19th c. Chateauroux Museum Cabinet

Once it stood in the Musée Bertrand in Châteauroux, the mansion where Napoleon's own Grand Marshal lived out his last years, a case built to show a collection under glass while the rest waited in the drawers below. Found in Le Perche and dating to the 19th century, the oak cabinet stands low, its two hinged glass tops lifting open over shallow display wells above two banks of flat drawers. The museum has held its Napoleonic collections since 1921 in a 1769 mansion that belonged to Henri-Gatien Bertrand, the general who followed Napoleon into exile on Saint Helena, which makes a case out of its rooms a genuinely rare thing to own. We restored her meticulously and replaced the glass, and Sylvie keeps her in a hall or study, the glass tops over a few treasures and the drawers for everything else worth keeping.