Malmaison in the sky Malmaison is familiar to many as the château of the Empress Josephine in Rueil-Malmaison, eight miles west of Paris. In 1978, though, Malmaison moved to New York—figuratively speaking—in the form of Roger Prigent’s fabled Malmaison Antiques, which introduced French Empire furnishings of the highest quality to the United States. An insatiable—yet discerning—collector who refers to Josephine as “the first lady of the world” and once bought a white Cadillac just because he liked the radio, even though he does not drive, Prigent has led a singularly atypical li...