Supposedly, de la Malmaison need some nice plants like Dijon, Louise Odier is fertile and healthy, and the lanky purple one is seed fertile. Are any of these true? I would get them for their fragrance alone, but I do not want to deal with their faults in my small space I can allot them if they are worthless as breeders.
Need is bred. No idea how that happened…
It depends upon what you’re thinking of breeding toward. If they aren’t sufficiently cold hardy, productive and healthy where you are, I wouldn’t touch them. For my climate, they are hemophiliacs, but for yours, if they grow well, flower well and require no chemical assistance (or as little as is acceptable to you) to flourish, and they appear like what you see your seedlings looking like in your mind’s eye, go for it. If you hope for your products to translate well to other climates, I’d rethink that decision. You will find there are MANY faults to be waded through with any rose you select, but these represent century-plus old “modern technology”. Are you sure you want to go that far backwards, then have to work your way forward many generations to get back where the rest of the universe was when you started? All you should have to do is look at Constance Spry to see where you could likely end up pretty quickly, then notice how long it took Austin to get to sort of decent plants for American climates.
Rather than classes of roses - which are all marketing terms and meaningless genetically - you could think in terms of traits you want to capture when choosing breeding stock: petal count/corona diameter; prickles; petal size, shape and form; parenchyma thickness, color and reflectance; architecture (branching pattern, internodal spacing, cane thickness and so forth); pigment profile; disease susceptibility; cold hardiness and heat tolerance; rooting ability; scent profile; remontancy; floriferousness and on and on.
All you should have to do is look at Constance Spry to see where you could likely end up pretty quickly, then notice how long it took Austin to get to sort of decent plants for American climates.
It’s a good case in point. Study the sequence of crosses that led from the species to the finished product. At each step a breeder was selecting for some combination of traits. It is very instructive to try to identify which traits are derived from which crosses.
On a side note:
petal count/corona diameter; prickles; petal size, shape and form; parenchyma thickness, color and reflectance; architecture (branching pattern, internodal spacing, cane thickness and so forth); pigment profile; disease susceptibility; cold hardiness and heat tolerance; rooting ability; scent profile; remontancy; floriferousness and on and on.
Some of these characteristics might be a bit hard to track down 
I get your point. A premium account on hmf might be needed. (I don’t like spending money.)
$2 a month is CHEAP for what you receive. There is no book, period, nor anything else on line for any price where you can receive what your $24 a YEAR gives you on Help Me Find. And, it is a rolling year. You join today, your membership is renewable a year from yesterday. You see more information in one place than there is anywhere else, and if there are color photographs of the results, they’re most likely there for you to study and browse to your heart’s content. Believe me, I bought all the books I could find and afford twenty to thirty years ago. Old, new, Modern Roses issues…NONE of them compare to what I can glean from HMF in an evening’s browsing.
Well, I’ll cough up the money as long as I don’t have to use PayPal. I hates it. I saw somewhere that you could mail a check…
Petal count/corona diameter; prickles; petal size, shape and form; parenchyma thickness, color and reflectance; architecture (branching pattern, internodal spacing, cane thickness and so forth); pigment profile; disease susceptibility; cold hardiness and heat tolerance; rooting ability; scent profile; remontancy; floriferousness and on and on
Now it would be nice if Hmf might reveal some of these more elusive traits. Some things come with experience…
HMF is to a large degree a collaborative project. A lot of good info can be gleaned from the Comments section, and that’s where we can share our own knowledge.
Louise Odier is very fertile. Excellent mother. Unfortunately, many seedlings dies down early. The same happens to some of two - three years old shrubs. Frost resistance is sufficient but the black spot is transmitted in the genes - always. In order to develop Their fragrance alone all you need is luck. It happens quite often. Five years I tried to get some characteristics from LO- and I can say that the resulting seedlings need same further action.
Well, blackspot can kill round here 
A Jak jest ojczyzną?
I found using Bourbons and Gallicas the seedlings developed a lot of PM. I dont use them any more as I have discovered newer routes to obtain the OGV traites without all the problems. I did this cross of Sympathie X Queen of Bourbons and got this rose I called Prinnie. It almost flowers not stop, health is very very good.
I dont use them any more as I have discovered newer routes to obtain the OGV traites without all the problems.
Oh, do tell!!