Tag: French history
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A Renaissance Friendsgiving: Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron
“For a long time I have cherished all the many excellent gifts that God bestowed upon you; prudence worthy of a philosopher; chastity; moderation; piety; an invincible strength of soul, and a marvelous contempt for all the vanities of this world. Who could keep from admiring, in a great king’s sister, such qualities as these,…
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All The Art We Do Not See: Curating From the Margins of the Art World
It might be 85 degrees outside, but technically it is almost fall here in Pittsburgh, and about time for us to return to the Carnegie Museums and see what they have going on. I haven’t been down to the Science Center yet since their big name change/reopening, in part because they’re cycling through all of…
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The Dark Knight Returns: Abridgment, Adaptation, and Revisiting The Count of Monte Cristo
“Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom.” – The Count of Monte Cristo, chapter 117 “You’ll like it;…
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House of Cads: The Unlikely Destiny of the Lusignans
“I spent nearly five years at the knees of the Poitevine princesses, my lord. They taught me to trust a Turk before a Lusignan.” – The Gourd and the Stars, chapter fourteen Much like with the world of The God’s Wife, there’s a lot of ancillary tangents to explore in the medieval Mediterranean of The…
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The Anarchist Aristocrat: The Chimerical Career of Joseph Fouché
“And first, let me not be considered responsible either for the Revolution, its consequences, or even its direction. I was a cipher.” – Joseph Fouché, Memoirs (1824) “Turning later to the duke of Otranto, he [Napoleon] said: ‘The man is merely a schemer. He is prodigiously clever and facile with a pen. He is a…
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The Tangled Web We Weave: The Royal Houses of France and England in The Gourd and the Stars
“Henry was eighteen when we met, and I was queen of France. He came down from the north to Paris with a mind like Aristotle’s and a form like mortal sin. We shattered the Commandments on the spot.” – The Lion in Winter “Marguerite and Alys [are Constance of Castile’s daughters], but you shouldn’t worry…
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America’s Eternal Sweetheart: The Transatlantic Love Affair with Lafayette
“Lafayette, we are here.” – Col. Charles E. Stanton, visiting Lafayette’s tomb after the arrival of American forces in Paris during WWI “As I admired this noble countenance of stone, a wry smile crept across the [French] curator’s face. Suddenly the silence was broken. ‘Why,’ asked the curator, ‘should we have a bust of Lafayette?’”…
Sarah Holz 