items, as nothing is labeled, not even in French.

Napoleon was Josephine’s second husband. One of her daughters from her first marriage, Hortense, was forced to marry Napoleon’s brother Louis, thus making her her mother’s sister-in-law. Hortense also wrote marches for the French army and played a mean game of billiards. She did not get on with her husband, but managed to provide him with three offspring, the confusingly named Napoléon Louis Charles Bonaparte, Napoléon Louis Bonaparte, and Charles-Louis Napoléon Bonaparte. One of the died young, one of the was king of Holland for two weeks when he was five years old, and one of them became the Emperor Napoleon III. The sometime king of Holland married his first cousin Charlotte Napoléone Bonaparte, an artist noted for her landscapes of scenic New Jersey.