Exhibition: The Eye of Josephine at Atlanta's High Museum

Napoleon Bonaparte once said that the only thing that came between him and his first wife Josephine were her debts. Even before she was crowned Empress of France, Josephine, who was born and raised on a sugar plantation in the West Indies but moved to France after she married a nobleman, was famous for her instinct for fashion and her love of extravagant entertaining.

In fact, it was at a glittering social occasion in Paris that the young General Bonaparte met Marie-Rose Beauharnais, who was now playing the field after her husband, the Vicomte Alexandre, had been executed during the Reign of Terror. Marie-Rose, whom Napoleon renamed Josephine, was herself imprisoned for three months during 1794, but she survived her ordeal and eventually regained her place in society.

Some historians theorize, however, that her health suffered because of her incarceration during the French Revolution, and that this traumatic experience may have caused her subsequent infertility, which was the primary reason that her tempestuous, 14-year marriage to Napoleon finally ended in divorce in 1810. As Emperor, Napoleon needed an heir, and he married Marie Louise of Austria to secure the succession.

Josephine herself retired to the Château de Malmaison, outside of Paris. There she remained on good terms with Napoleon until her death in 1814. It was during those years as well that she continued to express her impeccable taste in the process of furnishing her new home.

Sixty objects from the Greco-Roman and Egyptian antiquities that were installed by Josephine at Malmaison are now on display at the High Museum in Atlanta as part of a three-year partnership between that museum and the Louvre in Paris.