cahn | Historical Characters, Including Frederick the Great, Discussion Post 41

Now, thanks to interesting podcasts, including characters from German history as a whole and also Byzantine history! (More on this later.)

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From:

cahn

He's quoted more than once, and is never dull, but I doubt there's a complete edition available in English or German.

Ha, well, maybe if it's in French

mildred_of_midgard can read it? :)

Incidentally, it's hard to say whether Louis had a type, based on his mistresses.

Ah, that's interesting!

Now the wiki entry is only cautious about the bisexual love affair between Madame de Monaco and Minette, and says "they were rumoured to have" while reporting all the other affairs as stone cold facts

Heh. Okay, I'll slot this into "I want to believe!" category :)

Only if someone used Digitalis. Most of the poisons actually available at the time didn't work instantly, and people were in agony and dying for days. Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't that also true of Arsenic, which was the most popular poison back then?

Oh, huh. I guess Progress has also led to better poisons, which is not something I have ever thought about :P I think most of my exposure to arsenic has been via mystery novels, where they don't usually dwell on how much pain the victim is in.

From:

selenak

To quote Wiki on the the procedure of Arsenic poisoning:

Symptoms of arsenic poisoning begin with headaches, confusion, severe diarrhea, and drowsiness. As the poisoning develops, convulsions and changes in fingernail pigmentation called leukonychia striata (Mees's lines, or Aldrich-Mees's lines) may occur. When the poisoning becomes acute, symptoms may include diarrhea, vomiting, vomiting blood, blood in the urine, cramping muscles, hair loss, stomach pain, and more convulsions. The organs of the body that are usually affected by arsenic poisoning are the lungs, skin, kidneys, and liver. The final result of arsenic poisoning is coma and death.

Arsenic is related to heart disease[ (hypertension-related cardiovascular disease), cancer, stroke(cerebrovascular diseases), chronic lower respiratory diseases, impaired lung function, compromised immune response to H1N1 (swine) flu (a respiratory virus infection and diabetes.Skin effects can include skin cancer in the long term, but often prior to skin cancer are different skin lesions. Other effects may include darkening of skin and thickening of skin.

Chronic exposure to arsenic is related to vitamin A deficiency, which is related to heart disease and night blindness. The acute minimal lethal dose of arsenic in adults is estimated to be 70 to 200 mg or 1 mg/kg/day.

The reason why Arsenic was and is, as far as mysteries are concerned at least, a popular poison is that all these symptoms can be explained naturally, that it doesn't work instantly, and that thus, the poisoner is in the clear if they do it in order to inherit, like the Marquise de Brinvilliers. (One reason why Sophie of Hannover nicknamed it "Inheritance Powder" in her letter.) Whereas Digitalis would have been available if you knew apothocaries or knew your herbs, but it does work really fast, and thus there's no way of disguising what you did.

Have you ever read Flowers in the Attic? Because long time use of Arsenic is a key plot point there. In the Angelique novels, our heroine's first husband, Joffrey, who is among other things a genius level scientist, has her consume a tiny dose of Arsenic on a regular leve, as he does himself, in order to immunize herself against being poisoned. It does save her life later on. But you really have to get the dose right to use it like that. (I think. I'm anything but a scientist.)

From:

felis

long time use of Arsenic is a key plot point there. In the Angelique novels, our heroine's first husband, Joffrey, who is among other things a genius level scientist, has her consume a tiny dose of Arsenic on a regular leve, as he does himself, in order to immunize herself against being poisoned. It does save her life later on. But you really have to get the dose right to use it like that. (I think. I'm anything but a scientist.)

See also: Strong Poison by Dorothy Sayers! The bad guy takes small doses over a long time so that he can eat the same meal as his victim later on (the question of when the poison was administered and who did it being the key question in the case). The immunization does apparently work, but you can still expect some bad consequences for your health after a while, see this interesting blog post about the book and about arsenic poisoning in general by Deborah Blum, who wrote a whole book about poisons. /tangent

From:

cahn

That's such an interesting blog post, thank you for linking it! It's fascinating that having a reliable test for arsenic was so important -- of course that makes total sense, but I had never thought about it. And also interesting that Sayers and presumably Golon knew the idea of the poison immunization, but not the further/later research that it would probably not be very good for you!

From:

selenak

On a more cheerful note, I was now able to crosscheck Horowski's book re: Madame de Monaco/both Madames. Horowski is 100% certain Minette/Monaco was real. He doesn't provide a footnote or a quote, but he has read way more about the court of Louis XIV than I have, so I trust him on this. Otoh, he does provide the Liselotte quote re: the failed pass Madame de Monaco made at her.

Horowski: It was observedhow (Madame de Monaco) approached the new Madame with the same tender gestures she had used on the first one, but aside from a few excited incognito walks through Paris, this didn't go anywhere. Much later, as an old woman, Madame herself describes it to an interested niece thusly: "It's true that Madame de Monaco loved women. She would have liked to introduce me to this, but she didn't win me over, which grieved her so much that she cried."

Alas, the Princess of Monaco was permanently damaged by a botched blood letting in 1772, her health got increasingly worse from 1775, which made courtiers suspect anything from STD to poison (by her husband), and she died in 1778 at age 39. But if the her/Minette affair was real, at least we can say Minette had some enjoyable hours in between marital warfare with Monsieur.

From:

cahn

...okay this is amazing, thank you for looking this up! :D

"It's true that Madame de Monaco loved women. She would have liked to introduce me to this, but she didn't win me over, which grieved her so much that she cried."

LOLOLOLOL I love this.

I love even more the idea that Monaco/Minette might have been real <3

Ugh for blood letting! I am now imagining using this hypothetical time machine to go around and yell at people not to get bled!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ha, well, maybe if it's in French [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard can read it? :)

Lol! Well, not right now, but that is exactly where we're headed! I'm on a really good streak of reading French, German, and Italian, and I have high hopes for my French this year. I would like to be able to read the memoirs, bios, and diaries for salon that we otherwise cannot read. :D

And, that,

selenak, is why I may not be able to reply to your latest discussion, alas. :( But know that I feel that they just prove my point that eyewitness books belong in your (overcrowded) hands, because you do such amazing things with them, and in a perfect world I would send you ALL the eyewitness books today, and in an even more perfect world, we would rent the flat next to you and fill it with book spillover, so you could be like Crown Prince Fritz and his separate library (but without the sneaking and beatings, and without the major debts too). ;)

We'll see if I manage to reply properly this weekend, but I'm going to try very hard to start write-ups on 18th century Danish kings and their favorites (so much gossip! I had no idea! I have ordered more books and am eyeing the Danish language!), so I may not.

So much to read (and write), so little time!

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Ha, well, maybe if it's in French [personal profile] mildred_of_midgard can read it? :)

Good news, it's on Google books; very bad news, it's 2 volumes of 800 pages each, and I am not the great

selenak. But--you never know, I don't really control what my brain decides to obsess about, so we'll see!

From:

cahn

Well, maybe when your French is better and you're casting around for something to practice on, I will remind you of this :D (Actually, I remember Lehndorff being great for elementary German practice, because a lot of it was very repetitive.)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Well, maybe when your French is better and you're casting around for something to practice on

HAHAHA okay I need to update you on my French. It's now almost as good as my German--I read 65 pages of a biography of Philippe II yesterday, and have read 20 pages already today. I can read faster generally in French than in German, but have to stop and look up more words, so it works out to about the same overall speed as in German. I am way past the need for repetitive text, and I'm not casting around for something to practice on. My reading list is huge already and I'm actually able to read most things on it. :P

That's why I'm skeptical I'll have time for this one, which isn't anywhere near the top 50 of my reading list. I was thinking specifically of Lehndorff, as in, I haven't even read more than a couple hundred pages of Lehndorff, and he's much higher on my list! (There's also the problem with this diary that it's a non-OCRed pdf, which means I can't stop and look up words. I'm going to have be substantially better before I can do that.)

Also, I am so, so sorry, guys--if I'd known that there was going to be this much of a discrepancy between my French and my German learning speeds, and that French was not going to have to come at the expense of German, I would have started French sooner. I could have been reading salon all kinds of things in the last 3 years!

But now I'm just alternating French and German and trying to get my reading speeds in both up, so that it doesn't take me a week to read a book and that only if I do nothing else. But for now that means I do almost nothing else, which is why I am reading along with but not participating in the Louis XIV and Byzantine discussions. :/

From my Philippe reading yesterday (this is 12-13th century,

cahn, he's most famous to an Anglophone audience for his interactions with Richard the Lionheart), I give you this tidbit: his main nickname that he's known by may be "Auguste", for obvious as well as not so obvious reasons, but among his other contemporary nicknames was "Philippe le Mal Peigné", i.e. "Philippe the Badly Combed", because his hair was so shaggy!

I admit, I was not expecting that.

From:

selenak

See, my way of distinguishing this particular Philippe from all the other Philippes in French history would have been to say he was played by a young Timothy Dalton in The Lion in Winter, so the hair thing figures.

(Mature Timothy Dalton was interviewed about five or so years ago and had some great stories about the shooting of that film. As a young actor, he totally fanboyed both Katherine Hepburn and Peter O'Toole, as you would, and had a wonderful description of O'Toole's performance in the "I have no sons!" scene after Henry busts everyone ein Philippe's bedchamber.

Sadly, while Philippe the shaggy haired struck me as an intriguing character in that play/film, I had to do some research more than a decade ago and the antisemitic acts he's responsible for are extraordinary even for a medieval ruler.