Another book I read a few months ago was the Catherine de Medici biography by Leonie Frieda. Great book, with plenty of the nuttiest historical nitwits in Renaissance times.

The quotes below are descriptions of various parties and celebrations that the French court hosted.

From page 110, here’s a description of the marriage of the snot-nosed Francis II (when he was still dauphin) and Mary Queen of Scots, on April 24, 1558:

Among the fantastic entertainments laid on for the wedding was a banquet at which twelve man-made horses covered in gold and silver cloth were led in to be ridden by the royal princes and the small Guise children. The shimmering horses pulled carriages carrying singers glittering with jewels, who entertained their guests with their music. These were followed by the arrival of six silver-sailed ships that appeared to float over the ballroom floor, on board sat the gentlemen who were allowed to bring a lady of their choice. Francis invited his mother [Catherine de Medici] to join him and Henry chose his new daughter-in-law.

(Frieda got this info from Antonia Fraser’s Mary, Queen of Scots.)

In February of 1564, Catherine de Medici and her court began travelling around France. The trip was to take about two years and there were lots of triumphal entries, banquets, balls and the like. In Fontainebleau, “Catherine had ordered that each of the most important nobles give a reception or a ball”:

Both the Constable and the Cardinal de Bourbon gave suppers at their lodgings, and on Dimanche Gras, Catherine threw a banquet at the dairy of Fontainebleau which lay a little way out from the palace, near a meadow. The courtiers dressed as shepherds or shepherdesses for this fête champêtre, a precursor of the Petit Trianon parties thrown by Marie Antoinette nearly two centuries later. Everyone judged the day a huge success; the nobles having enjoyed their little afternoon of pastoral simplicity, albeit in February. Later in the early evening the guests attended a comedy in the great ballroom, followed by a ball at which 300 ‘beauties dressed in gold and silver cloth’ performed a specially choreographed dance. Henri of Anjou gave his banquet the next day, after which a mock battle was held between twelve young knights. On Mardi Gras an enchanted castle had been built in which six maidens were held captive by devils and guarded by a giant and a dwarf. Their liberators appeared, led by the four Marshals of France. Six groups of men came to claim the captive damsels. At the sound of a bell, Condé led the defenders out of the castle to fight a superb mock battle and the scantily-clad nymphs were rescued by their gallants. The royal children also played a role in the festivities giving a performance of a pastorale written by Ronsard.

(From page 182.)

In 1565, there was another big celebration:

…The spectacle on the Bidassoa river is considered to be one of the most famous of Catherine’s ephemeral works of art. After a waterside picnic, with all the participants dressed as shepherds and shepherdesses, Charles [IX] appeared on the river in a barge that had been disguised as a floating fortress. As the other participants took to their own sumptuously decorated barges, a gigantic artificial whale appeared that was then attacked by ‘fishermen’. Suddenly a gargantuan man-made tortoise was seen swimming towards them, on it stood six tritons blowing cornets. The two marine gods, Neptune and Arion, surfaced: the former in his chariot was pulled by three sea horses and the latter carried by dolphins. The extravaganza ended as three mermaids glorified France and Spain with their siren songs.

(From page 194.)

Finally, after the capture of the Protestant stronghold of La Charité-sur-Loire on May 2, 1577, Henri III hosted a banquet for his brother, the Duke of Alençon: “The theme of the celebration was that all should wear green, Catherine’s favourite colour (coincidentally also the colour often associated at the time with insanity), and that the men were to dress as women and vice versa.” (From page 336.)

Frieda cleared up one mystery for me: why the royal family had so many castles and why they were always on the move. It’s related to food, its transport logistics and a little bit to hygiene. She explains how the food situation worked in the court:

..The king was fed by the cuisine de bouche and everybody else by the cuisine commun. The purveyors to the royal kitchens were kept busy finding enough for the thousands of dependents to eat. Food was divided into three sections, panéterie, échansonnerie and fruiterie (bread, wine and fruit). One of the principal reasons that the Court had to move, frequently after only a month or two, from one château to another was the lack of food available after a stay in one particular area. Sanitation prompted another compelling reason for leaving. After weeks in the same place, especially during the summer, the stench and filth became dreadful, and the risks of disease grew proportionately. The Court also moved to find new hunting grounds where fresh game could be found. When the King left one château to lodge in another of his residences, most of the furniture and hangings accompanied the caravanserai. The castle left behind was thus almost completely empty when the royal family had moved on.

(From page 178. Frieda credited R. J. Knecht’s 1994 biography Renaissance Warrior and Patron: The Reign of François I.)

Earlier this fall, I read Graham Greene’s Our Man in Havana. There were some pretty good quotes but I never bookmarked them. I thought I could remember the pages. Thanks to modern conveniences, my memory is kaput. So, unless I reread the whole book, I’ll never know the gems Greene meant for us to remember.

However, there was one quote I did leave a receipt tucked into the spine crease. That quote is below. It is a piece of dialogue spoken by the Cuban torturer/police officer Captain Segura and it outlines who is in the “torturable class”:

‘The poor in my own country, in any Latin American country. The poor of Central Europe and the Orient. Of course in your welfare states you have no poor, so you are untorturable. In Cuba the police can deal as harshly as they like with émigrés from Latin America and the Baltic States, but not with visitors from your country or Scandinavia. It is an instinctive matter on both sides. Catholics are more torturable than Protestants, just as they are more criminal….

‘One reason why the West hates the great Communist states is that they don’t recognize class-distinctions. Sometimes they torture the wrong people. So too of course did Hitler and shocked the world. Nobody cares what goes on in our prisons or the prisons of Lisbon or Caracas, but Hitler was too promiscuous. It was rather as though in your country a chauffeur had slept with a peeress.’

One more note to add to this. I recently met someone who tried to escape communist Romania during the bad old days and was caught. Now we know at least one of the worst case scenarios for capture: this woman was beaten for three days. They knocked out many of her teeth. (She was in her early twenties when she made her first escape attempt. Tooth loss is a common Romanian affliction.) Luckily, one of the secret police knew her father and arranged for the woman to be released. Yet, now she was on the bad books. More secret police came to her house. On one occasion, her father chased an agent away with an axe. Her family knew that they would never let up and she would always be in danger. Next time she was in custody, she may not be able to obtain a release. She had to escape again, successfully this time. And so she did.

Albanian writer Ismail Kadare’s medieval police mystery novel was a lot less Agatha Christie than expected, with some supernatural shenanigans thrown into the mix. Other critics have explained the story in many other places on the internet, so there’s no need for a synopsis from me. I just want to pick out a couple of quotes:

“…Though they would believe they were passing judgment on someone else’s tragedy, in reality, they would simply be giving expression to their own.” (Page 37)

“…Albania would have to find new ways to defend itself. It had to create structures more stable than “external” laws and institutions, eternal and uiversal structures lying within man himself, inviolable and invisible and therefore indestructible. In short, Albania had to change its laws, its administration, its prisons, its courts and all the rest, it had to fashion them so that they could be severed from the outside world and anchored within men themselves as the tempest drew near. It had to do this imperatively or it would be wiped from the face of the earth.” (Page 145)

A note to self from Richard Rudgley’s Barbarians: Secrets of the Dark Ages: make green ink by putting copper in vinegar or wine, scraping off the green stuff and mixing it with egg white (page 215). Yellow in the Lindisfarne Gospels came from arsenic – not likely I’ll ever be drawing with arsenic. Black was easy: soot with gum or oak galls.

When the Venerable Bede wrote his Ecclesiastical History of the English People around 731, historians had a tough time. Much like the Japanese calendar today, the English calendar depended on who one’s ruler was. Thus, in the patchwork England of the so-called Dark Ages, one parish might be celebrating Easter while a neighbouring one was still trudging through Lent. This is an example that Richard Rudgley used in his book Barbarians: Secrets of the Dark Ages. The Venerable Bede, to write his history, began using the innovative Anno Domini dating system.

The book describes some of the other math genius tricks up the Venerable Bede’s sleeves:

Not only did he have to reconcile diverse chronological systems, he had to find a means to calculate them. The Arabic numerals we use today were not known in the world of Bede and his contemporaries. Roman numerals made complex calculations extraordinarily difficult and so Bede taught a method of calculation using the fingers and other parts of the body. By moving the fingers into different positions it was possible to represent all the numbers up to 9,999. By employing the elbows, shoulders and other body parts you could get up to a million!

(Page 207)

My library copy of The House of Mirth was partly read by an enthusiastic underliner; partly only as the pencil marks stop around page 73. The underliner also provided some marginalia, most of it boring, but with some personality-suggesting bits. She (and I am entirely stereotyping here with my guess as to this reader’s gender) underlined the following on page 57: “Silverton…had meant to live on proof-reading and write an epic, and who now lived on his friends and had become critical of truffles.” The reader commented in the margins with “me,” then added below, “Lol. How can one be critical of truffles?”  I could almost smell the chocolate emanating from the pages that this invisible reader had turned before me.

I read The House of Mirth with eagerness at first, then dread as Wharton dragged her character deeper and deeper into a quagmire.  There’s some writing advice for novelists: get a girl in trouble, then get her out again.  Wharton missed the last part.  I stopped reading for a few weeks, then spurred on by the looming library due date, I raced to the end.  Though the big flashing foreshadowing fifty pages or so before the end left no further doubt as to Lily Bart’s outcome, I still read hoping that my friends R. and M. were wrong and that Selden somehow swoops in to save the day.

Since finishing the book, I now want to re-read it, at a much later date when my depression for Lily’s fate subsides.  I revised my initial opinion that it was a pretty good book to it was a very good book.

*****

Wharton was a brilliant writer.  Does anyone know of a contemporary writer who can write as insightfully about merdeufs and hipsters and right-wing nutjobs?

A few of my favourite quotes from The House of Mirth:

• She wanted to get away from herself, and conversation was the only means of escape she knew. (Page 18)
• Mr. Gryce was like a merchant whose warehouses are crammed with an unmarketable commodity. (Page 21)
• But she could not ignore him on the morrow, she must follow up her success, must submit to more boredom, must be ready with fresh compliances and adaptabilities, and all on the bare chance that he might ultimately decide to do her the honour of boring her for life. (Page 27)
• To attempt to bring her into active relation with life was like tugging at a piece of furniture which has been screwed to the floor. (Page 39)
• Mrs. Trenor was a tall fair woman, whose height just saved her from redundancy. (Page 42)
• It was difficult to define her beyond saying that she seemed to exist only as a hostess, not so much from any exaggerated instinct of hospitality as because she could not sustain life except in a crowd. (Page 42, also describing Mrs. Trenor.)
• “…It’s rather clever of her to have made a specialty of devoting herself to dull people – the field is such a large one, and she has it practically to herself.” (Page 43)
• “…It’s much safer to be fond of dangerous people.” (Page 46)
• One of the conditions of citizenship is not to think too much about money, and the only way not to think about money is to have a great deal of it. (Page 72)
• [She] behaved as though she thought a house ought to keep clean of itself, without extraneous assistance. (Page 106)
• No insect hangs its nest on threads as frail as those which will sustain the weight of human vanity… (Page118)
• Selden senior had an eye for a picture, his wife an understanding of old lace; and both were so conscious of restraint and discrimination in buying that they never quite knew how it was that the bills mounted up. (Page 161)
• The man who built it came from a milieu where all the dishes are put on the table at once. His façade is a complete architectural meal; if he had omitted a style his friends might have thought the money had given out. (Page 168)
• “Peas?” said Mr. Bry contemptuously. “Can they cook terrapin? It just shows,” he continued, “what these European markets are, when a fellow can make a reputation cooking peas.” (Page 193)
• It certainly simplified life to view it as a perpetual adjustment, a play of party politics, in which every concession had its recognized equivalent. (Page 271)
• The situation between them was one which could have been cleared up only by a sudden explosion of feeling; and their whole training and habit of mind were against the chances of such an explosion. (Page 293)
• It was a meagre enough life, on the grim edge of poverty, with scant margin for possibilities of sickness or mischance, but it had the frail audacious permanence of a bird’s nest built on the edge of a cliff – a mere wisp of leaves and straw, yet so put together that the lives entrusted to it may hang safely over the abyss. (Page 337)

Before returning Four Queens to the library, I had a quick look at Nancy Goldstone’s speculation of what would have happened if Saint Louis of France had struck up a deal with the Mongols, fellow enemies of the muslim empire:

Louis was no match for the descendants of Genghis Khan…Given the history of Mongol behaviour, of which there was substantial precedent, the alliance would have been broken as soon as the Muslim forces were subdued. Louis, Charles [of Anjou], and Robert [of Artois] would have been beheaded with ruthless efficiency, Marguerite [queen of France] and Beatrice [Countess of Provence] would have been sold into slavery, and the course of European history would have been changed forever.

(Page 129)

Another quote from Nancy’s Goldstone’s Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe. This time it’s two translated letters, one from the crusading King Louis IX of France (1214 – 1270) and the other the response from the sultan of Cairo, Ayyub (c. 1205 – 1249).

Here’s Louis’ chivalric letter:

You will be aware that I am the head of the Christian community, as I acknowledge that you are the head of the Moslem community…I have given you sufficient demonstration of our strength and the best advice I can offer…If this country falls into my hands, it will be mine as a gift. If you keep it by victory over me, you may do as you will with me. I have told you about the armies obedient to me, filling the mountains and the plains, numerous as the stones of the earth and poised against you like the sword of destiny. I put you on your guard against them.

Ayyub’s diplomatic response:

Fool! If your eyes had seen the points of our swords and the enormity of our devastations, the forts and shores that we have taken [from you] and the lands that we have sacked in the past and the present, you would gnaw your fingers in repentance! The outcome of the events you are precipitating is inevitable: the day will dawn to our advantage and end in your destruction. Then you will curse yourself.

(Page 130)

One of the books I am enjoying right now is Four Queens: The Provençal Sisters Who Ruled Europe by Nancy Goldstone. The book follows the 13th century four daughters of the Count of Provence as they marry into the French and English royal families.

One of the best parts of the book is the description of the Holy Roman Emperor at the time, Frederick II (1194 – 1250):

Frederick’s was the most interesting personality of the century. He was called Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. Certainly, he was the most educated ruler in Europe. He read widely, spoke seven languages, and had even written a book (on falconry). He was interested in everything: science, alchemy, history, law, architecture, medicine, mathematics. He started the first university in Europe where the teachers were not paid by the students but by the state, and then recruited the respected scholars in his empire to teach at it.

When the Mongol Empire heard of Frederick’s Empire, Goldstone describes the outcome with better words than I could muster:

When a descendant of Ghengis Khan, who was wreaking havoc in the Muslim world, wrote threateningly that the Holy Roman Emperor should surrender his lands and come to his court to become one of his vassals, Frederick replied that he’d think about it and to please hold open the position of falconer.

(Page 85)

One of the byproducts of my reading of The Great Cat Massacre‘s Chapter One: Peasants Tell Tales: The Meaning of Mother Goose, is that I ordered the latest translation of Charles Perrault’s fairy tales, by a Christopher Betts. I’ll add this book to my 73-book list I whipped up in preparation for my trip to France.

Perrault’s fairy tales were the original Mother Goose stories. They are not the nursery rhymes we know by that name. In fact, many of the nursery rhymes we know don’t have the meanings we were taught: I learned Ring Around the Rosie originally as a rhyme; then an elementary school teacher told me it was about the plague; now it isn’t about the plague anymore. Perrault’s stories, published in 1697 in a book called Les contes de ma mère l’oie. The stories reappeared in Germanized form as written down by the Brothers Grimm, who got their stories from Jeannette Hassenpflug, who got them in turn from her French Huguenot refugee mother.

Yet Perrault was not the only person writing fairy tales in Louis XIV’s court. Darnton brought up Marie-Catherine d’Aulnoy, a writer and scandaleuse (she ran away from her husband to Spain). When I looked her up, I found another modern translation: Enchanted Eloquence: Fairy Tales by Sixteenth-Century French Women Writers. I’ll add it to my ridiculous reading list. Unfortunately, I have to look up the other female fairy tale writers: Catherine Bernard, Charlotte-Rose de La Force, Marie-Jeanne L’Hériter de Villandon, and Henriette-Julie de Murat.

But that’s enough for tonight. Time to actually get some real reading done tonight.