Marie Josephe Rose de Tascher de la Pagerie was the first wife of Napoleon Bonaparte and the first Empress of France. She was born in Trois Ilets, Martinique, in 1763. Her family home was a sugar cane plantation, the ruins of which are pictured here. She married the Vicomte de Beauharnais, who was executed in the French revolution. She married Napoleon two years later.

The family estate in Martinique was destroyed several times by hurricanes, and only the kitchen outbuilding remains today. (Kitchens were generally in buildings separate from the family residence because of frequent fires.) The estate has the stone foundations of the residence and the shell of one of the buildings used to press the cane and boil off the water, leaving sugar.