A sad fact from Love and Louis XIV: The Women in the Life of the Sun King, a book by Antonia Fraser: “Estimates of the number of women who could actually sign their own name in this period vary between 34 and 15 percent” (page 43). No source listed, otherwise I would like to track down each estimate to see how they came to it.

And yet today, so many women waste their time reading nothing but repetitious women’s magazines that promote wanton materialism, self-hate and ridiculous stereotypes. End rant.

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.

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)

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.

Today is a historic day for me. I updated my first Wikipedia page with a citation. Yes, you can read all about it on the page for Norway’s Lofoten Islands, in the wildlife section. My addition is the last sentence there. I am proud of knowing little weird facts like that. I am sure the historical society there has a section devoted to these lone WWII nine penguins.

As part of my preparation for my triumphant return to France this year, I joined a Goodreads book club on French history, where a fellow French history fan asked if we wanted to start an online discussion about some serious history book. He gave me a few choices and I picked The Great Cat Massacre and Other Episodes in French Cultural History by Robert Darnton. It’s been on my to-read list for a while (since my late 18th century French obsession circa June-September 2006, here, here, here, here and here).

So far, it is serious. By serious, I mean that I am taking notes every few pages. I love it.

The notes I would like to share come from just the second page, in the introduction. These pertain to my favourite growl topic – the annoyance I feel when period dramas mess up the history and make the “cool” people back then, as imagined by pablum-for-brains starlets, all modern and liberal and shit. Yeah, right, they were so open-minded and feminist.

Anyhow, here’s how Darnton tackles anachronism:

It is worth repeating, nonetheless; for nothing is easier than to slip into the comfortable assumption that Europeans thought and felt two centuries ago just as we do today – allowing for the wigs and wooden shoes. We constantly need to be shaken out of a false sense of familiarity with the past, to be administered doses of culture shock.

****

(Lest you think me a snob, I do not feel like I know it all – I am merely on a never-ending path toward ever more knowledge, tying together lose and disparate ends, just for the fun of it. No one can ever know everything – even the Francis Bacons of the English Renaissance, the best educated men of their day back when knowledge seemed finite, could never know what the Aztecs or Incas knew – I suppose the constant striving for more novelty and understanding is a goal that will bring years of fun. And the striving for knowledge will never end, nor be complete except with dementia and death. It doesn’t mean I am smart. In fact, I am pretty certain I am one of the world’s dumber people.)