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:

selenak

I've now read the rest of the "The Court of Louix XIV in Eyewitness Accounts" book. Compared with the "Frederick the Great and Maria Theresia in Eye Witness Accounts" book from the same series, it's noticeable less enamoured with its main subject. (Reminder: the editor of the Fritz/MT book is an aherent of the "it was all a misunderstanding, Fritz wanted to be MT's champion and protector when he invaded Silesia!" school of thought, blaming "Austrian propaganda" for making this look like a cynical land grab and a protection racket. It's still a book full of great quotes.) Whereas is a lot of Louis critical stuff among the selections here, and also courtier critical stuff. For example, when we get around to the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, those same courtier sources previously presented as amusing gossip providers and/or witty literati are now made to look like callous fanatics by their own quotes, like Madame de Sevigné saying the soldiers of the King make excellent missionaries (to force the Huguenots to convert), and the actual preachers can do the rest. And while most of the book is gossipy, the editor never loses sight of the gigantic cost of it all, presents stories featuring starving peasants and in general solidly blames Louis for leaving his kingdom in an exhausted, poor and terrible state, for all the superpower dressings. And he doesn't just say this about Louis' final years. This story is from the glorious beginning, when Versailles was built/expanded from a country mansion into what it became. The author of the quote is Parliamentary Council Lefèvre d'Ormesson, who notes into his diary on July 1668:

A woman who had lost her son through a fall when he was working on the machines of Versailles and who had been condemned to payments by the Chambre du Justice, presented full of pain a general petition in order to get some attention, and indeed she was asked whatever she wanted; she then shouted insults about the King, called him whoreson, King of Machines, tyrant and a thousand other scotises and extravaganzas, whereupon the King, surprised, asked whether she was talking of him. Whereupon she said yes and continued in her rant. She was arrested and immediately condemned to be whipped and be brought to the Petites-Maisons (then the madhouse of Paris). The whip was used on her with extraordinary hrashness throughout the entire Faubourg Saint-Germain, and the woman didn't make a sound, suffering the evil like a martyr for God's glory. Many have disliked this strict punishment and have said that the woman should have been treated as a madwoman and immeditaely brought to the Petites-Maisons, instead of letting oneself provoked into this punishment.

The editor also gives us, late in Louis' reign, the entire letter from the Abbé Fénelon (bestselling author of Telemaque, the How-to-be-a-good-prince novel so beloved by Fritz and Leopold Mozart, in which he provides Louis with an almighty "here's why you suck, in detail, and how your people suffer from it" speech. (This did not end well for Fénelon, who had started out with a very good job - teacher of the King's Grandsons - and was one of the candidates to become the next bishop of Paris, but after that letter, Louis made him first bishop of Cambrai instead (far less prestitigious, and far away), and then, when Fénelon wrote a pro Quietism pamphlet (Quietism, like Jansenism, was one of those inner Catholic branches which got popular in the later part of Louis' reign, but Quietism less so, and it was outright condemned), brought down the thunder, meaning he got the Pope to excommunicate Fénelon until Fénelon recanted (in public).)

But for all the social injustices, two thirds of the book consists of sensational gossip. Sometimes the editor presents conflicting accounts, as whenever there's a poisoning accusation, or how an affair came to be. For example: Louis and his first Maitresse en Titre, Louise de La Valliere. In one version, this started out as a kind of beard/cover story for his flirtation with his sister-in-law, Minette, and then became real, in another, La Valliere approched with and she was so devoted and crushing that he was nice to her at first, what with her not being a great beauty (too thin, and a slight limp, the courtiers said), but then fell in love with her.

Now, the chapter Madame est morte about Minette's death has a lot of very long quotes, and I can't translate them all, but here are some

Daniel de Cosnac, Bishop of Valence, about the early days when Minette still thought she could get rid of the Knight of Lothringia:

Madame replied to me that, if someone would advise her well, she would be capable of being careful, for the Chevalier de Lorraine was passionately in love with Madame de Monaco; Madame de Monaco was the friend of her heart and of unshakeable devotion, and thus she would be able to move her to signal the Chevalier de Lorraine whatever she wanted. I returned: 'I don't know either Madame de Monaco nor the Chevalier de Lorraine well enough to reassure your royal highness in this matter that such a strategy would be successful." She said: "I swear it will."
Only a few days after this conversation, Madame started to change her mind. I already said that Monsieur had demanded of the Chevalier de Lorraine that he, MOnsieur, was supposed to have precedence in his emotions before Madame de Monaco, and the later undoubtedly recognized that this was the key point in order to keep Monsieur's favor, and thus he prefered the fortune he could expect from Monsieur to the true or pretended love to Madame de Monaco. At various opportunities, it became clear without any shadow of a doubt that he was devoted exclusively to Monsieur and was Madame's enemy. This went so far that he showed open hostility and contempt towards Madame. Madame recognized too late that she shouldn't have put any hopes into Madame de MOnaco, who did not fulfill the expectations Madame had of her, and who had no influence on the Chevalier whatsoever.

(According to Horowski, Madame de Monaco was actually bi and either flirted with or had an affair with Minette herself, and later made a pass to Liselotte as well, who said no. But there is no quote supporting this in this book.)

Then the negotiations for the Treaty of Dover take up steam (reminder: the treaty for a France/England alliance, with the secret additional clause that Charles II promises to convert to Catholicism, which he'll only keep on his deathbed), which means Minette after years of neglect is increasingly important to Louis again, which means Philippe sulks. Simultanously, there's the matter of the abbeys he wants for the Chevalier, and it all explodes on January 30th, 1670. According to Saint-Maurice, who is working for the Duke of Savoy and reporting to him, this happened:

This, Monseigneur is the complete truth, as Madame de Montespan wrote it to her father the Duke of Monetemart, and how I learned it from Madame de Trambonneau, her trusted and beloved friend. But I ask your royal highness not to tell anyone I named these people as my sources.
The Abbé de Rivière and Bishop of Langres had two abbeys who belonged to Monsieur's territories. As the Bishop was old and fragile, (Monsieur) had been waiting for a long time for his death in order to give these abbeys to the Chevalier de Lorraine. He said this to the King at Chambord, but the King immediately replied that as the Chevalier was not a member of the clergy, his conscience did not permit him to allow this, and that besides this man was leading a far too debauched life to get a clerical income. Nonetheless Monsieur begged him for his permission, but his Majesty replied again that this was impossible, but that he, as he loved him (i.e. as Louis loved Philippe, his brother), would give the Chevalier a pension of 40 000 Livres despite having little respect for him once the abbeys in question were free.
Monsieur told all of this to the Chevalier de Lorraine, and they made a hundred jokes about the conscience of the King which accomodated for all the ladies. The King learned of this. The King accused the Chevalier de Lorraine of the shameful crime of sodomy with the Comte de Guiche and other men who have been burned for this crime at the Place de Grève.
When the Bishop of Langries died on Thursday morning, Monsieur told the King that he had given the abbeys to the Chevalier de Lorraine, whereupon the King said that he didn't want this to happen. Monsieur replied that it was a done deed and a fact. HIs Majesty told him again that he would prevent this. The conversation got so heated that the people around them started to notice.(...)

Philippe takes off to Saint Cloud with his entire household. To get the next paragraph, reminder that the Duchess of Orleans is Minette, Philippe's wife, the first Madame.

Madame asked (Louis) to agree that the Chevalier de Lorraine was to receive these abbeys. He told her that this was not possible. She asked for it as a favor to herself. He remained firm in his refusal and chided her for having forgotten the bad treatment she'd been subjected to so quickly. She told him that she prefered Monsieur's contentment to her own interests, that the Chevalier de Lorraine was a young man , that he would change his behavior, and asked (Louis) to forgive him, but when she saw that she could not succeed, she threw herself at the King's feet, crying, and told him that she saw it as the greatest injury to be separated from his person, but that it was her duty to follow Monsieur who wanted to leave the court. The King withdrew and tsaid that if his brother would wish to separate himself from him for this reason, he'd know how to punish those responsible.

=> The Chevalier gets arrested. Philippe decides to move his entire household to the furthest estate he owns (300 miles from Versailles) until he gets his boyfriend back. And because it still cracks me up how the tv show Versailles presented this whole thing in s1, complete with the Chevalier suffering in a ratty dungeon, here's how his arrest actually proceded:

The Chevalier spent the night in Saint-Germain; he wasn't brought to the Bastille. He was asked how many servants he wanted to have, he could bring as many as he wished; he chose two of his nobleman and two valets. He left on Friday in his carriage with a strong escort commanded by a lieutenant of the Gardes des Corps. He's supposed to be sent to Pierre-Encise; others say to the citadel of Montpellier, or maybe to Collioure, at the Catalonian border.

Monsieur can't endure the countryside for long and comes back to Versailles. Louis offers a compromise: the Chevalier is freed on the condition that he takes up residence either in Rome or in Malta (after all, he is in theory a Maltese Knight, that's why he's a Chevalier). The King provides a pension of 10 000 livres, and the abbeys will go to the Chevalier's brother, the Abbé d'Harcourt, who is at least a priest. Minette takes off to Dover, meets Charles, James and Jemmy, and returns. Then we get several descriptions of her death, one by her lady in waiting Madame de La Fayette (presumably an ancestress?), one from Louis' and Philippe's cousin, the Grande Mademoiselle (daughter of Gaston the schemer, older sister of Marguerite Louise the involuntary Medici wife), and then various descriptions from various people of the aftermath. What all these have in common is that she felt a pain in her side on the first day of her return, scandalalized her court by insisting on bathing in the river on Saturday and on Sunday felt worse. On Sunday, a painter was busy painting a portrait of her and Monsieur (oh joy, under these circumstances). While Monsieur is about to leave, Madame takes a glass of Zichory Wataer, drinks, her side attacks return, and she breaks down. From then onwards, it's an extremely painful dying, for hours and hours. Madame de La Fayette:

Suddenly (Minette) said one should take care of hte water which she had drunk. It was surely poisonous, maybe someone had confused a bottle, she was poisoned, she felt it, and was asking for an antidote.I was standing in front of her bed, next to Monsieur, and while I thought him incapable of such a crime, a feeling close to human malice made me take a good hard look at him. He was neither moved nor embarassed by this thought of Madame's. He said that the water should be given to a dog. He was sharing Madame's opinion that oil and an antidote should be brought to her in order to take such an evil suspicion from her. Madame Desbordes, her first chamberwoman, who was devoted to her, said that she had prepared the water, and drank from it, but Madame insisted on bring given oil and an antidote. She was given both.

It doesn't work, she gets worse, and Louis gets send for, who arrives with the Queen, two of his current mistresses (La Valliere and Montespan) and the Comtesse de Soissons, i.e. Olympe Mancini, Eugene's mother, and briefly also a mistress of Louis. Minette wants another medication to make her throw up, the doctors (now present in the plural) say no, and Louis starts to argue.

The King wanted to argue with htem, they didn't know how to reply to him. He told them: "One cannot let a woman die without trying to help her!" They looked at each other and didn't say a word. There was a constant coming and going in this room, people were having conversations, some even laughed as if Madame was in a very different state.

At which point both Madame de Lafayette and the Grande Mademoiselle claim they were the ones who thought that Minette needed a proper confessor, not the "lousy Capuchin" already present, and another, more renowned confessor is sent for so she can go through the final rites with him. The English envoy, as opposed to all the French memoirists, also mentions this exchange in his report to Charles:

I took the liberty of asking her whther she believed she had been poisoned. Her confessor, who was present, and heard what I had asked, said to her: "Madame, don't accuse anyone and offer your death as a sacrifice to God." This stopped her from replying, and despite the fact I kept asking her this question repeatedly, she only answered with a shrug. I asked her for the box in which all her letters were preserved in order to send them to His Majesty, and she ordered me to demand it from Madame de Bordes, who kept fainting and nearly dying from the pain to see her mistress in such a lamentable condition, and so Monsieur was able to get his hands on the letters before (Madame de Bordes) got to her senses again.

Louis orders an autopsy and the result says she wasn't poisoned. (The English envoy is not convinced.) Saint-Simon, who wasn't alive then, let alone in Versailles, still has a version of this story in his memoirs, and he not only reports it as being poison, administered by the Marquis d'Effiat and ordered by the Chevalier de Lorraine, but includes an aftermath where Detective Louis comes to the same conclusion and interrogates the Marquis:

"Now you listen to me, my friend: If you admit all to me and tell me the truth about what I want to know, then, whatever you may have done, I shall pardon you, and it will never be mentioned again. But take care not to keep anything from me, for if you do, you are a dead man. Has Madame been poisoned?"
"Yes, Sire," he said.
"And who has poisoned her?" the King asked, "and how was it done?"
He replied that the Chevalier de Lorraine had sent the poison to Beauvron and d'Effiat, and told him what I have described earlier. Whereupon the King continued to ask: (...)"And my brother, did he know?"
"No, Sire, none among us three was that stupid. He cannot keep a secret, he'd have betrayed us."
Upon this reply, the King exclaimed a loud "Ha!", like a man who after having had a constricted throat can breathe again.

From:

selenak

If this conversation happened, it didn't result in anything negative for the Chevalier or D'Effiat. On February 12th 1672, Madame de Sévigné writes to her daughter:

The King asked Monsieur who had just been in Paris: "Well, my brother, what is the talk of Paris?" Monsieur said to him: "Sire, one talks a lot about this unfortunate Marquis." - "And what do they say about him?" - "That he wanted to plead for another unfortunate man." - "And for which unfortunate man?" the King asks. "For the Chevalier de Lorraine", Monsieur says.
"But," says the King, "do you still think of this Chevalier de Lorraine? Are you worried about him? Would you love him who returned him to you?"
"Really," Monsieur said, "that would be the greatest joy anyonen could ever provide for me in my life."
"Well," the King said, "then I shall make you this present. Two days ago a courier has left. He will return, I give him back to you, and wish you to be obliged to me for the rest of your life. What's more, I'll promote him to Field Marshal of my army."
Consequently, Monsieur threw himself at the King's feet, hugged his kneeds and kissed his hand in boundless joy. The King lifted him and said to him: "My brother, brothers should not embrace like this." And he embraced him in a brotherly fashion.

Not thrilled: the English ambassador. The Chevalier de Lorraine has been permitted to return to court and to serve in the army as Field Marshal. If Madame has been poisoned, like nearly everyone in the world believes, then France regards him as the killer and is justly amazed that the King of France has so little respect of our King that he permits this creature to return to court, especially if one thinks of the impudent way he has treated the Princess throughout her life.

Edited Date: 2023-02-07 04:50 pm (UTC)

From:

landofnowhere

I don't have any history to discuss, but I saw that Princeton University Press was having a book sale that included Frederick the Great's Philosophical Writings for $10, and I thought of you people!

From:

cahn

"it was all a misunderstanding, Fritz wanted to be MT's champion and protector when he invaded Silesia!" school of thought, blaming "Austrian propaganda" for making this look like a cynical land grab and a protection racket.

looooool! (I always need these reminders, and it's great because I'm usually coming at it from a place of knowing more than I did last time it came up :) )

like Madame de Sevigné saying the soldiers of the King make excellent missionaries (to force the Huguenots to convert), and the actual preachers can do the rest.

oh wow!

The author of the quote is Parliamentary Council Lefèvre d'Ormesson, who notes into his diary on July 1668:

Should we... find this guy's diary? :P (This is a terrible and interesting story, does he have more??)

Many have disliked this strict punishment and have said that the woman should have been treated as a madwoman and immeditaely brought to the Petites-Maisons, instead of letting oneself provoked into this punishment.

:(

In one version, this started out as a kind of beard/cover story for his flirtation with his sister-in-law, Minette, and then became real, in another, La Valliere approched with and she was so devoted and crushing that he was nice to her at first, what with her not being a great beauty (too thin, and a slight limp, the courtiers said), but then fell in love with her.

That's fascinating, the different versions! Is there any historian consensus as to which it was?

(According to Horowski, Madame de Monaco was actually bi and either flirted with or had an affair with Minette herself, and later made a pass to Liselotte as well, who said no. But there is no quote supporting this in this book.)

Gosh, if you ever find the supporting evidence, I want to know! Because I want this to be true :P

Poor Minette :(((( (I had to go read some articles about how people think she actually died. Ugh, it all sounds horrible. Poison might actually have been more pleasant!)

From:

cahn

If Madame has been poisoned, like nearly everyone in the world believes

Lol, I love that Albion self-assurance!

From:

cahn

Oh neat, thank you for pointing me to that! I may have to get it, as I, uh, have read lamentably little of Fritz's actual words, even though we've been doing this for a while now!

From:

cahn

On Alexios and the Crusaders:

but tomorrow I might need him against the Normans. For example.

I laughed!

Crusaders: What kind of Christian Emperor are you anyway?

heeeee!

The irony is that Basil - who grew up to be one of the most powerful eunuch officials of the Byzantine Empire and managed to serve and survive several Emperors in a row - did not betray Romanos, but his legitimate sons did.

This sound super interesting and... I'm gonna have to wait until I'm through the German podcast and starting this one to hear the story, huh? :PP (*)

Theophanu the younger was his niece, not his daughter, plus hadn't been born in the purple at all

I totally laughed at his comparison of Theophanu with... someone I've never heard of, and the podcast guy was like "Yeah, I've never heard of her either. Anyway, that was the equivalent of Theophanu." That was great and was a very visceral way of explaining to me how not-purple Theophanu was :)

On a different note (or maybe the same note, in the sense of, things that amused me):

I mean. The readers of Voltaire's memoirs and pamphlets are not going to find themselves thinking, "Oh, I see, Fritz likes to bottom. I've read the Kinsey report, and that all checks out." !!!

LOLOLOLOLOL! The statistics are just SOMETHING ELSE.

(*) Otto III has just died, and also recently (maybe the previous episode?) is where Sylvester II became Pope and only then did I realize -- okay, this is super embarrassing but I guess I might as well admit it and amuse you guys -- that this guy "Jabert" that he's been talking about for ages and who sounded super cool and interesting but whom I had never heard of before was actually Gerbert d'Aurillac. (My brain just recognized that it sounded like (American-accented-French) Javert, okay? I'm not good at French phonetic spelling!)

(ETA: No, as you can infer, I still haven't reread Ars Magica. But now I have even more reason to!)

ETA2: Huh, it seems that Judith Tarr wrote a novel about Theophanu! I will have to read and report back! (Lol forever, Publishers Weekly didn't seem to like it at all. "But when she writes of Theophano's nuptial banquet, 'the feast dragged itself into eternity,' she could be describing this novel." Aw.)

Edited Date: 2023-02-08 06:54 am (UTC)

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Oh, hi! I absolutely love that when people see Frederick the Great, they think of us! :D

gambitten had told us about this book a while back, and it was on my list, so I snagged a copy yesterday. Thanks for the heads-up!

From:

selenak

oh wow!

No wonder Liselotte - who started out as Protestant and only converted because she had to, for her marriage - was always full of bile when it came to the hardcore Catholicism of the French court. Mind you, there are laudable exceptions, of which everyone's favourite bestselling author Fénelon is one. But there's probably a reason why Louis revoking the Edict of Nantes was actually a popular measure among the society surrounding him. And remember, for the Calas case going as it did, with nearly all Toulouse prepared to believe a father would murder his son for the intention of converting from Protestant to Catholic, you need a certain kind of society - the very one we see in action here, three quarters of a century earlier.

Should we... find this guy's diary? :P (This is a terrible and interesting story, does he have more??)

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

That's fascinating, the different versions! Is there any historian consensus as to which it was?

I've read either version in different biographies, so, no. Since we don't have a letter from Minette to Louis saying "Attention: pay court to this lady so our mothers aren't mad anymore about us flirting!", or Louise de la Valliere's secret diary, I don't think confirmation is possible for the former - it's hearsay in both cases.

Incidentally, it's hard to say whether Louis had a type, based on his mistresses. Louise de La Valliere was, everyone agreed, modest and lovely and pious and submissive. Her successor, Athenais de Montespan, was witty - her entire family was in fact famous for "the Montemart wit" - ruthless and dominating. Francoise de Maintenon, the ultimate winner of the mistresses in that Louis actually married her in a morganatic fashion, was smart, restrained, and the "soft power" type of woman who actually is responsible for a lot of decisions but is good ata making the guys thinking it was their idea. And those are just the three most famous ones, with whom he had relationships that lasted many years, as opposed to the ones he just had brief flings with, like Madame de Soubise or Olympe Mancini, Comtesse de Soissons (and mother of Eugene). Whether his first love, Marie Mancini, was a quiet submissive type or a energetic go getter depends on who describes her - as a girl, she comes across as the former, whereas as an adult woman in Rome, she's come into her own. (And btw, let's not forget the Chevalier de Lorraine during his temporary exile in Rome supposedly slept with her, presumably as another fuck you to Louis.) Based on all this, it's hard to say whether or not he and his first sister-in-law did more than courtly flirting. There was definitely gossip, but no one ever proved anything. But the story Jude Morgan used for his novel - that teenage Louis when told to dance with his young cousin said she was so thin that she looked like "the bones of the Cour des Innocentes" (i.e. the most famous cemetary in Paris), and a few years later was struck by her beauty and elegance, and that Minette for a while was the trend setting first lady at court (since the other cousin, the one Louis did marry, Maria Theresia of Spain, was too withdrawn and lethargic to be). Morgan has Jemmy suspect that she might have started out thinking to show Louis what (and whom) he could have had and then it got emotionally more serious. But like I said - we'll never know, since no letters between Louis and Minette were ever found, if they existed.

Gosh, if you ever find the supporting evidence, I want to know! Because I want this to be true :P

Well, here is her wiki entry for starters. She's the sister of the Comte de Guiche who was the Chevalier's predecessor as Philippe's favourite boyfriend, btw, and who then fell in love with Minette. 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 (when they were based on rumors as well, okay, except for Philippe/his boyfriends), which doesn't heighten my confidence; all wiki names as a source is Anne Edward's book about the entire Grimaldi dynasty.

Poor Minette :(((( (I had to go read some articles about how people think she actually died. Ugh, it all sounds horrible. Poison might actually have been more pleasant!)

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?

Speaking of poisons, I'm going to do as write-up of the Affair of the Poisons quotes as well; there's interesting stuff there, including not one but two eye witness accounts who swear that Eugene's mother Olympe was maligned and was innocent.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

I am woefully behind on commenting, but since I am not behind on book-buying... :P

selenak, since you reminded me that the Jessen volume was is part of a series and informed me that this is part of the same series, I went looking for other books, as is my wont. ;) I couldn't find a comprehensive list, but this is the list that came up on bookfinder.com

Burgund und seine Herzöge in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Amerikanische Bürgerkrieg in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Aufstieg der NSDAP in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Dreißigjährige Krieg in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Kampf um Berlin 1945 in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Mahdiaufstand in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Ungarische Volksaufstand in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Wiener Kongress in Augenzeugenberichten
Deutschland in der Weltwirtschaftskrise in Augenzeugenberichten
Deutschland unter Napoleon in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Befreiungskriege in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Deutsche Arbeiterbewegung 1848-1919 in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Deutsche Revolution 1848/49 in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Französische Revolution in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Geburt des modernen Japan in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Gründung des Deutschen Reiches 1870/71 in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Hugenottenkriege in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Kreuzzüge in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Reformation in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Russische Revolution in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Türken vor Wien in Augenzeugenberichten
Die letzten Habsburger in Augenzeugenberichten
Heinrich VIII. von England in Augenzeugenberichten
Ludwig II. von Bayern in Augenzeugenberichten
Napoleons Rußlandfeldzug in Augenzeugenberichten
Revolution und Räterepublik in München 1918/19 in Augenzeugenberichten

Which of these are of interest to you? You will not get all of them today, but if I have a shopping list, I'll keep an eye out for ones at good prices. :)

From:

selenak

Hm, I think Judith Tarr and Theophanu would be a good match, and I see I can get the book as an ebook for less than 2 Euros, so I'll aquire it!

This sound super interesting and... I'm gonna have to wait until I'm through the German podcast and starting this one to hear the story, huh? :PP (*)

The German podcast also has soap opera among royals galore. I mean, you're only three Emperors away of Henry IV, husband to Bertha (who he may or may not have seen as a sister) and then Adelheid/Eudoxia/Praxidis, she who accused him of a horrible sex life at the papal court. And before that, there's the "Three Popes with one Stroke" episode featuring Henry III deposing those three (and we get some juicy accounts about their scandals first) and starting a series of goody two shoes Popes, which is good for the church but really bad for his son. While Bamberg local hero Henry II does not have scandals to offer, he has another fierce Empress for a wife, Kunigunde, and he's the one European royalty can thank (ahem) for pointing the Church towards relations in the fourth degree or what not being incest and thus an impediment for marriage. (Not for his own marriage! He was very uxorious. But the definition of incest was a hobby of his. What can I say, he was educated as a priest for some years before his fate changed to his being able to become a Duke after all.)

Speaking of fierce Empresses, as you know all about original Adelheid the Empress, she who ruled even as a grandmother, you can see that making her into a pining semi-hysterical damsel is as bewildering an authorial decision as making Voltaire boring, can't you?

Gerbert d'Aurillac

Whereas when I got to the relevant podcasts, I thought, ah, that's the guy Mildred nominated as who Voltaire wanted to be. (French intellectual idol of young King who also accepts him as political mentor.) :)

From:

selenak

I already have the French Revolution, it was part of my reading for a seminar decades ago. As for the rest:

Burgund und seine Herzöge in Augenzeugenberichten
Der Dreißigjährige Krieg in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Deutsche Revolution 1848/49 in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Hugenottenkriege in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Kreuzzüge in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Reformation in Augenzeugenberichten
Die Türken vor Wien in Augenzeugenberichten
Revolution und Räterepublik in München 1918/19 in Augenzeugenberichten

but only in the long term, when you get bargains. I'M really overcrowded right now anyway.

From:

mildred_of_midgard

Noted!

If you want to return the favor, my copy of Hagendorf's diary arrived yesterday, but I haven't been able to find a copy of the second edition for sale, only the first one where the diarist hadn't been identified yet. If you should happen to find yourself in a library that has the copy on the shelves, and you have some free time, and the book lends itself to scanning, I would appreciate a scan of whatever introductory material in the second edition talks about the identification of Hagendorf.

No rush, I have a ton of books ahead of it on my reading list! I also owe you guys a Struensee/Denmark write-up, maybe this weekend.

From:

selenak

So, the Affair of the Poisons, which ensured that whenever someone prominent died of anything but old age (and sometimes even then), people would suspect poisoning all over Europe even more than they did before. (Like future F1 after the deaths of his two full brothers, Karl Emil and Ludwig, and feeling sick after lunching with Stepmom, suspecting his stepmother and probably also his father and becoming the first Prussian Prince to very publically escape from Prussia. Only in his case sucessfully - he made it to Hannover.) It's a rather complicated story, and I'll try to simplify it. One key problem is this: while there was some poisoning for which we have sold proof (as in, phioles with poison and correspondence mentioning poisoning), once the ball got rolling and confessions poured out of the arrested people who weren't of the nobility and thus could and did get tortured, you have to put a question mark on those confessions that comes with every confession produced by either torture or the threat of torture.

Another problem is that the underground network the French police uncovered on that occasion, which certainly did have some high class clients (hence all of Europe munching popcorn and observing the scandal) wasn't primarily consisting of poison deliveries, but provided abortions and their less-good-to-modern-eyes-looking twin service, midwife services plus letting your illegitimate child disappear, beautfy products like potions to enlarge your breasts, soothsaying and love potions. Someone like Catherine "La Voisin" did also include poisons in her offerings, but not all of the other "Sorceresses" of the Parisian scene did, plus there were certainly any number of courtiers who had used La Voisin's non-poisoning services, - a credible case could be made that Madame de Montespan, for example, who was at that point visibly losing Louis' favour, had wanted a love potion - but now found their names among the clients. Plus some of the "sorceresses" like La Voisin's daughter deduced that if they hinted at knowledge of sensational poison plots (ideally directed against the King himself), they remained alive longer, becauses then the police would have to investigate further and need you as a source, whereas if you just confess to, say, being an abortionist, you get condemned and executed immediately. So how many of the big poisoning accusations are actually true, beyond the initial cases that got the whole scandal going? Who knows.

It all starts with Marie-Magdelaine d'Aubray, Marquise de Brinvilliers. When her (a noble as well, and an alchemist) lover dies, a box is found in his posession containing phioles with poison and a letter from her demanding them from him. She makes a runner to England but gets arrested in Lüttich and brought back to France. Unlike a great many women later, she doesn't get tortured, she is nobility, and so she gets a trial in front of the highest court available in France, in which she is accused of having poisoned her father and her brothers for the inheritance she then made. Alas, the fatal box doesn't just contain letters from her, but also from a guy (noble, too) who basically had the office of highest clerical tax collector, who visited the Marquise after her lover's death and gave her a large sum of money, for what, he doesn't want to say. The Marquise confesses to having poisoned her brothers and father (with Arsenic, btw) and having intended to poison her sister as well. As a member of the nobility, she gets beheaded (once stroke, she was lucky). But now people are starting to wonder. And then an anonymous letter gets found in a Jesuit church in which the writer says that there is a a conspiracy to kill the King, and a lot of people have confessed to using poison regularly, but he can't break the seal of othe confession so can't name names, but please investigate, save the King.

=> A series of arrests follow, first of an alchemist who knew the Marquise's dead lover, then of his girlfriend, and then of the (non-noble) "sorceresses" she names - La Vigoureux (wife if a tailor), Marie Bosse (whose main trade is soothsaying via cards), and then, finally, Catherine Deshayes, wife of Antoine Voisin, hence "La Voisin". These ladies are not members of the nobility, they get the according treatment, and then they start to name noble clients left, right and center. Here's Primi Visconti (aka the guy who rebuffed the pass of the Marquis de La Valliere):

(There was) a certain Voisin, who under the pretense of sorcery and soothsaying made her house to a place of debauchery and traded with drugs and perfume which got suspected of having been poisons. Fact is that she caused a great many stillbirths and collected plants of all types. Most ladies in Paris visited her; she had alist of their names and of what they wanted from her. It got said that the Duchess of Foix wanted a potion to develop her breasts further, Madame de Vassé such a one for her hips; many wanted a secret recipe to awaken love, and several wanted the position Madame de Montespan had. Moreover, La Voisin claimed that it was due to her art that Madame de Montespan and Louvois retained the royal favor.

Madame de Montespan doesn't keep it much longer. Louis has started a fling with an 18 years old beauty named Angelique de Fontanges. (Who won't be around for long; her early death is another case of "poison? Maybe?". The final winner, as mentioned repeatedly, will be Madame de Maintenon, the former Francoise Scarron, who started out as governess of the Louis/Athenais de Montespan children, one reason, btw, why she will be such a partisan of the Duc de Maine, the oldest boy of that set, against Liselotte's son Philippe II for the regency.) La Voison makes her confession naming Madame de Montespan as a client on March 12, and in April, Madame de Montespan gets dismisssed. As Louis' mistress, mind you, not yet from court. Instead, Madame de Montespan gets an office in the Queen's household, currently owned by none other than the Comtesse de Soissons, aka Olympe Mancini, Eugene's mother.

Trichateau writes to Busby-Rabutin: This Wednesday, the Comtesse de Soissons get the order to hand over her office. This princess was staying at Chaillot in a small hows she owns there. Monsieur Colbert had to run around a lot. She talked with the the King in the evening when being with the Queen, who told her that there was a joyful surprise waiting for her. She replied with the suitable submissiveness, and finally she received two hundred thousand Taler, and with that sum, Madame de Montespan became supreme intendant of the Queen's household and now isn't the King's mistress anymore.

Meanwhile, the interrogations continue, and more and more noble names are getting named. Louvois (Minister of War, scourge of the Palatinate) writes to Louis about his conversation with La Reynie, the police boss, about the confession wave and with ill conceiled glee because the guys named are two rivals of his:

Everything which Your Majesty has seen against the Sieur de Luxemburg and the Marquis de Feuquières is nothing compared to the declaration which this interrogation contains, and in which the Sieur de Luxemburg gets accused to have demanded the death of his wife, and that of the Marshal de Créquy, and furtherly the marriage of his daughter with my son, his regaining of the Dukedom of Montmorency and glorious deeds of war which would make your Majesty forget the mistakes which he has made at Philippsburg. Monsieur de Feuquères gets described asa the most evil man of the world, who used the opportunities to sell his soul to the devil in order to move Madame Voisin to poison the uncle or guardian of a girl he wanted to marry.

In November, La Voisin accuses none other than one of three greatest writers of the age - the three being Corneille, Racine and Moliere. The guy she accuses is Racine, at this point already a living classic, member of the Academy and official historian of the King. Some years earlier, Moliere's best actress , La du Parc, left his troupe and Moliere himself for Racine, who wrote the play and the main part of Andromaque for her and also had a love affair with her. Racine's son Louis, indignantly writing after his father's death, says du Parc died of the aftermath of childbirth, that his father loved du Parc and would never have harmed her. But La Voisin claims Racine poisoned her, and the book quotes the interrogation protocol of November 21st:

Q: How did she get to know the actress Du Parc?
A: She has known her for fourteen years, they were very good friends, and she was in her confidence for all her affairs. (...) She had all the more cause to suspect (Racine) as Jean Racine always stopped her, who was the good friend of Du Parc, from visiting her during her entire illness of which she died, despite Du Parc constantly asking for her. But whenever she went there, in order to see her, she was stopped from entering, and this on Racine's orders; all she learned through Du Parc's stepmother, who calls herself Mademoiselle de Gorle, and through the daughters of Du Parc, who are in the Hotel de Soissons and have told (La Voisin) that Racine is the cause of her misery.
La de Gorle has told her that Racine, who secretly married la Du Parc, was jealous of all the world and especially of her, La Voisin, whom he distruisted; and that he got rid of Du Parc through poison because of his boundless jealousy, that Racine throughout Du Parc's illness had not left her side, that he took a precious diamond of her finger, and that he also removed the jewelry and those things owned by Du Parc which had some worth.

This testimony sounds less than convincing to the French police, and so there is no order to Racine's arrest. Unlilke for... drumroll...well, you'll haven noted La Voisin's supposed sources are staying at the Hotel de Soissons...

Letter from Bussy-Rabutin to La Rivière: I'm sharing big news with you. The special commisson for the affair of the poisons has produced orders of arrest for the Sieur de Luxemburg, the Comtesse de Soissons, the Marquise d'Alluye and Sieur de Polignac.
Furtherly, the following have been asked to appear in person in front of the commission: Madame de Bouillon, the Princess of Tingry, the wife of the Marshall de La Ferté, and Madame du Roure. Moroever, there has been an order of arrest for Cessac.
Rumor has it that the crime of the Sieur de Luxemburg has been to have poisoned a tax official for Flanders when with the army, who had provided him with royal money.
The Comtesse de Soissons gets accused of having poisoned her husband; the Marquise d'Alluye her brother-inlaw; the Princess of Tingry her newborn children; Madame de Bouillon a valet who knew about her love affairs. The King has returned a billet written by teh Duchess of Foix to her, in which she had written to La Voisin an din which she told her: "The more I rub, the less they grow." As His Majesty demanded an explanation for these words, she replied that she had asked la Voisin for a recipe for the development of her breasts.

Also arrested: two priests, who supposedly read black mass over various ladies' bodies in order to get them the objects of their desires.

From:

selenak

The Abbé de Choisy about Eugene's Mom and her reaction to all of this: The King, with a last consideration of the memory of the late Cardinal - i.e. .Mazarin, Olympe's uncle - sent Sieur de Bouillon to her, in order to tell her that she had a choice: either to go to the Bastille tomorrow, and to endure the hardship of imprisonment and condemnation there, or to leave France at once. The Duke of Villeroy and the Marquise d'Alluye both were with her at the time. She asked for their advice. Everyone wanted her to go to the Bastille, since she said she was innocent, but she did not dare to do it; she told them: "Monsieur de Louvois is my mortal enemy, because I refused to marry my daughter to his son. He has so much credit that he can get me accused, he can provide false witnesses. If an order of arrest has been issued for a person of my standing, then he will complete his crime and will let me die on the block, or at least let me rot in prison. I prefer to escape. I will justify myself later. Her dear friend the Marquises d'Alluye went with her.

La Voisin gets condemned to death on January 19th, and the Duke of Luxemburg brought to the Bastille. Madame de Sevigné, the most famous female letter writer of her generation, writes on the 29th to the Count of Guiteau:

At a distance, don't you have the impression that we breathe in nothing but poisons here and are surrounded by sacrilege and abortions? Indeed, all of this causes disgust everywhere in Europe, and whoever will read us in a hundred years will lament for those who were witness to all these accusations. You know that poor Luxemburg went to the Bastille on his own free will; he himself was the officer leading himself there, he presented the arrest warrent to Bèzemaux. He came from Saint-Germain and met Madame de Montespan on the way; they both left their carriages in order to talk undisturbed with each other; he cried a lot. (...) At first, he was brought into a rather beautiful room. Three hours later the order arrived to treat him more strictly. Now he's residing on the top floor in a miserable room. He was interrogated for four hours by Sirs Bezon and de la Reynie.
As for the Comtesse de Soissons, that is another matter entirely. She has sworn that she is innocent. She left in the night and said she did not want to endure prison or the shame to be confronted with beggars and villains. The Marquise d'Alluye went with her. They took the way to Namur. There is no intention of pursuing them. There is something natural and noble in this behavior. As far as I am concerned, I approve of it. It's said that the things she is accused of are nothing but idiocies, which she has told a hundred times, as one does if one comes from these sorceresses or however they call themselves.

The Duke is eventually released. None of these nobles mentioned in the book seems to be executed. La Voisin, otoh, gets burned alive on February 22nd. Madame de Sevigné:

I'll tell you about la Voisin now. It wasn't on Wednesday that she was burned, as I mistakenly told you earlier, it was yesterday. She knew her sentence since Thursday, which was very unusual. In the evening, she told her guards: "HOw now, don't we keep medianoch?" She ate with them at midnight, for the hell of it, for it wasn't a fasting day. She drang a lot of wine. She sang twenty drinking songs. On Tuesday, she was put though the regular and extraordinary interrogation - the later is the euphemism for torture, of course - ; she had eaten and slept for eight hours. She was confronted with the ladies de Dreux and Le Fréron - who were supposed to have killed their husbands - and with some others while on the rack. There is no public declaration yet what she has testified. There is just rumor that a few more extraordinary things have been revealed. (...) She appeared on the cart dressed in white; that is the dress for being burned. She was very red faced, and one could see she violently pushed back the confessor and his cruxifix. We saw her pass from Hotel de Sully.

This still isn't the end, though, because there are more arrests, more interrogations, and now Marguerite Voisin, the daughter, accuses Madame de Montespan of having been not a one off but a regular client of her mothers. And of having ordered Black Masses. Which is when we get a letter from Louis himself:

After I saw the declaration which Marguerite Voisin, prisoner in my chateau de Vincennes, has made on the 12th of the past month, I write you this letter in order to tell you that it is my wish that you use all your abilities in order to bring light to the facts which are contained in this declaration and in the interrogation, that you take care that the comparisons of protocols, confrontations and investigations made about the mentioned declaration and the interrogation are noted in separate documents.

Separate, because the one naming the mother of seven of his children sure as hell won't be published.

From Marguerite Voisin's interrogation protocol, which Louis has just read:

She has seen that two masses were read by Guibourg - that's the main black mass priest, who has already admitted of having read black masses for Voisin's clients - (...) The first one she knows about happened more than six years ago. She helped her mother to prepare the necessary things, to wit, a mattress to be put on chairs two sools on both sides on which the chandeliers were put. Then Guibourg entered dressed in his mass robe from the little room that was next, and then la Voisin let the woman enter over whose body the mass should be read, and told her - Marguerite Voisin - to leave.
When she was older, her mother didn't hesitate anymore and she was present during masses of this type and has seen that the lady was put on the mattress completely naked, the head supported through a cushion on an upturned chair, the legs hanging down, a hankerchief on her body, and on the hankerchief, placed above the stomach, a cruxifix and the cup. Madame de Montespan had such a mass read for hserlf by Guibourg at La Voisin's place three years ago. She came around ten in the evening and left around midnight. And as La Voisin told the lady that she needed to name the times at which one should read the other two masses that were needed to achieve the success for her cause, the later said she couldn't find the time for them, and that she (La Voisin) would have to do without her and would have to do everything needed to bring this affair to a good end. Whereupon (La Voisin) promised her that she would substitute herself to have the two masses read in hers, the Marquise de Montespan's cause. Some time later, she (Marguerite Voisin) was prsent a mass which Guibourg read in this way over the body of her mother, and during the sacrifice he named the name Louis de Bourbon and that of a lady which consisted of two or three names, but did not say the name Montespan.

By now, La Reynier has 140 people prisoners in both the Bastille and Vincennes, and every single one of them, as he writes to Louvois, has been accused of either having used poison or of trading with poison. Louvois orders the files to be brought to him. These include supportive evidence against Madame de Montespan, who is named as a client of La Voisins by Le Sage (another ex priest turned black mass priest). Accoding to them, there was an additional plot going on: while Montespan ordered a love potion so she could give it to Louis, in reality what was prepared was a poison which would kill him, but without her knowledge. Otoh, she did want something lethal against young Mademoiselle de Fontanges. Who does die. Louis this time does explicitly NOT want an autopsy. The Affair of the Poisons interrogations won't be finished until July 1682. Inconclusion, there were 210 interrogations, 319 orders of arrest, 318 actual arrests, 88 people condemned. La Reynie in his final report says:
It is well advised to end the comission, but one has to avoid leaving the impression this happens out of fatigue or because of the disgust of the judges, so that a great many interested people won't use this as an excuse to ridicule our justice system.

Well, quite, La Reynie. So: was everyone accused guilty? Were some, and others were accused the same way victims of with hunts just a generation earlier were? Was everyone after the Marquise de Brinvilliers innocent? The biggest argument against the last one is that La Reynie actually did NOT want to produce that many accusations of VIPs, whereas during a witch trial, the interrogators do want more accusations and operate accordingly. Otoh: Madame de Montespan was both unpopular and on her way out, which everyone knew. So more than one of the accused could have named her as a safe bet. Or she could, indeed have been so desperate to remain Maitresse en Titre that she resorted to Satanism and love potions. We will never know. But the difference in sentences for noble and not noble accused is yet another reason why I am utterly unsurprised the Revolution happened (if a century later.)

Edited Date: 2023-02-09 08:52 pm (UTC)

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:

cahn

Excellent, and same here (less than $2), so I shall read it too, eventually -- even if it's as boring as Publishers Weekly said, my sense is that Tarr is usually pretty good with her historicity (or at least noting when she's diverged), so I shall learn something, at least!

I confess that I have been paying more attention to the soap opera bits in any case, so I'm excited at the teasers for more :)

Speaking of fierce Empresses, as you know all about original Adelheid the Empress, she who ruled even as a grandmother, you can see that making her into a pining semi-hysterical damsel is as bewildering an authorial decision as making Voltaire boring, can't you?

I can indeed! I trust Tarr to do better than that :P

From:

cahn

Wow, this is all just something!

Another problem is that the underground network the French police uncovered on that occasion, which certainly did have some high class clients (hence all of Europe munching popcorn and observing the scandal) wasn't primarily consisting of poison deliveries, but provided abortions and their less-good-to-modern-eyes-looking twin service, midwife services plus letting your illegitimate child disappear, beautfy products like potions to enlarge your breasts, soothsaying and love potions.

...I can see how that would muddy the waters a great deal!

a box is found in his posession containing phioles with poison and a letter from her demanding them from him.

WHOOPS

And then an anonymous letter gets found in a Jesuit church in which the writer says that there is a a conspiracy to kill the King, and a lot of people have confessed to using poison regularly, but he can't break the seal of othe confession so can't name names, but please investigate, save the King.

Okay but this sounds... less than convincing...

The final winner, as mentioned repeatedly, will be Madame de Maintenon, the former Francoise Scarron, who started out as governess of the Louis/Athenais de Montespan children, one reason, btw, why she will be such a partisan of the Duc de Maine, the oldest boy of that set, against Liselotte's son Philippe II for the regency.)

Aww! That sounds endearing to me.

The Comtesse de Soissons gets accused of having poisoned her husband; the Marquise d'Alluye her brother-inlaw; the Princess of Tingry her newborn children; Madame de Bouillon a valet who knew about her love affairs. The King has returned a billet written by teh Duchess of Foix to her, in which she had written to La Voisin an din which she told her: "The more I rub, the less they grow." As His Majesty demanded an explanation for these words, she replied that she had asked la Voisin for a recipe for the development of her breasts.

The poor Comtesse de Soissons, she just wanted bigger breasts and she gets arrested for poisoning!

i>Also arrested: two priests, who supposedly read black mass over various ladies' bodies in order to get them the objects of their desires.

This also sounds less than convincing to me.

From:

cahn

I prefer to escape. I will justify myself later. Her dear friend the Marquises d'Alluye went with her.

Well, I guess you said no one got executed, but quite frankly I cannot blame her! There is something natural and noble in this behavior. As far as I am concerned, I approve of it. It's said that the things she is accused of are nothing but idiocies, which she has told a hundred times, as one does if one comes from these sorceresses or however they call themselves. Yeah, I'm with you, Madame de Sevigné!

Separate, because the one naming the mother of seven of his children sure as hell won't be published.

Oof!

From Marguerite Voisin's interrogation protocol

I appreciate that you bring up in the previous comment the context that if she confesses to a bunch of stuff, then they won't execute her. Because otherwise I would have thought I should have taken Marguerite's confession much more seriously.

Anyway, this was fascinating as always, thank you!

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:

selenak

....Better than that, but Adelheid is the relentlessly mean and jealous mother-in-law in three quarters of the book, until Otto II. dies, at which point she becomes a respectable tough old bird and worthy ally. It just about works as a pov thing, there's only one of those in the novel (not Theophanu but her bff and cousin, who hates Adelheid for being relentlessly mean to Theophanu, though she later once the two ally grudglingly admits Adelheid has good qualities, too), but this is not a novel for Adelheid fans.

As you can deduce, I've now read it, and basically I liked it, it's well told, and most characters, including the main villain (Henry the Quarrelsome of course) aren't one note but layered, but alas for historicity, Judith Tarr seems to have based her novel on sources that were published in the 1960s. And research marches on. This unfortunately means two key premises of the book can't have happened, to wit: in the novel, Theophanu the HRE is actually the daughter of Theophano the Byzantine Empress and her first husband, the Emperor Romanos. Her bff and cousin (or rather, aunt), our true heroine and the title character, nicknamed Aspasia (as her birth name is also Theophano) is a sister of Romanos, and the daughter of the previous Emperor Constantine. (Which makes her literally born in the purple.) Theophano the Byzantine Empress is at the start of the novel on to her second marriage, to Nikopheros Phokas, brilliant General and lousy Emperor, and as Tarr is basing this on 1960s sources, Theophano the Byzantine Empress is absolutely guilty of arranging the murder of Nikopheros with her lover John Tsimitikes, who then ditches her, offering her as a scapegoat to the Patriarch, so he can be crowned by same. Tarr's novel has John (I.) Tsimitikes also kill Aspasia's (fictional) husband Demetrius for good measure, so she hates him. Now, current research has Theophanu the HRE being the niece of John Tismitikes, daughter of his sister, and thus not born in the Purple or having grown up in the palace at all, which makes for a completely different childhood than her being the daughter of Theophano the Byzantine Empress and Romanos and co-raised by Aspasia. This isn't Judith Tarr's fault (in the 1960s, "maybe she was the daughter of Romanos and Theophano" was still a theory for Theophanu the HRE), and John's coup plus Nikopheros' murder makes for a great suspenseful opening chapter, but it still means that the backstory is completely wrong (as far as we know today) and can't have happened.

Later on, when young Theophanu talks John the Ursurper into picking her to give to Otto the Great's emissaries for his son, there's also the problem that while John was more diplomatic than Nikopheros and did hand over one of his relations for the purpose of good relationships and diplomatic recognition of his newly gained status by Otto, it's doubtful that he would have sent not just one genuine Byzantine Princess to the Germans but two, since he okays Aspasia coming with her. Especially since the now widowed Aspasia could legitimize any alternate claimant. That's what I mean about two key premises being historically unlikely.

The novel itself, though, as a novel is very readable, and I suspect the Publisher's Weekly reviewer would have been fine had it been set among the Tudors or in another English history setting they were familiar with, instead of one that was new and requiring accordingly more attention. Gerbert the future Sylvester II is a key supporting character, and gets a couple of great scenes.

From:

selenak

Aww! That sounds endearing to me.

To you and to me, but not to Liselotte, who had already hated Madame de Maintenon for several seasons, not least because Maintenon, who had grown up a Protestant and than converted to the Catholic faith by conviction, not necessity like Liselotte, was a hardcore Catholic fundamentalist, and Liselotte blamed Louis' later life attitude religion wise on her. All the Duc de Maine promotion at the expense of her son and with the insinuations Philippe the future Regent was really after the throne himself, had already offed much of the royal family and would kill future Louis XV. as soon as he got his hands on the kid was just the ice on the bitter cake. But it's always worth remembering Madame de Maintenon did raise the Duc de Maine, and also his sister whom Louis XIV married to Philippe the future Regent, to the great indignation of both Philippe the Gay and Liselotte, who were in rare agreement that for their son to marry Louis' bastard daughter was godawful. Madame de Maintenon looking out for the kids she had seen more of than her mother, otoh, is all to natural.

The poor Comtesse de Soissons, she just wanted bigger breasts and she gets arrested for poisoning!

No, the lady who wanted bigger breasts was the Duchesse de Foix. These are all different ladies named in the sentence, with different accusations aimed at them.

From:

selenak

Well, I guess you said no one got executed, but quite frankly I cannot blame her!

Me neither, I would have been out of there at once. Especially since the Marquise de Brinvilliers, who started this whole scandal, had been executed, and I'm sure Olympe remembered that. Spending many years in the Bastille, even in an nice room, would also not have been my fate of choice. Where it starts to get questionable is by her leaving kid Eugene behind, but then a) noble ladies did little childraising themselves anyway, and b) she probably thought that growing up at the court of Louis XIV was better for his later career and prospects. As an exile, she couldn't have assumed she'd be able to give her son the same prospects. Little did she know Eugene was getting nowwhere at the court of Louis XIV but as an exile himself would launch a brilliant military career against Louis.

I appreciate that you bring up in the previous comment the context that if she confesses to a bunch of stuff, then they won't execute her. Because otherwise I would have thought I should have taken Marguerite's confession much more seriously.

Oh, it's still entirely possible that Marguerite was telling nothing but the truth, and certainly if you've ever read a novel set in this era that includes the Affair of the Poisons, black masses do happen. In a superstitious age, it would have been one more thing to fleece the paying nobility for. However, as I wrote, I can't help but consider that the non noble women accused were as good as dead for being abortionists alone the moment they got arrested, and they must have known that. Any hope for clemency and/or staying alive a few months longer would have been in providing information, and spectacular information worked best. Moreover, as you know I've read quite a lot about the witch trials that happened in the same century just a few decades earlier, and they feature a lot of black masses being reported under interrogation, and in these cases, no one assumes all these women were telling the truth. Meaning: these stories were well entrenched in the public subconscious. Whether or not La Voisin offered Black Masses for the customers willing to pay more to get Satan himself on their side, Marguerite would have known approximately how a Black Mass was supposed to be staged, because there were so many pamphlets with such stories making the rounds.

Incidentally, while the Affair of the Poisons shows up in many a fiction set in this era - like the Angelique novels, or the tv series Versailles in its second season - my favourite of Judith Merkle Riley's novels, The Oracle Glass, has it at its centre and from an unsual perspective; our heroine is a young smart and handicaped girl, Genevieve, who has fallen out with her family for plot reasons, nearly dies, but instead is saved and ends up getting mentored by La Voisin who uses her as one of her soothsayers. So the main characters aren't the nobles but the ring of alchemists, abortionists, soothsayers, and yes, also poisoners working in Paris, and Genevieve's mixed feelings about her mentor, once she has figured out the full extent of La Voisin's services, make for a great central push-pull relationship.

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:

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!