18th-Century Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 35

[cahn]

In the previous post Charles II found AITA:

Look, I, m, believe in live and let live. (And in not going on my travels again. Had enough of that to last a life time.) Why can't everyone else around me be more chill? Instead, my wife refuses to employ my girlfriend, my girlfriend won't budge and accept another office, my brother is set on a course to piss off everyone (he WILL go on his travels again), and my oldest kid shows signs of wanting my job which is just not on, sorry to say. And don't get me started about Mom (thank God she's living abroad). What am I doing wrong? AITA?

Comments

Re: Henri IV and Louis XIII

[mildred_of_midgard]

Maybe it were Sabine Appel's convoluted sentences that put you off the track. :)

LOL! No, I would like to blame Appel, but I am to blame: I was thinking of Marie's contemporaries, not the previous generation that had died 10 years before. Which is silly, as humans tend to meet people from more than one generation, and Henri IV certainly did.

But! While I have speculated that Marie was one of those people whose hair darkens when they hit puberty and that she missed her blonde days (especially with a husband like that), it occurs to me: Catherine was fat in her later years. With ten pregnancies, what do you expect? And Marie, after a single pregnancy, at the age of 16, was probably not, not yet.

So actually, I reverse my opinion a second time: I now think Henri was thinking of Catherine and that Marie was a blonde after all, as per Rubens. Which is interesting, because you tend to think of dark hair and skin as dominant, but they're both polygenic, non-Mendelian traits, so I suppose a brunette and a blonde could have black-haired, olive-skinned descendants. (Googling suggests it's rare but possible.)

Furthermore, I should report that Schultz strikes a blow on Marie's behalf by saying that Henri IV was unattractive and reeked of garlic, that women found him repulsive, that his mistresses were generally cheating on him with the men they were actually attracted to, and that all the action he got and his reputation as the "vert gallant" were due solely to him being king, the only reason any woman would ever sleep with him.

:D