Once again ...

... I haven't actually stopped reading. Eight weeks of learning how to live a new life, mid-divorce, have rather interfered with my time and attention span.

But I still have my Kindle. I am immersed in a nineteenth-century biography of Marie Antoinette by Charles Duke Yonge, having already read Madame Campan's Memoirs of the Court of Marie Antoinette, Queen of France.  Why is it that the queen seems to be the very epicenter of the French Revolutionary whirlwind? Perhaps because I read books about her. If I condescended to read books about Danton, perhaps he would seem the very epicenter of the French revolutionary whirlwind.

And was she an "ordinary woman," as Stefan Zweig called her, totally unable to cope with the disasters at the end of her life? (Could anyone?) Or was she quite astute, only tragically thrust onto a ridiculous stage by an accident of birth, and then surrounded, seemingly mid-performance, by a gang of thugs and fools who very much and very simply wanted to kill her? In 1787 she wrote of changes in French politics to her friend, the Duchesse de Polignac, vacationing in England:

The words 'opposition' and 'motions' are established here as in the English Parliament, with this difference, that in London, when people go into opposition, they begin by denuding themselves of the favors of the king; instead of which, here numbers oppose all the wise and beneficent views of the most virtuous of masters, and still keep all he has given them. It may be a clever way of managing, but it is not so gentleman-like. The time of illusion is past, and we are tasting cruel experience. We are paying dearly to-day for our zeal for and enthusiasm for the American war ....

To me this does not sound like the helpless, befeathered, sleepy-eyed flibbertigibbet of the Vigee-Lebrun portraits, nor does it fit in with the sort of popular half-knowledge which understands Marie Antoinette as somehow really ancillary to the whole exciting business, but anyway deserving of her fate because she was rich, or idle, or ignorant, or titled, or a woman. Then again, it's possible that the people around her at the time knew perfectly well she was not a helpless flibbertigibbet, but rather an anti-revolutionary conspirator looking for help from her foreign and imperial relations, and lying about it, up to the very end. This was treason, though to her, queen and daughter of an empress, it was clear she had every right to bring her riotous and misguided people back to "calmness." "What is going on in France," she wrote, "would be an example too dangerous to other countries, if it were left unpunished."

And here we are, two days after Bastille Day. Still apparently unpunished. But I must go on reading.

A Versailles Christmas-tide by Mary Stuart Boyd

A pleasant little book. I downloaded it from Project Gutenberg without any of its illustrations, to save memory on my Kindle, but that may have been a mistake; judging by the space allotted them, half the point of the memoir seems to have been the  pictures. They were drawn by the author's husband A. S. Boyd, whose art appeared in Punch and who himself appeared in the Who's Who of 1900.

Even bereft so, it's a pleasant little book. The Boyds, an English couple, receive word that their teenaged son, away at school in Versailles, has come down with scarlet fever. They set out at once -- "it was full noon when the news came, and nightfall saw us dashing through the murk of a wild mid-December night towards Dover pier" -- and after about a day and a half, a boat, a train to Paris, a drive across the city, and another train bring them "jolting in a fiacre over the stony streets of Versailles."

The following nine chapters gently tell the story of the parents' observations and small adventures while they winter unexpectedly in this eerily forgotten corner of France. Only twelve miles from Paris, "Versailles is not ancient; it is old, completely old. Since the fall of the Second Empire it has stood still. Most of the clocks have run down, as though they realised the futility of trying to keep pace with the rest of the world." The Boy recovers, as we know he will (this is not a writer to stun us with a tragedy at the end). Since he is being nursed by the Soeur of the Red Cross hospital in town, who only seems to allow parental visits at mealtimes, Mr. and Mrs. Boyd simply wait, and knock about Versailles for the better part of a month. They watch the goings-on among their fellow hotel guests, or at the vegetable market, where they buy and decorate a Christmas tree as a surprise for the invalid. Because it is Christmas, they watch the goings-on at the local Notre Dame, where silent worshipers contemplate a crèche, or attend to private spiritual needs.

Here a pretty girl returned thanks for evident blessings received; there an old spinster, the narrowness of whose means forbade her expending a couple of sous on the hire of a chair, knelt on the chilly flags and murmured words of gratitude for benefits whereof her appearance bore no outward indication.

Most interesting for the modern reader are the Boyds' leisurely tours of the palace of Versailles in the days before it was -- I should think -- a full-on, cleaned-up tourist destination, as crowded and lockstep with routines and défendus as it probably ever was when the Sun King's court adored him there. Early on in her book, Mrs. Boyd quickly sketches memories of a previous, rubberneck visit -- "a palace of fatiguing magnificence" -- but now in the off season while she is living in the town, she goes there again and really explores. Now she is given a private tour of the hidden staircase, "dark, narrow, and hoary with the dust of years," by which Marie Antoinette fled the invading crowds in October, 1789, and she claims to have asked to see it only after surmising, all on her own, that it must exist. ("... I was puzzling over the transparent fact that either of the apparent exits would have led her directly into the hands of the enemy, when the idea of a secret staircase suggested itself.") She visits the hameau, the queen's little fake dairy farm, and records it still abandoned and unkempt because its previous owners had been dragged away. Her writing is very pretty, and deserves quoting at length.

About the pillars supporting the verandah-roof of the chief cottage and that of the wide balcony above, roses and vines twined lovingly. And though it was the first day of January the rose foliage was yet green and bunches of shrivelled grapes clung to the vines. It was lovely then; yet a day or two later, when a heavy snowfall had cast a white mantle over the village, and the litle lake was frozen hard, the scene seemed still more beautiful in its ghostly purity.

At first sight there was no sign of decay about the long-deserted hamlet. The windows were closed, but had it been ealy morning, one could easily have imagined that the pseudo villagers were alseep behind the shuttered casements, and that soon the Queen, in some charming déshabillé, woudl come out to breathe the sweet morning air and to inhale the perfume of the climbing roses on the balcony overloking the lake, where gold-fish darted to and fro among the water-lilies ....

The sunset glamour had faded and the premature dusk of mid-winter was falling as, approaching nearer, we saw where the roof-thatch had decayed, where the insidious finger of Time had crumbled the stone walls. A chilly wind arising, moaned through the naked trees. The shadow of the guillotine seemed to brood oppressively over the scene, and, shuddering, we hastened away.

I'm sure I don't know why, but perhaps some psychiatrist could explain why middle class, middle aged women, perhaps particularly Anglo women, stand ever fascinated by Marie Antoinette. Do French or for that matter Austrian women swoon over her quite as much? Do we recognize her as one of our own, though shrouded in far more than the glamor of mere foreignness? Stefan Zweig subtitled his biography of her "Portrait of an Average Woman," in keeping with his thesis that her fate and the fate of those around her might have been less tragic had she possessed any outsize abilities. Perhaps we like her because we see her as wife, mother, interested in friends, parties, rehabbing the house, elevated as a teenager to the highest and richest and most delightful sphere -- first Dauphine, then Queen of France! -- above all, innocent. Mrs. Boyd's book on visiting her ill son would have been far shorter had she not included two whole chapters on this woman and a great many of her compeers ("to me the Palace of Versailles is peopled by the ghosts of many women"). But her fascination with the queen fascinates also because, as a practical matter, from this witness in 1900 we enjoy the ghoulish little thrill of seeing the hameau as it can never be again. For her it was a crumbling but living thing. With her we can look at the rotting thatch and murmur inwardly, "just a little more than a hundred years ago ... not even repaired." I doubt it's quite so authentically, "oppressively" ghostly today.

 

Image from chateauversailles.fr, the official website of the Château de Versailles.

Yes, the Boy recovers. Like the boy in the (oppressive) children's story The Velveteen Rabbit, his things all have to be burned once he is well -- which is why his parents, in all their hurry, took care to bring him only old outgrown toys from his playroom at home anyway. It was 1900. No antibiotics. Apparently time, luck, emotional succor, and a boiled milk diet saw him through. At the end of it he is able to say, in the speech patterns only a Victorian thirteen-year-old could muster, " 'Do you know, I've rather enjoyed it!' " And so have we.

Elizabeth and her German Garden by Elizabeth von Arnim (Marie Annette Beauchamp)

The introduction to this book is almost as interesting as the book itself, for it explains, briefly and lucidly, the life and works of our authoress, and why she happened to have two names. The lady was born in Australia Marie Annette Beauchamp, and was a cousin of the more famous, New Zealand born writer Katharine Mansfield (nee Kathleen Mansfield Beauchamp). Reared in England, where she "was always called Elizabeth," she married, or "was persuaded to marry" a German count, and so became a rather young countess Elizabeth von Arnim. For the publication of her first book, Elizabeth and her German Garden, the former Miss Beauchamp acquired in 1898 a third name: for in the gentle but surely expiring tradition of lady writers even then, she was at first Anonymous.

The book was a huge success, so that for subsequent editions her name, or at any rate her German name, was permitted to grace the cover. The Garden was followed in later years by more books, a few of which we might know better. She wrote Mr. Skeffington, made into that great movie of the same name in the early 1940s with Bette Davis and Claude Rains; she wrote Enchanted April, made into a movie in the early 1990s starring actors not quite so well known.

All this we have from one R. McGowan, writing in San Jose on April 11, 1998. Apparently he or she is the one responsible for getting Elizabeth and her German Garden scanned into the files of Project Gutenberg as long ago as that. Indeed he closes with, "In the centennial year of this book's first publication, I hope that its availability through Project Gutenberg will stir some renewed interest in Elizabeth and her delightful work. She is, I would venture, my favorite author ...."

I don't think I'll count Elizabeth as my favorite author quite yet. Her rough diary of a year at her country estate is certainly a unique view into a strange and vanished world -- faint praise; any good book should be that -- but there is also something unpleasantly dreamlike in these cool, guarded, yet outlandish portrayals of family, guests, servants, routine, holidays, chores, and weird excursions. There is warmth in the garden, but only there. And even there, the reader who is also a gardener will not be able to follow her too far in her hobby, even in sympathy, unfortunately. Though she began as an absolute amateur, still she was the wife of a count, and had the means -- the pin money -- to order things like a hundred rose bushes at a time, and to speak of stream and woods. Like so many garden writers, where she says "garden," she means property. There is a big difference, even if one tries to rejoice for her.

The rough diary, set down from the beginning of May to the end of the next April, is one half given over to the garden, and one half to a chronicle of indoor domesticities, chief among them a long midwinter visit from Irais and Minora. These are two women whom Elizabeth would far rather not have left on her hands, especially Minora, who is merely a young relation of a friend, taken in as a favor because she is alone in Germany and requires chaperoning. The girl also has literary pretensions. She is gathering material for a book on Germany. Elizabeth and Irais find her ignorant, credulous, and yet absurdly timid when it comes to any chance for an authentic German adventure.

Such as, for instance, a sleigh ride to the Baltic coast in the depths of winter. Minora starts out happily enough with her two companions, but after six hours of the cold and a cold picnic and then the swiftly gathering darkness, and pop-eyed, faux innocent assurances from Elizabeth that the elderly coachman doesn't fall asleep and overturn the carriage too often, she turns desperate and drops broad hints that they ought to stop at a neighbor's house for the night and continue home in the morning. Upon that she is treated to a long, sumptuously composed speech from Irais about how vulgar and pushing such a visit would be, and how even if they all were such rubes as to dare it, she herself would promptly be seated in the most uncomfortable chair in the house, in the spot preordained for unexpected visitors who are also virgins of no rank. Granted Minora's idea was a little awkward, still the reader wonders if indeed German etiquette at this time was so atrocious, or if Irais was indulging in deviltry, or if Elizabeth was making the entire scene up for the sheer joy of invention.

Regardless, it makes one sympathize with Minora, even though perhaps she was sometimes an annoying chit. And, to be fair to Elizabeth, long country house visits must have worn on the hostess' nerves in any society or era where they were once commonly made. Elizabeth wanted to get back to her garden and her family privacy. Still, in setting the stage for this long and not very funny story, Elizabeth had told us that she also likes to take her truly wearisome summer guests to these same Baltic beaches. The great joke there is that the seacoast in summer swarms with mosquitoes, which spoil the expectations of visitors who had thrilled to the suggestion of refreshing ocean breezes. After that, they tend to pack their bags and go home. So, I think, would I. I think also I do not make Elizabeth one of my favorite writers, not just yet.

A couple of scenes, if they are not much warmer than any others, nevertheless ring with a likable and unmistakable truth. In one, the young wife, mother and gardener tells us what it was like, not only to have servants to do your work, but to be forbidden to do your own work -- even if it was work you loved:

I did one warm Sunday in last year's April during the servants' dinner hour, doubly secure from the gardener by the day and the dinner, slink out with a spade and a rake and feverishly dig a little piece of ground and break it up and sow surreptitious ipomaea [morning glory], and run back very hot and guilty into the house, and get into a chair and behind a book and look languid just in time to save my reputation.

This was the mistress of the estate, and she could not garden. In another scene, that same young mistress proves her mettle when it is time to sack one of those servants. One day a door to a parlor swings open and the governess, Miss Jones, is accidentally overheard criticizing her employers in a private talk with our Minora. She pronounces, in a general way, that most parents "are not wise," that most pious husbands including the present master were probably rakes as bachelors, and that it's a sore trial for the governess to have to be polite and "even humble" to such pompous fools. Elizabeth walks in to the parlor, icily invites Minora to tea, and tells the governess she "wants the children for a little while." The next day, Miss Jones is gone, flung out into the great world with no good references, we may be sure. No mention of consulting the husband, "the Man of Wrath," in all this. No need to, it seems.

R. McGowan's introduction tells us that in time, Elizabeth had to leave this idyllic home -- we never quite know where it is, except that it is fifteen miles from the Baltic -- and go on to a probably much more urban second half of life. (Back in England? We don't know.) After the Man of Wrath died, she circulated among people fine enough to introduce her to friends like H.G. Wells and Bertrand Russell, whose brother she married. Somehow, one doesn't see men like that mucking about in the compost days from any town, and knowing the names of a hundred roses, too.

The second marriage ended in divorce. With the outbreak of World War II, she fled to America, where she died in 1941.

Now of course the Garden is not all unpleasantly dreamlike, and mosquitoes and sacked servants. There is humor in it, and it would be unfair to leave you with no idea of it.

"I really think, Elizabeth," said Irais to me later, when the click of Minora's typewriter was heard hesitating from the next room, "that you and I are writing her book for her. She takes down everything we say. Why does she copy all that about the baby? I wonder why mothers' knees are supposed to be touching? I never learned anything at them, did you? But then in my case they were only stepmother's, and nobody ever sings their praises."

"My mother was always at parties," I said; "and the nurse made me say my prayers in French."

And there is the garden and the flowers, "which I have loved so much." (Even on the last page we hear a hint of a goodbye.)

"I love tulips better than any other spring flower; they are the embodiment of alert cheerfulness and tidy grace, and next to a hyacinth look like a wholesome, freshly tubbed young girl beside a stout lady whose every movement weighs down the air with patchouli."

I'm curious to know what Elizabeth's last novel, Mr. Skeffington, is like. Of course I have seen the movie, but I'd like to know if Skeffington shows some kind of arcing journey of the woman and the writer. I think it must, unless Hollywood transformed it sight unseen. From idyllic and adored German garden, the titled young mother, thirty, becomes a seventy-year-old telling the tale of a Jewish banker who barely escapes with his life from a Germany that now occupies another universe.

The Letters of the Right Honourable Lady Mary Wortley Montague (1790); Memoirs of Lady Fanshawe (1676)

Two English ladies, living two generations apart, travel half the world in pursuance of their husbands' careers. Lady Mary made a circuit from London through the Low Countries to Austria to Hungary to the Ottoman capital, and from there via the Mediterranean to north Africa, Italy, and thence to Paris and then home; all this over the course of about two years, 1716-1718, while her husband was an ambassador. In the 1650s and 1660s, Lady Fanshawe covered less ground but also had a rougher time of it, for the English Civil War you might say crafted her itinerary. Her husband, later the baronet Sir Richard Fanshawe, sided with the monarchy against Oliver Cromwell, and so the couple spent a great deal of time during the Commonwealth beating about from England to the Netherlands to France to Spain -- anywhere royal heads were still safe -- raising money for the dispossessed prince who, on Cromwell's death, became King Charles II.

Both women wrote books which, if not timeless repositories of wisdom, are nevertheless remarkable time capsules of life and adventure in their respective eras. Lady Mary's Letters are the more interesting to read, since she was a better, indeed a delightful writer who not only performed at concert pitch for an audience of great friends like Alexander Pope himself, but also carefully chose and polished what she wanted posterity to see. Her book only came out decades after her death. She was probably a fun person to be around, too, if perhaps a little snooty. She loves being the clear-eyed, liberated and logical Protestant Englishwoman, asking tough questions of the friars showing her holy relics in Bavarian churches. If the church possesses, for instance, both the mantle of a saint and a silver-plated griffin's claw, does that mean the griffin was also a saint? Her host smiled abashedly.

Lady Fanshawe, however, probably led a more interesting life, at least to the reader sitting in comfort and clicking through her Memoirs on a Kindle. (What would the ladies have thought about that?) In old age, she wrote in firm but somewhat pedestrian style of all the things that had happened to her on her travels, almost week by week, for years. She wrote for her one surviving son, so there are many family details that he could have untangled better than we can do. She seems to have had no desire to please a fretful posterity with gay, polished summations: these memoirs were meant to honor her late husband, and so she fleshed out anything and everything that concerned him, right down to the apparently photographic memories of official state ceremonies (he was an ambassador, too), and to what guards wore which uniforms, and what the people lining the dusty roads, cheering, looked like.

Yet what with the travel and the narrow escapes and the forged passports, the shipwrecks and the perpetual hunt for money, one wonders how the former Ann Harrison herself stood it. Perhaps she found it wonderfully "interesting" too, and all for the service of a noble and godly prince. Perhaps seventeenth century Englishwomen were simply made of sterner stuff than we can imagine. I would think after a while, the adventures would simply turn ghastly, and the reward of reaching a career in the wasp's nest of Stuart diplomacy, only to find betrayal and disgrace there, would finally break anyone's spirit. The twenty pregnancies added in must have been small help in times of family turmoil. (For her part Lady Mary, in the course of her Letters, appears to have had two.) Six miscarriages, including a set of triplet boys, fourteen births, withal four survivals to adulthood: Lady Fanshawe recounts them all, and notes in every case when death happened and where "my son" or "my daughter" is buried. For one decade-long stretch, she lost a child, on average, every two years.

It's best to let these ladies speak for themselves, but before listening to them, it's also wise to note one way in which both their eras now overlap our own. It lies in their experience of Islam. For several centuries now, we Westerners, we Americans especially, have been able to develop an amnesia about Islam because we have not much encountered it. Until very recently, the U.S. Marines' hymn's lyrics about "the shores of Tripoli" might have been the only (and beyond oblique) reference to Islam remotely a part of American life. We are accustomed instead to religion as a sedate, gentle human construct -- each one a part of the civic fabric -- and to understanding that everyone simply agrees, one day a week, to let one another worship peacefully where all choose, all faiths being essentially the same: benign.

Islam is different, and our ancestors saw it. Lady Fanshawe, sailing from England to the safety of the Continent circa 1650, knew that the approach of a Turkish vessel meant the real threat of a combat, capture, and slavery. "When we had just passed the Straits, we saw coming towards us, with full sails, a Turkish galley well manned, and we believed we should all be carried away slaves ...." She was not a hyperventilating Islamophobe. The Muslim slave trade was vigorous to say the very least. Two generations later, Lady Mary traveled and lived in the Ottoman Empire as a distinguished guest, made great progress in learning Turkish and appears also to have made polite noises when her hosts encouraged her to study "alcoran." She wrote, for public consumption, glowing descriptions of splendidly rich, beautiful cool Turkish homes sumptuously appointed in rare woods and and glowing fabrics, all plashing with fountains, and of fields and gardens blooming in the warm Mediterranean January; she wrote of her cloistered friend, the enchanting Fatima, exquisite and serene.

But she also traveled through the wild Serbian countryside in company with "bassas," imperial Ottoman officials, and their guards, the "janizaries" (slave soldiers, originally kidnapped Christian boys forcibly converted to Islam), both of whom preyed grotesquely on the helpless Serbian peasants. They slaughtered their animals, ate their food, and then charged them "teeth-money," "a contribution for the use of their teeth, worn with doing them the honour of devouring their meat. ... the wretched owners durst not put in their claim, for fear of being beaten." She notes that all this oppression is owing the "natural corruption of a military government, their religion not allowing of this barbarity, any more than ours does." Here, she is wrong. The bassas and the janizaries could certainly have pointed to Islam's laws demanding the jeziya, the tax levied on infidels for being infidels.

And in a section of letters at the end of the book, which seem to have been intended to remain private (from Letter LIII forward -- "Footnote, this and the following letters are now first published"), she is even less sanguine about the wonders of Muslim civilization. Men go in terror of "the vile spirit of their government," which "stifles genius, damps curiosity, and suppresses an hundred passions." Women go in terror of men.

The luscious passion of the seraglio is the only one almost that is gratified here to the full; but it is blended so with the surly spirit of despotism in one of the parties, and with the dejection and anxiety which this spirit produces in the other, that ... it cannot appear otherwise than as a very mixed kind of enjoyment.

Even the lovely Fatima herself is of startling parentage. She is the daughter of a Polish Christian woman, kidnapped and enslaved in one of the many running battles the Ottoman Turks fought in eastern Europe, always lunging for more conquest -- more jihad. Mind you, this was long after the Crusades. They had only just been beaten back from Vienna in 1683, about halfway through our two ladies' flourishings. The date of that Muslim defeat was September 11.

It is all part of a pattern that we have had the luxury of forgetting, a historical truth that was delivered to our attention in short doses during the 1980s and 1990s, and then with ferocious confidence on another September 11. This historical truth is not that Muslims are awful people; it is that Islam is the only major world faith which demands the subjugation of all non-believers, period. When its most passionate adherents take the mandate seriously, war, conquest, enslavement, punitive taxes, and the raising of mosques on other people's sacred sites are the norm. Two vigorous, educated women, living in the most civilized cities in Europe three and four hundred years ago, saw normative Islam in action on their travels in Europe. They recorded it, matter-of-factly. Pay attention to these voices, for, not only can they help cure us of our pleasant and dangerous amnesia, but the more you read in old books, the more you'll find these ladies are just two of a surprisingly large company of witnesses.

But, we said we would let them speak for themselves. They did take notice of less deadly subjects. They enjoyed audiences with royal personages, cast a jaundiced eye over other women's dresses and hair, attended archery demonstrations among court ladies, went to the opera. The great disadvantage of reading on a Kindle is that you cannot ruffle back and forth through the pages. You have to click about, one little screen at a time, and you forget things. I had forgotten that Lady Mary, gadding regally about, saw the ruins -- or what she believed were the ruins -- of both Troy and Carthage. For a gentlewoman of the Augustan age and a friend of Pope, this must have been a supremely pleasing experience. And early on in her travels, she wrote with delight of Vienna as a garden spot for mature women:

A woman, till five and thirty, is only looked upon as a raw girl, and can possibly make no noise in the world, till about forty. I don't know what your ladyship may think of this matter; but 'tis a considerable comfort to me, to know there is upon earth such a paradise for old women; and I am content to be insignificant at present, in the design of returning when I am fit to appear no where else.

And as for the storm-tossed Lady Fanshawe, wife of a Stuart cavalier from the age of sixteen, this is her first meal after a shipwreck, and she's enraptured to get it:

... we sat up and made good cheer; for beds they had none, and we were so transported that we thought we had no need of any, but we had very good fires, and Nantz white wine, and butter,and milk, and walnuts and eggs, and some very bad cheese; and was not this enough, with the escape of shipwreck, to be thought better than a feast? I am sure until that hour I never knew such pleasure in eating, between which we a thousand times repeated what we had spoken when every word seemed to be our last.

These women lived lives, if I may mix a metaphor, at full throttle and without a safety net. Lady Fanshawe and her husband were glad to start married life with a fortune of £20 cash, which he used to buy pen and paper, the tools of his trade (diplomacy). For her part, Lady Mary wrote her friends, half-jokingly, that she hoped to survive the trip from Vienna through Hungary to Peterwaradin in Serbia, in the depths of winter, but that it would make her of necessity incommunicado for a while. Her steely, un-self-pitying address to a correspondent could sum up any one day or year that either of these two ladies ever lived through: "Adieu, dear sister: this is the last account you will have from me of Vienna. If I survive my journey, you shall hear from me again. I can say, with great truth, ... 'I have long learnt to hold myself as nothing'; but when I think of the fatigue my poor infant must suffer, I have all a mother's fondness in my eyes, and all her tender passions in my heart."

Cleopatra: the Story of a Queen by Emil Ludwig

It beggars the imagination to know that four of the most epochal figures of the ancient world -- can there be a lot of epochal figures even in one part of an epoch? -- all were exact contemporaries, met each other, and that three of the four enjoyed the most intimate alliances, and had children. They were Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Cleopatra, and the Octavian who later became the emperor Augustus. Add a fifth to the Important mix, for there was also Cicero, and we should not forget Brutus and Cassius, assassins though they were, nor Octavian's general, Agrippa, nor the women besides Cleopatra: Fulvia and Octavia, Antony's two first wives, and then Octavian's second wife Livia, who for public television viewers in the last generation may have become the most recognizable of them all.

In 1937 -- just about the time Robert Graves was writing I, Claudius -- Emil Ludwig wrote Cleopatra: Geschichte einer Konigin, which was then translated and published in New York in 1939. His sources, as he writes in his introduction, were for the most part "my master" Plutarch, as well as the few other ancient historians whose scanty records of Cleopatra survive, men unknown now except I suppose to extreme specialists, -- men like Appian and Dio Cassius.

Emil Ludwig is anxious, in that same introduction, to explain why this novel is so unlike his others, he who has been "studying the human heart these thirty years." It contains no dialogue, for example, because none of the great Queen's talk is preserved, and he did not want to make things up entirely; from the mouths or pen of his four main characters, not an authentic word exists except a few lines from a letter of Antony's, noted by an ancient historian in an archive and paraphrased a century after the events. Ludwig happily includes this in his book. ("Are you upset that I sleep with the Queen?" Antony asked Octavian. "She is my wife ....")

This handicap of a lack of dialogue, stemming from those familiarly scanty sources which apparently gave Ludwig not much more information to work with, circa 1930, than Shakespeare had to work with circa 1630, doesn't make for an insurmountable problem if you don't mind reading a novel without the freshness and movement of dialogue -- a novel that takes place almost entirely in the characters' heads. Given his unwillingness to invent scenes around dialogue, there is not much for the author to do, and he admits this, but serve as a sort of psychological companion to the Queen, describing what she likely thought and saw, and whom she loved and hated, during her brief and spectacular career. What is noteworthy, if you compare the gist of his romance to a proper biography like that by Michael Grant (Cleopatra, 1972) is how much he gets essentially right. Perhaps this, again, reflects the uniform paucity of sources, and the fact that ancient historians operated much like modern novelists. They were more interested in their subjects' moral dilemmas, in their tragedy or bravery, than in mucking around with evidence or proving exactly how many men died in a battle. What he got right above all were two things, Cleopatra's politics -- "never against Rome," always Rome's ally, ancient Egypt having little other choice against the superpower -- and her most important ambition, which was to maintain a Greek-speaking cultural counterweight to Roman power in the eastern Mediterranean. She was three hundred years ahead of her time, Michael Grant thinks, for when Rome tottered in the fourth century, its rulers did move east, to establish a rejuvenated Empire for a thousand years in Greek-speaking Byzantium.

The focus of the psychological action, the necessary novelistic "conflict" (such as it is), seems to lie between Cleopatra and Octavian, and it's a simple, visceral conflict. These two people are actually not thrown much together in the story -- Octavian is the one supreme Roman whom Cleopatra never enchants, and in the book we understand it's because he was cold and unworthy of her -- but if it's true that Cleopatra's first child, her son Caesarion, was in fact the son of Julius Caesar, then after Caesar's murder this half-Egyptian boy instantly stood in the way of the official, Roman heir, Octavian. Octavian, after all, was only a great-nephew. And the grandson of a moneylender, as Ludwig gleefully points out more than once. The latter half of the novel is overshadowed by Cleopatra's ghastly problem, namely grooming her son for a supreme monarchy but keeping him, the prey, out of the predator Octavian's claws.

The only other possible source of dramatic conflict in the story of the Queen's life has to do with that plebeian side to Rome, with the clash of personalities or more accurately, the clash of two entirely different civilizations' approach to the world and to life. (Of course Rome is convulsed by civil war at this time, which is why so many great people are so busy with gigantic action, but this is a novel about a woman, and Ludwig is a historian of the human heart.) We see Ludwig illustrate something of this in comparing Cleopatra to her rivals for the great men's affections, Caesar's other mistresses and Antony's other wives, not least of whom was his second wife Octavia, Octavian's sister. Roman women are portrayed as certainly formidable and beautiful in their way, but distinctly un-royal, un goddess-like. They are married to the grandsons of moneylenders and know nothing of what it is to be glorious, silver-robed Isis come to life; Ludwig once compares Cleopatra to a force of nature, an "artist in love," as opposed to the "pious" Octavia who conforms her behavior to the expectations of her noble and yet proudly republican neighbors. He says, noting the fact that the two women did not meet during the time when they both were married to Antony, even as they both sent him ships and supplies and money for his wars, from their two different homes in the Mediterranean:

"But the Roman matron was too much the great lady, too much a part of her family, to desire a [face to face] contest. Such things could be risked by a queen who was also an Amazon and an artist in love, since what she did was right because she did it; but not by a patriotic citizeness whose dignity was determined by the judgment of her fellow citizens."

And Octavia covered her eyes piously when a rhinoceros spitted a criminal in the arena. Cleopatra, "cynically innocent," laughed -- and was the only force of nature capable of holding her own with Caesar. Is the theme of the novel, possibly, something to do with a man's ultimate fantasy of the perfect, lawless, overripe woman? There are tiny hints that somehow, Cleopatra knew secrets characteristic of the ancient Orient, so that in her early twenties she could fascinate and satiate an "ageing" and experienced conqueror, a force of nature himself. The laughing at spitted criminals, or the relishing having younger brothers and sisters executed, or the testing snake venom on slaves, merely added an excusable whiff of piquancy to the Queen's more important splendors ....

The historian Grant agrees with the novelist Ludwig that in her own day, only Cleopatra was simply this, "the Queen." There was no need even to specify what country she ruled. The details of her romance may be found in Grant, or in Ludwig, or in Plutarch -- she had herself unrolled from a smuggled carpet at her first meeting with the well guarded Caesar, she sailed into Tarsus as Aphrodite, in a golden ship exuding perfumes and song, at her first meeting with Antony -- but what beggars our modern imaginations is not only the fact of her permanently bewitching these great men, but the very nature of the world she lived in. Two foundations seem to have supported the whole structure of pagan antiquity: Homer and Alexander. Homer had laid down in his poetry what heroes and gods did in life; Alexander had shown in his life how a hero, and king, could translate those emulations beyond what anyone had ever known as empire. Ludwig describes Caesar assassinated on the eve of carrying out his "Alexander-dream," the conquest of Persia which would make him as great as his model. For her part Cleopatra, a Ptolemy, united Egypt and Greece and Alexander's legacy in herself. It would have been an already stupendous combination even in a personally charmless woman. The Queen was not, never that. To have united with Caesar as well, and to have founded a dynasty with him, would have meant the gathering of almost unfathomable power, and we cannot forget Egypt's wealth, too, and its status as the importer of food into Rome. If Caesar and Cleopatra had had a son, in this world where the gods were understood to walk among men and the expectation and acceptance of divine and royal births seems to have served as a kind of mortar between the foundation stones, that son might, as comically extravagant as it sounds, "have ruled the world."

But they did have a son, it seems, and after the Queen and Antony (who had his own Alexander dream, funded with the Queen's money) and Caesar were all dead, Octavian made sure to annex Egypt and, in Ludwig's telling, have the seventeen-year-old Caesarion strangled. The Queen loses this novelistic conflict, and the predator Octavian wins.




Image from the Hunterian Museum and Art Gallery, University of Glasgow

To School Through the Fields; Quench the Lamp by Alice Taylor

July, 1999

Idyllic childhood on an Irish family farm; backbreaking work, plenty of fresh air, surprisingly sentimental care of farm animals. Yet, a depressing place for any adults, especially men, who happen not to want to be farmers. Lone bachelors living in their parents' homes, who simply die one summer. No fuss, no doctors.

Here the last vestiges of day to day medievalism die out in Ireland only in the 1950s. They are still taking their wheat to the mill while dancing to Nat King Cole. Beautiful and strange.

Digging into my old Book Lover's Journal

I think pre-formatted, blank page book review journals may have been more in vogue ten or twelve years ago than they are now. Is it the kind of thing worth dipping into, or will what you see just make you cringe?

July 1997 (I distinctly remember I wrote this while sitting in the backyard on a hot day. Four toddlers played in a wading pool while the baby slept nearby.)

Desiree by Annemarie Selinko (pub. 1953)

Novel of Desiree Clary, affianced to Napoleon before he became famous and found Josephine. Desiree marries Bernadotte (relation to Count assassinated in Cairo, '47 -- Israeli independence?) -- and becomes Queen of Sweden.

Surprisingly good, considering length and laborious detail. Well-arranged, astonishing research; first intro to the Vasas of Sweden. Learned more about Napoleon here than in any book yet. (Prob. not saying much.)

My understanding of the assassination of Count Folke Bernadotte was hazy.

November 1997

Louis XIV: A Royal Life by Olivier Bernier (pub. 1987)

Good. Interesting analysis of 17th vs. 20th century politics and war, and expectations of both. "Freedom" in the 17th century meant the right to state protection of the weak and the poor.

Well now. That's pertinent.

Queen Isabella by Alison Weir

Writing biographies of medieval queens has to be tricky. We know these women led interesting lives, sometimes hideously so. Yet if the author dutifully chronicles only the lady's life, he ends up telling us how she traveled from this manor to that, or gave that gift or this to some monastery, poor man, or relative. If, instead, he chronicles the grand events of the day, he ends up telling us of the activities of the lady's male family members, who were the ones most deeply involved in the action.

And how does the biographer handle the question of female authority, circa 1300? Were women monarchs uniquely incapable, or did all the talent in the world fail to protect them from the trouble caused by men who could not stomach female authority? Modern authors are anxious to cope with this question, with general questions of responsibility and guilt, but they are also anxious to obey our modern world's self-understanding that we are uniquely enlightened compared to all previous generations. We understand sex, sexism, class, classism, (good) judgment and (bad) judgmentalism. The biographer's woman subject must be held accountable for her deeds; but if she happens to be a queen vilified in previous histories, then the modern author is anxious also to be different and fresh, and find ways in which she is not guilty.

All of this is a tribute to Alison Weir, and the mammoth amount of work she has put into this biography of Isabella, "the She-wolf of France." Very much in the style of Tudor historian David Starkey, she has assembled every primary source in the universe and gone through them in chronological order, explaining month by month and sometimes day by day, for a lifetime lasting from 1295 to 1358, where the queen was and what she did, or what the people around her did. It's a brilliant approach -- are they taught to do this, in Oxford perhaps? -- but one trouble with it is that it doesn't tell a story. Another trouble with it is that, for long stretches while a queen didn't do much, we have to hear about the decor of her palaces and who built them and when. And when she arrived at what gate, and who greeted her. The one life event which modern biographers of queens tend to ignore is their experience of childbirth, which I for one would like to know more about. Of course the mechanics of that don't change much, but I'd like to know how anybody survived it then and how exactly the midwives and physicians cared for their patients.

Queen Isabella's story can be briefly summarized, which Weir does in a preliminary chapter. A daughter of the King of France, she was married off at the age of twelve (1308) to King Edward II, the son of England's mighty King Edward I. Edward made a habit of falling in love with, raising up and then toying with and essentially destroying male lovers, first Piers Gaveston and then Hugh Despenser. Edward not only fawned shockingly and physically over these favorites -- he gave Gaveston the little queen Isabella's wedding jewels, for a start -- he allotted them such power that they strutted as demi kings through exchequer, government, and other people's private property, dangerously outraging powerful barons and the commons alike. Piers Gaveston survived two exiles and two recalls to his master's side, but did not survive a third; Hugh Despenser might have taken heed and given the king a wide berth, however handsome and rich he was. He did not.

Youth, virtuous obedience, and childbearing kept Isabella too busy to raise any kind of standard of revolt until the 1320s. By this time, though Gaveston was long dead, the Despensers (there was a father and son) had become such tyrants that she feared for her own life at their hands. They had already stripped her of much of her income and separated her from her children, with the king's acquiescence if not worse. She fled to her homeland, France, formed an open liaison with the dashing exiled English traitor Roger Mortimer, and with him sailed back to England at the head of an army determined to overthrow the king and his minions.

They succeeded in this, the first more or less constitutional deposition of an English king. The Despensers suffered hanging, drawing, and quartering, as befitted traitors, with castration while bound to a fifty-foot high ladder thrown in for the younger man. (Isabella watched.) Edward II abdicated in favor of his son, was imprisoned and then he was either murdered grotesquely or he escaped to become a hermit in Italy. Alison Weir works hard to convince us of this latter possibility, but, amateur though I am, I doubt it. It all hinges on feckless Edward, who liked nothing better than to dig ditches and pitch hay with common men, quietly murdering a poor porter one night and then fleeing in the porter's clothes. That is the action of a hero, not an Edward II.

Isabella and Mortimer then spent a few, a very few years enjoying power as regents for the heir, Isabella's firstborn prince Edward. The lovers turned out to be just as rapacious and tyrannical as any previous favorites of the previous, useless king. As the young prince's eighteenth birthday and therefore his majority approached, he became so alarmed at what his mother and her lover might do to maintain their authority that he launched a coup on his own behalf. It was an actual one-night, one-chance cloak and dagger affair, complete with underground passageways into a castle and then -- the breaking up of a sinister meeting, and the seventeen year old boy standing with sword drawn outside his mother's rooms, ignoring her shrieks for mercy as Mortimer was dragged away. That's the action of a hero.

Mortimer was only beheaded. King Edward III claimed his crown (1330), and after a short spell out of the public eye, which she spent either recovering from a stillbirth or nervous collapse or both, Isabella lived the rest of her life in comfort, in this manor and that, as Queen Mother and grande dame. She entertained visitors. She enjoyed her grandchildren. She gossiped with other formidable ladies, visiting queens and duchesses, daughters and cousins and aunts who all could have told life stories almost as gamy as her own. Who says women are ignored by history? Oh, and yes -- the Black Death came, in 1348, when she was in her fifties. She survived.

What the reader gets from this book, I think, amid all the details of chronology and the speculation that ventures toward the Hollywoodesque (Edward II as Italian hermit secretly visiting his son in England in the 1330s -- really?) is finally a broad appreciation for a few medieval things. These people lived life at breakneck speed. They traveled perpetually, really pounded out the miles on horseback or in tubby little ships, and trusted everywhere to who knows what lodging and food. And fate. Weir says that Edward II visited four thousand places in England in his lifetime, partly of course because big, messy royal courts had to move about in the search for cleaner houses to live in for a while. Isabella crossed and recrossed the Channel nine times, once as the head of an invading army. A granddaughter died of the Black Death on the way to her own wedding. What did this do to a human being's memories, sense of home, perception of time? They married at thirteen or fourteen, which meant, for women like Isabella, abruptly assuming and relinquishing glamorous adult titles, wealth, and prestige. She was queen of England at twelve, supplanting all other women; when her son's beautiful teen wife Philippa in turn supplanted her, she was instantly a dowager at thirty-two. In another blink of an eye thirty years had passed, lover Mortimer was long gone, and she was enjoying the company of her last grandchild, the now forty-year-old Philippa's thirteenth.

And at every turn lay violent death. The modern world may shrug correctly at royal biographies, because they say nothing of the People, but it seems to me that the privileges medieval aristocracy enjoyed may have been more than counterbalanced by the daily risks they ran. Without law, which English society at this time was still struggling to create, people born into the lawmaking strata -- and none of them chose it -- learned quickly that the choice in life personally was often either to remain royal or die by evisceration. "Random aristocratic violence" sums up the middle ages, according to the historian Norman F. Cantor in Inventing the Middle Ages, and he praises, of all things, the Japanese movie Ran (Chaos) as clearly illustrating this.

One final medieval thing we can try to appreciate from a biography like this is the presence of religion in these people's lives, but that's a difficult mental leap to make. The modern world's ignorance of religion is the biggest handicap we have to either writing, reading, or thinking accurately about how human beings really lived in Europe seven hundred years ago. Daily worship, excited and happy plans to go on pilgrimage to shrines rather than "on vacation," the existence of the Catholic church as a governing body in daily life, the custom of leaving orders that one's body was to be buried apart from one's heart, so that two places of rest would allow for two places of eternal prayers commissioned for the soul -- all these and a hundred other commonplaces of medieval living stand so far outside our experience that in looking back at them we are really looking back at an alien planet. We do our best to understand them; Alison Weir consulted seven and a half pages (closely printed) full of primary source documents for us, into which I suppose we could also plunge if we chose. But it's not the same thing as understanding a world in which sun and moon and wind were the same, but all attitudes, every thought and every sentence, began with in the name of our Lord, amen.



Castle Rising, Norfolk, Isabella's main home after the accession of her son (1330); photo from castlerising.co.uk


For those who like trivia: Isabella makes an appearance in the Mel Gibson movie Braveheart, but the liberties taken with history are very extravagant. She is a gorgeous adult, and sleeps with the Scottish rebel William Wallace (Gibson) so that she can taunt her dying and paralyzed father in law, Edward I, that "a child ... not of your line ... grows in my womb." In a previous scene, the old king has already thrown Piers Gaveston out of a window to his death, to young Edward II's helpless horror. Great fun, but Wallace was executed -- drawing and quartering, of course -- in 1305, when Isabella was, by Alison Weir's reckoning, a child of nine in Paris. That's just for a start.

The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus, Vol. 1 by Washington Irving

This opening volume of Irving's biography takes us from Columbus' birth to a climactic point during his second voyage to the New World, when, as the result of what can inadequately be described as overwork, Columbus collapsed and his crew "spread their sails to the east wind and bore him back, in a state of complete insensibility, to the harbor of Isabella" (a Caribbean port).

There are two volumes to go. That will make the reading sound like a chore, but it isn't; Washington Irving's prose is very pleasant, having a unique tone -- circa 1830 -- that stands refreshingly somewhere between the august rolling periods of the eighteenth century and the fussiness of the nineteenth. What the reader should know, however, is that Irving either really, really liked the subject, or else he had terrific sources of information, not one of which he wanted to neglect. This latter seems to have been the case. Irving's descriptions of his researches in his preface are absolutely worthy of any professional historian today. And why do we assume anyway that our professional standards must of course outrank those of previous eras?

Or perhaps people -- to continue the warning -- in previous eras simply had little else to do with leisure except read, and so they were willing to sit down to a painstakingly recollected three volume history of the life of anybody or anything. Columbus? Certainly, bring it on. What I hint at here, with all due respect to Irving and previous readers, is that by golly as you read along you are going to visit with the hero every coast he saw, and study every cubic foot of shoal water, and measure every day's weather and greet every native chief (cacique) he did. Do not look for summation, except concerning the kinds of topics we moderns slaver over: what about that illegitimate son?

Columbus' achievement is so gigantic that as we rock along with Irving's pleasant prose, we find it startling to understand that the first voyage only took seven months all told. He and the three famous ships left Palos -- there are suburbs in Chicago named Palos, who knew? -- in August of 1492. Columbus returned in the Nina, first briefly to Portugal and then back to Palos, in March 1493. To the residents of the little town, the sudden appearance of that ship in the river one quiet March morning must have seemed like an apparition from another universe. In a sense, it was. The Admiral was back -- but how, and from where? Why only one vessel, and who was left alive? Church bells pealed all day, and "all business was suspended" amid the "hurry and tumult."

The Pinta, commanded by Columbus' mysterious right hand man, Pinzon, returned that same evening. And there lies a tale to set any Hollywood director's imagination racing, surely. There was something wrong about Pinzon, and the Pinta. The Pinta disappeared from Columbus' side twice during those seven months, the second time on the journey home. (The Santa Maria ran aground and was wrecked in the New World.) Where did it go, and why? Pinzon's explanations, the first time, seem to have followed rather dubious terrible-storm-we-thought-you-were-dead-sir lines. The second time, as he sailed into Palos to hear the bells still clanging and to see the Nina already there, explanations were pointless. The first man back got the glory and, so to speak, the end-of-year bonus. Like Columbus, Pinzon had made a first landfall before turning his ship toward Palos, and from Bayonne had already dispatched a letter to King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella, announcing his arrival and his discoveries; now he slunk home and lived long enough to receive their answering missive "of a reproachful tenor," forbidding him to come to court. He died a few days later, of illness and chagrin. But "let no one indulge in hard censures over the grave of Pinzon!" Irving warns. "His merits and services are entitled to the highest praise; his errors should be regarded with indulgence."

Columbus' plan to reach the fabulous Orient by sailing west was very much like plans for space travel today. It wasn't that people in the fifteenth century believed it could not be done, certainly not that they believed the earth was flat and the ships would fall off, although perhaps some true bumpkins might have reasoned so. The terror was that no one knew what lay out there in that howling wilderness of water. Did the sun boil the sea in the southern latitudes? What monsters awaited? How far did Ocean extend? How could anyone come back? Even the best educated men were hampered by one colossal mistake, handed down to them from Ptolemy. They believed that the circumference of the earth was a good 7000 miles less than it was. Columbus acted as if he had a presentiment of this, for he kept two logs on the journey west. For his private log he recorded distances accurately. For the log the crew could look at, he wrote down figures hundreds of leagues short of what they had actually traveled. Even so, as the ships pounded west before beautiful winds day after day and week after week, no one could know, as today no astronaut can know -- where are we, and when does all this space end?

It ended of course, after seven weeks of sailing, in the islands of the Caribbean, which to the end of his life Columbus believed was the fringe of Asia or at least the outer edge of "Cipangu," Japan. His guiding text was Marco Polo. In exploring islands today called by familiar names like Cuba (with its fine bay, Guantanamo), Jamaica, and "Hayti," Columbus met new peoples with whom he had somehow to communicate two prime desires, one, to know if there was gold nearby, and two, to know where and how to reach the Great Khan. The natives, no fools despite having every reason to believe these fantastic white men had indeed descended from heaven, continually pointed the newcomers onward in both quests. Cipangu, whatever it meant amid garbled misunderstandings and signs and gestures, was always south and west -- always away from here.

The desire for gold, incidentally, seems not to have been entirely a function of Western greed. The native Indians did wear small gold ornaments, which they were happy to trade for anything that came from the heavenly men's hands, hawk's bells especially. It was the presence of gold, and pearls and gems, that would have reassured the Spaniards that they had reached their goal: the glorious wealth of Asia. This was also why they were forever literally sniffing the island winds for the smell of spices.

In later volumes, Irving tells us, we will retrace the story of the tragedy that Columbus' landfall eventually brought the native tribes. Trouble began quickly with the second voyage, which the Admiral undertook in September 1493, only a year and a month after setting out on his first. On the second trip, a larger cohort of men had greater scope for human mischief. The Spaniards had greater contact this time with the fierce Caribs, free-ranging warriors and cannibals who held most of the humbler islanders in thrall. And there were problems with women. Columbus seems to have held things together, on both voyages, by the strength of his personality and sheer crippling hard work; the Santa Maria only ran aground on the first voyage because he personally dared to allow himself a little bit of sleep on a calm night. With that the whole crew nodded off, including the man at the wheel. And now, with more men to control, Columbus found that these Spanish grandees considered themselves above such nonsense as, for example, work. For their part they began to realize that he was after all an Italian, a foreigner. What right had he to lord it over them? And if they stood before a burnt-out Spanish settlement, sure that a cacique whom the Admiral trusted was in fact a murdering heathen scoundrel, well -- what did he plan to do about it?

And all the while Columbus kept on searching, searching, always tacking south and west, south and west, looking for evidence that these jungle shores were in fact the suburbs of teeming Cathay. He returned from his fourth voyage, I believe, actually under arrest and in chains. Irving's first volume does not take us that far. But early in this book he says:

Let those who are disposed to faint under difficulties, in the prosecution of any great and worthy undertaking, remember that eighteen years elapsed after the time that Columbus conceived his enterprise, before he was enabled to carry it into effect; that the greater part of that time was passed in almost hopeless solicitation, amidst poverty, neglect, and taunting ridicule; that the prime of his life had wasted away in the struggle, and that when his perseverance was finally crowned with success, he was in his fifty-sixth year. His example should encourage the enterprising never to despair.

Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, by the Sieur Louis de Conte; tr. by Jean Francois Alden by Mark Twain

Once, in a bookstore, I found a copy of the Personal Recollections of Joan of Arc, and read on the back jacket flap the statement that Mark Twain considered this his best book. That's a surprise, and in the reading lists they assign and laud, it's clear college professors and other authorities don't agree with Twain's self-analysis. But I do believe I enjoyed this more than I ever enjoyed Tom Sawyer or Huckleberry Finn. Reading a master's work at one's own pace, untroubled by thesis deadlines, may help. Also, I like the middle ages.

It's a strange book, as well is should be since it's about a strange person. It may be the most serious and the most transparent in tone of any novel of Twain's I remember. You really do feel that a mournful fifteenth-century relic is speaking out of heartbreak, and only occasionally does the normally ebullient and joshing Mark Twain get a word in ("I still opened up with a small lie, of course, for habit is habit, and not to be flung out of the window by any man, but coaxed downstairs a step at a time"). The language is very simple, simpler also than what I remember in Twain's other novels. It's as if the language must serve appropriately as a frame for Joan's own simple background, speech, and goodness. The book is a bit like another gospel, in which Joan's words, like Christ's, really ought to be set off in red type.

What the author wants to understand in these Personal Recollections, written from the point of view of Joan of Arc's page and secretary, Sieur Louis de Conte (whose initials match Samuel Langhorne Clemens') is what every historian and biographer has wanted to understand about her. We know who she was and what she did, and what was done to her. But why was she believed and obeyed, and then why was she destroyed?

It seems that, when this illiterate peasant girl came out of Domremy in the winter of 1429 to demand that she be allowed men-at-arms to go and fight the English occupying France -- she spoke of going "into" France, as if her birthplace had been outside it -- what stunned people was her ability to speak to her betters without fear. I can only assume that class differences were so enormous in those days that even the term is weakly inappropriate. When she faced lords and generals calmly, it was not just that a peasant was talking uppity. It was as if an animal was speaking. It was a miracle. In Twain's telling, she quickly became famous for being famous, like a speaking deer or calf from the pasture, and her career was underway.

For background, in 1429 France north of the Loire had endured English assault and occupation for ninety years, and France south of the Loire was a kind of medieval Vichy, a France in quotation marks. England's three great victories against French chivalry on French soil, Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, had each served as near death blows to the country. Before his death the French King Charles VI, who was insane, had actually signed over his throne by treaty to the English monarchy as a result of the defeat at Agincourt. His son the Dauphin, eventually to be Charles VII, not only thus had no throne to assume but worried about his legitimacy anyway. Justly so. Twain does not say, but Wikipedia does, that in fact Charles' own royal parents told him he was his mother's bastard by another father. He was on the point of fleeing the country.

Into this mess from out of nowhere stepped the beautiful young Maid, the speaking deer, claiming her divine Voices commanded her to do two things: to raise the siege of Orleans and so defeat the English in their current predatory project, and to escort the Dauphin to Rheims to be crowned and anointed by God King of France, and insane men's treaties be damned.

She did both things. Twain notices what must have been her fundamental role in all this, assuming that France and all its generals were not simply suddenly awash in a white light of revelation for upwards of two years because of her. She was a talisman. Famous for being famous, examined and vetted by the Church in an era when the supernatural and organized religion both bestrided Western national life, her presence at the head of the armies intoxicated men and really drove them to victories as nothing else had done, for ninety years. To serve in this way she did not need to be a natural military genius, freakishly come to earth in the body of a peasant girl, although these Recollections describe her as that, too. She had only to inspire, to command by divine instruction a simple and temporary change in French tactics: assault against occupied cities and forts, rather than the perpetual enduring of siege or, at most, wearily besieging the besiegers. Somehow she seems to have known at least this, what other generals -- MacArthur, for one -- have known. Defensive warfare is defeat.

But at some point during her brief career, maybe at the height of her triumphs -- standing in full armor at the altar of Rheims cathedral, watching her king being crowned -- it must have dawned on powerful men around her that after her work was done, this weird force of nature could never be released and left to her own devices again. Imagine the miracle of the speaking animal in some other lord's camp, on future battlefields, or dazzling other peasants, or serving as some duke's marriage prize. She had to be kept close, even while the French court undermined her victories by timidly backing away from attempting the great prize, the capture of English-occupied Paris, in favor of more treaties with enemies whom Joan had proven she could destroy. While the king dithered past the glory days of summer 1429, she stayed on, skirmishing here and there in the environs northwest of the capital. And who knows, for all her protestations that after Rheims her mission was done and she wanted to go home and tend her sheep, La Pucelle may have long since learned to thoroughly enjoy her extraordinary new life and been very loath to give it up. She must have had other aspects to her personality besides her "Voices."

In May of 1430 she was captured by the forces of the English-allied Duke of Burgundy, who kept her for the ransom he expected to be paid by a mortified and grateful Charles VII. It didn't come; the French were probably glad to be rid of her. Her English enemies offered the ransom instead, and legally the Duke was obliged to accept it. She was now a year from her death.

Her destruction was as strange, to modern eyes, as was her rise to power. For a year, French churchmen and lawyers in England's pay pursued the same two rough courses with her that, it so happens, a later generation of powerful men would pursue in the legal and physical destruction of another woman and another force of nature, Anne Boleyn. The cases are unrelated except that both times, authority wanted two things, an admission of guilt from the accused, which should have led to rehabilitation and mercy, -- and it wanted the death penalty. (The Tudor system was at least mercifully quick. Anne Boleyn was dead two and a half weeks after her arrest.)

What the French authorities harped on, sixty men looming over her in six consecutive trials during which Joan sat publicly in chains with no legal counsel, was her refusal to swear an oath to reveal everything about her career to the Church. In other words, the church wanted to officially pass judgment on her Voices, and to know exactly all they said to her. She insisted that these Voices, whom she identified as St. Michael, St. Catherine, and St. Margaret, had specifically commanded her to keep a few things secret. She answered her accusers as well as possible but would not promise to disobey these divine orders.

Her consulting with her own private experience of God over the Church's understanding of it therefore made her, essentially, a Protestant. She was not tried as such and would not have understood herself as such, but it was her obedience to her private religious conscience that brought her to the stake. That, and of course the English monarchy's determination that she should die. In the last days of her life, she actually did submit to the churchmen's demands, having been brought out of her dungeon to see the stake and the pile of smoldering wood waiting for her amid excited crowds in the middle of Rouen's town square. She believed that upon signing a paper then (remember she was illiterate) and returning to women's dress, another thing authority harped on, she would be allowed to attend mass again and at least have women jailers. If Twain's Sieur de Conte is correct, back at the prison her English guards simply instantly stole her new women's clothing while she slept, and left a nineteen-year-old girl nothing to wear but her former, useful men's things. When she put them back on, she was considered to have relapsed into heresy. The punishment was death by burning, in Rouen on May 30, 1431.

A quarter of a century later, she was officially rehabilitated and declared a martyr by the French church. Twain's loyal Sieur shrewdly notices that this was after the English had been almost entirely driven out of France, and could only look back and spit that the pusillanimous king, Charles VII (called "the well-served"), had no better rights to his throne than those given him by a condemned witch and Satan worshipper long since properly burned as heretic. One way to wipe away that smear was to declare his benefactress Joan of Arc good again. Her aged mother had survived, to attend the opening of the rehabilitation trial at Notre Dame in Paris. Beatification followed many centuries later, in 1911, and then sainthood in 1920, although of course Mark Twain could not know that; I remember a college professor of mine saying that this last had everything to do with buttressing French morale after World War I.

She is such a strange figure that it's hard to know, to put it bluntly, what is the weirdest thing about Joan of Arc. Her youth? Her sex? Her humble origins? Her acceptance by men as a military commander, even if only a talisman show of one? (And she may have been a good one anyway.) What of the Voices? -- rye fungus poisoning, common in the European diet perhaps as far back as ancient Greece, and a possible source of hallucinations? God, truly? Why did the voices happen to speak French, the English wanted to know, and why were they mute when it came to warnings of what her persecutors in Rouen were up to, her Sieur wanted to know? And how can she have been a patriot before what textbooks call "the rise of the nation state"? And a French patriot to boot, who yet spoke of leaving Domremy to "come into" France? If so, then where was Domremy?

In the end, there is no doubt that a large part of her fascination for Twain and perhaps for many readers is that she is also a very Christlike figure. (She was "the most noble life that was ever born into this world save only One.") She seems to have been personally flawless and totally innocent, that is, for someone whose destiny was bizarrely military. She transfixed crowds, loved righteous battle, but after victories cradled dying Englishmen in her arms. That all her life is known from sworn testimony at a trial ("the only story of a human life which comes to us under oath," italics original) also conjures up images of patient silence before Pontius Pilate and a recording humanity too, albeit when her time came Joan was not silent. Her very character seems to have been miraculous. Even at the stake, while burning, she warned a man nearby who was holding a cross aloft for her to gaze at that he must move away, or he would be hurt. One wonders if, in another era, she could have easily served as the unwitting foundress of another church herself.

The Recollections are a very different piece of work from what we think of as the oeuvre of Mark Twain. His best book? Perhaps not, but perhaps he meant it was the one he most loved writing. To at least honor his taste in reading it, even for curiosity's sake, seems the right and really very pleasureable thing to do.



Birthplace of Joan of Arc, Domremy, France

The Kaiser: His Life and Times by Michael Balfour

The theme of this enormously dense book is Kaiser Wilhelm's personal responsibility for the outbreak of World War I, and consequently for its hideous aftermath, World War II, and the decline of Europe (John Keegan would say its "ruin") as a civilized world power.

It's a book that could only have been written in the 1960s, not in the sense that nobody before or after that decade could write enormously dense books about the Kaiser, but in the sense that by publication date (1964), enough time had passed to give the author some perspective, all the while events remained alive enough to encourage him to take his reader along on leisurely explorations of little details which later scholars probably summarize or ignore. There are details, for example, about how fast the train went carrying the body of Queen Victoria to her funeral site in 1901, the Kaiser her grandson, who hated being late, accompanying her ... possibly 92 miles per hour ....

I am not sure, also, if later books on the World Wars are quite so apt to begin, as this does and as William Manchester's The Arms of Krupp did, with serious and pained explorations of the, do we dare say, atrocious German character. It was 1964. Photographs and memories of the concentration camps were only twenty years in the past. Veterans of 1940-1945 were still young men barely into their forties; plenty of veterans of 1914-1918 were still hearty men in their late sixties or just nearing seventy. They had had their lives shaped and had set foot on a continent whose millions, across two generations, had had their lives destroyed by German decisions. When they sat down to read or to write about it, it seems they wanted answers to the question why. Why the Germans.

The passage of forty more years has laid most of those veterans in peaceful graves, and so has faded immediate memories and dulled that curiosity. I suspect political correctness has done the rest, frankly freezing any tendency to dare ask questions about national characteristics which sober men once asked -- even when they recognized that the Nazis were partial to those questions, too. Michael Balfour begins what one expects to be a simple biography of the Kaiser with a chapter on the huge topic "The Historical Background: 400 B.C. - A.D. 1880," and follows this with a second big chapter on "The Background to Anglo-German Relations." Anyone expecting a life story to begin with a discussion of a subject's parents or grandparents soon learns he is in the hands of a different type of scholar.

As he probes the Kaiser's moral responsibility, what Balfour studies in this book is the tragic conflation of three or four giant historical circumstances, centering on one people when that people was still burdened with the personal crapshoot of a hereditary monarchy. By the nineteenth century political liberalism and parliamentary democracy had evolved, most naturally and prominently in Britain. But "Germany" -- Bavaria, Hesse, Prussia, dozens of other small warmed-over medieval fiefdoms -- had only just united as a nation state, and Germany's people equated their country with the means that had unified it: a powerful military, a landed and splendid noble class, and a mystic, ancient German-ness outdazzling small things like individual rights, middle class urban living, and drab, democratic electioneering. By the nineteenth century, the industrial revolution and surging economic prosperity had arrived, most prominently in sea-girt, trading, colonizing Britain. But Germany was landlocked, and its economic life amounted to a long game of catch-up, mostly Balfour thinks because so much of its population was either absorbed in farming and the military, or lost to emigration ("800,000 left in the decade after unification alone," among them a set of my own great-grandparents, who departed in 1874.)

In the late nineteenth century, also, the nations of Europe still stood ready to contemplate war with one another in any combination at any time for any reason. It seems as if the middle ages had not died, and powerful men still ogled dragon-drawn maps and grinned over what dukedom could be had for what princess and why. Add to this that behemoth to the east, Russia, which considered itself the owner of the Balkans and yet made it policy to overleap central Europe ("we are Central Europe," the Kaiser said) and ally with France and Britain, too, for whatever reasons it liked. Add to this the Industrial Revolution's improvements in weaponry and transportation, and you have a sinister stage for the Kaiser to tread.

Then there is Wilhelm himself. The reader expecting to learn about his private life, his marriage, and the births of his children will not learn much. This is a man's book. Wilhelm grew up under the thumbs of his frantically English mother, Queen Victoria's eldest daughter Vicky, and -- not to sound comical -- of the frantically German Bismarck. German-ness and Englishness warred within him. He was intelligent but light-minded, and he had power, simply because he was born, at a time when a Germany suffering political and economic growing pains could pursue lethal plans because "the national mood" would not have it otherwise.

On June 28, 1914, the heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary was assassinated. The killer was a Serbian subject of that empire. The assassination of an empire's heir really serves as an announcement that that empire is stupid and shouldn't exist. A simple way of putting it, but those of us who have never quite understood why the Archduke Franz Ferdinand's death mattered might perhaps understand that. Russia, would be owner of the Balkans, supported Serbia. Outraged Austria was Germany's ally, and so in that summer the clanking machineries of alliance and counter alliance, of monarchical and ministerial decision-making in Russia, France, Germany, Austria, Britain, all moved. Russia was the first to mobilize troops. In five weeks, the rest was done. One of the reasons why war had to be declared, Balfour says, was simply because pre-arranged railway timetables for getting German troops to the front --any front, for any reason -- required the pestering of Russian officials for explanations and replies that, outrageously, failed to come on time. When they didn't, the Kaiser, on August 1, 1914, signed the declaration of war which called into being all the others.

At the back of Norman Davies' huge book Europe, there is an appendix with the numbers of soldiers killed or dead of wounds by 1918: in round figures Russia lost 1.7 million, France 1.35 million, Britain 908,000, Italy 650,000; Germany lost 1.7 million, Austria-Hungary 1.2 million. It remains incomprehensible to see human deaths, and these the deaths of active young men only, expressed as fractions of a million.

The Kaiser signed the paper which started World War I, but how much was he responsible for everything leading up to it? Balfour concludes that "he was not fit for the outsize job destiny assigned him." True, but no one would have been. And, under the Kaiser's leadership (or lack of it), what was Germany's responsibility? More than once, Balfour says that it should be incumbent on nations, as it is on individuals, to realize they are not alone in the world and that their actions and ambitions will rub up against other peoples' and other nations,' and perhaps cause problems and suffering. Small actions, apparently trivial choices especially could be paramount in retrospect; in describing the Kaiser's birth to a young mother who suffered a horrific labor and delivery, Balfour asks whether history might have moved differently, if only the doctor attending had been a German committed to saving the baby rather than an Englishman committed to saving the mother (who lived to work the influence she did).

He does not quite say that the Great War proves nations should rise above happenstances, recognize their frightful moral interdependence, and trim the sails of their self-interest accordingly. As a historian and an adult he knows they don't and won't, especially not the most active and the most ambitious. On his last pages he writes, in fact, that there is no way of imagining how World War I could not have happened. "There are a number of things which one cannot imagine happening in a significantly different way unless one presupposes so many other alterations in the world as to turn the exercise into idle speculation." Germany was anxious for its "place in the sun." Britain was rich. Russia supported Serbia. Kaiser Wilhelm was born. And so on. " 'It happened because it happened,' " as Norman Davies quotes a later scholar in Europe.

Balfour ends with a quote that is true, if not terribly helpful. (What helps to understand World War I, and/or human nature? Scholars write huge books, and still don't know.) It also serves to illustrate a writing style that is really beautiful, and beautifully sustained, throughout all the enormous density:

We must always remember that it is our choices and decisions which will go to circumscribe the freedom of succeeding generations. Taken individually they may seem trivial, but taken together, and along with other people's, they add up to destiny.

The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth by Frances Wilson

I do, occasionally, take up brand new books. I like those nice, crackly new mylar covers, and the feel of new paper and the look of clean bright typeface. I like, who does not, the possibility of fresh discovery, something good of today. And I remember finding and liking new books when I browsed the library shelves at the age of ten or twelve or a little more. Have I since become snarkily judgmental? Or have the books all declined precipitously in quality? Surely it can't be possible that intelligence and talent left the human race -- or the English-language publishing world -- sometime around June of 1977.

I plucked this, The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth, off the New Arrivals shelves a few days ago. It looked good. A quick sample of the prose was nice ("a routine of mutton and moonscapes, walking and headaches, watching and waiting, pie baking and poem making"). I am sorry to say that within thirty pages, the promise fell away and the book confirmed the teachings of my inner voice, which has warned me for a long time: in general, avoid new books.

Why? Because not only did this one begin awkwardly and self-consciously, with the author writing in the present tense and omnisciently ("She can stand it no longer. When she looks from her window ....") about a subject whom she will subsequently treat in a more traditional style ("This is the story of four small notebooks whose contents Dorothy Wordsworth never meant to be published"). But it exemplified the bloodless, navel-gazing, oh so archly aware attitudes that come straight from people whose only meaningful education has been in the thin air of the university classroom, and whose cohorts have these last thirty years gone on to suck any healthful oxygen out of English-language publishing officialdom. The result is not only a book like this, but a veritable book-stuffed universe lived in, loved, and guarded by themselves. The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth sings the Academy, with a capital A.

What people learn in an Academy's English literature departments, it seems, is to perfect a basic human skill, and that is the ability to see patterns. If you can see patterns and then weave them into something more or less semantically clever -- if you can " 'make extracts,' " as Mr. Bennett teases his bluestocking daughter Mary in Pride and Prejudice -- then you may be on your way to a book contract with an important firm. (Did I mention that no important firm has ever offered me a book contract? Full disclosure.) Here is where I stopped reading Frances Wilson:

She weighs and measures her condition: her heart is full, she cries until it is lighter; her brothers are together, she is apart from them; they are walking, she is still; she leaves them under the trees, she sits upon a stone. Dorothy initially wrote that she sat upon a stone at "the foot of the lake" before changing "foot" to "margin," which gets in more her sense of frames, limits, borders. It is William who provides the contours of her life.

I would not doubt that William Wordsworth provided the contours of his sister's life, but in this particular case, she may have read over this one page, realized that lakes don't have feet but they do have, what, beaches, shorelines, ah! -- margins! and corrected even her private words accordingly. But to an academic, this is pattern. Capital P. This is something to analyze. And of course the resulting extract is always plausible, publishable, because as long as you provide evidence, who is to say that your pattern analysis might not have been right? At any rate you are thinking for yourself, as your professors want you to do. You are writing your paper. Dorothy Wordsworth is in no position to argue.

I don't know what the rest of the book is like, but I take it that Frances Wilson's oeuvre is the dissection of the idea of the Journal, any journal, as such. "The self as a perceiving subject." Pity, then, poor Dorothy, or any diary keeper. Who knows why people do it? To purge the mind (Aristotle). To not purge it (" 'Aw, Sport, because I've seen them, and I want to remember them,' " Harriet explains in Harriet the Spy). Every journal keeper might list the pretty flowers she saw on a walk, or write down an appalling encounter with a bereaved neighbor who had lost all her children to disease in a year and a half. Let those jottings come under the eye of a well-meaning academic two hundred years on, however, and you've got pattern. The flowers "symbolize her sorrow," as they do for Hamlet's Ophelia; by the tale of the mourning neighbor she "communicates her own fear for her immediate future." It didn't all just happen. No one could get a book out of that.

In the end you can tell you've got an anemic, modern book on your hands, Modern with a capital M, when the quotes in it from older sources, meant to be ancillary, stand out as fresh, adult, and simply normal. The lines from Wordsworth's poems stand out. A bit less so do the snippets from Dorothy's journals. You read them and feel encouraged to go and seek them out for their own sake. That's good; and previous eras have certainly also produced their share of anemic books, which I am sure one by one suffered their inevitable fate, and were forgotten. What strikes me about Modern publishing, and what makes my inner voice say 'life is short, avoid it,' is that a whole industry should seem to be so devoted to making and selling such thin, repetitive, adolescent product. The really dense, impressive but new book, randomly plucked from a shelf as opposed to sought out from an author whose talent you know, is a rare treat. How do good, untried things ever pass the narrow gate? Perhaps it is just randomly done.

Madame du Barry by Stanley Loomis

Madame du Barry was the last of a long line of official royal mistresses of the French kings. She followed Madame de Pompadour into the affections and the lit of King Louis XV, and lived splendidly with him at Versailles for the last six years of his life, from 1768 to his death in 1774. The monarch was succeeded by his grandson, the unfortunate King Louis XVI, who for a variety of reasons not least of which was marriage to Marie Antoinette, seems to have kept no mistresses of his own.

When Louis XV and Madame du Barry met, he was in his late fifties and she was in her early twenties. The circumstances of their meeting, the role she played, the whole course of her life, all was so extraordinarily alien to us and our world that it seems one can't really write a review of a biography of her. One must muddle along and almost rewrite the biography, not because it wasn't good enough but simply to get all the information straight.

The position of royal mistress at Versailles was virtually a ministerial one. Exactly as in the Tudor court of sixteenth century England, powerful or merely grasping or merely needy people scouted out beautiful women to place before the king's eye, hoping that a new and grateful "Favorite" would be able to persuade him to grant favors, lands, incomes, religious sanctions, best of all official government posts, among the faction to whom she owed her elevation. (In Madame du Barry's case, this was one Jean du Barry, called "the Roue," a provincial comte who was making a living in Paris by schooling and then essentially selling pretty girls to wealthy men.) A difference between Tudor England and eighteenth-century France was that Henry VIII would never find himself seriously baited with a woman who was not herself of some genuinely powerful landed family; Louis XV, in contrast, met Madame du Barry because the palace of Versailles was open to the public. One spring day, because her patron, the Roue, had a kind of small-claims-court issue to pursue with the royal bureaucracy, she arrived, and his Majesty saw her in the crowd.

She was breathtakingly beautiful, voluptuous, ash-blond, large-eyed, and it seems sweet- natured and gentle, too. (It's a pity really that she should have been portrayed in Sofia Coppola's film Marie Antoinette as a belching gypsy.) Within a few months, she was ensconced in that vipers' nest of a palace, where every faction faced a counter-faction fighting to the death for position and power, and the personal really was political. She lived in a blazing whirl of jewels, glorious dresses, fabulously appointed private chateaux, gambling parties, hate and gossip. And like all previous "Favorites," her position ultimately depended on the health of the king. As long as he lived in sin, his Catholic Majesty could not hear Mass or take Communion. Yet, he could not die without having returned to the forgiveness and sacraments of the church, and he could not return to them unless he first dismissed the Favorite forever. In those days of sudden mortal illness, La Dubarry, like all her predecessors, never knew when a royal "indisposition" might become a "maladie," and spell the end of her "Left-handed" reign. When the time came, etiquette required that she leave instantly, without goodbyes.

It happened in the spring of 1774. The king died after a horrific two week siege of smallpox, professional bleeding, and finally it seems gangrene. Madame du Barry lived most of the next two years in a local exile, put under house arrest in a convent because the new king and especially his queen, Marie Antoinette, took a high moral line about the former Favorite's purpose at the former court. Once forgiven and released, however, she next entered into what was perhaps the happiest part of her life. King Louis XV's settlements on her had been generous and she still owned a fortune in jewels as well as her lovely and famous home of Louveciennes, not far from Versailles. She had many friends, a busy and elegant social life such as only the eighteenth century French aristocracy ever enjoyed, and a long and happy love affair with the handsome and noble duc de Brissac.

Then came the Revolution. A few years into the turmoil, Madame du Barry's house was broken into, and almost all her jewelry stolen. Her lawyer made the mistake of circulating a kind of "reward" poster throughout Paris, inventorying the hoard in great detail. The virtuous revolutionaries who wanted everyone to be equal got a new look therefore at "the woman DuBarry's" lifestyle. And when the jewels turned up in London she made the mistake -- if it was a mistake -- of traveling there not once but four times in the next few years, ostensibly to recover her property and settle lawsuits about it. While there, she happened to make large donations to exiled French aristocrats and churchmen allied with the foreign powers ready to surround and destroy republican France. Most of the stolen jewelry seems never to have been found.

On her fourth return home, she found her house confiscated. The last months of her life were spent battling a mysterious figure, an Englishman named George Greive who had turned up at Louveciennes and its local village, and had set about agitating the populace and Madame's own servants against her. In those days when revolutionary violence had become the norm and its scythe had in turn put government into the hands of less and less experienced men, anybody could bring death to a neighbor by publishing any article in any broadsheet accusing him of "aristocratic tendencies" -- or simply by calling him an aristocrat. Greive pursued Madame du Barry with "wolfish ferocity." She evaded him for a while by carefully defending her legal rights under the new legal systems of the country, but when in September of 1793 the government was captured by the Jacobin party -- the left-est of the left -- she found herself doomed. Greive asked for her arrest on grounds of aristocratic leanings, and the Committee of General Safety agreed. In her letters written from prison, she hints that Greive raped her when he took her into custody.

She was tried and condemned to death, along with her bankers, in December of 1793. Her shrieks of terror and her struggles on the guillotine have often stood in marked contrast to the " 'icy disdain' " (more likely the shocked stupor, the author thinks) of other victims. But in her very last hours Madame du Barry had tried to save herself by telling her jailers the locations of buried treasure at her chateau, in exchange for her life. She believed she had succeeded in the bribe, up until the executioner came to her cell to cut off her hair and bind her arms. "The merciful drug of resignation did not have time to paralyze her senses," Loomis writes. "Neither emotionally nor physically did she go to the guillotine a dying woman." She was fifty.

It's an excellent book filled with what must be some of Loomis' best prose. The passage describing "the last of the great Versailles receptions," on the occasion of the wedding of the Dauphin to Marie Antoinette in 1770, is especially beautiful. Historians of the ancien regime are always at pains, and usually at a loss, to fully convince us of the incomprehensible sophistication of this civilization. " 'Of their kind they were perfect,' " -- he quotes Taine -- " 'there was not a gown, not a turn of the head, not a voice or turn of phrase which was not a masterpiece of worldy culture and the distilled quintessence of everything exquisite which the social art has ever elaborated.' "

The very fact that we need to have this explained to us -- good grief, they were people, how otherworldly can they have been? -- probably shows how divorced we are from any real understanding of it. For me it finally comes through, faintly, in excerpts from Madame du Barry's letters. She writes to her friends with a calm simplicity on all sorts of occasions, each word a simple pulse beat of meaning, whether she is announcing a party or saying "I love you." She writes to her lover's daughter, with whom she is of course on good terms: "No one has felt more than I the great loss which you have just suffered. I hope you will understand the reason for my delay in mingling my own tears with yours. The fear of adding to your grief prevents me from speaking to you of it. Mine is complete ...."

This was a few days after the duc de Brissac had been murdered outside her chateau by a mob, his body mutilated and partly eaten, and his head thrown through a window into her living room where it rolled to her feet. " 'One does not die of grief,' " she wrote, simply, a little later.

In the end, I am surprised by one thing, and that is the last two paragraphs of Loomis' book. After writing a lyrical and sympathetic biography, he nevertheless regretfully but officially condemns Madame du Barry on behalf of his modern reader. She slept with the king for money, he says, and also she was unforgivably rich when others were poor.

True. But that is not the same thing as hurting other people. Even the king was a widower when she met him. It's a tricky thing to judge whether it was criminal of her to, perhaps, aid the enemies of her country, when her country had transformed politically and legally into something entirely new and continually free-forming. And fantastically, officially violent. It was the cusp of a new world; which explains why an upcoming monarch of France's future would be "king of the French," not king of France. Loomis does not explore this in his last two paragraphs. He only acknowledges: in the end, "she was kind."

More importantly, since we live now under a deep-dyed leftist President whose disciples are legion, who also hates bankers and wants everyone to be equal, I can't help but read La Du Barry's story with a certain funny chill. A new and free-forming government is not particularly a good thing. Under the veneer of any civilization, human beings are all alike. But surely it can't happen here.