I know, its crazy. If anyone out there actually did read my blogs, they would say, “What the Hades”, 2 postings in one night. The thought did cross my mind to type it in my word program, and copy and paste it to here tomorrow, therefore alleviating one more chore tomorrow. But, I do not need that witch of an inner voice, to tell me that would be cheating.

OK, yesterday, I made this absolutely stunningly beautiful gorgeous RED VELVET CAKE. It was white as snow with piping around the edges and pecans (peeeeecans, is how you say it here in the South, not puhcans, repeat over and over to yourself until you get it right) on top, and  crimson red inside.  I wish I had taken a picture to show you.  When I finished, I had a discussion with my husband about would we have enough food for the masses (his family) coming for dinner. He said, should be plenty. I said, “sure as Hades better be, because I am not cooking anymore today.”  Then, with my overly dramatic self, white icing and red food coloring all over me, and a butter knife in my hand, I held it up like a sword, and shouted,in a sing-song voice,  ”LET THEM EAT CAKE”
Well, thats a statement I make a lot, or a least every time I bake a cake. I could not remember where I heard that from, or who said that. So, I consulted a couple of geniuses I know, maybe you’ve heard of them, Google and Wiki, Pedia that is. This is what I found. Contrary to popular belief, Marie-Antoinette did not say this. No one knows who did, it is derived from the French, and it translated literally means, “Let them eat Brioche”.  Sometime in the 1700’s in that far far away land, laws required bakers to sell fancy bread, or brioche (similar to bread) at the same cost as plain breads  if they ran out of plain bread, and rumor has it, some princess (not Marie) remarked to a servant when they told her the poor had ran out of bread and were starving,  to let them eat cake or brioche,  and as one website said. Let them eat warm, soggy, eggy, bread, just wasn’t as catchy as my phrase, “Let them eat cake.”  Ha Ha, you have had your history lesson for today.
As for my brioche, I mean cake, it was as tasty as it was beautiful. I intend to make another sometime this week for a dear sweet friend. (Note the word intend in the previous sentence). If I do make this cake, I will take a picture, and I might just change my phrase to, “LET THEM EAT BRIOCHE”.

The road to Heaven must be paved with my good intentions.

Who said that?

Me.

The blog seems to be on a Burke kick, which is fine by me.  I have always thought that Burke’s comments on Marie Antoinette are important in highlighting his view of the world.  Here are his comments:

“It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then the dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like the morning star full of life and splendor and joy. 0h, what a revolution! and what a heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall! Little did I dream, when she added titles of veneration to those of enthusiastic, distant, respectful love, that she should ever be obliged to carry the sharp antidote against disgrace concealed in that bosom; little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor, and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult.

But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded, and the glory of Europe is extinguished forever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom! The unbought grace of life, the cheap defense of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone. It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honor, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness. “

Marie Antoinette was worthy of this accolade.  She went to her death through a screaming blood mad mob with calmness and dignity, back straight, head erect, every inch a queen.  She showed no fear, in stark contrast to many of those who caused her legal murder  and who would later go to their own deaths giving every sign of abject terror.  Here is a translation of the text of her last letter:

16th October, 4.30 A.M.

It is to you, my sister, that I write for the last time. I have just been condemned, not to a shameful death, for such is only for criminals, but to go and rejoin your brother. Innocent like him, I hope to show the same firmness in my last moments. I am calm, as one is when one’s conscience reproaches one with nothing. I feel profound sorrow in leaving my poor children: you know that I only lived for them and for you, my good and tender sister. You who out of love have sacrificed everything to be with us, in what a position do I leave you! I have learned from the proceedings at my trial that my daughter was separated from you. Alas! poor child; I do not venture to write to her; she would not receive my letter. I do not even know whether this will reach you. Do you receive my blessing for both of them. I hope that one day when they are older they may be able to rejoin you, and to enjoy to the full your tender care. Let them both think of the lesson which I have never ceased to impress upon them, that the principles and the exact performance of their duties are the chief foundation of life; and then mutual affection and confidence in one another will constitute its happiness. Let my daughter feel that at her age she ought always to aid her brother by the advice which her greater experience and her affection may inspire her to give him. And let my son in his turn render to his sister all the care and all the services which affection can inspire. Let them, in short, both feel that, in whatever positions they may be placed, they will never be truly happy but through their union. Let them follow our example. In our own misfortunes how much comfort has our affection for one another afforded us! And, in times of happiness, we have enjoyed that doubly from being able to share it with a friend; and where can one find friends more tender and more united than in one’s own family? Let my son never forget the last words of his father, which I repeat emphatically; let him never seek to avenge our deaths.

I have to speak to you of one thing which is very painful to my heart, I know how much pain the child must have caused you. Forgive him, my dear sister; think of his age, and how easy it is to make a child say whatever one wishes, especially when he does not understand it. It will come to pass one day, I hope, that he will better feel the value of your kindness and of your tender affection for both of them. It remains to confide to you my last thoughts. I should have wished to write them at the beginning of my trial; but, besides that they did not leave me any means of writing, events have passed so rapidly that I really have not had time.

I die in the Catholic Apostolic and Roman religion, that of my fathers, that in which I was brought up, and which I have always professed. Having no spiritual consolation to look for, not even knowing whether there are still in this place any priests of that religion (and indeed the place where I am would expose them to too much danger if they were to enter it but once), I sincerely implore pardon of God for all the faults which I may have committed during my life. I trust that, in His goodness, He will mercifully accept my last prayers, as well as those which I have for a long time addressed to Him, to receive my soul into His mercy. I beg pardon of all whom I know, and especially of you, my sister, for all the vexations which, without intending it, I may have caused you. I pardon all my enemies the evils that they have done me. I bid farewell to my aunts and to all my brothers and sisters. I had friends. The idea of being forever separated from them and from all their troubles is one of the greatest sorrows that I suffer in dying. Let them at least know that to my latest moment I thought of them.

Farewell, my good and tender sister. May this letter reach you. Think always of me; I embrace you with all my heart, as I do my poor dear children. My God, how heart-rending it is to leave them forever! Farewell! farewell! I must now occupy myself with my spiritual duties, as I am not free in my actions. Perhaps they will bring me a priest; but I here protest that I will not say a word to him, but that I will treat him as a total stranger.

Christmas has come so quickly this year, I can hardly believe that it is here again.

Amalia, Carolina and I all went sledging yesterday evening at Schönbrunn, which was just the most delightful thing imaginable. The gardens were lit up with hundreds of torches and the whole scene was quite magical as the light flickered across the yellow brick of the palace, the glittering, snow covered gardens and the icicle covered statues, which seemed to shiver and tremble in the torchlight. I wore my new fur lined blue velvet coat with matching gloves and big fur hat.  One of Joseph’s friends said that I looked just like a snow princess out of a fairy tale, which made me feel even more warm inside. Finally, some compliments!

Tonight, after dinner, Josepha lit the first candle on the Adventkrantz and we all sang carols again as outside the snow swirled through the air and settled on the stone windowsills. Joseph was in a very good mood and made us all a special spiced punch, which made me feel very warm inside and rather jolly. I danced with Ferdinand and Maximilian and also with one of the Swiss guards while Joseph took Josepha’s hands and spun her, laughing madly, around the room while the footmen and ladies in waiting all laughed and clapped their hands.

I asked the Christkindl for a puppy and also that Amalia be allowed to marry Karl.

One of Carolina’s maids, Klara offered to share some of the special fortune telling rituals from her village with us. I was wary at first, remembering what a disaster St Thomas’ Eve was but Amalia was enthusiastic about the idea and promised that if it was as horrible as last time she would put a stop to it.

‘Although, you do know that it is all just harmless fun don’t you, Antonia?’ she asked, looking unusually serious just for a moment. ‘It doesn’t mean anything at all.’

I tried to shrug nonchalantly. ‘Oh, I know that. Yes.’

In the end it wasn’t so bad although Josepha decided not to take part. Klara had told Carolina to write as many male names as she could think of on pieces of paper and then place them carefully around the edges of a bowl of water, which had a candle stump floating in it. ‘The first name to start to burn will be the name of your future husband,’ she said with a wide grin. ‘It never fails.’
Amalia went first and we all watched with bated breath as the candle bobbed around the bowl, looking at one moment as though it would burn a piece of paper before suddenly floating away again until finally it singed the very edge of one of them.

Amalia fished it out. ‘Urgh, Ferdinand! I hope he isn’t as annoying as our brother, Ferdinand!’

Carolina was next: ‘Oh drat, Ferdinand again! Maybe it is the same one and we will end up sharing him?’ she joked to Amalia, who burst out laughing.

‘I do not think that Catholic princes are in such short supply as all that!’ she said. ‘Mama would be quite undone if that was the case.’

I went up to the bowl and watched as the candle floated this way and that, illuminating the names on the pieces of paper: Henry, Rupert, Fritz, Karl, George, Ludwig, Maximilian, Wolfgang, Augustus, Joseph. ‘Oh, please let me not get Wolfgang,’ I silently prayed as I watched the candle come perilously close. I did not think I could bear any more teasing about poor Wolferl Mozart and his alleged fancy for me.

‘Aha!’ One of the pieces of paper began to slowly burn and Amalia swiftly plucked it out of the water and held it between her fingertips so that she could read it. ‘Ludwig!’ she announced with a flourish. ‘Oh dear. I was hoping for Wolfgang.’ She winked. ‘Poor Wolferl will be quite heartbroken when he hears that you are not his little fiancée after all.’

From The Secret Diary of Maria Antonia.

I am just watching this programme about Versailles, specifically fundraising for the restoration of the Petit Trianon.  Check it out on BBCi Player to enjoy the swoon-worthy views and information on everyone’s favourite Queen of France.

One of their ideas is to recreate Marie Antoinette’s perfume – what a great idea!  Fingers crossed they’ll raise the necessary money so that visitors can at last enter the Petit Trianon …

Marie-Antoinette mania strikes again, in a recent ad for Juicy Couture fashion and fragrance. What on earth could this image really mean? The teeny bopper with the pink Antoinettesque hairdo and avian companion seem an unlikely combination… unless one recalls the popularity of such portraits in eighteenth-century high society, and the delightfully wicked connotations associated with the death of a girl’s pet bird (as seen here in Greuze’s famous “Jeune fille qui pleure son oiseau mort”). Whereas the innocence of the Old Regime flew the coop long ago, it is amusing to see how the advertising world in the USA keeps the memory alive, and how the tale of the naughty queen and her coterie is ever reinvented in the hopes of selling luxury to a society of plebs.

Madame du Barry entertains Louis XV at Louveciennes

Warning: major spoilers follow. So for those who don’t want to read further, I will say that I recommend both Jean Plaidy’s Madame du Barry and Joan Haslip’s Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty, although I would like to read a more scholarly biography of du Barry, and also think she is long overdue for revival as a fictional heroine.  She had an amazing life, yet I can’t find any other novels about her, although there are two centred on members of her entourage: Eve Ruggieri, Le reve de Zamor, about her page; and Frederic Lenormand, Mademoiselle Chon du Barry, ou, Les surprises du destin, about her sister-in-law, who acted as her secretary and companion at Versailles.

Madame du Barry’s life in exile

Had Marie Antoinette only known it, Madame du Barry was her best friend.  Over the past four years, when she had been Dauphine and Madame du Barry the official mistress, she had been wildly popular and Madame du Barry had been hated.  Madame du Barry had given a great a deal to charity and also intervened many times for strangers and even former enemies to obtain a reprieve from the King when no-one else could.  But the royal mistress was traditionally made a scapegoat for everything that was wrong with the current reign.  Louis XVI, unusually, had no mistress, so the only person to blame was Marie Antoinette.  According to her long-serving personal maid, Madame Campan, criticism of the Queen began within days of her accession.  Within a few years she would have taken Madame du Barry’s place as Public Enemy No. 1.

In the meantime, Madame du Barry was imprisoned in a convent, then exiled to her chateau of Saint-Vrain, south of Paris.  Eventually she was allowed to return to her country house of Louveciennes (pronounced Luciennes), close to the royal chateaux of Marly and Versailles.

Here she led a quiet life, although she was still considered a celebrity, and Marie Antoinette’s brother, Joseph II, insisted on paying her visit when he came to stay at Versailles, much to Marie Antoinette’s irritation.

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Marie Antoinette’s favourite portrait painter, also painted Madame du Barry and was one of the few people to know both women well.

Portrait of Madame du Barry, by Elisabeth Louise Vigee-Lebrun

Although the Corcoran Gallery of Art, which holds this painting, dates it as 1782, Madame Vigee-Lebrun states in her memoirs that she only met Madame du Barry in 1786:

It was in 1786 that I went for the first time to Louveciennes, where I had promised to paint Madame du Barry, and I was extremely curious to see this favourite, about whom I had heard such a lot.  Madame du Barry would have been about forty-five at this time [she turned 39 in 1782, 43 in 1786].  She was tall, but not too tall; she was plump; the bosom rather full, but very beautiful; her face was still charming, her features regular and full of grace; her hair was ash-blonde and as curly as a child’s; only her complexion was beginning to spoil.

She received me charmingly, and I could not fault her manners; but although her conversation was very natural, she had some affectations: her glance was coquettish, for her almond-shaped eyes were always half-shut, and she pronounced words in a childish way no longer appropriate to her age.

Confession: when I was about thirteen I was fascinated by accounts of Madame du Barry’s heavy-lidded gaze and decided to imitate it.  So I went round with my eyes half-shut for a day or two, until my family started to laugh at me.  Then I stopped.

If I try it now it just looks like I’m squinting to see something because I forgot to put my contact lenses in.  It can work for some women though:

Dr Brooke Magnanti, aka Belle de Jour

Vigee-Lebrun goes on to describe the loot Madame du Barry had acquired in her years as royal mistress, which she seems to have piled up much as dragons do their treasure:

Above my apartment was a gallery, not very well cared for, in which were placed, in no sort of order, busts, vases, columns, the rarest marbles and a quantity of other precious objects; so that one could have believed this was the house of the mistress of several sovereigns who had all enriched her with their gifts.

But Madame du Barry was generous with her wealth.  Vigee-Lebrun says:

She did a lot of good at Louveciennes, where all the poor people were helped by her.  We often went together to visit some unfortunates, and I still remember the fury into which she flew, one day, at the home of a poor woman who had just given birth and was in need of everything.  “What is this,” said Madame du Barry, “you have been sent neither linen, nor wine, nor broth?” “Alas! nothing, Madame.”  We returned immediately to the chateau; Madame du Barry summoned her housekeeper and the other servants who had failed to carry out her orders.  I cannot tell you how she stormed at them, as she commanded them to make up a packet of linen in front of her, which she made them take to the sick woman immediately, with broth and Bordeaux wine.

Vigee-Lebrun met Madame du Barry’s new lover, the Duc de Brissac, and she makes a comment which shows how far Madame du Barry had assimilated the customs of the aristocracy:

The Duc de Brissac lived at Louveciennes like a permanent resident; but nothing, in his behaviour or in that of Madame du Barry, would have aroused suspicion that he was more than the chatelaine’s friend.

Madame du Barry remained deeply royalist, risking her own safety to care for some of the Queen’s bodyguards who had been injured during the attack on Versailles of 6 October 1789, when the royal family were forced to move to Paris.  But Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette always saw her as, at best, a loose cannon; the Duc de Brissac, who was head of the King’s personal guard, was not told about the royal family’s projected escape from the Tuileries because he was known to confide in Madame du Barry. In 1792 Brissac was arrested for treason to the Nation, but never stood trial: he was murdered during the September Massacres, as Madame du Barry discovered when a mob turned up at Louveciennes with his head on a pike.

Like any rags-to-riches heroine, Madame du Barry had excellent taste, and the pride of her collection was her jewellery.  Much of her collection had been stolen from her bedroom on the night of 10 January 1791, when she was in Paris.  Unwisely, she published a detailed list of what had been stolen and offered a substantial reward for its recovery – which brought her back into the public eye at a time when most of the nobility were lying low or emigrating.  Nevertheless, this theft might have saved her life, because the stolen jewels resurfaced in London, and she made several trips there in an attempt to reclaim them.  But in March 1793 she returned to France.  In April she was arrested.

Plaque commemorating Madame du Barry in Louveciennes. Photo by Henry Salome.

Madame du Barry had fallen foul of an English radical, George Grieve, who had made it his personal mission to destroy her.  He was assisted by her Indian servant, Zamor, an ex-slave who had been in her household since childhood and now supplied Grieve with incriminating information such as the fact that her visitors were still addressed by their titles.  Both Plaidy and Haslip think Grieve’s motive was sexual obsession, and Madame du Barry later referred to “the horrors and outrages which he perpetrated” in the course of her arrest.  This may mean that he raped her either at Louveciennes or on the journey to prison.

Condemned to death in December 1793, on the morning the sentence was to be carried out Madame du Barry made a last ditch effort to save herself.  Over the course of three hours, she listed all the hiding places of her treasures – money, jewels and objets d’art – which were buried all over the Louveciennes estate.  All she succeeded in doing was postponing her execution.  In the last hours of her life her aristocratic poise deserted her and she was carried to the guillotine screaming, “You are going to hurt me!  Please don’t hurt me!”

With her death the era of the powerful official mistress, which in France had endured for over three hundred years, finally came to a close.

Lady Moppet of Yorkshire on Madame du Barry as a royal mistress

Madame du Barry was the ideal royal mistress – beautiful, desirable, but also able to create a cosy domestic atmosphere for her King.  She played to perfection a role she had hardly been trained for – that of a lady of the court – and contrary to the stereotype, probably much of the resentment of her stemmed from how well she fitted in.  It’s very important for favourites to feather their nests – they have short careers, with little job security – and Madame du Barry didn’t neglect this.  But nor did she forget to be charitable to those less fortunate and to use her influence with the King to help others.

Reading her story, it strikes me that there are so many parallels with Marie Antoinette.  They both came to Versailles young and were used as political tools by forces beyond their control.  They were both victims of calumny.  People underestimated their inner resources and intelligence.  They were extravagant, yet also kind and generous.  They reigned in turn over the Petit Trianon.  Even the grotesque episode of Brissac’s murder has a parallel in Marie Antoinette’s life: the murder of her friend the Princesse de Lamballe, whose head was paraded on a pike outside her prison windows.  She and Madame du Barry were defended by the same lawyer and went to the same death in the same cause.

I’d like to think that somewhere, somehow, they made up their differences and right now they are sharing a pot of chocolate and chatting about old times.

***

Simone Bertiere, Marie-Antoinette l’insoumise

Joan Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty

Elisabeth Vigee-Lebrun, Souvenirs, 2 vols, ed. Claudine Herrmann

Read part one of this post here

]]> http://ivoryslittleworld.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/wednesday-09-12-09/ Wed, 09 Dec 2009 20:50:07 +0000 ivoryebony http://ivoryslittleworld.wordpress.com/2009/12/09/wednesday-09-12-09/

weather: rainy streets

temperature: great (cold)

mood: juping for joy

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Hey everyone!

Today I was really productive. Okay not concerning learning chemistry, but now I have a learning plan. Approx learning- I got mixed up with the dates, and the exam will be on Thursday, so I got three more days for practising!

Let’s get back to the main theme: productiveness. I made some nice winter-cursors for me. I made them with a programme called Art Cursors, you may google it, if you want. The first 30 days are free and it’s super easy. You can make normal and animated cursors for your pc. I downloaded one cursor (wich was a .jpg document, and because of that I was not able to use it, because to choose it as your cusor it must be a .cur or .ani document).

Then I watched Lady Oscar – the Rose of Versailles, which is a anime serie by Ryoko Ikeda and is about a girl who lives in France before and during the French Revolution. Her Father wanted to have a boy and raised her up like one. She is the leader of the Royal Guard of Marie Antoinette. Lady Oscar is a fictive person and I really love this anime and manga (I just love the French Revolution, and woman who lived in former times without wearing dresses the whole days and being helpless and scared are pretty cool. Jeanne d’Arc is another woman I really like ♥). I also drew a picture of Oscar, I may upload it later.

Now I will continue watching the anime. Yay!

greetings

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Ivory

Can I just tell you how completely obsessed I was with this room when I saw it in Teen Vogue however many years ago… I wanted to paint my high school room that exact color! The whole room has a certain Marie Antoinette feel. Don’t you thinkkk?

I especially love the old fashioned fireplace. I wish my room in my apartment had one. We do have lovely old fashioned moldings and radiators though…who knows my room here might become a painting project next semester…

Stephanie♥Rae

Source: Teen Vogue

A visual feast.

This is the first book I read for the Royal Mistress Challenge.  My copy, pictured above, is the 1996 reprint but the book was originally published in 1959.

The bodice: to rip or not to rip?

To put it in context, here are a few other things which happened in 1959:

• Top grossing films included Walt Disney’s Sleeping Beauty, Some Like It Hot, Pillow Talk and North by Northwest
• Mattel introduced the Barbie doll
• The Motown record label was founded
• Bestselling books included Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago, D. H. Lawrence, Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita

Sexuality as depicted in film tended to be very coy.  There was more latitude in print, and in the world of historical fiction, bodice-rippers like the Angelique series were flying off the shelves.  Jean Plaidy, despite having an entirely bodice-ripper-worthy subject, chose not to go there.  The sexiest passage in Madame du Barry is this one:

Jeanne held up her radiant face, and the blue beribboned gown which had caused the Comte du Barry such anxiety was crushed against the somewhat sombre garments of the self-styled Baron de Gonesse who, as though at the waving of a wand, had been turned into the King of France.

Mary Sue Litmus Test

Let’s get the Mary Sue Litmus Test out of the way first:

No surprise there.  Plaidy has her flaws, but she doesn’t write Sues.

Discovering French history with Jean Plaidy

It was a Jean Plaidy book (or rather a Victoria Holt, one of her pseudonyms), The Queen’s Confession, an novel about Marie Antoinette which sparked my interest in French history and led to my doing a history degree.  I remember how pleased I was to find the first of her French Revolution series, Louis the Well-Beloved, in a second-hand book sale.  (The sequels are The Road to Compiegne and Flaunting, Extravagant Queen; she also wrote a novel about the Diamond Necklace Affair, Queen of Diamonds).  Coming back to Jean Plaidy as an adult, I find her narrative voice a bit flat – she tells the story from a detached omniscient viewpoint which has gone right out of fashion.  But she still gives me that same urge to go to the non-fiction shelves in the library to find out if what she describes really did happen.  And here’s a coincidence: after reading The Queen’s Confession, I started what would become a very large personal library of books about French history with a biography of Marie Antoinette by Joan Haslip.  Looking to find out more about Madame du Barry, I found that the most recent biography (1991) was by Haslip, Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty.

The two books read in a quite a similar way, because Jean Plaidy’s is solidly based on fact and Joan Haslip allows herself quite a few novelistic excursions.

A courtesan of the first quality

Madame du Barry is not a long book.  Jean Plaidy focuses on Madame du Barry’s five or so years as Louis XV’s mistress, summarising her early life and the years from Louis XV’s death in 1774 to the outbreak of the French Revolution.  The first two chapters play catch-up, setting the scene: Louis XV is approaching sixty, bored and lonely since the death of his beloved mistress Madame de Pompadour, whom he has not managed to replace.  Everyone around him is desperately trying to find a substitute mistress through whom they hope to rule the King.  So the book really begins with the introduction of Jeanne on page 47:

Her hair was thick and fell in golden curls about her shoulders; her skin ws fine and delicate, her eyes a dazzling blue and, because it seemed that Nature had wished to give her that kind of beauty which occurs but rarely, her brows and lashes were of dark brown in an entrancing contrast to her sparkling fairness.

We then backtrack through Jeanne’s childhood.  She was born the illegitimate daughter of Anne Becu, a seamstress whose relatives mostly worked as servants to the nobility.  Anne moved to Paris where her employer paid for Jeanne to have a convent education.  After various different jobs (hairdresser, paid companion, shopgirl) she drifted into high-class prostitution, living a life that sounds pretty much like that of Emile Zola’s fictional courtesan, Nana, one hundred years later.  And in fact, Nana and Jeanne seem to have shared so many characteristics – good humour, acquisitiveness, generosity, complete fecklessness with money, a desire for respectability – that I had wonder if Zola had based his character on her.  This is how a police inspector describes Jeanne at the age of twenty-one:

The Marquis du Barry appeared on Monday night with his new mistress, Mademoiselle Vaubernier.  She is a young woman of about nineteen years of age, tall, well-made with a noble carriage and the loveliest of faces.  He will certainly try to barter her to his own advantage, for it is what he always does when he begins to tire of a woman.  But one must admit him to be a connoisseur and his merchandise is always of the first quality.

With Jeanne, du Barry would make the deal of a lifetime, managing to sell her on to none other than the King himself.

Madame du Barry vs Marie Antoinette

For some time Jeanne lived a shadowy existence at the King’s side, following the Court from palace to palace but unable to appear in public in his company as she had not been presented.  The kerfuffle over her presentation is the first of three highly dramatic episodes in her life at Court which Plaidy chooses to focus on.

The presentation ritual had not existed in Louis XIV’s reign.  It was introduced along with the regulation that anyone presented had to be able to prove noble descent dating back to 1399, and can be seen as part of a larger aristocratic reaction that took place in France during the eighteenth century – at the very same time as ideas about equality and the brotherhood of man were gaining currency.  Presentation, requiring proofs of nobility which had to be checked by the Court geneaologist and lessons from a dancing master in curtseying and managing a train – plus magnificent clothes and jewels – was meant to keep people like Jeanne out, not let them in.  Louis XV had great difficulty finding someone to present Jeanne because most of the ladies at Court did not care to associate themselves with a woman whose relatives might be applying for a place in their household next week.  Jeanne was now married to du Barry’s brother, who was of genuine noble descent, but in the eyes of the Court, she could never be good enough.  This infuriated Louis XV:

She is very pretty, she pleases me, that must be enough.  Do they want me to take a young lady of quality for a mistress?

The answer was yes.  Few minded the King taking their daughter, sister or even wife as a mistress, as long as they reaped the benefits.  The powerful foreign minister, the Duc de Choiseul, became Madame du Barry’s arch-enemy partly because he had hoped that the post of official mistress would go to his sister.  Despite Madame du Barry’s best efforts to get along with everyone, the Court split into two parties: the Choiseulistes vs the Barriens.  And when Marie Antoinette arrived to marry the Dauphin in 1770, she automatically joined the Choiseulistes.  The reason: Choiseul had negotiated her marriage, and her mother, the Empress Maria Theresia, had dinned into her the necessity for gratitude to him.

One of Jean Plaidy’s great strengths is her ability to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds, and lots of her novels tell the same story from different points of view.  I’d already read about the Du Barry/Marie Antoinette showdown from Marie Antoinette’s perspective in The Queen’s Confession:

…Everyone realised that if they wished to remain in the King’s good graces they must please Madame du Barry.  But I was in his good graces.  I did not have to conform to ordinary standards – so I thought – and I made up my mind that I would never seek the friendship of a street-woman, no matter if she was the King’s mistress.  So I behaved as if I could not see her.  Often she would seek the opportunity to present herself before me but she could not speak to me until I spoke to her – etiquette forbade it, and even she had to bow the knee to etiquette.  So every time, I ignored her.

And from Madame du Barry:

Whenever she and Jeanne were in the same company, the Dauphine ignored the King’s mistress, thus making it impossible for Jeanne to speak.  Jeanne, who wished to please the King and had been warned many times by Chon [her sister-in-law] that it was advisable to bow to etiquette, found that even her mild temper was ruffled by these continual snubs.

Marie Antoinette and Madame du Barry were renewing an age-old conflict based around the pecking order in a court.  In theory, this should have been straightforward: the Queen and her mother-in-law both being dead, the fifteen-year-old Marie Antoinette was First Lady of France.  In practice, she found, as so many queens and princesses had found before her, that she was overshadowed by the royal mistress.  Other royal women had simply resigned themselves to the fact: she chose to fight back with the only weapon she had, silence.

Madame du Barry simply wanted Marie Antoinette to acknowledge that she existed.  But like many other royal mistresses, she wanted to have her cake and eat it (if you’ll pardon me mentioning cake in a Marie Antoinette context): she claimed to want to be treated as just another lady of the court, but no other lady of the court could have brought the pressure to bear on Marie Antoinette that she did.

What seems like a trivial catfight threatened to develop into an international incident.  Maria Theresia was negotiating the First Partition of Poland and was anxious not to annoy France, a Polish ally.  The last thing she wanted was Marie Antoinette alienating Louis XV with her coldness to his mistress. Her ambassador, the Comte de Mercy-Argenteau, was summoned to discuss the matter with Louis XV and Madame du Barry, and his account of the visit gives us something surprisingly rare – a glimpse of a king and his mistress in private:

Although, living here, I see one extraordinary thing after another, they often seem like dreams to me.  I have seen the King in company with Madame du Barry, she calls him Monsieur and treats him as an equal.  He thoroughly approves and, even in my presence, he did not seem embarrassed that his favourite should behave this way.

Marie Antoinette finally spoke to Madame du Barry on New Year’s Day, 1772.  The choice of day may have been deliberate: it was a day on which people who had been presented, but did not usually attend court, came to Versailles to offer New Year greetings to the royal family.  It may have been less galling for Marie Antoinette to speak to the favourite on a day when she would be talking to many other people she did not normally speak to.  And although no-one seems to have suspected it at the time, there may have been a bitchy undercurrent to the words themselves: There are a lot of people at Versailles today.  Does that translate as: There are all sorts at Versailles today – even people like you?

The MA/DB confrontation has been dramatised several times:

Click on the image to go to YouTube.  Here are the clips in order:

1. Marie Antoinette (1938).  Norma Shearer plays Marie Antoinette, Gladys George plays Madame du Barry.  In this short scene, MA and DB probably exchange more words than they ever did in their entire lives.  DB makes MA a deep curtsey, which is the right way round, but of course she couldn’t begin the conversation – that was the whole point.
2. Madame du Barry (1954).  Martine Carol plays Madame du Barry, Isabella Pia plays Marie Antoinette.  The most realistic.  The dialogue goes like this:
   LOUIS XV (raising MA from her curtsey): What a pleasant surprise, Madame!
   MA (to DB): There are a lot of people at Versailles this evening.
3. Marie Antoinette, la veritable histoire (French TV, 2006).  The dialogue:
   MA (to DB): There are many people at Versailles today.
   MA (to the Dauphin): [can't work out all of it but she definitely finishes by saying that] people tell me she does a lot for poor people.
   The Dauphin: I can’t stand that woman.
4. Marie Antoinette (2006): Kirsten Dunst plays MA, Asia Argento plays DB.  Dialogue translated from the Italian it’s been dubbed into:
   MA: Fine. I’ll talk to her.
   MA (to DB): There are a lot of people at Versailles today.
   DB: Yes there are.
   MA (to the Dauphin): That woman will never hear the sound of my voice again.
   Note that MA makes a deep curtsey in front of DB who just stands there – as if!
5. Rose of Versailles (Japanese anime).  I think MA says to DB: Happy New Year, Countess.  I hope that now you will be satisfied.
   Then as MA runs down the staircase she is saying, “How humiliating!” and some other stuff I didn’t catch.

Du Barry was a lady

It’s a pity that most people will only know Madame du Barry through her portrayal by Asia Argento in Sofia Coppola’s 2006 Marie Antoinette.  I can’t fault Asia Argento’s performance and she bears a resemblance to Madame du Barry, except for her dark hair.  The problem is with the script, which suggests Madame du Barry had the manners of a guttersnipe.  In fact, as the Duc de Croy, a veteran of Louis XV’s court, attests:

Whereas the Marquise de Pompadour, in spite of her culture, would in speaking betray her bourgeois origins, the Comtesse du Barry had no difficulty in assimilating the accents peculiar to Versailles.

(This was no easy task – the courtiers spoke a kind of private language and even pronounced some words differently).

Is it really necessary to attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of one woman by perpetuating stereotypes about another?

Madame du Barry’s fall from power

Madame du Barry won the battle, but she couldn’t win the war.  Louis XV’s health was failing, and in May of 1774 he caught smallpox.  She stayed by his side to nurse him, although she had never had the disease which could have ruined her beauty and thus her means of survival.  The King was at first not told that he had smallpox, but eventually he realised it for himself.  Knowing how low were his chances of survival, he decided that he must make his confession.  But he could not be absolved from his sins unless he truly repented – which meant Madame du Barry had to go.  He dismissed her with these words:

If I had known what I know now, you would not be here.  I owe myself to God and to my people.  So you must go tomorrow.

***

The Queen of Historical Fiction: Susan Higginbotham on the enduring appeal of Jean Plaidy

Jeanne du Barry is also a character in Plaidy’s The Road to Compiegne, which Markyza reviews here

Review of Madame du Barry (1954) by Markyza, with lots of stills

***

My copy of Madame du Barry by Jean Plaidy was bought second-hand and my copy of Madame du Barry: The Wages of Beauty by Joan Haslip was borrowed from the library

***

Additional source: Simone Bertiere, Marie-Antoinette l’insoumise

***

This post counts towards the Alphabet in Historical Fiction Challenge:

letter B for du Barry

***

In part two: why diamonds weren’t Madame du Barry’s best friend

The limousine liberals who are of course superior to all the petty little human beings beneath them arrived in Copenhagen – like gods descending from Mt. Olympus of old – and of course they did not forget their limousines.

Copenhagen is one of the great moments when your ontological superiors get to pass measures for the petty human insects crawling about below them.  Should they be held accountable to the same standards they pass for everyone else?  Of course not!  That’s part of what it means to be a member of the ruling class of deity, after all.

Copenhagen climate summit: 1,200 limos, 140 private planes and caviar wedges

Copenhagen is preparing for the climate change summit that will produce as much carbon dioxide as a town the size of Middlesbrough.

By Andrew Gilligan
Published: 10:55PM GMT 05 Dec 2009

On a normal day, Majken Friss Jorgensen, managing director of Copenhagen’s biggest limousine company, says her firm has twelve vehicles on the road. During the “summit to save the world”, which opens here tomorrow, she will have 200.

“We thought they were not going to have many cars, due to it being a climate convention,” she says. “But it seems that somebody last week looked at the weather report.”

Ms Jorgensen reckons that between her and her rivals the total number of limos in Copenhagen next week has already broken the 1,200 barrier. The French alone rang up on Thursday and ordered another 42. “We haven’t got enough limos in the country to fulfil the demand,” she says. “We’re having to drive them in hundreds of miles from Germany and Sweden.”

And the total number of electric cars or hybrids among that number? “Five,” says Ms Jorgensen. “The government has some alternative fuel cars but the rest will be petrol or diesel. We don’t have any hybrids in Denmark, unfortunately, due to the extreme taxes on those cars. It makes no sense at all, but it’s very Danish.”

The airport says it is expecting up to 140 extra private jets during the peak period alone, so far over its capacity that the planes will have to fly off to regional airports – or to Sweden – to park, returning to Copenhagen to pick up their VIP passengers.

As well 15,000 delegates and officials, 5,000 journalists and 98 world leaders, the Danish capital will be blessed by the presence of Leonardo DiCaprio, Daryl Hannah, Helena Christensen, Archbishop Desmond Tutu and Prince Charles. A Republican US senator, Jim Inhofe, is jetting in at the head of an anti-climate-change “Truth Squad.” The top hotels – all fully booked at £650 a night – are readying their Climate Convention menus of (no doubt sustainable) scallops, foie gras and sculpted caviar wedges.

At the takeaway pizza end of the spectrum, Copenhagen’s clean pavements are starting to fill with slightly less well-scrubbed protesters from all over Europe. In the city’s famous anarchist commune of Christiania this morning, among the hash dealers and heavily-graffitied walls, they started their two-week “Climate Bottom Meeting,” complete with a “storytelling yurt” and a “funeral of the day” for various corrupt, “heatist” concepts such as “economic growth”.

The Danish government is cunningly spending a million kroner (£120,000) to give the protesters KlimaForum, a “parallel conference” in the magnificent DGI-byen sports centre. The hope, officials admit, is that they will work off their youthful energies on the climbing wall, state-of-the-art swimming pools and bowling alley, Just in case, however, Denmark has taken delivery of its first-ever water-cannon – one of the newspapers is running a competition to suggest names for it – plus sweeping new police powers. The authorities have been proudly showing us their new temporary prison, 360 cages in a disused brewery, housing 4,000 detainees.

And this being Scandinavia, even the prostitutes are doing their bit for the planet. Outraged by a council postcard urging delegates to “be sustainable, don’t buy sex,” the local sex workers’ union – they have unions here – has announced that all its 1,400 members will give free intercourse to anyone with a climate conference delegate’s pass. The term “carbon dating” just took on an entirely new meaning.

At least the sex will be C02-neutral. According to the organisers, the eleven-day conference, including the participants’ travel, will create a total of 41,000 tonnes of “carbon dioxide equivalent”, equal to the amount produced over the same period by a city the size of Middlesbrough.

The temptation, then, is to dismiss the whole thing as a ridiculous circus. Many of the participants do not really need to be here. And far from “saving the world,” the world’s leaders have already agreed that this conference will not produce any kind of binding deal, merely an interim statement of intent.

Instead of swift and modest reductions in carbon – say, two per cent a year, starting next year – for which they could possibly be held accountable, the politicians will bandy around grandiose targets of 80-per-cent-plus by 2050, by which time few of the leaders at Copenhagen will even be alive, let alone still in office.

Even if they had agreed anything binding, past experience suggests that the participants would not, in fact, feel bound by it. Most countries – Britain excepted – are on course to break the modest pledges they made at the last major climate summit, in Kyoto.

And as the delegates meet, they do so under a shadow. For the first time, not just the methods but the entire purpose of the climate change agenda is being questioned. Leaked emails showing key scientists conspiring to fix data that undermined their case have boosted the sceptic lobby. Australia has voted down climate change laws. Last week’s unusually strident attack by the Energy Secretary, Ed Miliband, on climate change “saboteurs” reflected real fear in government that momentum is slipping away from the cause.

In Copenhagen there was a humbler note among some delegates. “If we fail, one reason could be our overconfidence,” said Simron Jit Singh, of the Institute of Social Ecology. “Because we are here, talking in a group of people who probably agree with each other, we can be blinded to the challenges of the other side. We feel that we are the good guys, the selfless saviours, and they are the bad guys.”

As Mr Singh suggests, the interesting question is perhaps not whether the climate changers have got the science right – they probably have – but whether they have got the pitch right. Some campaigners’ apocalyptic predictions and religious righteousness – funeral ceremonies for economic growth and the like – can be alienating, and may help explain why the wider public does not seem to share the urgency felt by those in Copenhagen this week.

In a rather perceptive recent comment, Mr Miliband said it was vital to give people a positive vision of a low-carbon future. “If Martin Luther King had come along and said ‘I have a nightmare,’ people would not have followed him,” he said.

Over the next two weeks, that positive vision may come not from the overheated rhetoric in the conference centre, but from Copenhagen itself. Limos apart, it is a city filled entirely with bicycles, stuffed with retrofitted, energy-efficient old buildings, and seems to embody the civilised pleasures of low-carbon living without any of the puritanism so beloved of British greens.

And inside the hall, not everything is looking bad. Even the sudden rush for limos may be a good sign. It means that more top people are coming, which means they scent something could be going right here.

The US, which rejected Kyoto, is on board now, albeit too tentatively for most delegates. President Obama’s decision to stay later in Copenhagen may signal some sort of agreement between America and China: a necessity for any real global action, and something that could be presented as a “victory” for the talks.

The hot air this week will be massive, the whole proceedings eminently mockable, but it would be far too early to write off this conference as a failure.

I’m sticking with the proceedings being eminently mockable.  The entire conference is a disgusting joke.  And the limousines and private jets – along with the profound absence of electric cars – is proof positive that none of these elitists either a) really much believes in their global warming load of hooey, or b) has any intention of changing their elites jet setting lifestyle as they oppress the little people.

The limousines and private jets are the equivalent of Marie Antoinette’s “let them eat cake” moment.

Meanwhile, even as the Olympian gods descend upon Copenhagen to shape the energy future of puny man and take back the fire they once gave him, we see the crisis of global warming:

Fierce snowstorm gains strength after hitting West

By FELICIA FONSECA, Associated Press Writer Felicia Fonseca, Associated Press Writer

FLAGSTAFF, Ariz. – A howling winter storm barreled through the West, hitting the mountain states with snow and fierce winds as it headed toward the country’s midsection on Tuesday.

The far-reaching storm system stretched from California to Indiana, gathering strength as it raced eastward.

Parts of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa and Wisconsin were bracing for blizzard conditions and up to 10 inches of snow, according to the National Weather Service.

“The storm system is really strengthening as it goes, and that’s usually a recipe for some heavy snowfall and a lot of wind, and that’s what we’re watching for,” said Mike Welvaert of the National Weather Service in La Crosse, Wis.

The storm hit nearly all of the western mountain states on Monday, leaving places like Flagstaff and Reno, Nev., under a thick blanket of snow. Heavy rain raised fears of mudslides in wildfire-devastated Southern California, but no damage was reported. The weather system also snarled traffic and closed schools in Indiana, and crashes caused one death.

In the Phoenix area, fierce wind brought down power lines, left four hospitals temporarily without power and created wide outages. At one point, some 250,000 customers were without power; by early Tuesday, that number was down to about 58,000, a spokesman for Arizona Public Service Co. said.

The storm system lingered over the West on Tuesday.

On Monday, virtually the entire Western region was hit by wintry weather — from subzero wind chills in Washington state to heavy snow that closed schools and government offices in Reno, Nev. Big rigs were left jackknifed across highways in several states.

In New Mexico, two people were killed in traffic accidents blamed on slick conditions, and officials there told snow-clearing crews to prepare for 12-hour shifts as the storm swept south and east.

The National Weather Service said the upper elevations of the Sierra mountains could get up to 3 feet of snow, with up to 4 feet forecast for the mountains of southern Utah.

Reno schools closed, and many state government workers were told to stay home. Chains or snow tires were required across the region. Several flights into and out of Reno-Tahoe International Airport were delayed or canceled.

“Motorists are going to have to chain up,” Trooper Chuck Allen with the Nevada Highway Patrol said. “Otherwise, we end up with a parking lot.”

In northern Arizona, state officials closed parts of Interstate-17 and I-40, saying early Tuesday that some stretches of the highways were snow-packed and visibility levels were near zero.

The city school district let students out early Monday and canceled classes Tuesday. Northern Arizona University also released students and staff early Monday, in the midst of final exams.

Arizona Department of Transportation spokesman Rod Wigman vowed to keep northern Arizona roads plowed despite a $100 million budget deficit, but advised people to stay home if possible as the brunt of the storm sweeps through.

“When the sun goes down, people need to go home,” Wigman said.

Please, take back our fire and send us back into the caves from which we once emerged, o mighty Zeus and all yon deities.

Save us from all this warming, lest our flesh melt away from our wretched mortal bodies.

Meanwhile, even as we see just what a corrupt bunch of thugs and frauds these global warming mongers have been, we learn that Al Gore has so enriched himself with his part in the scam that may be the first climate billionaire.

Once upon a time, socialists and Marxists were able to confiscate other peoples’ wealth and dictate other peoples’ behavior on the bogus theory of socialist equality.  Now the same socialists and Marxists are doing the same things in the name of saving the planet.

And just like with Marxism, the gods of global warming can live lives that never come even remotely close to touching the fraudulent message that they preach to the unwashed and ignorant masses.

Some photographs of Marie Antoinette’s bedroom at Versailles. It’s a bit over the top isn’t it? It’s funny really though that technically this is simply the ‘Queen’s’ bedroom but the other residents don’t really get a mention, it is and always will be the bedroom of Marie Antoinette.

View of the mantelpiece, where a beautiful bust of Marie Antoinette stands, looking out haughtily over the millions of visitors who pass by every year.

The hidden door beside the bed, which Marie Antoinette used to make her escape from the mob in October 1789. I have actually been through the door and down the very corridor, thanks to a cunning ploy of pretending to have a headache on one of my visits. The very kindly guard took me past the balustrade and within touching distance of the royal bed then through the door and down the corridor to the Oeuil de Boeuf room that lies at the other end. It was amazing.

The bed, complete with reconstructions of the beautiful fabric that Marie Antoinette used in summer. It has flowers, ribbons and peacock feathers intertwined.

Another view of the bedroom. Never mind the Hall of Mirrors or even the King’s bedroom on the other side of the château, this was the very heart of Versailles and the place that everyone wanted to be admitted to. Although Marie Antoinette actually prefered to sleep in a smaller, cosier room elsewhere in the palace, this was the room that was used for her official levée and coucher, the ceremonies of getting up and going to bed. It was also where the Queen was required to give birth: we know that Marie Antoinette had her children on a pallet bed that was set up more or less where I was standing when I took his photograph.

A close up view of the beautiful fabric used in the room.

The headboard, where you can see Marie Antoinette’s insignia: a combined M and A.

The amazing canopy, topped with an Imperial eagle, a reminder of her faraway home along with the portraits of her mother Maria Theresa and brother Joseph, which hang on the walls.

Proof that I was there!

The sofa tucked in next to the door and covered with the same beautiful fabric.

What is more exciting to a one and a half year old than a pile of crackly autumn leaves?

A damn big puddle that’s what.

Splosh splash splish.

Thank you the great British weather, which has outdone itself in wetness this past month, for bringing you this revelation.

And thank you wellington boots.

They do save you from having to drag an incandescently cross toddler past every enticing limpid pool of water between you and, well, anywhere you might care to go at the moment.

Of course, you don’t have any boots. You just have sopping trouser cuffs.

Because previously, you had considered the fashion for wearing brightly coloured wellies on the streets of the capital the pedestrian equivalent of driving a 4X4. Pointless and without the saving grace of having any kind of style.

Although fashion has moved on a bit and now it’s riding boots. Next year young urban women will be tramping down to model farms to hug a well washed lamb.

Marie Antoinette playing at being a shepherdess.

But you can’t let the Star jig up and down in the middle of a puddle on his own, can you?

Bring on the inappropriate footwear.

Rock ‘n Roll Bride · Marie Antoinette – To The Extreme!.

This is a real wedding where the bride and groom made/did everything themselves! I’m totally in awe.

You know that guy who loves to quote to sound important?  Or what about that girl without a real opinion on anything but spends a lot of time trying to figure out which facebook profile quote defines her as a person?

The thing that both have in common is that they probably misquote most of the time.  If they even drop one of these famous mis-quotations on you, be ready to call them on their bullshit:

“There’s a sucker born every minute” – P.T. Barnum

Barnum never said this.  When Barnum’s biographer tried to track down when Barnum had uttered this phrase, all of Barnum’s friends and acquaintances told him it was out of character.  Barnum’s personality was more along the lines of “there’s a customer born every minute” — he wanted to find ways to draw new customers in all the time because competition was fierce and people could become bored easily

“Money is the root of all evil.” – The Bible

In context: “For the love of money is the root of all evil: which while some coveted after, they have erred from the faith, and pierced themselves through with many sorrows.” (1 Timothy 6:10)  All translations agree that it is the love of money, rather than money itself, that is associated with evil.

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned“- William Congreve

The correct quotation is “Heaven has no rage like love to hatred turned/ Nor hell a fury like a woman scorned.” by William Congreve in The Mourning Bride of 1697.

“‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing” – Edmund Burke

The above is most likely a summary of the following quote in Edmund Burke’s “Thoughts on the Cause of Present Discontents”: “When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle.”

“Let them eat cake.” - Marie Antoinette

Antoinette never said this.  Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his 1783 autobiography Confessions, relates that “a great princess” is said to have advised, with regard to starving peasants, “S’ils n’ont plus de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche,” commonly translated as “If they have no bread, let them eat cake!” It has been speculated that he was actually referring to Maria Theresa of Spain.

“Hello, Clarice.” – Hannibal Lecter

This line, while occasionally used in parody of the film The Silence of the Lambs, was never once used in the film itself. However, Anthony Hopkins’s character, Hannibal Lecter does at one point utter a similar phrase of “Good evening, Clarice.” On the other hand in the sequel Hannibal, when the doctor answers detective Pazzi’s cell phone, just before he pushes him off the library balcony, Dr. Lecter greets agent Starling with the following, “Is this Clarice?, Well, hello Clarice…”

“Elementary, my dear Watson” – Sherlock Holmes

This phrase was never uttered by the character in any of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s written works. Though “Elementary,” and “…my dear Watson.” both do appear near the beginning of The Crooked Man (1893), it is the “…my dear Watson” that appears first, and “Elementary” is the succinct reply to Watson’s exclamation a few lines of dialogue later. This is the closest these four immortal words ever appear together in the canon.

The association of this quote with the Sherlock Holmes character likely comes from the closing lines of the 1929 film The Return of Sherlock Holmes:

Watson: Amazing, Holmes.
Holmes: Elementary, my dear Watson, elementary.

Vivcore Shop.

I love this dress so much, and its OOAK. ;_;

It all began in 1862, when Louis Ernest Ladurée, a miller from France’s Southwest, created a bakery at 16 rue Royale in Paris…

Louis-Ernest Ladurée, a miller, founded the bakery on the Rue Royale, Paris in 1862. During the Paris Commune uprising of 1871 the bakery was burnt down. A pastry shop was built at the same location and Jules Chéret was entrusted with the interior decoration. The chubby cherubs dressed as pastry cooks, painted by him on the ceiling, form the company’s emblem. The interior of the premises were painted in the same celadon colour as the façade. Ladurée’s rise to fame came in 1930 when his grandson, Pierre Desfontaines, had the original idea of the double-decker, sticking two macaron shells together with a creamy ganache as filling. Queen Catherine de’ Medici had brought the macaron to France from Italy in the 16th century, and the recipe for the biscuit had hardly varied over the years, but the amounts of the ingredients used and the appearance of the end product were up to the individual bakers.

Desfontaines also opened a tearoom at the pastry shop. In those days women were not admitted to cafés, which were the exclusive domain of men. This was a big success with ladies, who enjoyed meeting in the freedom of the tearoom rather than their homes.

In 1993, David Holder and his father Francis Holder, founder of the Holder Group decided to buy this Parisian institution, and promote and enlarge the famous “Maison”. In September 1997, a new prestigious Ladurée address both a restaurant and tea room opened on the Champs-Elysées. The mission of the President David Holder is thus to bring back the great classics, which have contributed to the reputation of this ‘salon de thé’, as well as create an environment for gastronomic creativity in Paris. With him, Ladurée will be a tea salon, pastry shop, restaurant, chocolate shop and an ice cream parlor.

-STORY OF THE  MACARON-

These small, round cakes, crisp on the outside, smooth and soft in the middle, are made every morning in Ladurée’s “laboratory”. With each new season, Ladurée pays tribute to this its most famous creation by creating a new flavour.

-SHOPS-

royale

bonaparte

champs elysées

harrod’s, london

dublin

burlington arcade

mitsukoshi ginznza, tokyo

-Chocolat-

-Other Goodies-

wedding cake

tarts n' pastries

pates fruits

preserves

marshmallows!

-Gifts-

shopping bags

candles

bath & shower gels

for xmas

christmas treat

gift box

LADURÉE also made the pastries featured in Sofia Coppola’s Marie- Antoinette.

Let them eat cake!!!

xo. Au Revoir! xo.

I know I have used this picture before …

Wednesday and her dolly, Marie Antoinette.

… but I still think it is just about the most adorable thing ever. Lisa Loring as Wednesday on the 1960’s television series The Addams Family.

Got my kidlet’s first parent-teacher conference in a bit, here. Incredibly nervous!

“She taunts me.  She teases me mercilessly with her cool, regal hauteur.  Oh, the bearing of this goddess!  If only she would . . . look at me . . .”

Ok, so I gave up my gig at Harlequin to write about all things rustic chic.  And this diminutive beauty is one of the most rustic and chic things I’ve ever seen.  She’s carved from a single piece of wood and measures 6″ high x 3-1/2″ wide (at those bows alighting such graceful shoulders).  “Oh, to be those bows!”  I found her for song at a little antiques store. 

I’ve tried to do some research about her but came up with zip.  I think she’s ultimately going to be one for the Antiques Roadshow crew if they ever come this way. To me she looks French, kind of can-can dancer meets Marie Antoinette meets Gibson Girl.  “I can’t fathom her and she haunts me still . . .”

Could this Rustic Chic Thumbelina be a lost member of a hand-carved chess set?  If so, I’m just a pawn in her game.

All photos by Joel Woodard

Since I am a toy collector and all I believe this doll to be creepily-cool and I actually wouldn’t mind owning it.

my latest inspiration…

“Kirtsten Dunst portrays the ill-fated child princess who married France’s young and indifferent King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman).  Feeling Isolated in a royal court rife with scandal and intrigue.  Marie Antoinette defied both royalty and commoner by living like a rockstar, which served only to seal her fate.”

“Marie Antoinette is an electrifying yet intimate re-telling of the turbulant life of history’s favorite villainess.”

Last night I watched Marie Antoinette directed by Academy Award Winner Sofia Coppola (2003/Best Writing/Lost In Translation)… My friend Hannah raved about this movie in college.  I AM OBSESSED WITH THE STYLING!!!! so cool – everything is so pretty, her clothes are decadent and look like cupcakes, Versailles is unreal.  Hmm… what else?  The soundtrack is great – my favorite it the scene by the Strokes!  Watch the trailer – it does a great job of highlighting the movie.

^great strokes song! I liked the album so much bought it on itunes

^fun scene!

Hong Kong Garden (With Strings Intro) – Artist: Siouxsie and the Banshees

Aphrodisiac – Artist: Bow Wow Wow

What Ever Happened – Artist: The Strokes

Pulling Our Weight – Artist: The Radio Department

Ceremony – Artist: New Order

Natural’s Not In It – Artist: Gang of Four

I Want Candy (Kevin Shields Remix) – Artist: Bow Wow Wow

Kings Of The Wild Frontier – Artist: Adam Ant

Concerto In G – Artist: Roger Neill

The Melody Of A Fallen Tree – Artist: Windsor for the Derby

I Don’t Like It Like This – Artist: The Radio Department

Plainsong – Artist: The Cure

Intro Versailles – Artist: Marie Antoinette Soundtrack

Jynweythek Ylow – Artist: Aphex Twin

Opus 17 – Artist: Dustin O’Halloran

Il Secondo Giorno (Instrumental) - Artist: Air

Keen On Boys – Artist: Air

Opus 23 – Artist: Dustin O’Halloran

Les Barricades Mysterious – Artist: Patricia Mabee

Fools Rush In (Kevin Shields Remix) – Artist: Bow Wow Wow

Aphex Twin – Avril 14th – Artist: Richard James

Sonata In D Minor, K.213: Andante – Artist: Patricia Mabee

Tommib Help Buss – Artist: Squarepusher

Tristes Apprets, Pales Flambeaux – Artist: Agnes Mellon

Opus 36 – Artist: Dustin O’Halloran

All Cats Are Grey – Artist: The Cure

(click on link to listen via rhapsody.com)

Marie Antoinette (2006) – loved it!

Synopsis: Oscar® winner Sofia Coppola brings to the screen a fresh interpretation of the life of France’s legendary teenage queen MARIE ANTOINETTE. Betrothed to King Louis XVI (Jason Schwartzman), the naïve Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) at the age of 14, she is thrown into the opulent French court which is steeped in conspiracy and scandal. Alone, without guidance, and adrift in a dangerous world, the young Marie Antoinette rebels against the isolated atmosphere at Versailles and, in the process, becomes France’s most misunderstood monarch. Kirsten Dunst stars as the youthful princess whose fateful life became the stuff of myth and legend. The story begins when 14-year-old Marie Antoinette is whisked away from her family and friends in Vienna, stripped of all her possessions and deposited in the sophisticated and decadent world of Versailles, the lavish royal court near Paris. Marie Antoinette is merely a pawn in an arranged marriage meant to solidify the harmony between two nations. Her teenage husband, the Dauphin Louis (Jason Schwartzman), is heir to the French throne. But Marie Antoinette is ill prepared to be the kind of ruler for whom the French populace yearns. Beneath her finery, she’s a sheltered, frightened and confused young woman, surrounded by vicious detractors, insincere flatterers, puppet masters and gossips….© Columbia Pictures (see movie for more)

images of Marie Antoinette sourced from google

Louis XVI, source: google

Marie Antoinette was an archduchess of Austria, born in 1755.  She became the Dauphin of France at fourteen years old when she married Louis Auguste.  Marie Antoinette assumed the position of Queen of France and Navarre when her husband, Louis XVI, took the French throne in 1774.

During their regime & the French Revolution, reffered to as the “reign of terror”, Louis the XVI was dethroned.  Marie Antoinette was executed for disloyalty in 1793, when she was only 38.

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Versailles extravaganza

Versailles

The Palace of Versailles, or simply Versailles, is a royal château in Versailles, the Île-de-France region of France. In French, it is known as the Château de Versailles or “La crotte de pain”.
When the château was built, Versailles was a country village; today, however, it is a suburb of Paris, some twenty kilometers southwest of the French capital. The court of Versailles was the center of political power in France from 1682, when Louis XIV moved from Paris, until the royal family was forced to return to the capital in October 1789 after the beginning of French Revolution. Versailles is therefore famous not only as a building, but as a symbol of the system of absolute monarchy of the Ancien Régime.

- information sourced from Wikipedia

La plus grande branchée des dix dernières années ? Marie-Antoinette, depuis que Sofia Coppola en a fait une dingue de bonnes vibes. La figure flamboyante de la monarchie agonisante est devenue une jeune femme avalée par des passe-temps frivoles : bals masqués, pièces de théâtre, jeux. Une desperate housewife avant l’heure. Une femme moderne. Bien dans notre époque.

Nous sommes toutes un peu des Marie-Antoinette. Mais qui peut vraiment prétexter, en sniffant joyeusement un rail de coke sous un lustre en plastique, avoir des prédispositions génétiques ?

Pour savoir si vous êtes l’heureux élu (et vous réjouir à l’idée de quelques excursions à la nécropole royale de Saint-Denis pour aller vous recueillir sur la  tombe de grand-grand-grand-maman) c’est simple : crachez dans vos mains, mettez le tout dans le récipient que vous aurez préalablement reçu par la poste et envoyez-le à Igenea, qui déterminera les régions hvr1 et hvr2 de votre ADN mitochondrial et les comparera à celles de votre rêvée mamie hype. Sous peu, vous aurez la réponse : suis-je un nobody ou fille de royauté ?

Bon, la vérité est un peu moins précise. Vous connaîtrez votre haplogroupe et saurez si vous partagez des ancêtres communs avec la décapitée dans les dernières dix à sept générations. Votre chance, c’est que comme Marie-Antoinette est la seule femme proposée, pas de risque qu’on confonde: il faut un chromosome Y pour analyser sa lignée paternelle (les hommes, eux, ont accès à leurs lignées maternelle et paternelle). Le laborantin épuisé ne pourra donc pas comparer par erreur votre ADN à celui de Jesse James ou de Napoléon. En revanche, ce qui est parfaitement envisageable et qui serait quand même vraiment bien, ce serait que la mèche de cheveux de la reine coupée dans son enfance, qui nous a permis de connaître son ADN, soit en fait celui d’une de ses suivantes. Ca, oui, ce serait bien. Ca mettrait un peu de guitares électriques dans l’histoire.

Paris Atelier.

This lady who lives in Cali has a passion for all things french, and her blog is a gorgeous collection of french roccoco, couture etc. Love it!

Photo by John Cunliffe for Abigails Ateliers. All rights reserved.

When I began collecting the titles of novels for the Royal Mistress Challenge, I realised that this amounts to a sub-genre in itself. What is the perennial allure of the mistress? I think it comes down to five things:

1. Beauty
2. Power
3. Money
4. Sex
4. Mystery

Beauty first. We like reading about beautiful people, otherwise People magazine would go out of business pretty darn quick.  Mistresses were nearly always renowned for their beauty; the few who weren’t, like Mlle Choin, the mistress/secret wife of the Grand Dauphin, Louis XIV’s son, don’t tend to get written about very much.

Power.  Mistresses and favourites were hated figures, because they were blamed for the poor decisions made by the king.  One of the reasons Marie Antoinette was so unpopular for much of her husband’s reign was that he did not have a mistress, so when things went wrong, there was no-one to blame but her.

How much power the mistress actually had varied.  In the medieval period the mistress was a shadowy figure, there for the king’s convenience, and baronial families objected to their daughters being ‘despoiled’ by the king.  By 1500 the mistress was emerging as a power player, and during the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries families backed potential mistresses like political candidates.  In return they expected their piece of the pie.  And that leads us on to:

Money. The early modern period was the heyday of the mistress, who, in addition to houses, jewels and art, gathered land, money, offices, privileges and pensions and redistributed them to supporters and relatives.  By the nineteenth century, with the decline of royal autonomy, the mistress was less rapacious, but still enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle.

Sex.  By definition, a mistress is desirable.  We like reading about desirable people.  Otherwise InStyle magazine would go out of business pretty darn quick.  An aura of exciting sex hangs around the mistress.  Whether she was enjoying all this sex as much as the king is another matter, which merits further discussion.  When she was having sex with the king, that was.  Anne Boleyn held Henry VIII off for six years because she didn’t want a hit-and-run romance like the one he had with her sister Mary.  Madame de Pompadour made the transition from mistress to best friend and confidante of Louis XV without losing any of her influence over him.

Mystery.  The mistress might be a public figure, but unlike her counterpart, the queen, she was not constantly on display.  She wasn’t crowned, she didn’t eat in public or have crowds of people trooping through her apartment.  Often surprisingly little is known about her relationship with the king.  While sources abound for the reign of Louis XIV – we know what he was doing every day for much of the time – almost no letters survive between him and his mistresses, none of whom wrote their memoirs.

And maybe there’s an X-factor that defies analysis.  One thing is certain: looking at reviews of royal mistress novels, a theme quickly emerges.  Major Mary Suedom.  Wikipedia is pretty good on popular culture, so I’ll leave the definition of a Mary Sue to them:

A Mary Sue (sometimes just Sue), in literary criticism and particularly in fanfiction, is a fictional character with overly idealized and hackneyed mannerisms, lacking noteworthy flaws, and primarily functioning as wish-fulfillment fantasies for their authors or readers.

And so I decided that the heroine of every one of these novels I read, and I mean every one, will have to undergo that most dreaded ordeal of any fictional character.

Yes.  You know what I’m talking about.

The Mary Sue Litmus Test.

Anyway.  Having decided this, Moppet felt she’d better put her own house in order before she started calling other people’s characters Mary Sues.  I.e.: make her own alter ego, Lady Moppet of Yorkshire, take the Mary Sue Litmus Test.

The phrase ‘alter ego’ should give everyone a clue that there was never much hope that Lady Moppet wasn’t a Mary Sue.  But there’s always some hope.  Isn’t there?

So, first, Miss Moppet did the Writers’ Mary Sue Test (squeaking with laughter all the way through).  The results:

Lady Moppet of Yorkshire isn’t a character: she’s you, or you as you’d like to be. She isn’t really very cool: she blends into crowds, she hangs out on the fringes at parties, and wearing shades after dark makes her run into things. She may have sometimes thought that she was special, or destined for greater things, but probably dismissed the idea as a fantasy. She’s come in for her share of hurt, but gotten off with minor damage. And you’ve been sparing with the free handouts: whatever she gains, she’s worked for.

You may have let yourself get a little too close to Lady Moppet of Yorkshire. Maybe she’s you as you wish you were, or maybe you’re just afraid no one will like her and are trying to give her a free ride. Have some confidence in your writing! Lady Moppet of Yorkshire is a good character. Give her room to be herself before you stifle her.

I’m not going to use this test for the Royal Mistress Challenge novels because there are too many questions that only the writer can answer, such as ‘do you frequently fantasise about being your character?’  I could have a guess, but it hardly seems fair.

So Miss Moppet found another test, The Original Fiction Mary-Sue Litmus Test.  And did the test again.  Hoping that maybe this one might come out differently!  The way you re-read Gone with the Wind!  Hoping that this time, everything will be okay!

And you were expecting?  She is a royal mistress, after all.